Finding Audrey

Mum’s been pissed off with us ever since Dickensgate. She made us tidy our rooms today, which hardly ever happens, and she found a cheeseburger in Frank’s room and it all kicked off.

I don’t mean a cheeseburger carton, I mean an actual cheeseburger. He’d taken about two bites and put it back into the box and left it on the floor, like, weeks ago. It was buried under a pile of rank sports kit. The weird thing is, the cheeseburger didn’t moulder. It kind of fossilized. It was pretty gross.

Mum started on the hugest lecture about rats and vermin and hygiene, but Frank waved her away and said, ‘I have to go, Mum – Linus is, like, a minute away. You always say we have to be polite to guests and greet them.’ He stomped downstairs and I felt a bit swoopy in my stomach.

Linus again. I didn’t think we’d be seeing so much of Linus while Frank was banned from computers.

Mum obviously thought the same thing, because she looked a bit thrown and called down the stairs, ‘He does know about your computer ban, doesn’t he?’ and Frank said impatiently, ‘Of course.’ Then he added, as he swung round into the hall, ‘But Linus can play LOC on my computer while he’s here, can’t he?’

Mum looked a bit flummoxed. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. A moment later she was heading off to her bedroom, saying, ‘Chris? Chris, what do you think of this?’

That was all about ten minutes ago. I know Linus is here because I heard him arrive a few minutes ago. He went straight into the playroom with Frank and I guess they fired up LOC straight away. Meanwhile I could hear Mum and Dad in discussion in their bedroom.

‘It’s the principle!’ Mum kept saying. ‘He’s got to learn!’

I think Dad was on the ‘They’re only kids, it’s all fairly harmless’ tack and Mum was on the ‘Screens are evil and corrupting my son’ tack, and they couldn’t agree, so after a while I got bored listening. I headed down to the den, and here I am now, waiting.

No, not waiting.

Well, kind of waiting.

I put on an old episode of How I Met Your Mother and try not to calculate how long a game of LOC is, and whether Linus might come and say hello when he’s done. Just the thought of him is giving me little twinges. Good twinges. I think.

I mean, not that he needs to say hello. It’s probably the last thing he wants to do. Why would he?

Only, he did say ‘See you soon’. Why would he say ‘See you soon’ if he was planning to ignore me for the rest of my life?

My hands are twisted up, and I try to unclench them. He won’t come. He’s here to see Frank, not me. I need to stop thinking about this. I turn up How I Met Your Mother, and am flicking through a copy of Closer too, for good measure, when Felix comes charging towards the sofa.

‘This pocket paper is for you!’ he announces, and thrusts a piece of A4 at me.

Hi, Rhubarb.

He’s drawn the picture of rhubarb in dark glasses again, and I feel my mouth twitch into a smile.

Hi, Orange Slice.

I’m terrible at drawing, but somehow I manage a picture of a face with hair and an orange segment for a mouth. I send Felix trotting off with it, and wait.

A few moments later I hear Mum and Dad coming down the stairs, and some sort of kerfuffle coming from the playroom.

‘You are SO UNREASONABLE!’ Frank’s voice suddenly echoes through the house.

‘PLEASE DO NOT SHOUT AT ME IN FRONT OF YOUR FRIENDS!’ Mum shrieks back.

I instinctively have my hands over my ears, and am wondering whether to escape upstairs to my room, when there’s a noise at the door. I look up – and it’s him. It’s Linus.

Before I know it, I’ve bolted into the furthest corner of the sofa.

Stupid, dumb lizard brain.

I stare fixedly at the wall and mutter, ‘Hi.’

‘Hi, Rhubarb. So what’s this “orange slice” thing?’

‘Oh.’ I can’t help a tiny smile, and my fists unclench a teeny smidgen. ‘I think your smile looks like an orange segment.’

‘My mum says it’s like a crescent moon.’

‘There you go, then.’

