Chapter 16
Things That Have Bloody Annoyed Me This Morning:
People who take forever to get to the point of what they’re saying – e.g., Larry. Oh just get on with it, you slow fuck! Chances are I won’t care what you’re talking about anyway.
When the Australians all talk over each other and the TV is on in the background.
Jordy touching my hair unrequested.
The sound of any of them sniffing, chewing or laughing.
Rhiannon Lewis, for not kidnapping me when she had the chance.
All night long, that sentence from Rhiannon’s message whirlpooled around and around in my head. Not the thing she said about the danger – the thing she said about writing to me:
I tried writing to you a few times (about a thousand times actually) but I never heard back so chances are Claudia never passed them on to you.
A thousand times, she said. Unless that was an exaggeration and it all boiled down to a couple of birthday cards and a letter.
Them, she’d said. More than once she had written.
I think if I was sending cards or letters to someone who never wrote back, I’d give up eventually.
But by ‘thousands’ it implied she never had.
You would think that even by accident, one might have got through.
As fast as Claudia might have tried stuffing them back up the chimney or barricading the letterbox, I would have seen one or two.
But I didn’t. Not one, in all these years.
I woke up mega early, before the sun, with the Australians all snoring soundly in their beds and my rabbit on my lap, and continued the final book in the Sweetpea series, Book Five. I read it right to the end. And everything fell into place.
I read how my Aunt Seren had been accidentally shot by the detective who was trying to catch Rhiannon, Nnedi Géricault.
I read how Rhiannon didn’t kidnap me but befriended Detective Géricault, her sworn enemy, and how for a while they worked together to bring down known paedophiles across continents on the dark web.
I read how Rafael crossed the same continents just to be with her.
I read how she didn’t kill a single person in that final instalment.
I read the end, where Rhiannon is holding a three-month-old baby boy.
I sat up bolt upright on my bed when I got to that bit.
… I felt this weight on my chest: a warm, spongey sort of weight. I opened the other eye to see my baby son lying on my chest. We lay there together, me and him, as Raf left us to go make the coffee.
‘Morning, sunshine,’ I whispered, kissing that addictive little head. His fluffy hairs tickled my chin. There’s no denying that smile of his or the big brown eyes or that same tuft of hair Raf has at the base of his neck. They even have the same eyebrows.
‘He must be real,’ I whispered to my bedroom air.
‘He must be – it’s right here. Why would she make that up?
’ Second-best-case scenario – that he was somewhere in Thailand with a nice family bringing him up, probably not even knowing who his real parents were.
Best-case scenario – that Rafael was still alive, like Freddie suspected, and that he and my brother were together, waiting for me.
‘Can you stop looking so much like your daddy today, please? Jesus – did my genes even put up a fight? I carried you for nine months. The least you could do is take after me in some way. But not every way.’
Melissa and her clan were going on a trip to Longleat Safari Park and then a tour of Georgian Bath as Heather had rented them a car for the duration.
They invited me along but I didn’t really feel like getting eaten by lions and strolling around a city where Jane Austen once shat her pantaloons so I said I had plans to see friends.
They weren’t to know I didn’t have any friends.
Melissa offered to cook ‘a full brekky’ that morning, paying no mind to my vegetarianism whatsoever, despite having been told three times I didn’t eat meat, and that included lard, sausages and bacon. I hated sitting down to meals with them. I could hear every gulp of food going down their scrags.
‘What are you doing with these friends of yours today then, Ive?’ she asked, chewing her way through a fatty tangle of egg-dipped streaky bacon.
‘Just going into town, hanging out. The usual.’
‘You could bring your mates with us. Family outing,’ suggested Jordy, ploughing through a mountain of scrambled egg.
‘No, they don’t like … stately homes,’ I said. ‘And Chloe gets car sick on long journeys so it’s best she stays home.’
‘No rain forecast,’ said Larry, sipping his tea and scrolling the local weather on his phone. ‘Better than being stuck in here in the middle of woop woop with nothing to do.’
‘I have plans.’
‘I wish you’d cheer up,’ sighed Melissa.
A red mist floated down. ‘About what?’
‘What do you mean “about what”?’ she countered.
‘Come on, guys, don’t start again,’ sighed Larry, sipping his coffee.
‘No, I meant it, what do I have to cheer up about? [To Larry] I saw you again this morning, trying to clap away my crows. [To Melissa] You keep putting poison down for my mice, and I expect I’ll come home tomorrow and find Maddox’s ears sticking out the cooking pot.
Oh, and I almost forgot, my mum and dad are still dead.
You’re right, Melissa. I should cheer the fuck up. ’
‘You’re nothing like your dad in temperament, are you?’ she sighed.
