Wishbones

by Virginia MacGregor

  It’s like there’s more air and space between the three of us all of a sudden. We go back over to the wall of the Lido and sit down. Clay sits between Jake and me.

  ‘Cool sweater.’ Clay touches the outline of a black cat on the front of Jake’s jumper.

  ‘Thanks. Mum made it.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Clay asks. ‘That’s awesome.’

  ‘I’ll tell her.’

  Steph knits – I mean, really knits. She started knitting – like she started going to church – when Jake’s dad left. She does these amazing jumpers with animal silhouettes on the front. We all say she should start a business, that everyone’s into retro knitted stuff at the moment.

  ‘Are black cats bad luck or good luck in the UK?’ Clay asks.

  ‘Bad luck—’ I start.

  ‘Neither!’ Jake butts in.

  Clay smiles. ‘You guys should start a double act.’

  ‘Feather’s superstitious,’ Jake says. ‘She flips out about umbrellas inside, walking under ladders, Friday the thirteenth – black cats. I don’t believe in that stuff.’

  Flips out? Jake knows that I like Clay, why’s he making me sound so lame?

  ‘Do you think your mum would knit me one?’ Clay asks, still staring at Jake’s jumper.

  Jake shrugs. ‘Sure.’

  Sure? He’s known Clay what, like ten seconds? It takes Steph ages to make those jumpers. I got one for my birthday last year and that was the most special present I’ve ever had. It’s red and has a picture of Houdini on the front.

  ‘What’s your favourite animal?’ Jake asks.

  ‘Hummingbirds,’ Clay says.

  ‘I’ll let Mum know,’ Jake says.

  Jake and Clay are so locked into their conversation, I might as well not be here. I take back feeling guilty about not telling Jake I was at the Lido with Clay.

  ‘I’d better get home,’ I say, standing up. ‘I have to clear up after the meeting. And make sure Mum isn’t eating rubbish.’

  I wait for Jake to say he’ll come with me but he just sits there.

  ‘Jake? I’m going now—’

  ‘Okay,’ Jake says.

  Okay?

  ‘Want me to show you around Willingdon?’ Jake asks Clay.

  I don’t know if this is payback for me not telling him where I was when he phoned, and for taking Clay to our special place, or whether he’s just being an idiot and doesn’t realise that I need him right now and that this isn’t the time to play tour guide – especially as a tour of Willingdon would take, like, five minutes.

  ‘A tour would be cool,’ Clay says.

  ‘You coming?’ Jake asks me.

  Which makes me feel guilty for thinking he was trying to leave me out.

  ‘I’d better get back to Mum,’ I say as casually as I can, though what I really want is for Jake to come home with me. I don’t think I can face Mum on my own.

  ‘Okay, later then,’ Jake says.

  Clay raises his hand to wave.

  I turn my back on them, run over to the end of the Lido and scramble up the ladder, still hoping that Jake will come after me.

  Only he doesn’t.

  When I look back, I see him shuffle up closer to Clay. He points up at the stars and they start talking. They were meant to be going on a tour of Willingdon but it looks like they’re not going anywhere.

  As I walk away from the Lido, I hear them laughing like they’ve known each other for years and part of me wishes I could go back and join them, but I know that Mum needs me. And what I said to Jake was true: I’m not giving up on her. Not even close.

  14

  For the next week, I go to train at the Newton pool every day, sometimes twice a day, and when Steph and Jake can’t come with me I take the bus and go on my own. I train so hard that my shoulders burn and my legs ache, but it feels good to be getting back to my training schedule and to feel my body getting stronger. And sometimes, when I’m worming through the water, my mind goes still for a bit and I forget about Mum and my chest opens and I breathe again.

  On Saturday afternoon, when Steph and Jake drop me back home after an extra-long training session at the pool, I find Houdini straining so hard at his lead I worry he’s going to choke. So far, Houdini has broken two out of his four legs, had a shard of glass from a Heineken beer bottle stuck in his hoof, got his head stuck in the Willingdon Park gates and been electrocuted by the fence Mr Warner, the farmer, put up to keep his cows from running across the motorway. So we don’t have any choice but to tie him up. Though Houdini’s so cross about being pinned to one place, one of these days, I reckon he’s going to find a way to escape again.

