The Pearl in the Attic

by Karen McCombie

  The grip of Father’s fingers suddenly dug painfully into Ruby’s arm, and she was tugged roughly away.

  “Come see me fly off into the sky!” the girl called after her cheerfully.

  Tripping and stumbling, Ruby wondered what the girl could possibly mean by that, but had not the luxury of time to dwell on the matter.

  The gate to the alleyway banged shut behind Ruby with the heavy certainty of a prison door, locking the girl and her bright words in the sunshine outside.

  In the gloom of the passageway, Ruby bit her lip, and felt buried…

  Two (Surprises) for the Price of One

  “Who knew she’d be as good at writing as she is at painting?” I ask in wonder, my mind still reeling with the delicious find of Nana’s story last night. Or at least, the first chapter of it.

  Mr Spinks gazes up at me but doesn’t reply. Maybe it’s because it was a rhetorical question, or maybe it’s because he’s busy weeing up against a street lamp.

  “Do you think she’s written more?” I ask, just enjoying the novelty of having a dog to hang out with. “I’ve got to find out what happened to poor Ruby…”

  I’d reread the pages a heap of times before I went to sleep last night, half expecting to lose myself in tangled dreams about Ruby and the future she faced.

  But I think so much had gone on in such a short time with Nana and, well, everything, that my subconscious was spoiled for choice when it came to stuff to mull over while I slept.

  In fact, it was a pretty busy night in Dreamland…

  Dream One. I was fighting my way through a dark forest of trees made of boxes, till I heard the THWACK! THWACK! of axes and saw cardboard trunks begin to crash down on top of me.

  Dream Two. I was running up Nana’s book-strewn staircase, but like a downward-bound escalator, I was going nowhere fast, with pages fluttering and flying all around my head.

  Dream Three. I’d been dyeing Nana’s hair mermaid blue, but first her hair and then Nana had disappeared, slipping clean away through my fingers…

  But this morning the sun is shining, and I feel a bit better and a bit brighter.

  Hornsey High Street looks a bit better and brighter too, in daylight. On my way to this grassy little green that Mr Spinks has just dragged me to, I spotted a florist bursting with colour and a café with pretty hanging baskets all around it.

  “Hey, I forgot; Nana said to tell you she’s fine,” I say, staring down at Mr Spinks. “And that what happened wasn’t your fault.”

  Mr Spinks wags his tail like fury. Does he understand, or does he think I have some doggy treats in my pocket? It’s like two people who speak different languages trying to get by via the universal language of hopeful smiles.

  “Suppose we’d better get back,” I tell him, then see that a passing mum and kid are grinning at me.

  Uh-oh … talking out loud to a dog is obviously a sign of mild madness. But how would I know? Like I say, I’m totally new at this pet-care lark.

  But pet care is one of the reasons me and Mum didn’t go back to our own place last night. Plus the fact that Mum couldn’t face the long drive to Chelmsford, not after the shock of Nana’s…

  a)fall

  b)diagnosis

  c)hoarding mania

  d)unexpected pets that we were suddenly responsible for.

  And so we’d stayed in the rooms Nana had prepared for us – and when I say prepared, I mean right down to pyjamas under the pillows … white cotton ones for Mum, a grey nightshirt with “TEAM UNICORN” on it for me.

  (Were the ready-and-waiting rooms just Nana being optimistic, and hoping the cold war between her and Mum would ease off soon? Or a symptom of Nana being fuzzy around the edges… ?)

  I slept pretty well, though when I got up in the night to use the loo (a freaky experience with a basket of plastic ducks staring at me, like birdy convicts) I saw that Mum was still awake. She was firing off emails on her ever-present iPad to everyone at work, telling them that she couldn’t come in today and giving them a thousand orders, I bet, about what they should and shouldn’t do in her absence.

  She’d already dropped an email to the school’s attendance officer, letting her know that I wouldn’t be in. All I’d be missing was last-day-of-term stuff like movies and quizzes in lessons. And having an excuse to avoid Miss Kendrick after sending in that useless bit of Spanish homework sounded pretty good to me…

  Anyway, I’ve learned my lesson about talking out loud to dogs, so me and Mr Spinks mooch along the pavement in comfy silence till we’re directly opposite Nana’s flat, and the derelict shop below it.

