Chapter Later that day
Later that day
As I made my sluggish walk up our gravel driveway, I noticed the crows gathered high in one of the trees encircling our front lawn.
I walked across to the low wall separating the garden from the road to see the food – a handful of mixed berries and pumpkin seeds – I’d put out that morning gone, replaced with an electric-blue ring pull, a rubber band and a shard of broken china.
‘Thanks, guys,’ I said, taking the offered gifts.
I’ve got quite the collection now – I keep it all in a shoebox in my bedroom.
Paperclips, rocks, buttons, sweet wrappers, Biro lids, broken zips, bits of old Lego and everything in between.
Today’s gesture was enough to make me cry all over again.
I cry a lot lately, but I only let the crows see, nobody else.
Definitely not Mum. She didn’t need any more stress.
I read this thing online about stress and the acceleration of tumour growth in cancer patients.
No wonder she’s dying with me as her daughter. Each one of those tumours was probably one of my misdemeanours. A shoplifted Creme Egg here, a football pitch tantrum there.
I ripped up the clump of dandelions growing beside the back door, wiped my cheeks and took a few deep breaths on the doorstep before I walked in. I always had to creep in case she was in bed. She was awake anyway, sitting in the lounge in front of the mid-afternoon news.
‘Hiya,’ I said breezily as my house rabbit Maddox hopped down from the bottom stair where he always waited for me. I placed the dandelion bunch on the carpet. He nibbled one corner then hopped outside through the cat flap.
‘Hello, darling.’ Mum lifted her head from the back of the armchair.
She had her beanie on today. Wiggy had been relegated to the newel post at the bottom of the stairs; had been since she stopped her chemo.
Many a time it got caught up in my coat and leapt out of my sleeve when I’d been at school or at Chloe’s.
She said she didn’t see the point of it anymore, seeing as she never left the house. ‘You’re home early?’
‘Oh, there was a fire at school – just in the kitchens – but there was a bit of smoke so the head thought it best to close for the afternoon.’
It never ceased to amaze me how quickly a lie would just shoot out of my mouth when I needed it. A precision-cut, brilliance-grade porky pie; flawless to the naked eye, but pure fiction under pressure.
‘What about the boarders?’
‘Dunno. They’re gonna let them burn, I guess.’
I made a swift exit to the kitchen to grab a drink. I didn’t think she’d follow me, but she did.
‘This is because of your football coach, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘What?’ I said, swigging my Diet Coke but not closing the fridge door so I could hide behind it. ‘How do you know?’
‘Mr Christensen rang me about the two detectives who came to school. And it was on the news.’
‘The main news?’
‘Yes.’ From the strained look on her face I could tell it hurt her brain to speak. She leant against the kitchen island but didn’t attempt to sit down. ‘You weren’t going to tell me, were you?’
‘Eventually. Shall I do you some scrambled egg?’
‘Not just now, Dolly.’
I used to like it when she called me Dolly or Dolly Bird.
But these days, she did it all the more because she knew she wouldn’t have many more occasions where she could.
There was a heavy air between us, full of unspoken words that were dancing there, right there on the kitchen island between us, but we stood on opposite sides staring into space, as I swigged and burped and she breathed heavily.
‘You look … clean,’ I said. ‘Did Sue give you a bath?’
‘Shower,’ she said, finally taking a seat on one of the breakfast stools.
‘I bet you feel better for it.’
‘Yeah,’ she said, even though I’d learned to translate her responses and that ‘Yeah’ meant ‘No’.
‘Why don’t you go and sit in your chair and I’ll make you scrambled egg? You can always leave it if you don’t like it.’
‘Okay.’ She slid off the stool and scuffed out. As she got to the doorway, she turned round and held the frame. ‘You didn’t go to Anning Court last night, did you?’
‘No. Stop looking at me like that.’ As much as the voice in my head was telling me to deescalate this now, the look on her face irked me. I slammed the fridge door which rattled the antique china on her dresser out in the hall.
‘I’m not accusing you of anything, sweetheart.’
‘Yes, you are. It’s all you ever do – you fear I’m going to turn out just like her. I’m not, Mum, and it’s about time you believed me.’
She looked so small; so shrivelled and beaten down. I spat out an apology quicker than I could mean it.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t mean to snap.’
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘If you say you didn’t go near his house, I believe you. Our quiz is on in a minute.’ She shuffled back across the hallway and took up her spot in the armchair again.
