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

  The room floods with blinding light. Everyone erupts.

  ‘Surprise!’

  December 4th, 2005

  Dear Lizzie J,

  Somewhere in the universe there is a life playing out where none of this ever happened and wherever that is, we’re happy. We’re driving Sea Fog for miles and miles to where there is nothing but sea and our brains are clean slates and we’re just happy. We’re finally free.

  That’s the only thing that’s getting me through this nightmare, J. Thinking of that place, and hoping one day we’ll get there. Or somewhere close.

  I thought I’d know what to say if I started writing, besides I’m sorry. But I don’t. I’ve tried, I’ve tried so hard, but I don’t know how. There are no words for what I have done.

  Please know you deserve more than this. You deserve the whole world.

  Thank you. For every minute.

  I’m sorry. I am so sorry.

  Roman X

  ‘Roman. This is … this is from Roman? ’

  Priscilla opens her mouth to speak, but no words come out. She swallows, the letter still open in her hand. Her other flies up to her forehead, as if pressing to check for a fever. Gradually, her hand drifts down to her cheek.

  ‘Lizzie …’ she utters. Then she pauses again, glancing back down at the letter. ‘Bloody hell. I mean – where …’ Priscilla trails off.

  I sit down on the bed beside her. It creaks under our weight. She stares at me, dark, feathery eyelashes slowly batting.

  ‘Where did this come from?’ Priscilla’s hand is pressed against her chest now, where her heart is. ‘And DDC, what’s that? This logo printed at the top.’

  ‘Headed paper, I guess. I don’t know, P.’

  ‘Two thousand and five. Jesus,’ she says. ‘December. That’s …’

  My heart heaves against my ribs. I nod. ‘The day he disappeared.’

  Priscilla blinks down at the letter, her lips parted. ‘But why now? Where’s it been? Lost or something?’

  ‘No idea. Just turned up at Dad’s with the rest of the post.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Yesterday. Katie brought it into work this morning on her way past. It didn’t get to my desk until I was leaving tonight.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she says again.

  ‘I opened it on the tube,’ I tell her. ‘I think I knew. It was the handwriting.’

  We look at each other in the dim light of Priscilla’s bedroom, our chests rising and falling, silence between us, as music, laughter, and chatter from the party below thumps through the floor.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ says Priscilla again into the silence. ‘How do you feel?’

  I shrug. ‘I don’t know. Slightly sick actually. Confused. A bit sad. Seeing his name again, saying it—’ The words get stuck in my throat. I really don’t know how I feel. Besides knotted on the inside; veins and bones and tissue and heart twisted together in a ball in my chest.

  We sit in silence again. Priscilla stares at a spot on the ceiling, then at the floor, then back down at the letter in her hand. ‘Shit,’ she mutters. ‘Mad,’ she says, over and over, picking up the envelope beside her on the edge of the bed and studying it, back and front, turning it over in her hand. She smiles, her manicured finger is pressed on the post mark. It’s dated two days ago.

  ‘Reading,’ she says. ‘So, what, Roman’s in Reading now? All those years and he’s a couple of hours away?’

  ‘Who knows?’ I say. ‘He could be anywhere, P – could’ve been anywhere.’

  Priscilla beams down at the envelope and letter, one in each hand. ‘This is amazing, really. I mean, if you really think about it.’ Priscilla shakes her head in disbelief. ‘What’re you going to do?’

  I fold my arms across my body. My pulse hammers in my throat. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ says Priscilla, her eyes snapping up to look at me. The sudden burst of sound, such a contrast to speaking so softly over the humdrum of the party below, makes me sit up. ‘Sorry, babe, it’s just … don’t you want to know?’

  I lift my shoulders to my ears. ‘But know what? It was years ago, P.’

  ‘I dunno,’ she says, quietly. ‘To find out why you got this now, where it came from, what he means?’

  Heat flashes across my cheeks. ‘P, we were teenagers when he wrote this. Kids.’