  “Sit!” I say, since a direct doggy order shouldn’t look too bonkers.

  Mr Spinks doesn’t sit, but he does look up at me in a smiley sort of way and wags his tail a bit faster.

  While we wait for a gap in the traffic, I gaze over at the shop, imagining the fictional Ruby standing there, wondering what was to become of her, what her life would be like working at Brandt’s Bakery and Confectioners.

  Actually, was it really a baker’s shop back in 1904? Did Nana know that for sure? Or had she just invented it for the sake of her story?

  Alexandra Palace is definitely real – when I showed Mum Chapter One of The Pearl in the Attic last night, she said it was round here somewhere, the building, the park, though she wasn’t sure if the station actually existed, or if Nana had made that part up.

  I have to say, I was kind of disappointed that Mum wasn’t more interested in the story, but I think she thought of it just as another of Nana’s projects, alongside painting and collecting vast amounts of vintage and non-vintage tat and junk. She’d only smiled absent-mindedly and said, “Ruby red, Scarlet red … maybe Nana named the character in honour of you, using the closest historical equivalent to your name.”

  But I suppose Mum had been a bit distracted when we got back from the hospital, what with sorting out work stuff and googling “dementia”…

  A toot of a car horn and some flashing lights gets my attention, and I see someone’s been kind enough to stop and let me and Mr Spinks cross while the traffic’s at a standstill. We run, and run again once we get inside, Mr Spinks leaping up the stairs incredibly speedily for one so short and pudgy.

  “We’re back!” I call out, as we go through the top door and into the flat.

  “Hi!” Mum calls out from the kitchen.

  “Hello!” Angie squawks from the top of a box tower.

  “Careful – don’t trip over the bag in the doorway,” says Mum as I slink sideways past boxes in an attempt to get to the kitchen.

  “What’s in it?” I ask, staring down at a holdall that’s probably stuffed with something ridiculous, like antique rolling pins or a collection of Guinness World Records annuals from the 1980s.

  “It’s just a few things for Nana,” says Mum. “She called from the hospital while you were out and asked me to bring her toiletries, her phone, pyjamas and some art stuff.”

  Now that I’ve negotiated the obstacle course of the hall and am finally in the kitchen, I see that Mum is standing in front of an open cupboard. Lots of open cupboards, actually.

  “What are you doing?” I ask her.

  “I was looking for breakfast cereal, but I found this instead,” she says, her hands on her hips, weariness written on her face.

  The shelves are neatly stacked, I’ll give Nana that. But instead of tins of beans and packets of pasta, there are balls and balls and balls of coloured wool in one cupboard; old jam jars full of coloured buttons, beads and crafting bits and bobs in another; and the one above the fridge is packed with nothing but glue. Glue tubs, glue tubes, glue sticks, glitter glue…

  “Not so great for breakfast,” I say. “It’s really hard to get glitter out from between your teeth, even with flossing.”

  Mum rolls her eyes at me, and slams shut the cupboard doors one by one, which gets Mr Spinks yelping excitedly and sends Angie squawking and flying off to the sanctuary of her cage.

  Tink! Ti
nkle! Tink!

  Mum drops her head and shuts her eyes. She’s counting to ten, and probably hoping at the end of it she’ll open them and find herself in her neat, calm office, and that the last twelve hours will all have been a dream…

  “Shall we grab a croissant at the hospital?” I suggest, trying to be helpful, since I can’t exactly make Nana’s mess disappear or the whole nightmare go away.

  “Yep,” says Mum, snapping into Practical Mode and grabbing the car keys.

  Twenty minutes later, we get to the hospital. Half an hour after that, we finally find a parking space.

  (I lost count of the number of times Mum growled, “You have GOT to be joking!” when we turned into yet another jam-packed road.)

  “Oh, I’m a such a mess!” Mum mutters, smoothing her hair in the reflection of the glass in the revolving door of the hospital entrance.

  “No, you’re not,” I tell her, though to be honest, my normally hyper-perfect mum is looking a little crumpled around the edges.

