Chapter 1
‘I hate you!’
The bedroom door slams. Hard enough to make me fear for the doorframe, the roof tiles and the San Andreas fault.
‘Sadie. Open the door.’
‘No.’
‘You’re being unreasonable.’
‘Yeah, well, you’re being a total arsehole.’
‘Nice.’
‘I just want to take Zelda.’
‘We’ve been through this. It’s not practical or appropriate.’
‘She’s my cat. I can’t just leave her here in Manchester while we go to fucking Florida.’
‘It’s not fucking Florida.’ I pause. ‘The “fucking” is silent. Look—’ I lean against the door and speak through the wood. ‘She’ll be fine, Sadie. This is her home.’
‘Yeah, but it’s not ours. Not any more. New people will move in, and they won’t look after her like I do. They might have a dog. A great big, hairy dog that digs.’
I rest my head against the door and butt it gently. ‘For fuck’s sake.’
‘The “fuck” is silent, Dad.’
I smile despite myself. Then I hear her move behind the door.
‘Dad. Please.’
I’m a soft touch about a lot of things: bedtimes, homework, clothes, septum piercings – but this … it’s nuts. Insane. I sigh. ‘You can explain it to airport security.’
‘Is that a yes?’
‘Against my better judgement.’
‘You’re the best.’
‘No argument there.’
Her bedroom door bursts open. I’m enveloped in a tangle of bony teenage limbs and nut-brown hair that smells of coconut, like her mum’s used to.
I reach to the side and grab the shovel I brought upstairs with me.
Yep, soft touch.
‘Go dig up your dead cat.’
Airport Security are remarkably sanguine about Zelda, all things considered.
‘It’s normally ashes,’ says the heavy-set black guy with a bald head and a tattoo poking out of his shirt that reads ‘Britney’ (singer, girlfriend or kid – who knows?). ‘But we’ve had human bones before. A skull once.’
‘Whoah.’
He lifts out Zelda’s small white feline skull and examines it with minimal interest. ‘Yeah. And that wasn’t even the weird thing.’ He places the skull back in the box, cursorily pokes among the other small bones and then closes the lid.
I know I shouldn’t, but I find myself asking. ‘What was the weird thing?’
‘It had teeth like a vampire.’
‘A vampire?’
‘For real.’
I fight the urge to roll my eyes. Rule one in life – even before the stuff about being kind – don’t piss off Airport Security.
‘Wow,’ I say.
‘Yeah.’ Britney guard nods. ‘Working here, it’s like the end of days. We see it all, man.’
I smile again, and five minutes later prove his point as I stand in the X-ray scanner holding up my arms while he yawns and stares inside my body.
It’s not until we’re settled on the plane, Zelda ensconced in the locker above us, that I finally relax and let out a long sigh.
‘What is it?’ Sadie asks.
‘Nothing.’
‘No, really. What are you thinking?’
I turn my head towards her. ‘I’m thinking that I’m glad we had Grandma cremated.’
She pulls a face. ‘Not funny.’
But humour is how we deal sometimes. Or how I deal.
Mum’s death is still raw, but humour rubs the edges off the grief.
Mitigation. I’m good at that. And grief is a complicated beast. A chimera, composed of many things: loss, guilt, resentment, relief.
It bites often and hard. We give the deceased a halo they didn’t deserve in life while we beat ourselves up over every petty argument and harsh word.
You learn to live with grief, but it’s a bitter bedfellow.
‘I miss her,’ Sadie says, a small catch in her voice.
‘Me too.’
And even that isn’t the whole truth. I miss Mum, but I won’t miss the daily phone calls that usually ended in curt goodbyes because Mum was lonely, and I was busy.
I won’t miss the 3 a.m. dashes to hospital and ten-hour waits in A a wisp of a woman with cotton-candy hair in floral blouses and tan slacks shuffling around with her walker, but that woman was not going to let the small matter of a failing heart beat her.
And then she got an infection. A UTI. God knows how or where from. She’d never had a UTI in her life, as far as I was aware, but a mere eight weeks into her stay at Cedars Wood I was woken at 5 a.m. to be told that ‘Doreen Barker’ had passed away in her sleep.
The staff expressed condolences, told me it was peaceful, her heart simply couldn’t fight any more.
They lit a candle for her in the communal lounge and put up a card: ‘In Loving Memory of Doreen Barker’.
Then they gave me her clothes and personal belongings back in two large refuse sacks and billed us till the end of the month.
However, with Mum’s death, in a way, came release. We had already sold her bungalow to cover the care-home costs. But I worried constantly that the money would run out, and I certainly couldn’t find ￡1,500 a week in fees. Now, we had one less financial burden. Mum had left us that.
But she also left us something else …
‘Another house?’ I had stared at the solicitor in disbelief.
