Tiger Moth

by Suzi Moore

  ‘When I was . . . when David, Aggy and I were younger, we . . .’ She turned her back to me and stared out of the back door window and across the stony beach. I waited and waited, but she didn’t finish her sentence. What was going on?

  ‘Mum?’ I stared at the back of her head and I thought I heard her muttering something under her breath. Did she say kimmen or killen? I couldn’t be sure.

  She let out a long deep breath, turned to face me and in a sort of high–pitched, weird voice she said, ‘Alice, we have to think about Alice.’ Then she explained to me what Dr Richardson had told her on the phone and I felt sad. They just thought that Alice had snuck down to the beach and been for a swim. They didn’t know the truth and the truth was beginning to feel like a secret I shouldn’t be keeping any more.

  27

  Alice

  I think my name is Alice, but I don’t know where I am.

  It feels like I’m asleep, but I don’t think that I’m dreaming.

  It feels like I’m floating, but I don’t think I’m in the sea.

  I think I hear birds singing and the distant sound of waves.

  I know I’m sort of somewhere, but I don’t know where here is. Sometimes I see a beach and a garden with white walls. I think I wandered down a lane with trees as tall as tall. I was sitting in a room; the floor was pinkish white and all the while the windows were lit with blue moonlight. Sometimes I think I see my mum. Or is it someone else I see?

  I think I can hear some voices, but I don’t know who they are. I saw a boy with the darkest hair; he was near. He was far. I think I saw a woman; her dress was whitest white. I don’t know where I am, if it’s day or if it’s night.

  I once thought I heard a crying sound, but it was far away. It kept coming and going then it stopped one day.

  It feels like I’m flying, but I know I’m on the ground. There’s something soft beneath me, but it isn’t sand I feel. Sometimes I think I see a woman; she has golden hair. She sparkles in the sunlight; her skin is fairest fair. She makes me think of lilac roses, reddest velvet and lemon cake. I don’t know if I’m sleeping or if I’m wide awake.

  It feels like I am dreaming, but something here is different. I hear the voices louder now and one of them is Dad. I almost see his hair and the freckles on his hands; it makes me think of medicine and splashing in the bath. I hear them talking louder now, but no one seems to laugh.

  I’m trying to move, but I just can’t free my body. It feels like I really want to, I just have to remember how.

  I hear something beeping, but I don’t know what it is. I feel a scratch on my skin, fast footsteps on the floor.

  I feel a hand on my hand and it strokes me gently.

  I feel lips on my cheek as she kisses me softly.

  And then I don’t feel anything.

  28

  Zack

  Dr Richardson is Alice’s dad, but he says I can call him David.

  I wandered outside slowly; it was already almost the hottest day ever, and I was sticky and sweaty by the time I reached the shiny black and gold gates of Culver Manor. I pulled the map out of my pocket and followed David’s instructions to meet him by the large cedar tree at the bottom of the south lawn, but as I ran down the winding driveway I heard the chugging noise and I looked up at the sky. There was the little blue plane. I wondered where George was going.

  The lawn sloped away from the house and I looked towards the grey stone of the house up to the three large windows. The garden was kind of made up of lots of different bits, with a place that just had lots of roses and one with only fruit trees, but I knew I was going to love the part of the garden where the big cedar tree was most.

  I saw David standing by the tree and, when he saw me looking around at all the different coloured flowers which sort of smelt a bit like perfume but nice, he waved at me to come over to him.

  ‘You like it?’

  I nodded.

  ‘I know it’s not the sort of thing that boys can get too excited about, but my wife made this part of the garden and I think it looks a bit like a painting, don’t you?’

  I did; he was right. It did look like the sort of painting I’d seen at that gallery my mum had dragged me round.

  ‘Now, young man,’ he said, handing me a pair of gloves, ‘we have a lot to do and if we work really hard it’ll be ready just in time.’

  We worked all that day and it was hot and sweaty work, but I loved it. On the second day Alice’s dad met me in the garden with a glass of juice and told me he had to go back to the hospital to see her.

