Cover

About the Author

Sarah Ann Juckes writes books for young people. Her YA debut, Outside, was nominated for the Carnegie Medal Award 2020, shortlisted for Mslexia’s Children’s Novel Award and longlisted for the Bath Novel Award.

She works with writers from all over the world via Jericho Writers and is on the board for Creative Future, a charity supporting under-represented writers. You can often find her hibernating in her writing shed in East Sussex, with her cat.

Also by Sarah Ann Juckes

Outside

Dedication

For Ryan

Welcome back to Stream Cast, Alice

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Connecting to WesleyCycles67 …

1

WesleyCycles67

And now I am strapped to the chest of a middle-aged man called Wesley as he straps his feet on to the pedals of his bike.

It’s still dark, but I can just about see his hand as he sets his watch to zero and pushes off.

His little street with the Monopoly houses curves round to a main road and we don’t have to stop and wait for the traffic today – we just cycle right into it and we’re riding – faster and faster – as the street lamps putter out behind us and the world is swallowed by darkness. Flashlight cars overtake us, and I can see glimpses of scarecrows in the fields. Eyes peering from bushes.

He checks his watch and cycles faster. Today we could beat his commute record. This morning could go down in history.

The road dips and everything blurs, but still we keep pedalling. His legs are going so fast I’m not sure if he’ll be able to keep up with them, but he does. And, when the road levels, we overtake the traffic-stuck cars that passed us before, and we glance through their windows to see the drivers’ looks of surprise – a quick flash – before we’re gone again.

The sun raises an eyebrow above the horizon and the lights from the cars stretch into neon lines, criss-crossing lanes like a stampede of metal, and we’re in the thick of it, zigzagging between bumpers, beating amber traffic lights, mounting pavements and jumping down kerbs to avoid belly-lit bollards and parked cars.

And we can see the finish line now – the bell tower jutting into the clouds from the middle of the school Wesley works at. And we have sixty seconds and one set of traffic lights to go through. They’re on red, but the way is clear so we don’t slow down.

And then.

Very much from nowhere.

A car.

And we brake and we brake and we brake.

And I’m screaming, because we’re going too fast and the car wasn’t there a moment ago and now it is.

I listen as Wesley’s heart leaps out of its cage as the rest of him

stops.

Carbon fibre fractures. The camera that he had strapped to his chest. Shatters.

WesleyCycles67 is no longer streaming.

Please choose another channel.

2

Alice

Two weeks ago, I died.

But I’m trying not to think about that, as today is a burst of brand new. The sun shining from under my closed curtains is turning Manta’s fish tank into rainbows, and Mum is absent-mindedly singing one of her old show tunes downstairs while she dishes up my breakfast and sorts out my meds.

I smile at her as she comes into my room, and the singing stops. ‘Oh, sorry, sweetheart, I hope I didn’t wake you.’

‘That’s okay,’ I say. ‘You can keep singing.’

But she doesn’t. She’s all tiptoes and hushed tones now as she opens the curtains and sets the bed to snail speed. And the room’s much too quiet for the angry buzzing of the bed motor slowly lifting me up, so I slide on my headphones and disappear into violins and flutes. I lie back and listen, trying to remember what it felt like to be cycling through fields with Wesley at weekends, chasing sheep while looking out at a sea of green cut against an almost perfect line of blue sky.

And then that car comes out of nowhere and everything stops again.

By the time I’m upright, I’m already out of breath.

Mum slides off my headphones. ‘How many spoons are we starting with today?’

‘Ten, I think,’ I say, although I said that yesterday and I was spent by eight.

Sitting up in bed = 1 spoon

Spoons are units of energy. When you’re trapped in bed by a chronic Illness, like I am, there are only so many units to go around. You might have an endless cutlery drawer full of spoons, but these days mine are all in a wobbly pot.

One unit of energy = 1 spoon

We started talking in spoons after we read a blog by Christine Miserandino, who used them as a metaphor for energy loss. Somehow, they’ve found their way into our everyday, now.

When you wake up with only ten spoons, you need to make every single one count.

Mum passes me my breakfast and I try to look happy about having smoked salmon again, for the fifth day in a row.

‘I know.’ She sighs at my strained smile. ‘It’s your dad’s fault. They had an offer on it and he’s packed the fridge full of the bloody stuff. We’ll all be eating it for the next year.’

Dad sticks his head round the door. ‘It was two-for-one, though. You never see that on salmon.’

