Page 93 of No Safe Place

Sunday | Evening

Callum

A shiver ran down his spine, as the sweat on Lily’s skin cooled against his.

The cracked leather sofa was clammy and uncomfortable, and the scratchy blanket they’d thrown down tickled his thighs, but Lil hadn’t been in his bedroom since the break-up, and Scott’s stuff was still scattered around Lily’s.

Callum drew soft circles on her shoulder blade.

She was breathing normally, but he could feel her heart was still thumping.

‘Are you okay, Lil?’

She turned her head so she could see him. ‘I don’t know.’

He shifted, and they spent a few awkward moments trying to get comfortable, the sofa not wide enough for them both to move easily. Callum settled back down with his hands behind his head, and Lily lay on his chest, her hand over his heart. He noticed how thin her wrists were.

Lily closed her eyes. ‘I think, maybe, when I thought I was better, maybe I wasn’t.’

Callum made a noise in his throat.

‘Like, maybe all this time, when I thought I was keeping my head healthy, I was kidding myself.’

He twisted a lock of her hair around one finger, going cross-eyed as he considered it. ‘Or are you overthinking it now? Are you trying to find evidence that you haven’t been okay all this time, when you have?’

‘I mean, that does sound like me, sure,’ Lily said, with a smile. Her smile – the one that could cut to the core of him. ‘But I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about it for a while.’

The sun passed behind a cloud, and the room was suddenly greyscale.

She sighed. ‘I’m just tired.’

‘Don’t do that,’ Cal said, sharply. ‘Don’t dismiss it.’

The new edge in his voice, that he hadn’t meant to use, felt like coming back to reality. Lily sat up, put one arm across her chest, and groped on the floor for her T-shirt.

‘I shouldn’t be putting my shit onto you. Not when you’re struggling.’

Cal laughed and didn’t move to cover himself. ‘When am I not struggling?’

Her T-shirt had rolled itself into a tube, and she wrestled with it, her back to him. Once it was on, she pulled on her pants and sat on the edge of the sofa, facing the bookshelves, her face in profile.

Her features were so familiar to him. The slight frown lines between her eyebrows. The vulnerability of the white skin of her neck below her hairline, when she had her hair up.

There was a brief flash of longing. Not for them now, not for the Lily in front of him. He wanted to be seventeen again, the punk version of himself, watching Lily set fire to her old food diary and give it a Viking burial down the Thames.

‘How’s your head, Lil?’ he asked. ‘Explain it to me.’

She stayed silent.

‘Please,’ he said.

‘I just feel like I’m on the defence. Always.

’ She laughed, but it had no humour in it.

‘I’m constantly on my guard. For the next behaviour, the next intrusive thought.

Whatever it is that would send me on a spiral.

’ She blew air up onto her face and put a hand on her stomach.

‘And being on my guard worked, didn’t it?

Because I haven’t spiralled. I’ve been okay, I’ve looked after both of us—’ She hesitated and looked down at him.

He nodded his assent. He wouldn’t make her feel guilty for saying what she had to say.

‘I’ve gone to work and got out of bed and got my nails done and read the Booker prize winners.’

‘You got promoted to head of Key Stage 1,’ Callum added. ‘You survived being dumped by me. You cleaned the oven last year.’

‘I got a tattoo I don’t regret. I do meal prep, and I sort your benefits. I phone my grandparents once a week. I stopped buying scratch cards.’ She paused. ‘And I haven’t blacked out or skipped meals or made an embarrassment of myself. So – I thought, yeah. Success.’

There were tears in her eyes. Cal didn’t say anything.

They just sat, and then the sun came back out, picking out the bright accents among the spines of the bookshelves.

‘I’d beaten it. I was beating it. I’d won.’ She sank her toes into their fluffy green rug. ‘But that wasn’t “better”, was it?’

Cal shook his head. ‘It’s not cancer, Lil. You don’t get an “all clear”. But look at where we were, and look at how far you’ve—’

‘I know.’ Lil rubbed her eyes with her fists. ‘I’ve come so far. I’m a mental medical fucking miracle.’

He didn’t know how to help her. Had never gotten well enough to struggle with the grey area of being “fine”.

He put his boxers and his T-shirt back on in silence, then sat up next to her.

The closeness – the madness that had overcome them, was gone.

She sighed. ‘Normal people aren’t on the defensive every day, are they?’

Lily jumped at the same time Callum did – and turned towards the noise from the back of the house. The back door had blown open and smashed into the kitchen wall.

‘To be fair,’ Cal said, standing up to go and close it. ‘What the fuck would we know about normal people?’

The back door slammed again.

He navigated the hallway in the dark, feeling for evidence that the search people hadn’t put things back properly, but not finding any. He’d replace the light bulb tomorrow.

The back door continued to smack into the wall, and he gritted his teeth, stepping into the dining room.

It was tidier than they’d left it. The chairs were tucked under the dining table, and the empty cans and bottles had been removed.

Callum wanted to rush, run into the kitchen before the ninth time the door hit the wall. But that was irrational, because he would get there before the ninth time anyway, and it didn’t matter if there was a ninth time.

The evening sun was streaming into the narrow kitchen. The grass needed sorting. Callum hadn’t been out into their little garden for over a year.

He’d go out there tomorrow and cut the grass. He loved the smell, and he wasn’t going to waste the ability to get out, now he had it.

As he closed the door and slid the top bolt across, a shadow fell across his arms.

He turned, expecting to see Lily, but all he saw was the knife.