by Glass, Lisa
Chapter 19I found my parents curled up on the settee. The strap of my mum’s black vest was under her arm and my dad was tickling her shoulder, which she loved. They was both a bit hot in the face, and I didn’t like to think about what I might have walked in on if I’d come home ten minutes later.
‘I’ve got some bad news,’ I said.
‘Spit it out then,’ my dad said, standing up and brushing down his shirt so it covered the top of his trousers.
‘You’re not going to like it. It’s about old Timothy. He’s in a bit of a state. He’s having some trouble.’
‘What sort of trouble? With criminals?’
‘No, Mum, not with criminals. Well, I suppose what they’re trying to do to him is bloody criminal, but they wouldn’t see it like that.’
‘Don’t swear, Jen. It’s not lady-like.’
I turned to my dad. ‘He crossed the telly folk from up the line, and now the Council are after him . . . and us too, I guess. The site is built on rocks that are leaking a lot of this weird gas, some radioactive stuff that can make people really sick if they get too much of it.’
‘Radon,’ Dad said.
‘Yeah, how’d you know?’
‘Couldn’t really be anything else. South West is famous for radon. Horrible bleeding stuff. Right pain in the bum.’
‘Well the Council says Timothy has to pay for some radon extractor system for every chalet. For our safety, like. But it’ll be too expensive.’
‘Oh my God,’ my mum said, her eyes getting wide. ‘Radioactive gas? Are we going to be okay? Could we have suffered already? Maybe that’s what made Jen take so long to walk when she was a baby?’
Dad put his hand up to shush her.
‘What?’ she said, flustered.
‘Sounds like we’re going to be homeless if I’m getting what our daughter’s trying to tell us.’
‘Exactly,’ I said, glad to get a word in. ‘Who’s got the kind of money that you’d need to buy all them extractors? And it’s not just that. Now we’re in the Council’s crosshairs and they want Timothy to renovate all the chalets with mod cons. You know, central heating, double glazing, proper boilers that are good for the environment and that.’
‘Well, that would be lovely,’ my mum said. ‘Sunny Daze do get awful cold in the winter, doesn’t it, Dad?’
‘Woman,’ my dad said, turning to her with his softest expression on his face. ‘It ain’t going to happen. Timothy don’t have the money. He’s living in Cloud Cuckoo Land if he thinks he can afford all that.’
‘He don’t, Dad. I found him crying in the dunes.’
‘Poor man, after just losing his daughter’s remains so horribly too. There’s no fairness in this world, there really isn’t.’ My mum dabbed at her eyes with a tissue that miraculously appeared out of her brassiere. ‘He must be suffering something terrible. I think I’ll bake him a round of those fairy cakes he likes so much.’
Me and my dad looked at her and I knew he was thinking exactly what I was.
‘We’re up a certain creek, by the sounds of it,’ my dad said. ‘Because now the Council are onto him, they won’t stop until they get what they want. They’ll use all these new fancy laws to get rid of old Timothy and the rest of us too. This land has a lot of value, especially these days. People would pay a small fortune to have our view. Londoners, like them telly folk. They’ll pay it. They’ll pay half a million pounds for a shoebox apartment with a view of the sea that they’ll only come to visit once a year for two weeks. It’ll be the end of us. Mark my words.’
‘Don’t talk like that, babe,’ my mum said. ‘We’ve got to stay positive. This is very early days, isn’t it? Who knows what will happen. Timothy didn’t say anything was set in stone, did he, Jen?’
I shook my head. ‘He’s only just found out himself, so I suppose it is early days. You’d have thought the Council would have given him a bit of time to get over his daughter and all that. They don’t even care though by the looks of it. Was horrible seeing him all upset like that.’
‘There’s a chance we might be given some compensation,’ my dad said. ‘People are usually given something in these types of situations. A grand or two at least. Maybe a lot more.’
‘But we don’t even own Sunny Daze now, do we?’ my mum replied.
