by Megan Tayte
‘What about Jude?’ said Luke. ‘He can be there too. He’ll want to, surely, once he knows… Hang on. She is telling him?’
I nodded. ‘She doesn’t want to, but she’s desperate. Gabe’s been on at her for ages to tell us all. Especially my mother. He had the idea that Mum, being human, could share in bringing Jack up – then he wouldn’t be with strangers, but family. Sienna hated the idea; she’s got some massive issues with our mum. But since Mum got hurt, and since Sienna’s seen me again, and Jude… I don’t know, something’s shifted. It’s ninety per cent Gabe persuading and ten per cent Sienna reaching out for help, I think. But she’s freaking out about Jude’s reaction.’
‘With good reason,’ said Luke. ‘If I were him, I’d be livid.’
‘I don’t think it’s his feelings she’s worried about handling. She knows she’s betrayed him, and that it’ll make him hate her all the more. It’s what he might do that terrifies her.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘That’s why Sienna never told Jude about Jack before she died. That’s why she went with Daniel, to Gabe’s side. She loved Jude, but she didn’t trust him to protect her and Jack.’
‘But that’s ridiculous! What guy wouldn’t protect the girl he loves and his child?’
‘A principled guy. A guy brought up to believe in a load of rules that say a woman’s role is to carry and nurse babies, and then give them up to others to raise. A guy from an island where a human baby’s an oddity, a problem, and is cut off from everyone else.’
‘I’m lost,’ said Luke. ‘Your sister thought she wouldn’t be able to raise her baby in Cerulea. I get that. But what’s this about cutting him off? I thought you told me all the children on the island are raised together?’
‘They are. Usually. But then there was Michael. Remember? He was born human, not Cerulean. So he was treated as different. Separated off.’ I thought about Michael’s visit to the hospital the day before; his odd look, his odd manner. ‘And look how he turned out,’ I added – unkind of me, but it had to be said.
‘So,’ said Luke, ‘what it comes down to is that Sienna didn’t trust Jude to choose her and their child over the Cerulean way.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Was she right, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. Back then, Jude was so loyal to Evangeline.’
‘And now? He was seriously het up in the pub yesterday.’
‘I know. I don’t know what’ll happen next. Sienna doesn’t want to tell Jude. I know that. But she has no choice – with me and Gabe and her in touch, I was always going to find out sooner or later. And if I know, she can’t ask me to keep that a secret from Jude.’
‘What a mess,’ said Luke. ‘I don’t envy the guy, hearing that from her.’
‘Me neither.’
I felt for them both, my sister and my friend. I could see both sides. There was no right or wrong.
‘When?’ asked Luke.
‘Today, I think.’
‘Better brace for the fallout then.’
‘Maybe. I don’t know. Jude’s pretty private with his feelings.’
We were quiet for a while, lost in our thoughts, until a squabble of seagulls flew shrieking overhead.
‘Random question,’ said Luke, ‘but why is Jack a boy? I mean, this business of Ceruleans mating with humans is about creating the female Ceruleans required to keep the line going, isn’t it? So your dad, Cerulean, and your mum, human, had two girls. Same mix as Jack’s parents, and same outcome: human child who’ll become Cerulean.’
‘Evangeline told me the human–Cerulean pairing usually creates female offspring. But not always. I guess Michael is another example.’
‘So if we have kids, they’ll likely be girls, but could be boys?’
‘I guess.’ I swallowed, plunged straight back into our earlier conversation. What did his question mean – that he was considering kids as an option, even Cerulean ones? Was he considering us being together together again?
Luke’s next comment took us onto safer ground:
‘Seems like for every rule Evangeline tells you, there’s an instant exception.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I spotted that too.’
‘So are you going to talk to her? About everything you’ve learned?’
‘Sometime, maybe. Not right now. I know what I need to know, about where I’ve come from and who my father and sister are. And my nephew! But confronting Evangeline over how she runs her little world – what’s the point? How the Ceruleans and the Vindicos operate isn’t really my business. I don’t belong to either side, and that’s not going to change.’
