by Megan Tayte
‘Was there something you wanted to say?’ she asked as she pushed the gate open and stepped into the park.
‘Just that it’s good to see you and Alex out and about.’
It was the right answer: she beamed at me.
Grannie and Cara were waiting for us in front of the little train. Actually, the closer we got, the more it looked like they were waiting for us in the queue for the little train.
‘Come on!’ said Cara. ‘I paid for us all!’
‘Ding ding!’ chirped Grannie.
I eyed the other members of the queue. None of them stood higher than my chest. I eyed the train: trains in fact, four little engines trundling noisily and very slowly around a track laid on the grass, each with a large bell mounted on the front that clanged with the vibrations and a giant stuffed rabbit shoved into the funnel.
‘Er, Cara,’ I said, ‘I think this is a kids’ ride.’
‘Family ride,’ Cara corrected. ‘See, says on the sign.’
‘Family!’ cried Grannie. ‘That’s us!’
And there was no arguing with that – or, apparently, with the gung-ho ride operator chap who was now ushering us along to board a stopping train.
‘Lighten up, Scarlett,’ said Cara, embedding an elbow in my ribs. ‘Live a little.’
So I did. I shuddered my way around that railway track five times to the soundtrack of shrieking laughter (Cara and Estelle), astonished babbling (Alex) and loud ding-dings (Grannie). I watched Estelle bounce her thoroughly bemused son on the bouncy castle. I raced the others with remote-controlled galleons in the ‘Treasure Island’ activity zone and got thoroughly thrashed in a round of adventure golf. I helped Cara manoeuvre Grannie onto the wheelchair roundabout and then turned her carefully until she boomed, ‘Faster, girl, faster – I want to be a whirling dervish, not a cake carousel.’
For a little while, in a seaside park surrounded by jostling, laughing, pirate-patch-wearing people, I let myself forget my family by birth and I lived it up with my adoptive one.
An hour later, we commandeered a row of deckchairs and slumped down.
‘I’m shattered,’ said Estelle beside me. ‘And I don’t think it was the golf. Humans are tiring, huh?’
I looked at Alex, fast asleep in his carrier now. ‘They are,’ I agreed.
‘So are budgerigars,’ said Grannie.
Estelle smiled. ‘We’d better go soon. I don’t want to push it too far with Alex.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll take you back.’
Cara and I had driven separately – Cara to pick up Grannie, and me with Estelle, who’d Travelled to the cottage.
‘After an ice-cream?’ said Cara hopefully, nodding to a van parked outside the park that was surrounded by a gaggle of sticky children.
Estelle’s eyes lit up. ‘Ice-cream! I can barely remember how that tastes! Do they still do those Fab ones with sprinkles on?’
‘I’ll ask,’ said Cara, struggling out of her deckchair.
‘Or a rocket lolly. No, wait. A Cornetto? I’ll have to come. Check out the options.’
Cara offered a hand and hauled Estelle upright.
‘Grannie?’ she asked.
‘Pokey hat for me,’ said Grannie with relish.
‘Ice-cream cone,’ explained Cara, seeing my mystified expression.
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘In that case, make that two pokey hats.’
Off went the eager ice-creamers, leaving Grannie and me to sit and watch Chester – who was joyously tussling with a bit of old rope – and enjoy a moment’s peace in the sunshine. Well, I say peace…
‘He’s a tramp,’ crooned Grannie.
That song again. I’d endured several renditions of it only recently, when Grannie and I had sat, shocked and shivering, after Gabe pulled us out of the care home fire.
‘Well?’ said Grannie. ‘Name that tramp!’
‘Oh, er, cartoon mongrel dog?’
‘Nope. The tramp.’
I looked around the park. No bums sleeping it off in a shady corner.
‘Harold from your home?’ I tried.
She had a good giggle at that. ‘Oh no. Though he does like a snooze on a bench, you know. They find him in the back garden quite often.’
I smiled. It was good to hear her talking in the moment, aware of the now. In fact, come to think of it, she’d been pretty lucid today…
‘It’s the blue tramp I’m talking about.’
… or not. Hang on, blue? I’d only ever heard her use that word to describe me. And my father the night of the fire.
‘Grannie, do you mean Gabriel?’
