The Facts of Life and Death (7 page)

‘I
hate
Mummy!’ she said, and burst into tears against his arm. ‘She didn’t even say thank you for the
flowers.
’ And another wave of weeping broke over her.

Daddy put his arm around her. ‘Women want a man who can take care of them, Rubes.’

‘But you
do
take care of us!’

Daddy just squeezed her against him while she cried.

She looked up when he stopped the car in a narrow lane between two high hedges.

‘Where are we?’ said Ruby, wiping her eyes.

‘Here,’ said Daddy and nodded at a gap in the hedge. ‘I ever show you this?’

Ruby looked across the road at a little white box of a guardhouse beside a red and white barrier. There was a light on in the hut, and Ruby could see an old man inside, drinking from a mug. His uniform collar was too big for his neck, which made him look like a tortoise.

‘What is it?’

‘This is where I used to work.’

She was confused. The hut was only big enough for one person. ‘Where?’

‘There.’ Daddy pointed.

Ruby looked beyond the hut. For a moment she thought she was looking into the black sky. Then she realized it was an enormous corrugated-iron shed – bigger than fifty houses – looming over the landscape.

‘Wo-ow!’ she said. ‘It’s
huge.’

He said, ‘Got to be big, see? We built proper big ships inside. Ships big enough to go all over the world. South America. Africa. Brazil. Places like that. Proper big ships.’

‘Bigger than the ones on the Quay?’

‘Some of ’em, yeah. Fifty thousand tonnes, some of ’em.’

‘Wo-ow!’ said Ruby again, although she had no idea what a tonne was. But fifty thousand of them was a lot.

The shed was gigantic, and being out here in the countryside made it look even bigger – towering over the high hedges, next to the narrow lanes and with no other buildings around it.

Ruby pointed down the lane. ‘How do they get the ships to the sea when they’re finished?’

Daddy laughed and told her they slid straight out of the shed and down into the river on the other side, dripping with champagne.

‘Wow!’ she said. ‘I wish I could see that!’

‘Me too,’ said Daddy sadly. He stared at the shed. ‘We used to have a right laugh here. I remember we used to send the new boys down to the stores for a long stand, or to get a bubble for the spirit level.’

‘Why?’

‘It was just a joke, see? Just a bit of fun.’

‘Ohhh,’ said Ruby, but she didn’t get it.

He wound the window down. The rain had stopped and the night smelled like green and river, and the hedges rustled with small, secret night things.

‘Daddy?’ said Ruby carefully.

‘Hmm?’

‘Are you and Mummy getting . . .
divorced
?’ The word was so hard for Ruby to say that it ended in a tearful squeak.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Never.’ He flicked his cigarette out of the window, and the night was so quiet that Ruby could hear it sizzle as it hit the ground.

‘Don’t you worry, Rubes,’ he said. ‘I’ll always take care of you. I just wish Mummy didn’t have to work. I wish I could keep her safe at home in a glass box.’

‘Like Snow White?’ said Ruby.

‘Yeah,’ said Daddy. ‘Like Snow White.’

Ruby imagined Mummy lying in a box on the kitchen table, with her hair all brushed and a little bunch of flowers on her chest.

It was so romantic that Ruby’s lip wobbled.

They drove back up to the main road and soon Ruby recognized the outskirts of Bideford.

Daddy stopped outside a shop and bought a six-pack of Strongbow for him and a Twix for her. He opened one of the cans and took a few gulps, then wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.

‘Now eat your Twix, and we’ll go home and have hot milk.’

‘With sugar?’

‘Yes.’

Ruby opened her Twix and took a bite. It wasn’t her favourite, but it would definitely do.

‘Better?’ said Daddy.

She nodded.

‘Good. Hold that,’ he said, and handed her the can and pulled back on to the road towards home.

As they drove, he held out his hand now and then, and Ruby gave him the can. It emptied quickly and she put it in the well behind his seat.

As they left Bideford, they passed a woman standing at a bus stop.

‘That’s Miss Sharpe!’

‘Who’s Miss Sharpe?’

‘My teacher. Can we give her a lift?’

‘Maybe she doesn’t want a lift, Rubes. Women can be a bit funny about taking lifts.’

‘But it’s raining.
Please
, Daddy!’

Daddy trod on the brakes and peered in his rear-view mirror. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Get in the back.’

