by Julia Green
Nick laughs. ‘Home Farm. The village is Southfield. We’re a mile from the village, though.’ He opens a bottle of wine, pours a glass for himself and one for Maddie. ‘Freya?’
I shake my head. ‘No thanks.’
I help lay the table.
‘Would you be a love and go and see if there are any courgettes in the kitchen garden?’ Maddie asks me. ‘And spinach. Enough for eight. Thanks, darling.’
I go back to the sitting-room door. ‘Gabes? Want to come with me, to pick stuff? You can practise with your crutches!’ I mean to be encouraging, but he gives me such a withering look I’m happy to leave him behind.
I’m used to pottering in Gramps’ vegetable garden, helping him. This one is much more overgrown and unruly. I find a handful of courgettes under the big star-shaped leaves, and then start cutting spinach. Something makes me look up. Theo’s standing in the doorway to the walled garden, lurking there in the shadow. Not exactly creepy, but a bit . . . But perhaps I’m just imagining things because he comes over and is ordinary enough.
‘Spinach goes to a mush when it’s cooked. So you need loads,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘I found that poem for you. Pike.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Are you staying?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
I don’t say anything.
He starts asking me questions. ‘So, Freya. You still at school?’
‘No, college. I’m doing A levels there. That’s how I know Gabes.’
‘Then what?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t decided.’
‘University. Or travel. Like everyone does.’
I look at him. Why does he have to be sarcastic? ‘Actually, Theo, no. I’d like to do something wild, and wonderful, and different. I want my life to mean something; to count. I don’t want to waste it. Not any of it.’
I don’t tell him why. I don’t say, when someone you love dies young, it makes you think about all these things, over and over.
There’s a long, awkward silence.
‘And you? What do you want to do, Theo?’
‘Write,’ he says.
‘Like your mother?’
‘No, not like her. Not like anyone.’
‘That’s enough spinach,’ I say.
He picks up the cut leaves from the path where I’ve laid them, and carries them into the house in both hands, like a dark green bouquet.
Just before supper, I go to find Gabes. I pick up one of the framed photographs on the piano, put it back, select another. ‘Tell me who everyone is,’ I say.
Most of the family group ones are fairly obvious. I peer at a particularly beautiful black-and-white photo of Maddie and Nick on their wedding day, looking totally in love and amazing. There’s another wedding one with two bridesmaids that Gabes tells me are Beth and Laura. ‘Nick was married before, to their mum, Lorna,’ Gabes explains. ‘Maddie isn’t their real mother, though she’s looked after them practically for ever.’
‘And this one?’ I hold up the square photo of the thin-faced little girl with short dark hair, the one picture that doesn’t fit with the others.
‘Bridie, when she was about six.’ He starts hobbling to the door.
Nick’s calling us from the kitchen: supper is ready and everyone’s starving. But I linger a moment longer, staring at the girl in the photograph. This is her. I’m face to face with Bridie . . . I study her face; look into her dark eyes. But of course there’s nothing there, nothing you can see, that is; nothing that says what will happen to her later . . .
‘Freya?’ Gabes calls.
‘Coming.’ Carefully, I put the photo back between the others and go through to the kitchen.
We take our places at the table. Everyone’s there except Laura, this time. Maddie has cooked an enormous fish pie. Theo watches me across the table, but I keep my eyes on my food, and on Gabes, and let the conversations waft over my head. Someone’s bought an injured fox into the surgery, Nick’s saying. It will need a quieter place to recuperate: he might bring it back to the house next week, if Maddie doesn’t mind . . .
Afterwards, Gabes practises going upstairs with crutches. I walk along the landing to find Beth bathing the twins. She’s red-faced and shiny from the steam. She sits on the floor, keeping an eye on both babies and playing with them. She wipes her hair back from her hot face and sits back for a moment. ‘Don’t ever have twins!’ she says, but laughing at the same time, and I know she doesn’t really mean it. She loves those babies to bits.
She stands up, stretches out her back. ‘Watch them for me, while I get their pyjamas?’
