A Quiet Kind of Thunder(61)

When you talk to other people, you seem to forget I’m there.

I swallow. That’s not fair.

His face scrunches. I’m not blaming you. I’m just trying to tell you. How it feels for me. It was the same at the Halloween party.

I find talking really hard, I sign. I can feel my face starting to redden. You know that. How can you say this to me?

His signing starts to become faster and more desperate as he tries to explain himself. I know you do. That’s part of the problem.

Problem?

Not problem. That was the wrong word. But the thing is that you are getting better, Bronze. You already talk more now than you did just a couple of weeks ago. And I’m scared that . . . he stops.

Say it.

That there’ll be no place for me. That you won’t need me. I’ll always be deaf. I can’t learn to hear. We’ll be . . . uneven.

My hands are shaking. I take a sip of Coke and give up trying to use BSL right now. ‘Are you saying you think I only like you because you can’t hear and I can’t talk?’

No! he signs, in a way that makes me sure he means yes. That isn’t what I mean.

‘Because that’s really insulting.’ My voice is shaking too. ‘That’s a really hurtful thing to say to me.’

Rhys looks agonized. Bronze.

‘And for the record my not talking is a problem, but you being deaf isn’t,’ I continue. The words are coming out fast, way faster than if I was using BSL, and his eyes are now focused on my lips as I talk. His expression is tense and slightly panicked, and it’s a face I recognize from school when anyone is talking to him, and though I feel a reflexive guilt at making him lip-read, I can’t quite stop myself. ‘I know you can’t bloody learn to hear, I’m not a moron.’

I’m sorry.

‘Would you rather I was properly mute so we’d be “even”?’

No, that’s not what I meant.

‘I make you feel bad when I talk to people.’

He tries to take my hand. No. Bronze. No.

‘Thanks a lot.’ I’m too upset to stay here. I grab my bag and coat, hoping I don’t start crying in front of him. ‘I need to go.’

‘Steffi,’ he says. He looks devastated now. Don’t go. I’m sorry.

‘And for the record,’ I add, pulling my bag up over my shoulder, ‘Daniel was Clark’s friend. I talked to him because he knew my stepbrother.’ At the mention of Clark’s name, my voice cracks and the tears spill. Damn. ‘He knew Clark,’ I repeat, and I’m not even sure why.

Rhys is standing and I can tell he’s going to reach for me, so I do the worst thing I can do. I turn my back on him and walk out of the pub.

I go straight home and shut myself in my room, curling on the floor with Rita and crying into her patient furry face. I ignore my phone, which beeps every few minutes, and I ignore my dad, who puts his head around the door to ask me if I’m ‘feeling all right, blossom?’. At some point Lucy comes into the room and tells me some long, rambling story I don’t really listen to properly about how she broke up with her first boyfriend when she was sixteen.

I want to tell her that Rhys and I haven’t broken up so this story is irrelevant, but my voice has deserted me (or maybe I just don’t feel like talking – who knows what the difference is? Certainly not me) so I just lie there until she leaves.

At some point I move from the floor and on to the bed, pulling up my knees to my chin and resting my head on them, tracing circles on my duvet cover and thinking about Clark. I wonder what he’d think about Rhys. He’d like him, right? Except when he makes me cry.

You know how people say life goes on? Well, it does. It goes on and suddenly four years have passed and you’re seventeen instead of thirteen. Clark would be twenty-three. But he’s not twenty-three, and he never will be. That’s how death works. I swallow, bite down on my lip and push my chin harder against my knees.

Clark wasn’t perfect – I should say that. He wasn’t the best looking or the smartest or the funniest. He wasn’t going to cure cancer or play for England. He probably wouldn’t have changed the world. But he was good, and he was kind. He acted like a brother, as if the word ‘step’ didn’t matter at all.

I skip dinner, choosing instead to burrow my face into my pillow and ignore Dad’s attempts to cajole me out of my room. I distract myself from thoughts of Clark by running over and over the argument I had with Rhys until I’m not even sure what parts are really true. I keep thinking of the way Rhys signed ‘uneven’. How he looked at me when Daniel said he didn’t need to pay.

There’s another knock at my door and I groan against the pillow, not even bothering to lift my head. I hear the sliding rustle of it opening and then closing, followed by the soft thump of Rita’s tail on the carpet.

‘Go away, Dad,’ I say. ‘I just want to be on my own.’

No response. I sigh loudly, waiting for the presence in the room to leave. After a pause, I feel the end of the bed sag a little. Rita’s collar gives a jingly shake as she gets up.

I wait a little longer, then give up. I sit up with a huff, spinning round to face Dad, then let out an unglamorous shriek. It’s not Dad. It’s Rhys.

Christ. I bolt upright and huddle against my headboard, trying to smooth down the creases in my – Christ – old One Direction T-shirt. My hair is all over the place. There’s make-up smudged all over my face. I look a state and a half.