The car didn’t have back doors so Ruby scrambled between the seats as he reversed up the road to the bus stop. When he was level with it, Daddy leaned over and wound down the window a few inches.

‘Want a lift?’ he said.

Miss Sharpe peered at him from under her umbrella with a suspicious look on her face. ‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting for the bus.’

‘Hello, Miss,’ said Ruby, leaning forward between the seats.

Miss Sharpe’s face cleared. ‘Oh, hello, Ruby! I didn’t see you there!’

‘We can take you home, Miss,’ said Ruby eagerly.

‘It’s all the way in Fairy Cross,’ said Miss Sharpe. ‘I don’t like to put you to any trouble.’

‘It’s on our way,’ said John Trick.

Miss Sharpe still seemed uncertain. She looked back up the road towards Bideford, as if she might see the bus coming, but it wasn’t.

‘Well, OK then…’ She got into the front seat and shook her umbrella into the gutter. She also had a gym bag and a badminton racquet.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’re very kind.’

‘No problem.’

They drove for a bit, with only the sound of the wipers clicking back and forth on the windscreen. Ruby hung between the front seats so she could smile at Miss Sharpe whenever she looked around.

‘Did you like my diary, Miss?’

‘Yes, Ruby, it was very good.’

Ruby looked at Daddy eagerly, but he didn’t give any indication of having heard her.

‘Is that a tennis bat, Miss?’

‘No, it’s for playing badminton,’ said Miss Sharpe.

‘What’s bammington?’

‘Well, it’s a bit like tennis, but you don’t play with a ball, you play with a thing called a shuttlecock.’

‘What’s a shuttlecock?’

‘It’s like a little cone made out of feathers.’

‘Does it fly?’ said Ruby, and Miss Sharpe laughed.

‘Only when you hit it.’

‘Oh,’ said Ruby. She found it difficult to picture that. Hitting one of those with a bat must be like swiping a cartoon bird – with all the little feathers floating down to earth afterwards.

They passed the sign that said
FAIRY CROSS AND FORD.
From the other direction, Ruby knew it said
FORD AND FAIRY CROSS
, just to be fair.

Miss Sharpe said, ‘You can drop me just past the pub. Thank you.’

‘But it’s raining,’ said Ruby.

And her father added, ‘It’s no problem to take you to the door.’

‘You’re very kind,’ said Miss Sharpe again.

John Trick followed two more brief instructions, and then stopped the car outside a short terrace of whitewashed cottages.

‘Thank you very much, Mr Trick,’ said Miss Sharpe, getting out. ‘And I’ll see you on Monday, Ruby, bright and early.’

‘Bye, Miss.’

Miss Sharpe put up her umbrella and waved back into the car with her racquet, and they set off again.

Ruby hung between the front seats and told Daddy about the diary.

‘Miss Sharpe said it was excellent,’ she lied, but it was wasted anyway, because Daddy had gone quiet again, so Ruby went quiet too, because she realized that things couldn’t be all better just because they’d been for a drive.

Daddy sipped from another can of cider, so Ruby got back in the front and dozed the rest of the way. She knew the route so well from her bus ride to and from school that even in her semi-sleep she could map the road home. Dimly she felt the swings through the S-bends at the Hoops Inn, and slid forward a little as the car nose-dived down the hill to Limeburn.

When they finally pulled up in the tiny cobbled square just feet from the drop to the beach, she stretched and yawned.

Daddy sat without getting out, finishing the second can of Strongbow.

Ruby was getting cold, but she was nervous of going into the house alone and seeing Mummy again.

Maybe Daddy was too, because he drank a third can, looking up at the light in the bedroom window of The Retreat while the ocean breathed in and out in the darkness.

‘You know,’ said Daddy suddenly, ‘when we first got married, your mum used to call me her hero. She used to say I’d rescued her.’

‘Like Snow White’s prince!’

‘Yeah, like that.’

‘Did you have a horse?’

‘No.’

‘Oh.’ That was disappointing. ‘What did you rescue her from?’ He shrugged. ‘Just, you know, I come along like a prince and swept her off her feet.’

His smile faded. ‘She needed me then, see. When I had a job.’

‘Can’t you just get another job?’

Daddy shook his head and gave a bitter little laugh. ‘Not in this economy.’

Ruby nodded. Her socks were still wet from the cobbles, and her feet were like ice, but she could hear Daddy thinking, so she didn’t want to whine like a girl.

