The Sticks [Chapter Seven] - REVISED

7. Present Day

After Amy stormed out, I could no longer bear to be in the flat. She’d tainted it with her touch. It had seemed void of any life before, but that feeling had been enhanced so much by her pointless chatter and now it seemed to be sucking the life right out of me. So I left, shoving some belongings into my backpack before swinging it onto my back and locking the door behind me. It didn’t matter that I was still in yesterday’s clothes, or that I hadn’t showered in a week. It was a Sunday, and no one went out on a Sunday.

The air outside was crisp and fresh, and as it filled my lungs I glanced round until I spotted my bike. It was still chained to the fence that separated this car park from the playing fields behind the flats. Starry would have said that it was some kind of miracle that a snot-nosed kid wearing an Adidas tracksuit hadn’t nicked it yet, or that I was really lucky. One time, the flat got broken into, and when I cried over my laptop having been taken, Starry told me that it was just my luck.

“Luck is just karma, and karma is whatever you put out into the world.”

The padlock opened once I’d twisted the numbers to the correct combination. The bike frame had rusted during the months I’d abandoned it out in the rain, and it took me a few minutes to coordinate myself enough to be able to cycle without wobbling. The bag on my back probably wasn’t helping with my balance, but I found my equilibrium eventually, and suddenly I felt that freedom that cycling brings. My legs, though usually weak, felt so powerful as they pedalled. My hair billowed out behind me in the breeze, making me feel like some sort of goddess. It was only for a moment - a tiny fraction of a moment. And then the feeling disappeared. How could I have been so selfish as to call myself a goddess?

I hadn’t even been paying attention to where I was cycling, but as I snapped out of that temporary freedom I realised I was three streets away. The breaks squealed as I squeezed them, and my body slammed into the crossbar with a jolt. My foot suddenly became much more painful, I had barely even noticed it until now. It throbbed and pulsed, sending sharp shocks up my ankle to my calf like the pain was trying to escape through the surface of my skin. Looking up, I could see the This and That cafe, nestled at the end of the street. Some rational part of my subconscious must have been trying to tell me to go back to work, to earn money so I could pay my rent and stay in the flat. I knew better than to trust myself. It wasn’t like it was my dream job - being paid £8 an hour to serve the same people the same order each day - but I had enjoyed it before I left. Technically, I had never quit.. I thought about popping in, seeing how everyone was, but that sounded too cheerful, so I forced myself to pedal on.

I still had no real idea of where I was going, but I didn’t let that stop me. The town bled into a continuous blur, rows of terraced housing blending into one, each new corner shop less distinguishable from the last. Red bricks faded into grey as I approached the centre of town.. Bluevale Ridge Secondary School appeared in my peripheral vision, the big blue gates taunting me from across the road. I paid it no heed, and let it disappear behind me as I arrived in the town square. I hadn’t had to think of that place in almost four years now, since I’d collected my GCSE certificates and bolted out of the premises for good. I certainly wasn’t planning on letting it mess with my head again.

Bluevale Ridge town square sat in the shadow of the town church - The Redemption, Restoration and Resurrection of Jesus Christ Church. It was as old as the town, and towered high above any other building in the town, looming over us like some thinly veiled threat from the heavens. I’d loved visiting the churchyard as a child, blissfully unaware of the damage religion could do a person, to a community, to the world.

The graveyard also sat in the shadow of the church, hidden from any sun that tried to resurrect the wilting flowers that’d had been placed beneath cracked headstones. I let my bike drop onto the grass as I entered the zombie land. This was so close to the road where I was hit by a car on my first day of year seven, over eight years ago now. It was also close to half of my family.

Four marble headstones were the only physical reminders that I had left. Everything else had gone up in flames. Each marble headstone was engraved with a name, a birthdate and a death date. Heather Graham. Dexter Graham. Journey Graham. Julius Graham. Taken too soon.

There was a fresh bouquet of flowers left by each grave, four bunches of expensive Roses. It meant dad had been there recently, seeing as the roses were still alive. Not for much longer. He must have been there with Nathan, and Aristotle and Adeleine. The thought of Nathan visiting my family's graves and laying flowers in their memory made me physically wretch. He never knew them, he wasn’t family. He and dad weren’t even married yet.

Starry wasn’t buried here - she’d rather have rotted in the gutter with the leaves. The church had been beautiful to her, and she had spent too many hours sat in the grass, painting the stained glass windows in her sketchbooks. But if there was one thing she hated most, it was organised religion. “Belief in a higher power should be a personal thing,” I recalled her saying, in that soft voice that could soothe anyone to sleep. “You should believe what your heart tells you too, not some old white man in a stupid dress.”

She was cremated, her ashes scattered in the river that ran through town. Little parts of her were floating out to sea, riding the waves out into terra incognita, the unknown. Little parts of her had been entangled in the pond weeds, swallowed by hungry fishes, scooped up in buckets by kids trying to catch minnows. Little parts of her had evaporated into the clouds.

Time had ceased to exist for me, and when I fell back into reality the sky was tinted orange with streaks of pink. I had left my phone at home, and had never liked the thought of a watch, so I was unsure of exactly what time it was but I guessed maybe six thirty or so. My stomach groaned audibly, shattering the silence. After days of barely eating, my body had decided that now was the time to finally give in. I forced myself to turn away from the graves and made my way back to where my bike lay abandoned in the dying grass. My foot was hurting even more now, and I was sure that my sock would be soaked with blood by the time I got home. That was, if I could muster up the courage to return to the flat again. The word home seemed so foreign, so wrong. It wasn’t a home, it was more like a prison cell.

There was no way I could cycle again with the amount of pain that was now consuming my foot, so I pulled the bike up by the handlebars and pushed it alongside me, the wheels clicking as they spun. Dad had bought me this bike, during the summer before year eight, and it was still the right size for me. I’d barely grown in those years, barely changed.

The town was still as deserted as it had been earlier, and the shops were all closed. I caught my reflection in the window of the bank, and it stopped me dead in my tracks. Even though I knew what I looked like - I’d seen myself in the mirror in the flat - I was still surprised to see how close I was to matching how I imagined my mother to be, in her coffin six feet below where I’d previously been standing. My hair was matted from being untouched by shampoo or a hairbrush, the curls that Starry had always said she loved so much now flat and volumeless. My eyes had sunk so far into my skull it was almost comical. It made me ill to see myself in such a state. A year ago I had been happy, and maybe even beautiful. A year ago, Starry and I had been making plans to spend the rest of our life in a log cabin out in the sticks, away from all the people.

I didn’t go back to the flat. Instead, I found myself standing outside of my dad’s new house, the one he shared with Nathan and the kids. I hadn’t spoken to them at all since Starry’s funeral, and even then it was only a brief few words and a hug. My dad and I hadn’t had a proper conversation since Mum died.

“It’s not like they’re strangers,” I told myself out loud as I ditched the bike on the path. “It’s your dad, and his boyfriend, and your brother and your sister. They’re your family.”

The outside of their house was framed by a sickeningly picturesque front garden, with rows of flowers planted neatly along the driveway. A football lay by the foot of a trampoline, and a small pair of wellies had been left by the slide. No passerby would take a second look, it was just so ordinary. I knew I wouldn’t just be able to slot myself back into family life. There was no room left in a house like this for me.