The Taming of Lilah May Read online

  ‘Aha,’ Bindi is saying, with a satisfied smile. ‘There. You can come and live with us now.’

  I give her a rueful grin. ‘I wish,’ I say.

  In fact, I’d probably be driven mental by having to live with about fifteen people in one house. But I love the fact that Bindi’s family are so open and kind and that when I visit, they just sort of weave me into the fabric of the household, like I’m a missing thread that’s turned up in the sewing basket.

  As if to illustrate my thoughts, two of her little sisters come into the bedroom and dive onto my lap, where they fiddle with my hair and bracelets.

  I like pretending that they’re my sisters.

  Siblings are a bit thin on the ground in our house at the moment.

  My smile must have faded, because Bindi shoos her sisters out of the room.

  ‘I’d quite like to live here with you, actually,’ I say. I guess I’m hoping she’ll say, ‘Oh, OK then,’ and I’ll just be given a camp bed to put on the floor here and never have to go home again.

  Bindi frowns.

  ‘It’s not always quite the paradise you’re imagining,’ she says. ‘My parents are really strict. I’m going to have an arranged marriage, and that will have to come ahead of any career when I leave school.’

  ‘Really?’ I say. ‘Wow. That sucks.’

  ‘My parents are going to choose a boy in India and get me to marry him,’ says Bindi. She sounds very matter-of-fact when she says this, like she’s discussing choosing a coat in the shopping arcade or something.

  ‘Yeah, I know what an arranged marriage is, Bindi. Just never thought you’d have to have one.’

  ‘It’s no big deal,’ she says. But her mouth has drooped a bit at the corners. ‘It’s what a lot of Asian families do. Well, those who are still religious. Like mine.’

  I shake my head. For a moment I can’t speak. I try to imagine how I would feel if Mum and Dad stopped being obsessed with clowns and lions and instead focused all their energies into marrying me off to some boy I’d never met.

  Groo.

  ‘I so would hate that,’ I say.

  Bindi is staring down at her lap now and fiddling with the end of her dark plait.

  ‘Well, I don’t get much say in the matter,’ she says. ‘Sometimes it’s difficult to be heard around here. Too many kids in the house.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I agree, but I’m not really listening. My head is still spinning with Bindi’s revelation about the arranged marriage.

  Bindi comes out of her trance and turns up the music on Asian Network.

  ‘Now, Lilah May,’ she says, settling cross-legged on the bed next to me. ‘Let’s hear about you. Spill.’

  Bindi’s the only person I can talk to about how I’m feeling.

  And she’s the only person I don’t get angry with.

  She doesn’t ask me that stupid, ‘How ARE you?’ question, and she’s always got time for me.

  Mum’s too busy with her clown job and comes home exhausted and with no energy left to speak to me after yelling at groups of kids.

  Dad’s kind of good to talk to about some things – like how hideous my teachers are, what boring subjects I’m doing at school and what we’re going to do at the weekend.

  But I can’t talk about the important stuff to him. You know – boys, feelings, girl stuff. He’s more interested in animals than he is in me. To Dad, animals have more feelings than humans do. He’s always worrying about them and reading great long articles about animal behaviour. He writes articles too, for a science magazine that deals with animals.

  So I can’t really talk to Dad about how I’m feeling. Teenage girls don’t register on his animal radar.

  The only other person I used to be able to talk to about personal stuff isn’t here any more. And he got just as fed up with Mum and Dad never being around as I did.

  I’ve got my anger diary to write in but it’s not the same as talking to a Real Live Person with a sympathetic look in their eyes.

  So there’s just Bindi left. She’s like the dustbin for all my raging tempers.

  Poor Bindi.

  She’s staring at me now with an expectant look in her wet brown eyes.

  I clear my throat and cross my legs on the bed, fiddle with my socks.

  ‘Y’know,’ I mutter. ‘It’s still difficult at home and all that.’

