Page 85 of No Safe Place

Sunday | Afternoon

Lily

Part of her hoped that Cal would be there, and part of her didn’t.

The police had left a voicemail to say they were done, and Lily could go back home. She didn’t want to go inside yet, but she wanted to see it – the house.

Their street was quiet. Windows were open in every home, curtains hanging limply in the still air. There was nothing to indicate the horrors of a few days ago.

The house looked the same as it always had. Middle of a terrace of identical little houses. Scruffy front garden, with a pop of colour from the pot of geraniums she planted for Paige, every spring.

But behind the house, over the roof, the sky was shot through with orange. A warning colour, caused by dust from the Sahara, according to the News app.

Lily’s stomach rolled and pitched, and she stopped walking for a moment, sitting down heavily on a crumbling brick wall opposite, a few houses down. She wasn’t going to be sick – she was almost sure the actual vomiting was over. She just had to breathe through it.

The feeling was so familiar, now she knew what it was. When she was younger, beta blockers had made her feel ropey, but it was diazepam that had really fucked with her.

Three separate doctors had tried her on diazepam, prescribing more pills for the side effects.

No one listened when she asked, begged, not to go back on it.

Patronising smiles promised that if she could power through for a few short weeks, her body would adjust, and she’d start to “really feel the benefit”.

The worst had been the second time, just after her thirteenth birthday. She was painfully thin already, and the pills set off a chain reaction of sickness, fever and migraines that blurred her vision for days.

Another deep breath in.

It wasn’t the same. Scott couldn’t have been giving her the pills more than once a day, and she was fitter, healthier and stronger than her thirteen-year-old self.

‘Lil?’

Her eyes opened, and she had to blink Callum into focus.

He frowned down at her. ‘You okay?’

She gulped down the question and tried to form an answer.

Angry. She should still be angry. Scott had pitied her – that was the worst thing. Diagnosed her and then, like the doctors before David, made decisions for her.

‘What’s happened?’ Cal demanded.

And although Lily had been so sure that Callum would fly off the handle, potentially even assault Scott, there was a worse option. Worse – she might catch a glimpse of I-told-you-so in his expression, and have to watch Cal judge her for making such a shit choice.

She couldn’t answer. She shook her head, and looked up at Cal.

He was wearing one of his own T-shirts, a white Cure band tee with a faded logo, too big on his shoulders and across his chest. There was a patch of sweat below the collar.

She’d expected him to look thinner and distraught, but he seemed solid. His shadow was blocking the sun. He was trailing the red parka behind him like a comfort blanket.

Then it dawned on her.

He was outside. Callum was out of the house.

The thought hadn’t really occurred to Lily, when she visited him on the ward, but seeing him in the street, in natural light, it felt huge.

‘David and Sam—’ Her voice came out as a croak. ‘I can’t believe they’re dead.’

‘I know.’

‘Sam was one of us,’ Lily said, limply. It was a nothing comment. It didn’t convey the depth of everything she felt, but she couldn’t think of another way to say it.

Cal spread out the parka like a picnic blanket. As he sat down, the sunlight hit her face again. He was cross-legged on the dusty pavement, his elbows on his knees, chin in his cupped hands.

Lily was glad she didn’t have to stand up yet. She glanced at the house again. There was a stray tendril of crime scene tape caught on their hedge.

‘Do you remember,’ Cal said abruptly. ‘The session where David got us all to write those letters?’

Lily remembered.

David picked up on their fears about leaving the ward, their fear of getting ill again when they weren’t wrapped up in the safety of the group.

It was a trauma, what they’d been through. David’s answer to trauma was to confront it. Put pen to paper and write to the people who let everything go so wrong in the first place.

‘Paige let me read hers,’ he said. ‘It was to her sister – because she was so angry that she got to be the normal one. We set fire to it with my Zippo, behind the bins.’

‘I never knew that,’ Lily said, quietly.

‘Who did you write to?’ Cal asked.

‘My parents, obviously.’ Lily sniffed. The conversation was distracting her from the lump sitting low in her oesophagus. ‘Some of the doctors I had. I never posted mine, either. Did you?’

‘I only wrote one letter,’ Callum said. His eyes were shining. ‘I tried to write so many of the ones David wanted, to the people I was angry with. But I couldn’t.’ He laughed – a bitter, twisted sound. ‘I think I’d already put all of that into the book.’

Lily eased herself off the wall, joining him on the ground. She picked up one of his hands and turned it over, resting her palm on his. Not holding hands, just palm to palm. Something they hadn’t done for a long time.

‘I wrote to the house,’ he said.

She looked at it over his shoulder. ‘You were angry with the house?’

‘No.’ He brushed a tear away with his other hand, then covered his eyes with it. ‘I wrote to the house and asked it to keep me safe.’

He stayed hidden behind his hand, and Lily noticed that he was gripping the side of his face so tightly that the skin beneath his fingertips was bright white.

The sinking in Lily’s chest had nothing to do with the diazepam.

She wanted to wrap her arms around Callum, stop him talking, take his pain away.

‘I’m outside. I’m outside again, Lil, and I just want to call David to tell him.’

Lily clenched her jaw, every muscle in her face, trying to repress her own tears. She leaned backwards so the wall was digging into her back, above her shoulder blades.

‘But I can’t tell him, now. I can’t call him, and I can’t thank him.’ Cal let his hand fall from his face, his usually dishwater-coloured eyes bright green. Another gargled laugh. ‘I felt like I was cheating on him, with that new doctor.’

Lily wiped tears from both their faces. ‘You can’t think like that, Cal.’

He nodded, then lay backwards on the pavement, arms splayed, head on the thick ridge of the kerb.

She had a moment of hesitation, thinking of neighbours and passers-by, then lay down next to him, and looked up at the bloodshot sky.

Callum left his parka on the low wall of their house, like leaving flowers at the side of the road after a car accident.

They walked up and down residential streets. They had easily been walking for over an hour, in no particular direction.

Cal read the door numbers and gave her hand a squeeze whenever they passed a “9”. He was crying, silently, the tears falling down his cheeks and onto the chest of his T-shirt, where they dried quickly.

She didn’t remember choosing to hold his hand, or him taking hers. His palm was dry, despite the heat of the afternoon. He only let go to roll cigarettes.

It’d felt like this before, between them. A long time ago, when they were both ill. They were only able to speak about the hardest things, only able to deal in truths. Every conversation tore something from them or opened an old wound.

So – they didn’t speak. They spent whole days, before, in total silence. It wasn’t allowed, but most nights Lily would go into Callum’s room and sleep in his bed. Both fully clothed – nothing ever happened. They just needed to be near each other.

Finally, as Lily’s feet were starting to ache and the sun was dipping behind pink cotton-candy clouds, they were back on their road.

‘Lil—’

Cal stopped walking and she turned to him, her anxiety sparking at the thought of having to go back into the house, to sit down and talk about what had happened with Scott. Try and figure out what would happen next, or pick through their memories of Sam and David.

‘Lil—’ he said again, and his voice broke.

She lifted her free hand to wipe away a tear and Callum trapped her palm against his cheek.

Lily looked up at him. Nodded. ‘Okay.’

Then he kissed her.