Libby in the Middle

by Gwyneth Rees

  Once Bella and I were alone in our bedroom she said, ‘Hey, do you know the only good thing about renting this place?’

  ‘What?’ I asked suspiciously, because I was struggling to find anything good about it right now. Our room was small and dark with a low ceiling and it smelt really odd. According to Bella the smell was probably a mix of damp, mould and dust, and she said it was a good job neither of us has asthma.

  ‘At least Aunt Thecla’s hideous paintings have to stay in storage!’ she declared.

  I smiled. ‘That’s true! But it’s going to be tricky now we’re living so close to her, isn’t it? I mean, we can’t just put up her paintings for the week she’s staying with us.’

  ‘Sam thinks it’s hilarious how Mum and Dad do that,’ Bella said.

  Suddenly Mum appeared in our doorway, looking anxious.

  ‘Have you two brushed your teeth yet?’

  ‘Yes, Mum!’ Bella answered with a roll of her eyes. ‘And flossed.’

  ‘Why? What’s wrong, Mum?’ I asked when she didn’t look nearly as satisfied as she normally would.

  Then Dad appeared behind her, holding a large bottle of mineral water. ‘It definitely comes from a tank in the loft, Nina … full of animal droppings and dead bats, most likely …’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Bella demanded.

  ‘The water in the bathroom. Make sure you don’t drink any of it. In fact, I wouldn’t even use it to brush your –’

  He broke off as Bella let out a fake retching sound and I murmured, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

  After Mum and Dad had gone, Bella hissed angrily, ‘I hate it here! I wish –’ She broke off abruptly as her phone buzzed. We’d had an intermittent signal since we’d arrived – more absent than present – and now it seemed the outside world was finally getting through.

  ‘Is it Sam?’ I prompted as I watched Bella read the text.

  ‘Shush!’ She swiftly turned on to her side away from me and started texting back, shutting me out again, just like she usually did.

  The first couple of days in our rented cottage turned out to be anything but idyllic. Yes, it looked like a quaint little country cottage on the outside and, yes, it was right next to a field with horses in it and, yes, there was a riding school just along the road and a farm nearby which sold freshly laid eggs. But actual day-to-day life soon turned out to be a sort of endurance test.

  First, the ancient boiler kept switching off, leaving us with no hot water, and now that we’d got the front door open it wouldn’t close properly. On day two, Dad lost his temper and kicked the door shut with so much force that one of the rusty hinges broke off, so we had to get a joiner in to repair it and plane some wood off the bottom of the door at the same time. The joiner looked at the staircase handrail and said it could do with replacing, but Mrs Fuller refused to have that done, claiming there had been nothing wrong with the handrail until we’d set foot in her house. Instead she sent her husband round to fix it back on so that it looked OK again, though Mum and Dad kept reminding us to be careful as we weren’t sure how secure it was.

  On day three it rained and we discovered several holes in the roof, one of which was directly above my bed. Mum said that must be why our bedroom smelt so badly of damp. The only positive thing was that Dad climbed up into the loft that day and found that the water storage tank had a cover on it. Which was just as well because at night we’d definitely heard some weird scratching noises overhead.

  Sam was texting Bella several times a day, though because of the bad signal she often wouldn’t get any of his messages until we left the cottage. I guessed Sam must be missing Bella a lot, though funnily enough she didn’t seem to be missing him as much as I’d anticipated. I’d expected her to shut herself away and refuse to show any interest at all in our new surroundings. In fact, she seemed keen to go out and about exploring, though she never wanted any of us to go with her.

  On day four Grace said she’d seen a gerbil in the garden and she got all excited because she thought it must be someone’s pet that had escaped from its cage. She spent all afternoon outside on the patio trying to lure it into an empty shoebox with little squares of peanut butter on toast, because according to Grace that’s what gerbils like to eat.

  We didn’t take much notice until lunchtime the following day when we were all sitting at the table by the window eating sandwiches.

  ‘Oh look, there are two of them now!’ Grace suddenly said enthusiastically.

  Mum looked out at the patio and screamed.

  Two large rats were feeding on the scraps Grace had put down. ‘Right, that’s it, Paul! We’re not staying here!’ Mum blurted.