  Bindi nods. She does know. She’s seen me in great stomping rages after yet another argument with my parents. She’s seen me quiet and withdrawn at school, and she’s seen me burst into flames of rebellion and act like a complete nutter.

  Bindi’s always calm and serene, like the surface of a blue-green river under sunlight. She ripples with sympathy but never goes over the top.

  Sometimes I wonder whether there might be a tiny flame of rebellion living deep inside Bindi. I haven’t seen it yet.

  ‘How did it go with Adam?’ she says now, getting up to draw the curtains. She is smirking at me, twirling her dark plait around her finger and then sucking on the end of it. Honestly. She’s so girly, she’s giving off invisible pink fumes.

  ‘It sucked – I made a right idiot of myself. Maybe YOU should go out with him,’ I say.

  ‘Don’t be so stupid,’ she says. She gets up and changes the CD to some other weird Asian music. ‘I told you – my parents would go mad. I’m not allowed to date a non-Asian boy. Anyway, I don’t fancy Adam Carter. But you do.’

  My face must have fallen again, because Bindi’s smile has faded too and she’s looking at me with genuine concern.

  ‘Is there still no news?’ she says in a softer voice.

  I shake my head. For a moment I can’t speak.

  Two years.

  Two years.

  People keep telling us that things get easier with time, but when you’ve got this big puzzle and you can’t find the answer to it, all that happens is that the frustration and anger get bigger and bigger, until they threaten to swallow up all the nice things in your life.

  ‘Sorry,’ whispers Bindi. ‘I wish I could help.’

  I let my hair fall over my face.

  ‘You do,’ I say. ‘You’re my best mate. That helps. But don’t leave me, right?’

  Bindi reaches over and brushes the hair out of my eyes with her delicate long fingers.

  ‘Right,’ she says.

  We don’t do a lot more talking after that.

  I listen to Asian Network with Bindi and she tells me about her favourite DJ, and we test each other on Biology because we’ve got a mock exam tomorrow. And then Dad rings my mobile and asks if I want a lift, because he’s just on his way home after dropping off the Big Cat Vet and he’ll be passing near Bindi’s house in a moment. I tell him not to bother, because I need the fresh air.

  Then I hug Bindi and all her sisters and brother goodbye, hoist my black rucksack over my shoulders and set off on the twenty-minute walk home, except that Dad ends up driving past me anyway, so he hoots and I jump out of my skin. I climb into the van and sit there in silence while Dad talks about Hero, his biggest lion cub, who’s just had some injection for something or another, and after a while I tune out his words and just stare at the windscreen wipers going back and forth. Another face pops into my head with a wide grin and curly hair, but I can’t quite see his eyes any more and that panics me, so I shake the thoughts out of my head and try to focus on what Dad’s telling me.

  It’s no good, though.

  Seeing Bindi always makes me feel a bit better, but by the time I get home, that’s all faded like a memory of one of those holidays which is too good to be true.

  Now I am back in our white kitchen with the Aga and the big pine table and it all looks as it always does, but then there’s the silence coming from upstairs, the silence that threatens to eat all of us up.

  When will it ever get any easier?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I haven’t always been angry.

  There was a time when I was smiley and happy, right up until just before I turned thirteen
. Or so the photographs tell me.

  The photos are too painful to look at now, so I don’t. I can’t see how that little girl with red cheeks and fuzzy brown hair lying on the top of a canal boat has turned into the whey-faced, black-eyed, scowling girl I see in the mirror now.

  It all changed when I got to thirteen.

  It’s like a steel curtain whammed down and divided off the first few years of my life from the rest that lay ahead.

  None of us saw it coming.

  It’s a week later and Dad’s making supper tonight because Mum’s out entertaining thirty seven-year-olds in a village hall somewhere.

  Dad’s hours at the zoo are a bit more regular. He’s usually around in the morning to make breakfast and then again when I get home from school, unless an animal has a medical emergency. Then he leaps into his white van with the zebra-striped Morley Zoo logo and roars off to help.

