Lifesaving for Beginners

don’t.’
    ‘George Pullman last week. And now Damo.’
    ‘That’s only two people.’
    ‘But Damo. He’s your best mate. You never fight, you two. What were you fighting about?’
    I look away. Out of the window. The school looks empty when it’s not home-time. ‘Can I tell you later?’ If she goes to band practice later, I’ll be in bed when she gets back – Mrs Barber always makes me go to bed dead early – and I’ll pretend to be asleep and she’ll forget to ask me in the morning.
    She mightn’t go though. She hasn’t been to band practice for ages.
    Faith nods and turns the key in the ignition. It doesn’t always start first time round. It’s Dad’s old car, the one he taught her to drive in. He says he’ll teach me to drive too, when I’m seventeen, but it’ll be pretty tricky, seeing as he lives in Scotland with Celia and I live in Brighton with Faith.
    Damo is right, I suppose. About Faith not being my sister anymore. I don’t even think she’s my half-sister. Not really. I wish she was still my sister. She says she’s crap but she’s not. Not really. It’s just hard to be good at things when you’re sad a lot of the time.
    Faith lets me sit in the front so I don’t think she’s too mad with me. She even lets me put the car in gear and take the handbrake off. She yells, ‘Clutch!’ and I put the car in second, then third, then fourth, but we never get to fifth. The traffic is too slow for that.

 
    The great thing about having my bedroom all to myself again is the space. For example, I can use both bedside lockers now, if I want to. For books, say. I could put books on top of the bedside locker that was on Thomas’s side. There’s nothing on it at the moment. But the point is that there could be things on it. If I wanted to put things on it. If, say, I ran out of room on my bedside locker. There’s the extra space now.
    It’s Thursday night. I hate Thursday nights. They remind me of Thomas. I hardly think about him at all and then Thursday night comes round again and he advances like floodwater. I suppose you could say that Thursday night was sort of like ‘our night’. I know, I hate couples who have their own special night of the week but it’s not like we ever told anyone. We’d just say, ‘Sorry, I’ve made other plans,’ to anyone who asked us to do anything on a Thursday night. It was never usually a problem for me because Minnie knew about our Thursday-night arrangement and Ed usually worked late in the café on Thursday nights. But Thomas was often invited to book launches and film premieres and what have you but if it happened to be on a Thursday night, he’d say, ‘Sorry, I’ve made other plans,’ and that would be that. We never discussed it, this Thursday-night thing. It just sort of happened that way, I suppose. Not long after he moved into the apartment, as far as I remember.
    In fact it was a Thursday. The day that Thomas moved in. But really, he’d been moving in for a long time. Long before he ever brought up the subject of his moving in. He did it by stealth. He was so good that I hardly noticed myself until it was mostly too late.
    It started off with a toothbrush. I let this pass, being a bit of a stickler for oral hygiene. Soon, other items appeared. A disposable razor, a book of blades, a travel pack of shaving cream, aftershave and shower gel. Citrus-smelling. I opened the little bottles when he was out and inhaled them. Lemons. That bittersweet smell.
    Clothes began to appear in the wardrobe. I found his gym bag in the utility room. Shoes under the bed. When he arrived one night with a towel – a small, frayed scrap of material that would have difficulty covering one cheek of his arse – I began to experience disquiet.
    ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he asked, stuffing the towel into the drawer in the bathroom that is home to sanitary towels and tampons and painkillers and a hot water bottle and a couple of copies of Now magazine. It is – unofficially, at least – my time-of-the-month drawer. I have never put a towel into this drawer.
    ‘Well, I . . .’
    ‘It’s just that your towels are so soft.’
    ‘Towels are supposed to be soft,’ I told him, grazing my fingers against the thing masquerading as Thomas’s towel.
    ‘Yes, but they’re a bit too soft. It’s taking me ages to dry myself.’
    I said, ‘If, by drying, you mean peeling the top layer of skin off yourself, then this towel is perfect.’
    Thomas smiled. ‘I