  I catch sight of myself in the glass and spot that I’m a little crumpled around the edges too. But that’s not much of a shock, since I’m mostly always pretty scruffy. Same as Mum, I’m still in yesterday’s clothes, only I’ve swapped my black hoodie for this pink tweed vintage jacket I found on one of the clothes racks on the top landing. It looks great with my hair. (Bella and Aisha would be horrified to the point of barfing at the idea of me wearing “smelly” second-hand stuff.)

  “Argh! Look at the time; if it hadn’t taken us so long to find a stupid parking space…” Mum moans, as the revolving door steers us into the airy reception area, with its information desk, lifts and escalators and sweet, sharp scent of disinfectant.

  It’s not technically visiting time, but Mum phoned ahead and got special permission, since she had to have the meeting with the other doctor and someone from social services. Plus, as Mum pointed out, an early visit meant we could leave straight after and zip back to Chelmsford for fresh clothes, plus rubber gloves to clean Nana’s flat when we got back. Mum says we’ll have to stay in London for the weekend at least, till we see what’s what.

  “Listen, Scarlet, I’m going to have to go straight to the meeting,” Mum says wearily as she checks her watch. “Are you all right to go and sit with Nana on your own till I come? And can you give her this?”

  “Sure,” I say, taking the holdall Mum packed earlier.

  I’d really like to have time on my own with Nana, to be honest. Now that I’ve had a glimpse of the upside-down world she was living in without us knowing, I feel really protective of her. I also realize how much I’ve missed her. Growing up, hanging out with Nana felt like hanging out with the most fun, adult-sized kid, who’d make up the best games and giggle as much as me – while Mum would be in the background rolling her eyes at both of us.

  “Good girl. Love you,” says Mum, giving me a quick kiss on the cheek before she rushes off to a close-by lift that’s just opened its doors.

  Well. That was a bit surprising. The “good girl” bit and the “love you” and the kiss, I mean. Mum doesn’t usually say or do any of those things. And I don’t do them back.

  But I quite like that it just happened, I realize, as I bound up the short escalator that’ll take me to the section of the building with the wards in it. It’s funny, but I think Mum and me have talked more in the last few hours than we have in the last few weeks put together. It’s like we’ve had to become a team overnight or something. Which sounds a bit corny, but feels sort of good, to be honest…

  Anyway, Nana is the most important person in all this, and now that I’m getting closer to Ward 9, I start to hurry, keen to get to her and tell her all the things I lay in bed thinking about, after the dawn light came glowing through the tea-towel curtain in the small window in the sloped ceiling.

  For a start, I want to let her know that I LOVE my attic room.

  And I think she’ll love to know that Mr Spinks is fine and kept me company – and sniggering – all night on the bottom of my bed as he zzzzzz-ed and snurfled in his sleep.

  I want to tell her that I think Angie likes me; she let me put her in her cage last night (with the lure of a grape) and sang me “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” when I let her out this morning.

  I want to ask Nana who Dean and baby Zephyr are, since me and Mum didn’t come across any pet/gremlin/alien in the flat by that name.

  But most of all, I want to tell her I adored the story she wrote. I’ve brought Chapter One of The Pearl in the Attic with me in my backpack so we can chat about it. And of course, I need to know if there’s more; I HAVE to find out what happened to poor, uprooted, unwelcome Ruby!

  Fancy my gran having a go at writing a novel, I think as I buzz into the ward and walk towards her bed. Maybe she’ll get it published and go on book tours. Except that’s not very likely, I quickly remind myself, if the diagnosis turns out to be right…

  I take a deep breath and wipe away the tears, so Nana will see the cheeriest version of me that I can—

  Oh.

  I slow down.

  Considering it’s not visiting time, I’m a bit surprised to see two figures sitting on the orange plastic chairs either side of Nana’s bed. The one with his face to me is quite young: a tanned, sandy-haired teenage boy, with a brown-beaded necklace showing above the neck of his faded T-shirt. The darker-haired figure with his back to me shields my view of the person in the bed, who can’t be Nana.

  But a couple of tentative steps on, I see that it is.

  Nana is looking confused, probably wondering who these strange people are.

  I’d better help.

  “Nana?” I say, reaching the bottom of her bed.

