The Lake Louise Sharland (each kindness read aloud txt) 📖

for her – I mean, I’m her only kid and all – but I really, really like that she gets me, and knows all I can think about right now is that girl in the Radiohead t-shirt.

We walk back to her car in silence. She gives me another hug. She looks like she’s going to cry: properly, this time. She tells me she loves me. I tell her the same. She starts to give me another talk about drink, drugs, and safe sex, but I remind her we’ve had that discussion and that I’m not a kid any more – I’ll be fifteen in March! She nods and gets into the car. My eyes shift in the direction of the green. I wonder if Radiohead girl is still there. I wonder if she has a boyfriend.

This is going to be the best year of my life.

I shower, have some breakfast, and then force myself outside to sit on the front step and get some fresh air.

It’s as if I have discovered an entirely new Michael; one that fascinates and frightens me at the same time. Maybe I should have told Adam about the diary. He would know what to do. I grimace and shake my head.

Ever since I can remember, my way of dealing with problems has been either to avoid them or to let someone else handle it. At fifteen, I had told no one that my periods had stopped; I had hidden my swollen belly under an oversized school jumper. When the school nurse had finally confronted me, I hadn’t even tried to deny it. That night, after the meeting in the nurse’s office, my mother had beaten me with a wooden spoon.

The next night the church elders had been at our door, the three men lined up like crows. We were shut out, a temporary form of excommunication that involved being shunned by fellow Brethren, possibly permanently, unless we complied with doctrine. The only solution, the elders had said, was for me to marry a church member and raise the child as Brethren as a means of both penance and appeasement. The father, Ryan, was an outsider and unclean – a danger to our community – and must be treated as such. In an effort to appease the elders and prove her devotion, my mother had prayed, fasted, and relentlessly tried to coerce me into the arranged marriage; but I had refused, even threatening to go to social services.

Three months after that, it had been decided we were unredeemable, even in God’s forgiving light, and we were cast out – excommunicated, rejected, scorned. All clearly outlined in that letter from Brethren headquarters my mother still kept. After that, if any fellow Brethren saw us in the street, they would completely ignore us or turn away in disgust. Our community, on which we relied so heavily, had abandoned us. My mother raged, but I had found it extraordinarily liberating. Being moved to the young mothers’ unit at the local comprehensive school had also meant I was finally allowed to study GCSE Science. I uncovered a talent I never knew existed.

As for Ryan, he had left a few months before Michael was born to take up an apprenticeship in the West Midlands. I often wondered if the Brethren had anything to do with that, but never had the courage to ask. I saw him once or twice in the village when he was home for the holidays or attending a family do, but we lost touch. He married in his early twenties and had two daughters. Michael, it seemed, was easily forgotten.

I make myself another cup of coffee and go back upstairs to the bedroom. I pick up the diary and begin flicking through the pages, stopping only when I make the most astonishing discovery. It’s a poem. Michael, my fourteen-year-old sporty, sweaty, socks-and-trainers son has written a poem. It was a struggle to get Michael to read a restaurant menu, let alone a collection of poetry. ‘Books are boring, Mum,’ he’d used to say when I’d suggest some new young adult title, ‘and poetry is for girls!’ Yet here he was writing – or at least trying to write – a poem. I suppose it could have been for his English coursework, and to be fair he did have a reasonable aptitude for language, but why the leather-bound diary? Knowing Michael, a Pukka pad would have been considered a luxury item for schoolwork.

Photo-frame (November 2014)

I keep a photo/or photo-frame? by the bed,

The frame is grey///gunmetal grey,

Holding in and holds an image???

of awkward affection,

Mother, daughter, and son,

Family but still strangers still.

forever

Stand close but not touching.

Hurricane eyes and cyclone smiles

A storm that swirls beneath,

A/the? riptide of rebellion

filling my lungs,

it suffocates and stifles

the unending the unending?? Overwhelming???

The love I harbour

Eternal, unending, sinking beneath

The water/the ocean Murky seas

I stare at the page open-mouthed. This comes as a revelation like no other. When Michael was little, I used to love to read poetry to him at bedtime: Yeats; Blake; Wordsworth; A.A. Milne. I always thought he was indulging me – but could he have actually been paying attention? Maybe he’d somehow absorbed it all.

In places there are deep gashes where Michael has crossed a word out so fiercely that the page is torn: a ragged wound seeping fresh letters from underneath. I skip forward hoping for some sort of explanation. Instead I find this.

1 February 2015

You’re waiting for me by the bike sheds (cliché eh) so gorgeous I can’t take my eyes off you. I risk a smile and look around to make sure no one is watching. I’m not going to bite, you say, and kiss me. You taste like winter air and cigarettes. Diving Fish, I want you so much.

I feel my chest tighten. Had Michael been in love? He had never even told me he had a girlfriend. I feel the same wretched ache as on his first day of school when I had to leave him alone at the