Letting You Go

by Anouska Knight

  Alex glanced at the box in Jem’s hand. Blythe had convinced her bosses to buy them in when genealogy-fever had set in the Falls, as a way to bring in some revenue to the library and hopefully more interest in local ancestry.

  ‘This one must be the tree Mum did for Dad. Fancy a quick look? You could have a break,’ Jem said hopefully, ‘I’ll make the tea?’ Why was Jem so keen to spend time together all of a sudden?

  ‘You go ahead.’ Alex said. ‘I’m going to sort these records.’

  ‘Alex,’ Jem sighed, ‘even if you do take them all down to Mum, what are you going to play them on?’

  ‘The record player. It has a headphone socket, I’ve checked. I just need a plug to wire back onto the cable.’

  ‘Well keep away from my hair-straighteners. I need that plug where it is.’ Jem was trying to be upbeat. Alex might’ve smiled but she thought how sleek Jem’s hair had been when she’d been standing in Millie’s lounge.

  ‘Any ideas where Dad keeps his small screwdrivers?’ Alex said nonchalantly.

  ‘In the workshop. He has about a million. You might even find a plug in there. He always keeps stuff like that. Just don’t let him catch you in there.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know, he said there are dangerous bits of machinery in there. I think he thinks we’re still little girls, sometimes.’

  Jem wiped the dust from her Back To Your Roots box pack. ‘It’s a shame these didn’t catch on.’ There had been a surplus at the library. Eventually everyone had been gifted one of Blythe’s Back To Your Roots sets. The girls had been thoroughly relieved when this set had turned up in their dad’s Christmas pile and not one of theirs.

  ‘So what if local families are linked up way back down the line? Who cares? It’ll just mean more Christmas cards to write,’ Jem had said.

  Perhaps there was a crossover somewhere back along the line. Alex saw her mother again, reaching for Alfie to go sit with her, not realising why he’d looked so terrified.

  ‘My mum’s hallucinating!’ Jem had sputtered at the nurses. Only she wasn’t hallucinating. There was something of Dillon in Alfie Sinclair, Alex had seen it too. The way Alfie’s cowlick threw his hair up at the front? Serious eyes, too old for such a little boy? It wasn’t that easy to name it, but it was there.

  A crossover, Alex thought again. Everyone knew, the Sinclairs and the Fosters were the two oldest family names in the Falls. It wasn’t impossible that Dill and Alfie had both dipped a toe in the same gene pool, was it?

  ‘I’ll leave you to it then, shall I?’ Jem said impatiently.

  ‘Sorry. I was just … thinking.’

  Jem softened. ‘How long do you think you’ll be? I thought we could go into Kerring together today? Maybe grab some lunch on the way through town? I’ve been thinking about what you said, actually. About carrying things around, setting them down …’

  About brutal honesty, Alex remembered. Alex snapped again. ‘Mum doesn’t need anything else on her plate right now, Jem. Maybe you should keep it to yourself for a while?’ Her voice sounded harsh. She tried to sound softer. ‘You can’t drop any bombs on her now, Jem. I know what I said before about total honesty but, you can’t now.’

  Jem looked down at herself and then repositioned the family tree in her arms. Alex had pulled the rug out from under her; she’d stolen back her sisterly encouragement. Jem nodded. ‘You’re right. It can wait.’

  Alex felt like a bitch. But she was protecting them, her mum and Jem. This was tough love. ‘And I think we need to be more of a family unit for her too, cut out all the other distractions. Spend more time together here. The three of us.’ Mal was not invited. She waited to see how that one sank in but Jem didn’t argue.

  ‘You’re right. But Dad’s a hard one to nail down, Al. You know how he deals with things, he works, or plays backgammon down at The Cavern. That’s how he copes.’

  ‘I know. But Mum’s really not well, now. Jem, she’s seeing Dill. You did tell Dad that, didn’t you? So he knows how serious this is?’

  Jem looked away for a second. ‘I did.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He changed the subject.’ Jem’s face crumpled. ‘Can’t we just leave him to do what he needs to get through it?’

