Somewhere Close to Happy: The heart-warming, laugh-out-loud debut of the year Read online

  For my 15-year-old self. For holding on. For dreaming.

  For knowing good things would come to us one day.

  You were right.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Twelve Years Earlier

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Acknowledgments

  Author Q & A

  Credits

  Copyright

  Twelve Years Earlier

  In a moment, I’ll open my eyes and wake up. I so badly want to wake up. Where is he? Where is he?

  I knew something was wrong by lunchtime. I’d had no answers to my texts, and his phone, when I called, was going straight to voicemail. I knew. I knew from that moment.

  ‘He never switches off his phone,’ I’d told Ramesh desperately, shivering in the entrance of The Grove. ‘C-call his social worker. Please. Do something – anything. Something is wrong, Ramesh, I can tell.’ He picked up the phone, his eyes squinting, puzzled, then hung up, telling me she couldn’t help. And nobody will. Nobody will help me, and I have asked and asked and pleaded, but they just keep saying he’s fine, that he’s old enough, that he’ll be in touch, but they don’t understand. They don’t understand that I need to know he’s OK. I need to know he’s safe, and that his heart is still beating. Because Roman isn’t anywhere. My best friend is gone. He has disappeared. And he promised me, so many, many times, he never would.

  Chapter One

  ‘They just called. He’s a minute away.’

  ‘A minute. Oh, god, did you hear that, Lizzie? Chris is a minute away.’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘Shit. Shit. Bollocks. Oh, god.’

  ‘Priscilla …’

  ‘I can’t breathe. I actually cannot breathe. Is everything ready? I mean, is it? Where’s the big fifty balloon? And why are the spring rolls not on the buffet table, yet? I told Perry to put them out but he’s probably too busy letching about the place to—’

  ‘Priscilla, seriously. You need to chill.’

  My best friend pauses, nods, and holds onto the inside of my forearms as if they are crutches, drawing in a huge breath, pink, glossy lips pressed together. Groups of party guests scurry past us to the living room, their shiny shoes scuffing and clip-clopping on the oak floor beneath us.

  ‘Sorry, Lizzie,’ she says. ‘I’m just shitting it. Really shitting it.’

  ‘I know, P, but there’s really no need,’ I tell her. ‘Look around you. Everything’s done, everything’s perfect. The party’s ready. All we need now is Chris.’

  Priscilla smiles nervously and squeezes my arm. ‘God,’ she exhales. ‘You have no idea how filled with nerves my belly is right now.’ And I want to tell her that I do. I do, because my belly is the same, although it’s for a reason she’d never believe; a reason that’s sitting in my cardigan pocket as we speak, growing heavier and heavier at my

  thigh.

  ‘You should be shitting it to be fair,’ says my brother. He’s standing beside me, looming like he always does, with a plastic cup of beer in his shovel hand. I roll my eyes at him.

  ‘What?’ he shrugs. ‘I’m just saying, the bloke didn’t even want a party. He might walk in and “shit it” all the way out the front door. Plus,’ he smirks, ‘the elderly aren’t so keen on big dos, are they?’

  Priscilla scowls up at Nathan, but there’s a tiny smile on her lips. ‘Oh, look, you’re being an ageist bastard again.’

  Nathan lets loose a roar of his buffoony laugh and gives a shrug. ‘I’m just saying, even I know that your fiancé is not at all the surprise party type and—’

  Nathan’s sentence is cut short by Katie’s elbow nudging him in his side. ‘Oh, be quiet, you arse,’ she tuts up at him, her hands moving to hold onto his arm now, tree trunk-like beneath her small, slim hands. She gives Priscilla a weary smile. ‘Please ignore my idiot of a husband. Chris is gonna absolutely love it. Isn’t he? ’

  ‘I’m joking,’ laughs Nathan. ‘Oh, come on, P knows I’m joking, don’t you, P?’

  Priscilla smirks, giving a flip of her middle finger.

