Undertow (3 page)

“But not us,” Mum says. “None of it. Just ephemera.”

I looked it up. It’s an insect, a mayfly that only lives for a day or something. But I know what she means. I know why she made us pack the rest up and take bagful after bagful to the charity shop. Not just because of the train. But because all that matters is us: me, her and Finn. Stuff comes and goes. We are our own world and possessions.

“What about my chair?” Finn begs.

Mum looks at the tiny wooden thing, made by his grandpa, his “Nonno” – Luka’s dad. Too small for Finn to squeeze into now so a plush giraffe and Buzz Lightyear lie tangled together on the worn pine, an improbable pair. “There’ll be furniture there,” she says. “Or we can get new stuff.”

What with? I think. Mum hasn’t got a job. Hasn’t had one for a year now. And before that they only lasted a few months before she’d start turning up late, or not at all. Or argue and get fired. But I don’t say anything. Because I know what she’s doing. She’s starting again. She wants new things. New people. And so I fit my world into two suitcases. My jeans, the denim soft and faded with two years of washing, but Cass’s name in a heart stubbornly ingrained in black Bic on the knee; my cowboy boots that I begged for for months because Cass had a pair; my paints and sketch-pad, every page filled with graphite lines: Finn eating a Cornetto, the ice cream trickling down his chin; Luka sitting at the table, playing guitar. Moments gone. Dead. I push the pad down to the bottom of the blue vinyl. My secret.

Cass comes over to say goodbye. She’s crying, crocodile tears welling in the corners of her eyes then slipping over her waterproof mascara, saying how I have to get a mobile because it’s my human right and Mum is abusing me or lying even that they’ll radiate my brain but if I don’t then she’ll email or write even, like in a film, with proper paper and everything. Then she checks her make-up in the mirror, the gold frame exposed, naked, the notes binned, necklaces hanging in the Salvation Army. Says she has to go because she’s meeting Stella down at Chicago’s. Then she gets up and hugs me, and fans her eyes, as if she’s willing the tears to stay in. But I know she won’t cry again, because there’s only so much that her Maybelline can take, and because Ash is going to be at Chicago’s, too. I know this because she’s wearing a crop top, her tan tummy a flash of brown goosebumps between the red check and denim blue.

And I don’t cry either. Not then. Not when we close the door for the last time and leave the note on Mrs Hooton’s mat; not on the 36 when we pass Oliver Goldsmith Primary where Cass and I first met; not when we’re on Vauxhall Bridge and I look down the river at the Eye and the Houses of Parliament and the picture-postcard London.

But now, sat on the InterCity on Platform 5, my eyes fill with tears, as my head fills with insects, the mayflies we’re leaving behind. I think of Luka coming back to the flat to find someone else in our place and his stuff in a box in the hallway. Of Finn’s “Nonno” and “Nonna”, in a flat just a mile from here, Polaroids of Finn and me grinning out from the silver frames that crowd their windowsills like an army of memories. And I’m scared that we will die and disappear; that they won’t care; that we are ephemera too. And I’m scared we’re not; that we are more than fragile wings and faded photographs; that part of them will be missing for ever.

I hear the shrill note of the guard’s whistle, the last-minute clatter of bags and feet on the platform before the doors are slammed, and I am suddenly aware I am trapped in this tin carriage, being taken away from my life to a new one I’m not even sure I want. The insects are in my stomach now, and I stand suddenly, nauseous, panicking.

“Billie?” Mum questions.

“I need the loo,” I say. I lurch down the aisle, pushing past tutting men in suits, clutching at the backs of seats to steady myself and push me closer to the exit. My cases are at the bottom of the luggage rack. Too heavy to pull out now. Not enough time. They’re just stuff, I say to myself.

But when I get there, when I’m standing at the open window, my lungs heaving, my knuckles white, gripped around the cold metal of the handle, I think of him. Of the part of me that’s missing. Not even a Luka, coming and going in and out of my life. Never there at all. My hand relaxes on the handle, blood rushing back to the tips of my fingers, and I look up to meet the eyes of the guard, his whistle touching his lips, waiting to see which way I’m going to go. I drop my hand and pull it inside the window. And the guard closes his mouth around the whistle and blows.

