Chapter 4 #3
It was the kind of box that had moved around with me ever since I’d left Scarnbrook, shoved into the corners of understairs cupboards alongside the never-used steam cleaner that had been bought on a wine-induced whim after watching soothing late-night infomercials.
I wrapped myself in my dressing gown, sat on the floor and dragged it over to have another rifle of its contents.
It was a hodgepodge collection of late-nineties tweenage memorabilia that my parents had hastily scooped up from my bedroom when they’d moved out of our Scarnbrook home not long after Livvie’s funeral.
Among yellowed Point Horror and Sweet Valley High books, a bottle of Exclamation perfume (‘make a statement without saying a word!’), chipped ornaments from family holidays to the Balearics and a sealed sandwich bag of shrivelled bath pearls, I discovered an old snow globe.
I gave it a little shake and watched as the artificial flakes drifted downwards through the murkiness of the yellowing glass.
I could just about make out Tower Bridge nestling amidst the floating glitter.
Annoyingly, it played a plinky-plonky version of ‘London Bridge is Falling Down’ when you twisted its crank.
The mismatching of the iconic landmark with a song that related to a completely different bridge grated, but the tune did bring back memories of a December trip to London to visit Auntie Sandra back when we were kids.
She’d taken the three of us to Hamleys and had let us choose anything we wanted for our Christmas presents, which had basically been the best moment of our lives up until that point.
Not wanting to take advantage, I’d selected the modest snow globe as a nice memento of a happy winter weekend.
Typically, Livvie had absolutely taken advantage and – much to my parents’ dismay – had chosen one of those giant floor pianos, as popularised by the film Big .
The only room large enough for it at home had been the garage.
She used to spend hours in there, running up and down the light-up keys in a surprisingly tuneful way.
I had no idea what had happened to it when they decided to sell up.
From what I remembered, Josh had chosen a Formula One quiz book.
I carried the dusty snow globe into the living room and put it on the mantelpiece, hoping it might add an extra element of festive magic to the place. Nope.
I returned to my room and unscrewed the lid of an ancient kiwi fruit lip balm from The Body Shop.
I took a big sniff, the familiar but long-forgotten aroma immediately transporting me back to school corridors and dashing through the gauntlet of communal showers after PE.
Teenage sleepovers and hours-long phone calls behind the curtain in the dining room, fingers occupied by a curly cord.
Friendship dramas – usually with Elle at the heart of them – and Tom Brinton.
Ah, Tom Brinton – the cool boy a quiet girl like me should never have had a crush on, but absolutely did.
It’s fair to say I’d been pretty smitten with Tom Brinton for almost the entirety of my time at Scarnbrook Community School. Even today, I still dreamt about a fictionalised adult version of him every so often, which was testament to the depth of my formative crush.
I screwed the lid back onto the ancient lip balm, amazed at the flurry of memories a simple sniff had triggered. I was surprised at how many of them were happy ones.
I placed the pot in my dressing-gown pocket and climbed up onto my bed, wrapping myself in the covers as more and more memories broke through the surface.
I thought about the last normal time I’d been in Scarnbrook: I’d been in the car with my dad on a drizzly September morning, with a kettle on my lap and a boot full of clothes and crockery, on my way to Cardiff, my mum crying as she faded into the distance in the rear-view mirror.
I remembered having to push down the emotional bubble in my own teenage throat.
Because, the truth was, I’d never wanted to move away.
I’d have been perfectly happy to stay in Scarnbrook for the rest of my life, just as my parents had intended to do themselves.
But Elle had convinced me that three short years at a university just forty-five minutes up the M5 wouldn’t do any harm, so off I went.
Little did I know that I was unwittingly severing my bond with Scarnbrook forever.
Because the next and most recent time I’d been in Scarnbrook, Livvie was gone and everything had changed. And instead of arriving in a place where I’d always felt nothing but ease and comfort, I returned to find nothing but a raw atmosphere of sickening shock that had pervaded the entire village.
I unscrewed the lip-balm lid once more and took another inhale from my horizontal position, trying to disperse the sad memories with the ancient fragrance.
When it came to writing this article, I had no idea what to do for the best – and I was annoyed at myself for even considering the possibility of going back to Scarnbrook.
All this pain was in the past. Wasn’t that where it belonged?