  ‘Deserved,’ Nathan grins, but his words are lost as Seedy Perry Keilson – self-proclaimed ‘brains’ of this whole party operation – appears in the doorway, all ruddy cheeks, white teeth, and misogyny, and shouts, ‘Positions, positions! Our main man’s just parking up.’

  At those words, all hell breaks loose.

  Party guests speed from all over Priscilla and Chris’s house, and there are so many more than I had expected tonight. This isn’t the first party my best friend has held at her house – dinner-party perfect with its white-walls, high ceilings, and jars of flowers and candles in all the right, Pinterest-precise places – but never before have I seen its rooms as crammed with bodies as it is now. There are shoals of them, rushing in from the kitchen, squeezing through the dining area, stumbling in from the patio, giggling, chattering, drinks sloshing in hands. And the guests are just as immaculate as the décor. Hair tumbles and shines, sitting neatly atop heads, pairs and pairs of elegant feet glide in elegant heels I’d walk like a constipated bridge troll in, and there are sleek, razor sharp suits at every turn. You can tell I arrived on a whim – in a gust of wind – from one look at the creased straight-from-the-ironing-pile dress I’d slung on in my desperate panic to get out, and this morning’s make up, which has sweated off after a long day in an airless office with my boss and his hairdryers for sinuses.

  I am not meant to be here. I wasn’t prepared to come to a fiftieth birthday party tonight. But then, I wasn’t prepared for the letter that was handed to me as I left work either, and the sudden desperate overwhelming need that followed after I broke open the seal, to be anywhere else, except in my flat alone with it pulsing in its envelope. I tried. I did. I made a cup of tea, put on my pyjamas, and picked up the phone to order Chinese food, trying to carry on the way I do every Friday night. But I felt sick. I couldn’t dial, or swallow, or even think, so instead I paced. Paced and paced – the way you do when you’re waiting for vital news – and nibbled my fingernails until they were raw, all the while staring at the letter across the room as if it were a bomb that could go off at any moment, as if someone might be watching me unravel like this, as a result of their sick joke. And I just couldn’t stay. I had to get out,
get to Priscilla. Because she’ll make sense of it, unearth the logical explanation. Nothing’s a big deal to Priscilla. She is 80% steel.

  ‘I’ve always liked the idea of a surprise party,’ muses my brother, as we shuffle together at the end of one of the lines of guests. There are rows and rows of us in Priscilla and Chris’s lounge now, like concert-goers squeezed together in the standing zone. ‘Just the thought of everyone stressing, sneaking about in their droves, all for me …’

  ‘Droves,’ I say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I shrug. ‘Just you know … droves. It’s a very confident thing to say.’

  Nathan puffs up his chest and nods once.

  ‘For a common estate agent.’

  Katie laughs, and chuckling, Nathan opens his mouth to speak, but we’re pushed against by even more filing, squishing-together guests, and he misses his chance. We’re arm-to-arm now with Nathan’s huge frame squashed against the wall, his head next to a canvas print of Priscilla and Chris in front of Sydney Opera House. Chris looks waspy in a pastel blue shirt, his razor-sharp jaw peppered with grey stubble, and Priscilla shines like the bright lights behind them. I’d once thought that the beaming elation Priscilla wore on her face after the almost-glimpse of Mr Dunmow’s crotch she got on our year ten trip to Walton-on-the-Naze could never be replicated. Priscilla had fancied him since year seven, and when he’d jumped into the sea with the rugby boys and his trunks had begun to fall down, Priscilla had grabbed my arm beside me on the shore, gasped like she’d just spotted Jesus walking on the horizon, and said, ‘I saw pubes! I saw skin!’ and the look on her face was unrivalled, concentrated happiness. Then she met Chris, three years ago, and ever since, she has been wearing the same shining, ‘can’t-believe-my-luck’ smile that she had on her face on that windy Essex beach.

