Chapter 27
By the time I’d driven what should have taken ninety minutes through Friday traffic with my nephews and nieces, I was ready to turn around and take them back again, confess to Lacey she’d been right all these years; I had no idea how to look after these children and had better not start trying now.
The saving grace was Bronte, who at the last minute had decided to join us. She made some excuse about Zendon playing in a football tournament all weekend, but I suspected either she didn’t trust me to handle her siblings, or her mum didn’t, and had bribed her to come too.
Lennon announced he was ‘fizzy’ the moment we left the city boundary, insisting a McDonald’s, or possibly a pizza, would settle him down.
‘Hmmm, ultra-processed junk food crammed with additives, fat and sugar? I’m going to disagree with you on that one.’
He then proceeded to prove how fizzy he was, by repeatedly kicking the back of my seat and pinching and punching his brother beside him, then winding down the window to lean out as far as he could on the motorway while screaming obscenities into the wind.
Meanwhile, Kaylynn was wailing because she’d forgotten her bunny.
Once I explained he was in her bag in the boot, she cried because he was lonely in the boot and missing Mummy and scared because he didn’t know where they were going and he hated Auntie Alex’s house and Lennon was making her head hurt.
Coincidentally, McDonald’s and pizza were the only cure for her headache.
Harley coped with being wedged in between this ruckus by singing, very loudly, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious over and over again. Not the song, just that one word.
I careened off the motorway into the first services we passed and screeched to a stop in the car park.
‘Yay, Burger King!’ Lennon shouted, the window down again.
‘We aren’t stopping for food, we’re stopping so we can swap places,’ I said, unbuckling my seatbelt as quickly as possible, which, due to the stress-induced tremors, was nowhere near quick enough to prevent Lennon scrambling out of the back seat and sprinting across the busy car park.
Not, as I was expecting, in the direction of the building housing all the food outlets. This boy simply ran for the hills.
‘I’ll go, you stay with the others,’ Bronte said, grabbing a KitKat out of her bag and hightailing it after him.
I found the car manual in the glove compartment and hunted for ‘child locks’, double- and triple-checking I had clicked both them and the window locks on before opening the boot to dig out Kaylynn’s bunny and moving Harley into the front seat.
When Bronte returned about fifteen minutes later, dusk was falling. To my relief, Lennon was with her, face beaming, cheeks rosy from his adventure.
‘There’s like this massive big crater in the ground over there,’ he said excitedly as Bronte strapped him in. ‘It’s full of rocks and metal robots and I think I saw a dead body!’
‘What?’ Harley twisted around. ‘I want to see robots and a dead body.’
‘Yeah, it was actually an old mannequin, so I wouldn’t stress about it,’ Bronte said, clambering over Kaylynn and squeezing into the middle seat.
‘I want to see a body!’ Harley screamed, clenching his fists and banging his trainers into the dashboard.
And so we continued, on what had to be the longest two hours of my life.
Only forty-six hours until I would take them back, I worked out while sitting in a queue of traffic at a level crossing. Thankfully, the barrier opened before I’d worked out how many hours were in seven years.
We picked up fish and chips in Bigley, because it was the closest the village got to fast food. On the way, we stopped to collect Ernest, but I sent in Bronte to fetch him because I couldn’t risk the potential ordeal of letting the kids out of the car.
Apart from a quick WhatsApp to let Will know I was coming to pick Ernest up, I’d not contacted him since Wednesday evening.
I simply couldn’t put the thoughts bumping about in my fraught, frazzled head into words.
However, he had sent me a five-minute voice message every evening, all of which I’d listened to more times than I would care to admit.
It was better than any bedtime story – not that anyone had ever read me one of those.
His warm, gentle voice couldn’t fail to soothe my frayed nerves as he chatted about his day, the funny things Bonnie had said at Jordan’s piano concert and simply that he was thinking about me and always here if I wanted to talk about it, or about everything but it.
After so long with no one to care about or offer comfort to me, his compassion was beginning to heal deep fissures in my soul.
Now, Will stood in the doorway chatting briefly to Bronte, mouth smiling but forehead creased with worry.
Behind him, the warm glow was a beacon, beckoning to my stressed-out sadness.
Through the living room window, I could see the Christmas tree lights, the decorations we’d made a lifetime ago draped across the ceiling.