‘We have rights though. Human rights. They can’t just make families homeless. The papers will be all over that. We’ll make sure they are.’
‘Timothy says there might be some compo but it won’t be much,’ I said. ‘Because to rich people these chalets would just look like shacks. Our site would be like a rubbish dump to them, he reckons.’
‘I don’t want to talk about this anymore,’ my mum said. ‘It’s bringing me down. I was just starting to feel better too.’
‘Well, it ain’t going to go away, love, so you’d best get used to the idea. I don’t suppose we need go over and over it now though. Let’s just see what happens. Things could play out in all sorts of ways. And money might come our way, you never know.’ That was my dad’s best attempt at comfort, which was really not that comforting at all.
Later I heard them talking again, even though they were trying to keep their voices low so they wouldn’t upset me. Fat chance. My mother’s voice got louder and louder with every minute.
Dad didn’t mind the sound of the compensation, because whatever amount they were given, it would be more money than they had and more money than they were ever likely to get by honest means, but my mum was inconsolable.
‘You forgotten why we came here in the first place?’
‘Nope. We came here for our girl, and she’s had her lovely upbringing like you wanted. Better than we ever had. On the beach near on every day of her life. Seen sunsets that oughta have been in paintings. Had beach barbecues and swim parties and seen more wildlife than a city slicker would see in a lifetime. Time to move on maybe.’
‘It is NOT time to move on. How can it be time? Jenny is so young still. It’s not like she’s left for university or got married to a nice boy. Christ. She’s still a child. She don’t need uprooting. And neither do I. I like living here. I don’t get on well in towns. You know that. I need the sea or I gets depressed.’
‘At least with some money in the bank there’s a chance she’ll be able to go to university. God knows there’s nothing in the bank now. Hardly got twenty pence to last the week, have we.’
‘There’s more to life than money! You’ve said it yourself a thousand times. And maybe we’d have more than a few pence left before Giro Day if you didn’t keep going down the pub. Did you have to spend all that lot with that bleeding coach driver? Twenty quid would have gone a long way in the house kitty.’
‘I was being hospitable. Poor man didn’t know a thing about Hayle and someone had to show him around. Twenty quid is not that much for two men to drink on.’
‘Well it’s more than I’ve ever had to spend on myself!’
‘I know that. But men have got needs that women don’t have. I can’t sit in this chalet all day long like you do. I’d go mad.’
‘I’m here because I have to look after our daughter and cook and clean. I’m not just sitting down staring at the walls all day, I can tell you.’
‘Look, let’s not get into all that. I’m just saying that we might not have a choice in this relocating business and if that’s the case, then we might as well be glad about whatever money we’re offered. We have to be sensible. And who knows what another year could bring? Another six months even.’
And so they went on and on arguing, both getting angrier and angrier until my dad left and we didn’t see him for three days. A drinking bender, people called it when their dads disappeared. But my dad had never been gone so long before. My mum wouldn’t admit she was worried and sad, and instead she just stormed about pretending that she was furious with him.
When
he finally came home, he was carrying a food parcel that my nanna had made up for us. He’d been dossing at her house in Truro, he said, to give him some time to think things over and cool down.
Turns out she gave him quite a bit of money and he used most of it to go drinking. Did he think of us back here with hardly any food and no money left for the electricity meter? He must have thought of us eventually though, because I couldn’t deny that he came home with some food and he put a hundred pounds into the kitchen table fruit bowl. I didn’t know how much money my dad had gone through, or ‘peed up a wall’ as my mum put it, but at least he had hadn’t lost all of it. At least he’d brought something home.
My mum shouted at him but then forgave him when she saw that wad of cash come out of his back pocket. We had a brilliant tea that night. My dad sent me to the chip shop with a crisp twenty pound note and we ate like rich people. I could have whatever I wanted, he said. Chips, cod, battered sausage, curry sauce, pickled onions and a cheese and onion pastie if I wanted it. I picked a pastie, a battered sausage and a large portion of chips. I’d never eaten so much food in one go before.