  Her face is stretched into her token constipated fake grin now though, over by the lounge door with Perry, one of Chris’s business partners and oldest friends. His arm is around her, squeezing her into his side, like the big seedy, smarmy snake that he is, and he is no doubt telling her, as if talking about a reliable used car, that if she had wanted an older man she should’ve gone to him first.

  ‘Come on, come on,’ he bellows, hand hovering over the light switch. ‘That’s it, party people, in your positions.’ Then he grins with eyebrows waggling so much that I expect the tinkling sound of a xylophone, and he says, ‘Anything from the Kama Sutra suits me, ladies of the room.’

  I usually avoid parties and dos of all kinds – always have. Especially when the likes of Seedy Perry Keilson are floating about in them, but anywhere is better than home, alone tonight. Even here, at a party full of black tie wearing, hair like spaniels, sixty-year-old pervs shouting shit about the Kama Sutra. At least here, I stand a chance of drowning out the questions rapidly filling my head. They’ve been sprouting one-by-one, then two-by-two since I read those words inside the envelope; like weeds, weaving, wrapping around my brain, taking root, blocking out the light.

  Nathan looks down at me. He’s huge, my brother. It’s always seemed ridiculous to me that he plays golf. He’d be much better suited to the tug of war or pulling along trucks with his ear lobes like those men on TV. I tell him this often.

  ‘Alright?’ he smiles.

  I nod.

  I’m not. I can barely move. We are all squashed and huddled together, packed tightly in lines like boxed cigarettes, and my head is pounding with anxiety. I’ve never fared well in crowds or confined spaces. They make me panic and turn the oxygen around me into thick gloop. I just want to talk to Priscilla, alone. I need to show her the letter. I know I’ll feel better once I do. I tried to show her when I arrived, after she’d finished squealing with excitement that I’d actually turned up, then telling me over and over that I looked so pale, I was ‘practically bloody see-through.’

  ‘I’m OK,’ I said. ‘I just … can we talk somewhere?’

  ‘Course. Liz, are you sure you’re alright?’

  I told her I needed to show her something. She ushered me inside.

  But then Perry and his ridiculous, flammable quiff had interrupted on his way to the kitchen, booming and smarming about me being late and arriving after the half-past-seven threshold, and how I’d get a ‘bloody good seeing to’ if I ruined the surprise of the party, and after that, everyone seemed to conspire against us. There were people everywhere, all of whom seemed to want to speak to Priscilla, and when it was announced that Chris was on his way home, the whole brimming houseful launched into an over-excited panic, a beaky woman I didn’t recognise asked Priscilla over and over why she and Perry hadn’t hired the ‘drink staff ’ she’d recommended, then Nathan and Katie came bounding over, shocked to see me, full of excited smiles and questions. I gave up. I’ll wait until the excitement dies down. I’ll wait until after Chris arrives. The whispers making their way slowly through the crowd like a Mexican wave now, tell us he is in his car, parked up, on the phone.

  ‘Here, meant to ask,’ says Nathan, ducking his head, a stray wave springing loose from his gelled, mousy curls. ‘Are you around on Sunday?’

  I give a shrug. ‘I should be. Why?’

  ‘Katie and I are venturing back up into the loft.’ Nathan says the last three words in the way someone would say ‘Monster Mash’ and laughs. ‘Dad’s hoping to move out of the house when he’s back from Menorca so I want the loft clear before he goes. That way he can take stuff with him while we’ve got the rental van. Makes sense.’

  ‘But why do you need me?’

  Nathan’s brow furrows. ‘Um, because there is loads of your stuff up there?’

  ‘Still?’ I ask. ‘You dropped round two bags of crap last week.’

  Nathan shrugs. ‘Not my fault teenage Lizzie was a hoarder. Dad said there’s a box up there full of your CDs, and one with just your pencils and paints in, and that’s only what he can see sticking his head up there—’

  ‘Oh, just chuck it all, Nate.’ It’s hot in here, so bloody hot, and as I turn my face away and look over my shoulder, I meet the staring eyes of a stranger who is so close, she’s practically nuzzling my hair. Oh, I wish Chris would hurry up. The walls feel like they’re closing in on us all.

