by Claire Sandy
‘Trouble happens around Zane.’ Clive was philosophical. ‘I’m used to footing the bill.’ A horn tooted outside. ‘That’ll be the guys who made the gate. They’re giving me an estimate for the repairs.’
‘Clive’s a fast worker,’ mused Evie, drawn to the kitchen by the smell of coffee. She looked around for Mike, who’d been absent when she awoke. Driven away, perhaps, by her primate legs? Perversely she’d decided to be proud of her hairy limbs; she might plait them later, tie in a few pretty bows. ‘How’d he get hold so quickly of the people who made the gate?’
‘Who knows?’ Shen was airy. ‘My husband works in mysterious ways.’
Just as well Clive didn’t seem to expect gratitude: Shen expected high levels of husbandly performance. To Evie, such can-do was impressive: she was accustomed to issuing minute, step-by-step instructions if she wanted Mike to pick up milk on his way home. She’d guided him through many a minimart on his phone, ignoring his tetchy this-is-not-my-job inflection.
A true alpha, Clive simply got on with it.
‘They reckon they’ll finish the repairs by the time we leave,’ said Clive, reappearing. ‘The owner’s not happy, but I’ve placated him and promised it’ll be good as new.’
He must have been up at dawn, making calls, thought Evie. And the expense . . .
‘Take it out of Zane’s allowance,’ said Shen, stirring a pot of porridge so worthy it was practically singing hymns. She tapped Miles’s pudgy hand as it crept towards the bowl of chocolate-coated rice puffs that Mabel was flooding with milk. ‘No, darling. You’ll outlive Mabel if you eat my breakfasts.’
‘Maybe,’ said Evie, grabbing the cereal box, ‘but he’ll be bored rigid during those long, extra, crispbread years.’
‘If,’ said Paula, at the threshold of the kitchen, ‘there’s any planet left for these poor orphans to inherit.’
‘What my wife means,’ said Jon, behind her, ‘is: Good morning, everybody.’
As the Wellcome Manor ad-hoc clan gathered for a lingering, multi-course breakfast, Mike pored over one of his stash of leaflets. ‘There’s a working seventeenth-century mill a few miles up the road.’
‘An actual mill? You. Are. Kidding.’ Evie’s irony whizzed over his head.
‘You can watch the water-wheel turn,’ he said, awestruck, as if watching a wheel turn was right up there with Disneyland for the modern child.
‘You can watch it turn.’ Shen poured out a white liquid containing no dairy, no fat and no fun. ‘I’ll power-walk around the grounds.’ She reached out to Fang, who was arriving in Elizabetta’s arms, as clean and wholesome as a scoop of ice cream. ‘Hello, you! Kiss your daddy!’
Clive bent for his cheek to be messily kissed, never taking his eyes from the financial pages. ‘Good morning, Baby-pops,’ he said absent-mindedly.
‘Gimme, gimme!’ Evie held out her hands. She’d anticipated much Fang-tickling and smooching on this break, but the child only appeared at set times, dressed in her best, her black comma of hair brushed fastidiously over her forehead.
The younger ones buzzed about, snatching food, pinching each other, complaining bitterly, exclaiming suddenly – the usual, in fact. Evie sensed Amber’s eagerness to join in, but when the child finally worked up the nerve, she mistimed it. Just as she leaned in to the little horde, the throng moved as one and stampeded, knocking her to the ground.
‘Man down! Man down!’ called Clive, as various hands dragged Amber back to her feet.
Amber, snivelling, darted behind Paula, who made no attempt to coax her daughter back to the others, but simply recited, ‘Shush’ and ‘There, there’. It was Tillie who put a gentle, many-ringed hand on her sister’s thin wrist and guided her to a stool.
‘Here,’ said Tillie. ‘Take some of my toast.’ She broke off a buttered corner, which Amber took gratefully, like a squirrel.
Mabel said, ‘We can play dead bodies later, if you like.’
Best not to ask, thought Evie, glad the little ones were back on-track.
‘Where’s—’ Before she even said his name, Evie saw him, leaning against the door jamb, watching them all. ‘Zane! Come and join us!’ She shoved Patch off the chair next to hers and patted it.
‘Naw. I’m not a morning person.’ Zane’s head dipped, his hands thrust into the pockets of his slashed jeans.