Luke crooked an eyebrow. ‘Sure you’re not ready to run off and be some vengeful Enforcer?’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stand by and do nothing about Mum. I’m going to Hollythwaite this week.’
‘I thought Sienna already searched it. More than once.’
‘She did. But she didn’t know Mum like I did. She hadn’t seen her in more than a year.’
‘You think you’ll see something Sienna didn’t?’
‘I don’t know. But I can try.’
‘Let me come with you,’ said Luke. ‘I have to work this week – you know I’ve been a flaky boss in the cafe recently. But Saturday, I can take the day off. We can go together.’
I thought about it. Truthfully, I was impatient to go sooner. But clearly Luke wanted the chance to be there for me.
‘Don’t you think,’ he said, ‘you could do with a few quiet days here, home, after all the drama of the past week or so? Hollythwaite will still be there at the weekend, and two pairs of eyes are better than one. Look after yourself, Scarlett. Please. For me.’
It wasn’t about me, though, it was about Mum – lying there in that hospital bed. I couldn’t shake the feeling I should be doing something to help her. But I knew, logically, that even if the search at her home threw up some clue, it wouldn’t wake her up. It wouldn’t bring back my mother.
The rest of the week here, visiting Mum once a day but otherwise in the old routine. Sleeping. Pottering around the cottage. Walking Chester. Seeing Luke each evening. Perhaps even a little healing locally. It sounded… appealing.
‘I’ll stay,’ I told him. ‘On one condition.’
‘What?’
‘That this calm week at home involves some less-than-calm surfing.’
Our eyes slid to the waves, heaving and rollicking and surging so close I could taste the salt of the spray. How long had it been? Ten days? Too long.
‘Hell yes,’ said Luke. And pumping a fist into the air, he gave the war cry of, depending on your perspective, a retro surfer or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: ‘Cowabunga!’
Such was my life that my normal, calm week saw me, come Wednesday, walking along the seafront with a jubilant mutt, an exhibitionist fashionista, a giddy mum-Goth and a merry octogenarian, discussing the finer points of ‘The Bare Necessities’.
‘Is it the bare necessities as in nudey, or the bear necessities as in roary?’
‘Bare necessities as in basic.’
‘Ah.’
‘Don’t think I’ve ever seen a fancy ant.’
‘Me either.’
‘Or tried a pawpaw.’
‘Me either.’
‘Such a wonderful idea to forget about your stripes.’
‘Er…’
‘Trust me, girls, it’s true. I never worry about being stripy. Life’s too short.’
‘Amen to that.’
To the tourists milling about the Plymouth Hoe, we must have looked a motley lot:
Chester was on fine form, and I was dripping sweat with the effort of restraining him from pouncing on drifting litter and other dogs.
Cara was undeterred by the cool sea breeze and bounding on brown legs exposed to the absolute limit in a dress that was surely a top.
Estelle was decked out from head to foot in black, including the baby carrier she wore at the fro
nt from which dangled a wide-eyed baby in a lamb onesie.
As for Grannie Cavendish: from the waist down she looked like a typical old lady, tucked up snugly in her wheelchair under a tartan blanket, but on top she’d dressed for the occasion in a bright yellow raincoat and a pink cupcake hat which I suspected might be a shower cap.
Needless to say, the afternoon outing had been Cara’s idea. She’d come back to Twycombe yesterday, got wind (from Luke) of my plan for a quiet week and at once suggested some girly time. I’d agreed, picturing a veg session at home with just Cara and a DVD or three. But Cara had other ideas.
Sitting at home was off the agenda. We needed ‘an injection of life’, apparently – which was to be found on the Plymouth Hoe, the long stretch of parkland along the seafront in the city.
Then there was the company. Grannie Cavendish had been lonely, Cara thought, since she’d been forced to move care homes after her last one burned down. She should come out with us. Estelle was struggling on the island, said Cara, and arguing with Adam. She should come out with us. As for Chester – well, we couldn’t leave him out, could we? He should...
