Page 43 of From Now On

She begins a new search,

How can you make someone fancy you?

This is more helpful. These are all things she can do.

Will do.

Tomorrow.

Chapter Twenty

Charlie

Charlie rubs sleep from his eyes. Dawn is dragging colour into the sky as he rolls out of Duke’s single bed. Every part of him aches. His back. His shoulders. His heart. It’s still the middle of the night in New York. Sasha will be curled up, snug, in the double bed that was meant for them both, resting before she begins her new life, her new adventure. Without him.

He pads downstairs. Last night after he’d left Pippa’s he’d gone straight upstairs to bed but now, as he opens the lounge curtains, he can see how sorrowful the house looks. It’s only been empty for a few weeks but a film of dust coats the sideboard, the photos. He picks up a silver frame that contains a photo of the five of them – six if you count Billie. It isn’t a recent shot. Mum’s hair isn’t streaked with grey and Bo doesn’t have his paunch. Duke is missing his front tooth as he beams into the camera, Nina has her hair in pigtails, and Charlie… Charlie is glancing to the side as though he can’t wait to get away. He gently places the picture back down and leaves them there, frozen in time.

Halfway down the hallway is one of Billie’s tug toys, the orange rope frayed at the end. It’s like one of those weird documentaries that investigate sudden disappearances.A family stepping momentarily out of their lives never to return.

In the kitchen he searches for food. He had barely eaten yesterday, a chocolate chip muffin at the airport and a soggy egg sandwich on the train. The fridge is empty, as he’d expected, but there are still some tins left in the cupboards, baked beans and spaghetti hoops, things he is guessing that Aunt Violet doesn’t approve of. He opens a can and scoops congealed macaroni cheese into a saucepan and while it heats he studies the things pinned to the cork board. A letter from Nina’s school from the teacher she hates – Miss Rudd – reminding her that her English essay is overdue and she must hand it in on the first day back. He guesses all the teachers will now cut her some slack. There’s a list of spellings that must be Duke’s along with his home-ed timetable, which is exhausting just to read. There’s a couple of photos – Bo barbecuing, a baseball cap pulled low over his face, while Mum lounges in a red and white striped deckchair with a glass of wine, Nina and her friend Maeve in the background, and one of Billie, panting into the lens, Duke’s arms wrapped around her neck. How he must miss her. Finally, in Mum’s scrawl that acts as a magic wand vanishing his appetite away, ‘Happy New Year!!!’ is written on a pink Post-it note. He traces the letters with his fingertips. The hopes she must have had when she’d written this not knowing that she’d barely see in the new year and it would be anything but happy for them all.

He sits at the table. There are prong marks in the soft pine. He remembers Nina as a toddler banging her hard plastic fork in frustration as she waited for her dinner.

There are other dents too.

Scratches from a biro in front of the place that Charlie still thinks of as his.He would sit here and write what he grandly referred to as his novel but was really a jumble of pretentious thoughts staining the A4 paper.

Dried paint is crusted around the edge of the table. He picks at it with his thumbnail until the blue flakes away. He thinks this probably came from Duke.

The grooves of a family. The map of their ordinary lives.

How can he get rid of this table where they had eaten meals for as long as he can remember? He wants to keep this at the very least. What about the rest of their things?

He wanders around the house. There’s so much stuff here.

In the music room he closes his eyes, hearing his mum’s soulful voice singing ‘Why Don’t You Do Right’. She sang that a lot in those dark days after Dad had gone, when all her love had poured into Charlie instead until he too had let her down, brought her so much shame she had packed him off to a therapist to try and ‘fix’ him.

As he leaves the room he notices Duke’s open saxophone case, instrument still inside. He frowns. Why hasn’t his brother taken it to Violet’s? He remembers Nina teasing him on New Year’s Eve.

‘Duke is basically always playing. It’s because he hasn’t got a life.’

‘Musicismy life. Well, music and Billie. I would literally die without them,’ Duke had said.

Charlie’s throat closes. His poor, poor brother.

He picks up the case; he’ll take it to Violet’s when he visits.

In the garage, he puts the saxophone in the boot of the family’s baby blue VW Beetle.

He glances around. It is here that Bo taught him how to whittle.

‘See this, Charlie lad?’ He’d passed Charlie a lump of wood.‘You can give it a shape. Make it anything you want it to be. All you need is patience, imagination and a bit of faith.’

‘But it doesn’t look like anything.’

‘Not yet, maybe. But smooth away those rough edges and, in time, you’ll be left with something beautiful.’

‘Do you think I can do it?’

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