Chapter 4 #2
But everything was still as it was after Elle had gone, meaning it remained a functional two-bedroom flat rather than the amazing one-bedroom property it had the potential to be.
Projects like this, which would undoubtedly involve making countless decisions and changes, always sent me into a tailspin.
Over the years, I’d managed to convince myself that having a spare room had handy dumping ground, storage and washing-drying benefits, as well as serving as an actual spare bedroom on the rare occasions my parents came to stay.
It was easier to just shut the door on the mess and keep the flat the same as it’d always been.
I carried the moss past my much-smaller double room, which was sandwiched in between the spare room and the bathroom, right in the middle of the property.
It always felt safe and snug in there, like my own little nest. The long and low window looked out over the flat’s narrow, concrete side return, which led to my measly patch of grass and rotting garden shed / spider sanctuary at the end.
Mum always tried her best to whip the garden into shape whenever she was here, but she was fighting a losing battle.
It was fair to say that I hadn’t inherited her horticultural instincts at all.
It wasn’t exactly an inspiring view out of my bedroom, unlike the one I’d had in Scarnbrook while growing up, but it was private and the room wasn’t overlooked from any direction, thanks to the busy railway line that bumped up directly against the garden.
The living space was at the back of the flat – an awkwardly shaped room that somehow managed to house a kitchen, sitting and dining area.
Even though it was creaky, tired and rough around the edges, this was the room that had grabbed my heart back when we’d first viewed the flat all those years ago.
While Elle had always had designs on the front bedroom, it was this dark and enclosed living space, with original stripped floorboards, bare-bricked chimney breast housing a woodburning stove and shelves creaking with the previous owners’ books and trailing succulents that immediately made the flat seem like a place I could feel comfortable in.
I made an offer straight after our first viewing.
At Elle’s insistence, it’d been a cheeky one since the financial crisis had suddenly put buyers like me on the front foot.
She’d coerced the estate agent into letting slip that the owners were desperate to move to secure their dream countryside project, and I’d ended up getting a bit of a bargain by today’s London property standards.
I removed a saucer from a kitchen cupboard and placed it on a shelf among some neglected house plants and creased-spined books. I laid the moss on the plate and put a small, torn square of kitchen roll over half of it, as if it was tucked up in bed. I took a photo of it and sent it to Elle.
Mally:
For Frannie (she’ll understand). Thanks for a fun night. Might see
you in the office on Monday x
Elle (voice message):
Ha, she loves it! Best godmum ever. Oh, and don’t think I was too
drunk last night to remember about your Christmas movie article. I’ve
had some more ideas so I’ll find you on Monday to talk it over. Argh
it’s so exciting!
Maybe there were some people who found Elle’s fondness for sending voice messages endearing, but I wasn’t one of them.
Especially when she was sharing vital logistical information and I had to listen to them over and over again, always knowing they could disappear at any moment due to her tendency to randomly delete them, too.
I’d been hoping that all that gin-induced chat about me writing this feature would’ve been forgotten. But who was I kidding? This was Elle. When it came to her ideas and plans, she never let them go until they became a reality.
I needed to chew over this some more. I decided that physical chewing would help.
I plonked myself on the sofa with a big bowl of Weetos – delighted it was the end of the pack, which meant I got the bonus addition of the extra-sweet cereal dust – and stuck Saturday Kitchen on.
I rolled my eyes as an antler-wearing TV chef served up a plate of raw scrambled eggs under the pretence of having cooked a speedy omelette in order to have their face slapped onto a meaningless leaderboard.
I aimlessly flicked through the channels until I landed midway through a Christmas movie on Channel 5, as I’d known I would.
My whole body relaxed as I stretched out on the sofa, balanced the bowl of cereal on a cushion and settled in for forty-five minutes or so of safe storytelling.
According to the TV guide, this one was called Christmas Wonderland and it was about a budding artist who’d put her creative dreams on hold for the sake of a glittering career in the city.