  ‘Will Alice be . . . I mean, will she . . .’ My voice trailed off and I had to stop myself from blurting it all out, but when I looked up again David looked so sad that I clenched my mouth shut.

  ‘I hope so, Zack. We just have to be patient. She’s in the best place to be looked after. Besides,’ he said more cheerily, ‘she’ll have something waiting for her, won’t she?’

  I watched him walk back up the lawn to the terrace and my heart sank deeper and deeper. I wanted to run after him and tell him that it was my fault. I wanted to tell him that Alice hadn’t just been for a swim: she’d tried to swim round the headland because of me. I wanted to tell him the reason she was so ill was my entire fault. But I was frozen still.

  On the third day I met Alice’s mum for the first time. I guess I expected her to look like the woman in the photograph Alice had. I mean, I look just like my dad and, because my mum is always changing her hair colour, no one would know that my thick black hair is just like hers. Mum once said that, when I was born, Dad kissed me and left his smile behind because sometimes, when I laugh at something, or smile at her, she holds out her hand, touches my cheek and says: ‘You’re the best thing we ever did, Zack.’

  ‘I’m Sophie,’ Alice’s mum said, handing me a plate of delicious-looking sandwiches, an apple, a slice of cake and a bottle of squash. Her hair was sort of tied in a plait that hung all the way down her back and she spoke in a voice that was so soft I could hardly hear her. She’s much taller than my mum and she sort of moves as though she’s kind of floating above the grass, not like Mum who sort of stomps very quickly as though she has to get everywhere like yesterday. ‘You’re doing a brilliant job, Zack,’ she said, but then the baby started crying, and she smiled at me and went back up to the house.

  I don’t know what the baby is called, but it is, like, so loud. I mean, it’s not like I haven’t been around babies before, but this one does not stop screaming and crying, and I wondered how anything so small could be so noisy or how anyone ever got any sleep in this house. If I could hear it at the bottom of the garden, you must be able to hear it through walls too.

  That night, when me and Mum were watching telly, I saw her twirl a strand of her now red hair round her finger and it made me think of Sophie.

  ‘Alice doesn’t really look like her mum or her dad. It’s weird; she doesn’t really look like she’s from the same family at all.’

  My mum looked at me. ‘Alice is adopted. Sophie and David aren’t her birth parents. But you mustn’t ask Alice about that, Zack; it’s not the sort of thing you ask someone.’

  That night I fell asleep really quickly and I dreamt that I was running along the stony beach with Otter and Alice, so in the morning I asked Mum when we could get him back, but she just shook her head. It made me feel sort of angry. I kept thinking that if Otter stayed at Lexi’s for too long he’d probably forget all about me too.

  So when I went to Culver Manor that day I was in a bad mood. Walking through the gates made my mood worse as I thought of my old school, and all my friends there, and about the new school I’d be going to soon and a cold sensation came trickling down my spine. I wandered down the driveway slowly, as though my legs had forgotten how to work properly. It was like I didn’t want to be here or there or anywhere. I must have been standing like that, just staring, when I heard my name. I looked up and saw David standing at the front door.

  ‘Over here, Zack!’ he sho
uted and I followed him through the grey stone archway beyond the ancient wooden door and into Culver Manor for the very first time.

  29

  Alice

  My name is Alice Richardson and I think I am here now.

  Sometimes I get so hot it feels as though my eyes are burning and my whole body gets so warm the sheets are wet with sweat. Sometimes I feel so cold that my teeth chatter and my body shakes. Last night I woke up freezing. I was freezing, freezing cold. Mum and Dad lifted me up together and I heard her voice again. She laid me in a warm bath and it felt like my skin was melting. I looked up at her pale face; I felt her arm round my shoulders and a warm sponge on my arms.

  ‘Poor baby,’ she kept saying, ‘my poor baby.’

  She cradled me in the water until I felt the tingle of life come back to my body.

  I know I’ve been asleep, but I don’t know for how long. I think I’m at home now, but something here is wrong. I think I saw my dad; he smiled and stroked my cheek. I heard his voice, but he was speaking to someone else. I heard him say they were making it for me. I heard him say I needed to get better. I heard him say that it was so hot outside that I couldn’t miss any of the summer.

