No Going Back (2 page)

T
HE
B
OMBSHELL

I
t was the May bank holiday when Mum dropped the bombshell. We were back in Derbyshire
again
. We'd barely had a weekend at home since Gran's accident. Anyway there we were in Aunt Jane's bewilderingly messy kitchen. How anyone can live with all of that stuff taking over the work surfaces I can't imagine. I want to clear it all away, find homes for all of the pots and pans, the straggle of herb and spice jars, the unemptied supermarket bags. The weird thing is that they don't even seem to notice how untidy it is.

That day the boys had been banished to the garden, as if they were the ones cluttering up the space. Liam and Luke are only eighteen months apart in age. Aunt Jane had several miscarriages after Liberty was born and everyone thought she wouldn't be able to have any more children. Then, six years later, along came
Liam, closely followed by Luke. I reckon I was just as excited as Liberty to have babies in the family. They seem to love me like a sister too. Sometimes though they won't leave me alone, so on that particular day it was a bit of a relief that they'd been sent outside to let off steam because it meant that Liberty and I could sit quietly on the sofa playing cards.

“We can't go on like this,” Uncle Pete said. “Jane's been working herself into the ground since your mother came out of hospital. This is the second migraine she's had in a week.”

Mum moved towards the kettle. “I'll take her up some tea.”

“Your sister doesn't need tea,” Uncle Pete shouted. “She needs help.”

I looked across at Liberty. She kept her eyes firmly fixed on the cards.

“I'm doing what I can,” Mum replied softly.

“Well I'm sorry, Liz, but it's not enough.”

My hand hovered in mid-air. I was holding the ten of diamonds. Those diamonds seemed to blur into a mass of red in front of my eyes. The kitchen was suddenly uncharacteristically still. It felt as if
the whole house was waiting for something. Outside there was the sound of a football being kicked.
Thud, thud, thud
like a slowed-down heartbeat. Uncle Pete's eyes were bulging, his body squared up as if ready for a fight.

“If you won't do more, we'll have to get someone in – or Margaret will have to go into a home and you have
no
idea how much that will cost.”

“Oh yes I do,” Mum flashed back. “But that's not what I want and I don't think it's necessary.”

“I'm just looking for practical solutions to the problem,” Uncle Pete replied.

Mum's chin was lifted, her jaw set. “She's
my
mother. She's not a problem and
that
is not the answer.”

“Well, what is?” Heads swivelled to where Aunt Jane stood in the doorway, wearing a fluffy pink dressing gown, dark circles under her eyes. She walked to the table and sank onto a chair, Uncle Pete immediately resting his hands on her shoulders.

“It's all right for you swanning up here at the weekend,” she said to Mum. “Mother's so pleased to see you that she makes a special effort. You don't get all of the moaning, the depression. You don't bear the
brunt of it. And after a couple of days you just go back to your normal life without a care in the world.”

For a few seconds I was shell-shocked. Where had all this come from? I knew that the tension had been building since Gran's accident but I wasn't prepared for this. Obviously neither was Mum.

“You know that's not true,” she said quietly.

For about the millionth time in my life I wished that Dad was here. He wouldn't have let them talk to Mum like that. But he wasn't, so, without looking at Liberty, I placed my cards down on the green linen cushion and went to stand next to Mum. She leaned against me slightly.

“I may not have a job at the moment but I've got Laura to think of,” she said. “I can't just pull her out of school in the middle of term.”

“That's right,” Aunt Jane retorted, “use Laura as a way of avoiding your responsibilities. Let's face it, that's why you've stayed in London all these years, so you don't have to deal with any of the difficult stuff.”

I felt Mum flinch. “That's not fair.” The words spurted out of me with the suddenness of one of
those Icelandic geysers we'd studied in geography. Everyone stared at me in surprise, everyone except Liberty. She had studiously begun to play clock patience on the coffee table in front of her.

“Stay out of this, Laura,” Uncle Pete warned. “It's nothing to do with you.”

“It's got everything to do with me,” I shouted. “We've been coming up here every weekend for weeks to help out and do you appreciate it? No!” I glared at my aunt and uncle. “It's not all about you, you know.”