Finally – without taking his eyes from The Retreat – Daddy sighed deeply. ‘Women can’t help it, you know, Rubes.’

‘Can’t help what?’ she asked through chattering teeth.

But Daddy went on staring up at the bedroom window, while Ruby sat and shivered beside him.

‘Can’t help
what?’

WHEN SHE GOT
home, Miss Sharpe realized that getting a lift had gifted her an extra half-hour with which to do whatever she liked.

So she put her badminton gear in the washing machine and cleaned out Harvey’s litter tray, while the big grey rabbit rocked gently around the kitchen behind her. Then she got out her marking for the evening and poured herself half a glass of white wine.

Any more would be stupid, and she didn’t
do
stupid.

She was sensible far beyond her twenty-six years, and had been that way for most of her life.

Georgia Sharpe had realized quite young that she was not pretty enough to catch a boy with her looks. She had believed her mirror when it told her that her wiry hair fizzed and spat like brown sparks around her head, that her eyes were small and pale, and that she had a mouth that turned down at one corner, making her look a little disappointed. But the truth had never daunted her, and by the time she was sixteen she was glad not to have been burdened by beauty. By then she’d watched her prettier friends dumbing down their lives to accommodate idiot boyfriends, and made up her mind that that was not for her; that she would get by on her brains and her good nature, even if it meant being single her whole life long. An old maid, her father said, but young Georgia thought that being single sounded rather exciting – and a lot less complicated than having to worry about the hopes and dreams of what she always referred to as ‘some random man’

So, instead of succumbing to panic-led convention, Miss Sharpe had upped sticks from flat Norfolk and moved to sinuous Devon, where she joined the badminton club for exercise, bought a house rabbit for cuddles, and – until she could have her own children – enjoyed those belonging to other people in class 5B at Bideford’s Westmead Junior School.

She wasn’t stupid, so she’d never expected
all
children to be enjoyable – and so it proved. For every Jamie Starke with her A in English, there was a Jordan Whitefield, with his essays punctuated only by bogeys. And for every sweet-natured David Leather, there was a Shawn Loosemore, who gave smaller children Chinese burns when he thought no one was looking.

Children lied, too. Miss Sharpe had expected a bit of exaggeration, but she had been surprised by just how tall their tales could be. In the first week’s diaries alone, Shawn had tamed ‘a wild stallyon’ and Connor Nuttall had done a triple somersault in gym – which he’d then painfully failed to repeat for a rapt crowd of children on the hard tarmac of the playground.

Miss Sharpe still had a pile of this week’s books to go through, but already Noah Jones had swum all the way from Appledore to Instow, and Essie Littlejohn had found an adder. It was half dead this week, but Miss Sharpe suspected that next week it could well be fully alive and – if nothing was said – the week after that Essie might be charming it out of a basket with a flute.

She understood why they did it. The more outlandish the lies, the more attention the children seemed to glean from their classmates.

Miss Sharpe knew that it was probably her duty to caution the children against embellishments, but she was reluctant to be too dictatorial because the lies were so much more entertaining than reality. Most of the diaries were plain boring. There were endless Playstation sessions, karate clubs, homework, and doing each other’s hair. David Leather seemed to practise the violin every spare minute of the day, and if Miss Sharpe heard one more time about there being no ponies in Ruby Trick’s paddock, she’d scream. Even Jordan had said
‘Again?
’ and made a loud snoring sound, which had made the other children laugh.

She thought of how Ruby had tried to show off to her father in the car tonight. She understood that little-girl need to have her daddy’s approval – even about something as mundane as a diary. She’d spent her own formative years trying to catch her father’s eye.

But after her mother had died, nothing had ever really caught his eye again.

Miss Sharpe wondered where the scars on Mr Trick’s face had come from – ugly, pale arcs that distorted his eye and his dark brow. He wasn’t what she’d have expected for the father of Ruby Trick, with her red hair and freckles. For her own amusement, she’d started to give herself points out of ten for predicting what the parents of each child in her class would look like. She hadn’t met them all yet, and wasn’t terribly good at the game. She’d only have given herself a two for Mr Trick. Unlike David Leather’s parents, who were perfect tens.
They
had come to school about David being bullied, and could barely fit through the classroom door. They were nice people, but as the parents of a victimized child they were ineffectual – too kind and too comfortable with their own girths to understand that what their enormous son needed to survive school was boot camp, not violin lessons.