Mum rolls her eyes and mutters, ‘Thinks we have money to burn, that man.’

The salmon is nice. So are the eggs. But I can’t shake the image of that car racing towards us and swallowing seems to take up more spoons than it should.

Eating breakfast = 2 spoons

Dad sneaks in as Mum disappears, and sits on the edge of my bed.

‘How’s tricks, kiddo?’

I smile, but keep my eyes on the skirting board. ‘Oh, I’m fine.’

He’s still looking at me and I can tell that smiles and pleasantries aren’t going to cut it today. So I pull my eyes over to his and try to keep them steady. ‘How was the funeral?’

‘Oh, you know – typical funeral really. A barrel of laughs.’

I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been to a funeral. But the dark circles under his eyes tell me that they might not be a laughing matter.

‘I recorded it for you.’

He picks up my plate and starts eating my leftovers like it’s nothing.

I swallow. ‘Oh?’

‘Yup. Took a camera in specially. Sat at the back – although you’d think I’d brought in a fricking clown from the dirty looks I was getting. You’re welcome, by the way.’

I pick at my nails. ‘That’s okay. Thank you, but I don’t need to watch it.’

Forgetting is a far more difficult task at a funeral.

He stops eating. ‘Alice. This is Wesley we’re talking about. I know you never met him in real life, but you were with the bloke every morning on that bike. You were with him when he died, for crying out –’

‘Yes, okay!’ I say, panic jumping up my throat.

Dad looks at me. Hard. I take a breath.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll watch it. Thank you.’

Dad pats my hand. ‘Let’s get you ready, then, and we’ll pop it on.’

Getting ready. Walking unsteadily to the en suite. Brushing my hair. Brushing my teeth. Having a wash. Staring at myself in the mirror for a good long time and wondering if I’d look less like my Black Moor goldfish if I bleached my hair blonde, or lost the fringe.

Getting ready = 5 spoons

I’m at eight spoons already and it isn’t even ten o’clock, so Dad helps me back from the en suite and into the black dress I wore for my sixteenth birthday last month. I climb into bed, panting like I’ve been cycling up a hill.

The footage Dad took at the funeral is set up on the laptop, ready to go.

I want to complain. Make up an excuse. Tell him that I don’t need to watch this after all, thank you. That I’m happy in my room, keeping my mind on meadows and music and goldfish.

But there aren’t enough spoons left to protest.

Dad leans over and presses play.

3

daddycool-007

And now I am at a funeral with my dad.

We’re sitting at the very back, but he’s holding me up high enough so that I can see over the heads. There are probably around a hundred people in front of us, all sitting in rows like black crows on telephone wires.

And there’s Wesley. The one inside the coffin with the shards of the camera still wedged inside his chest.

That camera had been my Christmas present last year. Dad gave it to me because I’d started to see the walls and he wanted to give me a window. At first, he would just go on adventures with it strapped to his chest, filming things for me to watch later. But then he discovered Stream Cast – a streaming site with a private channel open only to me, where I could log on any time through my laptop and watch the world Living live. And there was something magical about that.

Wesley was my first streamer. He worked with Mum at the school down the road, and she convinced him to live-stream his commute in the morning. Then Dad got my cousin Roy involved, who was born the day after me and plays a lot of computer games. And Dad met a friend at tae kwon do who takes me training, and my old babysitter, Hana, streams all the way from Tokyo, where she lives now.

But Wesley was always my favourite. When I was with him on his bike, it was like I’d banished the Illness and I was Living fast. I saw pheasants bursting out from bushes like feathered rainbows, and rabbit tails bouncing like ping-pong balls into burrows. I saw crops reaching up and flaming, until whole fields were ablaze with yellow fire. I saw puddles turn into rivers turn into wide lakes, the water as many different colours as the sky.

I did my very best Living with Wesley, so it does feel like this is my funeral somehow, too.

If this were my funeral, though, I suppose Dad wouldn’t be sitting at the back, the camera he’s holding up receiving angry stares.

A man who I think is a priest stands up at the front and starts talking. I can’t hear what he’s saying because we’re too far away, but it’s probably about how Wesley Lived his life by the clock and how time does seem to have stopped now he’s no longer Living.