Among the dishevelled heads and yawning gobs, he was a thing of great beauty. Naturally polished and poised, he rivalled Shen for glamour. Was the melancholy in his huge brown eyes another affectation? Evie couldn’t tell. He certainly loved posing. Was the pout natural? The boy intrigued her.
Zane moved to let Scarlett enter, jumping out of the way as if electrocuted. She glided to the table and took a seat unobtrusively, reaching out a freckled hand to slide the cereal box towards her.
‘Nice of you to join us,’ said Mike.
‘Da-ad . . .’ said Scarlett, drawling so that her father could guesstimate how boring he was.
‘We’re nearly finished. How come you can’t get out of your pit to eat with the group?’
‘The group?’ laughed Scarlett. ‘What are you, Oasis?’ Chomping toast, she sneaked peeks at Zane, sizing up his boy-band posture. When she realized her mother was watching her watch him, she transferred her attention to the ends of her hair, studying them up close, as if wondrous things were to be found in her split ends.
Paula spoke hurriedly, compulsively. ‘Was anybody else kept awake by the sounds in the bushes last night?’ Her pasty face was hopeful.
‘God, no,’ said Clive. ‘I slept like a baby.’
‘Not like your baby,’ muttered Elizabetta, eyes firmly on the floor.
‘There’s nothing in the bushes.’ Shen gave Paula a look that the woman was too self-absorbed to notice. ‘You’re imagining things. We all get spooked at night.’
‘Mmm.’ Paula wasn’t pulling her weight with putting the children off the scent. The other adults instinctively knew better than to put ideas into their heads, which might take root and cause trouble later.
‘Let’s,’ shouted Mabel, ‘investigate the bushes!’
As they scampered off like a pack of small, pretty hyenas, Mike bellowed after them, ‘We leave for the seventeenth-century watermill in half an hour!’
‘God, Dad,’ said Scarlett. ‘As if.’
‘Who,’ shouted Evie after the children, ‘wants to explore the village?’
There was a chorus of yeses. Evie’s brainwave had won hands-down. ‘Sorry, darling.’ She laid a placatory hand on her husband’s arm. ‘It’s cos they know I’m a soft touch in a sweet shop.’
‘It’s just sad that they’re missing out on the water-wheel,’ said Mike, smiling bravely.
‘It’s sadder that you really do think that,’ smiled Evie.
‘Careful, you.’ Mike wagged a finger and lowered his voice. ‘Don’t make me spank you, Lucinda.’
‘You’d have to catch me fir— Oh!’ As Evie pulled away from Mike, she careered into Zane who was – could it be true? – clearing the table. ‘Sorry, Zane.’
‘Leave that,’ yapped Shen. ‘You’ll break them.’
The boy put down a smeared plate and loped out into the sun.
‘Why do teenagers all walk as if they’ve got the world on their shoulders?’ laughed Mike.
‘Because they believe they have.’ Evie watched the boy recede into the garden’s shimmering greens. ‘What I’d give to be that age again.’
‘Not me.’ Mike was terse, downing the last of his tea with a manly slurp and banging down the mug. ‘Jon!’ He hailed his partner in dull crime. ‘You’re up for the watermill, I bet!’
‘Sorry, no.’ Jon looked regretful.
In the right light, thought Evie, Jon could be handsome. He was standard-issue English bloke, tall and long-limbed, with thinning fair hair and blue eyes blinking behind his glasses. It was rarely the right light for Jon, however; he was too recessive, too keen on camouflage.
‘I’ve planned a long wal
k,’ he added, ‘A solitary one’ – just in case. He nodded his goodbyes and was gone, leaving Paula to stare after him like a mongrel tied up outside Lidl.
‘Come on.’ Evie took the woman’s hand and led Paula out to the terrace. ‘Where are these bushes?’
‘There.’ Paula pointed straight at a bed planted with wiggy shrubs of varying heights. Evie recognized conviction when she heard it; Paula was sure of very little, but about this she was certain.
‘Let’s take a look.’ As Evie guessed, Paula hung back, allowing her to take the lead. ‘Can’t see any footprints.’ Evie squatted, racking her brains, dredging up all the crime programmes she’d sat through. ‘No broken branches. No sign of activity.’ She straightened up. ‘Can you think why anybody would want to lurk in the bushes?’
‘To watch,’ said Paula immediately, her face bloated, as if full of backed-up tears.
‘To watch what?’
