by Fiona Gibson
Dad used Melody’s arrival as an opportunity to virtually move to the allotment. Our house was just somewhere to sleep, change his clothes and make the occasional sandwich. Yet nothing resembling a vegetable ever found its way home from the allotment—not even a radish. Charlie reckoned he didn’t really grow things but locked himself in a shed—we assumed there were sheds—where he was designing a covered walkway to link the allotment to his study’s window, thus minimizing any risk of coming into contact with his offspring.
He knew nothing of our gâteaux consumption, or the fact that our school grades had slipped. Charlie’s form teacher had written on his report that ‘a laissez-faire attitude is beginning to erode his performance.’ My reports were less exotic. I tried to cultivate a laissez-faire attitude of my own, but fretted about falling even further behind with maths, which I struggled with anyway. Being laissez-faire was proving stressful, which, surely, wasn’t the point.
Anyway, did it really matter what my teachers thought of me when Charlie, I reckoned, knew more than the entire bunch put together? I hung out with my brother as much as he would allow, which was surprisingly often. Being left to our own devices had forced us together: the two of us, united against critical teachers and Melody’s bolognaise. Of all the places we could have chosen to hang out—the beach, with its reddish sand and faded beach huts, or the park, from which the smugglers’ tunnel led steeply down to the farthest bay—we favored an expanse of concrete littered with deceased vehicles, called the Slab. Its owner, the fearsome Mr Syrup, rarely put in an appearance. He would just dump the odd car there, to slowly crumble to rust.
Although Charlie and I were really too old for such antics, we would climb into the dented Beetle through the driver’s door—the passenger door had rusted shut—and go for imaginary drives. Usually, Charlie would let me take the wheel. I’d speed along, yelping at invisible pedestrians to get out of the way. Sometimes Lynette and her friends would loiter at the edge of the Slab, willing Charlie to climb out and notice them. ‘She fancies you,’ I hissed at him.
‘Drive on,’ he commanded, and I banged my foot on the accelerator, heading straight for Lynette’s mottled thighs.
One day Charlie had been ‘driving’ the Beetle by himself. He tried to force open the door but it wouldn’t budge. ‘Let me out!’ he yelled, but I couldn’t open it, either. He tried to climb out of the passenger window, but his limbs wouldn’t fit through. He was man-sized by then, a good four inches taller than Dad.
The window was edged with shattered glass. ‘I’ve cut myself,’ Charlie cried.
‘How bad is it?’
‘Really bad.’
I peered in. Blood was dripping down his arm and starbursting the front of his white T-shirt. His eyes were filled with tears and fear. I hadn’t seen him cry since the part where the dad comes home in The Railway Children. ‘I’ll get help,’ I said, and ran home and all through our house, shouting for Melody.
In her bedroom, the Jane Fonda book was lying open at the sit-ups page. ‘Where are you?’ I shouted, imagining Charlie’s arm bleeding and bleeding until it looked like a drooping sausage balloon.
Melody staggered into the kitchen, laden with Chelsea Girl carrier bags. ‘Charlie’s hurt himself,’ I announced. ‘We’ve got to help him.’
‘Jesus,’ she muttered. ‘What’s wrong with you two? You’re not normal.’
We ran to the Slab where my brother was gazing miserably through the Beetle’s back window, steaming the glass with his breath. Melody found a lump of concrete and smashed it through the windscreen, battering away enough of its shattered edge to make a Charlie-sized hole. He looked far too big to be playing in cars as he struggled through it. The remains of the windscreen glimmered in the sunlight, like millions of jewels.
We waited for Dad, desperate to show him Charlie’s injury. We wanted to see him really angry, as if Charlie’s arm really mattered. He’d storm over to see Mr Syrup and rant about the dangerous vehicles and his poor, damaged son.
By midnight, Dad still hadn’t come home. Perhaps he was out with Lindy Richards, a woman he’d met at the Social who wore catsuits with no zips, buttons or discernable openings. Charlie and I couldn’t figure out how she went to the toilet. Dad denied that she was his girlfriend, complaining, ‘That woman’s plaguing me again.’ He made her sound like an infectious disease.