  ‘He can’t change the subject! Jem, she thinks that Alfie Sinclair is Dill! Did you see how heartbroken she was when Alfie didn’t want to sit with her? When Helen bundled him out of the room?’ Alex felt a sudden warm rush from her eyes.

  ‘Al, it’s OK—’

  ‘Its not OK, Jem!’ Alex wiped her face in defiance but it was useless. The warm spilled down her face onto the dusty LP in her lap. Blythe had sobbed when Helen had taken Alfie out of the room. She’d called for him. Shouted his name again and again. And then she’d wailed with the same crushing despair when he wouldn’t come back.

  Alex had heard her mum like that before, on the front lawn, when Alex had been taken home from the Old Girl wrapped in blankets and disbelief. That awful guttural sobbing.

  ‘Dad needs to face it, Jem, how ill she is. I think we should eat together tonight, the three of us. We’re never all in the house at the same time and we need to work together on this. We need to be solid for her. She needs us,’ Alex said quietly. But Alex didn’t have the best track record for standing and fighting for anyone.

  CHAPTER 41

  Alex picked her way amongst the tools in her dad’s work shed. He’d customised an inflatable dinghy in here once, back when he’d still thought of the Falls’ preoccupation with all things Viking as a bit of harmless fun and the river race included normal water-craft instead of dubious rafts fashioned from empty plastic bottles and optimism.

  Alex scanned the workbenches for any sort of labelling system but it all looked like a headache, pots and trays of bolts and metal things she couldn’t identify. Her mother’s record player probably didn’t need a whole new plug, she’d decided. Working at the food bank had taught her to be frugal with everything. ‘We live in a throwaway society!’ Dan had declared. ‘Someone’s toaster stops working and what do they do? Head to Argos!’ Alex’s toaster had in fact stopped working shortly after Dan had made that very point. Alex had experienced some minor thrill at having successfully diagnosed a dodgy fuse and fixed it all by herself.

  She scanned the walls of tools and boxes. Fuse … If I were a fuse, where would I be? Something small and yellow shot into the gloom of the workshop and startled her.

  ‘Norma, I left the house for one minute. You’re like my bloody shadow.’

  Alex began rummaging through a run of pull out trays looking for a screwdriver. She’d put a joint in the oven to slow roast while she tried fixing up the record player. Jem had gone on to the hospital without her. Alex bristled as the same questions surged back into her head like a rogue wave. How could Millie have not seen Jem the other night? Jem must’ve passed Millie to grab her boots from the hallway, mustn’t she? Or had Millie moved Jem’s boots? But why would Millie move Jem’s boots and then pretend that Jem wasn’t in her house? What possible reason did she have? Millie would only have been duping Alex.

  None of it made sense. Maybe they could talk it all out later over the family dinner Alex had bullied them into. They could talk about Blythe’s delirium over the main course and then move onto the Jem–Malcolm–Millie saga over dessert. Brilliant.

  Alex moved along the workshop further into the gloom and crunched on something. Ugh, please don’t be a snail … Dill had pinched Jem’s roller blades once and returned them with a nice even layer of snail guts and shell from the path outside. Jem had gone mental, eventually. The Reverend had been over at the time and Jem had had to hold it in. Alex couldn’t look at a roller blade now without thinking about entrails.

  Alex tentatively took a look at what was under her feet. There was enough light in here to bounce off the broken glass strewn across the workshop floor.

  ‘Norma. Come here, girl.’ Alex scooped her up from the floor. Amongst the glass, a splintered
wooden frame sat abandoned. Alex picked it up carefully and held it up to the light. More glass tumbled to the floor. Norma struggled under Alex’s arm and she straightened up to hold her better. Alex examined the damaged photograph left clinging to the remnants of the picture frame. She knew this picture. By heart. A perfect day, committed to memory. Along with the other perfect stuff. This was one of the pictures Granny Ros had taken and given to Alex’s mum to hang in the hallway, probably because it featured the mayor and his wife.