‘Yes, a property in Serenity Falls.’
Serenity Falls. The name rang a distant bell.
‘It’s in Florida – one of the exclusive gated communities built in the seventies and eighties by Harold Winsom.’
Winsom. Of course. The world-famous entrepreneur and philanthropist. The man behind hundreds of beloved children’s films and the largest ‘most magical’ theme park in the world: Winsom Wonderland.
In the 1970s he began a new project. To build perfect American towns. Advanced Residential Communities. An idealized version of the US that owed a lot to the fifties (and rose-tinted glasses). What was the tagline? ‘A place to grow up, grow your family and grow old together.’
Fairy-tale stuff, although, from memory, the towns had had mixed fortunes over the years.
But Serenity Falls, the flagship, was still regularly voted one of the best places to live in America.
Houses there cost a fortune, and I’d read that you needed to be approved by the Winsom Corporation to buy one.
And Mum, my eighty-three-year-old, white-haired mum, who, as far as I knew, had never ventured further than the Isle of Wight, owned a property there.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘There hasn’t been some mistake?’
‘No. It’s a prestigious property on a sizeable plot,’ the solicitor continued. ‘Six bedrooms, a large yard with a pool.’
‘A pool?’
‘Yes.’
‘And this is for real?’
The solicitor regarded me patiently. ‘It is.’
‘Can I look? Do you have pictures?’
‘Indeed.’
He slid a glossy property portfolio across the table.
The picture on the front featured a smiling all-American family: perfect dentistry, blond hair, blue eyes.
Serenity Falls Welcomes You. I opened it.
Inside, the photos showed a whitewashed colonial-style mansion.
Pillars either side of the double front door, a massive wrap-around porch.
A small green lawn leading down to – dear God – a white picket fence.
I flipped the page. Inside, it was all cool marble and stylish appliances.
An open-plan kitchen diner, a lounge probably big enough to swallow an entire floor of our current home, a sweeping staircase and, of course, the pièce de résistance – in the (modestly named) yard, a sparkling blue swimming pool.
I stared at it.
‘Are you all right, Mr Barker?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Do you have any questions?’
Plenty, I thought. How could you afford to buy this, Mum? Was it an investment? A holiday home? But then, why did you never use it or visit it? And why did you never tell me about it?
Right now, I concentrated on the important one. Beautiful as the house was, exclusive as the neighbourhood might be, the fact remained that I was not uprooting Sadie to move to fucking Florida.
‘How much?’ I croaked.
‘Sorry?’
‘How much is it worth? I want to put it on the market as soon as possible.’
The solicitor (Jason or Jacob?) cleared his throat. His Adam’s apple wobbled. I had a feeling. Not a good one.
‘Well, the property is estimated to be worth around three million dollars.’
‘Three million?’
Stars danced in front of my eyes. I felt a little dizzy. This could … this could change everything for me and Sadie. I thought about our tired old terraced house. My beaten-up VW. My current problems with my employment. This could …
‘Mr Barker, there is one condition.’
I stared at him and felt my dreams deflate like a punctured balloon.
‘You mean a catch?’
‘If you want to call it that. The property cannot be sold.’
‘What? Why?’
‘Well, it’s part of the contract with Serenity Falls. Houses bequeathed to people outside of Serenity Falls cannot be sold or let by the recipients for a minimum of five years. Even then, you must get approval from the Winsom Corporation.’
‘How is that legal?’
‘It’s all in the small print. Theoretically the house is yours, but there are terms and covenants – and this is one.’
‘Well, what if we just don’t live in it?’
‘Well, that is an option, but then you would be subject to maintenance charges.’
‘Which are?’
‘Fifty thousand dollars a year.’
I feel my jaw slump open. ‘How the hell did Mum afford that?’
‘Your mother was smart enough to take out an insurance policy when she bought the house. The property was also rented for several years.’
‘When did Mum buy the property?’ I ask curiously.
‘Nineteen seventy-nine.’
Nineteen seventy-nine. The year I was born. That meant Mum had kept this secret for forty-six years. My entire life.
I took a breath. ‘Well, what can we do? I mean, we can’t move to Florida. No way would I get a green card.’
‘Well, that’s the other thing, Mr Barker. The residence comes with a rather unique and privileged extra – instant approval for a visa.’
‘It what now?’
I stared at the picture of the house again. The clear blue skies, the pool. It was ludicrous. Crazy. We couldn’t just up sticks and move from Manchester. Rainy, grey Manchester. No pool, but a decent-sized garden. And by decent, I meant enough room to swing a cat in. A dead cat.
The solicitor smiled thinly and slid a card across the table. I picked it up: Lansdowne and Mercer Estate Agents.
‘Let them know when you want to put your house on the market.’