I’m back in my seat as the train pulls out of the station. Past the stucco terraces, past the horses under the Westway. Past the tower block with the Polaroid army on the windowsill. Finn sees it too. Asks if Nonno and Nonna can come and stay. “Yeah, course,” says Mum. But she’s not really listening. She’s not really here. She’s somewhere else, in another carriage, another time.

Because she did it before. Caught a train along this line, but on the other side of the tracks. Left home and came to London. She erased her world, her past. Now she’s doing it again. Rubbing out the flat and the debt and the never-quite-enough of Luka.

But then I remember something Luka said about the past. That it never really goes away, that it catches up with you, grasping at your ankles and pulling you back. Wherever you hide, it will find you in the end. And I wonder if it’s found Mum. If this is a new start. Or if she’s going back to the start.

HET

HET WAKES
and pulls up the thick cotton blind on the sleeper car. The night-shrouded fields and grey granite walls she left behind have given way to early sunlight and the 1930s red-brick world of West London. She heaves herself upright on the narrow bunk and lets her legs drop to the floor. Leaden with sleep, they bang against the leather of her bag
.

She touches her belly, swelling now, aware that she hasn’t eaten for hours, since last night. Her last supper. Cold, boiled ham and beans from the garden. Eaten in silence, save for the ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall, marking out the seconds and minutes until she could leave this family of strangers behind
.

Her stomach gurgles and she looks up, embarrassed. But the bunk above her is empty. She is alone
.

She roots around in the front pocket of her bag until her fingers find what she is looking for. She pulls out a stick of peppermint rock and unwraps the cellophane. A slip of paper flutters to the floor, a black-and-white beach scene and the words
A GIFT FROM SEATON
.
Het sees it but doesn’t pick it up. In an hour it will be swept away, ephemera. Like the pink letters stretching through the rock, Seaton will disappear, will be sucked into sweet sugary nothing. What’s real, what matters, is what’s in front of her. Martha’s flat, and London, and this new life inside her. Her new life
.

BILLIE

I WAKE
up with the sound of rain hammering against the reinforced glass, Mum’s breath warm in my ear, whispering that we’re here. I open my eyes to the fluorescent glare of the carriage. Outside it’s pitch black, late now. I strain to see the landscape, but all I can make out is my own bleary-eyed reflection. The train is slowing, the wet iron of the rails squealing a protest as its brakes lock on. I stare at the window and slowly my sleep-soaked face, Finn’s excitement, Mum’s expectation all melt away under the orange sodium glow of the platform lights, and we see where we are, where we’re going. Black letters on white, spelling out our new world:
SEATON
.

“Are we here? Are we?” Finn demands, though he can read as well as me.

Mum smiles. “We’re here. Come on. Get the bags.”

“It’s raining,” I say, disappointment taking the edge off the fear I feel.

For a second I think I see a glimpse of it in Mum too. But, if it’s there, she forces practicality to push it down.

“We’ll get a cab.”

“Like on holiday,” says Finn.

Mum laughs. “Just like on holiday.”

But, even with our suitcases, and the tang of sea in the air, I don’t feel like I’m on holiday. This isn’t the newness of Margate, or Majorca. This is something else; older, deeper. And if I feel it, who have never been here before, except as a tiny seed inside her, then Mum must feel it too.

I lean into her in the back of the cab, feel her arm snake round me, the other already holding Finn, pulling him down into his seat as he strains to find the sand and the sea and the donkeys.

“What do you think?” she asks.

I look out at night-shuttered shops and arcades, neon signs with bulbs missing so that Tenpenny Falls is cut price to a penny; El Dorado an illegible scrawl, and I think of Magic City. Cass and Ash playing the slots and drinking cheap lager from brown paper bags.

“Like Peckham,” I say. “But wetter.”

The rain drums against the roof of the taxi, sweeping over the windscreen in a sudden, blinding arc as we turn out of the town centre and begin to climb a steep hill.

“It’s not always this bad,” the cabbie says. The first words he’s spoken, save for the “Where to?” at the station and the grunt as he heaved six suitcases into the boot of his rusting Ford Mondeo.

“Oh I know,” says Mum. “I grew up here.”

The cabbie snorts. Meaning what? That she doesn’t talk or look like she grew up here. That we’re outsiders. That we’ll never fit in. Thoughts that will prick me, prod at me again and again in the weeks and months ahead. But right now I bat the accusing fingers away. Because the cab has stopped. We’re here.

