by Julia Green
I slip my hand under his T-shirt, on to his warm chest.
‘. . . two hearts beating each to each.’
Seb looks at me. ‘You what?’
‘It’s from a poem,’ I say. ‘Robert Browning. It just popped into my head. It starts with the grey sea, and the long black land, and a yellow half-moon large and low . . . and two lovers meeting.’
We kiss. He traces my lips with his fingers, and kisses me again, harder. My body melts under his touch. The kissing and the touching make everything else go away. Nothing matters so much any more.
It’s enough for me, just lying together so close, like this. I think about what Kat said to me, when we were talking together before Christmas. I’m not ready for anything more than touching and kissing, not yet. But Seb is. I know that, even though he hasn’t said so, exactly.
The front door bangs. ‘Your mum’s back,’ I say.
Seb goes out to the loo.
I go slowly downstairs. ‘Hello, Avril.’
She gives me a big hug. ‘Are you all right, love? You look a bit fragile.’
I tell her about Bob while she puts on the kettle and unpacks her shopping.
‘I heard about the baby too,’ Avril says. ‘I expect things are a bit hard for you all in that tiny caravan. You can come here whenever you want some breathing space, you know.’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘Can you stay for tea tonight?’
I nod.
‘He missed you, that week away,’ Avril says. ‘He might not tell you that, but I can read him like a book.’
I smile.
‘And the cousins were all asking about you. You made quite an impression. Ruby calls you the princess.’
I don’t know what to say to that.
‘Seb’s her special favourite,’ Avril says. ‘Of all the nephews.’
‘He might be going to stay with her,’ I say. ‘To do that stone carving course.’
‘Yes,’ Avril says. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? He’s found something he wants to do at last.’
She pours three mugs of tea. ‘Take yours and Seb’s upstairs to his room,’ she says. ‘Supper’ll be ready in half an hour.’
Seb is sitting at the computer, clicking away at stuff.
‘Come here,’ he says. ‘I want to show you something.’
I squeeze next to him on the chair.
‘Look what I’ve found for you.’
It’s so out of the blue, so not what I’m expecting. Maybe if we’d been talking about it before, or if he’d told me he’d been looking, I’d have been more prepared, more in control. It throws me completely. He’s bookmarked pages of internet sites, all about tracing family members, reuniting families, that sort of thing. There are sites for information about missing persons, and maps and newspapers and records from all over the world. People who’ve run away from home; homeless people; sites for refugees and immigrants, adopted children . . . every variation of missing person you could possibly imagine and then more.
‘I thought we could start looking for her. Your real mother.’ He scrolls down some list and flicks from one site to another.
My head’s already throbbing.
I start to feel sick.
‘She’s not a missing person,’ I finally say. My mouth’s dry.
‘Well, not exactly. Missing from your life, though.’
‘By choice. It was her decision.’
I know I sound weird. I’ve gone rigid and stony inside. I don’t want to look at this stuff. I know he’s spent ages finding it and everything but it’s horrible. It’s the wrong stuff. It doesn’t help.
‘She’s got her own life somewhere. Just not with us,’ I manage to say.
‘But it wasn’t your choice,’ Seb says. He sounds slightly put out. ‘You were only two years old. You’ve a right to know about her. She’s your own mother.’
‘Don’t.’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Stop it. Stop talking about it.’
‘What’s wrong with talking about it? It’s important. We should be talking about it. We should be able to talk about everything, you and me.’
I can’t speak. My hands are clammy.
‘I’m trying to help,’ Seb says. ‘Show you there are ways we can find her. Together.’
‘I don’t think I want to.’
‘What?’
I can hardly breathe. The walls of the room seem to loom in. The computer hum gets louder and louder. I stand up, dizzy, and stumble to the window. The sky’s big and black; just a thin layer of grey cloud streaking above the horizon.
