Page 34 of The Good Part
I hate that he knows all this and I don’t.
There’s a knock on the door and I brace myself to answer it. What if Faye has changed? What if I don’t feel close to her any more? What if everything I loved has gone?
But as soon as I open the door, there is Faye, holding a car seat with a sleeping baby inside. She puts it down, then envelops me in a huge hug. After squeezing her back, I pull away to get a proper look at her. There’s a rush of relief when I see she is just the same. Her face is a little more lived in, there’s a hint of grey at her temple, but she is intrinsically still Faye. The same ballerina posture, the same light in her eyes. If anything, the light seems only brighter.
‘So, what’s this all about?’ she asks, picking up the car seat and walking past me, through to the kitchen. ‘You really can’t remember anything?’
I shake my head.
‘I was trying to call you,’ Sam tells Faye, crossing the room to give her a kiss on the cheek.
‘Sorry, Barney strikes again with my phone,’ says Faye, then turns back to me. I’m staring down at her baby now.I can’t believe Faye has a baby. ‘Don’t worry, he sleeps through anything when he’s in his car seat.’
Looking back up at Faye, I blurt out, ‘Tell me about Zoya, what happened?’
‘I’ll go check on the kids,’ Sam says. Faye pats him on the back then rubs her hand down his shoulder. There’s an easy affection between them, as though they’ve known each other for years.
Once Sam’s gone, Faye asks, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Was there anything anyone could have done?’
She shakes her head. ‘No. They said it was a massive bleed, even if she’d got to the hospital sooner...’ Faye trails off. ‘We were in France. We all went to Cannes to celebrate her engagement. You, me and Roisin flew home after the weekend. She stayed out there with Tarek, her fiancé. Two days later, he called to tell us what had happened. He could hardly get the words out.’
Faye’s eyes are welling with tears now, and I feel bad for making her relive this.
‘They said it happened so fast, she wouldn’t have known anything about it.’ Faye squeezes my hand, then reaches for her bag. ‘I brought some ginseng and chamomile tea, shall I make us a pot?’ I nod, reassured that Faye still thinks the right tea can fix anything.
‘I don’t know if I really have memory loss,’ I confess quietly, pressing my palms against the kitchen table. ‘It feels like I time-travelled here. I know that sounds nuts, but I made this wish to skip to the good part of my life and then I woke up here.’
Faye looks at me, and it takes a minute to identify the look in her eyes – pity.
‘That might just be something you remember, Luce. It doesn’t mean it’s cause and effect.’ She pauses, head tilted. ‘The newsagent’s in Southwark?’ she asks, and I nod. ‘I remember you telling us about that night. When you lived in Kennington Lane – the date who got naked, your shoes dissolving in the rain, the mad old Scottish lady who offered you a free go on her wishing machine. You dined out on that story for months. It was a classic Lucy caper.’
A cold, numbing sensation creeps down my neck, along each limb, all the way to my fingers and I crunch my hands into fists.She remembers me telling her about Thursday night.I feel nauseous. The logic of my narrative starting to crumble, because with Zoya gone, how could this possibly be the good part of my life? And if these years happened and I forgot them, then I won’t be going back. Falling in love, getting married, having children, I’ll never experience any of them. Worst of all, Zoya will really be dead, I will never see her again. I won’t get to say goodbye. I won’t get to say, ‘I’m sorry.’
Chapter 15
Google lays out the five stages of grief for me. One: denial. Done. Clearly this isn’t happening. Two: anger. Have I done anger? I don’t think I have. ARRRGGGHH. I must have skipped that stage. Perhaps I’m too confused to be angry and the anger will come later. Three: bargaining. Done. I lay in bed last night swearing to any deity who would listen, that I would never complain about my shitty damp flat or Mr Finkley or not having any money,everagain, if only I could go back to my real life, back to Zoya being alive. The fourth is depression. I guess that’s where I am now because I’ve been in bed for three days, hiding from this scary new, Zoya-less world. Five, acceptance, feels a long way off.
Confining myself to bed, days and nights start merging into one long, continuous landscape of time. I sleep a lot. Sam and the doctors think I need ‘time to recuperate’, as though I’m recovering from concussion and my brain simply needs quiet time in a dark room to heal. But it is my heart, not my brain, that is broken.
I wake from fitful bouts of sleep, my chest contracting with a tight panic, my sheets damp with sweat. I need to call Zoya. I need to find her. Whereisshe?
My phone is the only place I can look. Scrolling back through the years, I find the very first video I have of her – it is of the four of us at sixteen, getting ready for the end of year social at my house.
I’m filming. Zoya is doing Faye’s make-up on the bed, and Roisin is pinning up her minidress in the mirror to make it even shorter. Roisin has feathers in her hair, which makes me muster a smile, because I’d forgotten hair feathers were ever a thing.
‘Guys, I’m filming. We’ve got to record this moment,’ comes my sixteen-year-old voice from behind the camera.
‘What is so important about this moment?’ Faye asks. She looks so young, with her round face and chunky braces. She’s wearing a side fringe, which she was always fiddling with, desperate to grow out.
‘Us, finishing our GCSE year,’ I say from behind the camera, moving towards Zoya who waves.
‘Our graduation into womanhood,’ Roisin says in a mockingly dramatic voice. ‘Our last night of purity before the virgin sacrifices.’ When the camera moves to Roisin, I see how much more mature she looks than the rest of us. Her body developed first, and she was taller than we were. No wonder she was able to get served in a bar at fifteen. Out of everyone, it is Zoya who looks most unchanged. Same big hair, same small body. Her skin has a few pimples, her cheeks are a little rounder, but otherwise, she looks just as I remember her.
‘Who’s doing a virgin sacrifice?’ Faye asks, frowning, always prone to take Roisin too seriously.
‘Hopefully Will Havers will be sacrificing mine,’ Roisin says, running towards the camera and trying to lick the screen.
