One Lucky Summer

by Jenny Oliver

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, non-committal, turning away before he could even consider resemblances. His body starting to envelop itself in a protective force field.

  Zadie shrugged. ‘I think we do.’ Nothing was able to dent her limpet enthusiasm.

  In the kitchen, the patch on the ceiling was getting exponentially bigger. The bowl he’d put on the floor was already full.

  Zadie stared up at it, hands on her hips. Now she looked like her mother. ‘It’s got much worse.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that, thank you.’ Curse his life.

  ‘Barry would know what to do.’

  ‘I’m sure he would,’ said Ruben, bashing about in the cupboard under the sink for a bucket.

  ‘That’ll fill up really quickly,’ Zadie commented when he appeared with an old red one.

  ‘Yes,’ he muttered in agreement.

  Then after a few seconds. ‘I think the bucket has a hole in it.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘That’s a pound in the swear jar.’

  ‘A pound! Are you kidding me?’

  ‘Some words are worse than others.’

  Ruben could think of a million words he’d like to say but he couldn’t afford it.

  ‘When we had a leak once, Barry fixed it himself. He went out the skylight on to the roof. It was really exciting.’

  ‘I’m sure it was.’ Ruben replaced the broken bucket with the bowl and searched the kitchen for something more substantial.

  The cat stretched and yawned, mocking Ruben’s inadequacy.

  The rain splashed on another area of the floor.

  ‘There’s another leak!’ Zadie was hopping.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ As soon as he said it, Ruben flinched and stopped. He had his hands on his hips, his brow furrowed. If he looked in the mirror now he’d be the spitting image of his father. He took a deep breath, exhaled slowly like his yoga teacher had taught him. He could do this.

  ‘Shall I call Barry—’

  ‘No,’ Ruben held up a hand. ‘No, I’ll do it myself.’

  Zadie’s eyes lit up.

  Ruben yanked on his old Barbour and pushed his feet into his wellingtons, while Zadie slipped on her Converse. He was outside in the garden shed before he really stopped to consider what he was doing, pushing spiderwebs and plant pots out of the way to get to the ladder on the far wall. Something fluttered in the darkness, Ruben yelped as a bat flew out, making him jump, and Zadie laugh. He searched the shelves for a tarpaulin and something to hold it down with, finding a rusty staple gun in a box of old tools. Zadie held onto the bundle of plastic and the staple gun as Ruben swept away more cobwebs to haul the ladder out and up the path. The rain had slicked back their hair, soaking through his coat, getting in his eyes.

  As soon as he’d stepped outside the house he’d realised it was a mistake. He wanted to go back inside. If Zadie wasn’t there he’d have left the leaking bucket where it was and ignored the whole fiasco till a professional could fix it in the morning. He’d have just thrown money at the situation. But the deadly combination of her heroically capable stepdad and the memory of his own authoritarian father had propelled him into this ridiculous no-man’s land as he tried to out-do one and banish the other, succeeding only in making a mockery of himself.

  The ladder tipped and swayed as he extended it to its full height, hands slippery with rain, and propped it up against the side of the house, pushing the leaves of a buddleia out of the way and securing the base against a particularly vile faux wishing well, another of the garden ornaments for which his father had such a penchant.

  ‘Shall I hold it?’ Zadie asked, face soaked.

  ‘Definitely,’ said Ruben, as he tested the slippery ladder rungs, more reluctant now than ever to head up to the kitchen roof. Nothing but pride spurring him on. His wellingtons slid as he started to climb. The whole endeavour was foolish. But Zadie seemed to be enjoying herself. ‘This is exciting, isn’t it?’ she grinned, little wet hands holding tight to the ladder.

  Rain slicked his hair to his forehead. The staple gun weighed down his coat pocket. He had a folded tarpaulin under his arm. It was dark, the noise of the rain was deafening. He could see the dreaded black cat smugly stretched out along the kitchen radiator, not out in the pissing rain with a pointless point to prove. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he muttered.

  ‘You can do it, Ruben!’ Zadie urged him on.

