Chapter 25
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
They had left the island when she was seven. One day, after school, Tristan and Felicity had returned home to find all their things in boxes and a removal company loading a huge lorry with their furniture.
‘We’re going to a hotel tonight,’ their mother had said, with false brightness, ‘and then tomorrow we start a new life.’
Felicity and her brother had exchanged nervous glances. Their mother was smiling but it was that strange, fixed smile they knew all too well. Felicity started to cry.
‘What about my friends, Mummy? I told them I’d see them at school on Monday. It’s our prize-giving next week and we’re all getting a prize, Mrs Taylor said.’
‘We’re going to England. We’re getting the hell out of this place. And you’re going to make some new friends so don’t you worry about that.’ She wagged her finger in Felicity’s face. This was a voice you didn’t argue with.
Tristan was crying now, too. He was a bit older and had been much quicker to fully grasp the implications of this strange announcement.
‘I don’t want to go to England! I want to stay here. I want to see Dad! I am not going! You can’t make me!’
‘It’s lovely, you’ll love it,’ drawled their mother. She was slurring her words. ‘We’re going to Derbyshire. It’s really beautiful.’
Neither of the children could have cared less about what it looked like.
They cried all the way to the hotel. Then they cried and complained most of the night while their mother just sat on the bed with that same fixed grin on her face, rocking ever so slightly back and forth as they screamed and shouted around her. By the next morning, Felicity and Tristan were so strung out and exhausted that as soon as the hire car rolled off the ferry at Poole, they fell asleep. They slept all the way up the country and they didn’t wake until they heard a strange man shouting at their mother as she tried to park their old car at the bottom of what looked like a ravine. They had made it safely, which was a bloody miracle in itself, one they only really appreciated as adults. At the time, the fact their mother had been drunk at the wheel hadn’t even been on their radar. The much more pressing issue was that the lorry had got stuck across the road, there was nowhere for them to pull in and the removal men had to trundle all their worldly possessions half a mile vertically up the hill. In Felicity’s memory, it was all just a blur of fury and tears and rain.
Felicity had grown to appreciate it, as an adult, not just surviving the journey of doom but the beauty of the place they had arrived at. As a child all she could remember of her introduction to Derbyshire were those hills. Their aching leg muscles as they walked up and down, up and down, up and down, usually in the wind and rain and fog, all the way to their tiny terraced house perched on the side of the valley – although it felt more like a cliff – near Matlock Bath.
The town was usually grey and wet, and the rented house was grotty and cold and smelled of mushrooms. She had to share a room with her brother for the first time in her life. The absolute pits, that was. Until he decided to leave too, anyway. They had to walk two miles to school each morning and the other children looked down on them. She wanted to tell them all about Guernsey, about the life she had left behind. But no one ever asked her or showed the slightest interest. Not until high school, anyway. They had travelled halfway up the United Kingdom and now they were all alone in this strange new place, with just their gin-soaked mother for company.
The next day, Felicity put on her ancient and yet still slightly uncomfortable hiking boots and walked south towards the first stop on her self-imposed itinerary and the one she hoped would be the most straightforward. Ease in gently, that was the idea anyway.
It was less than a mile to Icart Point, a small headland on the southern coast of Guernsey, which had been the setting of the only decent holiday she’d ever had as a child. Her grandparents had taken pity on her in the summer after their father walked out, and they had treated her and her brother to two weeks in the lovely old hotel just along the footpath.
Sitting there now, perched on top of the cliffs on the newly painted (and still somewhat sticky) green bench, she could almost hear their voices carried on the tide as it swept and rolled around the rocks below. Every so often, the navy-blue sea would send up a plume of salt spray, soaking her in its fine droplets. Gulls sailed overhead and the winter wind rushed past, burning her cheeks. It was all jolly idyllic.
Felicity pulled her coat tighter around her and strained to remember that holiday. Forced herself even. There were happy memories somewhere deep down if only she could bring them into focus. She waited patiently… and slowly, slowly, slowly they came.
First, there was a stout blonde waitress from Scotland who loved to swim slow lengths in the hotel swimming pool, which was heated like a bath. Even in the height of summer you could see the steam rising off its surface. Then, she pictured a dessert trolley heaving with sweet pavlova and thick chocolate mousse and sticky caramel apple granny and remembered how she’d once been allowed to have two ice creams for tea. The simplest things brought them joy back then. And there was that glorious day below the cliffs in Saint’s Bay when they had sculpted a perfect little boat in the sand and rowed to the Caribbean and back in an afternoon, dodging pirates along the way. It was all jolly idyllic and wholesome.
But there was one thing about that holiday she had no memory of at all. Before she’d died, her nana told her that Felicity had spent hours during that holiday sitting on this same bench, staring out to sea. Eyes wide. Face stern. Hands clenched.
Sometimes, apparently, she would bring a small picnic, or her beloved toy rabbit, Mr Higgins, or even her granddad’s binoculars (although they were usually held back to front or the wrong way up). She would set up camp on the bench with her precious items and it would take all their ingenuity to persuade her to leave when it was time for tea.
‘Waiting for your daddy, you were, I’m sure of it,’ her nana had said.
No use waiting for him anymore , thought Felicity grimly, but all the same she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the sea. She stared down into the waves as they chopped and swirled in the cove below and, as she did so, the image of that tiny figure with her cuddly rabbit and her granddad’s binoculars threatened to break her heart wide open.