‘I don’t get it. You told me you’d started thinking about her. Wondering about her. Remember? When we were in the cafe. And then in the wood. It seemed really important, you telling me that. We can actually find her. Don’t you see how big that is? How amazing it would be? All your questions . . . there would be answers for them. You don’t have to do it by yourself. I’ll help you.’
‘Not like this.’
‘Why not?’
‘This is just horrible.’
‘Why are you angry with me?’
I stare at the dark sky. I’m shaking with something – can’t think – anger, or fear . . . I can’t tell the difference any more.
‘Come here,’ Seb says. He holds his arm out as if to pull me in, closer.
I shrink away. ‘You should have asked first. What I wanted.’ My words come out like bullets.
‘I thought you’d be pleased. I did this for you. It took hours.’
My skin burns, then freezes. I’m shivering all over.
‘You were wasting your time, then. You were just filling in the time, anyway, weren’t you? Messing about on the stupid computer. You’ve got too much time doing nothing all day.’ Even as I say the words I know how cruel and horrible they are. And not even true, any longer.
‘For Christ’s sake, Em. It’s just a load of web pages. It’s no big deal. You’re overreacting big time.’
‘If that’s what you think, it shows how little you know. Or care.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘You haven’t a clue about me, have you?’
‘Now you’re just being ridiculous. Childish.’
‘Just shut up. Piss off. I don’t need this.’ I’m so furious I can’t look at him. I storm into the loo and sit there with the door locked. My head’s spinning as if I’m about to faint. And then I throw up.
Through the muddle and darkness inside, I begin to hear small sounds again. A tap, dripping. The whirr of the fan, and the click of the radiator turning on.
Feet pad along the landing. Voices drift upstairs from the kitchen.
I start to calm down.
What happens now?
I’ve gone too far.
Is this it? The end for me and Seb?
What should I do? It’s too far to walk back home by myself. I could phone Cassy, who hates driving in the dark and is already in a mood with me. Dad’s out tonight. I haven’t any money for a taxi.
‘Tea’s ready,’ Avril calls up from the kitchen.
I can hardly think. But how can I leave, now?
I rinse my face. I look terrible: my eyes red and swollen and piggy; my cheeks blotchy. I find a comb in the bathroom cupboard and sort my hair out.
Seb’s already sitting at the table by the time I get downstairs. He doesn’t even look up. All through the meal, Avril and Nick make polite conversation, and I answer their questions, and Seb doesn’t say a word.
I carry dishes out to the kitchen. ‘You hardly ate a thing,’ Avril says.
‘I need to go home, really,’ I say. ‘I’m tired. Thanks for dinner. It was really tasty. I’m sorry I didn’t eat much.’
Seb’s standing in the doorway, watching us.
‘Well,’ Avril says to him, ‘you’d better take the princess home.’
Seb winces. ‘Where are the car keys?’
‘You had them last. Upstairs?’
‘Did something happen to you two?
’ Avril asks me, while he’s out of the room. ‘You both seem miserable as sin.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. My eyes well up.
‘You take care, Emily. Come again soon.’ She gives me a peck on the cheek. ‘Things have a way of working out. Don’t you worry.’
* * *
Seb drives too fast. He glares at me when I suck in my breath as a lorry comes over the brow of the bridge and he has to brake sharply.
What should I say?
Not sorry. I’m not sorry. Why should I be? I didn’t ask him to search out all that stuff. It’s his fault I’m feeling like this.
But the silence is horrible.
It scares me, the way I can flip. I get trapped into another version of me, and then I can’t find the way back out. It’s happened before. It’s as if being forced to think about finding Francesca has tipped me back in time, to being little, and helpless, all over again.
Seb hasn’t seen this side of me before.
He pulls up at the top of the lane. ‘There,’ he says.
Nothing else.
No kiss or hug.
‘Bye,’ I say, all frosty and mean.
Make the first move, the good Emily says in my head.
No. Why should I? The flip-side wins. I slam the car door.
He doesn’t wait to watch me go down the lane. He spins the wheels as he turns the car, and speeds off.
