On top of all this, Will, while still not talking to him at home, was making a genuine effort to close that once cavernous but now almost leapable gap between them. Yesterday he’d woken up earlier than usual to help Danny make breakfast, a small miracle given how averse he was to mornings, and today he’d given his dad an unprompted hug before heading off to school. All in all, Danny had to admit to himself that for the first time in a long time, life felt good. In fact, aside from the ever-present fear of Reg, life felt better than good. Life felt great. Only when he saw Will clapping along with the rest of the crowd did he suddenly remember that his landlord wasn’t the only tricky situation he had to resolve.
“I didn’t know you could dance,” said Will as the rest of the crowd trickled past him.
Danny took a seat on the bench and fished out his notepad and pen.
Pandas can do loads of amazing things.
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
Danny thought for a moment.
We can go invisible.
“No, you can’t.”
Yes, we can.
“I’ve never seen an invisible panda,” said Will.
Exactly! wrote Danny.
Will rolled his eyes and sat on the bench beside him.
“Mo says pandas poop up to fifty times per day. That’s pretty amazing.”
It’s true. We spend a fortune on toilet paper.
Will laughed.
Who’s Mo anyway? wrote Danny.
“My best friend. His name’s Mohammed, but everybody calls him Mo. He’s, like, an animal expert. Did you know that a group of pandas is called an embarrassment? He told me that too, but I don’t know if it’s true.”
It depends how much we’ve had to drink, wrote Danny.
Will smiled. “Who taught you to dance like that?”
A pole dancer called Krystal, wrote Danny, sure that Will wouldn’t believe him anyway.
“Very funny.”
I’m serious. She taught me after I rescued her bathrobe that was stolen by a wizard who can set things on fire with his mind.
“I might only be eleven, but I’m not stupid.”
Eleven? I thought you were at least twenty-four, wrote Danny.
“I wish.” Will laughed.
No, you don’t. Keep being eleven for as long as possible.
“How old are you?”
Eighty-four in panda years.
“Well, you’re a really good dancer for an eighty-four-year-old,” said Will.
Danny put his paws together and gave a little bow of gratitude.
“My mum used to be a dancer. She was really good too.”
What kind of dancer was she? wrote Danny.
“Every kind. She could dance to anything, even if there wasn’t any music.” He pulled out his phone. “Here,” he said, showing the screen to Danny. “This is her.”
Will pressed play and Danny watched as Liz danced alone in a spacious room with wooden floors and high ceilings reminiscent of a school assembly hall. He’d never seen the video, and the fact that he didn’t even know where it was filmed caused the stitches of his soul to unravel slightly.
“She worked at a school,” said Will, as if reading Danny’s mind. “Sometimes she used to practice there, when nobody else was around.”
Danny nodded, his bleary eyes fixed on the video as he took in every detail. What Liz was wearing. How she was moving. The way she brushed her hair from her face. The way she laughed and pretended to be mad when she realized that Will was recording her. The way she covered the camera with her palm before the video came to an end. Danny had plenty of videos of Liz, but seeing one for the very first time—one he didn’t even know existed—momentarily made him feel as if she were still alive somehow, as if she hadn’t died at all but slipped through a crack in space and time and ended up trapped in the video he was now watching. He wanted to replay it, and then replay it again, and keep replaying it until the battery eventually ran out; but suddenly aware that he was staring at the screen despite the video having already ended, and unsure of how long he’d been doing this exactly, he handed back the phone and scribbled something into his notepad.
Most people could live forever and not have that kind of talent, he wrote. Will smiled and nodded. A dog started barking somewhere nearby and they sat in silence for a moment while they watched a rowdy Jack Russell straining on its lead as it tried to pick a fight with an anxious pit bull.
Tell me something about your mum, wrote Danny.
Will shrugged. “Like what?”
Like anything.
Will stared across the park at something only he could see.
“She had these moles on her arm that sort of made a star if you joined them up with a pen. She used to let me do it for fun, but one time I did it with a permanent marker by accident and it took her ages to wash it off. And she was really good at crosswords, especially those cryptic ones with the clues that are super confusing. She was always trying to solve them, even when she wasn’t looking at them. Sometimes we’d be having dinner or we’d be in the supermarket or something and she’d suddenly shout out a random word like the name of a country or the color of a certain type of horse. One time we were on the Tube and she shouted out, ‘Leprechaun!’ and there was this really short woman sitting opposite us and she started yelling at Mum because she thought she was talking about her. It was pretty funny. And she always smelled of oranges because that’s what her favorite hand cream smelled of. I have one of the empty jars and it still sort of smells like she did. I don’t open it much because I don’t want the smell to disappear, but the wardrobe in my bedroom has sliding doors and sometimes I sit in there and open the jar and the smell gets trapped. If I close my eyes, it’s like she’s right there with me.”
Will flicked the loose button on his sleeve back and forth. Danny took the silence as his cue to say something, but Will continued before he could write anything.
“She drank, like, ten cups of tea a day, and she always put two tea bags into the cup because she liked it really strong, even though it tasted gross. She used to laugh at my dad because he couldn’t drink it, even though he’s a builder and builders are supposed to drink really strong tea apparently. She couldn’t drink mint tea, though, or eat anything with mint in it, because it made her sneeze, and when she did she sounded like a mouse, or that’s what my dad said, but my mum always said that mice don’t sneeze. Mo says they do, though, but only when they’re ill. She was left-handed too, like me. We have a left-handed pair of scissors at home, and me and Mum always used to laugh when Dad tried to use them because he couldn’t. Oh, and her favorite color was yellow. She had lots of yellow stuff, like shoes and clothes and things. Even the scissors are yellow. She sometimes wore this yellow dress that made her look like sunshine, even when it was raining. I don’t know where it is now though.”
Danny nodded. He knew exactly where it was because he had picked it out for Liz to be buried in. He thought about that day and how surreal it had felt to be going through her wardrobe in search of a suitable outfit for such a horrendous occasion, and he recalled how it had rained so heavily and for so long after the funeral that it seemed as if what Will had said was true, that Liz was the sunshine and that they hadn’t just buried her that day but also any light that was left in the world.