  ‘They’re only rats, Nina.’

  Mum immediately started listing off all the horrible diseases rats can pass on to humans: ‘Typhoid fever, rat-bite fever, tapeworm, salmonellosis, leptospirosis, toxoplasmosis, bubonic plague –’

  ‘OK, OK, don’t panic. I’ll put down some poison,’ Dad said impatiently.

  Grace burst into tears. ‘You can’t poison them, Daddy! It’s cruel!’ She became completely hysterical when he offered to set some traps to kill them with instead.

  ‘Hey, what if those scratchy noises in the loft are rats?’ Bella said. ‘What if they’re inside the house as well?’

  That afternoon Mum and Dad went to see our landlady, Mrs Fuller. Mum was usually perfectly happy to leave us in the house alone for short periods, but today she invited Aunt Thecla over to stay with us while they were gone.

  ‘Are you sure that’s necessary, Nina?’ Dad said, trying to dissuade her. ‘The countryside is much safer than the town, you know.’

  But Mum wouldn’t be swayed and said that the countryside in general might be safer, but this particular cottage was a whole different matter.

  Of course, as soon as Aunt Thecla arrived she was bursting with ‘I told you so’. Having seen and smelt our bedroom she offered to put up Bella and me in her spare room straight away. She didn’t offer for Grace to come with us. I think even she knows that Grace is too much of a mummy’s girl to agree. Besides, Grace’s bedroom wasn’t nearly as toxic as ours.

  I’d expected Bella to kick up a fuss about moving in with Aunt Thecla, even for a short while, but to my surprise she readily agreed. ‘That would be brilliant, Aunt Thecla!’ she said, rewarding her with an unusually warm smile.

  So that evening Bella and I left Rat Cottage (as Bella had christened it) and moved in with Aunt Thecla, while Mum and Dad began their search for alternative accommodation in the village.

  Chapter Eight

  A few days later I woke up in the room I was sharing with Bella at Aunt Thecla’s house, feeling gloomy. The large depressing painting of withered bluebells in a cracked black vase on the wall above the bed didn’t help either. I really missed my old bedroom. It wasn’t very big but it had always given me somewhere to wind down. Mum had let me choose the colour scheme myself, and my window had overlooked the back garden.

  I realised I was feeling a lot like I’d felt just after Sarah left – kind of bored with everything, as if I couldn’t be bothered leaving the house or making much of an effort to do anything. And I was worrying about school. It was still the summer holidays at the moment, but in a few weeks I would have to make a huge effort to be sociable whether I felt like it or not. There was no going back home to my old house and my old school, which, even if I’d never exactly loved it, was at least reassuringly familiar.

  I suppose I’d been hoping this move would bring Bella and me a bit closer, since neither of us had any friends here. I was hoping we’d have to rely on each other for company, at least until school started, but instead Bella seemed to be avoiding everyone. Since we’d moved in with our aunt she kept saying that she wanted to go out on her own to explore the village, and she was full of excuses about why I couldn’t go with her. Whenever she came home she always seemed pretty chirpy for someone who’d spent the whole day hanging out alone. I did try to press her for mor
e information about where she’d been, certain she wasn’t telling the whole truth, but she always got snarky and told me to mind my own business.

  Aunt Thecla wasn’t much company either. She spent most of the day up in her attic studio, where she told us she was working on a portrait of her beloved Hughie. I asked if I could see it but she refused to let me even enter her art room. It was off limits to everyone, with no exceptions, she said, although she did promise to show me the painting as soon as she’d finished it to her satisfaction.

  ‘To her satisfaction being the key point,’ Bella said sarcastically when I told her.

  I giggled because it was true that our aunt’s whole house was full of awful paintings that had clearly also been completed to her own satisfaction.

  So any worries I’d had of having to spend hours on my own being polite to Aunt Thecla turned out to be quite unfounded, since she was far too obsessed with depicting Hughie to bother too much about me. She would appear in the living room from time to time to criticise my TV watching, but I usually ignored her since there was nothing else to do to pass the time.