‘Really, dear, who else would I mean?’
‘Why do you call him a tramp?’
She chortled. ‘His little joke. Because his lady was such a lady, and he was rough around the edges, so he put it. And, of course, because afterwards he was homeless, with no one.’
‘Afterwards?’
She patted my hand. ‘You have to forgive your family, dear, for being so judgemental. Peter, Alice, even Elizabeth – they saw only what Gabriel did, not who he was. Going about bashing people isn’t to be sniffed at, you know. And that day, your mother did find him with blood on his hands.’
I stared at her. She knew? She knew what had torn apart my parents the day Mum left?
‘But I knew he was a good boy,’ Grannie said. ‘It’s in his eyes – always has been. When I found him afterwards…’
I waited for her to finish, but her gaze had wandered to the ice-cream van.
‘Grannie, what happened afterwards?’
I thought she’d gone – lost in her own little world. But she looked straight back at me and said:
‘Well, I found him, didn’t I? At St Mary’s, in the graveyard. Broken, he was, because Elizabeth had left him. Gone off on the train to London. I made him tell me what happened. He was just like my Ryan – you had to push him when he was upset until he popped. I pushed. He popped. Bang! Out it came. The blood on his hands, but for good reason. That Jacob Hargreaves, he’d beaten his wife for years. We all saw her at church. We all saw the bruises. Gabriel put an end to it. Gave that thug what he deserved. He’s a good boy. That’s why I helped him.’
She broke off for a little hum.
‘Grannie,’ I said. ‘What did you do to help Gabriel?’
‘Oh, not enough. Poor boy – orphan that he was. Should’ve been a mother or father there to step in and guide him. ’Course, Peter had tried, but the two of them together were like gunpowder and matches. All I did was listen, without judging, and point him in a direction.
‘He was running away, you see. I worried about him all on his own. No one should be so alone. I sent him to my sister, Maud. She had a guesthouse, and was always one for taking in waifs and strays. Here, I have a picture.’
Blood roared in my ears as I watched Grannie rummage in her handbag, pull out a tin, rusted with age, and pop the clasp open to reveal a handful of old, square photographs.
‘There,’ she said, ‘that’s Maud in front of her house, with me and Mike, and Ryan and Anne, and a wee whippersnapper of a Luke. And there he is, pruning the tree by the cliff edge. See? There’s Gabriel. Lovely house, isn’t it?’
I stared at the picture she’d thrust into my hands. I knew this house, standing all alone on a rocky island on a beach. I’d seen it when I went to Newquay on the surfing trip. I’d even met Luke’s Aunt Maud. My father had once lived with her? Maud had said nothing to me. Though come to think of it, she’d reacted oddly when I introduced myself as Peter Blake’s granddaughter.
‘Of course, Maud’s not there now,’ Grannie was saying. ‘Gave the place up when it got too much for her. Still, kept it close, didn’t she, selling it to Gabriel.’
My head snapped up. ‘Hang on… what? My father owns this house now?’
‘Keep up, dear. I said so, didn’t I? He calls it his summer house.’
Gabe had bought a house belonging to Luke’s family. Gabe and Luke’s family went way back.
<
br /> I should have realised it before: that Grannie knew Gabe, and Gabe knew Grannie. She’d spoken of him often enough, and he was clear in her otherwise muddy memories. Oh – and he’d Travelled to Grannie’s bedroom in the burning home. Because he’d been there before. He’d probably shared a pot of tea and a packet of biscuits with Mrs Cavendish Senior and heard all about her grandson Luke and his girlfriend, the Little Blue Fairy.
I wondered why Gabe hadn’t told me about the link between the Cavendish family and our own. But then, I’d never asked. Ask and you will be answered. Fail to ask and you may never know.
Which made me wonder: what else had I failed to ask?
A sniff from Grannie caught my attention. She was looking at another picture in the stack, one of a baby boy.
‘My Ryan,’ she said. ‘A lost son. Another lost son. But at least Ryan had a chance. Not like that little lamb. Poor Gabriel.’
‘I see,’ I said. But I didn’t, not really. Gabriel was the lamb a.k.a. the tramp? But Gabriel had a chance, didn’t he? Grannie and Maud had seen to that.