Cliff House towers over us, important. Solid granite walls, stained glass in the door, dark now, but in my head I see it backlit with the warmth of a chandelier. It isn’t a palace. Not really. There are no turrets, no arrow slots for windows. But, even in the rain and half-light, it’s a fairy tale. So far from the flat in Peckham that I have to choke back a laugh. Because how can I have grown up there, and Mum here? How can she have given up all this for so little? But even as I ask I know the answer. Because I was what mattered. Not five bedrooms, and two floors, and a garden the size of a park. Because they would have been empty without me there. And they didn’t want me there. Until now.

Mum shakes me from my imagined palace. “Have you got the key?” she asks frantically, the contents of her purse tinkling onto the black and white tiles of the path as she upends it in the search.

For a second I panic. That I have forgotten it. That it is sitting laughing to itself on the scratched kitchen table in Peckham. But then I remember slipping it into the pocket of my black dress, its weight pulling the fabric, threatening to pull the stitches away from the seam. I push my hand inside, and it is there, the metal pressing against my hip bone.

“Here,” I say, and I hold it out to her.

“No, you do it,” Mum replies, still picking up the cab change from the floor, precious coins that she knows we need, though she’ll spend them without thought.

“Let me,” begs Finn. “I’ll do it.”

“No,” says Mum. “It’s Billie’s, remember.”

“’S’OK,” I shrug. And it is. Because I don’t want to do it. In case it doesn’t fit. Or it is the Ark of the Covenant, or Pandora’s Box, letting out something wonderful and terrible all at once.

But none of this happens. The key fits, and instead of shrieking, I hear the satisfying clunk as the frame releases its grip on the door and it swings heavily, silently open.

Finn looks up for a light switch and finds one, a brown Bakelite circle, a relic from another age. He pulls it down with a sharp click.

“Wow,” he says. And for once I am caught up in his fever. Because, even though the floor is strewn with post, this isn’t the bare concrete of the flat hallway. This floor is criss-crossed in wooden parquet, like one of those Magic Eye paintings, concealing a secret pattern. And beyond that, carpet takes over, not the rough hessian mats that mark your knees and wear holes in your socks, but actual soft, sage-green carpet.

“Don’t just stand there all night,” says Mum. “Come on.”

I turn to look at her. Trying to read her. But all I can make out is impatience and cold.

“I’m hungry,” says Finn, and he instinctively stoops to scoop up the post. “Can we have pizza?”

“It’s too late,” laughs Mum. “And I don’t even think they deliver food here. It’s not like London. People cook.”

Finn shrugs and heads down the hall. To check the fridge, I assume. I turn back to Mum, still framed in the doorway, her hair a halo, the wind and rain a
Wuthering Heights
backdrop to the wild Cathy standing before me. I hesitate. But I need to know.

“Are you OK?” I ask.

Mum tips her head to one side. As if she might tell me a secret. But instead, she rolls her eyes. “I’m knackered,” she says. “And this wind is hideous.” She slams the door behind her and follows Finn.

The fridge is empty but Mum starts rooting in cupboards. “Pasta?” she says, holding up a half-full packet of penne.

“With what?” asks Finn.

She looks again and finds a bottle of ketchup and a tin of tuna. Finn pulls a face. But she kisses it away. “It’ll be lovely,” she says. “We ate it all the time when I was a student.” And she opens the packet and pours it, clattering, into an expensive-looking saucepan from an overhead rack.

“Can I look round?” asks Finn.

Mum nods, dropping the packet without thought into the bin under the sink. Finn disappears into the house, his feet a soft thud on the carpet fading up the stairs.

Mum looks at me. “Go on,” she says. “You can go too, if you want.”

So I do.

Finn finds it first. I hear him call “Bagsy” and I know he’s claiming the best bedroom. The biggest one. Or the one with the sea view. Or the secret passage.

But the secret’s bigger than that.

The walls are covered with certificates. Awards for swimming, for rugby, for rowing. Silver trophies glint and wink on polished shelves. And by the bed a stack of
Beano
s sits waiting to be read.

But not by Finn. By Will.

The room looks like it hasn’t changed since the day he died. The bed made. The curtains drawn. His shoes lined up neatly in a row against the wall. A shrine to a boy who went before I was even born. And I realize she lived like this for sixteen years. Eleanor. My grandmother. One child gone away. And one dead. Nothing more than ghosts.