‘What?’
‘You could say anything to our Austin, he’d never get mad. He’d never snap like this. And he was never miserable, was he, Larry? Little ray of sunshine.’
Larry shrugged, deer-in-the-lights. ‘I didn’t know him for long, love—’
‘—you must get that from her – the bitch,’ Melissa spat.
‘Don’t call my mother that.’
‘I didn’t mean Claude – I meant … the other one. Her.’
‘You mean Rhiannon.’
Melissa’s fork clattered onto her plate. ‘Don’t you dare say that name in front of me, girl.’ Her wrinkled lips had puckered and her eyes had gone black.
Jordy, a peacemaker, cut in. ‘It might be an idea, if you’re ready, Ivy, to start sorting through Claudia’s stuff. Heather said she was gonna talk to you about putting some antiques into a sale in town, didn’t she?’
‘Yeah.’ Me and Melissa were staring each other out by this point, neither of us blinking.
‘Do you want to make a start before we go out? Or do you want to go through it all by yourself? I’m easy.’
I looked around the table. Only Jordy met my eyes. ‘That’d be nice, thanks.’
Melissa started clearing plates and stacking cups not long after that and didn’t say one more word to me. She didn’t need to. I could tell by the look in her eyes. It said, You’re not him, and you never will be.
Jordy sat on a cushion on the garage floor, sorting through Christmas decs.
‘That can all go,’ I told them.
‘What, your Chrissy decs? Won’t you want them?’
‘Keep the angel maybe. Everything else can go to the tip.’
‘There’s boxes of DVDs here too.’
‘They’re all Mitch’s. They can go to the charity shop. Just write it on the box and I’ll organise a collection at some point.’
Jordy began taping up and labelling the boxes as I instructed, but soon became perturbed by the amount of stuff I was just willing to bin.
‘Got your mum’s journalism certificates here.’
‘Recycle.’
‘You should keep some of ’em. They’re her special awards and stuff.’
‘They’re not my awards, are they? Bin ’em.’
I noticed Jordy didn’t do as I’d asked and taped them up and labelled them, setting them aside behind my Wendy house and paint pots.
‘You’re not in the mood for this, are ya?’
‘Not really, but there’s never going to be a good time to do it.’
‘Are you looking forward to coming to Oz?’
‘No. I don’t want to go anywhere if I’m honest.’
‘How come?’
‘Cos I live here. And you’re all strangers. And your stepmum hates me.’
‘She doesn’t hate you. She’ll be apples soon enough. She just needs a bit of time to get to know you, and you her.’
‘I don’t want to get to know her. She stinks of cigarettes. And her upper lip’s all spiky. And she has yellow teeth.’
‘Just like Maddox,’ Jordy laughed.
I forced a smile. ‘She doesn’t want me, Jordy. I can see it in her eyes; the way your dad looks at me too. I’m not their sort of people. I’m not anyone’s sort of people. I just tend to put people off. Like Rhiannon.’
Jordy set aside a box of old horse-riding rosettes of Mum’s from when she was a kid and started polishing a small trophy with an old yellow duster. ‘Wanna know where she met my dad? A treatment centre for addicts.’
‘Drug addicts?’
‘Nah, all kinds of addicts. Melissa’s an alcoholic and Dad’s problem is gambling.
They’re in recovery. He’s had a couple of daft relapses, the spoonhead, but Mel’s doing all right.
Well, she was. I’m worried this TV interview with Rhiannon’s gonna tip her back into it.
It’s everywhere – all over the papers, magazines, that bloody advert keeps coming on—’
‘How long ago did they meet, her and Larry?’
‘They’re about to celebrate their fifteenth wedding anniversary so about seventeen years ago.’
‘How old were you?’
‘I was four. My real mum walked out so Dad took me on. But he was shit with money – still is. That’s why his eyes lit up when he walked through your front door.’
‘So that’s why they’ve got debts,’ I said. ‘I heard them talking. Is that why they offered to look after me? Cos of the money?’
Jordy looked me straight in the eye. ‘Honestly? Maybe. But I think Mel just wants AJ back, in whatever form. She doesn’t see you as a human girl with your own brain or your own thoughts and feelings. You’re just AJ’s photocopy. And I think maybe she resents that you’re not him.’
I nodded. ‘That makes sense. Nobody really “wants” me. I’m guilty by association. A nothing. A freak.’ I wished I hadn’t said it the second it came out of my mouth cos I realise how pathetic it sounded.
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘It’s true. I’m sick of being a fucking reject.’ I threw down an old horse-riding trophy of Mum’s and it made a satisfying clang on the floor.