  “Well, well, well!” she says, breaking into a smile. “My sweet Scarlet! Where’s your mum?”

  “Um…” I fumble, not totally sure what I should or shouldn’t say. “She’s having a meeting with another doctor, but don’t worry, she’ll be here soon.”

  “Another doctor? What about? Should I be in the meeting too?” says the person opposite the teenage boy. He’s a grown man – dark eyes, dark hair, Anglo-Indian, maybe? But with an accent that sounds Australian, I’m pretty sure. He’s dressed in a worn checked shirt and jeans and looks like he just finished lumberjacking or something.

  “It’s just for family,” I say quickly.

  “But sweetheart, Dean IS family!” says Nana, looking at me with her piercingly blue eyes.

  Dean? DEAN?!?

  “Who? How!” I bumblingly ask, completely thrown at hearing one of the names Nana came out with yesterday.

  “Hi, how are you, Scarlet,” says the man, holding out his hand to shake mine. Dumbly, I shake it back, though I haven’t a clue what’s happening. “Patsy has told us lots about you. All good! But I get the feeling she hasn’t told you much about us… ?”

  I look from the smiling man to the slightly embarrassed-looking boy to Nana.

  “Nana mentioned you yesterday,” I find myself babbling. “She said she was worried the hospital would wake you up … you and baby Zephyr.”

  What I’ve said – it makes the man and the boy burst out laughing. Even Nana is laughing, but putting her hands up to her face in embarrassment.

  I can’t remember a time I felt less in on a joke.

  “Oh, I was very muddled yesterday, wasn’t I?” says Nana. “I even called myself by my old married name when they checked me in here! Couldn’t think why the nurse was calling me Mrs Chaudhary this morning. I said to her, ‘What silly sausage went and told you that was my name?’ and of course she said, ‘YOU, dear!’ Ha!”

  Everyone’s laughing again – except me.

  “Yeah, but Nana, I still don’t get it.”

  “Which part, darling?” Nana asks, making me feel like I’m having a mind-twisting conversation with the Mad Hatter. “You mean why I thought they’d disturb Dean if they called last night?”

  I answer her with a suppose-so shrug. I’d rather find out who Dean actually is
, but this piece of information might help us get there.

  “Well, because I was all in a muddle with the shock and the painkillers, I thought Dean was over in Australia, and in a different time zone, but of course he was already in here in Britain. And Zephyr … well, in my mind I was thinking of the picture on the mantelpiece, when Zeph was a baby and in his grandad Manny’s arms. But you’re hardly a baby, are you, Zeph!”

  Nana smiles warmly at the tanned teen boy.

  I don’t understand a word of this explanation.

  I also don’t know why the tanned teen boy who is Zephyr suddenly looks familiar.

  “We live in Melbourne, Australia, but I had to go to a work convention here in the UK, in Cornwall. I took Zeph out of school to come with me – he’s always wanted to see the beaches there!” this Dean person says. “We’d planned to come to London and visit Patsy in a couple of days’ time, but when the hospital phoned and told me what had happened, we just packed up our stuff and jumped in the hire car.”

  Dean’s sing-song Australian accent is bright and breezy, but I still fix him with my version of Mum’s fierce glower. I might not know what this stranger’s on about, but it does sound an awful lot like he’s staking some sort of claim on my gran.

  “Nana,” I say, turning sharply to her. “Please explain what’s going on!”

  “Oh, Scarlet, darling, don’t look so grumpy!” she pleads. “It’s all pretty straightforward. Dean is … I suppose he’s my…”

  Nana wafts her good hand in the air as she struggles for the right term. It doesn’t come.

  “I don’t think what we are has a name,” Dean says warmly to her.

  “Yeah, but me and Scarlet are cousins, right?” the boy suddenly chips in.

  “No, we’re not!” I immediately snap, feeling my pale cheeks heat up with outrage.

  “Um, technically, you are,” says Dean, shrugging his shoulders almost apologetically. “Your mum is my half-sister. Ren and I have the same dad – Mandeep Chaudhary?”

  “Ah, Manny, Manny, Manny…” Nana says wistfully, as if she’s playing a scratchy old Super 8 film in her head of the young, happy couple she and my grandad once were.