‘Me. Us.’ Paula shook her head. ‘I can’t make it sound sensible. Jon’s right, I shouldn’t try.’ She bent her mouth into a horrible shape that might pass for a smile in a horror movie. ‘You’re right. Nobody was here.’ She walked away, presumably aiming for a jaunty air, but attaining only demented.
Evie toed the dirt with her shoe. Avid watching of Scandi-noir had her half-expecting to find a crumpled cigarette packet or a clump of hair, but there was nothing, unless you counted one of Patch’s curiously circular droppings, and she’d rather not.
‘Come on, you lot, if you’re coming!’ Evie loved shouting for the children. They often complained that she shouted for them to come to the table when they were already seated. ‘Zane!’ she called, seeing the boy back away. ‘You joining us?’
‘Naw,’ said Zane. ‘I’ll hang around here.’
‘Hang around!’ Shen harassed the porridge pot under the hot tap. ‘That’s all the boy can do.’
It occurred to Evie that Clive had yet to speak directly to his son.
‘On the front step in ten mins!’ boomed Evie.
‘Mu-um,’ said Mabel, from nipple-height. ‘We’re right here.’
The Wellcome Manor brochure was airy about the village. It was ‘a few minutes’ walk’, apparently, down ‘pretty country lanes’. With four young children in an untidy crocodile, the lanes weren’t so much pretty as lethal. Country drivers put their pedals to the metal: cars zipped by so fast that the kids were flattened into the bushes.
‘How much longer?’ Mabel had been whingeing since they were still on the drive.
‘Nearly there.’ A handy maternal lie, this sprang easily to Evie’s lips. ‘Shall we sing something?’ Imagining a hearty chorus of something traditional, she was overruled; they preferred pop songs. A mere two lines into each suggestion and Evie had to yell, ‘Stop! Think of another one!’ Their innocent voices trilling about ‘ho’s’ and ‘grinding’ was too much to bear.
‘Is this it?’ Dan seemed disappointed with the village’s Norman church, picturesque green and quaint lamp posts.
‘What were you expecting?’ Evie smiled.
‘A lovely shopping centre.’ Dan was dejected. ‘These shops are all out in the weather, like the olden days.’
‘Can we feed the ducks?’ Mabel gurned desperately, her entire happiness suddenly dependent on duck-feeding.
Sweating in the rain jacket Paula had wrestled her into, ‘just in case’, Amber half-screamed, ‘Not the ducks!’, as if the feathered fatsos waddling around the village pond were man-eaters.
‘Maybe later.’
The proper, traditional sweet shop shooed away all thoughts of ducks or malls. Even Evie fell into a reverie, going up and down the shelves, savouring the names of the sugary mood-enhancers. Humbugs. Black Jacks. Sherbet Dip Dabs.
In charge of the spending money, Dan was ruthless. ‘You can’t afford a million chocolate mice,’ he told Mabel. ‘You’ve got fifty pee.’
Coiled in a jar, emanating calories and straightforward joy, the liquorice shoelaces pitched Evie down a time-tunnel.
She hadn’t believed that Mike, at the advanced age of twenty-one, had never eaten a liquorice lace. ‘You serious?’ she’d laughed, opening the crackling, cheap paper bag. ‘Here.’
Licking it uncertainly, he’d risked a tiny bite, then wolfed the whole lot down. ‘They’re fabulous.’
‘So you really never ate sweets, when you were little?’
In this blast from the past, Evie was all in black, a Nineties vixen in a bandage skirt, ruched top and clompy shoes. Mike was slim – God, so slim – and his hair was cropped, the better to show off the finely made bones of his face. His eyes . . . back then, staring into Mike’s clear, slightly hurt-looking eyes had been her favourite hobby.
That was the moment he’d opened up about his childhood. On the pavement, outside a newsagent’s. His shoulders lowered. His voice dropped to an urgent murmur.
When he’d finished talking, even though she was a gauche and fairly useless twenty-year-old, Evie had understood why the telling of his tale made Mike so emotional.
‘There’s no need to be ashamed.’ She had lifted his chin with her finger and kissed his lips. Supermodel-plump, they tasted of liquorice.
‘I like this village,’ said Dan now, after they’d taken in the sweet shop and the fudge shop. ‘Can we live here?’
‘We have to live near Daddy’s work,’ said Evie. ‘Ooh, look.’ She pointed to a bow-fronted shop window. ‘How about we pop in there?’
