Happy

I hated it when they fought like that. Shouts that echoed around the house and made the walls reverberate from him; screams that seeped through the crack under the door and made the glass rattle ominously in their frames from her. It always sent me running to my room, where I would hide my face underneath my pink cushion, the one with the white spots and the appliqué ladybird with the dangling feet. I would grip my teddy-bear like my life depended on it, imitating his voice as I tried to take us off to some kind of imaginary world where there was no fighting and no shouting and no stupid grown-ups. Sometimes, if the shouting got really bad, I would go under the duvet and those imaginary worlds would become a little more real. I would pretend we were up in the mountains, hiking through the snow; pretend we were on the beach, watching the dolphins play in the sea; pretend we were in the jungle, watching the monkeys dance from tree to tree

But no matter how hard I tried, I could never completely escape the fighting.

I sometimes tried to make them stop. I would run into the room and start screaming too, slamming doors and breaking plates. If I really wanted them to stop, I would break a piece of her favourite china, the one with the heart pattern on it that she got as a present years ago. I was convinced that seeing this shatter into millions of tiny fragments would cause them both to snap out of their stupor, start yelling at me instead, which is how things are supposed to go. Grown-ups shout at kids, not at each other, right?

But it never worked.

He found me one day, a little while after an argument they had. It had been particularly bad, and I had wanted to get away so badly that I had dragged all the toys out from under my bed and was now lying in the dust-free imprints they had left behind, the inches of mattress above me doing nothing to stifle the noise. He called my name once, then crouched down, smiling a little as he saw me lying under the bed and hugging my teddy-bear.

He always knew where he could find me.

“Hey, Riri,” he said. “It’s ok. You don’t have to lie with the dust-bunnies any more.”

Then he reached for my hand, letting me decide whether to trust him or not. This was one of the things I liked about him – he never tried to decide things for me, push his opinions on me like the others. He thought that, at the tender age of seven years old, I was plenty old enough to do whatever the hell I wanted. Probably not the best method of parenting around, but hey, it worked for us, which was all that mattered.

Hesitantly, I reached out my hand and placed it in his. His hand felt rough, and it made my titchy hand look even smaller than it actually was. He helped me to crawl out, standing me up and brushing all the clumps of dust off me, shaking the bits of paper and junk out of my hair.

“What were you doing under there, hey Riri?” he asked, still knelt down on the ground.

I stared down at the sorry-looking teddy-bear still in my hand and didn’t answer. My teddy-bear’s face stared back at me, his glass eyes scratched and the stuffing falling out of his nose, making him look like he had an oozing infection in the middle of his face. I wondered if he could ever be repaired, if he could ever be returned to that perfect state that they bought him as.

I learnt from an early age that perfection isn’t possible.

“Oh,” I heard him say. “That’s why, huh?”

He always knew how to read me, even back then.

I nodded once and continued my assessment of my teddy-bear’s face. His fur was falling out and his mouth was sagging. He had peanut-butter chunks around his lips from where I had tried to feed him, and to be honest he smelt a bit weird. I preferred him smelling weird, though, to smelling like the nauseous stench of washing powder.

“Riri, it’s ok,” he said. “We were just fighting. That’s all.”

I pouted crossly. “That’s what you always say,” I muttered darkly. They always said that I was into dark stuff, always picking black over pink and the twisted skull and crossbone temporary tattoos over Barbie ones. I put it down to individuality; they put it down to weirdness.

“Because that’s all it is,” he said. He never usually spoke like this. Spouted shit like all the grown-ups did. He had a policy of being honest and truthful to everyone, regardless of whether that person was one or one-hundred-and-one. He was hiding something. He was lying.

“You’re lying!” I shouted, stomping my foot the way she did when she got mad at him for something insignificant. “You’re lying! All you ever do is lie, lie, lie! You always tell me not to, and you always do! Just stop lying to me! I’m not a baby any more!”

I expected him to shout back, like he always did with her. In a way, I wanted him to shout back. Feeling that white-hot anger pumping through my veins felt good in a twisted kind of way.

But instead of shouting, he leant back on his haunches, looking up into my hot little face. My heart thudded painfully against my chest as I realised who I sounded like: I sounded like them. Sure, I had screamed before. Sure, I had shrieked before. I was only a kid, after all.

But I’d never shouted like that before.

“You’re right, Riri,” he said. “I shouldn’t be lying to you. I’m sorry,” he added, sounding so sincere, so honest, that the idea of doubting him didn’t even cross my mind.

“Me too,” I said, because that’s what I had been taught to do. Someone says sorry, then you say that you’re sorry, too. That’s just what you do.

“I’m going to make it up to you,” he said. He took me by the hand and led me downstairs, putting my shoes on and buttoning up my coat. I looked at him in confusion.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” he said, taking my teddy-bear from my grasp and placing him carefully on the stair.

He took me to the beach. He drove me in the car, because we lived about a mile from the beach and getting there tired my short little legs out. Both the sky and the sea were grey, making the sand look a strange sort of off-colour, and seagulls battled the determined coastal wind. Blobs of rain splattered against the tarmac of the car park, but I didn’t care: I was at the beach. I was at the beach, the one place in the world where I felt I could lose myself completely and not have to think about shouts, screams and breaking china.

He took me down across the sand-dunes, over the sand and to the rocks. To me, they seemed like boulders, huge grey things that stood by the sea and protected the beach from losing any more of her precious sand. They scared me, but at the same time amazed me, looming over me like cliffs or mountains defying all attempts at movement. There were signs saying that you shouldn’t climb on them, but everyone did anyway – the illegality of it all made it more exciting. He’d always told me that rules are made to be broken.

He probably never should have told me that.

“Here,” he said. He bent down and picked something up from by the bottom of one of the rocks, holding it up to show me. I stared at it in sudden fascination. He was always picking things up from the beach and taking them home – rocks with holes through the middle of them, perfectly formed seashells, smooth bits of driftwood. It drove her crazy to have so much of the outside inside, but I loved it. I loved how something so imperfect could be so beautiful in a world where perfection seemed to be everything.

“What is it?” I asked.

“It’s a mussel shell,” he said. “Still in tact, too. See this bit?” He pointed to inside the shell. “That’s where the mussel lives. And then the shell snaps shut to keep it safe.”

“Where is he now?”

“Maybe he moved house,” he said. I giggled. “You can put other things in here too, you know.”

“Like what?”

“Promises,” he said. He took my hand again and crouched down in front of me so we were now seeing literally eye-to-eye. He held the open shell up, positioning it so that it was directly in front of our mouths, enabling it to catch our every word. “I promise you, Riri, that I won’t ever lie to you again.”

“I promise too,” I said.

He pressed a finger to my lips before I could say anything else and snapped the shell shut. “There,” he said. “Now for as long as this remains shut, our promise will never be broken.”

“What happens if it opens?” I asked.

“Then the promise is broken,” he said. “But don’t worry; that’s not ever going to happen with this one.”

Then he turned around and threw it into the sea.

Sometimes I think it did open.