Uncle Pete was purple in the face now and Aunt Jane had twisted to grab hold of his arm.

“That's enough, Laura,” Mum murmured. She moved to the table and sat down, opposite Aunt Jane.

“You
are
right about one thing,” she said, sounding calmer than she looked. “We can't go on like this, so I think the best thing is if we move up here at the beginning of the summer holidays. Can you manage until then?”

Even then I didn't realise what she was saying. No one did.

“I suppose we'll have to,” Aunt Jane replied ungraciously.

“And what if six weeks isn't enough?” Uncle Pete added. “What if your mother still isn't back on her feet? What if she never gets back to how she was before?”

Mum traced her finger over a knot in the pine table. She looked up, but at them, not at me.

She should have looked at me, given me some warning. We were a team, that's what she used to say and I believed her. I trusted her completely. If you're part of a team you consult each other, don't you? You don't have any secrets, or that's what I thought. I was in complete ignorance as I stood behind her chair. There wasn't a voice in my head that said,
Brace yourself, Laura. Things are about to change. Big time
. That's what made everything so much worse: the fact that I wasn't prepared.

“I wasn't talking about just moving up here for the holidays,” Mum said. “I meant for good.”

My mouth dropped open. I could hardly believe it. But instantly I knew it was true. Once Mum made up her mind about something that was it. The wheels had been set in motion. There was no going back.

F
LOWERS

W
e didn't speak all the way back to London. As we pulled up outside our house, the light from the hall shone through the stained glass window at the top of the front door. Mum always had the lamp on an automatic timer and I loved the welcoming glow it gave when we arrived home after dark. The glass picture was of a beautiful blue boat balanced on little curly waves and, at that moment, I just wanted to sail away to a desert island, away from everyone and everything.

“Laura, come on! It's late and you've got school tomorrow.”

Mum opened the passenger door and held my overnight bag out to me. I grabbed it, slammed the car door shut and followed her up the garden path, keeping my head down. As soon as the front door
was open I pushed past her, pulled off my trainers and left them where they landed in an easy-to-trip-over place.

“I'll get something to eat,” Mum said, dropping her keys with a familiar clink into the little turquoise bowl on the radiator shelf.

“Yeah right,” I replied, climbing the stairs. “Food, that'll solve everything, won't it?”

I heard her suck in her breath, sensed her using a heroic amount of willpower to prevent the snap back.

“Just some toast and a hot drink?” she called after me. Persuasively. Verging on pleading.

“Don't bother,” I shouted, slamming my bedroom door even harder than the car door, so hard that my best photo of Dad collapsed face down on the bedside table. I flung myself face down on the bed in sympathy, pulling the pillow over my head. Two minutes later I heard a muffled
tap, tap, tap
.

“Laura, can I come in?”

Too late to say no. She was already there, tilting the mattress as she perched on the edge of my bed, her hand resting lightly on my shoulder.

“I'm sorry, Laura. I didn't mean for it to come out like that.”

I didn't reply. She waited. Grown-ups are good at that. Waiting. It was getting hot under that pillow and I couldn't breathe properly. I had to emerge eventually, didn't I?

“So how did you mean for it to come out then, Mum?” I mumbled, turning onto my side, half lifting the pillow, feeling the dampness where sweat had stuck my hair to the nape of my neck. “When were you going to tell me about all of these plans you've been making behind my back?”

“It's not like that, Laura. I'm just trying to do what's best for everyone.”

I turned around properly then, propped myself up on my elbows, felt the anger, boiling hot, inside of me.

“Not for me you're not. Were you even going to ask what
I
wanted?”

She shifted, bent down, picked a piece of fluff up from the carpet.

“It's not a decision that I've made on a whim. I've been thinking about it for a while, even before I lost
my job, even before Gran broke her hip. I'll be forty in a couple of years, Laura, and you're growing up fast. You'll have your own life, away from here. If we're going to make a change, now is as good a time as any.”

“And what about school, my friends, the house? What about Dad? We're the only family he had. Who will look after the grave if we're not here?”