If he were talking about me, it’d probably be about what I was like before the Illness came and took me, because people do seem to find that easier to remember. He’d be talking about me as if I died at ten, when I went on adventures with Dad, won that trophy for breaststroke, ate aniseed balls by the bag, listened to music at full blast and wanted nothing more than to be a marine biologist one day.

He wouldn’t be talking about me after the Illness. When I caught some silly virus going round at school and then didn’t seem to get better while everybody else did. He wouldn’t be speaking about the girl who slowly stopped being able to go to school. Then outside. Then leave her bed. He wouldn’t mention the Illness and how no one knew quite what it was, even after all those years, and all those tests, and all those Google symptom searches. If I’m honest, I wouldn’t blame him for that. Who wants to hear about a girl who’s exhausted after having a wash?

The thing most people don’t understand, though, is that I don’t have to Live inside these four walls. I don’t have to be trapped inside my body. I can be strapped to the chest of brilliant people and I can watch them Live lives that could perhaps be my own, and that’s a thing of wonder.

That is, until one of them dies.

The priest stands aside and a woman I think is Wesley’s wife gets up and I use my last spoons to lean over and slam the laptop closed.

Welcome back to Stream Cast, Alice

Users online:

destroy_roy

Online for:
57 mins

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daddycool-007

Last online:
68 days

Connect to a channel to start watching.

Connecting to destroy_roy …

4

destroy_roy

And now I am balanced on the desk of my sixteen-year-old cousin Roy as he hammers at his keyboard like he’s playing some ferocious piano.

There’s no music that I can hear, though. Instead, I watch his screen as he stalks through an apocalyptic landscape, his hands clutching a gun as he runs towards a derelict building.

I don’t recognize this game. Usually Roy streams himself playing games that involve building up whole worlds from nothing. And even though he never takes the camera outside, there’s something brilliant about watching him breathe life into building blocks.

This game is different, though. His fingers are white on the keyboard. He pulls open the door to the building and crouches under an empty window, wrapping bandages round his computerized hands.

And then I hear the popping. Far away at first and then louder and louder. And I want to warn him, but he can’t hear me and he probably doesn’t even know I’m here with him, because that’s not how Stream Cast works. It’s not a two-way conversation. I just watch and shout into silence.

He reacts too late. His fighter stands up at the window as we see the van racing towards him, killers wearing tin helmets hanging out of the windows and speeding his way.

Pop-pop-pop-pop.

And the bullets hit him and hit him and the screen splashes red and the health bar drains to nothing and Roy is shouting in a way I’ve never heard him shout before and –

You have disconnected from this stream.

5

Alice

I throw the laptop down and grip the sides of my bed and, of course, Mum sees.

She hurries forward. I try to smile as if nothing’s wrong, but my breathing’s giving me away. She pinches each of my wrists between her forefinger and thumb.

‘Nice steady breaths,’ she says.

I close my eyes. Take myself away to another place for a moment, where I’m suspended in a whole ocean of multicoloured life.

I am safe. I am happy. I am alive.

I think it until I start feeling that it’s true. The bad thoughts tie themselves into nice little bows and I fold them neatly in a drawer at the very back of my mind.

I open my eyes and smile at Mum as she searches my face for any wisps the thoughts left behind.

‘Perhaps you should give Stream Cast a rest. Just for a while.’

I grab her hands. ‘No! I’m fine, honestly. I was just being silly.’

Mum sighs. ‘You can talk to me, you know. About Wesley. About anything.’

‘I know.’ I smile and try to shake Wesley’s name away before it sticks. ‘And I was going to talk to you, actually. About maybe getting me a new streamer. Someone who doesn’t play shooting games, or fights, or walks round a busy city. Someone who just does normal, everyday things that I might do.’

Mum slides her hands away and picks up the blanket that slipped off the bed when I was trying to get away from the bullets. ‘I’ll think about it. But, Alice – think about what I said, too. I’m here if you want to talk.’

She puts the blanket back on my bed and irons out all the crinkles with her arm, and it feels as if she’s doing the same to my brain – smoothing out all the thoughts of cars crashing into bikes, and soldiers being gunned down.

I nod and hope she can’t tell how fast my heart is beating. Because – as much as I know that she’d do anything for me – I can’t keep asking her to hold everything. Like how my chest is hurting today, or that the pain in my knees is back. I can see all that worry weighing her down and drawing lines on her face that shouldn’t be there yet.

