by Suzi Moore
I didn’t walk down the hallway, I ran. I didn’t run down the stairs, I jumped two steps at a time, and I didn’t stop until I felt the wet grass under my bare feet and I was standing right under the cedar tree, looking up at it.
‘It’s amazing!’ I shouted. ‘It’s perfect!’ I cried. ‘It’s the best tree house in the whole world!’
And just then Zack stuck his head out from the little window and said, ‘That’s exactly what I said.’
He let down a little rope ladder and I climbed all the way up. The first room was sort of square and it had a kind of rectangular window that looked down across the fields and out to sea. It was like a perfect little wooden house, and there was even enough room for two beanbags and a table. The walls were painted a sort of pale blue, like the colour of the stones on the beach. On one wall there was a huge map so that you could see the whole of the vale and out to sea to the little island where no one lives.
‘It’s cool, isn’t it?’ Zack said, showing me the three little steps which led up to another smaller room that also had a kind of window. ‘It’s a two-tier tree house and I helped make it.’
And the best thing about it was this. At one end of the tree house was a hole that you could fit through and slide down to the ground on a sort of fireman’s pole which is exactly what I did. In fact, I did it three more times until I heard a familiar, horrid, whiny voice, and when I looked out of the window I saw the toady face that it belonged to. Casper. I’d forgotten all about him and Florence coming to stay, and as I looked up the lawn to the terrace I saw Aunt Aggy and Florence walking across the terrace towards Mum.
‘Let me up!’ Casper demanded, folding his arms across his chest and tapping his foot.
‘Who is that?’ Zack asked, peering down the hole.
‘It’s Casper, my cousin,’ I said, pulling a face.
‘Let me up now!’ he yelled, his pasty face getting redder.
‘Quick,’ said Zack and he pulled the rope ladder back up into the tree house just in time to see a red-faced Casper glare up at us.
‘I want to come up!’ he shouted. ‘Let me up now!’ But Zack and I just laughed, and when he tried to climb up the fireman’s pole the two of us laughed so loudly that I think the whole of Porlock Weir must have heard us. ‘I’m telling! I’m telling Mummy!’ he cried.
Zack, who was trying to stop laughing, just shouted back, ‘NO ONE likes a telltale, Casper!’
We stayed up there until Mum shouted at me to come inside and get dressed, but before I slid down the pole Zack said, ‘Will you tell? I mean, seeing as you’re all better and everything?’ He looked scared, really worried, and I shook my head and crossed my heart.
I raced back inside the house. I heard Rebecca before I saw her. Mum looked really tired again, poor Mum; it’s actually hard work looking after something so tiny. I followed her upstairs to the nursery. I stood at the door and watched her carefully lift Rebecca out of my old cot and when she turned to me she took my hand in hers. We walked slowly down the hall together until we reached the big windows that look out on to the garden. She sat down in the middle window and I sat next to her. Then she showed me how to hold my little sister. I held my arms out and delicately cradled Rebecca so that her head was resting on my arm and she was safe and snug.
Have you ever held a baby? Have you held one close to your heart? It made me feel like a giant. It made me feel like I was holding on to something that could break. At first I was scared and I looked up at Mum worriedly.
‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered. ‘You’ll be fine.’
When Rebecca opened her eyes, she stared right at me again and I smiled. Then she opened her mouth and, I don’t know why, but I thought she might just say hello, so I did.
‘Hello,’ I said softly. ‘Hello, Rebecca. I’m Alice. I’m your big sister.’
I looked down at the tiny warm bundle. I felt her wriggle and squirm about, and I kind of liked it. It was a bit like a doll that I used to take everywhere except this was better; this little doll actually moved around and looked at me. This Rebecca really belonged to me.
Mum handed me a tiny bottle of milk and, without thinking or knowing, without even being told how, I lifted it to her dainty pink mouth and I fed her. She sucked and sucked, and it made me giggle a bit and feel special and grown-up.