  ‘Chuck it all?’ asks Nathan. He ducks closer again, lowering his voice. ‘But what about photos and stuff for … I don’t know,’ he shrugs, hand in his pocket, beer to his chest, ‘for memories?’

  ‘But it’ll just be junk.’ Heat pounds my face, and all I can see is heads and backs and shoulders. I step onto my tiptoes to get a view of Priscilla, for a hint as to when this’ll all be over. She’s nervously looking at her phone, still squeezed into Perry who is mouthing something to someone far behind

  me.

  ‘Maybe just pop in?’

  ‘Nathan …’

  ‘Just take a quick look, so I know what’s junk and what’s not. There’s loads of Mum’s stuff, too, and to be honest, I could do with a—’

  ‘OK, fine,’ I cut in, mouth dry. Nathan’s lips press together. ‘Fine. I’ll pop in.’

  A voice from behind shushes us then, and I raise my eyebrows at Nathan as if to say, ‘your fault.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he grimaces. Then after a breath and a sip of beer, he ducks again and whispers, ‘Lizzie, are you alright?’

  ‘Me? You’ve already asked,’ I say, widening my eyes, and putting my finger to my lips like a school child. ‘I’m fine.’

  Nathan nods. ‘I know, I know. Just that … you weren’t gonna come tonight, were you? Usually, we wouldn’t be able to prise you out of your flat on a Friday night for love nor money.’

  ‘Changed my mind.’

  Nathan nods once but carries on. Of course he does. Thirty-one years into life, and my big brother is still utterly incapable of taking a hint. ‘You’re just acting a bit … weird.’

  ‘Nathan, we’re currently being squashed into what can only be described as a mass grave,’ I whisper, ‘so, yes, maybe I am acting a bit weird.’

>   And then there is darkness. Pure, sudden darkness, as the light switch is pushed. The room fills with low, excited giggles and more hushing, and Nathan doesn’t say anything else. Divine timing. That’s what it’s called, isn’t it?

  There’s the jingle of keys, a click, and a bang. Chris has let himself in and closed the front door behind him.

  ‘Priscilla?’ Chris calls through the house. ‘Only me.’

  We all stand still and silent in the darkness. It’s disorientating. I can see nothing, besides dancing navy blue and black fuzz, like at the beginning of an old video tape before the film starts, and my brain is racing; more and more weeds continue to sprout, weaving into the gaps that are usually filled with visual distractions. I think about the letter. I think about his words, scrawled on the page. My brain runs over and over them, like a tripping record. ‘… where none of this ever happened.’ ‘… where none of this ever happened.’ This. None of ‘this’. What does ‘this’ mean?

  Someone’s chest presses into my back. I can smell breath and onions and too-strong aftershave. I am working my arse off here not to tear from the room into a wide, open space to swallow down fresh air.

  ‘Hiya!’ Chris calls through the house again.

  Silence. I close my eyes and breathe deeply, stuffing my hand into the deep woolly pocket of my cardigan. The letter folds under my fingers and crackles in the silence.

  ‘Shhhh,’ someone says.

  It’s real. It must be, if it rustles, if a room full of people can hear it.

  My heart thump-thumps in my throat. He mentioned Sea Fog in the letter. God … Sea Fog. I thought I had forgotten about it, but actually, I don’t think I’ve passed a caravan without looking for its name ever since. That bucket of rust – safety and freedom, and a reminder of how trapped we were, all rolled into one – must be hidden, but anchored in my mind somewhere, like it was anchored to that driveway. Until the day it wasn’t.

  ‘Priss?’ Chris calls through the house, his voice close now, on the other side of the door. ‘I know you’re here. Your bloody phone’s in the kitchen …’

  The handle squeaks; the lounge door swings open. Someone snaps the light switch.