A Library of Lemons

by Jo Cotterill

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Epilogue

  About Jo Cotterill

  Copyright

  For all my friends over the years,

  but particularly Shelley and Mandie,

  Claire, Esther, John, Cas,

  Helen and Steve.

  And Phil, the best.

  The new girl, Mae, asked me to play with her today. I didn’t know what to say. She’s got long black hair that she’d tied into two plaits and put on top of her head, like Heidi or the children from The Sound of Music. She has a round doll face with bright blue eyes, and she only joined the school this term.

  I was sitting in my favourite corner of the playground, with a book. It’s what I always do at break-time. Mae smiled at me in a hopeful way, but I shook my head and went back to my book.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, and went.

  I tried to concentrate on my book, but my eyes kept sliding over to watch her. She says okay a lot; it seems to suit her. It even rhymes with her name. Okay, Mae. She told us in circle time she’d changed schools because her family had moved house. She didn’t seem to mind about it, though. She always looked cheerful.

  I thought maybe she would go up to someone else but she went over to the fence on her own and started to pick up twigs from the ground. She made a little pile of them. Then she sat down and pulled something out of her pocket. The sun glinted off it – a magnifying glass.

  She was trying to set fire to the twigs. I watched, fascinated. Would it work? She seemed to be having difficulty getting the angle right. She kept looking up at the sky and then down at the magnifying glass, tilting it from side to side.

  That’s not right, I thought to myself. She needs to hold it in one position for a long time, so that the pinpoint of light heats up the twig underneath. I read it in a book once. Lighting a fire that way isn’t actually very practical, but it can work if you’re patient enough and if the sun is strong enough. But this is autumn. The sun isn’t very strong.

  I was watching her so hard that when she looked up and saw me, I nearly dropped my book in shock. Quickly, I fixed my eyes on the page again, but I couldn’t resist sneaking another glance at her. She was still looking at me, and she smiled as if I was her friend.

  My face felt hot with embarrassment. I didn’t look up from my book again.

  Mae didn’t manage to set fire to her twigs. I know that because if she had, one of the teachers would have come running. Instead, when the bell went, everyone lined up just as normal. I dawdled behind, waiting until the line had almost gone in. Then I rushed over to the fence to look at Mae’s little pile of twigs.

  It wasn’t a pile any more. She’d arranged them into letter shapes on the ground. They spelled out a word.

  CALYPSO

  I raced back to the classroom, my heart pounding. Why had she written my name in twigs?

  Dad always says you should be your own best friend. When I was younger I didn’t understand what that meant, but now I do. It means that you should be happy being alone, with yourself; that you shouldn’t need other people to make you happy. He doesn’t need other people, he says.

  I wonder sometimes if he needed my mother, but it’s not the sort of thing I can ask him. And I can’t ask her because she’s dead.

  Teachers at school used to worry that I always sit by myself. They wrote things like ‘she is a very solitary girl’ and ‘she isolates herself’. As though those were bad things.

  My latest report says something different: ‘She will find it hard to transition to secondary school next year if she can’t form close friendships.’

  ‘They don’t get it,’ Dad said when he read it at the end of last term. ‘They don’t understand people who don’t need people. They think being independent means you must be lonely. They’ve never been taught about inner strength.’

  Dad’s a big believer in inner strength. ‘If something happened to me,’ Dad says every now and then, ‘you’d be fine, Calypso. You have great inner strength.’

  I feel proud that he thinks I have great inner strength, but I don’t like to think about something happening to Dad. Something happened to Mum, five years ago, and I try not to think about that either. It all happened so quickly: she felt a bit unwell and went to the doctor, and they did some tests and told her she had cancer, and then she got very ill very fast – and then she died. If Dad died too, I’m not at all sure I’d be fine.

  Whenever he says it, I feel my eyes fill with tears. He notices and shakes his head, as though I’ve let him down again. ‘It’s no good getting upset,’ he says. ‘I’m just showing you how to be strong. Find your inner strength.’

  I wipe my eyes and try. It’s there, I’m sure. He says it often enough, it must be there. ‘I’d be fine,’ I say, and I don’t let my voice wobble. ‘And if … something happened to me … you’d be fine.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he says, with an encouraging smile, and goes off to his library. I try not to mind that he agrees. It’s because he’s got inner strength. It’s not that he doesn’t love me.

  At school, the other children have stopped trying to be my best friend. I like playing with them – it’s not that I don’t like people. But to be honest, I prefer books. I like the quiet space in my head that they make; the space that can be filled with magic or islands or mystery.

  Mae is new and doesn’t understand about me yet. She’ll realise in a few days, and then she’ll find someone else to be her friend.

  I’m still puzzling over Mae and her sticks when I get home. I let myself into the house and tiptoe past the library door so that I don’t disturb Dad while he’s working. It’s a big wooden door on the left, thick and old, and probably he wouldn’t hear me anyway, but I’ve got into the habit of being quiet. Then I go up the stairs to my bedroom and start my homework.