  Priscilla’s brow furrows. ‘But this isn’t just a kid, is it, Lizzie? This is Roman. Like … actual, real, Roman.’ She studies my face for a second, but I’m not even sure I’m breathing. My head is rushing with blood. I am frozen; stunned, I suppose, by all the questions, by the memories, trickling in, slowly, one by one. ‘And now you have this,’ carries on Priscilla, ‘you could probably trace this back, or at least try. Look, we know it was stamped in Reading, so maybe we could call the sorting office—’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘But you could just find out where it came from,’ says Priscilla. She’s turned now, so she’s looking right at me, eyes wide and glinting with excitement, beside me on the bed. Like she’s hatching a plan, and she wants me on board. ‘It was only sent two days ago …’

  ‘Yes, but written twelve years ago,’ I say. ‘He’s a man now, Priscilla. A grown man, probably getting on with his life and, knowing Roman, living in some sort of weird yurt in some tribal village with wolves for friends, and playing his bass. He probably hasn’t a clue this was even lost.’

  Priscilla looks at the letter in her hands, her eyes narrowed, as if looking for a detail she might have missed. ‘But how can it be lost if it was only just posted?’

  I swallow. ‘I – I don’t know.’ My arms are pricked with goosebumps. That’s the thing that’s jarring, that’s what playing on my mind, apart from the meaning behind the words inside, apart from wanting to know why he was sorry. So sorry, in fact. The idea that it was sent two days ago purposely. By him.

  Priscilla brings her arms around herself and looks at me, sadly.

  ‘Bloody hell, P,’ I say, my voice shaking. ‘I really thought that you would … I don’t know, tell me it was cute, reminisce a bit, and then tell me to chuck it or something. That it’s been years, and how spooky, and how weird, now let’s go and have some mini crab cakes and watch Perry dance to Ricky Martin.’

  Priscilla laughs. Light catches in her eyes, the colour of burnt sugar. ‘It is cute,’ she says. ‘And it is spooky. But you can’t chuck this, babe. You can’t just leave this.’ She places her hand on mine. ‘I don’t really know what any of this means, but … there must be a reason you’ve got this now – today – all these years later.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Lizzie, you could even find him—’

  ‘Priscilla,’ I say.

  She stops. We stare at each other. I take the letter from her hands and push it back into the envelope. She watches me, biting the corner of her lip. Eventually, she nods.

  ‘Nothing,’ Priscilla says, her shoulders deflating. ‘Fine. OK. Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say.

  Chapter Two

  Three boxes. That’s all my childhood whittles down to. Three cardboard boxes, the tape crunchy and curling with age, and a shoebox of keyrings that I collected from every holiday and day out we had from about the age of six. All tat; plastic boats, enamel shapes of countries and counties, dusty teddy bears too big for keychains really, but each one carefully and meticulously picked out. Each one with its own story of a moment in time.

  ‘So, hang on a minute,’ Nathan had puffed, this afternoon, creaking down the steps of Dad’s loft ladder, a split bin bag of dusty clothes bundled in his arms. ‘You have just dumped a box full of perfectly good oils and pastels, but you’re going to keep … that?’

  ‘For memories,’ I told him, squeezing a squeaky plastic pig keyring in his face.

  He’d smirked, dumping the bin bag on the landing, next to a line of boxes and an old ironing board. ‘See, if you’d left me in charge, I’d have binned those and kept the paints and pencils and st
uff.’

  I shrugged. ‘But you can get paints from anywhere. I could never buy or collect all these again.’ I looked down into the shoebox held against my stomach. ‘I can tell you where I was when I bought every single one of these.’

  Nathan cocked an eyebrow. ‘Go on then,’ he said. ‘The squeaky pig.’

  ‘Easy,’ I said. ‘Oakwood Farm with you, Mum and Dad. Dad got reflux from the scone in the farm café and she told him he was fat and killing himself with dairy and they didn’t speak for the rest of the day.’

  Nathan laughed. ‘And uh …’ He fished about in the box, chains jangling. ‘This one? This bear thing.’

  ‘Alton Towers with Priscilla and her parents. We were fourteen.’

  ‘Is that one a … rose?’

  ‘Peonie. Some urban botanical garden place in a dome. Suffolk, I think.’

  ‘With Hubble,’ Nathan stated, incorrectly, more than asked, dusting his top down with his hand, and I swallowed at the sound of my grandad’s name.

  ‘No,’ I told him, lowering my voice. ‘Dad. Two weeks after Mum left him and he went a bit mad and kept taking me to weird places because he couldn’t bear to be in the house with all her stuff.’

