Chapter 14
He’s in the cabin, looking at his screens. I can tell from the reflection in his reading glasses that, once again, he clicks to a different window when he sees me.
“Why didn’t you tell me you cleared Saint Helen’s?” I say, putting my knuckles on the glass of his stupid nondesk and leaning over him. “In fact, why did you tell me you hadn’t?”
“Eh?”
“Stop it!” I say. I bang the flats of both hands down hard. Nothing breaks, more’s the pity. “How can you lie to me? You know better than anyone how hard it is for us to— What are you playing at?”
“Lindsay, I have no idea what you’re on about,” he says. “What’s up with you? I swear on Zak and Nicky’s lives I didn’t clear that house.”
“Huh,” I say. That’s that then.
I fall back into the old-rich-people chair. “God, I’m sorry,” I say. “Listen, what chocolate biscuits would you say a random granny would keep in her tin?”
“Is this a joke?” John should know me well enough to know I don’t tell jokes, but he sticks with it. “I don’t know—what chocolate biscuits would a random granny keep in her tin?” When I don’t answer he adds, “Penguins, Clubs, Twixes, KitKats.”
I slump in the chair until it creaks.
“Jesus,” I say. “I’m such a wreck. Sorry. God, John, I’m sorry.”
“What happened?” he says.
I think hard about how to answer. “Nothing,” I say in the end.
“Stress, grief, nightmares. Possibly sleepwalking.” Will I say more?
Should I actually try to tell him about the intruder last night, about the book?
Instead, I say, “I really do admire you, you know. You’re as solid as a rock and all it takes is moonlit walks round the Barrens. ”
He frowns and says nothing.
“Good self-care,” I say.
“Self-care!” he says, scoffing at me. “That’s all bath salts and whingeing, isn’t it? Not for me.”
“So you really are that over the caravan?” I ask him. “And goan just answer me straight, this one time.”
He gives me a sober look, considering. “We both are,” he says at last, and I breathe out in a rush. “We got over it with the tree,” he goes on. “We got over it with the sliding section of metal. You know we did.”
“Christ, John!” I blurt. “Please! I call it ‘the caravan’ same as you do. But you know what I mean. I’m talking about what happened to us when we were wee. All of it. Dad.”
“Dad?” he says. “Dad?”
I am frozen. About a hundred different things have just become clear. Or one big thing, maybe, a hundred times bigger than me. Our family motto isn’t just a slogan for John. It has worked. It’s worked so well, the last bit of it is no longer true. He knows, but he can’t so he doesn’t. The end.
“Lindsay?” he says.
“What?” I say, aiming for clueless. I have no idea if I hit it. I have no idea if he’ll buy it.
“You just said ‘Dad,’” he tells me, giving me a screwball look.
“Piss off,” I say. “Stop messing with my head.”
“I’m serious, Linds,” he says. “You just made out like if we weren’t going to call our childhood the caravan then we had better call it Dad.”
“Wow,” I say, shaking my head and keeping my eyes wide. “Hell of a tongue slip. I meant Mum. Obviously.”
“Paging Dr. Freud,” says John, laughing.
“Why did I leave my good medical insurance behind?” I say, laughing along with him. “What’s the waiting list like for a head doctor on the NHS?”
He cracks up again, then sobers. “You don’t need a doctor,” he says. “You got over it. We got over it. And under it and past it. You and me.”
With him smiling at me, the memory is so close that I can feel the rough bark of that overhanging tree branch as I dangle, John jeering at me from below.
I can hear the squeal of that leaning panel scraping across the laminate underneath it.
For a moment I feel guilty for not telling him about my dresser.
But he didn’t need it. He was fine by then.
Tall and strong and happy to hang out in the park till whenever.
“Sorry,” I say. “Sorry if I’ve destabilised—” He groans. “Just . . . all round sorry, okay?”
“Fine by me.”
“And look, let me make it up to you for going off like that by being your best customer of the month? Maybe the year. Any massive old wardrobes you can’t shift? What about a piano? Have you still got that fairground horse in the back shed where the keyboards go? I need . . .”
I know I sound manic. I feel manic as I set off into the belly of the junkyard. He’s got the right idea. He’s got it layers deep. We got over it and under and past it, I tell myself. John and me.
We did, so long as we call it the caravan and pretend it was a one-time thing.
