by Suzi Moore
I walked over to the little table and looked down at the model that was sitting half finished. I stared down at the wings, one grey, one red, and I heard his voice. ‘Zack, just hold the brush like this,’ he’d say. ‘Take it easy, you only need a little bit of paint, Zack,’ he’d tell me, but I wasn’t really very good at it. I had dripped the paint everywhere. I got the wrong colours on the wings and finally I’d just given up. In the end I just liked to watch Dad. I didn’t mind just watching or passing him the paints or cleaning the brushes. I was happy just doing that.
‘In the winter, during those endlessly wet days we have here on Exmoor, me, my brother and our friends used to practically live up here. Your mum and my sister used to have a doll’s house up here that they painted blue.’
I looked around at the attic and immediately imagined a group of friends hiding out as the rain and thunder rattled the windows. But then I remembered the two photographs I’d seen. There were five, weren’t there? That’s what George had said too: ‘the Famous Five’. My mum, David, his brother and sister made four, but who was the fifth? Who was the boy with the dimples and curly hair in the photos?
‘Kirran was the kindest of all of us, my brother the bravest and your mum was . . .’
‘The loudest?’ I said and laughed.
David nodded. ‘Something like that.’
I reached out and touched another perfectly painted plane.
‘My brother did that one. I remember it like yesterday. At first he used to make me watch him paint the models because I was just rubbish at it. I was completely hopeless,’ he said, sort of laughing, and it made me smile again and then the two of us seemed to stop smiling at the exact same time.
We stood like that for ages, together, silently, but it didn’t feel very quiet.
‘I’m not very good at that either,’ I said, looking up at the wings of a beautifully painted plane.
‘Tom was better than me at most things: cleverer, faster, braver. He did everything fearlessly. I used to just follow him around, trying to copy everything he did. When he painted this one,’ David said, touching the Tiger Moth with his forefinger and smiling, ‘he hung it on that piece of string, pointed at his chest and said: “Me tiger, you moth.”’
We left the little room and headed back downstairs. As we reached the spiral staircase, I said, ‘Is he still, you know, better at most things?’
He suddenly stopped, but he didn’t turn round; instead he took a deep breath and softly said, ‘He would have been, Zack, but he died a long time ago. When I was about your age.’
‘What happened to him?’ I blurted out without thinking and it was ages before he answered me. At first I thought he was going to be cross or something; my mum would have gone mental if she’d heard me. She’s always telling me off for asking things I shouldn’t. I stared at his back and gripped the box of baby clothes for what felt like an eternity, and when he spoke again it was in a weird voice; it was kind of serious, but like he was really far away or something.
‘He drowned. He drowned at Culver Cove.’
I held my breath. Was that what Mum had been about to tell me last night?
David didn’t turn round again, but if he’d seen my face at that moment I bet he would have guessed. And, as I followed him back through the house, I felt my heart beat quickly and I swear that he could hear it.
In that moment I knew that David, Mum, Sophie, no one could ever know what nearly happened to Alice. No one could know that she’d followed me like a little moth and nearly drowned as well.
It had to always be our secret and Alice had to get better.
31
Alice
I am Alice Isabella Richardson and today I opened my eyes to see my mother asleep in the chair beside my bed, and on the table the photograph of my other mother was propped up against a pile of books.
Last night I dreamt of her again. I dreamt of my other mother. It was a dream that seemed to change and yet it was just the same. She was trying to find me; she was always trying to reach me. She was on a plane surrounded by fog. She ran to the station, but the train left without her. She was on a big red bus that broke down. She was in a car and it ran out of petrol. She was on a bicycle with a flat tyre. She was running up the beach, but she wasn’t getting any closer. She was swimming round the headland and kept getting dragged out to sea. She was at the gates to Culver Manor, but they were locked, and when I opened my eyes again I think I knew why. She didn’t look after me because she couldn’t and the churning, burning feeling started to melt away.
It was as though the bad feeling that had been pressing down on me suddenly lifted and I felt like me again. I felt like Alice once more.
It was like the time me and Florence had been dressing up in Mum’s clothes and I’d broken her special necklace. I had tried to tug it over my head and the chain suddenly snapped. Florence and I had watched in horror as the creamy white pearls clattered on to the wooden floor and rolled under the bed. For some reason I didn’t want to tell Mum. I didn’t want to upset her. The necklace had been her mother’s and her grandmother’s so, instead of telling her, me and Florence had collected up all the pearls and hidden them in a sock at the back of my wardrobe.
At first Mum hadn’t noticed. Even when Florence and her family left to go back to Scotland she still hadn’t realised that the necklace was missing, but when she did it was horrible. She raced round the house, turning out drawers; she pulled everything out of her wardrobe and emptied the cupboards in her bathroom. I saw her walk quickly past my bedroom and into my bathroom, muttering all the time, ‘I can’t have lost it, please let me find it.’
As every hour went by, I felt myself getting more and more nervous. As each box was emptied out and searched through, I told myself to confess. The more upset I saw my mum getting, the harder it became so, when she asked me if I’d seen it, I lied.