I lay in bed, listening as Charlie rummaged about in his room, unable to sleep for his bad arm. I wished I could go in there, just to talk to him, and we could be sleepless together.
‘You two are running wild,’ Dad announced next morning over breakfast. ‘Can’t you find better things to do than hang about on that Slab? Shouldn’t you be studying your extra maths, Stella? Using your brain?’
‘We were only playing—’
‘Playing? At your age?’
‘What does it matter?’ I countered, shocked by the rage in my voice. ‘You’re never here, you don’t care what—’
‘It wasn’t Stella’s fault I got hurt,’ Charlie cut in. ‘It was my fault. Just leave her alone.’
Dad reddened and opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it shut as Melody strode into the kitchen.
‘I’m leaving,’ she announced.
I blinked at her, wondering if this was just an empty threat, or a joke. ‘Great,’ Charlie muttered under his breath.
‘But you can’t,’ Dad protested, ‘we need someone to—’
‘I’m not spending another day in this filthy house with you nutters.’ Melody stormed out with a carrier bag of LPs and a bulging bin liner of clothes, banging the front door behind her.
Melody was replaced by Gayle, a girl only three years older than Charlie, with a face as flat and unwelcoming as a paving slab. At least Gayle prepared edible meals: meat pies that came in round, flat tins, and fruit cocktail (also tinned) that she’d divvy between us. Gayle always kept the cherry for herself.
One day after school, while Charlie pored over his biology notes at the breakfast bar, I opened a can of fruit cocktail, fished out the cherry and popped it into my mouth. It tasted more like marzipan than cherry. Gayle drifted in, her face that nondescript buff color you see on hospital walls. ‘Stella,’ she said, ‘did you open that tin?’
‘No.’ I poked out my tongue with the cherry perched on it.
Gayle’s hand came hard and fast, burning my cheek like when you’re burrowing into a freezer and graze bare skin on ice.
No one replaced Gayle. Dad decided we’d manage better by ourselves. One evening, in the dusty gloom of our living room, he announced, ‘I’ve been asked to write a book about French cuisine. It’ll probably lead to TV.’
‘Great,’ Charlie said flatly over the TV’s dull mumble.
‘I’ve been paid an advance,’ Dad continued, ‘so I might as well take you two on holiday.’
Charlie and I stared at him in disbelief. We thought he’d forgotten that going on holiday was something families did. ‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘France, of course. Home of great cooking—real cooking. We’ll take the ferry, rent a cottage…. When do your summer holidays start?’
‘We break up next Friday,’ Charlie murmured.
‘Really? That soon?’ Dad looked scared, then blustered, ‘I’m sure we’ll find something.’
I wasn’t sure about France, and I certainly didn’t relish the prospect of being trapped in a cottage for two weeks with Dad. Without an allotment to escape to, how would he fill the days? We’d have to fit together, the three of us, a feat that seemed virtually impossible. ‘I don’t want to come,’ I said firmly.
‘Why not?’ His cheeks flushed angrily.
‘I was thinking of getting a summer job.’
I saw it then—a terrible hopelessness hazing his pale gray eyes. He had tried the nanny option, which had been a dismal failure. This holiday was his way of trying to make things better. ‘I won’t force you to come,’ Dad said quietly.
Something twisted inside me. I
wanted to put my arms around him, to bury my face in his soft nest of chins. ‘Dad,’ I said, ‘of course I’ll come.’
I decided, right then, to try to make things better, too.
We drove to Plymouth to board the ferry to Brittany. In a quayside pub, Charlie and I practiced our French. ‘Je voudrais,’ he announced grandly, ‘une tasse de café.’
‘Mais, bien sûr!’ I replied. ‘Prenez-vous le sucre?’
‘Oui, merci!’
Dad sipped his pint and gazed through the window. He looked worried, as if unsure how he’d survive two vast, virtually endless weeks with a couple of teenagers whom he hardly knew. Rain dribbled down the window’s dimpled glass.
On the ferry, Charlie discovered an upper lounge filled with reclining pink seats and long-haired French teenagers with edible accents. One girl kept peeping through a gap between the seats and grinning at Charlie. She said something, but too quickly for us to understand. ‘Je voudrais une tasse de café,’ Charlie said, and we creased up laughing.
