Broken Soup by Jenny Valentine

someone out. Friends, that is, not Mum and Dad so much, I suppose, but he’d do anything for his friends.”
    â€œWho were his friends?” Bee asked.
    â€œOh, there was Melly who lived down the road, and Pete and Oscar from your class, except Pete’s left now, hasn’t he? He hung out with them mostly.” Melly and Pete and Oscar, who tried their best but didn’t know what to say to me when Jack was gone. They didn’t have a clue.
    â€œI like Oscar,” Bee said. “He doesn’t say much, but when he does it’s funny.”
    â€œI miss him,” I said. “Jack, I mean.”
    â€œI know you do,” she said, sitting behind me, braiding my hair.
    Stroma and Carl made rice with broccoli and tomatoes and fish sticks, enough for everyone. Sonny woke up and clung to Carl and ate like a horse. After supper, Bee took him for a bath and Carl played the shape game with me and Stroma. You draw a random shape and the next person has to turn it into something with a different-colored felt-tip marker. Bee joined in, too, and Sonny, dripping and shiny from the bath, drew on his own legs and set Stroma off laughing again. Everyone was busy making a six-year-old happy, which made a change from it being just me.
    At seven thirty, Carl took Sonny to bed with a bottle and I read Stroma a story on the sofa. She curled herself up under the quilt, put her thumb in her mouth, and started playing with my hair like she used to do with Mum. After a bit I untangled myself and kissed her on the forehead.
    She said, “Can we stay here tomorrow as well?”
    Later, Bee and Carl and I were washing the dishes. We were humming the same tune and doing a kind of dance around each other just to get things done in the tiny kitchen. I didn’t know where anythingwent because there weren’t any cupboards. The battered wooden filing cabinet with the radio on top was the last place I expected them to keep plates and cups and saucepans. The cutlery lived in the top left of a chest of drawers, the same sort you put your underwear in. I think jam and honey and stuff went in the right. Whatever was left seemed to live on the table. It was much nicer than those kitchens with plastic cupboards lining the walls and a place for everything. It was much more fun than washing up at home.
    When it was as tidy as it was going to be, Carl said, “Time for some sugar,” and he started rolling a joint. Bee let her head drop back and said something to the ceiling about being the teenage daughter of a teenager.
    â€œYou’re not having any,” Carl said.
    Bee said, “I know,” and I held my hands up in the air to say I wasn’t interested either.
    Jack used to smoke grass. Mum got cross because he’d stop finishing his sentences and eat everything in the house, but really she was relieved he was doing it at home and not in some bus shelter where she couldn’t find him. Dad thought she was way too easy on him. He said Jack’s room might as well be the bus shelter once all his friends found out you could smoke there, but that never really happened. Maybe once or twice when they were out.
    Anyway, Carl smoked and it stank up the kitchen, and then he started making a packed lunch for Stroma.
    I said, “I can do that tomorrow morning.”
    He looked at me. “You know what? It’s your night off. Go and watch a movie upstairs or something.”
    I asked if I could have a bath and Bee went to run me one. When I got there, she’d lit candles and used bubbles and suddenly I felt like Stroma must have done all evening: taken care of. “What would I do without you?” I said, and I really meant it.
    â€œWhat you’ve been doing,” Bee told me. “Getting on with it. It’s what we all do.”
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    Stroma woke up in the night and forgot where she was. She climbed into my sleeping bag and then went straight back to sleep, leaving me with a few