by Glass, Lisa
A booming voice started shouting Vega’s name and something like ‘filming in T minus one minute’.
‘Look, come back tomorrow,’ she said with her pouty bright red lips. ‘We can talk then, okay?’ Vega leaned forward and hugged me lightly and then kissed me on the cheek.
I nodded and turned away from her. That day, instead of cutting through the dunes, I took the long road back to the site. My head was burning up and I had to take deep breaths, just so I felt like I could get enough oxygen inside me. It was as if everything I knew about myself, about my town, about Han, had all turned to rubble.
Chapter 17Suddenly I had an urge to see Lizzie and her awesome puppies. Avoiding Sunny Daze and my parents who might’ve been on the look-out for me, I walked around to Buoyed Up and rang Mr Hitchcock’s bell. He came to the door with a bunch of newspapers under his arm.
‘Cute as baby bumblebees and nothing but eating and pooping machines.’
‘Can I see them?’
‘You may. But be warned, I was just about to change their bedding for the fifth time today so watch where you step.’
He wasn’t joking. They’d got themselves into a right mucky state, rolling about in their own mess and stinking to high heaven.
‘Should we bath them?’ I said.
‘I’ll wash, you dry.’
I watched as Mr Hitchcock filled up his tub with warm water and mixed in some dog shampoo, and then very carefully he lowered the smallest puppy – my favourite – into the water and cleaned away the filth. When Mr Hitchcock handed me the puppy to dry and went to get another, I gave it a little kiss on the head. Body-wise it looked like a little border collie pup with black and white markings, but it had a typical beagle head with floppy, ginger ears and massive brown eyes. ‘It’s alright,’ I said, ‘mutts are way smarter than pedigrees. Who wants to be the product of decades of inbreeding, eh? You’re like a cool new hybrid.’ It wagged its tail at that.
We had to refill the bath several times before they were all done as the water was so rank, but in an hour they were all fluffed up and fast asleep in their dog bed. Poor Lizzie was pacing around anxiously.
‘What with all this looking after the pups, I haven’t had a chance to walk her today.’
‘Not even one walk? She normally has three.’
‘No dear, not even one. And now I confess I am dead tired and fit for nothing more than sleep.’
‘I’ll take her out now,’ I said.
‘It’s getting dark.’
‘So what? I’m too old to be afraid of the dark.’
‘It’s not so much the dark that should scare, but rather what might lurk in it.’
‘In Hayle?’
‘Even in Hayle.’
‘Come on Lizzie,’ I called, picking up her lead. ‘Nice for her to have a bit of time away from her babies. Do her good.’
Lizzie was leaping around in excited circles.
‘Well, make sure you’re careful. And I suppose the pups can do without Lizzie for an hour, but don’t be too long as they’ll need their milk again soon. Poor Lizzie has to feed them every couple of hours, if they’ve any chance of surviving. Wonders of mother’s milk.’
‘Okay, forty minutes tops. Come on, girl.’
Lizzie ran ahead like she was on drugs, leaping over low walls and barking at every piece of litter that rolled in the wind. I hadn’t seen her like that since she was a puppy herself.
I let myself think about Han. How could he do it to me? And if he had to cheat on me with another girl, why did it have to be with one of them Catwalk princesses? It was such a cliché. If I was him, I decided, I would feel really embarrassed to be so blokey and stereotypical.
I was just thinking all this when a bone-chilling scream rang out.
Lizzie.
I ran towards the noise and saw Lizzie on her side, panting. Not three feet away, I saw a dark adder bolt into some bushes. Lizzie, my lovely Lizzie, had been bitten. Thoughts rushed through my head all at once. Dogs died from adder bites. Without Lizzie, her pups could die too. There was no anti-venom in the whole of Cornwall, that was what people said. She didn’t have a chance.
I crouched down to her face.
‘I’m sorry, Lizzie,’ I said. ‘Don’t die on me. Please . . .’