  He exhaled, slow and resigned. His wellie slipped as it caught on the rung and made him wobble. When he got to the roof, he held onto the gutter with one hand and leant forward to examine the felting. He should have brought a torch. What kind of idiot goes up on the roof in the dark and doesn’t bring a torch?

  Annoyed with himself, he looked down. It was quite a long way. Instead, he focused on where the hole might be by following the line up from the red bucket he could see through the almost ceiling-high windows, and started to staple the tarpaulin at random over the approximate area.

  It was an ill-conceived plan and he knew it, but he couldn’t back out now.

  ‘Barry would be SO impressed. I’m not sure even he would go out in the rain.’

  Ruben swiped the water from his eyes. ‘You said—’ but then he stopped himself, it was too petty. He imagined Penny catching sight of him in horror – he’d been tasked with being a responsible adult and looking after his daughter and he was precariously up a ladder in—

  ‘Is that thunder?’

  ‘Fuck.’

  ‘That’s five pounds!’

  The tarpaulin was too big, buckling where he’d stapled it in crumpled lumps. He imagined his father watching with a sneer – ‘de Lacys never show weakness, boy!’ Even more frustrated now, Ruben tried to flatten the tarpaulin, steadying himself on the gutter, stapling great pockets of the woven plastic. He stapled through his index finger at the same time as the cheap guttering snapped.

  ‘Argh!’ he cried, yanking his stapled hand back in shock. The plastic beneath his other hand shearing, his foot losing purchase and suddenly he was falling, sliding down the ladder, his hands grappling for hold, ungainly in his tragedy. Zadie’s little face gasped in horror. Fear infused every pore of his being as his body whacked and thumped against the ladder.

  The buddleia softened his fall. But it was the crumbling wishing well that took the brunt of the impact, smashed first by the ladder and then further destroyed by the weight of Ruben’s body.

  He felt a moment of triumph considering his father’s passion for ornamental garden statues, but the triumph was short-lived as the bruising pain from the fall kicked in. Zadie was peering over him with a look of sheer and utter panic that he was dead.

  ‘It’s OK, I’m OK.’ He sat up. His head throbbed. His back ached. Rain pelted his skin.

  Zadie fussed around him. But Ruben just sat for a moment, staring at the broken old stones between his legs, thankful that the wishing well wasn’t real otherwise he’d have plummeted metres underground, thinking enough was enough. He would leave for London in the morning. He’d get his cleaner Hildegard to babysit.

  But then something among the rubble caught his eye. His brain was a little slower to compute as his hand reached to pick it up.

  Zadie stopped fretting and asked, ‘What’s that?’

  It was a little blue plastic box. Ruben hadn’t seen one for years. It immediately brought back memories of unconcealed excitement. Of unfolding a square of paper. The staccato handwriting in black biro. He remembered school holidays racing through the woods. Light flickering through canopies of leaves. The thrill of the chase. The crackle of bonfires. Waves crashing on the beach. The dart of something in the undergrowth. The goading, the fun, the triumph. The dares to reach out for antlers soft as velvet. The warmth of a darkened room. The flicker of a TV. Hot coffee. Illicit cigarette smoke. The throatiness of her laugh. The shocking green of her eyes. The scent of her skin. The humour of her gently mocking gaze.

  My God, he must have had a knock to the head.

  ‘What
is it?’ Zadie asked again.

  Ruben’s hand rested on the lid of the box, reluctant to open it as a strange mix of warmth and trepidation infused him. ‘It’s a clue,’ he said, ‘for a treasure hunt.’

  ‘Ooh! Can we do it?’ she asked, voice squeaky with excitement.

  Ruben didn’t reply straight away. Instead, he turned the box over in his hands, mulling over the possibilities and found himself suddenly less inclined to dash back to London. He looked across at his overeager daughter. ‘The thing is,’ he said, forehead creasing, ‘it’s not really our treasure hunt to do.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Olive.’

  Olive didn’t think she was looking at Mark in any particular way. If anything, it was her complete lack of personal expression that she found perplexing.

  ‘You know as well as I do it hasn’t been working for a while.’

