Chapter 16 #2
Jordy brushed their hands of dust and stood up, leaning on the ladder to the garage loft.
‘Back where I come from, South Island, there’s these two graves, out on the back roads where no one goes.
They’ve been there since the Gold Rush; donkey’s years.
A lot of men died going there trying to find gold … ’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, not really listening if I’m being honest. I was too interested in the box of Mitch’s old rubbish he’d left behind – old bank cards, out-of-date gym membership cards, Spurs memorabilia (which I couldn’t bin any faster), old wallets, souvenirs, alcohol miniatures, and a Swiss Army knife.
I pulled out the corkscrew and then the scissors. Then the knife …
‘… anyway, this one guy died and nobody knew who he was. Rumour was that he’d drowned in the river looking for gold and the river had dried up.
Died with no name. No mourners, nothing.
And this guy who found him, I forget his fuckin’ name now, but anyway he made sure the rando guy had a grave; he even dug the hole.
Put a little marker on it. And when the time came to put a name on the marker, he carved “Somebody’s Darling Lies Buried Here”.
It became a tourist attraction. And before the guy himself died, he asked to be buried next to Somebody’s Darling, so he wouldn’t be on his own anymore. ’
I pocketed the Swiss Army knife in my dungarees. ‘Why are you telling me this? We weren’t talking about some random dead bloke in a riverbed, were we?’
‘Because everyone is somebody’s darling, Ivy. So what you just said doesn’t add up at all. Your mum – Claudia – she wanted you. She couldn’t help getting cancer. And your dad – AJ – he wanted you so much.’
‘How do you know? You were only four when your dad met his mum. And you said at dinner you and your dad moved in just a few months before AJ went abroad.’
‘It’s true,’ they replied. ‘Mel met my dad not long before AJ left for England. But Mel talks about him all the time. Got photos of him all over the house. She knows how much AJ wanted kids. And what a good father he’d have been to ’em.
She’s just consumed with Rhiannon right now, cos of how much you look like her.
But you look like him too. You’re like killer and killed – it freaks her the fuck out. ’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘No, I know you can’t. Come on, let’s get clearing a few more boxes, yeah? Let’s make three piles on the lawn – re-use, refuse and recycle …’
Jordy and I spent a pleasant two hours lugging boxes and bags out onto the lawn into their respective piles.
We worked our butts off until half the garage was clear and the other half we could at least see what was left and where it belonged.
Then it was time for them to go off on their day out.
Melissa had packed a picnic and I saw them all off at the car.
‘Sure you won’t come?’ asked Melissa as Larry started up the engine.
‘No. Thanks for asking though.’ I attempted a smile. She smiled too and her face seemed to soften out its wrinkles like it hadn’t before.
As I was hauling the last box of childhood cuddlies out to the lawn bound for the charity van, a shoebox, tightly taped up, fell down from one of the shelves we had disturbed and bled out its contents all over the dusty floor. It was just labelled ‘IVY’.
The box had been stuffed with pieces of paper and card, edges curling with age.
The faint scent of ink and old paper rose up as I sifted through them.
Letters and cards, all addressed to me. I lifted a letter out, still in its envelope and the address was our old place in Hampstead.
Another was addressed to our place in Henley, and another one here.
Several of them had been sent to Granny and Grump’s place in Tenerife while we had stayed with them.
Tears blurred my sight as I traced snippets of words from each one.
Rafael had written his own little notes on some of the letters and birthday cards – some in Spanish, some in English.
My Spanish was solid so I could read them all without needing a translation.
I hope you are well. Please know that I am always with you.
You’re always in our hearts, Ivy, please don’t ever forget that.
Despite what we’ve done, and wherever we end up, please know that we love you and that your mom only had your best interests at heart.
One of them from him read: Even though I never met you, I think of you as my daughter. I hope we can meet some day, mi hermosa.
A warmth spread through my chest. I remembered what one of Freddie Litton-Cheney’s books had said – that Rafael had offered to go with Rhiannon to England and help kidnap me, just before he got shot.
Let’s go get our little girl. That’s what he’d said. Our little girl. Rafael wanted me. Rafael wanted to be my dad.
And then my chest tightened and all warmth was squeezed out and in its place grew a coldness, like cracks appearing in ice: Rafael was dead, just like AJ.
Rhiannon had killed him too. There had been no sign of him anywhere for the last five years.
Freddie didn’t think Rafael was dead at all – he believed that it was just a rumour Rhiannon and he had cooked up to protect him from arrest and save their little boy.
That little boy being my brother.
The frustration of not knowing what was true was crushing.
‘Fuck!’ I shouted, picking up my mum’s horse-riding trophy again and yeeting it across the garage where it smashed against the wall and snapped in two pieces – cup and base. I had to know. And the only person who would know for sure what had happened to them both was Rhiannon.
I dug deeper into the box pulling out more and more letters and cards, each one a tiny piece of a puzzle I didn’t know I needed to put together.
A photograph I hadn’t seen before of Claudia, holding me in the hospital, just after Rhiannon had left me.
Someone had taken it – Heather? – and Claudia was looking down at me like I was the most precious jewel in the world.
My adoption certificate and all the paperwork were in a brown envelope underneath.
I sifted through the rest of the correspondence from Rhiannon – some letters had been opened; some were still sealed.
The cards spanned my entire childhood – from You Are One Today! Today You Are a Teenager! and beyond.
‘Why didn’t you tell me she’d written to me?! Why didn’t you tell me you’d kept it all?’
I sat there, raking through my memories of Mum, searching for some hint, some memory, anything of her telling me this was all here but I couldn’t find any.
If Mum kept all these letters from me, she must have had her reasons.
I guess they were bound up with being a mum, and an adoptive mum at that; something I couldn’t possibly understand.
She knew I’d need to see these someday, but maybe she couldn’t bear to show me herself.
I knew one thing for certain: Rhiannon really did love me and she’d left me with the best person in the world, knowing that she was one of the worst. I scrolled my phone for clues and found the rumours about Rafael being alive in an aged Reddit thread but it led me into a swirl of conjecture and argument and nowhere else. A dead end all round.
I closed the garage and headed back inside the house with the shoebox.
Just by the front door I noticed a patch of dandelion leaves had sprung up so I picked them for Maddox.
I called him at the bottom stair – he usually poked his head through the banisters and hopped down to greet me but on this occasion he didn’t.
No little head peeking through, no happy hop down for his treat.
I looked all over the house, outside on the lawn, in his run, his hutch, all his usual places, but there was no sign of him whatsoever.
Then I noticed the front gate was still open from when the Thompson-Pierces had sped off to Longleat.
‘Shit!’ I cried out, running to the top of the driveway to check the road.
I looked left and right, scanned the endless grey stretch and bordering trees as far as I could see, but there was nothing but a chewed-up cabbage leaf left in the middle of the road.
Maddox had been here, briefly, but then he’d gone.