  ‘Come on then, just a few minutes of freedom,’ I say, unclipping the lead. ‘Just don’t tell Dad.’

  Houdini head-butts my hand and then scampers around the driveway like a mad thing, leaping and bleating and pirouetting. I reckon Mum should sign him up for the next round of Strictly.

  For a while, I sit on the wall, keeping an eye on him. I’m grateful to have an excuse not to go into the house yet. Things have been awkward between Mum and me since I stormed out the other night. She’s been expecting me to say sorry – but I’m not sorry. And how am I meant to bring her tea and wash her and help her get into her PJs and settle her into bed, all when we’re still mad at each other?

  Houdini munches the grass and goes round and round in circles like he’s chasing his tail, his bell tinkling. Sometimes, I think he must have been a dog in his past life.

  For a second, I close my eyes and let the afternoon sun warm my face and pretend that I’ve got a normal life with normal parents and a best friend who’s not more interested in hanging out with a guy he’s only just met than he is in me. Jake’s been just as weird with me as Mum has. The two people I love most in the world feel like strangers right now.

  When I open my eyes, Houdini is lying in a warm patch of grass, his eyes closed too.

  I pull out my ‘Mum Action Plan’ list and scan the items.

  Joining a support group. Well, look how that worked out. I’ll have to go and see Mitch and apologise for all the trouble he went to and how Mum let everyone down.

  I look down at the item I added last night: Staging an intervention. I saw them doing that in a film once. I know it would have to be a last resort, I mean, picture Mum having to sit in the middle of all her friends and family as they tell her how much she’s hurting them by not even trying to get healthy. If it didn’t work, she wouldn’t talk to me ever again. But with what happened today and with Dad not helping, it’s looking like one of the only options I have left. And maybe Mum not talking to me ever again might be an okay price for her staying alive.

  Just as I’m relaxing a bit at the thought of having a new strategy to work on, I hear a burst of music from Mum’s room. Jive music. I spin round and look up at the window of the lounge.

  It’s the theme tune from Strictly.

  She’s got the TV back.

  I dig my nails into my palms.

  Mum doesn’t leave the house. And even if she did, she couldn’t have wheeled herself out of the house and down the ramp and all the way to the garage by herself. And she wouldn’t have been able to open the garage door. And she definitely couldn’t have hauled the fifty-inch TV back to her room.

  So it had to be Dad.

  I jump off the wall, run to the side of the house and yank open the rusty garage door.

  When Mum was still working for Dad, she converted the garage into an office. She organised his tools onto special hooks and bought a filing cabinet for his paperwork and put a desk and chair in the corner. Now the tools hang at weird angles because they’re on the wrong hooks. One of the filing cabinet drawers is stuck open, yellowy bits of paper spill out of its metal mouth; mouldy mugs of coffee stand on Dad’s desk – there’s mould on everything, the walls and the cardboard boxes and the seat pad of Dad’s office chair. Cobwebs hang from the ceiling and the air smells damp. Dad’s put a bucket in the corner of the garage to catch th
e leak in the ceiling. Even though it hasn’t rained in days, the ceiling’s still drip, drip, dripping this reddy brown liquid onto the garage floor. Dad’s so busy doing jobs for people he never has time to fix things at home.

  At the far end of the garage, there’s a pile of boxes stacked from floor to ceiling. They’re supplies. Enough food to feed every resident of Willingdon and Newton combined for at least six months. Tinned fruit and tinned potatoes and tinned condensed milk and tinned hot pot and tinned spaghetti hoops and packets of rice and packets of pasta and cartons of long-life milk and a whole load of other stuff that won’t go off for another zillion years. Mum says it makes her feel safe, to know that we’ll never run out of things to eat.

  Steph and I had propped the TV against those boxes. Of course, it’s gone.

  Just as I’m getting myself ready to go into the house and explode at Dad, I notice that the lid’s come off one of the boxes next to his desk. The bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling reflects the glossy paper inside.