  Olive was stumped. There was Mark, her partner of eight solid years, standing by the front door all packed and ready to go. If she hadn’t come home from work early she’d have – she presumed – been notified via email. Mark didn’t like to talk on the phone.

  ‘Can you say something?’ Mark said, hovering by the front door in a blue and white striped shirt that Olive didn’t recognise.

  ‘You’re wearing a new shirt,’ she said because Mark didn’t buy new things. He wore the same jumpers he’d had in college. When she bought a new bed he didn’t understand what was wrong with the one they’d inherited from his parents. Sweet, kind, ordinary Mark who made a lasagne at the beginning of the month and cut it into squares for the freezer. Mark who sat behind his desk in the spare room, head obscured by the piles of paper. Glasses falling down his nose as he peered into his microscope. Dishevelled, familiar. Too busy saving nature to care about his appearance. When he’d finally look up and realise she was in the room, he’d grin and say something like, ‘Mitochondria, Olive. Gotta love mitochondria.’

  Not now, however, now he was itching to get away, hair more coiffed than normal, wearing his new shirt, with his belongings stuffed into an assortment of Sainsbury’s Bags for Life.

  ‘Look, I’d better go,’ said Mark, reaching for his bags.

  ‘You can’t leave.’ Finally, she found her voice. One tinged with an edge of desperation.

  ‘Olive,’ he said, ‘I think even if I asked you, you wouldn’t be able to look me in the eye and declare your undying love.’

  Olive opened her mouth but her voice was gone again. She frowned. Then she said, ‘It’s not about undying love, Mark, it’s about what works. This. Us. We work.’ When had the man who was the poster boy for honest, predictable dependability cared about down on the knee declarations of love? ‘I do love you,’ she said.

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘I do.’

  But Mark shook his head. ‘It’s not enough, I’m afraid.’

  Not enough? Olive thought of all the things they’d done together. The comfortable, reassuring routine of their lives. The way he folded his clothes before he got into bed. The smell of his deodorant. The mug he liked his tea in. Those things couldn’t just disappear without consultation. The worst of it was, she thought with a flash of guilt, that if anyone in the partnership was going to leave, she’d always assumed it would be her. That she quite firmly held the strings.

  A car horn beeped outside. Mark looked sheepish. ‘I’ve got to go.’

  Olive was still catching up. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Just a friend,’ said Mark, unable to meet her eye. ‘Barbara.’

  ‘Who the hell’s Barbara?’

  ‘Just someone I met.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Nowhere.’ He twitched awkwardly. ‘She’s awakened something in me, Olive. Something I didn’t know I had.’

  Olive paused, looking at him questioningly, then went to peer out of the window of their ground-floor flat. A silver Mercedes was parked over the drive, at the wheel was a mousy-haired woman in a blue polka-dot top Olive recognised from a Marks and Spencer’s advert. Not a boyfriend-stealing Jezebel but a perfectly ordinary citizen.

  Olive didn’t know what to do. She refused to cry although she felt more desperate than she’d have imagined. There was no paperwork to divvy up – they weren’t married, the flat was rented, they had two months’ rent put away for exactly such circumstances. She would give notice. The car was in her name because Mark rarely drove. It was all very simple. ‘You’re such a practical couple,’ people would say at parties and only now did it seem like an insult.

  Swallowing down a wave of emotion, a sudden sadness that tonight he wouldn’t be sitting on the sofa to watch Netflix with, she did the only thing she could think of, she opened the front door for him.

  Mark looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, Olive,’ he said, eyes beseeching, before, head down, he dashed out to where Barbara was waiting in her Mercedes.

  Olive leant against the wall. She had a vision of the sad squares of lasagne for one in the freezer. It was not, she said to herself, how this was meant to go.

  The phone rang as Olive stood at the door to Mark’s office in the spare room. Her vision tunnelling as she took in the sight – piles of stuff on every surface, papers lining every shelf, a cheap office chair that he’d wheeled from the university when they were updating and giving the old ones away free. That was the Mark she knew. The one who this room smelt of.

  The landline handset was under those papers somewhere, she could hear it. She didn’t try to look for it because it was always someone trying to sell her something.

