Jenny Downham - Before I Die aka Now is Good

I might.

‘I’m going to make a cup of tea,’ I tell her.

There are shortbread biscuits on a plate and little sachets of sugar and milk. This really is a very nice room. I look out of the window while I wait for the kettle to boil. Two boys are playing football on the promenade. It’s raining and they’ve got their hoods up. I don’t know how they can see the ball. Zoey and me were down there just now, in the cold and the wind. I held Zoey’s hand.

‘There are daily boat trips from the harbour,’ I tell her. ‘Maybe they go somewhere warm and far away.’

‘I’m going to sleep,’ she says. ‘Wake me up when it’s over.’

But she doesn’t move from the chair and she doesn’t close her eyes.

A family walk past the window. A dad pushing a buggy and a small girl in a pink shiny mac clutching her mum’s hand in the rain. She’s wet, maybe cold, but she knows she’ll be home and dry soon. Warm milk. Children’s TV. Maybe a biscuit and early pyjamas.

I wonder what her name is. Rosie? Amber? She looks like her name would have a colour in it. Scarlett?

I don’t really mean to. I don’t even think about it first. I simply walk across the room and open the wardrobe door. I startle the coat hangers and they chink together. The smell of damp wood fills me.

‘Is it there?’ Zoey asks.

The inside of the door is glossy white. A total re-paint. I touch it with my fingers, but it stays the same. It’s so bright it makes the room waver at the edges. Every few years we disappear.

Zoey sighs and leans back in her chair. ‘You shouldn’t’ve looked.’

I shut the wardrobe door and go back to the kettle.

I count as I pour water onto the tea bags. Zoey’s over three months pregnant. A baby needs nine months to grow. It’ll be born in May, same as me. I like May. You get two bank holiday weekends. You get cherry blossom. Bluebells. Lawnmowers. The drowsy smell of new-cut grass.

It’s one hundred and fifty-four days until May.

Cal comes trotting up from the bottom of the dark garden, his hand outstretched. ‘Next,’ he says.

Mum opens the box of fireworks on her lap. She looks as if she’s choosing a chocolate, delicately picking one out, then reading the label before passing it over.

‘Enchanted Garden,’ she tells him.

He rushes back to Dad with it. The tops of his wellies slap against each other as he runs. Moonlight filters through the apple tree and splashes the grass.

Mum and me have brought chairs from the kitchen and we’re sitting together by the back door. It’s cold. Our breath like smoke. Now winter is here, the earth smells wet, as if life is hunkering down, things crouching low, preserving energy.

Mum says, ‘Do you know how truly horrible it is when you go off and don’t tell anyone where you are?’

Since she’s the great disappearing expert of all time, I laugh at that. She looks surprised, obviously doesn’t get the irony. ‘Dad says you slept for two days solid when you got back.’

‘I was tired.’

‘He was terrified.’

‘Were you?’

‘We both were.’

‘Enchanted Garden!’ Dad announces.

There’s a sudden crackle, and flowers made of light bloom into the air, expand, then sink and fade across the grass.

‘Ahhh,’ Mum says. ‘That was lovely.’

‘That was boring,’ Cal cries as he comes galloping back to us.

Mum opens the box again. ‘How about a rocket? Would a rocket be any better?’

‘A rocket would be excellent!’ Cal runs round the garden to celebrate before handing it over to Dad. Together they push the stick into the ground. I think of the bird, of Cal’s rabbit. Of all the creatures that have died in our garden, their skeletons jostling together under the earth.

‘Why the seaside?’ Mum asks.

‘I just fancied it.’

‘Why Dad’s car?’

I shrug. ‘Driving was on my list.’

‘You know,’ she says, ‘you can’t go around doing just what you like. You have to think about the people who love you.’

‘Who?’

‘The people who love you.’

‘Loud one,’ Dad says. ‘Hands over ears, ladies.’

The rocket launches with a single boom , so loud its energy expands inside me. Sound waves break in my blood. My brain feels tidal.

Mum’s never said she loves me. Not ever. I don’t think she ever will. It would be too obvious now, too full of pity. It would embarrass both of us. Sometimes I wonder at the quiet things that must have passed between us before I was born, when I was curled small and dark inside her. But I don’t wonder very often.

She shifts uncomfortably on her chair. ‘Tessa, are you planning on killing anyone?’ She sounds casual, but I think she might mean it.

‘Of course not!’

‘Good.’ She looks genuinely relieved. ‘So what’s next on your list then?’

I’m surprised. ‘You really want to know?’

‘I really do.’

‘OK. Fame’s next.’

She shakes her head in dismay, but Cal, who has turned up for the next firework, thinks it’s hilarious. ‘See how many drinking straws you can stuff in your mouth,’ he says. ‘The world record’s two hundred and fifty-eight.’

‘I’ll think about that,’ I tell him.

‘Or you could get tattooed all over your body like a leopard. Or we could push you up the motorway in your bed.’

Mum regards him thoughtfully. ‘Twenty-one-shot Cascade,’ she says.

We count them. They shoot up with a soft phut , burst into clusters of stars, then drift slowly down. I wonder if the grass will be stained sulphur-yellow, vermilion, aquamarine by morning.

A comet next, to appease Cal’s desire for action. Dad lights it and it whizzes up above the roof, trailing a tail of glitter.

Mum bought smoke bombs. They cost £3.50 each and Cal’s seriously impressed. He shouts the price to Dad.

‘More money than sense,’ Dad yells back.

Mum shoves two fingers up at him and he laughs so warmly that she shivers.

‘I got two for the price of one,’ she tells me. ‘That’s one advantage of you being ill and us having firework night in December.’

The bombs spray the garden with green smoke. Loads of it. It’s as if goblins are about to arrive. Cal and Dad come running from the bottom of the garden, laughing and spluttering.

‘That’s a ridiculous amount of smoke!’ Dad cries. ‘It’s like being in Beirut!’

Mum smiles, passes him a Catherine wheel. ‘Do this one next. It’s my favourite.’

He gets a hammer, and she stands up and holds the fence post still while he bangs the nail in. They’re laughing together.

‘Don’t hit my fingers,’ she says, and she nudges him with her elbow.

‘I will if you do that!’

Cal sits in Mum’s seat and rips open a packet of sparklers. ‘I bet I’m famous before you,’ he tells me.

‘I bet you’re not.’

‘I’m going to be the youngest person ever to join the Magic Circle.’

‘Don’t you have to be invited?’

‘They will invite me! I’ve got talent. What can you do? You can’t even sing.’

‘Hey!’ Dad says. ‘What’s this?’

Mum sighs. ‘Both our children want to be famous.’

‘Do they?’

‘Fame’s next on Tessa’s list.’

I can tell from Dad’s face that he wasn’t expecting this. He turns to me, the hammer limp at his side. ‘Fame?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How?’

‘I haven’t decided.’

‘I thought you’d finished with the list.’

‘No.’

‘I thought after the car, after all that’s happened…’

‘No, Dad, it’s not finished.’

I used to believe that Dad could do anything, save me from anything. But he can’t, he’s just a man. Mum puts her arm around him and he leans in to her.