After my dad went out, I walked down to the Three Crowns in the middle of the High Street. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but staying at home was doing my head right in.
Han was in there playing pool with his stupid friends. Mr Hitchcock was there playing darts with two local boys and beating them easily by the looks of it. I mouthed the word “Lizzie” to him, and he gave me the thumbs up, which was one good thing at least.
My dad was sitting at the bar and talking to the landlord’s canary. I swiped a half-empty glass of Coke off a table, took a big swig and went over to Han.
‘Alright?’ I said, thinking I’d better be polite.
‘Not really.’
I hadn’t expected that. People almost always said they was alright, even if they then went on to tell you that their puppy had died by getting squashed underneath the recliner on their sofa.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
‘You know what’s wrong.’
He gave me that hangdog look of his.
‘What do you expect? You’ve been lying to me all summer,’ I said.
‘I know. I wanted to tell you the truth. But I made a promise. It’s –‘
‘Save it,’ I said.
Rick Sylvester chimed in with, ‘Mate, I don’t know why you bother. She’s such a raging –’
I didn’t mean to do it but I already had that glass of Coke in my hand and suddenly the contents of it was dripping down Rick’s face.
Han was looking at me really shocked but I didn’t care. I gave him the stink eye and left.
That night I waited for the sound of my parents’ snoring to start up and then I got down on my knees and prayed. But I didn’t pray to God, because if people was right, it seemed like Hayle was in his bad books. Instead I prayed to any guardian angel I might have. I prayed to the people who died on the plane, and I even prayed to the big sharks that were somewhere swimming in our ocean.
When I woke up the next day there were three small white feathers near my bed and I took that for a sign. Just maybe I did have an angel and she had heard me.
It wasn’t the only thing that had come through my window. On a small scrap of paper, someone had written me a message.
Stay out of the dunes. They’re totally infested. Please don’t be angry with me because of before. I really do care about you. Just not that good at showing it. Love H.
Chapter 20‘Mind where you step,’ a homemade poster at the edge of the dunes said. They had come like a plague. Luke Gilbert had made out that they were halfway extinct but he was wrong. All summer people had been saying there had been a spike in numbers, but now it was an invasion. Dark squiggles in the dunes; tea-coloured females and black males with vees up their backs like rude signs meant for us. They sunbathed in the light and they was bold; they wouldn’t slither away, no matter how fast me and Nathan ran along them sandy paths, shrieking like a pair of hooligans my mum said. The sea was stinking that day – some days it’s like the smell of weed and fish comes in from the deepest ocean and it’s overpowering.
It was Sunday. I hadn’t been back to the camp because I had been busy looking after my mum while my dad went AWOL and now that he was back we had to play Happy Families. I was itching to go and see Vega but the models were always given Sundays off, and the contestants tended to use any rest days to get drunk or stoned with local lads, and so I agreed when my mum insisted on dragging us out for a picnic. I still hadn’t mentioned to my parents what had happened to Lizzie – they wouldn’t have liked that I was out walking her at night and I reckoned I could do without another lecture.
‘There’s a terrible sea fog coming in tonight,’ my dad said. ‘Won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face, judging by what the weather man had to say on the radio this morning.’
‘Then we’d best make the most of this sunshine while we can,’ my mum said. ‘I’ve done you Marmite sarnies on white bread, Jen, and cheese and jam for Nathan, which he still likes, don’t he?’
The picnic wasn’t going as planned though and my mum’s main priority seemed to be getting home alive. Dad walked behind us, carrying a deckchair like a handbag and swigging from a bottle of cider. It used to be he wouldn’t start getting drunk until the mid-afternoon, but as that summer wore on, some days it wasn’t long after breakfast before he popped to the site shop for refreshments, as he called them. I looked at him and wondered if I was really related to someone so undependable.