  I sling my bag onto the floor and slide into a chair, picking my nails and glowering at nothing.

  ‘Fish OK?’ says Dad, unwrapping a slimy paper packet all red with blood and guts. He’s a health nut. Everything he cooks is drowned in great handfuls of sesame seeds and swamped with large green leafy vegetables.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘But can you cut the head off mine? Gobsome!’

  Dad hacks the head off a mackerel, wraps it back in the paper and lobs it at the bin. Something about the action reminds me of the way he throws great chunks of dead deer into the lion pen at Morley Zoo.

  ‘Can you do the veg, Lilah?’ says Dad. ‘Or are they gobsome too?’

  I get up and fill a pan, chop broccoli into little pieces and peel long orangey strips off carrots. There’s not a lot of point arguing with Dad. He’s built like a tank and doesn’t often show a sense of humour.

  Mind you, none of us do any more.

  Not since that day.

  We eat our dinner in silence.

  It’s not a bad sort of silence, like when Mum’s home. She shows her feelings more, so we’re always aware that we have to be careful what we say. Sometimes her eyes fill up with tears and she leaves the table and washes up with her back to us. At other times she tries too hard to be jolly and kind and smiley, and it’s so awkward and embarrassing that Dad and I clam up, and then she gets angry and bitter and accuses us of never talking about the things that matter.

  When it’s just Dad and me, the silence is calmer. He flicks through a copy of a nature magazine while forking broccoli and carrots into his mouth.

  I pick the bones out of my fish and try not to think about Adam Carter. His band is playing a gig tomorrow night and I half want to go and half don’t. There’s this part of me that wants to get lost in the music, and head-bang and leap about shaking my hair around, and blot out all the angry and confusing stuff going on in my head. But then I know that afterwards I come crashing back down to earth, and the fallout is even worse than before.

  ‘Ice-cream?’ says Dad. He spoons pink and brown curls into my bowl and plucks himself a bunch of cloudy purple grapes from the fruit-bowl.

  Then he heads off upstairs, leaving instructions for me to finish my homework and do the washing-up. I hear the click of his PC going on and guess that he’s doing research on something lion-related.

  I sit at the table in the quiet for a good long while. I pull out my French homework, look at it, then stuff it back in my bag again.

  Part of me is actually hoping that Mum will come home. At least she’ll chat away and make the effort, even if half of what she says is painful or embarrassing.

  But Mum’s going straight from entertaining kids to her weekly yoga class. She says it’s her only way of de-stressing, after what’s happened to our family.

  The other part of me quite likes sitting here in the early-evening gloom with just the whine of the fridge for company.

  I think about Bindi and her perfect life. She’ll probably be up in her pink bedroom doing homework at the desk by her bed, her long hair falling down her back in a glossy plait and her dark eyebrows scowling with concentration. Bindi’s parents will be bickering downstairs in a good-natured sort of way and her little sisters and brother will be tucked up in bed.

  It’s very quiet here now.

  My eye wanders around the kitchen.

  We don’t keep many pictures of him around the house.

  It’s too painful.

  But there’s still that one on the fridge, bent with age and only held up by a tiny red fridge magnet, nearly obscured by one of Mum’s endless shopping lists.

  It’s my favourite picture.

  He’s grinning towards the camera because I took it.

  He’s just had his ear pierced and you can see if you look closely that the lobe is still red-raw. He’s got a tattoo of a black guitar on his left shoulder, and is wearing a black vest and black jeans. His hair flops forwards over one eye, like it always did. He looks crazy and loving and wired up, like he always did.

  Jay. Jacob. J.

  My brother. Nearly sixteen when I last saw him. Almost eighteen now.

  He went missing two years, three days and nine hours ago.

  Nobody’s heard a thing from him since.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Everyone reckons that I must have this big hole in my life since Jay went missing.

  Wrong.

  It’s not hole-shaped, but more like something that has crept into our house and made it look different. The rooms seem the same as ever when I first go into them, except that when I’m standing in the middle of the floor and being very quiet, and the traffic has stopped and the radiator isn’t humming, I realise that something isn’t quite right.