We arrived at the cottage in the early hours and tumbled into the musty living room, breathing in spores. ‘Charlie, you can sleep here,’ Dad said, indicating a decrepit brown sofa. We hauled it open. A speckled sheet was stretched tightly like skin across the thin mattress.
Dad marched upstairs with Charlie and me in pursuit. This was exciting, an adventure, like the railway children arriving at their crumbling house on the moors in the middle of the night. Dad marched from room to room, clicking on lights. The bulbs were the yellowy, low-wattage kind. ‘This can be your room,’ Dad told me, indicating a box room with dark yellow walls. Ocher, Mum might have called it.
‘It’s lovely,’ I said, and it really was.
‘I’m starving,’ Charlie complained. We hadn’t brought any food. Dad, who was exhausted from the drive, lay fully clothed on the double bed in the biggest room, and was soon snoring throatily. He hadn’t even taken his shoes off.
I tripped downstairs and peered into the fridge. As we’d neared the cottage Dad had said, ‘I’m sure the owner will have left a few basics—a hospitality package.’ I wasn’t sure what a hospitality package was. I’d imagined a medical kit with plasters and the smelly antiseptic cream that Melody had dabbed onto Charlie’s cut arm.
We couldn’t find a hospitality package. The fridge contained only fuzzy blue crumbs. Charlie wrapped himself in a blanket on the pull-out bed, looking like a giant Swiss roll. ‘Bonne nuit,’ I called back from the stairs.
‘Je voudrais une tasse de café,’ he murmured back.
‘Avec du sucre?’
‘Oui, merci bien!’
Sunlight poured, warm and golden, into the ocher room. We’d never been anywhere since before Mum died, and now I’d woken up in France. ‘Get dressed!’ Dad shouted up. ‘We’re not lying around the house all day.’
I pulled on yesterday’s clothes and hurried downstairs. Dad bustled Charlie and me into the car and drove at around seventeen miles per hour along the narrowest roads I’d ever seen. Bushes were thickly laden with blowsy pink and blue flowers. ‘They’re hydrangeas,’ Dad said. ‘What’s interesting about hydrangeas is…’
I had already decided that there wasn’t a single fact I wished to learn about hydrangeas. ‘… So it’s their environment, the acidity or alkalinity of the soil,’ Dad burbled on, ‘that determines the color of the blooms.’
I winced every time Dad veered too close to a creamy stone wall. I wished he’d stop wittering about hydrangeas and keep his mind on the road. But as the day unfolded, and we ambled around ancient, sun-dappled towns, I realized that something was happening to Dad—as if he, too, was changing, due to being on a different part of the earth. The Slab, and our chest freezer, could have been on some distant planet.
Everything looked freshly painted in colors I had never seen in Devon. The town hall was painted dazzling blue and adorned with hanging baskets overflowing with tomato-red geraniums. I blinked at the brightness of it all. In the market, which sprawled through the streets of our nearest town, Dad pressed unfamiliar notes into our hands and said, ‘You two—go and buy dinner. It’s time you learned about food instead of that rubbish you eat.’
‘Aren’t you coming with us?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m going to pop into a couple of restaurants, talk to the chefs, see what’s going on around here. Stick together, use your French—isn’t that the point of learning it?’
I wanted to ask, ‘Why don’t you speak French?’ then remembered that Dad only knew food words like boeuf bourguignon and salmon en croûte.
Charlie and I slipped into the throng of the market. We peered at fat, glossy cherries and crusty cheeses that looked as if they had fallen off the underside of cars. We wandered and sniffed and touched things. Strangers smiled at us. Two girls at the cooked-chicken stall whispered and pointed at Charlie. ‘This way,’ he said, pulling me by the arm into a patisserie.
‘What shall we buy?’ I asked him.
He grinned. ‘Whatever we want.’
We stared at the glossy tarts in the display cabinet. ‘Je voudrais…’Charlie began. I felt a giggle starting deep in my belly.
The shop lady smiled expectantly. She had a soft, plump face and dazzling red lips.