  I go over and read the label on the side, which is in Mum’s handwriting:

  Insurance Papers

  But they’re not insurance papers. They’re photographs. Piles and piles of photographs.

  I feel so dizzy, I have to close my eyes. Red dots swim around in a sea of black.

  Then I take a breath, open my eyes and look back down at the photos.

  Shuffling through a few of the pictures from the top of the pile, I notice that they’re from when I was really little. So Mum and Dad did have a camera. And there was a time when Mum did like pictures. I look at myself in a pink tutu at a ballet showcase, another one from when I was a baby, lying in a pram, my fists held up beside my head in a pea-on-fork sleep. Then I see one photograph that gives me the same feeling I had when I found Mum lying on the floor on New Year’s Eve: like the bottom’s just fallen out of my life.

  Mum’s sitting on the edge of the Lido, her legs dangling into the water.

  ‘Feather?’

  I look up. Dad stands at the door that leads from the kitchen into the back of the garage.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asks, walking over.

  I stuff the photograph into the back pocket of my jeans.

  ‘Nothing.’

  He puts the lid back on the box and carries it over to a filing cabinet.

  ‘Please don’t play around with my work papers,’ he says. ‘I’m finding it hard enough to keep everything in order.’

  I want to blurt out that I know he’s lying, that they’re not work papers, that they’re a bunch of photos from when I was little – from before I was little – hundreds of them, and that if the one I found is anything to go by, he and Mum have some serious questions to answer.

  I look back over to the box where Steph and I had put the TV.

  ‘Why did you bring the TV back in, Dad?’

  He shoves the box under a dustsheet with a pile of other boxes.

  ‘Your mum asked for it,’ he says.

  ‘Of course she asked for it, Dad. What did you expect?’

  ‘She’s allowed to have some entertainment, Feather.’

  ‘But it’s not helping, Dad, is it?’ I hear my voice thicken. ‘Like you cooking her fatty, sugary things isn’t helping. Like nothing you’ve been doing for Mum for the last five years has been helping.’

  Dad stares at me for a moment, as though he doesn’t recognise me. And maybe he’s right. I feel like something’s changed in me too; I feel like, no matter how much I want to, I can’t go back to the person I was before New Year’s Eve.

  Dad takes some tools off the hooks and puts them in his box.

  ‘I’ve got a late call-out,’ he says. ‘Mum’s been waiting for you.’

  ‘Dad – you can’t keep ignoring this.’

  He looks at me for a second and then blinks and says, ‘This isn’t something you can fix, Feather.’

  Why does everyone keep saying that?

  ‘Yes, it is. If you help me, we get Mum better.’

  He checks his phone. ‘I’ll be back late,’ he mumbles and walks back through the kitchen door.

  I grab a box of nails from his desk and hurl it at the wall. The plastic container splits open and a shower of metal falls to the floor.

  Why doesn’t anyone understand how important this is?

  Mum needs you. Dad’s always saying that.

  ‘Don’t you get it, Dad?’ I shout at the door he’s just walked through. ‘If we don’t help Mum get better, she won’t need us ever again!’

  I go back out through the garage door to the front garden.

  Houdini’s bell lies in the patch of grass where he was sunning himself just a few minutes ago, next to his snapped collar.

  Please, no.

  I scan The Green but can’t see him anywhere.

  Dad’s van is still on the drive, so he must be in the house. He won’t have noticed that Houdini is missing. Not yet.

  I run up the ramp, open the front door and yell, ‘I’m taking Houdini for a walk! I’ll be back in half an hour!’

  And then I slam the front door and run down to the road.

  Crap. Crap. Crap.

  15

  ‘Houdini!’ I yell as I run across The Green.

  Why the hell didn’t I keep him tied up?

  ‘Houdini!’

  Every time Houdini escapes, he gets more adventurous. Last time, Dad found him by the bus stop, like he was waiting to hop onto the 474 to Newton. A little further from there, the motorway starts. And I’m not talking about a small village motorway a couple of lanes wide with cowpats and tractors and a takeaway van in the lay-by. I’m talking a proper, full sized, lorries rattling past in the slow lane and idiots speeding in the fast lane, get yourself killed if you step out into it, motorway.