I take her place on the floor. Phoebe’s pouring water from one plastic beaker to another, while Erin pushes a blue and yellow plastic whale to make it go under the bath water. Each time it pops back up she laughs. It’s unsinkable, that little toy whale. I take a small blue boat from the basket of toys and float it. It tips sideways. Not an unsinkable boat, then. The brief, painful thought of my brother, Joe, catches me unawares.
Beth hangs the pyjamas over the warm towel rail; one pink and white pair, one blue and yellow. ‘Thanks, Freya. You OK?’
I nod.
‘Gabes isn’t his normal self. It’s his foot, it’s nothing to do with you.’
‘I know.’
She smiles.
I find Gabes stretched out on his bed, listening to music.
I sit next to him for a while, but he seems so remote, listening to music on headphones, making no effort to talk to me, that in the end I get up and go back downstairs. He hardly seems to notice.
Piano music is drifting from the sitting room. I follow the sound. Theo’s playing something haunting and rather lovely. I read the name from the music book on the piano stand: Trois Gnossiennes, by Erik Satie. Nick and Kit are engrossed in a game of chess, and Maddie’s sitting in the window seat, reading. Family life, I think. This is what it’s supposed to be like.
I pick up a book from the pile on the side table, and start to read the beginning. It’s called The Behaviour of Moths, but it’s a novel, about two crazy sisters. Every so often I look up at Theo, and one time, he’s looking straight back at me, and that feeling comes again, something running between us, a little bit dark, and edgy, and exciting.
Maddie turns on more lamps as it gets dark outside. She goes over to the bookshelves and pulls out a big hardback art book for me to look at. ‘You might like this, Freya. Do you know her work? I think she’s a wonderful painter. Very underrated. You know St Ives, I expect, in Cornwall. She lived there for a while.’
Winifred Nicholson. I leaf through the pages. I’ve seen some of the paintings before: Gate to the Isles is pretty famous, but there are others I haven’t seen, and yes, Maddie’s right, I do love them. The colours, and the emotion that they evoke. How, exactly? I’m not sure. I stare for ages at one called Dawn Chorus.
Theo stops playing, and stretches out on the rug, reading too. It’s quiet except for the sound of wooden chess pieces on the board, and heavy sighs from Kit as Nick steadily and inexorably defeats him. The almost-silence of people in a room, all happily absorbed in something: I love it.
At last, Maddie looks up from her book. ‘Time for bed, for me. Shall I show you Laura’s room, Freya?’
I nod. I take the art book with me upstairs, and pad behind Maddie, past the rows of doors, where Beth and the twins are already sleeping. We go past Gabes’ room, and Maddie pauses there, listens, opens the door and closes it again very quietly.
‘Fast asleep. Good. That’s when the healing happens: while you’re sleeping. Like growing does, when you’re a child.’
We take another step down, turn a corner. I’ve not been this far before, or seen the narrow wooden steps leading up to an attic bedroom.
‘There you go. I put a towel on the bed. Help yourself to anything you need.’ She hugs me briefly, as if she were my own mother. ‘Sleep well, Freya.’
I step carefully up to
the attic, with its sloping walls and narrow single bed, cream covers, cream rug, a single wooden chair. A green-covered book is lying on the pillow: Ted Hughes, Selected Poems, and a thin slip of paper marks page 59. A shiver runs down my spine; I don’t know why. I pick up the towel and go back down to the bathroom for a shower.
I make myself wait till I’m actually in bed, under the white duvet, before I open the book. I read the poem about the pike, first, then one about an otter, and a fox. The poems are full of darkness, and sounds, and something disturbing that I can’t quite fathom.
I find a message from Mum on my phone. She’s got mine, she hopes I’m having a good time, she’ll see me tomorrow. And there’s one from Miranda: How’s it going???? Tell all!!
I text her back: We had a bike accident! Gabes broke his foot. I’m staying over, in his sister’s room, and then I turn off my phone because I don’t want to speak to anyone right now. Even the tiny clicking sounds of texting sound loud in the deep silence of this ancient, solid house.
