HOPE

The feeling of wanting something to happen or be true. A person or thing that may help or save someone. An optimistic belief that something good may happen.

We live by the sea now, Claudia and I.

When I first saw her, at the airport – months ago now – it was hard to believe it was really her. I walked through the doors and there were all the people waiting with signs with other people’s names on and I couldn’t see her, and I started to panic, thinking maybe something had happened to her or maybe she couldn’t face seeing me after all because of Billie, or maybe I’d just imagined the whole thing. Panic is always there now, just under my skin, between every heartbeat.

And then a big guy from a taxi firm holding up a sign moved out of the way and there was Claudia just standing there waiting, looking sharpened and thinner but really just the same, and her face when she saw me made me feel like I’d made it home at last.

At first, we didn’t talk much about what happened to us.

She’d been moved from the detention centre in Kent to a camp somewhere in Wales. She didn’t tell me too much about what it was like, except that it was bad. I remembered what Shaun had told me about the camp near the village. There were so many people there, Claudia said, that the guards were overwhelmed. Some were just kids themselves really, some were even kind. Eventually, when food and medication was in such short supply that people were dying, there was a riot. The guards couldn’t stop it. They didn’t even want to, Claudia said. They were as hungry and sick as everyone else. And she’d escaped and made it across the sea to Ireland.

Toby Knight’s days are numbered, Claudia says. He’s no longer in control. It’s only a matter of time before he goes. I don’t want to hope, but if life has taught me anything it’s that Claudia is always right.

We haven’t found Dad yet.

We will, Claudia says. It’ll just take time.

Every day she makes a new list, and every day she gets closer to finding him. As soon as she was safe, she tracked down other people in his resistance network. Most of them had either been arrested or were in hiding, but if you’re an item on Claudia’s list it’s only a matter of time before you get ticked off. Some were unwilling to talk to her. They didn’t know whether they could trust her or whether they were being set up. But eventually she found out that Dad was arrested at a house in Chatham and she thinks he was taken to a prisoner camp somewhere north of Newcastle. After that, she hasn’t found any trace of him. She says if he’d died there, we’d know. I think she says this because she has to believe it. But she says some people who were in that camp escaped and made it to Scotland, so maybe we were closer together than I knew.

I still make paper cranes, every day, filling our tiny house with them. One day they will bring him home. When they do, I’ll tell him I know he blames himself for what happened to Billie and that he shouldn’t. I couldn’t say it when I left and I wish I had. I’ll tell him how he kept me alive, all those months. He told me I had to keep going, for him. And I did, even when I felt like I couldn’t.

Claudia and I are lucky. Can this really be true, when the worst thing we could imagine has happened to us?

We know it can, even when we don’t feel it.

We’re lucky to be alive. Lucky to have a home, and food, a place to live and people around us – friends now – who have taken us in and looked out for us and been kind to us even though they didn’t know us or owe us anything, kind just because we needed their help.

Others haven’t been so lucky, we remind ourselves. Still, some days it is unbearable.

Most of all we are lucky to have each other, though even this isn’t always easy. We drift as if carried by the tide, in and out, closer together, farther apart.

Never too far though. We are together. I love Claudia in a way that I will never love anyone else. She was the person who found me, who never gave up on me, who kept me safe. We are each other’s. Nothing can change that.

But we are hollowed out.

We try not to wait: for Dad; for things to get better; for our old selves. When it’s safe, we will go home, but our old life will not be waiting for us there. This is our life for now and we must live it.

I study, more than I used to. I signed up for a drama group to keep Claudia happy because she said it was important to join things. I haven’t actually been yet. But last week I went to the cinema with some girls from college. Claudia works some locum shifts at the local hospital. She does yoga and goes on long walks by the sea. She works with other refugee families, helping them to find people they’ve lost or helping them to settle.

We planted an apple tree for Billie in a pot so we can take it with us when we leave. We sing it Billie’s favourite songs to help it to grow. In the spring it will flower with white and pink blossom. In the autumn, if we sing enough, perhaps it will give us fruit.

We have started to make plans. It’s harder than you’d think, looking ahead, so we’re starting small. Nothing big. Day trips, that kind of thing. If the landlord lets us, we’ll paint the front door cherry red.

We are even happy, sometimes.

I realized after a while I’d stopped waiting for Mum too. All those years I waited for her. I thought she was my story, but she wasn’t, any more than I was hers. She doesn’t want to be found. I don’t need to look any more. I have Claudia. I have Dad and Billie, even though they’re not here.

I still worry about Grandpa. For weeks after I got here it was impossible to get news from the village. Then one day a message popped up on my laptop screen when I was doing my homework. Hello, stranger! You missing us yet? Huw sends all his love. I cried.

Shaun messages when he can now, when the internet isn’t blocked. Things are better, he says, though food is still rationed. And no one will forget what happened. Feuds run down generations in this village, he says, but then what’s new?

Jonas escaped the village and his mum. Shaun says he thinks he’s in France. He says he knows he’ll get in touch with me when he can. I hope he’s right.

I think he’s right.

I allow myself to hope that much at least.

One day a miracle happened. My phone rang. Till then, my phone never rang unless it was Claudia asking me to pick up some oat milk on the way home from college or whatever. This was a number I didn’t recognize. I ignored it, thinking it must be a wrong number or a cold caller. But then, once it stopped, I started to panic. Polly has my number; it could have been her. Maybe it was someone with news about Dad. I called the number back, feeling so sick I could hardly speak.

There was a crackling noise at the other end of the line.

‘I think you just called me?’ I said quickly.

‘Well why didn’t you bloody answer then, babe?’