  Anyway, my gut’s saying that Houdini is heading straight to that motorway.

  I run past Rev Cootes, who’s collecting empty Coke cans and crisp packets and other rubbish from the front bit of St Mary’s, and I run past the bus stop and then past Mr Warden’s field (checking to see whether Houdini is there because he likes cows) and then out to the roundabout that leads to the M77.

  The air from the whooshing cars nearly knocks me over, as does the smell of petrol wafting off the tarmac. Part of me doesn’t want to look, in case I see a Houdini-shaped splat in the middle of the road, but I force myself to scan up and down the motorway anyway; Houdini’s had so many narrow escapes, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d magically got through to the other side of the road.

  ‘Strange place to take a walk.’

  I spin round to see Jake standing there.

  ‘You’re here,’ I say, smiling.

  ‘Clay said he saw you running like a maniac from the house.’

  ‘Clay said…?’

  ‘Amy wanted to meet him, so I took her over.’

  My chest goes tight. Jake never brings Amy to Willingdon. Although we’ve never spoken about it, it’s like a deal we have – that, in Willingdon, I get to have Jake to myself. He knows that it’s my way of coping with him having a girlfriend I can’t stand.

  ‘You actually left Amy with him?’ I ask. If Jake’s at all interested in impressing Clay, he’s just gone and blown it.

  ‘Amy thinks that just because he’s from New York, he must know loads of A-list celebrities. She begged me to let her come over.’

  I’ve heard Amy and her friends talking about Clay. Jake’s right: everyone’s totally psyched about him being American. For those of us who live in Newton or Willingdon, coming from New York is as exotic as coming from the moon.

  ‘Houdini’s escaped,’ I say.

  He smiles. ‘Right, let’s get looking then.’

  And right there, I love him again. In the end, he always shows up when I need him.

  ‘And I can’t stop worrying about Mum,’ I say.

  Jake was there when the nurses spoke about Mum not having long left to live. He must get how serious it is.

  ‘Your mum’s goin
g to be okay, Feather,’ he says.

  A Tesco lorry roars past. We both step back. And just like that, I realise Jake doesn’t get it. He’s dismissing how serious things are, just like Dad is.

  ‘You been to the Lido?’ Jake asks.

  I shake my head. But he’s right, that’s where we should look next. Houdini likes it there. And there are loads of leaves and bushes and lots of grass in the park.

  ‘Well, let’s go then.’ He takes my hand.

  On the way to Willingdon Park, we scan people’s front gardens. Houdini could munch his way through all the gardens in Willingdon and still have room for pudding.

  ‘It’ll be amazing to see it open again,’ Jake says, looking across the empty Lido.

  ‘Yep.’

  Steph, who works as a cleaner for the Newton council, said they closed it because they couldn’t afford to keep it open, but from what I can gather, the Lido’s one of the only things that’s ever made the village money.

  ‘What’s this?’ I ask, walking up to a tree with a laminated sign.

  We go up and read it:

  NO! TO THE LIDO! There’s a hand-drawn picture of a pool with a big red cross through it.

  ‘Mum says there have been some letters of complaint at the council,’ Jake says. ‘It’s really driving people crazy.’

  ‘Why? It’ll be amazing for the village.’

  ‘I guess people don’t like change. And they think it will cause noise and disruption to the village. There was a big piece about the dispute on the front page of the Newton News. Apparently, a local resident wrote a really fiery letter to the editor.’

  Jake gets to read the front page of the Newton News before anyone else when he collects the papers for his round from the corner shop.

  ‘It doesn’t make sense. Having the Lido again will make us special, it will bring people to the village. And having the swimming championships here this summer will be amazing.’

  I stare out at the empty Lido.

  ‘Do you think I’ll be good enough to get through to the finals?’ I ask.

  I imagine the sun beating down on the water, the lanes divided up, me standing on a starting block, ready to dive in.