  The library has always been Dad’s work room. Mum had a little studio upstairs in the third bedroom, the smallest one. After she died, we turned it into a library for me, so now I have a bedroom and a library, which makes me very lucky because I don’t know anyone else my age who has a whole room for their books. When Mum was alive, it was full of canvases and easels and oil paints and watercolours and brushes and white spirit. It still smells very faintly of oil paints, even though there haven’t been any here for years. I like that I can sit in my library, with its walls of shelves and books, and breathe in the memory of Mum while I’m reading. It’s my special place, and Dad never comes in.

  After I finish my homework, I go downstairs to make tea. There isn’t much in the cupboard, as usual, but there’s some bread and cheese
– and a tin of baked beans. I toast the bread and warm up the beans and then grate some cheese over the top. Then I sit at the kitchen table and eat with one hand – the other hand holding a book open in front of me. It’s Pollyanna, a book from years and years ago. I’m not getting on with it very well because the heroine is astonishingly dull and wants nothing more than for everyone to like her. I’m starting to wonder whether it’s worth going on with. Anne in Anne of Green Gables is much more my sort of character. Or Sophie in Rooftoppers or Louie in The Girl Who Walked On Air. They all have imaginations and want adventures. They don’t spend their time being ‘glad’ about stuff.

  Dad still hasn’t appeared after I’ve finished and washed up, so I make a cup of tea for him and take it to his library.

  ‘Dad?’ I knock on the heavy door and then push it open.

  Dad’s desk is to the left. He’s sitting there as usual, eyes glued to a manuscript. He’s a proofreader, which means he reads books before they’re ready to be printed, to make sure they’re perfect. Dad can spot mistakes that ten editors have missed. Even nowadays, with all the computers we have, no one can beat my dad for proofreading. He does have a computer, but he hardly ever uses it. He says it’s impossible to spot errors properly on a screen, so he prints out each manuscript and the desk is always covered in neat piles of paper.

  The large rectangular room is quite gloomy. The trees in the front garden have grown so much that they block the light that should stream in through the big bay window – and today is overcast anyway. At some point, years before we moved in, someone knocked a hole in the wall and added a glass door to a sort of conservatory-greenhouse thing. Maybe at that point they were worried about their books being damaged by sunlight, because they also built big carved shutters to cover the beautiful old wooden shelves that line three of the walls. The sunlight doesn’t reach the shelves these days, but the shutters are still always closed out of habit. Dad has to use a lamp on his desk, but he likes it that way. I do too. The library feels quiet and dark and comforting. Sometimes I imagine the characters in the books tiptoeing around behind their shutters.

  ‘Cup of tea,’ I say, and put it down on the corner of the desk.

  ‘End of page,’ he says, holding up a finger and not taking his eyes off the paper.

  I wait. Dad is forty-two, but no one ever guesses his age right. He’s got one of those faces that could be much younger or much older, depending on how he’s feeling or what he’s concentrating on at the time. His hair is sort of springy and brown, and it’s slowly moving back from his forehead like the tide going out. He wears glasses for reading, and he’s naturally tall, thin and gangly. Once, when I was very small, he dressed up as a scarecrow, and somehow he looked exactly right, as though he’d been one in a former life.

  He reaches the bottom of the page and makes a tiny scrawl under a word on the last line. Then he looks up and smiles at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘Good afternoon, Calypso. How was school?’

  ‘Fine. The new girl made my name out of twigs on the ground.’

  He takes off his glasses and tilts his head to one side. ‘Strange.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘Were you playing a game with her?’

  ‘No, she just did it.’

  ‘Did she make her own name?’

  ‘No, just mine.’

  He shrugs. ‘Ah well. People do odd things sometimes.’

  ‘I know. What are you working on?’

  His face brightens. ‘A scientific journal. There’s a particularly good article about citric acid. I’m thinking of asking the author to review my History when it’s out.’

  Dad is writing what he calls his ‘magnum opus’, which sounds like an ice cream but is actually a really big book. It’s called A History of the Lemon and it’s all about where lemons originated, how they’ve developed over the centuries, what medicines can be made with lemons, recipes … everything to do with the lemon, really. I think it’s great that one day he’s going to be a famous author. Sometimes, when I’m in my library, surrounded by books and the people who wrote them, I secretly dream of becoming an author myself. It’s not something I’ve dared to say out loud though, in case that somehow spoils it, like a bubble popping when you breathe on it.

  Dad’s library used to smell of beeswax polish, but now it smells of lemons because he’s growing his own trees. Four years ago he cleared out the conservatory-greenhouse thing with a kind of mad enthusiasm. Then he bought six lemon trees at the garden centre and a book about how to look after them. That was a very strange day. I went to school in the morning, and when I came back there was a lemon orchard in the house. I think it was soon after that he started writing his book.

  I tried reading to the trees once, because I’d heard that plants like to be read to. Dad asked me to stop after one of them developed brown leaves.

  ‘You will remember to eat dinner, won’t you, Dad?’ I ask now.