  Nathan raised both eyebrows, as the sound of Dad’s feet began to pound the stairs. ‘Bloody hell, Liz. Your memory’s a Tardis. I don’t even remember when I last took a shit.’

  ‘Right,’ said Dad, breathlessly, as he’d reached the top of the stairs, hand rubbing the side of his big tummy, as if kneading out a stitch, ‘car’s full for the tip. Lizzie, did you still want a lift home, darlin’?’ As Dad helped me gather up the last of the boxes, he stopped at the top of the stairs and said, ‘And it was last night, Nathan, when Britain’s Got Talent was on. You took so long, poor Katie had to wee in a bucket.’

  I hadn’t planned to open the boxes. I was going to slide all three of them to the back of my wardrobe, drape them with an old winter coat and save them for another day, for when I was ready – whenever that’d be – but when I sat cross-legged by the wardrobe after Dad dropped me home, boxes stacked beside me, I saw a glimmer of orange through a loose flap of cardboard – the amber of an old college prospectus. 2005. I pulled it out, scraps of old drawings and doodles scattering from its pages like a switch had been pressed on a fan, the want to open it was like a hand, shoving me. Now, I sit staring at it, my hands carefully, peeling back the layers and layers of memories, one by one, as thunder rumbles outside, and a cup of tea turns cold on the carpet next to me.

  I remember packing this box; tearing photos and papers off my bedroom walls, pulling every piece of evidence of The Grove, of him, from every crevice and shelf, and pushing them deep, deep down. It was January, 2006, a month of nothing but grey skies and howling winds. I remember the intense need for it all to go away as I packed. I remember my eyes, swollen and gritty from weeks of crying, and holding that gift in my hand one last time before I buried that too – the strong, heavy book wrapped loosely in the crinkled black tissue paper it came in, its gold gift tag still attached, still waiting to be used. And I remember the disc – the CD I made in a hurry, dragging over folders of conversations, hundreds of them automatically saved over one year, and picking and choosing what was worth saving; what would be most important to Future Me. The me who would one day unpeel the wrinkling tape. The Lizzie James who would know the answers to all life’s questions and be strong enough to look back.

  I find the CD easily now, between the pages of my old art book – front cover stamped with a sticker that says ‘Lizzie J, group B’ – and balance it on the end of my finger. ‘Lizzie laptop’ is scrawled on it in black marker in my sixteen-year-old self ’s handwriting. I stretch over to my bed and pull my laptop onto the floor with me. I slide the disc into the tray. Thunder rumbles, like a grumbling monster outside in the humid night. The air is so dense this evening, it’s like breathing static electricity.

  The computer whirs, and I’m seconds – millimetres – away from ejecting it now, throwing it back in the box, taping up the lid, and shoving it – shoving everything – back to where it was. Hidden. Forgotten. But something in me wants to open it; a part that’s been lying dormant for twelve years and has been roused since opening Roman’s letter on Friday. I can’t stop thinking about it; about him. Us. That year.

  The computer fan silences and there’s the soft crunching sound of the computer’s gizzards. The folder opens. And there it all is, as if it’s been waiting all this time. Everything worth saving.

  I scroll and scroll. Music, school essays, photographs – mostly of bands, some of me, razor-cut bob, thick fringe, and eyes smudged with an awful lilac eye shadow I thought looked fabulous, all taken with a digital camera pointing into my dusty bedroom mirror. Then I stop, cursor hovering over a folder. The ends of my fingers sting with the urge to slam the lid shut, but I click twice, and for a beat, I don’t think it’s going to work, corrupt with age or something, but then the screen turns white. It stutters. ‘Roman’ opens.

  This PC/D: Lizzie Laptop/Roman/

  Roman signed in on 29/09/04 21:54

  Roman: Did you know that otters are actually aggressive arsewipes?

  Lizzie: um … no?

  Roman: Yep. Watching a documentary and they’re proper sick dickheads.

  Roman: Just telling you. In case it ever comes up on your GCSEs.

  Lizzie: hahaha

  Lizzie: “Who are the biggest dickheads in the animal kingdom? Please answer and explain below …”

  Roman: and/or arsewipes*

  Lizzie: sorry. course. and/or arsewipes*

  Roman: Think I might announce it to the group tomorrow.

  Lizzie: I dare ya.

  Roman: “I sit before you, a changed man after a week of discovery.”