I was about to ask her to explain further, but a cry of ‘Pokey hats!’ broke the mood, and we looked up to see Cara and Estelle bearing down on us with teetering ice-cream cones.
Soon we were all in vanilla-chocolate-strawberry heaven and deep in debate over the correct spelling of ‘super-cali-fragilistic-expialidocious’ (Grannie was adamant it was ‘soupy-cally-fragy-listy-expyalydocious’).
‘Look at her,’ said Cara to me, smiling at her grandmother fondly. ‘She never ceases to amaze me.’
‘Me either,’ I answered honestly. And at the thought of the kindness she’d shown my father, I found myself flooded with emotion, so much so that the empty deckchair beside me seemed to shimmer and blur in my vision.
‘Everyone should have a Grannie Cavendish,’ I said with feeling.
‘Everyone,’ echoed the breeze.
I had to hand it to her: crazy as she could be, Cara was spot on that what I’d needed – what we’d all needed – was ‘an injection of life’. Once Estelle and a still-sleeping Alex had vanished from the Mini in a quiet corner of the city car park, I drove back to Twycombe feeling more myself than I had in a good while.
By the time I reached the hedge-lined lanes leading to the cottage, I was humming along to Bastille’s ‘Pompeii’ (Chester provided howly backing vocals) and wondering what Luke was rustling up for dinner. He was coming over at six and had banned me from cooking after a little incident the night before that had somehow resulted in flames bursting out of the grill. I smiled at the memory. Luke was mighty attractive in firefighter mode, masterfully holding me back with one hand and swatting out a fish-finger fire with a tea towel brandished in the other.
But it couldn’t last, my little brush with normality. I knew that the moment I turned the last bend and caught sight of a splash of red on the cottage doorstep. Instantly, my heart stuttered and a memory sprang to mind: my mother’s hair, matted and sticky with…
It’s a coat, I told myself sternly, just a coat, as my sister unfolded herself from her miserable huddle and stood to watch me park the car.
Stupidly, I opened the door wide as I got out, leaving plenty of room for a geed-up Chester to throw himself past me and gallop across the drive to investigate this unexpected visitor. Sienna stood a head taller than me, but she was willowy, no match against eighty pounds of inquisitive dog. The two of them crashed down into the flowerbed by the front door.
‘Chester!’ I roared as I hurried over. ‘Bad dog! Off! OFF!’
I may as well have been yelling, ‘Chester, what’s the square root of Pi?’ for all the interest he took.
Flashes of red revealed Sienna’s futile attempts to push off the mighty beast. Gritting my teeth, I waded into the fray, grabbed his collar and hauled him back. Chester continued to struggle for a few moments, and then the realisation pierced his dull brain that with every lunge forwards he was strangling himself. He sat back on his haunches and whined.
‘Daft dog,’ I told him. ‘How many times have we been here?’
Sienna was struggling out of the weeds – I’d neglected the garden recently – and making a strange sound, something between a wheeze, a shriek and a sob.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘He means well.’
She made it to her feet and grabbed hold of the windowsill for support.
‘Are you okay?’
Her face screwed up into an expression I couldn’t interpret. ‘I…’
And then she was laughing, shrill, hysterical cries that ripped through the air. Chester began backing away, so I let him go and he fled around the corner of the cottage. Then, before I could think of relaxing, the pitch of Sienna’s laughter changed.
‘Sienna?’
She gasped in a breath of air and managed to get out, ‘He… hates… me!’ before she simply gave up: like a baby who’d suddenly forgotten how to stand, she plomped down, howling, onto the weeds.
I dropped to my knees and put my arms around her and she collapsed onto me. ‘It’s okay,’ I said soothingly. ‘It’s okay.’
But I knew it was anything but.
*
Later, when Sienna was all cried out – which took long enough that our muscles cramped up and we were like old ladies climbing back out of the flowerbed – I settled her under a fluffy blanket on the sofa and went to the kitchen to make hot drinks. My mobile rang as I was spooning instant coffee into mugs and I checked the caller display: Luke.
‘Hi,’ I answered. ‘Look, it’s not the best time.’
‘It’s just a quick one,’ he said in a hushed voice.
‘What’s up? You sound stressed out.’