I could see that she was in a lot of pain. Her breathing was bad and getting worse. I bent double and picked her up, glad for once that I wasn’t a skinny minnie, but a fit girl with strong arms. I hoisted Lizzie onto my shoulder and she didn’t fight it. Walking slow and jerkily, I carried her back towards the site.
Fainter and fainter her breathing was. Without my phone there was nothing I could do except walk. Those fifteen minutes were some of the longest of my life.
Eventually I made it onto the site and spotted Nathan sitting on the rock outside Sunny Daze and drinking from a can. He saw me, jumped up and ran over.
‘Take her,’ I said, and he took Lizzie from my shoulder. I sank to my knees to catch my breath.
‘She had a heart attack?’ he said.
‘Adder bit her.’ I could barely get the words out, they were so awful.
‘It’s alright,’ he said.
‘She’ll die,’ I said. ‘It ain’t alright. There’s no anti-venom at any of the vets. Too much demand this year. Only stocks left is for people.’
‘We don’t need it. Come on.’
‘What?’
‘Just come on, Jen. We got to get her inside.’
Nathan carried her like she was no weight at all, and I struggled to keep up with them. Lizzie’s head lolled down Nathan’s back and her eyes was so dull and sad that I wanted to shut mine.
Demelza Grey was quiet; Sammy asleep and his parents doing the quiz down The Bucket o’ Blood. Nathan laid Lizzie on the sofa and ran out to his kitchen, where he started rummaging through the drawers.
‘What are you doing? She needs help. Now.’
‘I’m getting her help. This is all we can do.’
He came back with a fistful of white tablets, which he forced into Lizzie’s mouth with a digestive biscuit so she’d swallow them down.
‘Hay fever tablets. My dad heard from his mate down the pub that’s all the vets round here’s doing now, cos all the anti-venom’s gone and it’s dead expensive anyway. Just chucking a load of antihistamines down their throats with a shot of anti-inflammatory painkiller and hoping for the best. Adders got a ‘short-lived venom’ apparently so if a dog don’t croak overnight, they’ll be alright. Antihistamines stops them having a really bad reaction. Thank god that little wuss Sammy has so many allergies, huh.’
I hugged Nathan, and he blushed a bit and said, ‘Alright. Calm down.’
After half an hour Lizzie got up and drank two bowls of water. It was slight, but her tail definitely wagged. I ran to Mr Hitchcock’s place and he already had his hat on.
‘I knew something was wrong,’ he said, before I had a chance to say anything.
‘She got bit.’
‘Where is she?’
‘Over at the O’Shaughnessy place, and I think she’s going to make it, thanks to Nathan.’
He took my hand and squeezed it.
‘And thanks to you, Jennifer,’ he said.
Chapter 18I got up at the crack of dawn to check on Lizzie and was relieved to see that she seemed okay and had regained some of her normal bounce. Her back leg, it seemed, was still painful if you touched it, but that was to be expected. Mr Hitchcock said he would take her down the vets first thing to get the painkiller injection, which would help with any soreness, but the main thing was that she was alive. I really hoped she would stay that way.
After a couple of hours helping out with the puppies, I decided to confront the other thing that was stressing me out: I’d go to the bootcamp to see Vega and finally find out what was going on with her and Han. I couldn
’t get the truth out of him, so it had to be her. I was all set for a long day, with my packed lunch in my satchel, five packs of Milky Bar buttons and a flask of tea, when I heard crying. On a deckchair at the foot of a dune, an old man was sobbing like a teenage girl. It was Timothy.
Timothy is one of those people who just looks poor. It don’t matter how much money he has or don’t have, he looks like he hasn’t got a penny to scratch his bum with. Like me, I suppose. It’s obvious at school that I’m not one of the well-off kids. Even the teachers know that. I don’t have all the cool clothes and hundred pound trainers that the kids down the town have. The walls of our front room are covered in beermats that my dad’s collected over the years and paintings that my mum has done herself. Mostly of the beach and our lighthouse – the one that Virginia Woolf wrote about.