‘…une tarte tatin,’ Charlie said, his accent perfect. The woman placed it in a shallow box, tied a thin golden ribbon around it and presented it to him like a gift.
‘It’s not quite what I had in mind,’ Dad said later, back at the house. The three of us gazed at the design on the box lid: a crest with fish, a fleur-de-lis and three stars. Stars like Stella, my name.
The tart was deep and filled with soft pieces of apple. Charlie poked in a finger and licked it. ‘Don’t do that,’ I said. I didn’t want him to spoil it.
Dad cut us a thin slice each. ‘This,’ he said, his mouth full, ‘is something very special.’ It’s what Mr Grieves had said when he’d shown me the silver flute.
I could still taste the tart when I woke up at around 2:00 a.m. in the ocher room. I slipped out of bed and crept downstairs in my pajamas. There it was, uncovered on the table, with a quarter missing. I snapped off a fragment of pastry and popped it into my mouth.
Charlie stirred on the pull-out bed. ‘What are you eating?’ he whispered.
I couldn’t remember the tart’s proper name. Through the living-room window I could see the moon: full, round and golden. ‘Moon pie,’ I whispered back.
‘La tarte de la lune. C’est bien?’
‘Oui,’ I said, ‘c’est très bien.’
I crept back to my room and lifted the special flute from its case. Dad had never found out how much it had cost, hadn’t even realized I owned two flutes. I could have told him how Mum’s hand had trembled as she’d written the check; she wasn’t here anymore, so she couldn’t have got into trouble. Even Charlie assumed it was just ordinary. That made it even more special. It had nothing to do with my colossal-brained brother, or Dad being famous a lifetime ago.
I no longer cared what Dad really got up to at the allotment, or that I was incapable of being laissez-faire. I felt warm inside, and ridiculously happy as I slid back into bed. Here we were, the three us, on holiday together. Just like any ordinary family.
8:25 a.m. Dad whirled into the ocher room, snatching my Advanced Flute Solos book, which, having forgotten to bring my music stand, I had propped up on the windowsill. ‘Same piece,’ he boomed, ‘over and over. Can’t you play something else?’
I placed my flute carefully on the bed. ‘Mrs Bones said I should practice over the holidays, and this is the piece we’ve—’
‘You, you, you,’ Dad ranted. The bedroom seemed to slump into gloom.
‘I didn’t know,’ I murmured, ‘that you minded me practicing.’
Dad paused. ‘There are limits,’ he said. I realized then that Dad was usually out when I played, back at home.
‘Well, I can’t stop,’ I said firmly.
His eyes met mine. ‘Why not?’
&nb
sp; ‘I… I can’t explain it. It’s like—’
‘Love?’ Dad cut in.
I nodded, unable to form words. That was it, exactly. Playing made me soar like nothing else could. I had yet to fall in love, but this was exactly how I’d imagined it would feel. How did Dad know?
‘You could show some thought for others,’ he blustered, looking embarrassed now.
‘For you, you mean.’
‘Everyone likes some peace and quiet on holiday.’
‘So you’re banning me from playing?’
He dropped the music book onto the bed. It landed on top of the flute. ‘Until we’re home,’ he added brusquely. ‘Then you can do as you please.’
I watched him as he marched out of the room, and stared at the space he’d left. Four days. Another four days until I would be allowed to play.
I was fueled, then, with a fury that rose up my throat and burned my ears, and snatched my flute from the bed. I would never again be scared of Dad. I would do as I pleased, just as he’d said. The mouthpiece was still warm as I brought it back to my lips. I filled myself with air, and the note poured out, flooding the huddled French cottage. I propped Advanced Flute Solos on the windowsill and resumed playing the piece, expecting Dad to yell up or thunder into my room again, but there was nothing.
I played on, knowing that Mrs Bones would say, ‘That’s it, Stella! That’s lovely,’ and tell Mum that she had never heard me play with such confidence and flair. Mum would never have banned me from playing, not for a second, let alone four days.
Dad didn’t shout up to the ocher room, but even if he had, I’d have carried on playing right into his face. I wasn’t scared anymore. The special flute was about Mum and me. She had gone, but it was still our secret.
