The Scrapbook by Carly Holmes Page B

my hand away, kept yours outstretched to create distance. You told me I was childish.
    I wiped my palm on my dress and ran to catch you up but you refused to hold my hand, refused to even look at me. I tried to hug your arm and match my strides to yours, half-skipping to stay close, but our hips kept clashing and throwing me off rhythm. We lurched like that for a while, in silence.
    You were angry with me. I thrilled with the newness of it. You were angry with me and I had the power to defuse or inflame this moment. How much damage would we do? How much would it hurt? More than saying goodbye? I let go of your arm and made a brittle, laughing comment about the difference in our ages. I think I called you an old man. You stopped and we faced each other, showed our teeth. We’d never done this before, didn’t know how, but suddenly I wanted to, and so badly.
    You started to speak and I mimicked your tone, repeated your words in a high, sing-song whine that pressed a nerve behind your eyes so that they grew wide and hard. You half turned away and I grabbed your arm and pulled you roughly back. I began to shout.
    Do you remember what I said? Do you still think about it? I can’t recall anything but the exhilarating surge of spite and the need to take a word-axe to your roots and topple you. I hadn’t realised I could be so cruel, hadn’t realised how many layers of hurt had calcified beneath the crust of my smile. I stood and shouted.
    Your lips drooped apart and I saw beyond the trembling pink your crooked bottom teeth. I couldn’t breathe for tears.
    You hugged me as I cried. You hushed my remorse. You told me that it didn’t matter, that nothing had changed, that everything was going to be okay. And then you gave me your hand as we walked. It started to rain and you laughed and draped your jacket over me as we ran to the car.
    After you’d gone I sat in my room and shivered as I tried to summon memory of what I might have said. I sat in the dark and whispered words I might have used. Bastard. Dirty old man. Cheap kicks. Other woman. Whore.
    I couldn’t remember a single thing. My mind had tipped itself upside down and emptied out all trace of our argument. There was nothing left but a sour taste along my gums. I brushed my teeth and rinsed my mouth, rubbed my tongue with soap until bubbles frothed iridescently around my gag, and by the next morning the sourness had gone.

4
    I was fourteen when Granny Ivy’s spirit shook itself loose from its nest below my rib cage during a nasty fever and flung itself onto the bedroom wall. Her final breath made solid and given physical shape.
    Once the bout of coughing had subsided, I propped myself onto my elbow and watched as the thing I’d created scuttled and clung to the shadows. Rustling up to the ceiling and whispering, whispering words that I couldn’t make out.
    It was like a child’s crayon drawing of a crow, all scrawled edges and funny lumps, but it looked at me with her eyes. I flung myself against my pillows and reached as high as I could, tearing at the air, scrabbling for it.
    Come back to me.
    When I think of that night I want to scoop up my fourteen-year-old self and hold her close; keep her safe from a world which my adult self knows doesn’t allow for such whimsy. Yes, I was delirious, but I was also sure, am still sure, that my granny’s soul was there, on my ceiling. And I couldn’t bear to lose her twice.
    My pillows reared up and pummelled me and I threw myself forward, onto my knees. The blankets twisted themselves around my wrists, pulling me down into the mattress. I rolled onto my back, legs pedalling the air, and spilled over the side of the bed, jarring my shoulder against the wardrobe. Its door swung slowly open and the mirror fastened to its dark-wood carcass distorted my face so that I loomed above myself like a stranger. I screamed for my mum.
    She careered through the door a few seconds later,