  Lizzie: hahahaha

  Roman: “For I unearthed the groundbreaking fact that otters are dark dark shits who would never survive a day in the court of law.”

  Lizzie: pissing myself.

  Lizzie: shit! think I just woke my dad up.

  Roman: Good.

  Roman: :)

  Lizzie: :)

  Lizzie: not sure even that announcement will beat the giant ball sack that girl painted today in art tho – that was real bravery.

  Roman: Jade. She’s a lifer like me.

  Lizzie: the girl with the white hair?

  Roman: Yeah, the one who drew the bollocks.

  Roman: Good word that … bollocks:)

  Lizzie: bollocks:)

  Lizzie: didn’t realise Jade was a lifer btw. She seems OK …

  Roman: whereas I’m quite obviously NOT?

  Roman: :P

  Lizzie: haha, you know what I mean.

  Roman: Yeah. Jade talks a good talk. She’s strong.

  Roman: But nobody goes to the grove for nothing Lizzie J.

  Roman: not one of us.

  Lizzie: I guess not.

  Lizzie: well unless you’re just a misunderstood genius miles ahead of his time …

  Roman: Who knows a lot of crap about ruffian otters.

  Lizzie: yep

  Roman: and has the devastatingly handsome smile of a fallen archangel.

  Lizzie: errrrm …

  Roman: and the rippling physique of a Greek warrior.

  Lizzie: ok now I haven’t a clue who you possibly could be talking about.

  Chapter Three

  ‘Ludicrous. Absolutely bloody ludicrous!’

  ‘Gail, please, I think we should discuss this.’

  ‘Last year you had us dress as nurses. Nurses! And you had the cheek to say it was to raise awareness of the flailing NHS. Yeah. Course it was. As if you give two hooeys.’

  ‘Gail …’

  ‘No, Tim. No. OK? Just no.’

  Priscilla and I stand peering out of the sliver of the open door of my unnecessarily tiny accounts office. My boss, Calvin, is standing behind us watching, enrapt like me and Priscilla, as Sad Gail Travers, the saddest and most barbaric of all Fisher and Bolt Stationery�
�s sales reps, tears Tim Bunting, the sales manager, a brand spanking new arsehole. Gail’s outbursts happen often, although concealed deep in here, in this doom-filled shoebox of an office, I usually miss them and have to relive them vicariously through Priscilla at lunchtimes. Not today, though. And today’s is a humdinger. Not quite a chinned-Gerry-in-the-warehouse humdinger, but it’s up there, and it’s the sort of distraction I have been holding out for this week. A little nod from the universe that all is still well.

  ‘Tim must’ve sent the email,’ whispers Priscilla, her cheek squashed against mine. Calvin looms behind us, the Very Serious Gossip-Abhorring Accounts Manager mask that he wears is dangling at his chin.

  ‘What email?’ he asks.

  Priscilla shrugs. ‘He wants our department to dress up in school uniform on Friday. You know … for charity.’

  ‘And?’ says Cal.

  I slowly look upwards. Calvin is staring out across the office floor, face screwed up, mouth gaping; it’s his ‘I forgot my bloody glasses’ face. He left them at home this morning. His wife, Eva, called to tell him she found them on one of the twins’ highchairs and somehow, it turned into an argument about the horrendous way in which Calvin had parked the car last Wednesday, and the fact he kept her up last night because he has nostrils like a lawnmower.

  ‘Well, Gail thinks he’s a pervert,’ Priscilla continues, ‘so she’s dead against it, of course.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A pervert, Cal,’ I whisper. Priscilla nods and goes to take a bite of her sandwich, but stops, when her mobile phone bursts into song on my desk. She straightens and goes to answer it.

  ‘Well that’s rubbish, that is,’ Calvin flaps. I look back up at him. He’s shaking his whopping meathead and his mouth is a hard, appalled line. ‘Tim Bunting isn’t a pervert, of course he bloody isn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t say it,’ I tell him. ‘Gail did. Although, to be fair, such an accusation doesn’t exactly shock me.’

  ‘Well, he isn’t,’ Cal tuts. ‘He has a wife, Lizzie. He has kids.’

  I snort a laugh. ‘Oh, well in that case, he must be innocent. Just like all those prisoners with wives and kids, all those murderers and savages …’