I dream of St Ailla. The colours are as bright as a Pre-Raphaelite painting. In the dream, I’m walking across the sandbar at high tide: it’s a neap tide so there’s a strip of sand a metre or so wide at the top of the bar. If it were a spring tide, the sea would cover it completely, and the water would be rushing and swirling and eddying in dangerous currents. But no: I can walk right the way across to the next island without getting wet feet. At the far end of the bar I scramble over big stones and stinky seaweed, on to the short turf path that runs between tall bracken, up to the top of Gara. The island is uninhabited except by birds: black-backed gulls wheel over it, calling incessantly, and dive-bombing you if you come too close to their nesting places on the rocks. I cross to the other side, in the lee of the wind, and sit for a while against the huge lichen-covered boulders at the edge of the cliff. Oystercatchers with their bright orange legs and black-and-white plumage make their piping song and fly off as I walk down to their beach. The sun’s prickly hot on my skin. I strip off, walk out into the water and begin to swim. Ahead, there’s nothing but blue sea, on and on to the line of the horizon where the dark blue meets the paler blue of sky. I am utterly at peace, swimming into the wild blue.
I wake up, the dream vivid in my head, full of that sense of peace, and purposefulness. In the dream there was no uncertainty, no muddled feelings. I lie in the darkness for ages, and then I switch on the bedside light, get out of bed to find my notebook and a pen, and begin to draw. I’m drawing from the dream, and from the memory of the real place, vividly alive for me. But I’m drawing as if I am an observer, watching myself in the scene: a series of sketches like a storyboard, or a cartoon strip. I draw fast, instinctively, without stopping to think. The drawings retrace my journey across the island, but at the top of the cliff I stop and there’s something else there, something I didn’t see the first time: a dead bird, a patch of soft feathers around the torn corpse of a brown speckled hawk, its ribcage stripped open to reveal the red raw inside. The girl changes, too. She isn’t me, I realise after a while. She has short dark hair, and she looks the way I imagine little Bridie from the photograph might have looked when she was older: about eighteen or nineteen.
I check the time. It’s three o’clock, the dead time of the night, the time when people who are dying actually die, when the life force is at its lowest ebb. I switch off the light, and I drift in the darkness, back towards sleep, until it’s properly morning and the house begins to wake.
Ten
Beth offers to give me a lift home. Neither Gabes nor Theo are up, but I’ve had breakfast and helped Maddie let the hens out, and played with the babies all before ten o’clock, and I’m ready to go.
She drives slowly and carefully along the lanes. She looks different this morning, I think: lighter and happier. Or perhaps it’s just that she’s driving, and not with the children: we’ve got the windows open and a CD playing in the car. She turns up the volume. ‘Listen to this one,’ she says. ‘My favourite.’
It’s a song about being free, and close to the one you love. ‘Closer to heaven, and closer to you,’ Beth sings along. The lyrics will stay in my head all day.
‘Life is so much easier when I stay at Home Farm,’ Beth says. ‘You can’t imagine how difficult it is, sometimes, on my own with the children all day. It’s turning me into some kind of monster. No wonder Will doesn’t want to come home to us at the end of the day.’
I’m embarrassed. I don’t really want to hear all the details of Beth’s marriage problems. I don’t know what to say.
‘So, did you have a nice time? In spite of grumpy Gabes?’
‘Yes. I love being there, too,’ I say. ‘My own home’s a bit . . . quiet, I suppose. A bit empty.’
‘Quiet sounds heavenly, to me!’
‘It’s the wrong sort of quiet,’ I say.
Beth glances at me. ‘I’m sorry. Tactless of me. I’ve just remembered what Gabes told us. About your brother.’
I don’t say anything. I’m wondering what Gabes has said, and to whom. I don’t like people feeling sorry for me.
‘You’ll have to tell me where to go, in a minute,’ Beth says, as we turn on to the ring road. ‘I know the general area, but not exactly where your street is.’
I give directions and she stops at the top of the hill for me to get out.
‘Thanks so much, Beth. It’s really kind of you.’