Dunesiders don’t live like kings. At the end of the month before payday our family only eats stuff from tins, unless it’s fungus or berry season, and then my dad takes me out to the fields with a plastic bag and we fill it up with all the mushrooms and blackberries we can find. The best mushrooms are always in the farmer’s field with the gigantic bull. Nobody else dares to go in there, but we risk it.
I think one reason people look down on dunesiders like me is because our homes cost less to rent than council houses. There is a council estate out near the main road but them houses look fancy to me. They have downstairs loos and big back gardens with trees in them. Some of the kids with the nicest clothes live at that estate. They have greens outside their houses with goalposts where they can play football and they have proper parks with swings and slides.
Our site is nice but it’s old-fashioned, not modern. Once, back in the Fifties, our chalet site was for holidaymakers but then Timothy Trelawney bought it and he couldn’t afford to compete with the brand new caravan park that opened up, which had a swimming pool and a club house and all the mod-cons. So instead of renting the chalets out to tourists he started renting them to locals. The rent hadn’t increased in years. I’d always been nice to old Timothy because he could have jacked up our rent if he wanted, or slung us out altogether if we did his head in. His daughter died too young and her grave was one of the ones destroyed by the plane crash. So when I saw old Timothy sobbing his heart out, I thought that might have been what was wrong.
I didn’t want to interrupt him but I thought I should say something, just in case he’d seen me and wondered why I didn’t talk to him. I considered telling him about Lizzie’s brush with death, but from what I remembered Timothy didn’t much like dogs, on account of the fouling that went on around the site.
‘Alright,’ I said. ‘Sorry about Shelley’s grave. She was really nice. Bought me a cricket set from the shop once when I said I was bored. Pure class she was.’
He turned to me and stared into my face.
‘You’re right, maid, she was that. She didn’t deserve what she got. Not when there’s so many out there who go around making mischief and never have a bad thing happen to them their whole lives. My Shelley didn’t have a nasty bone in her body. And then to have her last resting place destroyed by a poor family’s aeroplane crashing. Well, there’s no justice in this world, there really ain’t.’
I nodded.
‘Sorry. It’s horrible. You must be really sad.’
I could tell he wanted to answer but he must’ve had a lump in his throat from the miserableness, because he couldn’t.
‘I better be going,’ I said. ‘I’m working. For as long as I can get away with it anyway.’
‘Where’s that then?’ he said, taking a deep breath.
‘Catwalk Queen camp. Girl there reckons they could do with an extra pair of hands. I’m going to be her dogsbody, I suppose.’
‘Crooks and thieves and charlatans those damned telly folk,’ he said, getting redder by the second. ‘I wouldn’t spit on them if they was on fire.’
‘Why’s that then?’ I said, wondering what the telly people could have done to so offend old Timothy.
He shook his head and more tears rolled down his face. It was like he couldn’t control his tear ducts at all.
‘Are you going to be alright here?’ I said. ‘Shall I go and get someone for you? From the site?’
He began to really cry then and his body shook with huge sobs. He kept trying to say something about the site but I couldn’t make it out because his voice was all distorted from the crying. Eventually he managed to get out:
‘I’ve lost Shelley and now the site. I can’t take it. It’s too much,’ he said. ‘And all because of those interfering Cockney swines.’
I went and sat down in the sand next to him and poured him a cup of tea from my mini-flask, which I was trying to take everywhere instead of my hipflask. When old Timothy had downed the tea, he was calm enough to talk.
‘It’s bloody gas,’ he said.
‘Gas?’ I said, wondering what he could possibly mean.
‘Underneath all that sand, there are rocks. Wicked bad rocks that could change life as we know it.’
‘Space rocks?’
‘No, not ruddy space rocks. Why would I mean space rocks? No, no, no. The site, the place of our most dearest homes, has been built on rocks that are, according to the villains at the Council, giving out a load of radon gas. There’s nothing that can be done without bankrupting me.’
‘What’s that got to do with the show?’