  Alex blew any sharp fragments from the image. ‘Jem’s seventh birthday and the pink dress debacle.’ Alex knew it was Jem’s seventh on account of the big blue number seven sitting centre point on the cake Granny Ros had frosted in lilac, a halfway compromise between Jem’s blue and Granny Ros’s pink preference. Alex remembered Louisa Sinclair bringing that dress over for Jem in case she didn’t have something pretty to wear for her own party. Their mum had made her wear it for politeness’ sake. Despite Jem’s grimace and Louisa Sinclair skulking in the background looking utterly out of place in a non-mayoral home, this picture had been one of Alex’s favourites. Not only did Jem look hilarious in her puffy pink sleeves and puffier pinker eyes, but they’d all been on there, in happy coexistence. Before the big one hit.

  Alex frowned. Why would you leave this on the floor like that, Dad? And not pick it up for safekeeping? Alex followed the faces on the photograph to her father, Ted causing gleeful havoc with two young hysterical boys thrown over his shoulders because, if Alex’s memory served, Malcolm and Finn had taken the last two bowls of jelly. Alex smiled sadly at their faces. At Dill, pudgy in their mum’s arms while Blythe looked fraught with the stresses of house guests.

  Alex did a double take at Mal. He’d been much fairer then, his hair a sandy blond. Alex squinted. It was uncanny. She hadn’t ever thought about it before now. Mal’s hair had darkened significantly by the time Dill was running around annoying everyone so they hadn’t looked much like each other at all, not on the face of it. Plus Mal rarely came up to the house by then anyway, not like Finn. Finn. Alex looked back to Finn. He looked goofy then in his Superman t-shirt and neat haircut. Back when he was still allowed to come up to the house and Ted didn’t yet blame him for the mistakes Martin Finn had made at the garage. For the mistake Alex made following him into the bushes.

  ‘I wish we could all go back,’ she said into the dusty gloom. But they couldn’t. All they could do was clutch at the memories of what they all used to be. Memories like broken glass, to be handled with care. Tightly enough that they didn’t fall away, gently enough that they didn’t cut too deeply.

  CHAPTER 42

  ‘Food smells nice.’

  Jem was fiddling with her bracelet again. She’d painted her fingernails a pastel colour and was running one around the contours of the fine silver leaf skeletons wrapped around her wrist. There was a time Jem had thought of nail polish as an aberration. Another mark for the cheerleading brigade with their fake tans and lip-liners. Alex had barely remembered to put a brush through her hair this week but Jem was all camera ready for a meal they’d both been stood up for.

  ‘Smelled even better when it was hot.’ Alex glanced at the clock. Nine, they’d agreed. So Ted could spend some time at the hospital first.

  ‘It still smells great, Al. Maybe he just lost track.’ He hadn’t lost track. Visiting hours finished at 8.30 p.m. He wasn’t coming.

  ‘It’s been on the table for nearly an hour.’

  Jem took another sip from her wine glass. Alex didn’t want wine, it wasn’t fair when their dad had cut it out completely to go wafting it around but then what did Alex know? Jem knew what the limits were, Alex was just a house guest who occasionally spent two hours preparing a family meal no one would end up eating.

  ‘Just, cut him some slack, Alex. He’s trying his best.’

  ‘So am I!’ The tears were coming. They made Alex speak too quickly, trying to outrun them. ‘I asked him what time to eat, I … I … I cooked this because it was on Mum’s recipe list under Ted’s bloody favourites …’

  ‘It’s not you, Alex,’ Jem said solemnly.

  ‘What? It’s not me it’s him? Ha! He can’t stand to be around me for more than ten minutes, Jem, unless he’s reminding me to keep away from Finn. He hates me.’

  ‘He does not hate you, Alex!’

  ‘Then where is he, Jem? Why isn’t he here, so we can at least pretend to be putting on a united front for Mum?’

  Jem looked like she had tears in the pipeline too. ‘He loves you, Alex. You know he does.’

  ‘Maybe he does. But he’ll never get over what I did. He’ll never get past the thought that I was at it with Finn when we were only looking for a stupid dock leaf.’ Alex shook her head as the disbelief washed over her again. ‘A dock leaf! I was worrying about a nettle rash while Dill was drowning.’ Alex clamped a hand over her mouth. Jem was already on her feet.

  ‘Alex, that’s not why he’s not here.’

  Alex pulled out the photograph she’d found in the workshop from her back pocket and set it on the table. ‘No? Then why can’t he even bear to see us all on the same photograph together, Jem?’