I hardly slept at all that night and when I came down for breakfast I couldn’t even eat anything. I saw Mum gazing out of the window and when Dad came in he bent down in front of her and wiped a tear away from her cheek and kissed her. I watched her take two deep breaths and then she turned to me, smiled and said, ‘So then, Alice, if you don’t fancy croissants, how about I make you some French toast instead?’
Perhaps it was something in her smile or the way her pale grey eyes looked at me so kindly, but when I opened my mouth to answer her the whole story came blurting out of me. By the time I’d finished telling them both what had happened, I was crying so hard I could barely talk. I expected the biggest telling-off ever. I expected to be shouted at and sent to my bedroom. I told myself that I deserved the biggest and worst punishment ever, but Mum just threw her arms round me and cried.
We almost ran up the stairs to my bedroom together and when she saw the sock with all the pearls inside she sort of laughed. And, as she tipped the pearls out on to the bed and counted them all, she laughed, looked at me, smiling again. ‘You must have felt horrible. You must have been more upset than me. But you never need to be scared of telling me the truth, Alice. Doesn’t it feel much better?’ And she was right. As I looked into her happy eyes again, I did feel so much better.
I looked at my mum now. Her eyes were closed; a strand of blonde hair hung down across her face. Her pale hands lay folded on her lap. She wore a white nightdress with a lilac shawl around her shoulders. The sunlight shone across her face so that I could see the little hairs on her pale cheeks.
I looked back to my other mother, held my hand out towards the photograph, traced my fingertip along her face, her long dark hair and I whispered something softly.
I lay back on the pillow; my eyes were tired, my head still ached and I closed my eyes to think some more. I heard the sound of the house martins chirruping at the window where they had come back to nest again. They always came back, I thought, they always found their way back to Culver Manor, and I pulled the covers up to my chin and fell asleep.
32
Zack
&nb
sp; Alice is getting better.
‘Alice is going to be fine,’ David told me as we drank lemonade on the terrace, and I felt happier and more relieved than I’ve felt my whole entire life, and I kind of stayed feeling like that all day. Which was good because I spent quite a lot of that day in a very small space, tripping over stuff and banging my head.
When David saw what I’d done, when he saw that I hadn’t dripped the paint all over the lawn (well, I did, but I just put my foot over that bit), he was really impressed.
‘Have you done this sort of thing before, Zack?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, thinking of the shed me and Dad had built at our old house. I rubbed the thumb that was still a bit sore from where George had got the splinter out and I remembered how Dad had really bashed his own thumb with the hammer. He’d been telling me how I had to be really careful with all the tools, but he’d been looking at me as he banged the nail into the wall. ‘Like this,’ he said as his hand slipped and the hammer came down hard against his thumb. As he shouted out all the various swear words I’d ever heard, he sort of laughed and said, ‘But definitely don’t do it like that, Zack.’
David sighed and put the lid back on the pale blue paint pot. ‘Well, have you enjoyed it?’
I looked up at what we’d made. I thought about how many more little splinters I’d got in my fingers and how many times I’d banged my head, and I looked at him, grinned and said, ‘It was cool.’
We stood like that for ages, just kind of looking, and then I realised that we were both just staring down the garden across the sea and out to Wales. I looked at David and then a sad feeling came over me because, now that we’d finished, what else would I do every day when Mum was at work? Would I have to go back to the cottage and sit on my own all day until school started? I looked round at the garden and up to the house. I felt the sun warm the backs of my arms, I took a gulp of Sophie’s home-made lemonade, I breathed in the lovely flowery smell, I listened to the sound of waves on the beach below and I knew I wanted to stay here forever.
And, as if he could read my mind, David smiled and said, ‘Would you like to earn a bit of pocket money, Zack?’
So, while I waited for Alice to be well enough to come down from her bedroom, I did all sorts of jobs in the garden. I did this thing where you take the dead flowers off the plants, I stacked the logs in neat piles, I brought in all the different vegetables and that’s when I saw Mum’s favourite food.
‘Asparagus,’ David said when he saw me looking. I loved the way they tasted, but I’d never seen them grow up out of the ground like funny green pencils. I realised that tomatoes could actually be yellow as well as red, but I preferred the way the really little ones tasted and David had to tell me to stop gobbling them all up. I spent ages in the herb garden getting rid of weeds and things, but I hated doing that. That was, like, the worst job ever, but the best thing was the lawn-mower. It was the sort that you sit on, like a kind of motorbike with a grass cutter attached to it. It was probably the coolest thing and I was even allowed to have a little go all by myself, and I worked out how to go backwards round one of the apple trees, although David wasn’t really laughing when I did it a bit too fast and kind of drove over a special kind of plant.
‘Hmm,’ he said, frowning. ‘Er, Jenson Button, a little less speed, if you don’t mind.’
But he was sort of smiling at the same time and that’s when I realised that David isn’t like other grown-ups. He doesn’t say things like: ‘Don’t do that, don’t do this, do it my way, stop doing that.’ He sort of likes telling jokes, and when I asked him what Somerset Vale was like he locked the door of the shed and said, ‘If it was good enough for me, it’ll be good enough for you.’