‘Adders,’ he said, shaking his head like they were three-headed monkeys, when my mum told him to watch his step. ‘I’m not afraid of a few flaming adders. They’ll hear us coming and scarper. They’re more afraid of us than we are of them, the poor little shits.’
But it didn’t seem that way. These was the boldest adders anyone had ever seen. Loads of them had spilled out of the dunes and were actually basking down on the beach. The tourists were freaking out and hurrying back to their caravans in droves. They had probably never even seen so much as a slowworm, so no wonder they weren’t happy about sunbathing on a snake-riddled beach.
Nathan kept poking the adders with sticks and trying to pick them up by the tails and STILL they wouldn’t slither off. It was like they were amped up on snake steroids or something. My mum couldn’t stand to look at Nathan when he was goading them like that.
‘Your mother’ll have me guts for garters if you get bitten by one of them things.’
‘I’m used to snakes, Mrs Grand. Got three at home, haven’t I, Jen?’
I nodded.
‘Three snakes? Goodness me.’
‘Yeah, they’re me pets. Got two tarantulas too. Looks like three, cos one of ‘em’s just shed his skin.’
My dad grinned and my mum went white.
‘Your mother is a generous soul, letting things like that live in your home.’
‘They’re mostly harmless. They’ll bite you if you aggravate ‘em, like, but they’re not poisonous or nothing.’
There was only two things my mum hated more than snakes: one was her belly and one was my nanna.
‘I’m not coming back in these dunes ever again,’ she said, shivering. ‘Well, not until winter. I’d rather eat your dad’s undies.’ Me and Nathan made gagging noises, but Dad just whistled and pointed out a gannet flapping silently out to sea, then he stuck up two fingers at my mum’s back.
She shrieked again as a snake slithered across her path, trying to get to some bracken on the other side of the rabbit path.
‘For God’s sake, woman,’ he said. ‘That was right in my ear’ole.’ He sighed really loudly and rolled his eyes. He was probably thinking that Mum was being really dense saying she’d avoid the dunes till winter, bearing in mind that the chalet park where we all lived was right on the edge of them dunes, because if
there was adders on one side of the long white fence, they’d soon be on our side too. But my mum believed in boundaries and the power of fences.
‘Well, I’m not afraid of snakes. I’m coming back in here whenever I want,’ I said.
‘No, you’re not, Lady Muck.’
‘I am. I have to go through here to get to work.’
‘Tell your daughter she’s banned,’ Mum said, turning back to Dad, who was reconstructing his deckchair with a view to smoking his fag in comfort.
‘You tell her if you want her told,’ he said, stretching out his purply legs and lighting a cigarette. You couldn’t criticise him about his smoking or he’d put three fags in his mouth and smoke them all at the same time. He was stubborn like that.
‘And to think they say women are the weaker sex,’ my mum said, walking past him. She reached for his too-long hair, but it was hard to see if it was a tender gesture or a whack. She turned back to me. ‘You’re not coming back in these dunes till the end of summer when they buggers have all died off or gone underground or wherever the heck they go to in winter.’
‘Well, I have to because one of the girls at the bootcamp has agreed to pay me twenty quid a day compensation for my time.’ I thought it was better that she didn’t know how much I was really getting. ‘You and dad can have half of it and I’m saving the rest for a car.’
‘Girl’s got a business head on her shoulders, can’t argue with that,’ my dad said, looking all proud but probably thinking of how many shots of Jack Daniels he could buy with my earnings.
‘I don’t know who’s worse out of you two,’ Mum said, ‘You with your fairy tales and funny clouds, or her with her business head.’ Then she spotted another snake and said, ‘Forget the blooming picnic, I’m off home,’ and with that she took off and left us in her wake.
By the time we reached Sunny Daze, which was shining in the sunshine, smells of sausages, bacon and eggs were coming out of the kitchen window. It was technically breakfast food, but Dad said if you added chips to a fry-up you could have it any time.