  The answerphone clicked in. Olive stared at the overgrown houseplants on the shelves. The chipped mug still with half a cup of tea in it. The old microscope slides with toxic green mould all over them. The plastic pencil pot. The chewed biros. All the things she had found so endearingly simple. Now she just felt the emptiness of the flat. The cheap desk clock ticking the seconds.

  ‘Oh hi. Hi,’ said the voice on the answerphone, cut glass and a little awkward. ‘This is a message for Olive King. Ruben de Lacy here.’

  Olive froze.

  ‘Long time no see, eh?’ he laughed.

  And suddenly Olive was frantically searching for the phone. Lifting papers, the movement causing a ripple effect, like the twopence machines at amusement arcades. Piles of paraphernalia slid to the floor to reveal the phone on the edge of Mark’s desk.

  ‘Hello, Ruben?’ she said, breathless, heart beating overly fast. ‘How did you get my number?’

  ‘Olive! You’re there. I got it off your Aunt Marge. She’s the only one of you with a listed number,’ Ruben replied, his voice catapulting Olive back to a time and a place that didn’t exist for her any more.

  ‘Anyway, you’ll never guess what …’ he was saying, an excitable girl’s voice in the background shouting, ‘Is that her? Have you got through? Tell her, tell her!’ And Ruben, slightly irritable, ‘All right, all right!’

  The signal was terrible. Olive felt like perhaps this whole thing was a dream. That’d be a relief. Wake up, Olive. But Ruben carried on, ‘I’m back at Willoughby Hall, Olive, and guess what I’ve found—’

  ‘What?’ Olive asked, brain torn between trying to catch up and simultaneously forget.

  ‘The first clue, Olive,’ Ruben’s voice was tinged with amusement. ‘For the treasure hunt. For your dad’s treasure hunt.’

  Olive almost dropped the phone. Ruben’s line cut out. She sat on the edge of the desk trying to let her brain catch up with what was happening. She saw her family’s little cottage on the Willoughby Park estate. Her dad beaming that he’d hit the jackpot. His explorer hat hung on the peg now for good. The adventures were over. He’d found his treasure. He was home.

  Looking around Mark’s shambolic office, Olive wondered what her dad would think of her now.

  The phone rang again. ‘Sorry about that, signal’s bloody awful. So do you fancy coming down here? Do the treasure hunt?’

  Olive didn’t know what to say, eve
rything going far too quickly for her liking. She could barely believe she was talking to Ruben de Lacy. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, buying herself some time. The whole idea was madness. She couldn’t possibly go on a treasure hunt.

  ‘Come on, Olive.’ Ruben laughed. ‘It’ll be fun. I can’t do it without you.’

  At the sound of his laugh, memories, supersonic like rainbows, sped past her, too fast to catch hold of. Too bright. A door very firmly closed.

  He started telling how her he’d found the clue in a wishing well. As he talked, she got her mobile out and typed Ruben de Lacy’s name into Instagram, curious about who he’d become. There he was, bold as brass. With a page open to anyone. The first shot was of him dressed in a Barbour and boots posing in front of Willoughby Hall, captioned, Lord of the Manor? Olive cringed; who was this guy? All floppy hair and cheesy grin. She could certainly handle seeing him if this was what he’d become.

  She skimmed some more photos: keys to a new Austin Martin, selfie with a brunette in sunglasses on a Caribbean beach, cocktails with other equally floppy-haired friends, a boxfresh Peloton bike set up on a penthouse balcony.

  Oh Ruben, she thought with a twinge of disappointment. Despite everything, he had lived up to the cliché of his parents’ expectations after all.

  It made her think again about her own dad. What would he think if he could see her now? Safe, predictable, no sense of adventure. ‘You want something in life, Olive, you have to go looking for it. There’s no such thing as X marks the spot.’ She imagined him looking down at her current existence with such dismay she felt her stomach curl in on itself.

  On the other end of the phone, Ruben said, ‘So what do you think, Olive? Want to find some treasure?’

  And with the exquisite shame of her dad’s disappointment so clear in her mind, Olive found herself replying, ‘OK,’ before her rational brain could stop her.