  Today I got up to find Bella already downstairs and fully dressed. She was sitting on top of the kitchen unit by the fridge, reading something on her phone as she munched on a banana. Aunt Thecla wasn’t there or she’d have been nagging her to sit down and eat a proper breakfast at the table.

  ‘I wonder if Aunt Thecla will ever get another dog,’ I said, more to get her attention than anything else.

  ‘The house still stinks of Hughie,’ Bella complained, still not looking up from her phone. ‘Hey, listen to this … Thecla is the name of a saint.’ She started reading from her phone screen. ‘Thecla was a saint in the early Christian Church who was saved from burning at the stake by a miraculous storm, sentenced to be eaten by wild beasts, then saved again by a series of miracles.’ She started to laugh.

  ‘Well, I’ve never heard of her,’ I said with a grin as I put some bread in the toaster.

  ‘There are probably loads of saints you’ve never heard of,’ Bella said. ‘Hey, did you know Mum told me she might go to church with Aunt Thecla on Sunday to try and meet a few people? I mean, how hypocritical is that when Mum doesn’t even believe in God?’

  ‘She believes in a creative force though,’ I pointed out.

  ‘That’s not the same thing,’ Bella argued.

  I didn’t think it was very different, but I decided to keep quiet because I didn’t want to get drawn into an argument like the ones Bella is always having with Mum and Dad on just about every topic imaginable. She seems to make a point of disagreeing with other people these days, and she never even tries to phrase things tactfully like I would if I was contradicting someone.

  ‘Did you know Aunt Thecla is taking us to buy our uniforms today?’ I said, to change the subject. ‘Mum was going to take us but now she’s got some work stuff she needs to do.’

  ‘More likely she’s hoping Aunt Thecla will pay for everything,’ Bella scoffed.

  ‘Shush … she’ll hear you,’ I hissed.

  ‘So?’ Bella slid down to stand on the floor. ‘She’s probably expecting to have to buy our uniforms in any case. You do realise Dad’s business hasn’t been doing very well lately, don’t you?’

  I frowned. ‘No.’

  ‘Mum is stressing about money. She says she might have to go back to working full-time if things don’t pick up. But you can’t tell her I told you. I promised not to say anything, because she thinks you’ll worry too much.’

  Well, I will now, I felt like saying, wishing she wouldn’t do this thing of telling me some secret that really does worry me, then forbidding me to talk about it to anyone, so my worry just gets even worse.

  We were meant to be taking Grace with us to the shop so that Aunt Thecla could buy her uniform too, but when the time came Grace kicked up such a fuss that Mum gave in as usual and said she would take her later.

  Lucky Grace. Or, as Bella would say, clever Grace.

  It turned out that the lady who ran the uniform shop in the village – Mrs Mayhew – had grown up with our aunt. The two had lived within a few streets of each other all their lives, attended the same school and the same church, and now they sent each other Christmas cards and always stopped to speak in the street. But behind her back Aunt Thecla called Mrs Mayhew ‘an awful snob’ and ‘a terrible gossip’, and she said that she dreaded to think what Mrs Mayhew called her.

  ‘You’re frenemies!’ Bella joked when Aunt Thecla described the situation to us. Then she had to explain to Aunt Thecla what a frenemy is.

  As soon as we arrived at the shop, Mrs Mayhew greeted our aunt with a smile and then came forward to have a closer look at Bella and me. ‘So, Thecla … these are Paul’s girls, are they?’

  ‘The older two – Bella and Elisabeth,’ Aunt Thecla introduced us, quite proudly I thought. ‘Girls, this is Valerie Mayhew.’

  ‘Don’t look much alike for sisters, do you?’ Mrs Mayhew said as she looked us up and down in a way I found quite embarrassing. I wondered if she automatically sized people up for uniforms the second they walked into her shop. I just hoped she wasn’t going to make some comment about our comparative measurements. I’m not fat but I’d really love to have Bella’s measurements rather than mine. The fact is that Bella looks great in everything, whereas I have to be more careful what style of clothes to choose if I want to look good.

  ‘Come this way, girls,’ Mrs Mayhew said, waving us towards the changing rooms. ‘I’ll soon have you both kitted out.’