‘Alice,’ Mum said softly. ‘When you became our daughter, when I held you for the first time, I was scared. I was scared, but I was the happiest I had ever been in my whole life. It makes me very happy to see you hold your sister. I love you both very much.’
I looked up from Rebecca to Mum’s pale face and saw the tears roll down her cheeks and land on her lilac shawl like little silver droplets of rain.
‘She would have loved you so much,’ she said and she leaned over to me and kissed my forehead. ‘She would have loved you if she could have.’
For some reason it made me think of Otter. It made me think of Zack’s gorgeous brown dog. I remembered the dream I had had and I understood. I thought about the photograph of my other mother and then I said, ‘Where is she now?’
Mum didn’t say anything for a while, but I could see her concentrating hard as though she was trying to put the words together, but kept getting mixed up. ‘We don’t know a lot about her. We know she was very young when she had you, and that she didn’t have a family to help her, and that she was from London.’
As I listened to her, it was as though it didn’t matter. As she told me a little tiny bit about the mother who had given me away, I found that I didn’t care in the way I thought I would. My other mother gave me away for a reason: so I could find my real mother who was sitting right in front of me.
I looked up at Mum’s tear-stained face and then down at my beautiful, most perfect little sister. ‘Mum, you are, like, totally crying on Rebecca now, look,’ I said, wiping one of Mum’s tears from Rebecca’s cheek, and Mum smiled at me again. I sniffed the air and wrinkled my nose. ‘Was that you, Mum, or Rebecca?’ And we both laughed.
‘I’m so proud of you, Alice,’ Mum said, kissing the tip of my nose, and then she pulled me close towards her. I turned round and sat with my back against her, so that she had her arms round me and I had mine round my beautiful baby sister. We sat like that for ages and when Rebecca finished her milk she closed her eyes again and fell asleep holding on to my little finger.
I didn’t say anything for a while, but then the rain began. It started with tiny droplets that rattled on the windowpane and very soon the sky seemed to have turned almost black and there was a waterfall of water. Mum reached up with one hand and pulled the curtain round us so that we were hidden on the window seat, so that it was just the three of us.
‘Mum, how come you and Dad said the footpath to the cove was covered in rocks and things? How come we never went down there because I think it’s amazing?’
She didn’t say anything for ages and, as I looked down at Rebecca, she told me a story that I had never heard before. I listened with the widest eyes. I heard every letter of every word, and in the end I knew the real reason why the beach had been closed off and it all made perfect sense. And I knew that Zack and I must keep our secret for ever and ever.
The next day Rebecca stayed at home with my aunt and uncle, but Dad said, ‘There’s only one thing to do on a hot day like this,’ and Mum, Casper, Florence and me followed him through the rose garden where the red rose bush had now been cut back to reveal the overgrown door which I had found.
‘Wow!’ Florence said when she saw the door. ‘That is, like, so cool,’ and, as we walked down the footpath, I told her all about the story I had heard from Mum. When we got to the waterfall, she turned to me and, tying her long hair in a sort of messy bun, she said, ‘It’s all beginning to make sense now, isn’t it?’ I nodded. I wanted to tell Zack all about it too, but Mum had said I shouldn’t talk about it too much in case it made Dad feel sad.
When we got to the beach, Zack was there with his bodyboard and for the first tim
e ever I realised that Casper wasn’t being annoying.
‘Is it true?’ Florence asked as we looked for shells together. ‘Is it true you named your sister?’
I looked over at Zack and smiled. ‘Yes, it’s true.’ And just then I spotted the perfect pink shell. It made me think of Rebecca’s little pink mouth and I picked it off the sand. ‘For Rebecca,’ I said, holding up the shell for Florence to see.
‘It’s perfect,’ she said, looping her arm into mine and the two of us lay in the sun until we got so hot that there was only one thing to do: run as fast as we could into the sea and dive right under.
That night it was like I was the mum or something because I got to give Rebecca a bath. Well, Mum was in the bathroom too, but I got to fill the little bath up, make sure the water wasn’t too hot and I used the little sponge to wash her softest-ever skin. Mum wrapped Rebecca in a big white fluffy towel and we carried her back to the nursery. As Mum dried her off, I placed the pink shell on the chest by her music box.