I won’t let myself cry. I walk down the lane to the gate, and across the field. It’s too dark to see properly: I keep stepping into puddles in the deep ruts made by car wheels. I don’t care.
I fumble for my keys. All the lights are off in the caravan. No one’s home. I stumble in over the doorstep and fling myself down on the sofa. Still I don’t cry.
I turn on my laptop. No one’s on MSN. I try Facebook. Everyone’s off-line. Everyone I know in the whole wide world is out somewhere having a good time. Bob’s dead. I’m not allowed to have Mattie. Seb hates me.
I lie in the dark. I let myself sink down into it, this feeling of being utterly alone and abandoned.
Like a little child.
Like it’s all over. Finished.
3
Sunlight streams through the classroom window, falling on to the table in squares of light, turning the piles of tissue and crêpe paper into glowing blocks of emerald green and stinging yellow.
Hold the thin sheet of tissue up to the light and it’s like stained glass.
Cut out petal shapes, Mrs Levens says, and green spikes for the leaves. Stick them down on the card. Now you curl a strip of yellow crêpe round your finger and push the end, so it goes wavy. Glue down one end of the yellow tube, so it sticks out of the card to make the daffodil middle, like a trumpet. Our 3-D daffodil cards will make our mothers very happy. Now best writing, to go inside the card. No mistakes. Copy the letters from the whiteboard. Happy Mother’s Day. Now write a special message for your special mummy.
I wander to the window sill. You are not supposed to get up and walk about in Class Five, but Mrs Levens doesn’t notice because she’s busy helping Tomas. I check on the tadpoles in the tank. They are just getting legs. We have given them a rock for climbing out on when they get four legs and that’s when they have to breathe air. My head is hot and my throat’s gone tight. I want Kat and it’s ages till playtime.
‘Come and sit down, please, Emily.’
Mrs Levens tugs my arm because I can’t seem to move away from the window and the tadpoles. My legs don’t want to move. The pondweed is a bit brown at the edges. Some tadpoles have two back legs and a tail. One is just a big fat tadpole and no legs at all. Sometimes that happens: they grow and grow but they don’t change like they ought to.
Mrs Levens’ jumper smells of washing powder. She crouches down next to me so she is the same height as me and she stays there while I write, Dear Cassy, Love from Emily. We leave out the bit in the middle about mothers.
4
I’ve gone over and over in my mind what Seb did and why it upset me so much. It was partly that I was already upset about Bob’s death, and then, if I’m really honest, it was a bit hard to see Seb so excited about going away to do that course. But the real problem was the way he just took over, so I wasn’t in control. Everything happened too fast.
The same thing happened when Rachel started going on about looking for my mum, back in the autumn.
It has to be my decision. I have to do it in my own time. If I do it at all, that is.
What if I do?
What would it be like, to find Francesca?
Since those few words Mr Ives said last October, it’s been worming away at the back of my mind, the idea that I might actually be able to find her.
Something Rachel said keeps coming into my head: I’d want to know the ways I was like her, and the ways I was different.
It’s beginning to make sense to me, now.
Finding my real mum might be part of finding me.
So now I’m starting to see (duh!) that’s what Seb wanted to help me do. And that means I feel terrible about how I reacted. And terrified that I’ve blown it completely with him for ever.
His phone’s still turned off.
I left a sorry message, earlier.
I tried phoning him again before school.
I’ve sent three texts. I can’t send any more. So now what?
‘What have you been up to today?’ Cassy says when I get home from school. She’s cooking a slap-up meal for Kat’s return from London tonight with Dan. She’s often in a chatty mood now she’s started feeling so much better.
‘Not much.’
‘How’s the Photography project?’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘I can show you if you want.’
When she’s got everything in the pan and has turned down the heat, she wipes her hands and sits down with me at the table.
Cassy looks thoughtful, flicking through the pages of my journal. She doesn’t say much.
‘I like this one.’ She points at the photo of birch trunks making silvery shadows. ‘It almost looks like a painting, instead of a photo,’ Cassy says. ‘How do you do that, then?’
