He raises his eyebrows, purses his lips, and makes an excited ‘ooooh!’ sound at our discovery.
‘This is it,’ he says mock-seriously. ‘I can feel it in my bones. It’s a diamond tiara. Or a voodoo doll. Or a collection of fake passports and a bundle of foreign currency because your dad was a secret CIA assassin. Something life-changing, anyway.’
I roll my eyes, and take the box from his hands, feeling its surprising weight. I pull away the crinkling tissue paper, and look at what lies beneath.
I see a pile of items, of different shapes and sizes, heaped over each other. It all looks like correspondence or paperwork of some kind, with crooked edges and coloured corners and tiny glimpses of writing.
Face up on the very top is a birthday card. A birthday card for a little girl, with a cartoon teddy bear with a blue nose on the front. The bear looks a bit sad, even though he’s holding a bunch of red balloons. Written across the card, in bumpy 3D foil, are the words ‘for my daughter’, and a big number 5.
This is not the kind of card my parents ever bought for me. This was not their style at all. I stare at it, this brightly shaded thing, stacked on the top of more cards and letters and postcards, all poking out at strangely pointed angles, jostling for attention: look at me, look at me, look at me … don’t you want to know what I am? Don’t you want to gouge out my secrets?
The card starts to tremble, which I eventually realise is because my hands are shaking.
Part of me wants to put it back in the box, buried beneath a layer of tissue paper and cowardice; to close the lid and hide it away beneath a broken deckchair and pretend I never saw it.
Part of me knows I’m being silly – it’s just an old birthday card, surely? I don’t remember it, but that’s not surprising if I was only five. It must have been for me. It must be mine – because the only alternative I can think of feels like a phosphorous grenade igniting inside my skull.
My shaking fingers are moving in front of my eyes, the sad-faced bear blurring. Everything blurring, even sound. I can hear Michael talking, but can’t differentiate between his words and white noise. My brain is buzzing, and eyelids are blinking fast, and I feel distinctly separate from the world around me.
I open the card. I see the handwriting, all scrawls and loops and passion. I read the message.
‘For our darling angel, Gracie. Us three against the world. I love you both. Now and always, Daddy Joe Joe xxx’
I tell myself I must be wrong. That it can’t be from him. That he was long gone by the time Grace would have been five. That he’d left me – left us – swimming away from the wreckage of our lives and moving on to new harbours.
I prod the contents of the package, jumbling things from side to side. I see that everything in here, in this volatile box-of-not-brogues, is either a birthday card, or something else that bears the same looping handwriting. That all of this – every single thing in this box – is from him.
The meaning of this registers both instantaneously and slowly. One end of my brain intuits it in a nanosecond; the other end trundles slowly towards it. Eventually, they meet each other, and spell out a few inescapable facts in flashing neon light.
They spell out the fact that he hadn’t swum away. That he hadn’t abandoned us.
And that, ipso facto, means that my parents had lied. It means that everything that I’ve believed to be true for so long is based on that lie. My whole life has been lived under the shadow of that lie, starved of light, quietly surviving, never thriving.
It means that the people I thought loved me the most, my mother and father, deceived me on the most sacred of subjects.
I feel the strength drain suddenly and completely from my legs, as though someone has chopped off my feet and all the muscles and tendons and every essential thing that holds me together have poured out of my body. My throat clamps against my own saliva. The skin on my face burns suddenly, and I know that I need to sit down before I fall.
Michael, by my side, takes the card from my passive marshmallow grip and reads it.
‘Who on earth is Joe Joe?’ he asks.
Chapter 4
September 1998
As soon as she’s safely on the bus, her mother’s stiff waving figure receding into the distance, Jessica breathes a sigh of relief and gets out her Big Bag of Secret Supplies.
The hoop earrings go in first, replacing the demure gold studs she’s been wearing for years, the ones that make her look like a slightly rebellious nun.
Then she puts on her headphones, which is more awkward than it sounds with earrings as well. The wires keep getting caught in the hoops. She swoops her dark-blonde hair up into a scrunchied ponytail to stop everything getting tangled, and sets up the Sony Discman.
She’s listening to No Doubt singing ‘Don’t Speak’, because Gwen Stefani seems like the kind of kick-ass girl she wants to be – as opposed to her parents’ vision of her, which is modelled on early Princess Di.
Next is the make-up. She’s never really worn much make-up, and has little experience of applying it. Her last school was really strict about it, and a teacher called Mrs Bone would patrol the playground, wielding a pack of baby wipes to use on any cosmetic criminals.
Jessica has practised at home in her room at night, and with some of her friends, but it’s still a work in progress. Most of her spots have cleared up now, thankfully. She spent the whole of years nine and ten with acne so bad she looked like she had one of those horrible medieval diseases they learned about in history. Crusticus explodicus.
In the Big Bag of Secret Supplies, she has amassed a few precious items, including some nude matte lipstick and a brown lip pencil. She read in Sugar that this is all a young woman needs and anticipates looking like Kate Moss in no time at all.
After the dual challenge of speed bumps and lack of know-how, she eventually decides she’d rather keep her eyesight than risk another coat of mascara. Kate Moss probably has a make-up artist to do all this for her, and never has to put her face on while she’s sitting in a bus.
By the time she shoves the tubes and bottles away again, she’s not entirely convinced she’s improved matters. Like most sixteen-year-old girls she doesn’t realise how beautiful she actually is. She’s so busy criticising herself there’s not much room left for confidence, and the make-up hasn’t transformed her quite as much as she’d hoped. She still looks like her – just a more gunked up version.
As the bus bumps and twists its way out of the countryside, into the suburbs, and towards the outskirts of the city, Jessica notices increasingly larger crowds of other teenagers getting on board. As they get closer to the college, the groups get bigger, and louder, and brasher, and every time it happens, a bit of her excitement fades and turns into something more primal.
The bus gets so full that kids are lining the aisles, swinging from the handrails, sitting on each other’s laps, and it’s like being trapped in a circus on wheels.
A massive woman is next to Jessica, her bum taking up most of both seats, her face crimped up in disapproval at what’s going on around her.
Jessica has switched off her CD, but keeps the headphones on. It seems as decent a way as any of distancing herself from the wolf pack.
She tries to look casual, to strike that balance between appearing confident and devil-may-care without making any kind of eye contact that would draw attention. All of it feels unfamiliar and uncomfortable and nerve-wracking. Not just the noise, or the rising sense of claustrophobia, but the sheer number of that alien species – boys.