  Jem looked long and hard at the image until tears began sliding down her cheeks. ‘Where did you get this?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘In his shed. It looked like it had been stamped on, Jem. Stamped on.’

  Jem wiped her face. ‘You don’t understand, Alex.’

  ‘I think I do. He can’t bear to look at this photo because Finn’s in on it with us. And it wasn’t even Finn’s fault! Finn tried to get him out, but he couldn’t. And now Dad can’t even have this in the house.’

  Alex rose from her chair.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To do what I’ve been too much of a coward to for the last ten years. I’m going to tell Dad that I’m sorry. And then I’m going to get out of his hair so you two can at least eat together and have one conversation about our mother losing her mind.’ Alex rubbed at the tears steadily streaming from her face.

  ‘Alex, don’t go looking for Dad, please.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because … there are things you don’t know about.’

  CHAPTER 43

  Alex looked at the empty gazes of the two sculpted Valkyries flanking what was to be the boat race’s finish line on riverbank. Alex had dressed up as a Valkyrie once in college to go collecting for the Air Ambulance. Wings had been the theme. Finn had waddled around town shaking his bucket in a creepy Wizard of Oz style winged-monkey suit. But the Vikings held that the Valkyries, with their swan feathers and swords, were otherworldly, steadfast, unyielding beings. The deciders of those who would live or die in battle. Alex had rather fancied the idea of shaking her bucket as an otherworldly, decisive being.

  Alex slowed automatically on the approach to the bend outside The Cavern as Ted had always insisted she do, just to be safe. She cleared her throat and ignored the Valkyries. Decisive. Steadfast. Had she been having a laugh? She couldn’t even keep her emotions in check. It was like she had no control of herself when she was back here. Seventeen again, incompetent again, floundering in the current.

  Alex pulled into The Cavern car park a bit too sharply, the speed-bump that hadn’t used to be there sending her bouncing around violently in her truck. Alex’s heart was instantly thumping. She slapped a hand against her steering wheel and let out an embittered sound. Sorry. SORRY! It was such a small word she’d never been able to present it to her dad. It would be like offering one of the families at the food bank a vol-au-vent and expecting it to fill them up. So she’d just always let it sit there, stuck in her throat instead, a weak little sound she was too ashamed to make in front of him.

  Valkyrie. Ha! What the hell had Finn ever seen in a wimp like her? Finn didn’t shy away from anything. But Alex? Oh yes, with Alex there were always conditions she now realised. Apologise? Sure, if she knew her dad would accept it. Talk to Finn? No problem, so long as it wasn’t out i
n the open where people could see it and question it and hold it up as proof that she wasn’t that sorry for what had happened at the Old Girl.

  Alex looked past the uneven white walls of the pub to the welcoming glow of light spilling from inside. She realised now that nothing she did would ever be enough to change anything between them. And that was fine, because she understood. She did a terrible thing, and she was sorry for it. She’d been sorry for it every day for the last ten years. But whether he accepted it or not, whether he wanted to even hear it or not, she was finally going to say it to his face. Right now. Inside this pub.

  Alex slammed her door and stormed past her father’s recovery truck across to The Cavern’s rear entrance.

  The sweet aroma of ale and people hit as soon as she walked into the commotion of the bar. Hamish was laughing heartily behind the draught pumps, a plait had appeared in his long red beard. She looked away before he could spot her and call a hello. The pub was thick with people. Alex might’ve recognised many of their faces if she’d bothered to look at them, but she was only looking at the far stairs leading up to where the old boys still held backgammon and poker nights. The same poker night Finn’s dad had been in such a rush to get to when he’d hurriedly signed off Helen Fairbanks’ car.

  Alex felt the resolve slipping from her heart so she skipped up the stairs two at a time before there was no resolve left at all. She barged through the doors into the upstairs bar and glanced across the cosy space, gentle laughter and male conversation giving the gloom a tavern-like ambience. Alex spotted him, sitting beneath a gallery of the pictures chronicling past boat races, elbows on the table as he sat nursing a stack of counters. She weaved her way amongst a couple of bar tables, older men in twos and threes sitting hunched over chess and chequers.