‘It’s them. All them. They done this. Back along they wanted to film something or other on the site, but I said no. How could I say yes? There’s people’s homes here and people have a right to privacy. They pushed and pushed and upped the money but still I said no. And then I get this letter, and I just know it’s them done it out of revenge. Devious. Meddling. Troublemakers.’
‘I don’t get it,’ I said.
‘It’s plain as day, my dear. As the landlord they say it’s my duty to put a radon sump in every one of the properties and I just don’t have the money to do that. Who do? And while them devils from the HPA was nosing around, they must have seen some other things they didn’t like, because now I’m being told by our no-good Council that I have to upgrade all the properties with new boilers and windows to make ‘em properly habitable. It’s beyond me. Even if I put the ground rent sky high, I still wouldn’t be able to afford this lot.’
He pulled a letter out of his pocket, which had a long list written down the middle. I glanced at it quickly but it was all technical and legal talk.
‘You can’t put up the rent. My dad’s lost his job. And he didn’t get the job at the fish packer’s neither.’
‘I don’t want to put up the ground rent, my dear. That’s the last thing I want. I know as well as you do that I made a promise that the rent would stay the same for the next five years and I want to honour that. Of course I do. But if I don’t find a way to work things out to the Council’s satisfaction, then I’ll lose the site, and it may well be that you all lose your homes. Another tragedy to add to all them others we’ve had handed to us these last months. As much as us lot don’t want to believe it, things would be a damn sight finer in the Council’s eyes if some fancy property developer came in, bull-dozed the site and threw up blocks of expensive holiday flats instead. These despicable Londoners with all their meddling have played right into the Council’s hands. Right into it.’
‘The Council can’t do that. Where would we all go? People wouldn’t let ‘em do that. We have rights.’
‘Where there’s money at stake, people find a way to do most things. Lawyers find loopholes and councils take backhanders to make problems go away. It’s the way life is, I’m afraid. Life has always favoured those with gold coins under their beds. And of course the Council’s based in Truro. They don’t care what goes on in Hayle Towans. Even if we got a signature from every person on the site and down the town, it wouldn’t be enough to change a thing.’
I
shook my head. After everything that had happened to our community, things had still managed to get worse.
‘We’ll have nothing,’ I said, wondering how I was going to break the news to my mum, who had already started up her crying in the bath again.
‘I suppose they’ll pay you some compensation for making you move out of your homes, but I shouldn’t think it will be much. Most of the chalets are built out of wood, and to some eyes they’d look like little more than shacks. It’d be the inconvenience they’d be paying you for, and I don’t suppose they care much about that.’
‘When will you know what’s going to happen? For sure, I mean.’
‘End of the week. If I don’t come up with a deposit for the radon sumps then the Council’s going to start proceedings against me. Once that ball gets rolling, I’ll have no way to stop it. Teams of fancy lawyers they have. I’ll be no match for them. All because some horrible rich folk from up the line had their noses put out of joint. I can’t believe this is happening. This whole summer’s been like one long bad dream.’
‘What can we do to help – must be something?’
‘You got a spare sixty-five thousand pounds lying around anywhere?’
‘No. Only wish I did. I could stretch to a pound for a Lottery ticket though.’
I gave him the emergency pound I kept in my pocket but he waved me away.
‘No, no, dear, I wouldn’t dream of taking your money and I would never waste it on the long odds of the Lottery. Tax on desperate people if you ask me. Don’t look so worried. We never know what’s around the corner, do we, so we’ll just keep hoping for the best.’
He put his hand out but when I went to shake it, he took my hand and kissed it, which made my face burn up. I nodded goodbye and walked on.
As much as I needed to know what had been going on with Han and his skeletal floozy, I knew that being homeless had to come first. Instead of going to the bootcamp, I turned back the way I had come and headed for home, eating my lunch sandwiches as I went. My parents had to be told what was going on. Maybe they’d have some sort of plan. I knew in my heart, though, that they wouldn’t. How could they? Their luck was even worse than mine.