‘… not have come out with us,’ said Cara now, pointing to Chester who was getting way too friendly with a park bench. ‘Bad dog,’ she scolded as I hauled him back by his lead. ‘We should have stuck to girls only.’
‘Hey!’ protested Estelle, waving one of her son’s little fists in protest.
‘Well, not including baba, of course,’ Cara said in a singsong voice, chucking the baby under the chin. ‘He’s an honorary girl, aren’t you, gorgeous?’
‘Cara,’ said Estelle, ‘he gets enough girlifying on the island, what with the baby April business. Let’s not girl him up any further, eh?’
‘Says the mum who dressed him in a lamb outfit.’
‘It’s cute!’
‘It is.’
‘Alex likes it.’
‘You know, I’m glad you’ve chosen your own name for him. It suits him.’
‘It does.’
‘Do you use it on the island?’
‘Not openly yet. I want to, but Adam’s –’
‘Well, I think he looks just like his father,’ Grannie broke in cheerily. ‘Little lamb, he was.’
Estelle and I looked at each other, baffled.
‘You’ve met my Adam?’ said Estelle.
‘Who?’
‘Alex’s dad.’
‘The baby’s dad? You mean Gabriel, dear. He was here just the other night, you know. We had a chat in the garden with me in my nightie! There was this fire, you see, and it all got lovely and blue…’
‘Grannie,’ said Cara gently, ‘Gabriel is Scarlett’s dad. He doesn’t have a baby son. Maybe you met his girl baby, though, when he lived in Twycombe. Her name’s Sienna.’
‘Oh,’ said the old lady. ‘Oh, yes, so it was. Little Sienna; he told me all about it. I’m sorry. I remember now.’
It pained me to see the distress clouding Grannie’s eyes: she was always better off blissfully oblivious than aware her memory wasn’t what it should have been.
Cara must have felt the same, because she declared, ‘Come on – I have an idea!’ Then, without waiting for a response, she grabbed the handles of Grannie’s wheelchair and whizzed her off down the path. Estelle and I watched them go for a moment, smiling as Cara’s dulcet tones floated back on the breeze cheerily Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo-ing.
‘I always worry a little,’ I confided in Estelle as we followed along, ‘when Cara says, “I have an idea.”’
Estelle laughed. ‘She’s great, isn’t she? So full of confidence.’
‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘But sometimes I think she’s just a brilliant actress. She’s tried to hide it, but she’s been really upset these past couple of weeks. Nearly losing her grandmother, what happened to my mum...’
‘It’s bound to stir her up,’ said Estelle. ‘Losing people, it creates a terror inside, doesn’t it? You’d do anything not to go there again, feel that pain, let someone you love go.’
I was silent, thinking of Estelle’s past: the father she never knew, the mother she claimed to feel nothing for who’d died of a drug overdose. And now, her own children – the children who were meant to grow up on the island, cosseted from the world; the children she was meant to allow others to raise. Yet she’d appeared at my cottage today with little April – no, Alex – in tow. I eyed him now, the baby I’d helped to deliver what seemed like eons ago. He was undeniably cute. I reached over and tickled his belly and his little legs kicked wildly with glee.
‘Evangeline’s dying,’ said Estelle abruptly.
My tickling finger dropped at once. ‘I know,’ I said, looking from son to mother. ‘She told me a few weeks ago that she wouldn’t see the next winter.’
Estelle reached out and touched my arm. ‘No, I mean dying dying, Scarlett. She took to her bed a week or so ago, and she hasn’t got up since. She’s weak, and white, and not herself at all. She barely eats, barely sleeps, barely talks.’
My stomach twisted painfully at the mental image. This was my great-grandmother we were talking about, a lady who’d been bewilderingly deceitful to me, but also loving.
‘Nathaniel’s been like a guard dog at her door – no one goes in. But last night I was summoned to see her; she’d asked for me. She was upset. Kept trying to explain about the Mother who came before her, the legacy she’d taken on, all the rules, the need to protect Ceruleans, us as God’s instruments.’