  It’s nothing that I can touch. It’s not that simple.

  It’s like something’s been sucked out of the air and spat out somewhere else.

  Somewhere I can’t see.

  We do stupid poetry at school about loss and great aching pains in your heart, but it doesn’t feel like that most of the time either.

  It feels more like somebody has turned a big dial in an anti-clockwise direction and made all the colours of trees and sky and sea and bushes a bit less bright, like I’m seeing them through one of those revolting, yellow-brown net curtains that old people have in their front rooms.

  There’s no point trying to explain this to Mum and Dad.

  They’ll only start talking about counsellors and therapy and grief again which is v embarrassing and doesn’t do any of us any good.

  I only got them off my back before by promising to keep an anger diary, as one of the women counsellors suggested. And I didn’t even keep that for the first year and a half, but just stared every night at the blank page and wondered why the words wouldn’t come out, until one day I managed to write groo and all the rest sort of came from there. It does help me to scribble my thoughts in it from time to time.

  But the sky still looks as though it’s been drained of all the blue.

  Jay was a good brother until things went wrong.

  That’s why I miss him so much.

  He was my favourite person next to Bindi.

  I mean, yeah, don’t get me wrong – sometimes I hated him. We fought and all that. Like brothers and sisters do. Sometimes he drove me mental with his arguing and teasing and winding me up about boys. And he knew just how to wrap Mum around his little finger. One flash of his lopsided grin, and she would melt like cheddar under a grill.

  He wasn’t so cheeky with Dad, though. Dad’s quite scary when he loses his smile, folds his big tattooed arms and glowers over the top of his glasses.

  Jay was just about the only person who would listen to my twelve-year-old rantings and take them seriously.

  ‘You’re my little sis,’ he’d say, whenever I was upset or in trouble. ‘Tell me who did this to you and I’ll go smash their head in, if you like.’

  Of course, he never did. He was gentle. He got upset if animals were mistreated, or if he saw anything on the news about cruelty to children or pets.

  But Jay made me feel
safe. It was us together against Mum and Dad. The Old Dudes, as he liked to call them. That’s how it’s supposed to be, right?

  My brother listened to Indie rock music like you wouldn’t believe. It was the main thing in his life, other than me. He always had a pair of headphones clamped on or a guitar slung round his neck. By the time he was fifteen he was playing in a band, and they were good. Really good. Record label interest and all that.

  Jay had six electric guitars posing on metal stands around his bedroom. He saved up the money for them himself, bit by bit, doing summer jobs and cadging donations out of Mum when she was in a good mood. Watching Jay with his guitars was a bit like watching other people with their pets. He picked each of them up and checked them over, tuned them and returned them lovingly to their stands. He polished them, restrung them and ordered effects pedals to plug into them.

  He loved a band called Muse, but mostly he modelled himself on Richey from Manic Street Preachers.

  I’d never heard of them, but Jay said they were a band from the 1990s whose lead guitarist had disappeared without trace, never to be seen again.

  Jay copied Richey’s hairstyle and even wore black eye make-up to imitate his look. His band covered all of Manic Street Preachers’s songs, but he also wrote his own and they were brilliant.

  But Jay didn’t disappear because his idol did.

  No.

  Jay’s disappearance wasn’t an accident, either.

  It was all because of me.

  It’s over two years since I saw my brother’s face.

  His bedroom isn’t exactly left as a shrine, because Mum went in there and had a good old clear-up on one of her bad days, but all his posters are still on the wall and his CDs are lined up on their shelf over his bed. His clothes hang in the wardrobe and they still smell a bit of him: roll-up cigarettes, shower gel, mints and the late-night smell of pubs and gig venues.

  On the day he went missing, he left everything behind except his mobile.

  All his things are still here.

  His wallet, his clothes, his rucksack and his contact lenses.

  His six guitars still sit around the room, waiting to be picked up and played.