He moves a little into the room. I’m not looking that way, but my radar is on full twitch alert. If you spend most of your time turned away from people, you get to know what they’re doing without having to see it.

‘So – aren’t you playing?’ My voice comes out a little husky.

‘Your mum’s banned me. She got a bit mad. Frank was helping me play, and she started on this thing about how he was banned, and that included sitting with his friends, telling them what to do.’

‘Right.’ I nod. ‘I can imagine. Do your parents get so stressed about computer games?’

‘Not really,’ says Linus. ‘They’re more stressed about my granny. She lives with us and she’s proper crazy. I mean—’

He stops abruptly and there’s a prickly silence. It takes me about three seconds to realize why.

That’s what he thinks I am, hits me with a horrible thud, followed by, Of course he does.

The silence is getting worse. I can sense the word crazy floating around in the air, like the words on Frank’s French vocab program.

Crazy.

Fou.

I learned that in French, before I quit school. Folie. That means crazy too, doesn’t it? Only it sounds like a chic form of crazy. Crazy in, like, a Breton-striped top with red lipstick.

‘I’m sorry,’ says Linus.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ I say, almost aggressively. ‘You didn’t say anything.’

Which is true. He didn’t say anything. He stopped mid-sentence.

Except that stopping mid-sentence is the worst thing people can do. It’s, like, totally passive aggressive, because you can’t take issue with anything they’ve said. You have to take issue with what you think they were going to say.

Which then they deny.

The Queen of the Mid-sentence Stop is my mum. I mean, she’s an expert. Some recent examples in no particular order:

1.

MUM: Well, I really think your so-called friend Natalie could have—

Mid-Sentence Stop.

ME: What? Prevented everything from happening? So it’s her fault? We can lay everything at the door of Natalie Dexter?

MUM: Don’t overreact, Audrey. I wasn’t going to say that.

2.

MUM: I’ve bought you some facial wash. Look, it’s especially formulated for teenage skin.

ME (reading label): For problem skin breakouts. You think I have problem skin?

MUM: Of course not, darling. But you have to admit that sometimes it’s a little—

Mid-Sentence Stop.

ME: What? Rank? Gross? Like, I should walk around with a bag over my head?

MUM: Don’t overreact, Audrey. I wasn’t going to say that.

Anyway, so I’m quite attuned to the Mid-Sentence Stop. And Linus just stopped, totally mid-sentence, and I know what he was going to say. He was going to say: She’s crazy like you’re crazy.

He’s repulsed by me. I knew it. He’s only come by here because it’s like entertainment, like a freak show. The girl in the dark glasses – roll up, roll up, see her cower in the corner!

The silence is going on and on, and someone has to break it, so I say tightly, ‘It’s fine. I’m crazy. Whatever.’

‘No!’ Linus sounds really shocked. Shocked, embarrassed, discomfited. Kind of mortified. Like he can’t believe I would say that. (I’m getting all this from one syllable, you understand.)

‘You’re nothing like my granny,’ he adds, and he gives this little laugh, like he’s enjoying a private joke. ‘If you met her you’d understand.’

Linus’s voice is kind of easy. Not like Frank’s, which sounds like a harsh battering ram most of the time. He laughs again and I feel like this swooshing of relief. If he can laugh, then he’s not repulsed, right?

‘So I guess I won’t be round again till Frank’s ban is lifted.’

‘Right.’

‘Your mum thinks I’m a bad influence.’

‘My mum thinks everything is a bad influence.’ I roll my eyes, even though he can’t see.

‘So do you ever go out or anything?’

He hasn’t stopped mid-sentence, but still the air feels prickly. At least, the air around me feels prickly. Go out or anything. I feel an urge to curl up and shut my eyes.

‘No. Not really.’

‘Right.’

‘I mean, I’m supposed to go to Starbucks.’

‘Awesome. When are you going to go?’

‘I’m not.’ I say it roughly, without even meaning to. ‘It’s . . . I can’t.’