I thought I was going to have to go home, but Sophie said I could stay for dinner and Mum came too. She chatted for ages with David. They told me how, when they were younger, they had camped out in the walled garden one night, but David laughed and said, ‘Yeah, but I got a bit scared and went back in the house.’
Mum seemed to be very interested in the screaming baby that still didn’t have a name.
‘I thought it would be like it was with Alice,’ I heard Sophie say, ‘but David and I can’t agree. I like the name Alexia, but David prefers Emma. We’re going to have to decide soon though.’
Then my mum said something that I didn’t know. ‘Zack didn’t have a name for the first three weeks of his life, and then Jonathan read this amazing book about the famous mountain climber, Edward Ellroy. The first time he climbed Everest he broke his leg on the way down. Normally he would have just died, but a man who was climbing up the mountain saved his life. That man gave up his oxygen and his own climb to the summit just to save Ellroy’s life. He was called Novak Zachariah.’
I looked across the table at Mum and she smiled.
‘But,’ I said, sort of confused and upset, ‘I thought I was named after the famous climber.’
David took a big gulp of his beer and grinned at me. ‘Nah, Zack, it’s better than that. You were named after a truly great man. The best sort of man. The bravest kind. A man who thinks of others first.’
I thought of my dad. He was the bravest, wasn’t he?
When we’d got home and Mum came to say goodnight, I asked her the question I’d wanted to ask since she told the story.
‘Mum, would Dad have done that? Would Dad have saved the man on the mountain?’
She smiled, kissed my forehead and said, ‘Every time, Zack. Every time.’
I was going to ask her about what happened to David’s brother. I was going to ask about the group of friends, but I didn’t want to make her sad.
I lay awake for ages and thought that when I was at Culver Manor all the worries stopped being worries. It wasn’t the super-scary place I’d imagined, Alice’s mum and dad were not the strict ogre ‘lock-you-up-in-the-attic’ type parents and Porlock Weir wasn’t the dull and boring place I’d once thought it was going to be either. But when I did fall asleep I had this stupid sort of nightmare where I was at my new school, but I was naked and everyone was standing around me, laughing.
In the morning I couldn’t wait to get up to Culver Manor and leave all the horrid feeling behind. I think I practically ran the whole way there and when I got there Sophie had the best news ever.
33
Alice
Today I sat up in bed for the first time. I still can’t really hear out of one ear, but I have two ears so that’s not so bad. I feel really hungry; when I move, I’m not in any pain and the light no longer hurts my eyes. I woke to the sound of crying and when I turned to look I saw the photograph of my other mother, and Mum was sitting in a chair next to the bed. I looked at her and smiled.
‘That is a lovely sight to see, Alice.’
Dad placed a delicious tray of food on my bed and, as I gobbled the sandwiches and slurped up the milkshake, they told me everything that had happened while I’d been ill, but, one thing was clear, no one but Zack and I knew that I had tried to swim round the headland or that Zack had saved my life. I decided there and then that it would always be our secret.
That evening I sat up in bed and read for a little while, drew inside my notebook, and it must have been really late when Mum came back to sit with me. At first I didn’t see her and then I heard a gurgling sound and my little sister let us know she was hungry. I watched her little pink face get redder and redder. I saw her tiny hands clench into tiny fists, but her eyes stayed tightly shut. I watched Mum as she started to feed her. The crying stopped immediately, but her eyes stayed closed. For some reason I wanted to touch the little pink thing which wriggled about, but when I held my hand out something strange happened. As my hand reached hers, she stopped sucking. As my finger hovered above her hands, she stopped drinking, turned towards me and opened her eyes. I looked up at Mum and smiled.
Dad slowly crept into the room and sat down on my bed.
‘She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’ Dad said and I nodded.
‘Sh
e doesn’t have a name yet,’ Mum said, looking up at me, smiling hopefully. I sat up and wriggled closer to Dad. I took his arm, pulled it round my waist and I felt him kiss the top of my head. I let my feet dangle down from the bed so that my toes were touching the top of Mum’s feet, so that I could feel her soft skin beneath mine. I leaned in closer to my dad and stroked the hairs on his freckly arms. All the questions stopped being questions. All the bad feeling that was churning in my stomach was gone. It was just like it used to be, but something made it better.
I peered over the blanket at my little sister. She was beautiful, she really was. With her tiny hand, she reached up, gripped my finger and stared right at me. She seemed to stare at me as though she would never stop. Her little hand seemed to hold on so tightly I thought she would never let go. As she began to drink again, her eyes stayed fixed on mine, and when I tried to pull my finger free she gripped it even tighter. She was so small. Smaller than small. Tinier than tiny. I stared back at her eyes, smiled and after six months of silence I looked up at Dad and Mum and softly said: ‘Rebecca.’
Mum and Dad looked at each other quickly and then they both smiled.
‘Rebecca Richardson,’ Mum said.
‘Rebecca,’ Dad sort of whispered. ‘It’s perfect.’
Now my little sister has a name.
It was Tuesday August 27th when I sat up in bed and felt like me again. My eyes sort of pinged open. I jumped out of bed, pulled back the curtains and when I looked down the garden to the cedar tree I saw something which made my heart sing.