  ‘Dinner?’ He looks puzzled.

  ‘Yes. Do you want me to make you some toast? I’m afraid I had the last tin of beans.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half past six.’

  ‘Half past six, already?’ he says. ‘You’re late home from school.’

  ‘I’ve been home for hours, Dad.’

  ‘Have you? I didn’t hear you come in.’

  ‘Dinner, Dad,’ I say patiently.

  ‘Oh, I don’t fancy toast.’

  ‘Okay … well, there’s not much else.’

  He frowns. ‘You know I don’t like that word, Calypso. Please don’t use it.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Dad claims that the word ‘okay’ is common and slang and not good English, but it’s hard to remember when everyone at school uses it all the time. And it’s Mae’s favourite word too. Okay, Mae. She’s a nice sort of person – isn’t it okay for people to say okay? I open my mouth to ask Dad whether it’s okay for some people to use the word and not others and, if so, how you know which sort of person you are, but his head suddenly jerks up and he fixes me with a delighted stare, the frown wiped from his forehead.

  ‘Shall we go out for pizza?’

  If anyone looked at him now, they’d never know he was in his forties. He looks like a big excited kid.

  I blink. ‘What, now?’

  ‘Of course!’ He jumps up and runs a hand through his scrubby hair. ‘Let’s be spontaneous!’

  ‘I just had beans, Dad.’

  ‘But you can still fit in pizza, can’t you? Everyone loves pizza. Get your coat!’

  ‘I was going to have a bath …’ But it’s no use. He’s already in the hallway, trying to find his shoes.

  I slip my book into my jacket pocket and follow him.

  Our wheezy Volkswagen almost doesn’t start, and I hold my breath.

  ‘Come on, old girl,’ Dad says. ‘Easy does it.’

  It strikes me that in some ways Dad is like a character from Pollyanna. Surely no one calls their car ‘old girl’ these days?

  The car coughs into life and I breathe with relief. Some day, and it can’t be that far off, the car won’t start at all. Cars are supposed to be serviced, I know that. But I don’t think ours has been serviced in years. It’s probably a ‘menace to society’, which is what Mrs Gilkes, our head teacher, calls anyone and anything she disapproves of.

  Dad eats a lot of pizza. I’m still full of toast and beans, so I only have a couple of slices, but it’s nice. I wish Dad had suggested it earlier, though, because then I could have saved the beans for tomorrow.

  ‘We need to get some food in,’ I say to Dad as we come out of the restaurant.

  He nods. ‘I’ll do it while you’re at school.’

  ‘Really? You won’t forget like last time?’

  He grins and takes my hand as we walk to the car. ‘Scout’s honour.’

  I feel happy. In bed I read another chapter of Pollyanna and frown. What is calf’s-foot jelly? It doesn’t sound very nice.

  I reach
out and brush my fingers against the photo frame that stands on my bedside table, the way I always do before I go to sleep. ‘Goodnight, Mum,’ I say.

  She smiles back at me from the frame, her long auburn hair lit up by sunlight. I don’t know if the sun really shone more when I was little, but it feels that way.

  Then I turn off the lamp and think about Mae. She’s a bit like Pollyanna. A cheerful sort of person. I wonder if she’ll try to make friends with me again tomorrow.

  I’m not sure if I want her to or not.

  Miss Spotlin pairs up me and Mae on a writing activity. We have to match words together that mean the same thing. I know Miss Spotlin has given us the advanced vocab envelope, because the words are printed in purple. Most of the class have green or blue words. The dyslexic group is given red ones.

  I know a lot of words because I read a lot. Being paired with Mae makes me wonder if she reads a lot too. Or maybe Miss Spotlin didn’t know where else to put her.

  ‘Talkative,’ I say, reaching for a word, ‘and loquacious.’

  Mae nods. ‘Worried,’ she says, matching it to ‘anxious’.

  That was an easy pair.

  ‘Sophistication and elegance,’ I say.

  Mae says, ‘Volatile and explosive.’

  I am impressed. Not many people in my class know what ‘volatile’ means. Maybe Mae does read lots of books. My eyes scan the little white rectangles for more matches.

  Mae beats me to it. ‘Minuscule and diminutive.’

  I raise my eyebrows and reach for ‘cerebral’ and ‘intellectual’.

  ‘You’re good at this,’ Mae says to me.

  ‘So are you,’ I reply.

  She beams. ‘I like words.’

  ‘Me too.’ I feel something approaching surprise. I’ve never met anyone my own age who would admit to ‘liking words’.

  ‘Words are kind of like food, don’t you think?’ she says, her eyes on the printed strips. ‘They have flavours, and they all feel different in your mouth. I mean, even though “cerebral” and “intellectual” mean the same thing, they feel different. “Cerebral” is almost slinky, or sugary – the end of the word makes it feel like it’s almost falling out of your mouth. And “intellectual” is kind of like a marching rhythm. In-tel-lec-tual. It’s sort of chewy with a snap.’