I explain about using filters, on the computer.
Cassy goes back to check the rice. Outside, Dad’s car bumps across the field and he parks up next to the caravan. The doors slam.
Kat tumbles in through the caravan door with armloads of stuff, followed by a fit-looking dark-haired bloke in neat glasses, and then Dad.
‘Better clear the table, Em.’ Cassy gets up to greet everyone.
Dan’s very polite: he even shakes hands with me, and makes Kat giggle. She’s all bubbly and manic.
I put my things away in the bunk room, and lay the table for supper. It’s a squash with five people, but Dan doesn’t seem bothered. I like him. I can tell he really likes Kat, and that’s what matters most to me, more than him being clever or good-looking. But he’s both of those too.
‘How was London?’ Cassy asks as she ladles bean casserole on to five plates. ‘Help yourselves to rice.’
‘Awesome,’ Kat says. She grins at Dan. ‘The best time ever.’
‘Well, soon be back to the grindstone,’ Dad says. ‘Won’t you have exams this term?’
Kat rolls her eyes. ‘End of semester exams, that’s all. Not for ages. They don’t even count towards your degree.’
‘Still, you want to do your best,’ Dad says. ‘No point doing anything else. What are you studying, Dan?’
‘Marine Biology.’
‘How fascinating,’ Cassy says. ‘Do you get to dive and go to coral reefs and swim in lovely exotic warm seas?’
‘Later, I can choose to study abroad,’ Dan says. ‘Canada or New Zealand. It costs extra, though.’
‘Worth it,’ Dad says. ‘You’ll already be in debt up to your armpits, I expect!’
‘Dad!’ Kat frowns at him.
‘Tuition fees. Student loans,’ Dad says. ‘That’s all I mean.’
In my head, I’m trying to work out where e
veryone’s going to sleep tonight. Dad and Cassy in the main room, me and Kat on the bunk beds . . . there’s not even floor space for Dan. When Kat takes the plates into the kitchenette I follow her.
‘Where’s Dan going to stay?’ I hiss at her.
Kat sighs. ‘Duh! We’re going on to a party at Mara’s, after supper. We’ll both stay over there.’
‘How was I supposed to know? You never said.’
And that’s the end of my chance to tell her about Seb and me. She hardly notices me, she’s so set on talking to Dan the whole time. She wants to show him Moat House, but Dad says not in the dark, in the wet.
‘You’d better clear up the stuff you’ve left all over our room,’ I say to Kat. ‘It’s a mess.’
She half-heartedly pushes the bags and rolled-up sleeping bag and stuff on to her bottom bunk, and most of it spills out on to the floor again. And then it’s already time for them to go, and with Dan standing right there I can hardly get cross with her about some petty thing like a messy bedroom, so I keep my mouth shut.
‘It was good to meet you all,’ Dan says. ‘Thanks for a lovely supper.’
‘You’ll be back tomorrow?’ Cassy asks Kat.
‘Briefly. Then we’re getting a lift back to uni from someone who lives near Bath.’
They’ve disappeared again all in a whirlwind. Dad drives them to Mara’s. Cassy and I are left behind, surveying the general chaos.
‘I’ll wash, you dry,’ Cassy says.
‘She doesn’t care about anyone except herself, these days,’ I grumble.
Cassy laughs. ‘Don’t take it personally. She’s a girl in luuuurve.’
Once we’ve finished all the piles of washing-up, Cassy lies down on the sofa. She puts both hands on her tummy.
‘I’m going to bed,’ I say. ‘If I can get through the heaps of rubbish she’s left.’
‘OK, love. School in the morning. Set your alarm, yes?’
I hear Dad come back, not long after, and his low voice talking to Cassy. I hear words like ‘essays’ and ‘she’s supposed to be there to study’, and Cassy laughing. ‘You’re such an old crosspatch. Stop stressing about everything. She’s just fine.’
Now I’m missing my stupid sister on top of everything else. Even though she is so selfish and horrible sometimes.
