Camilla Way - Watching Edie

Then there she is, standing right in front of me, and at first I’m too distracted by all the different parts of her to take in what she’s saying: the smell of the leather jacket she’s carrying over her arm, mixed with something else, something soft and appley, her eyes, big and golden brown with lots of black eyeliner, pale mauve varnish on her nails. In the hollow of her clavicle is a little gold locket with a tiny green stone in the middle. If you were to put your finger beneath it you’d feel the jump jump jump of her pulse.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘What?’

She smiles. ‘The office. Where is it?’ Her voice is clear and sure with a northern accent – Manchester maybe.

Of all the people she could have stopped to ask, she’d picked me. I get to my feet. ‘I’m going that way myself,’ I tell her, though I wasn’t. ‘I’ll walk with you if you like.’

She nods, shrugs. ‘Yeah, OK. Ta.’

As we walk, I see Sheridan Alsop and Amy Carter standing by the water fountain. They stop talking and watch us as we pass. I have a mad impulse to link my arm through hers, this stranger who walks beside me, and I imagine us strolling along like that, arm in arm like best friends. How amazed Amy and Sheridan would be to see that! I don’t though, of course. People don’t like it when you do that sort of thing, I’ve realized.

‘My name’s Heather,’ I tell her instead.

‘I’m Edie. Well, Edith really. But how lame’s that?’ She looks around herself then shakes her head, ‘Bloody hell, this place.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I know! Totally lame, isn’t it? Are you going to come to school here then?’

She nods. ‘Starting my A-levels in September.’

‘I’m doing my A-levels here too! What’re you studying? I’m taking Biology and Maths and Chemistry. I was going to do a language as well but Mum and Dad said it was pointless because it’s not what I need to read Medicine at uni. Best to concentrate on just the three. What with all my volunteering work and everything too. I’m going to be a doctor one day and—’ I stop myself, my mouth snapping shut. I always talk too much, Mum says. I bite my lip, waiting for Edie to look at me the way the other girls do.

But she doesn’t, she only smiles again. Her long brown hair swings in front of her face and she pushes it away, tucking it behind her ear. ‘I’m doing Art,’ she tells me. ‘And photography. I’m going to go to art college in London. Saint Martins probably,’ she adds with breezy certainty. And she explains that she’s recently moved down here to Fremton from Manchester with her mum. She has this way of talking, like she’s a bit bored by everything, looking around herself like she finds it all a bit of a joke, but all the while glancing back at me, including me as if I’m in on the joke too. It’s nice. I could stare at her for hours.

We’ve already reached the office, even though I’d taken her the long way round. ‘It’s in here,’ I say, and I’m about to tell her that I’ll wait for her, that I’ll show her around after if she wants, but she’s already moving away. ‘OK. Thanks, yeah?’ she says. ‘See you later.’

The door swings shut behind her. Edie. Eedee . I turn the word over and over in my mind on the walk home, trying it out for size, tucking it away for safekeeping like it’s a precious locket on a fine gold chain.

‘Heather … Heather … HEATHER!’ My head snaps upwards and I look around my bedroom in a daze. How long had it been this time? ‘Heather!’ My mother’s voice, its note of irritation rising as she calls me from the kitchen, propels me to my feet. I look around myself for clues. I’m dressed in my school uniform, my bag of books by my desk. It’s light outside, but definitely an evening sort of light, I think. Slowly it comes back to me. It had been the last day of term before exams started. I had returned home from school and come up here to begin my revision and then … it must have just happened, the way it sometimes does, and I never know why. Almost as though I fall asleep while I’m wide awake. It usually happens when I’m upset or angry, like the time with Daniel Jones, the boy who’d bullied me all through primary. I hadn’t even known I’d hit him till I saw the blood. A jumble of my classmates’ voices, past and present, crowds in on me, mingling to make one long mocking hiss. What’s wrong with you? Why do you stare like that? Weirdo. Fucking freak. I shake my head to clear it.

My dad collects clocks and there are hundreds of them in our house all ticking at once, like the air is shivering, chattering its teeth. I listen, and sure enough after a few moments, there it is: the clanging jangle of dings and dongs as they all strike the hour at once. I count to seven. Teatime, then. My mother’s never late. The thought of her downstairs sat at the kitchen table waiting to begin grace jolts me into action. ‘Coming!’ I shout. ‘I’m coming!’

Downstairs, Dad sits at the kitchen table reading aloud from a newspaper article about geological engineering. Mum moves around the kitchen not listening to him, transferring plates of food from the worktop to the table in front of us. I watch her, trying to gauge her mood, but she puts the last plate down and without looking at me, sits and begins to pray.

Sometimes Mum reminds me of the lake where we used to go camping back home in Wales. I’d wade through its water on hot summer days, occasionally chancing upon inexplicable pockets of ice-cold, before blundering further into a shallower, warmer patch. I’d stay there for as long as possible, wallowing in the sunny warmth until the touch of slimy seaweed or the thought of eels or dead fish slipping past my ankles would make me panic and press on. Being with Mum is like that sometimes: you never know where the cold pockets are, or what’s there waiting for you in the warmer spells.

‘Heather!’ My mother stops mid-prayer and I realize too late that I’d been absent-mindedly picking at the tomato salad.

‘Sorry,’ I say, and feel myself redden.

Sometimes I do this thing to help me sleep: pretend that everything’s as it was before, that I am six again and Lydia three, and we’re all still OK. I imagine Lydia’s hand in mine as we run together in the garden of our old house and hear her laughter as I fall asleep .

As if to rescue me from my thoughts the face of the girl I’d met that afternoon pops into my head, and I feel a sort of light, lifting in my heart. Edie.

Fremton’s a horrible town. I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true. We moved here from Wales when I was ten – a fresh start, Mum said. After what happened, people in our village who I’d known all my life suddenly looked differently at me when I passed them in the street, or else swooped down on my parents like big black greedy crows, cawing sympathy, pecking for answers.

Eventually Mum and Dad stopped doing the things they used to do. Slowly, bit by bit, Mum pulled out of choir practice, her book group, organizing school fetes. Except for church on Sundays, she barely left the house at all. Dad carried on teaching at the boys’ school across the valley but at home he found refuge in his study, mending his clocks and reading his books. I guess from the outside it might have looked like we were shutting out the world to find comfort in each other, but it wasn’t like that at all. My mum and dad cleaved like a stricken tree, me like a lost squirrel hopping between the two halves. Dad had never looked at me in the same way after it happened and Mum didn’t either, but it was different with her. With Mum I knew in my heart that she wished it was Lydia who had come home safe and sound that day, not me.

So when they told me one evening after supper that Dad had been offered a new job in an English town 160 miles away, that it meant a promotion and a bigger house, I knew the real reason for the move: we would be going somewhere nobody knew about us, about what had happened, and what it meant. And a month later here we were. But nothing changed, not really. My mum found a new church to go to, but apart from that she still hardly ever leaves the house. These days her focus is on me. My schoolwork, my weight, my piano practice, my future. She’s trying to make me better, I think.