After the protest her mum had booked them straight on a flight to Poland. They left that evening. ‘We were lucky,’ she said. ‘If she’d left it a few more days we’d never have got there.’ They’d lived for a year with Mischa’s family on their farm in the middle of nowhere. There was no internet and no phone signal except at the top of this one specific hill. There was no anything except for pigs and ‘extremely judgy’ relatives, according to Mischa, who admittedly has been known to exaggerate. After not very long, her mum remembered why she’d left for England in the first place: her family drove her crazy. The countryside drove her crazy. Even the pigs drove her crazy. Her mum made Mischa promise not to use social media because she was sure she would say something stupid and get herself arrested. Mischa ignored her but she kept her identity very secret. She looked for me but I’d disappeared. Eventually, when the borders were reopened, they decided to go back to London, even though the advice was not to because the political situation was still unstable and no one knew whether it would be safe. The weird thing was that once she was home, Mischa found she missed Poland, which she realized was beautiful now she was no longer there. And she missed her family who she realized were loving and funny and generous, though still kind of judgy. And she missed the pierogi made by her babcia who she missed most of all, even though she was borderline tyrannical in Mischa’s opinion. Anyway, when she arrived back at the flat, she found my note with Grandpa’s number and after trying a million different versions of the number I’d written, which was wrong, she’d finally got through to Shaun.

He told her about Billie. I was glad I didn’t have to. But talking to Mischa about Billie was a relief, somehow. We remembered. We cried. We laughed too.

We talked about Danny. Mischa hadn’t seen him, didn’t know what happened to him. She said she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out. I reminded her of that time he bought the pencil case for Billie. She said, ‘Clem, don’t. My mascara’s enough of a mess already. Oh, why can’t everything just be how it was?’

We talked until my phone battery was about to die.

‘I’ve had conversations with you this whole time,’ I told her. ‘All the time you weren’t there I still talked to you. I didn’t even know if you were alive. I should have trusted Wendy. She said she could feel your vibrations.’

‘Of course she could. My vibrations are hard to miss, babe.’

I asked Claudia one day if she remembered the word for Billie’s spinning toy with the little pictures inside. It was a zoetrope. I liked the strangeness of the word. I looked it up, like Grandpa would have, but online instead of in a dictionary with a magnifying glass. It’s from the Greek, apparently. It means ‘life turning’.

On the windowsill of my bedroom is a bird folded from gold paper. Sometimes I think of Sakura, how she gave Billie the gift of a paper crane because she didn’t want her to be sad, and how our trail of birds leads all the way back to her act of kindness for the friend she loved. I hold the fragile bird in my hands and wish for Sakura to be alive, to be well, to be happy. Next to the paper crane are a blue feather, a photograph, a cracked mirror.

I tell Claudia how Grandpa told me stories after Mum left. And about how after Claudia was arrested I told versions of them to Billie. I show her the notebook, though I can hardly bear to look at it. She reads, and her tears fall on the pages.

If this was a fairy tale, I think, where her tears fall on the petals pressed between the pages a flower would grow. And when the petals of the flower unfurled, inside would be a tiny, extraordinary girl, and the girl would grow and grow until she was tall and strong and clever, fizzing with ideas and love and curiosity.

But this is a story. It is my story. I can make anything I like happen.

Do I believe in happy endings?

Where Claudia’s tears fall a flower does not grow. There will be no extraordinary girl, now, except in our dreams and in unexpected echoes.

Claudia closes the notebook gently.

It is late. It is nearly the end.

Is this a happy ending? No. But it is a beginning, as all endings are.

It’s a steep walk up to the top of the cliff from where we live. It’s cold at this time of the morning, even in summer, but I’m hot with effort by the time I get to the top.

I feel calm and strong. I think of Bridie and touch the hag stone nestled against Granny’s emerald ring, which still hangs round my neck, on a chain now instead of twine, thanks to Claudia.

It’s my birthday, again.

I woke early and my first thoughts were of Billie, of Dad, of my fifteenth birthday in the park. Of Billie putting Smarties on the cake, and Danny playing football with the kids. I hope I didn’t imagine that Danny. I wonder where he is now.

For once, I was up before Claudia. Mischa had already messaged me with seven lipstick-kiss emojis:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOVE YOU

Up on the cliff I sit and look out at the sea for a while. I take a picture of it and send it to Mischa. A message comes back straight away.

Okay now ur just showing off!

I type:

            Wish you were here.

 

She sends me back a photo of the car park outside the flats. It’s raining.

Me too, babe.

I put my phone in my bag. I take out the notebook. I look through its pages, at the stories I wrote for Billie, at the little messages she wrote for me all that time ago, before she even gave it to me.

On a page near the end of the book she has drawn a picture of her and me with wings. Underneath she’s written:

This is us flying

I stand as near to the cliff edge as I dare, the sea crashing below me.

I remember: Billie’s smile, her frown, the way she stuck her tongue out when she was concentrating. But she wouldn’t look like that now, not exactly. How would she have changed already? Who would she have grown up to be? And who would I have become in the version of my future with Billie still in it? All those possibilities, those dreams, those stories. They can never happen, but they’re part of me anyway.

Once there was a girl who

Billie was the story that kept me going, that got me here.

Stories are hope, even the sad ones.

The story ends. The hope doesn’t.

‘She’ll always be with you,’ Dad said. He was right.

I take out the first paper crane Billie and I ever made from where it’s folded into the pages of the notebook and I throw it out into the salt-sharp air as the sun rises over the sea.

I make a wish.

I see it soar.

I hear its song.

I will always hear its song.

Then I sit and take out my pen. I turn to the last page of the notebook. It’s still blank. And I write:

Once there was a girl who lived.