The Reading List(20)

She ran one hand over her hair, and shuffled deeper into her seat, eyes still on him. He glanced up for a moment, just a moment, and their eyes made contact – small and insubstantial.

She hurriedly looked down at her phone again, nervous – unsure what to do. She opened up Tinder. She’d never used Tinder properly. Unlike all her friends, who seemed to be on Tinder all the time, with dates every other night of the week, she didn’t have the time to be meeting guys, for dates or hook-ups. But sometimes, when she wanted to pretend that her life was something else, that she had some kind of freedom, she just swiped for the sake of swiping.

Was this guy on Tinder too? What if she’d just mindlessly swiped left to him? Worse … what if she’d swiped right?

She pressed the home button hurriedly, minimizing the app, then stuffed her phone into her pocket, panicking. But he was scrolling on his phone again and wouldn’t even have noticed. He wasn’t paying attention to her. She smoothed over the pocket of her jeans, feeling the warmth from her phone radiating through the fabric.

She looked up again and let her eyes roam slowly around the carriage before they came to rest on the Tube map above her, as though she hadn’t been looking at anything in particular at all. In a final attempt to really look like she wasn’t interested, she pulled the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird out of her bag …

They were already at Queen’s Park and no one in her carriage had left yet. All five of them still there, waiting for their stop. She started to read, her eyes darting over the page, wracking her brains to recall where she’d left off earlier, just as her phone buzzed.

It was Aidan.

‘Hello?’ she said, self-conscious, trying to whisper. The boy-man looked up at her, and she hoped her cheeks hadn’t flushed.

‘Come back, Leish,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Can you get back home within the next hour or so?’

‘Why? Are you home?’

‘Yes, just come back if you can. I …’ He paused.

‘What, Aidan?’

‘I need you,’ he said quietly.

And then he hung up. Aleisha felt an immediate tightening in her chest. Leilah had seemed okay this morning, hadn’t she? Okay in the circumstances.

Aidan hadn’t said the words ‘I need you’ to his little sister since their father had left the house and Aidan had been desperately trying to clear out all his stuff. She hadn’t known at the time why he needed to eradicate every little detail of their father from their home.

That had been the summer when Aidan gave up his place to study business at uni, just until things ‘settled’ again. When they were kids, they’d always played pretend that she was a particularly grumpy customer at his bike shop. For years, she’d never doubted that her brother would make that pretend bike shop (with the cutlery from the cutlery drawer as all the tools and bits and pieces for sale) into a reality. But things hadn’t settled again. Aleisha wasn’t sure if they ever would.

‘I need you’ rang in her head. The train came to a stop, and she looked at the boy-man one last time, before stepping onto the platform towards the Tube train ready and waiting to take her home. She dropped one hip and looked at her phone, trying to pretend to the whole world that this was her intention, that she had a plan. That she had a life.

She glanced behind her, hoping to catch a glimpse of him again. The train had gone.

She stood on her doorstep, looking up at the windows, listening hard, hoping for a clue, the tiniest clue, of what to expect inside. All she could hear was a helicopter hovering a few streets away, the wind gently buffeting her hair.

Before she could pluck up the courage to take the keys out of her pocket and put them into the lock, her ringtone made her jump. Then the door flew open to reveal her brother standing in the doorway, his mobile to his ear.

‘Aleisha, there you are,’ he said quickly, putting his phone down by his side. ‘Why you just waiting here?’

‘I don’t know. I just got here. What’s going on?’

‘Erm, I’ve got to go out …’ He was looking beyond her, down at his feet, up at the sky, anywhere but in her eyes.

‘Where are you going?’ Aleisha kept her eyes trained on him, trying to work out what was going on.

‘I’m going to work. Can you stay in?’ His feet were rooted to the spot.

‘What for? Mum?’ Aleisha watched his face carefully, searching for any hint about what state Leilah might be in, what she was walking into. ‘I thought you had the afternoon off.’

Aidan was now staring at his car keys. ‘Yeah, I … I’ve been called in last minute. Look, I’m really sorry to do this but I don’t want to leave her on her own today and I’ve got to get out.’

Aleisha stepped forward, but Aidan made no move to get out of her way. There was something he wasn’t telling her. ‘Is she okay?’ Aleisha was trying to keep the panic out of her voice, the words I need you flashing up in her mind again.

‘Yeah, Leish, yeah, I’m sorry, she’s totally fine. I just, you know, it’s been up and down, and I’ve got some stuff to do and I didn’t know where you were, you didn’t leave a note.’ For a moment, Aleisha saw panic, stress, hurt in her brother’s eye, but dismissed the thought. Aidan was never panicked, right? He had so much going on, but out of the three of them, he was the one who had it all together. Uncle Jeremy always said, ‘That boy, he carries the world on his shoulders with so much grace.’ He was right.