I’m not arguing that we got over the time when I was four and John was seven and we made a den in a pristine, mint-condition caravan that my mum and dad had let slip their minds.
We holed up in there day after day, night after night: spacemen, cowboys, knights that we were.
Once, Mum found us coming out of it. She chased us—we thought she was playing.
She dragged us all the way back there, holding one little arm in each of her big hands, and she locked us in.
“This is where you’ve been hiding?” she shouted through the door.
“This is where you’ve been when Da— When we’ve been looking for you?
You want this instead of two bedrooms full of expensive toys?
Parents who love you?” She thumped hard on the flimsy door with the side of her fist, making us both jump. “You’ve got it.”
We were there for twenty-six hours. John missed Cubs and it was the next day—light again—that Mum came and let us out.
She hugged me so hard, I could feel her bones and mine clashing together, as if she’d got thin like I had, from not eating all those long hours.
“You shouldn’t have run away,” she said.
“Your dad has been going out of his mind with worry.”
“But, Mummy—”
“Your dad and I told the police you never knock about the yard, so they knew you weren’t hiding.”
“But Dad knows we play—”
“And if you run away again, they’ll take you away to a children’s home, you know.”
“But we didn’t ru—”
“That’s what the police told us.”
“But you knew where—”
“If anyone ever finds you outside these fences where you don’t belong, you’ll get taken off us and live in a children’s home.”
“But—”
“Go and get in the bath and wash yourselves. I need to tell all the kind people who’ve been looking for you round the clock that you’ve stopped being spoiled little brats and come home.”
A police lady came and asked us if we’d been in a car, if we’d been with a stranger, if anyone had told us to keep a secret.
I was sitting on Mum’s knee, with her arms tight round my middle, and John was sitting next to Dad, on the couch, with Dad’s big hand on John’s little shoulder and I could see the white in his fingernails and John was shaking.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wanted to do an adventure. I’m sorry.”
“Adventure is for your storybooks, Lindsay,” said the police lady. “You read about adventures safe here at home from now on, eh?”
“Sorry,” said John. “We won’t run away ever again. We want to stay at home.”
The three of them, and the man who was police too but didn’t wear a uniform, went outside onto the step and talked for a long time.
“We can’t ever run away again,” I said to John.
“They’ll put us in a children’s home if we run away again,” John said to me.
Then we tried on her police-lady hat that she had left on the coffee table, but she only smiled when she came back in and caught us.
And that was all that happened. Because if nothing happened before that day, to make us hide in the first place, and nothing happened after, then we’re over it.
Our family motto has worked beautifully.
We know, but we can’t, so we don’t, though we do.
And we call the bit we do know the caravan. Which we’re over, John and me.
And now it’s thirty-two years later and I’m just a woman with an empty house, the lucky sister of a generous junkman, wombling again.
I slip past the gates and barrels and baths, searching out bulk like a raptor hunting prey. There’s a chaise longue that’s been on top of a pile of school blackboards for at least nine years. It probably needs resprung, definitely reupholstered, but it’s huge and I want it.
And the fairground horse is still there, slightly wormy and chipped, with its saddle crumbling and only the faintest gleam of gold where its painted harness used to be.
“You and me both,” I say to it. “We were made for each other.”
I pat its neck, marvelling at how it hasn’t moved except to be borne back on the tide, like everything always is.
Except—
I’m standing deep in a nest of household textiles—towels and tablecloths and bedsheets and pillowcases—and they shouldn’t be anywhere near here. It’s like John’s stopped trying to organise the stock the way my dad did, with my mum helping. No!
Not going to think about anything Dad did, with Mum helping.
I’m shopping for household items. I’m grown up. John lives here. It’s different now. I’m fine.
This looks like one complete lot of assorted linens, I think, forcing my mind back to the present.
As if it’s from one clearance, stuffed in beside half a dozen rolled rugs that are balanced along the tops of two dressing tables and four bedside tables, the matching wardrobes at the back.
I ease open a mirrored door and see clothes still hanging in there, a pile of shoe boxes on the floor.
Well, maybe it’s more fun for customers that way. But it’s harder to forget that this was someone’s life that’s been scraped together and junked. If I was in charge, I’d sort things out the way my parents did, group like with like. Because who’s ever going to buy a whole bedroom set these days?
Me, maybe? It would fill a lot of house.