‘No!’ Dan backed away, a vampire confronted with a string of garlic. ‘You can’t make me!’
‘Oh, but I can.’
The girls needed no prompting. They loved clothes shops.
‘Come up, if you want, Zane.’
‘I don’t want.’
‘Fine.’ Scarlett giggled over at Tillie, who didn’t giggle back. They’d brought some of Wellcome Manor’s uncountable cushions from the house to the treehouse. They’d lit a candle, even though it was bright. Books were scattered. A bead necklace lay coiled like a cheerful snake.
‘He really, really wants to come up.’ Scarlett looked down at Zane meandering about the base of the tree, scuffing the grass with his spotless trainers.
‘Why doesn’t he, then?’ The newcomer didn’t seem to intrigue Tillie, although the fact that he intrigued Scarlett did intrigue her. ‘I mean, either climb up or sod off, yeah?’
The thought of Zane sodding off grazed a sharp edge over Scarlett’s good mood. She and Tillie hadn’t talked much, yet. They’d merely, under adult scrutiny, herded together. She knew that Tillie attended a sixth-form college in London, and had been at a mixed comp back in the vague wherever that none of the Browns talked about, before Amber’s arrival halfway through the spring term at St Ag’s. To Scarlett, marooned in a girls-only sixth form, Zane was an exotic specimen, a gem glittering in the dreary fog of this dreaded fortnight. ‘D’you think he’s hot?’
‘Do I what?’ Tillie made a horrified face. A slapped-in-the-face-with-a-wet-fish face. ‘I think he’s an idiot!’
‘Oh.’ Scarlett had hoped for common ground.
‘Why?’ Tillie looked interested at last; she sat up on her cushion, alert. ‘Do you? You do! You fancy him. Oh my God.’
‘I don’t,’ said Scarlett quickly. Partly because this was the kind of information only to be shared with your bestest bestie – and Tillie wasn’t even a worstie – but also because she wasn’t sure what she felt about Zane. The sight of him made her tingle; she couldn’t understand why everybody hadn’t shouted in unison, ‘Look at his amazing lips!’ the moment he arrived. She’d already started working out how to discover if he had a girlfriend. But she hadn’t really spoken to Zane yet. She needed to know more about him. Then she’d discover if he just made her tingle or if she wanted more. There was a difference. ‘I think he’s fit, though.’
‘Fit?’ Tillie wrinkled her nose. ‘He’s too busy looking in the mirror to notice us, Scar.’
Nobody ever called her that. Scarlett didn’t correct Til
lie, because she didn’t know how to do it without being rude, and the careful, clever girl was spikey; Scarlett sensed that one comment could turn Tillie off for good. And Scarlett needed Tillie; two weeks was soooooo long to be surrounded by the hideously old and the ludicrously young. So she put up with her new nickname, even though it brought back memories she successfully suppressed.
Scar.
The treehouse trembled. Zane was climbing the rickety rope ladder.
‘It looks lovely on you, Dan.’ Evie was firm, ignoring the look on the face sticking out of the Breton-striped hoodie. ‘We’ll take it.’
The small pile of clothing on the counter was unnecessary and would have to be smuggled past Mike, but Evie found that spending twenty-four hours a day in the presence of Shen and her limitless wardrobe had affected her. The contrast between Miles’s pristine blue dungarees and Dan’s chain-store jeans was more apparent out here in the countryside, without other kids to bring down the mean average. A few pertinent, pricey purchases in this chichi boutique would narrow the gap.
‘I love my new dress.’ Mabel swished the crisp floral cotton, her Crocs clattering on the shop floorboards. ‘Don’t you wish you had a new dress, Amber?’
‘Mm-hmm.’ Amber nodded, consoling herself with a Dip Dab.
‘I can’t buy you clothes without your mummy’s permission,’ said Evie, in a gentle voice. This child was like tissue paper: she might tear, if handled roughly. ‘But I can buy you this.’ She popped a hairband, complete with fabric flower, onto Amber’s head.
‘Oh, it’s gorgeouth!’ The little girl wriggled happily.
‘Can I have one?’ Mabel was nothing if not predictable.
‘No, that’s Amber’s special thing,’ said Evie.
‘You can lend it,’ said Amber.
‘You’re a very kind woman,’ said Mabel. ‘I wish I wore glasses.’
As Evie pixelated the total and punched in her PIN number, she asked, ‘Who’s hungry?’