I followed her in and tucked the blanket around her in the chair where it had fallen down. I noticed multiple packets of ibuprofen and paracetamol on her lap table. ‘Mum, how many of these have you had today?’
She looked up at me, but it seemed that her eyes hurt from the light. ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ she croaked, the line in the centre of her forehead more pronounced than I’d ever seen it. ‘They don’t touch it anyway.’
‘What about some grapefruit?’ I suggested, more of a last-ditch attempt to get her to digest something.
The doctor said she wasn’t allowed it as it interfered with her chemo, but now that had stopped I didn’t see the harm.
After rooting through the cupboards for an interminable length of time, I finally found some just in-date grapefruit segments in fruit juice and poured the contents into a bowl off the dresser in the hall. That was wrong, of course.
‘Why are you using my best china?’ she said.
I shrugged. ‘Why not? What are you saving it for?’
She pecked at the segments and I sat on the sofa, kicking my school shoes off and trying to get invested in some property development programme where a couple had severely underestimated their two-million-pound budget to renovate an old piggery into a gym.
‘Why don’t you change out of your uniform and hang it up?’ Mum muttered as our quiz sprang to life. ‘You’ll get it all creased.’
‘I’ll do it in a minute.’
We sat in front of the TV in our six-bedroom house, at least four rooms of which neither of us had set foot in for the past year.
She got a question right about some swimmer who won all these Olympic swimming golds in 1972 and her face lit up.
Her smiles were so few and far between that I tried to memorise it.
A smile can make you forget how bad things are sometimes.
We used to be happy all the time. When it was just me and her. And for the last six years, it had been.
We’d moved seven times. I was five when we moved out of the Cotswolds, and from there we went to central London when Mum became a newspaper editor at one of the broadsheets.
When I was eight, she moved us out to Henley, and at ten – after you-know-who left – the press hounded us so much we fled to Tenerife to live with Nana and Grump.
Nana homeschooled me for a bit. When we came back to the UK for Mum’s new job at the Guardian, we hopscotched from Hertfordshire to Chigwell to Hampstead before the paps found us again, and Mum decided to finally settle in Devon and work mainly from home – she kind of had to; cancer clung to her like rotten egg.
I liked it here though. The Christmas tree looked amazing in the bay window in the lounge; we’d go and cut our own from the farm down the road, and I had my crows and Maddox and the mice.
I wanted to stay. I wanted Chloe to move in so we could be a family.
But then I remembered; I’m sixteen, still a kid, and nothing stays mine for long.
‘Heather said I have to go to Brisbane with the Thompsons.’
I threw glances at Mum, sitting in the chair like an ancient old crone, even though she’d only just turned fifty-four, ensconced in her plush faux-fur throw, bald as a new chick in a warm pink nest. Her eyes were fixed on the TV.
‘Who sang “Castle on a Cloud” in Les Mis, Ivy? You know that one.’
‘Cosette. Heather said I have to go to Brisbane with the Thompsons, Mum.’ I wasn’t going to let her get away with not answering me.
‘Not now, Ivy. Our quiz is on.’
‘It’s a repeat.’
‘Melissa’s changed her name now – it’s Thompson-Pierce. She added Larry’s name to hers some time ago.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘Just for information. You didn’t actually ask a question.’
‘If I go out there, can I be a Thompson?’
She looked at me. ‘You want to be a Thompson?’
‘Yeah. Well, it was my dad’s name, wasn’t it? Do you mind?’
She smiled. For a flash, I thought it signalled everything was okay. ‘Of course I don’t. You should have AJ’s name. We’ll ask Heather about it. I don’t know what we’d do without her. She’s been like another mum to you.’
‘I already have another mum.’
I saw her face fall as one contestant walked away with five thousand pounds.
I got my phone out and flicked to my bookmarks. ‘I looked up the suburb where the Thompsons live,’ I said. ‘It has a really bad crime rate.’
‘No, it doesn’t.’
‘I swear it’s true. And the current figures show they’re twelve per cent up on last year’s for crime in the area. It’s only moderately safe to walk around after dark if you’re a woman …’
‘Delaney’s Creek is a safe area,’ she said. ‘I know all about it.’
I scrolled down. ‘Common assault was up thirty-four per cent in the last six months alone, fuelled by drugs. Massive drug problem. I could get in with the wrong crowd. I would get in with the wrong crowd …’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘Burglary, murder, armed robbery. There was a story just last week of this bloke who lived very close to Delaney’s Creek who was caught with his mother’s head in the fridge.’
‘I read that headline as well,’ she said. ‘It was Florida.’