‘It’s not me who’s stressed. It’s Jude.’
‘Ah.’ I dropped my tone to mirror his.
‘I’m at Si’s – I came by after work. Jude’s turned up. He’s not himself. Scary quiet and starey-eyed.’
‘Have you asked him what’s wrong?’
‘No.’
‘Because?’
‘Look, this is beyond us. Can you come over?’
‘No.’
‘Huh?’
‘No.’
‘But Scarlett, surely you can help him. I mean, it’s your sister – evidently, Sienna’s told him about the baby.’
‘Evidently, given that I just got home to find Sienna in bits on the doorstep.’
‘Oh. I see. So you can’t come over.’
‘No.’
‘And I can’t come over to yours tonight.’
‘No.’
‘Bummer.’
‘Indeed. So what’s your plan?’
‘Plan?’
‘Luke, if Jude’s turned up at Si’s, he needs mates. He needs to talk. Try to get him to open up.’ I remembered Grannie’s approach with my father and added, ‘Push him till he pops.’
‘We’re guys, Scarlett. We don’t really do talking and sharing and all that. Unless we’re… oh, okay.’ His tone brightened. ‘I’ve got it! Don’t worry. We’ll sort him out.’
‘By…?’
I heard a muffled shout in the background at Luke’s end.
‘Gotta go! Talk later?’
‘Yes, but…’
He was gone.
I sighed and reached for the kettle and tried not to feel bad about the fact that my friend, who’d stood by me when my sister had hurt me horribly, was out there suffering without my support while my sister, the ‘villain’ of the piece, was about to get all my attention.
*
Despite the fact that Sienna declared my coffee to be ‘undrinkable pigswill’, she drank four cups over the course of the evening as we talked. Maybe she asked for another each time because the feel of the hot mug in her hands was solid and comforting. Or maybe she just needed to dunk the many, many biscuits she consumed. It was strange, seeing my usually fussy sister gobbling down sugary carbs. But not as strange as sitting with her while she revealed to me the deepest, darkest depths of her soul – depths I’d nev
er known existed.
I sat gobsmacked as she talked. Gobsmacked, and devastated for her. We both cried on several occasions, especially when she spoke of being a mother, what that meant to her, her struggle with the way we’d been mothered. But most heart-breaking of all for me was the Jude-and-Sienna story that unfolded. How she’d fallen for him. How he’d made her feel. The dreams she’d had for the future. Then, the terrible choice she’d felt forced to make. And ever since, the guilt and the sadness and the aching for the man whose eyes looked at her every day from her little son’s face.
But it was an ache she would have to always carry now, she told me. Because Jude hated her – for taking his child from him, and for crushing any hope of a future, a reconciliation, with her deliberate transgression in a dark alleyway. Oh, he hadn’t come out and said it, she told me. But the look in his eyes, the tone of his voice, the way he couldn’t even stand near her in her apartment, where she’d told him: his hatred was unmistakable.
I asked her what would happen now. I knew it wasn’t just Jude’s emotion she’d feared when she told him the truth, but also his power to act. Did he plan to be a father? Did he want access to Jack? Did he want to take Jack? She didn’t know, she said. They hadn’t got that far. They’d been so busy yelling about the past, they hadn’t considered the future.
And where was little Jack in all this? I’d asked. The question had unleashed a fresh round of tears. He’d been in the room, it turned out, watching as his parents tore each other apart. At first, he’d rolled merrily around the rug, apparently oblivious to the atmosphere. But then, there’d been a moment when Jude had said something cutting and Sienna had let out a sob, and that had been it, the turning point. Jack started crying and Sienna picked him up. Jude stopped accusing then and he crossed the room and put a hesitant hand on his son’s back. But the touch of a strange man catapulted the little boy from crying to screaming. And moments later, Jude was gone.
‘So I came here,’ finished Sienna at last. ‘I’m sorry. I just didn’t know where else to go.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I told her. ‘This was your home too.’
‘Once,’ she said. ‘Now it’s yours. I can see, looking around, you’ve made it your own. Fresh paint. New stuff all over. I don’t get that picture in the hallway, though – like all that poncey art Mum’s filled Hollythwaite with. And why you bought a new sofa in this chintzy fabric I’ve no idea.’
