Chapter 25
Poppy: The Present Day
I leave Joe to his nap, and I walk down the stairs – still rickety, still made of old floorboards that seem to wheeze beneath your feet – and into the living room.
The ceiling is low and criss-crossed with dark wooden beams, and Joe will undoubtedly spend his whole time here having to duck, or rubbing the bumps on his head.
One of the walls, which used to be covered in family photos, is now strangely bare, the outlines of old frames and the vivid patches of colour where they used to be hanging there like ghostly reminders.
I find Rose staring at the flat-screen telly, even though it’s not on. She is lugging two boxes down from the table, and has tied her hair up into a huge ponytail. I recognise the look on her face – it is the one that means business.
‘There’s a lot to do,’ she says, not even looking at me. ‘We’d better get started.’
She sounds bossy, and a bit rude, and despite the fact that I understand how hard this is for her, for both of us, it still makes me bristle.
It’s the tone she sometimes used when we were kids, and she was trying to get me to revise when I wanted to go out; or when Mum had left us chores to do while she was working, and I made excuses not to do them.
I nod, and deliberately take an absolute age getting the papers Lewis gave me out of my bag. I take even longer unfolding them, and know I am being ridiculous – but, somehow, I can’t help myself.
The boxes are sitting at her feet, and looking at them makes me smile, no matter how sad I feel.
They’re big, old-fashioned wooden crates, one decorated with beautifully painted poppies, one with roses.
The flowers are all red and white against a black background, twining green leaves and draping petals and curling stems blending in with each other to create a floral meltdown.
‘I remember those …’ I say, reaching out to touch the wooden sides. ‘Our old Special Things Boxes.’
Mum had given us one each when we were little, after spending hours painting them.
She told us they were for us to keep precious items in, mementos for the future.
I suppose she had in mind school prizes and cherished artworks and baby clothes, but we were too immature to understand that, and instead used them as toy boxes.
They’d been stashed in the Hideous Extension, crammed with old Barbie dolls and dried-up Play-Doh and Monopoly with all the hotels missing.
Lost to us, as we got on with our adult lives, but clearly not forgotten. It’s only now, as I stare at them both, that I realise how much time and effort she’d put into the painting. How pretty they are. How much love she’d put into them. And how much we’d taken it all for granted.
‘Yep,’ says Rose, her tone still brisk. ‘So do I. Shall we?’
‘Okay,’ I say, looking at the index. ‘It says here that we start with “A” – fair enough – and that A is a letter, which we’ll find in the Rose box. Let’s get on with it, shall we?’