The Art of Not Breathing(3)
Mum picks up some pink wafers.
“Celia,” my father cries, jumping out of the way, “we’re going home.”
He slams the trolley against the shelf and walks off. The shelf wobbles, and packets of gingersnaps tumble into the trolley. When everyone else has run after my father, I unzip my jacket a little way and slide one of the packets inside so it sits neatly under my arm. Then I scoot to the next aisle, where the party bits are, and grab some candles. They’re the flimsy ones that go in cakes, but they’ll do. At least we’ll have something for tomorrow.
The wait is like listening to a ticking bomb. The closer the day gets, the louder the ticking; the louder the ticking, the more my parents shout; the more my parents shout, the more I want to get in a car and run my father over.
I catch up with them as they’re leaving the supermarket. Dillon walks by Dad’s side and brushes Mum away when she goes to him. He always defends my father—sucking up is the term I’d use. I don’t know why, because Dad’s so hard on him. He goes on at Dillon all the time about getting good grades and makes him sit in the kitchen and study if he gets a low mark. I get shouted at and banned from going out, but my father never actually makes me do my homework—he knows I’m a lost cause. For that, at least, I’m grateful. I start on the gingersnaps before we’ve even left the car park. No one says anything. Eventually I offer them around.
“Did you pay for those?” my father asks. In the rearview mirror I see his nostrils flare.
I shake my head.
“For Christ’s sake, Elsie. Do you want to end up in a detention center? Because you’re going the right way about it. They’ve got CCTV, you know.”
I do know this, because I’ve been dragged into a back office and shown footage of myself trying to get a packet of noodles into my back pocket. I don’t know why noodles. At the time it seemed like something that might be useful.
“You can go back and pay for them if you’re that worried.”
My father accelerates, and when we get home he grabs the packet from me and chucks it in the dustbin. Mum doesn’t defend me like she usually does. She’s distracted with everything else. With tomorrow.
4
APRIL 11. MONDAY. MY BIRTHDAY. SCHOOL STARTS AGAIN TODAY after the Easter break, but I’m not going in. Today I am exempt from school. The sky is still a smoky black when I get dressed. I think I’m the first up, but then I hear the sounds of the others—my parents moving around their bedroom, the wardrobe door sliding open and closed, my mother’s hair dryer, my father’s electric razor. The squirt of an aerosol, one long spray followed by two short ones, then a gap and another short one. I hear the groan of the electric shower in the bathroom as it starts up, and then the running water, which lulls every now and then because the pressure is bad. A dry cough from Dillon’s room. There are no voices. I wonder how loud it might be if we could all hear each other’s thoughts. It would be unbearable, I decide.
One hour until we leave. It zooms by, like a time-lapse video—the black outside turns to blue-gray, to violet-gray, to pinky-gray, and finally it’s just gray, like pencil lead. I use a pocket mirror to apply my Ruby Red (it is, after all, a “special day!”), then climb back under my duvet and wait. In the mirror I watch my lips whisper the words “Eddie. Do you miss me? I miss you!”
My father finally knocks on my door and opens it slightly. Half a face appears, and then his whole body slides into my room.
“Are you ready?”
His voice is even, like he’s bored. I nod without looking at him. I can’t bear to see his eyes. Not today. He turns and leaves.
I chew a Wrigley’s Extra because if I brush my teeth, I’ll mess up the lipstick.
Downstairs, I find Dillon pacing up and down in the living room.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing,” he says, hugging his arms around his waif-like body. “Just waiting.”
We pace in opposite directions, meeting in the middle on each length, occasionally brushing shoulders. My father waits in the hallway with his arms hanging slack by his sides. The silence continues, aside from the gurgling fridge, and my rumbling stomach.
Mum is the last to appear. She always wears the same outfit on this day: white jeans and a tight white T-shirt with nothing over the top, as though it were the middle of summer. She moves like a ghost through the hallway to the front door. In one fluid movement she takes the car keys from the hall table, passes them to my father, opens the front door, and drapes her blue raincoat over her shoulders. We all walk in single file to the car, the glass in the front door rattling as we close it behind us. We drive in deafening silence to Chanonry Point. The drive is only five minutes—we could walk, but we never do. I think it’s so we can make a quick getaway.
No one says “Happy birthday, Elsie.” I say it to myself instead and picture a future birthday when I get cards, presents, and a cake made of donuts.
5
THE BLACK ISLE ISN’T REALLY AN ISLAND—IT’S A PENINSULA that sticks out from Inverness into the North Sea. It’s called the Black Isle because when the rest of Scotland is coated in snow, it remains uncovered, someone once told me. We seem to have our own weather system, which mostly involves bitterly cold winds, rain, and fog. We do have the occasional blizzard, though. Chanonry Point is a spit of land on the east of the Isle that extends even farther out into the choppy water. Sometimes it feels as though we’re on the edge of the world.