When I caught sight of Bonnie snuggled on the sofa in her elephant mask and onesie, my throat constricted with longing for something that seemed to be slipping further out of reach with every boot against the back of my seat.
I managed a half-hearted wave, but it was fully dark now, so Will was oblivious.
I knew he’d be wondering what was happening, whether I was okay.
Whether we were okay. I should get out and at least say a proper thank you for dog-sitting, but the reality was I felt as if my bones were made of spun sugar.
If I looked in Will’s eyes, heard the tenderness in his voice, was close enough to throw myself against the sanctuary of his chest, I would shatter.
Thankfully, Ernest came to my rescue, bounding into the car in a flurry of sniffs and wags of happiness. Kaylynn squealed in delight as the little dog butted her with his nose.
‘He remembers me.’ She giggled, patting his head, back, ears, everywhere. ‘Hi, Ernest. I missed you!’
‘He’s telling you how awesome it is at Auntie Alex’s house,’ Bronte said, taking the dog firmly in her lap once she’d got comfortable.
‘Or else he’s excited because he thinks we’ve come to take him home,’ Lennon said. ‘Maybe he hates her house.’
‘Or the smell of fish and chips makes him happy,’ Harley added. ‘It makes me happy, but not when we have to sit in the car and wait for ages. Then my tummy starts to get cross.’
‘I think he’s over the moon to see you all,’ I said. ‘But you’re right. Let’s get home before the food gets cold.’
I glanced in the rear-view mirror to see Will still standing in the doorway, hands in his jean pockets, watching as we drove away.
Things didn’t get much better from there. I realised as soon as we stepped into my spacious, sophisticated, glass-everything house that bringing them here without their mum was a mistake. I could see how it all appeared to the children. Strange and echoey and soulless.
They were right.
The Christmas decorations, so chic and classy five days ago, now appeared cold and drab.
‘It smells funny.’ Lennon wrinkled his nose.
Kaylynn huddled against Bronte’s leg, warily eyeing my stupid, designer open-tread staircase.
‘I don’t like this place. There’s nowhere to sit,’ Harley declared, after opening the ground-floor doors, which led to a mostly empty garage, utility room and another room I hadn’t decided what to do with yet. ‘It doesn’t even have a TV.’
‘It has the best TV,’ Bronte said, bending down to smile at him. ‘Look, follow Ernest.’
They trudged upstairs, all the nervous energy from the car dissipating in the reality of this weird house.
I made sure the outside doors were locked, keys hidden.
There was nothing to see at this time of night, and I shuddered to think how quickly Lennon could find a way over the edge of my supposedly child-proof balcony.
There was a brief heartening of spirits when they found the huge sofas and giant flat-screen in the living room, which lasted throughout tea in front of half of The Polar Express.
These drooped again when I showed them the beds I’d hastily made up in my two spare bedrooms. I had a bleak chuckle at the plain white, lace-edged linen my interior decorator had sourced at a silly price, which had seemed so elegant at the time, and now proved I either had no intention of having my nieces and nephews to stay, or if I did that I was such a lacklustre aunt I had no idea that small children and white duvet covers were a fatal combination.
We did bathtime in my jacuzzi tub for the younger two, followed by warm milk, snuggly stories and everything else I’d learned during the past few days.
It made little difference. These children had never spent a single night away from home.
Doing it now, with an auntie they saw twice a year, in such a strange house compared to their own, was set up to be a disaster.
Even Lennon, who had grown more familiar with me over the years, hated any break from his routine.
My taps were different, so he panicked about washing his hands and brushing his teeth.
I didn’t have a nightlight, so had to dig out a torch from the utility room, but that was the wrong brightness and created creepy shadows on the wall.
He was too hot, too cold, the sheet felt funny and when an owl hooted outside, he nearly hit the ceiling.
In the end, the three of them fell asleep in my giant bed, Bronte quietly reading beside them.
She then crept out and found me sitting up against the wall in the hallway right beside the door. She crouched down to rest her head against my shoulder.
‘You did great,’ my niece whispered.
I muffled my laughter. ‘I’d hate to see what rubbish looks like, then.’
‘Mum would have been shouting at them hours ago. There’d have been fighting and throwing things and probably a rogue wee. Everyone would have cried.’
‘I think everyone did cry.’