I watched with renewed interest as the protagonist told repeated lies to her horrible boss so she could return to her hometown for some emergency babysitting, only to bump into her high-school ex.
I had no high-school ex, but as the rest of the film played out exactly in line with my bingo sheets, it made me think more about the possibility of returning to Scarnbrook.
Scarnbrook . Even the silent utterance of the word in my mind seemed slightly foreign and unreal, as if it had faded from my vocabulary over the last two decades and I had to teach myself how to get my mouth around it again.
My parents had cut all ties with the village since Livvie’s death, and neither Josh nor I had had any obvious reason to return since her funeral. But I’d always missed the place I’d once called home, despite everything that had happened.
From the outset, Livvie had been the anomalous sibling.
While never explicitly confirmed by our parents, her appearance three years after me was widely accepted to have been…
unexpected. It was always as if she subconsciously knew this and applied it to every way she lived her life. She was absolutely determined to exist.
She’d been the total opposite to each and every one of us other Allisters. Even her colouring – her copper hair, bright blue eyes and dusting of freckles over her pale skin – had seemingly come out of nowhere. Mum eventually tracked it back to some ginger-bearded great-uncle on her side.
Whatever kind of ease each of us had established before her arrival, she totally disrupted.
Where my mum was conflict-averse and fastidiously tidy, my sister was contrary and seemed to thrive among mess and chaos.
Where my dad was numbers- and details-oriented, my sister lived for big ideas and zany projects.
Where my brother was athletic and unshakably serious, she was unabashedly clumsy and an emotional open book.
And where I was dry-humoured yet ultimately rule-abiding, she was completely fearless, actively seeking out extravagant ways to draw attention to her musical talent and whimsical nature.
Despite her endless schemes, everybody – and I mean everybody – loved her.
From the moment she was born, she slowly but surely pulled each of us out of ourselves.
I could talk to her about anything; with full faith I could trust her with all my secrets big (like my huge, out-of-character crush on the most popular boy in school that even Elle had never known about) and weird (like my irrational fear of the Thomas the Tank Engine theme tune).
Me, Livvie and Josh had always looked out for each other.
Mum and Dad were thrilled at the wholesome dynamic of their offspring, as they could trust us to stay at home by ourselves once Josh was a fully-fledged teenager without having to find babysitters to keep up with their active roles in the community.
Livvie had truly been the glue that bonded each of our relationships with each other together.
Especially the one between me and Josh, which had always been a bit strained.
That’s why the two years after Josh left home for university, even though he was only twenty-five minutes up the road at the University of the West of England, were practically the happiest years of my life.
Just me and Livvie, loafing about at home after school every day, while Mum and Dad were busy with their own jobs and social lives.
Livvie was the beating heart of our family.
It was impossible not to be tugged towards her spirit and love of life.
There was no doubt in my mind that she’d do something significant with her talents, most likely through the cello that she loved playing so much, and that – regardless of whatever she did with her life and wherever she ended up – Scarnbrook wouldn’t forget Livvie Allister in a hurry.
And, well, it never did – for all the wrong reasons. Because Livvie’s departure was as unexpected as her arrival.
But thinking about that stuff – let alone talking about it – was instinctively out of bounds.
I blinked away my tears and opened up my coffee-table drawer to retrieve my Christmas movie notebook.
I added the details of the film that had just ended, along with the one I’d watched with Elle last night.
I’d watched twenty-nine of them last December, and it was my intention to beat that figure this year.
After I’d tallied up my latest viewing total, I decided I might as well put up my Christmas tree.
These days, ‘putting up the tree’ was a pretty depressing affair.
It involved retrieving my miniature fibre-optic spruce from its tatty box, bending the bristly wires into vaguely branch-like positions and shoving it on top of the space-saving dining table in the corner of my living room, which was permanently folded away into its smallest position these days.
As my outstretched hand scrabbled about under my bed for the box in question, it landed on another box, instead – the one that had housed my PE effort award for all those years.