‘My pleasure. Any time, really. Thanks for helping me with the babes, too.’ She scrabbles about in her handbag and finds a pen and scrap of paper. ‘My mobile,’ she says. ‘In case you need a lift or anything, while Gabes is in plaster and can’t drive the bike.’
‘Thanks, Beth!’ I watch her turn the car and drive off, before I walk down the hill to my house. I really like her. I wish I’d had an older sister, like her.
Dad’s car is outside. He’s back from his conference.
The back door’s wide open; the kitchen smells of coffee and toast. Through the window I see them – my parents – at the table, talking together. Mum’s laughing. I don’t disturb them. It’s rare to see Mum laugh like that, or looking as if she’s feeling close to Dad, happy even. At one point two summers ago I thought they might be about to separate, but they didn’t, and I am so glad about it I find myself wanting to do everything I can to keep them close. Sometimes I worry that being with me reminds them too much about the child who is missing. That having no children around might be easier than just one.
I go upstairs instead and lie on my bed. I’m tired, from being awake so much of the night. Later, I’ll do my work for college, and phone Miranda. Later.
Monday morning. Art. Our lecturer, Jeanette, is going round looking at everyone’s preliminary studies. I spread my notebooks out on the table ready, plus a stack of paintings I’ve been working on: small watercolours, mostly, apart from the one I did yesterday, which I put at the bottom because I think it is the best one, and I want her to see it last. All yesterday afternoon I worked fast, intuitively, painting the scene in the dream: the girl swimming into the blue, viewed from a high vantage point on the lichen-covered rock, with the space of air and light between.
Jeanette’s face doesn’t give anything away. She picks up the notebooks first, flicks through the pages, turns them the right way round where I’ve worked over two pages, sideways on. She leafs through the paintings, until she reaches the sea one. She spends a long time studying it. She looks at me. ‘This one, this is very interesting. The viewpoint, and your use of colour, and the sense of flow. As if you were painting at the scene, very fast.’
I breathe out, relieved.
‘But it seems to be more about harmony than discord. Of itself, it’s very good, Freya. The quality of light and air is beautiful. Keep working like this. Do some more paintings. Start to think about how you might interpret the theme more explicitly.’ She flips back through some of the drawings, stops when she gets to the one with the dead bird. ‘This, for example. Could the hawk be part of the painting?
The element of discord in the scene? Or is that too obvious? Perhaps it could be connected in some way to the figure of the girl?’
‘I’ll think some more,’ I say.
Gabes isn’t in college, and although I’m not surprised, I miss him at the breaks. I text him, to see how he is, and he texts back, briefly. He’s bored, he says. When Miranda and I catch up at lunchtime and I describe my weekend I don’t mention Theo, because that makes everything too complicated, somehow, which means I leave out quite a lot of the detail. I wonder at myself, later: since when have I become so secretive?
Gabes is away from college all week. He texts me back when I send him texts, but he never phones or anything. So I’m not sure what to think.
Now it’s Friday, after school, and I’ve brought a mug of tea and my art notebooks outside to the garden table, partly because I want to make the most of this last bit of sunshine, and partly because the house seemed so empty and lonely when I got home. Neither Mum nor Dad is back from work, even though it’s after six.
All this week, I’ve thought about Gabes, but I’ve also been thinking about Theo. I know I shouldn’t: he’ll be going back to Oxford for the new term any day now, and it’s disloyal to Gabes, even if nothing has really happened between Gabes and me, yet. Perhaps that’s the trouble: we’re friends, but not really anything more than that, even though he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and we’ve been spending lots of time together, and I’ve been to his house twice . . . and Miranda says it’s blindingly obvious that he likes me. I think of us lying side by side on his bed, last Saturday evening. It was me who got up and left, wasn’t it? But he didn’t seem bothered. He went on listening to his music, as if he didn’t mind either way. And he still hasn’t phoned. He’s never the one to send a message first: he just replies to mine. But then, maybe he’s just in pain, and a bit out of it . . .
When I think of Theo, it’s different: exciting, and a bit wrong, as if instinctively I know it won’t be good for me, being with him.
