Page 15 of From Now On

What is he going to do?

Chapter Six

Nina

Nina feels as though she has woken in somebody else’s skin. Somebody else’s life. Her arms sting from her self-inflicted scratches. Her house full of unaccustomed sounds. Not Mum singing as she dresses, or Dad whistling as he shaves but Charlie speaking in a low voice while a different radio station to the one her mum listened to plays.

Her parents are dead.

She turns the thought over but all she feels is… disbelief. A small seed of hope begins to unfurl inside her mind. Perhaps Charlie is talking to them on the phone right now. She flings back the duvet, still wearing yesterday’s clothes, and pounds down the stairs. They’ll laugh about this one day:remember the time we thought you’d drowned. Not yet, of course, but one day, when they are all sitting around the table, shaking cornflakes into bowls, arguing over who should fetch the milk.

‘Charlie?’ She runs into the kitchen. Pippa is humming softly along to ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ while she whisks eggs.

‘He’s in the garden.’

It’s freezing outside. The lawn sparkles with frost, the sky almost white.

Charlie leans against the wall under Nina’s window.

‘Is that—’

‘Sasha,’ he mouths, and that seed of hope curls tightly into itself once more.

Nina trudges back inside and slumps into a chair. Pippa places a mug of hot chocolate in front of her and gives her shoulder a squeeze. That one, small gesture says more than words could. It saysI’m sorry.I’m here. I wish I could change things, but I can’t.

It is only when Duke climbs onto her lap that she notices he is there. She wraps her arms around him and he leans back into her. They haven’t sat like this for years but she feels that he’s all she has and she clings to him tightly. What will happen to them now? Will they be sent to a children’s home? Separated? She supposes somebody might want to adopt Duke; he’s small for his age and, she grudgingly concedes, cute. But her? Who would want a moody teenager? She wants to ask Charlie again but she is afraid of the answer.

After breakfast they go for a walk because they can’t think what else to do. They go to the pocket park because no one ever goes there when there’s a much larger space five minutes down the road. Duke holds Pippa’s hand. Charlie unclips Billie’s lead but she doesn’t run off and explore like she’d normally do, twitching nose sniffing everything, she stays close to them, her head down. Instinctively, in the way animals do, she knows something is wrong. She too is sad.

At home Pippa tells them she’s going to peel some veg for lunch.

‘Want to help?’ she asks Duke and he nods, his hair sticking up at all angles. Nobody has reminded him to brush it this morning.

‘I suppose we should start… you know…’ Charlie looks to Nina. ‘Telling people. Have you got a piece of paper and a pen?’

Nina fetches the pad from the kitchen and a biro. On the first page is a shopping list. Mum’s writing. The same swirling script that Nina would find inside of her birthday and Christmas cards –lots of love –but now Mum will never write anything new again. She runs her fingers over each word – aubergine, courgettes, mozzarella, basil – and wonders what Mum was planning on cooking.

‘So…’ Charlie trails off.

‘There’s the home-ed lot,’ Nina says. ‘I haven’t got any numbers but they’ve got a group on Facebook. There’s… umm, Dad’s work, I guess. There’s couple of people from there he used to go to the pub with occasionally but…’ she screws her face as she tries to recall the names but she’s never paid attention and for that she feels ashamed. ‘Neither of them had any friends really. They preferred to be with each other.’

‘In their own little world. It’s a comfort that… you know, they were together,’ Charlie says.

‘A comfort?’ Nina tries to force a sarcastic laugh but it sticks in her throat.

‘Not… you know what I mean. They couldn’t bear to be separated, could they?’

Nina thinks of the embarrassment they caused her at parents’ evenings, sports days. The way they kissed, held hands constantly. Their love was complete. She doesn’t have to think very hard about who she’d choose to spend her last few days with but this is not the right time and they are not the right person for a million different reasons. Still, for a brief moment she had thought she too might have experienced love but it is now buried under a mountain of grief and regret.

‘There’s Aunt Violet, I suppose,’ Charlie cuts through her thoughts.

‘She hated Dad.’

‘I know, but—’

‘She called him a failed rock star. Do you know how much he was hurt by that?’

‘I do, yes. I know how much Bo dreamed of—’

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