Walking… Walking… Out of the fire circle, into the forest.
Not going to LA…
It’s okay… We may spend some time together in two weeks.
Not seen her for two years.
Tummy hurt.
Tummy really hurt.
I let go of Kyle and Whinnie and ran away from them, into the pitch darkness.
“AMBER,” they called frantically. Ten metres, twenty metres. Couldn’t see. So dark. Tummy really hurt. Too much whiskey.
Tummy…
I doubled over and was violently sick all over the forest floor. Crying and being sick. Sobbing and being sick. Whenever a new sob came out, more sick came out with it.
“MUM!” I screamed into the darkness. The word that causes me the most pain. The word that, to everyone else, brings the opposite. Brings them warmth, and love, and light and understanding and stability and security…
More sobbing, more sick. Everything hurt. My throat was on fire. My stomach felt like it had been shredded in a cheese grater.
Someone was holding my hair back. Someone was rubbing my back.
It was dark, so dark. In all the different ways – literally, metaphorically…
“Do you think she’s done?”
It was Whinnie’s voice. Whinnie’s lovely American voice.
“Mum,” I whimpered, coughing up something else.
More patting on my back. “Your mum thinks you’ve got food poisoning.” Kyle’s voice. Kyle’s all-American golden boy voice of honey and niceness. “We couldn’t let her smell the whiskey on you. We’d all get fired.”
“She’d just be jealous,” I wailed. “Because she wants it…all the time she wants it…that’s why she’s such a bitch.”
I flinched as I said it. But it was true.
“Amber, why don’t we move over here?” Whinnie asked. “Away from…umm…your puddle. And there’s more light.”
“What puddle? Oh…”
I looked down – I’d made such a mess. I wasn’t even embarrassed. They manoeuvred me through the darkness, leaning me gently against a pine tree. I slumped to the floor, the bark scratching up my back as I did.
“I want to go home,” I sobbed. Then I sobbed harder, because I didn’t know where home was. It certainly wasn’t here. But it wasn’t really with Dad either, with my cow of a stepmum and my devilspawn of a stepbrother, and all of them secretly counting down the days until I left for art college.
Whinnie kept rubbing my back, and said nice cooing things. I think Kyle just stared at me. I wasn’t sure. I ran back to my puddle to be sick once more, then collapsed again.
I was sobering up already. The whiskey had spent such a brief time in my body, it hadn’t had the chance to make much of an impact. It was grief keeping me on the floor now more than anything. All my hopes and fantasies for this summer melted inside of me, dripping out of my eyes, and merging into a puddle in the pine needles.
Whinnie stood up. “I need to find her mum.”
“Why?” Kyle asked.
“She needs to see this. She needs to look after her.”
“NO!” Kyle and I yelled at the same time.
“Please no.” I tried getting up but my legs collapsed under me. Kyle bent down to steady me and I sort of collapsed sideways onto him, my head resting on his shoulder.
“Her mum’s the reason she’s so upset,” he said, like I wasn’t there. “I don’t trust her to be helpful right now.”
Even in my sicky fuggy haze, the truth of Kyle’s words burned into me. He was so right. There was no way Mum would care for me when I was like this. No way she’d have an epiphany about her behaviour and rub my back and say it would all be different now. She’d dodge the blame. She’d bury down the guilt till it was six foot under. She’d yell at me. Tell me I was selfish. Irresponsible. Stupid. All the adjectives you use about teenagers whose parents have let them down and fucked them up and left them screaming inside, trying to get on with the shitty business of growing up when there’s a gaping chasm of a hole where your feeling of solid roots was supposed to be.
“I’m all right…” I said, hesitantly, as I blatantly wasn’t. “I just need some time…before…seeing her again… It was a shock.”
Whinnie looked torn – the whites of her eyes were so bright against the rest of her face.
“She’ll wonder where you are. I can’t get fired, Amber. I really can’t…”
I made to stand up. The last thing I wanted was for them to get into trouble. But Kyle pushed me back into him again.
“You go find her,” he told Whinnie. “Say we’ve got her in the rec hall toilets because they’re flushable. Say she’s got food poisoning because she didn’t cook her hot dog properly. Say Melody and Bryony are looking after her, not me. She hates me.”
Whinnie hovered on one leg. “What if she comes to see her?”
“She won’t,” I said.
Clutching my stomach, I padded to their bedroom door, and knocked lightly.
No answer.
I whimpered, hoping they’d hear and wake up. Too embarrassed to call. I mean, I was fourteen, but I was sick…so sick…I needed them.
Nothing. I knocked louder.
“Mum? Dad?”
The door creaked open. Dad came out in his dressing gown.
“Dad, I’ve been sick. Like really sick.”
“Amber, you poor thing! Where?!”
“All over my bed. I’m sorry. I didn’t get to the bathroom in time. It hurts…”
It had hit me again, and I vomited all over him, all over myself, all over the corridor carpet.
He didn’t get angry. He didn’t even look grossed-out. He just kept stroking the hair back off my sweaty face and ran me a bath. He scrubbed the carpet while I washed, and he cleaned my sheets, and put new ones on. Then tucked me in when he was sure I’d stopped being sick. He curled up on the carpet next to my bed with a blanket.
I’d woken up crying. Been sick again. And again. And again.
“Where’s Mum?”
That look came over his face. The one he used when he was about to lie.
“Mum’s sick too,” he said. “She was sick earlier. You must’ve got the same bug.”
Mum slept through the whole thing.
I didn’t stop being sick. I vomited for two days straight and ended up in hospital.
Salmonella. From the half-cooked chicken Mum had given me for dinner. The chicken I’d thought tasted funny but, when I questioned her, she’d flown off the handle and started screaming and ranting and I ate it just to shut her up, to try and calm her down before Dad got home.
She’d been too drunk to eat hers of course.
The day they discharged me from hospital was the day Dad took us to Penny’s house.
Kyle and I didn’t talk for some time.
There was almost no light, no noise, just us and the forest. Kyle didn’t rush me to talk, but he kept holding me.
Eventually, I said, “She’s an alcoholic.”
My head sank on his shoulder as he breathed out heavily.
“I’d figured out as much.”
“She’s been sober for over two years, after she went to this rehab place. We’re all so proud of her.” I could hear how hollow it sounded in my own voice.
He didn’t say anything. I shuffled back so I was supported more by the tree. I wondered why he was here. Why he was always here. Why he was always trying to help me.
“Why are you always here?” I asked. The leftover whiskey made my thoughts tumble out of my mouth.
Kyle didn’t reply for a moment. All I could hear was the rustle of the pine needles on the slight breeze.