So I distract myself by focusing on all the wonderful things there are in the world, like how I’m back to twelve spoons today. And that means that when she leaves, and my phone starts to buzz like a bee trapped inside a window, I can lift myself slowly out and round my bed to answer it.

Walking round my bed = 2 spoons

I blink the black spots out of my eyes and remember to breathe as I walk with one hand on my bedframe, just in case. My phone’s next to Manta’s fish tank and he swims down to the bottom to see who it is.

It’s Cecelia. Her face beams out at me from the screen mid-laugh.

I pick the phone up. ‘Hello, you.’

‘Oh my God, are you running, too? You sound like you’ve been running. I’m running round the park at the moment with all these people, Al. It’s crazy – there are, like, a hundred people here, all running, and I just saw them and thought, hey, why not join them? I’m wearing sandals and am so sweaty in my jeans.’

She laughs and pants, and I laugh and pant, and I sit down on the bed and remind myself again to breathe.

Standing up = 1 spoon

‘I’ve been … gaming. And now I’m visiting Manta.’

‘You and that fish,’ she says, and I can hear the thump of her legs on the ground, and the phone jumping at her face, and her lungs breathing the outside air, and it’s wonderful.

Manta blows a bubble and I open the tub of food next to his tank and sprinkle a few flakes in. He picks off the bits at the surface before twirling to catch the ones falling like snow.

Feeding Manta = 1 spoon

‘How old is that fish now, anyway? Do fish even live that long?’

‘Yes!’ I say. ‘He’s only six – they can live much longer than that.’

‘Jeez,’ she says, starting to gasp a bit now. ‘You got him when you stopped school, didn’t you? God, I can’t believe that’s been six years already. We’re getting so old.’

I swallow and sit a bit further back on the bed. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Cecelia laughs. ‘Sweaty people. And running shoes, which I should definitely be wearing.’

I close my eyes as she lists the other things she can see and try to imagine me running next to her, although it’s hard, because I never did do much running back when I could. I was too busy swimming instead – every day after school. Being in the water felt like coming home – as though I was born with gills and every moment of my life on land was me holding my breath. I used to pretend that I was freediving through mangroves and watching fish dart between tree roots. And I’d dream about one day disappearing somewhere far away, where the water is a window that you can push your hands right through.

‘Come join me, Al,’ Cecelia says, like she’s reading my mind through the phone.

I shake my head, but I make myself stand up, my legs shivering a bit and my hand holding the wall for support. I walk, though, forward towards the bedroom door and out on to the landing, where I can see into my old box bedroom that now belongs to Mum and Dad, and the family bathroom I no longer use. And I can see the stairs tumbling down to the floor below.

‘Come join me,’ she says again.

And I think about what it would be like to walk down them, slip on a pair of sandals and go running with strangers, just because I could.

I miss a breath.

The phone drops from my hand and I watch Cecelia’s face on the screen as it hits each step with a

Thud.

Thud.

Thud.

Standing on the landing = 2 spoons

Mum comes out of her room and catches me just in time. ‘Alice! Not near the stairs!’

I gulp big glugs of air as she helps me back into bed.

No, not near the stairs. I still have the bruise from where I fainted walking to the en suite last week and it would be so much worse to fall all that way, even if I would get to see the other rooms downstairs, even for just a moment.

I get my breath back and watch Manta in his four-walled tank over her shoulder, dark like a shadow until the light hits him just right and he shines gold. And as Mum makes the bed go back down again, I tell her that Manta and I are the same. That my body may be stuck inside this bedroom-tank, but I’m free to shine a light wherever I please. The world is packed full of beautiful things with hidden gold, if only you look at them in

the

right

light

and

What was I saying?

I’m sorry, I seem to have lost …

No, no, I’m not tired.

It’s my body.

It’s

stopped.

6

Alice

And now I am dreaming.

I’m floating in an endless ocean and all around me is a deep royal blue. And I feel weightless. Calm. Like I’m moving towards something, caught on an invisible tide that’s tunnelling under the waves and taking me somewhere.

But then I twirl. And below me I see rocks jutting out of the seabed. Rocks with shards of glass and splinters of carbon fibre glittering between them.

I struggle. I gulp water and the tide spins me round and I lose all sense of up and down. And suddenly the seabed is the sky and above me is Mum. Dad. Cecelia. All paddling at the top, their legs like sunbeams that can’t reach down to me in the dark.

I stretch my fingers out to them. I kick with every ounce of energy I have.

But still. I sink.

7

Alice

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