There’s another silence. I’m hunched away even further. I can sense his questions circulating around the silence like more vocab words: Why? How come? What’s going on?

‘I’m supposed to do, like, exposure therapy,’ I say in a miserable rush. ‘Like, you do a little bit at a time. But Starbucks isn’t a little bit. It’s huge. I just can’t. So.’

With every revelation, I’m expecting him to leave. But he’s still here.

‘Like allergies,’ he says, sounding fascinated. ‘Like, you’re allergic to Starbucks.’

‘I guess.’ This conversation is starting to wear away at my brain. I’m clutching a cushion for comfort; the tendons are standing up on my hands.

‘So, you’re allergic to eye contact.’

‘I’m allergic to everything contact.’

‘No you’re not,’ he says at once. ‘You’re not allergic to brain contact. I mean, you write notes. You talk. You still want to talk to people, you just can’t. So your body needs to catch up with your brain.’

I’m silent for a while. No one’s put it like that before.

‘I suppose,’ I say at last.

‘What about shoe contact?’

‘What?’

‘Shoe contact!’

‘What’s shoe contact?’ I’d laugh, only my stupid lizard brain has disabled the laugh button for now. I’m too frozen up with tension.

I am owed so much laughter. Sometimes I hope I’m building up a stockpile of missing laughs, and when I’ve recovered, they’ll all come exploding out in one gigantic fit that lasts twenty-four hours.

Meanwhile Linus has sat down on the sofa, at the other end from me. In my peripheral vision I see him extending a grubby trainer.

‘Go on,’ he says. ‘Shoe contact. Let’s do it.’

I can’t move. I’m a hedgehog rolled into a ball. I don’t want to know.

‘You can move your foot,’ says Linus. ‘You don’t have to look at it. Just move it.’

He sounds persistent. I can’t believe this is happening. My lizard brain is really not liking this. It’s telling me to dive under the blanket. Hide. Run. Anything.

Maybe if I don’t react, I tell myself, he’ll just give up and we can forget all about it.

But the seconds tick on, and he doesn’t go anywhere.

‘Go on,’ he says encouragingly. ‘I bet you can do it.’

And now I have Dr Sarah’s voice in my head: You need to start pushing yourself.

Gradually, I shift my foot across the carpet, until the rubber rim of my trainer is touching the rubber rim of his. The rest of my body is still turned away. I’m staring fixedly at the fabric of the sofa, my entire brain focused on the centimetre of foot that is in contact with his.

And OK, I know there’s, like, two layers of trainer rubber between us, I know this could not be less erotic or romantic or whatever – and by the way, my entire body is still twisted firmly away from his as if I can’t stand the sight of him. But still, it feels kind of—

Well.

See how I stopped mid-sentence? I can do it too. When I don’t necessarily want to reveal the exact thought I’m having.

I feel breathless, is all I will admit to.

‘There.’ He sounds satisfied. ‘See?’

Linus doesn’t sound breathless. He just sounds interested, like I proved a point which now he’ll tell his friends about or write up in his blog or whatever. He leaps to his feet and says, ‘So, I’ll see you,’ and the spell is broken.

‘Yeah. See you.’

‘Your mum will chase me out of the house in a minute. I’d better go.’

‘Huh. Yeah.’

I hunch towards the sofa corner, determined not to give away how I kind of wish he’d stay.

‘Oh. Um,’ I say as he reaches the door. ‘Maybe I could interview you for my documentary.’

‘Oh yeah?’ He pauses. ‘What’s that?’

‘I have to make this documentary, and I’m supposed to interview people who come to the house, so . . .’

‘OK. Cool. Whenever. I’ll be back after . . . you know. When Frank can play games again.’

‘Cool.’

He disappears and I stay motionless for a while, wondering if he’ll come back or send me any more notes, or a message via Frank or whatever.

Which of course he doesn’t.