“You can move school and Derbyshire's not that far. You can come back and see your friends. We'll come back and keep an eye on the grave too.”

“Every week or two?”

“No, but—”

“He wouldn't have wanted you to do this to me. He wouldn't have wanted you to take me away from where I grew up, from everything I know. This is my home, Mum. It's our home.”

My throat felt all tight and my voice was horribly high-pitched.

“Oh, Laura.” Mum stood up, sadness sweeping across her face. “You have no idea what your father would have wanted. You think you do, but…” She shrugged, stood up and moved towards the
door. “I'm not going to change my mind about this. The move will be good for us, you wait and see.” I flung myself over to face the wall and clamped my hands over my ears. I didn't want to hear any more. I just wanted to pretend it wasn't happening.

We weren't selling the house, just renting it out. That was something, I suppose. Some small bit of hope to grasp hold of. It meant that one day we might be able to come back. In the meantime someone else would be sleeping in my bed, sitting at our kitchen table, sunning themselves on our little bit of decking. I hated that and I hated them, whoever they were, and I hated Mum. At least I pretended I did. Those last few weeks in London were horrible. I wanted to enjoy myself, to make the most of everything, but whatever I did felt spoiled. Part of me wanted to be in the house all the time (but not when Mum was there), but the other part of me couldn't bear to mooch around listening to the imaginary clock in my head ticking down to the day we'd close the gate for the last time. So I went out – a lot. If my friends weren't around I visited Dad's grave. Sometimes, on the warm and sunny days, I sat on the grass under a cherry
tree, listening to the baby blue tits cheeping for food.

A few months after Dad died I'd helped Mum to fix a nesting box to the tree trunk. She'd borrowed a ladder from the caretaker and I had stood at the bottom holding the little bag of nails. The blue tits arrived the following spring and they've returned every year since then. If I sat very still on the grass, the parents would fly right over my head with beaks full of fat worms. If it was cold or had been raining, I settled on one of the oak benches and read a book or did a bit of homework.

Once a week I took some flowers, usually lemon-coloured chrysanthemums or, in the spring, daffodils. Yellow was Dad's favourite colour. Every so often, someone else would place flowers on the grave too. They weren't shop-bought like ours, but small, soft posies of garden flowers such as forget-me-nots, pretty pink dahlias or Michaelmas daisies. The blooms were tied together with raffia or a scrap of ribbon and squashed into a jam jar. They appeared every month or two and Mum said they were probably from Dad's cousin Penny. I used to move those flowers slightly to one side,
so that mine could take centre stage. When they withered I would chuck the posies away, tucking the jam jar behind the headstone, out of sight. I didn't think that Penny would mind. I knew that she must be a nice person to take the trouble to come and put flowers on Dad's grave, especially after all that time. Mum said that she lived on the other side of London and, although it wasn't that far away, I'd never met her. I'd have liked to because, like me, Dad was an only child and his parents died before I was born, but Mum never seemed to be able to get hold of Penny.

I did hope that one day I'd just bump into her. Those last few weeks in London I really wanted her to turn up, to ask her if she'd keep an eye on the grave for me, make sure it didn't get vandalised or begin to look unloved. One day, as I was sitting on the bench, slightly out of sight of the main gate, I looked up to see a woman walking in my direction. She had swingy brown hair and wore a bright green mac. She held a small bunch of flowers and my heart did a sort of somersault. This was it, I thought. This must be her.

The woman almost stopped walking when she saw me. I smiled. She hesitated, but not as if she was
making that split second decision about whether or not to return my smile. Instead I got the impression that she wanted to turn around and hurry back the way she had come. But she picked up her pace and carried on walking straight past, her eyes fixed determinedly straight ahead.

I watched as she picked her way across the grass, the heels of her black patent shoes sinking into the soft turf. She placed the flowers on a really old grave, one with a cracked vase at the base. One that looked as if it hadn't had any visitors for decades. She didn't stop to reflect, just turned, weaving her way in and out of the headstones, avoiding the path in her rush to get to the gate. After she'd gone I went over and looked at those flowers. It was a posy, similar to the ones that sometimes appeared on Dad's grave.