‘For luck,’ I said.
Mum reached out and stroked my face. ‘She doesn’t need luck. She has you.’
Later, as I climbed into bed, I picked up the photograph of my other mother and took a closer look. The thing that was so familiar wasn’t the street she stood on or the shop she was standing in front of; it was her eyes. I’d seen them before. I’d seen them every time I looked in the mirror. We did look alike. We had the exact same eyes and smile.
I opened the drawer and placed the photograph inside. I knew I’d look at it again, but there wasn’t really enough room on my bedside table for two photographs, all my books and shells from the beach. So, gently, I put the photo away and softly closed the drawer.
That night, as I was falling asleep, I heard the owls in the woods, the waves as they crashed on to the beach and I thought of Rebecca again. Would she grow up to be as tall as Dad? Would she have hair like Mum? Or would she love swimming in the sea just like me? And in the morning I couldn’t wait to see her.
34
Zack
Yesterday Alice saw the world’s greatest tree house.
I thought I was going to have to lock her annoying cousin Casper in the shed at the back of the vegetable garden. At first I really thought I might have to do something drastic, and when he started whining about nothing much I waited till no one was looking and gave him a really good dead arm instead. He turned round and glared at me, and for a millisecond I was kind of worried that he would scream the place down. But after that he kind of stopped being a complete brat and followed me around all day which was a little less annoying.
Alice’s other cousin Florence is sort of OK; she’s really pretty and everything, but she’s not as cool as Alice and she’s a bit like: ‘I live in a castle’, ‘I have three ponies’, ‘I’m so great’. But when we all went down to Culver again she spent the whole time with Alice and every time I looked over Alice was laughing or doing one of her silly animal walks.
The next day Mum drove me up the hill to visit George, and when we got there the two of them hugged for ages, and when I looked at George he wiped a tear away from his cheek.
‘He’s going to lend us one of his collection for the day,’ Mum said and I immediately thought about the Ferrari again. But it so wasn’t a Ferrari. It was a sort of camper van thing and as I waited for Mum to finish her cup of tea I wandered into the barn and over to the plane once more, but I didn’t touch it.
‘Fancy going up in her one day?’
I turned round quickly and shook my head at George.
‘Well, if you ever change your mind,’ he said and walked away. Part of me wanted to cry out after him, but part of me knew that I couldn’t.
It took over an hour to drive the little van down the coast road and when I started to feel a bit carsick I kind of wished I hadn’t eaten five pancakes for breakfast. Mum parked the little van near the sand dunes and, as I looked down the vast windy beach, I couldn’t get in my wetsuit quick enough. The waves were almost perfect. Even Mum put her wetsuit on and the two of us bodyboarded until my arms ached and my eyes stung, but I didn’t care.
That night the two of us lit a campfire and cooked a sort of supper and a pudding of toasted marshmallows that tasted so delicious I had to fight to have the last one. We lay back on our little beds with tired bodies and stuffed-to-bursting tummies, and I asked her the question I’d been wanting to ask since the time I was in the attic with David.
‘Mum, what were you going to tell me that night? What happened on the beach when you were younger?’
It was ages before Mum answered. She turned on her back so that I could just see the outline of her face and, for the first time ever, she found a way to speak softly, slowly in a voice that was like she was almost whispering.
‘It was always just the five of us. Five of us together. No one else was allowed to join in and no one tried to leave. Just the five of us. Tom, David, Aggy, me and Kirran. Kirran Moore. The kindest, sweetest boy. The gentlest, most patient boy. The best of all of us.
‘Tom was the bravest one, that’s for sure. Nothing ever seemed to frighten him. A spider the size of a saucer, a jellyfish the size of a football, a rat the size of a small cat. Before it happened, we all practically lived up at Culver. The winters were spent hiding out in the attic and every dry summer’s day we went down to the cove. We were always careful and never broken the golden rule: don’t try and swim round the headland.
