The Jump That Left Me Stranded

Chapter 15

As a parting gift, my Grandma hands me a crumpled card that I discover has fifty pounds inside. I want to give it to my dad - those scary bills flashing foreground in my mind - but he'd never accept it. Instead, I devise a plan. 

It begins with a trip to town. Winding my scarf tightly around my neck, I walk with my head ducked against the biting wind, hand curling around the note in my pocket. If things were different, maybe if I were different, I'd want it for clothes or music or makeup or Grace. As it is, one of those things has been ripped away from me and somehow it's dulled everything else. Music sits like a frozen ice block in my mind. The new imperative is these friends I've somehow managed to scrabble together: ones I'm determined to pull closer despite how I feel like I'm splintering apart. 

Town is decorated excessively, all glowing yellow lights strung from lamppost to lamppost and mini Christmas trees lining the pavement. I feel like a stubborn child in the way I want to kick each one as I pass, but I don't. Christmas music creeps beneath the shop doors, the noise of disparate sleigh bells, pianos, brass solos mingling together with chatter as I speed walk.

I try to stay focused. I follow the winding road past the local gift shops until I come to perhaps the one building that sits, dimmer than the rest, quaint and Elizabethan - buried amid newer buildings like treasure. This is the bookshop where I've spent many hours browsing before Grace joined me, having spent most of her money on perfume, to add a few more novels to her collection. This is where I stamp the snow off my shoes and feel myself settle into the ghosts and skeletons of everyone that has done the same thing before me. 

Looking closely at my hand, I squint at my handwriting twisted into the name of an author I've never read before, and set off towards the non-fiction isle for 'M'. 

Music by the Numbers 

Unsurprisingly, there is still a lonely copy on the shelf. I snatch it up with an inexplicable haste, tucking it beneath my arm as I stride towards the desk. The clerk is a middle-aged man with a beard and a beige roll-neck, and he scans the item silently while I stand trying to remember what small-talk is like; if I've always been this quiet or if the silence of the last few months has seeded itself in my memories as well as my bones.

There's a kind of backseat anxiety that mounts as I walk home, a kind of backseat anxiety that springs from this type of quiet contemplation. I force myself to think of better things: smiles and snow and Christmas excitement and Felix coming home next week. I force myself to read over the blurb of my gift, using extra concentration to make sure the words are going in and not just skimming over my head. I force my train of thought to burrow out of my own brain and seed itself in the world around me, try and ignore the way my attention stalls on people as I walk past like a zipper snagged half-way up a coat. 

Jenny's present I salvage when I get home, and I feel weird when I wrap it up besides Oscar's - one book fresh and new and the other battered and dog-eared. I guess that's part of what makes it special, though. I resist that childish impulse to take Jenny's gift back, the 'if I can't have it no one can' mentality foreground as I peel strips of tape off the side of my table and smooth them carefully down against the wrapping paper. Nudge is the gift I've chosen for her, Grace's copy. I wonder if there's something consolatory in that, or something condescending, but I try to ignore it. That's how I'm trying to deal with second-guessing myself now, I suppose.

With a flighty feeling in my stomach I reach for my phone, scan it for messages and can't help but feel my chest deflate when there's nothing. It's half past six; the next thirty minutes will stretch on infinitely if he doesn't send me something to sustain me. I cringe away from my own thoughts, think I've never sounded that needy before - think maybe that's a total lie. My finger hovers cautiously over Oscar's contact details but I employ more self-control than I ever thought I possessed in pulling my hand away - in turning the phone over on the desk. I can resist leaning into him for a half hour, I think.