‘Sounds like the same speech I got when I first met her.’
‘Yes, same one I got too. But it was different this time, the way she said it.’
‘Different how?’
‘Like she was begging me to understand her, the island. Like she wanted me to tell her that all she’d done was right.’
‘And did you?’
Estelle frowned. ‘I won’t lie. I’ve come to see, recently, that I don’t agree with all the rules of Cerulea that she’s upheld – or the lies I’ve learned, from you and Jude, that she’s told. But I wouldn’t want to hurt a dying woman, especially one who’s good. And she is good, Scarlett. Muddled, frightened, controlling, living in the Dark Ages maybe, but she means well.’
‘I know.’
‘So I just told her she was a good Mother.’
‘And?’
‘She burst into tears, and Nathaniel hustled me out of the room.’
I sighed. ‘Will she see me, do you think?’
‘Not yet. I asked Nathaniel: he said only when she’s ready.’
‘But if she’s dying…’
‘You can feel it, how close she is to death, when you’re with her. She’s not there yet. But she’s way closer than she was before.’
‘Before what?’
‘It was the night we heard about your mum. After Luke called, Jude came into the living room and told us. Evangeline was standing at the mantelpiece. She collapsed. Nathaniel carried her to bed. She never came back downstairs. It must have been the shock; I mean, your mother is her granddaughter.’
‘Yes,’ I said slowly. Funny, I’d never got the impression Evangeline cared about Mum before. My mother was ‘only human’, after all.
‘Come on, slowcoaches!’ yelled a distant voice.
I focused on the people ahead and picked out Cara a fair distance away, backing Grannie’s wheelchair through a gate to a children’s play area. A huge bouncy castle took up the central position on the grass area, a miniature train was clacking around one side, and behind it, in the distance, I could just make out a playground.
I groaned just as, beside me, Estelle shrieked.
‘Alex, look! Your first play park!’ Picking up on his mum’s excitement, Alex began thrashing his little limbs and burbling. ‘I knew I was right to bring you out today. Silly old Dad, eh, worrying about us?’
The reality of life as a Cerulean baby really hit home then. The babies from the island never interacted with the world at large. No parks. No picnics. No zoos. No sense of co
nnection to the people to whom they were meant to grow up and devote themselves.
I thought about the Vindicos I’d met in London. A mum had told me all about an outing she and her kids had recently been on to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. ‘They has a robot dine-saur!’ her eager daughter had interjected. ‘I seed it and it raaaaaaaaaaaa-ed!’
I opened my mouth to tell Estelle about that little girl, and then I realised: she didn’t know I’d visited ‘the Fallen’. I’d come back from London determined not to get involved in Cerulean–Vindico politics, convinced they mattered little to me because I lived outside of both worlds. But Estelle – she was trapped and unhappy.
The information I knew about the Vindicos, how they reared children, how they recruited new followers, how they were just a small group in a much wider community – it could change everything on the island. Which may benefit bold, hungry-for-change Estelle. But what about the others? What would they make of the wider world they knew nothing of? Were they ready for the knowledge? Would they thank me for delivering it? Or would their world collapse; would I ruin what I thought to most Ceruleans was a happy existence? Would I be saving or destroying?
We’d reached the gate now, and Estelle was about to fling it open when I put a restraining hand on her arm. I said her name. She turned to look at me.
But the words wouldn’t come.
She was my friend. I owed it to her to be honest and help her. But was this my decision to make? The Vindicos had never steamed over to the island and challenged the world there. Evangeline had never… come to think of it, did she even know the truth? I wasn’t sure.
I thought of Jude, the born-and-bred Cerulean who believed so passionately in their peaceful ethos that it prevented him being with the girl he loved. I thought of how upset he’d been after meeting Gabe’s people. He had the right to make this choice. Not me. I would wait and speak to him.
‘Er, Scarlett? We’re blocking the entrance?’ Estelle pointed out.
‘Sorry!’ I said. ‘Lead on.’