‘Every day of the summer holidays I would meet Kirran at the little stone bridge near our cottage and the two of us would race up to the manor with his little dog Spice. He loved that dog. Not that Spice liked anyone but Kirran though. We’d run up to Culver, through the gates and down to the secret door. Aggy always needed help jumping over the ledge and Kirran was a bit scared too, but Tom wasn’t scared of anything and would leap over it with his eyes shut, and everything that Tom did David did too.
‘That day we got to the beach later than normal. The tide was already in and then an argument began. Tom and Kirran were playing tennis or something and then started bickering about a point. At first it was just a jokey fight, but then it got louder and more serious until I looked up and saw Tom throw the tennis ball into the water. He threw it really hard and it went far out to sea. Wherever a tennis ball went, Spice was sure to follow. I remember seeing Spice practically fly off the rocks after the yellow ball and splash loudly into the water. Kirran shouted after him to come back, but the poor dog was determined to get his ball back.
‘David started yelling at Tom for being stupid, saying that Spice wouldn’t be able to reach the ball; he was so cross with him. We all watched Spice swim right out into the cove. Kirran was so worried about him . . .’ Mum paused and wiped a tear from her face. ‘Then Kirran ran into the water too and desperately started to swim towards Spice. None of us knew what to do. Kirran wasn’t a strong swimmer, but he wouldn’t just leave Spice out there.
‘I was screaming at the boys to do something, and Aggy was doing the same. Tom was the only one of us who stood a chance of reaching Kirran and we all knew that, so he ran into the water after him. He swam out towards the headland, but it was too late . . . Spice and Kirran were pulled under, we saw their heads bob below the water from the beach, but even then Tom didn’t give up; he just kept going. And then . . . then the current got him too. He was pulled under. Gone. Spice, Kirran and Tom, all just gone. There one moment, not the next. It was terrible. We went to the beach that day as five friends and we came back as three.
‘After that, the family closed the beach off. Culver Manor got gloomier and gloomier. David’s mum and dad became sadder and sadder until one day they shut the house up and never came back. I snuck in through the gates one day. I think it was the day before I left for university. I couldn’t believe how overgrown it was. How sad it looked. That’s when I took the photograph I showed you.’
Mum paused, but kept staring at the sky.
I looked at her and even in the darkness I c
ould see the tears glistening in her eyes. I lay there silently and thought of Alice. Did she know this story too? Is that why she was so afraid of being discovered?
So that night, the day after I turned thirteen, Mum and I fell asleep in the camper van to the sound of crickets and crashing waves, and a million thoughts swam around my head.
When we got home, I ran upstairs to put my stuff away and I spotted my new school uniform hanging up. I’d forgotten all about starting school on Monday and suddenly all the good feelings I had went away. I just felt totally sick instead. I sat down on the bed and wanted to stop the day from going any further. If my dad was still alive, I wouldn’t have to be doing all this.
Mum said I had to be brave. She always says I’m really like him, but most of the time I think I can’t be anything like him because I get really frightened of stuff all the time. And now I’ll never get to fly across the Channel just like he did because he isn’t here to show me, is he? And I’ve decided that being super brave, being really brave like my dad was or like the man I was named after, is not something that you can learn. I think it’s something that you either are or aren’t and, as I was too scared to go up in an aeroplane again, I must be the least brave boy on the whole planet.
I looked down at the name tag that Mum had sewn into my new school jumper and felt myself get upset. I didn’t deserve to be named after someone so amazing after all.
I went downstairs and when Mum saw my miserable face she said we should go for a walk, but instead of walking along the beach towards the headland we turned right along the bay. There was a little footpath that went all the way alongside it and, as we crossed a little stone bridge, I saw David and Alice just ahead.
‘Hey, Zack!’ she shouted and the two of us ran ahead along the marshes, but I didn’t really feel like saying much so I let Alice chatter on about her sister. Rebecca this, Rebecca that, on and on she went, and when she offered me one of her Haribos I still felt sort of too sick.