  As we tried on our uniforms in separate changing rooms I pulled a face at myself in the mirror, wishing – yet again – that I looked more like my sister. I’d once told Aunt Thecla that I wished I looked as beautiful as Bella, and she said that I was beautiful too, just in a ‘less obvious’ way, whatever that was meant to mean. Actually, the more I thought about it the more I remembered other typically odd comments Aunt Thecla had made over the years, all aimed, I’m sure, at making me feel better about myself.

  I heard Bella asking to try on a larger blouse, and then I heard Aunt Thecla’s loud voice saying, ‘I think we had better buy you a new bra as well. That one is looking rather grey. Your mother really ought to wash her whites separately, you know.’

  Bella mumbled something I couldn’t hear but I knew she was embarrassed.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Aunt Thecla’s voice came again. ‘We’re the only ones in the shop. Valerie, do you still sell underwear, or was that just while you had the boarders?’

  ‘We haven’t sold bras or knickers here for years, Thecla. Not since our day, I should think! Remember those navy-blue gym pants with a little pocket for your hanky?’

  They both laughed and I knew Bella would be cringing as much as I was. It got worse though. ‘If you want bras there’s a very good shop in Castle Westbury, on the market square. I’d take them both there if I were you. No doubt your younger one will be needing something too? They like to wear them early these days, don’t they? Makes them feel grown up.’

  Now I was the one who felt mortified as they went on to discuss which other shops might sell good-quality trainer bras.

  Suddenly there was a bit of a commotion outside my changing room and I pulled back my curtain to see what was happening. Bella had emerged fully dressed in her own clothes and was heading for the exit.

  ‘BELLA, COME BACK AT ONCE!’ our aunt was shouting after her.

  ‘Sorry! I’ve got somewhere else I need to be!’ Bella tossed back sharply as she barged out of the shop.

  Aunt Thecla’s face had gone pink. ‘I do apologise, Valerie. I shall be having words with her later.’

  ‘A bit of a rebel like her father, is she?’ Mrs Mayhew commented slyly. ‘You know, I was only thinking about your Paul the other day. I wonder how he feels about it all now.’

  My ears pricked up at that. Dad? A rebel? What was she talking about?

  ‘Valerie, can we save this for another time?’ Aunt Thecla snapped, nodding
across to where I was poking my head out from behind the curtain and staring at them.

  ‘Oh, doesn’t she know?’ Mrs Mayhew sounded surprised.

  ‘Good grief, Elisabeth, aren’t you changed into that uniform yet?’ Aunt Thecla asked swiftly. ‘Come on! Quick sticks! I’d rather like to get at least one of you kitted out today.’

  Chapter Nine

  When we got back to Aunt Thecla’s house, Dad was there with Grace. Aunt Thecla had hardly spoken to me on our way home, and when I’d asked her what Mrs Mayhew had meant by her comment about Dad she told me I’d have to ask him.

  ‘Good news,’ Dad greeted us with a smile. ‘We’ve found a great little house to rent a couple of streets away from here and we can move in immediately.’ He showed me a photo on his phone. ‘Since it’s unfurnished, we can get all our stuff out of storage as well.’

  ‘Where’s Bella?’ Grace asked.

  ‘Gone off in a strop,’ Aunt Thecla said. ‘Why don’t you and the girls go out and look for her, Paul? No need to rush back. Frankly, I could do with a breather from all of you.’

  Once we were outside I waited for Dad to stop complaining about how cringingly honest our aunt has always been before telling him some of what had happened in the shop. ‘She really embarrassed us, Dad. I don’t blame Bella for walking out.’

  ‘She’s not picking up,’ Dad grunted as he tried to call Bella.’

  ‘Dad … Mrs Mayhew said you were a rebel,’ I said. ‘How come?’

  There was a pause as he put his phone away. Dad looked a bit put out. ‘Valerie always was a stirrer.’

  ‘So it’s true then! But what did you do?’

  He seemed to be avoiding my gaze as he said, ‘Perhaps she meant I rebelled against my father … I also got into a bit of trouble with our next-door neighbour. It was his son Michael who was engaged to your aunt.’

  ‘Really?’ I was so interested in that piece of news that I was totally distracted from the story about Dad. ‘So what happened? Why didn’t they get married?’