  He asked me where I’d been, what I’d done, who I’d seen.

  I heard him say a name I knew.

  I am so tired. I have tried to sit up, but it just feels too hard.

  Tomorrow I’ll try harder, but for now I’ll rest again while my mum watches me, a little baby asleep on her chest.

  30

  Zack

  Alice Richardson has the most amazing house I have ever been in. She has to get better.

  Today David showed me all round the downstairs of Culver Manor and it is massive. It’s even bigger than it looks. The hallway is a bit like a church and is so big you could totally play football in there, which is what David said him and his big brother used to do, until they smashed one of the special windows above the door. He showed me the library which has bookcases that go up as far as the ceiling and stretch the length of both the end walls where a tiny ladder rests against the shelves. At the far end are two arched windows and a large wooden desk with a dark green leather top sits perfectly between them.

  ‘That was my father’s desk,’ he said and I noticed the leather was curling at the edges and there were marks where a pen had pressed too hard against paper so that an impression of someone’s handwriting was left behind.

  ‘My brother got into big trouble for that,’ he said, sort of laughing and tracing his finger along the marks that were scored into the leather.

  The end wall was covered in a map. A map of the coast and its faded blue sea was dotted with names I didn’t recognise.

  ‘The south-west,’ David said when he saw me peering up at it. ‘That’s the south-west coastline from Bristol down to St Ives in Cornwall,’ and he pointed to the very tip.

  ‘Dad took me to Cornwall once,’ I said without thinking. ‘We went surfing there together, but I wasn’t much good,’ I told him and I remembered how I couldn’t even lift my body up on to the board until the very last day and even then I kept falling off.

  Bodyboarding was much easier. Even Alice could do that. She was really good. She’d got the hang of it pretty quickly and even when a wave had dunked her into the sand she didn’t moan or anything like I’d done the first time it had happened to me. Even when the salty seawater had burned her nose and she got a bit of sand in her eyes, she didn’t complain. She just sort of got on with it. She just shook the water out of her ears, stood up and tried again. Poor Alice; thinking about her made me feel sad once more.

  ‘Takes practice,’ David said, looking down at my miserable face. ‘You’ll get better.’

  I followed him back into the garden where we spent all day building the special thing for Alice, but every time I looked up and out to sea I thought about how Dad wasn’t here to show me things any more. So David was wrong: how would I get better at anything without Dad to teach me?

  Later that day I wandered back down the lane to our cottage slowly and the sad feeling that started at Culver Manor wouldn’t go away. I didn’t say much when I got home, but Mum was doing that thing where she asks me tons of questions about really stupid things and in the end I went upstairs to bed early. I fell asleep in my clothes and it was Mum’s singing that sort of woke me up. She was tiptoeing round my bedroom, tidying things up.

  ‘Not much point creeping around if you’re gonna sing, Mum,’ I said, but I didn’t really mind.

  When I was younger, and went to the little school, I used to find it really hard to get up early in the mornings, especially when it was winter and it was still dark outside. But my mum had a way of waking me up that made it less horrid. She would come into my bedroom and start singing really softly so that I’d always wake up to the sound of her lovely voice.

  She turned round and smiled back at me.

  ‘Mum,’ I said slowly. ‘How come we never came here before?’

  Mum stopped smiling then and a dark shadow appeared across her face. She sat down slowly on the edge of my bed and sighed. ‘I think it’s time I told you the truth about the beach and what happened there.’

  I felt my heart beat quickly and I sort of held my breath as I waited for Mum to tell me more, but then the telephone rang and Mum got up from the bed and went downstairs.

  ‘How lovely to hear from you,’ I heard her say.

  There was a silence and then I heard her try to speak quietly which is kind of hard for Mum because she only has two volume settings: loud and louder.

  ‘I was just thinking about him,’ she sort of whispered and then I heard a little cry. ‘I really miss him,’ she said over and over again, and I guessed she must be talking to Hannah. They often have really long phone calls when Mum talks about Dad and cries a lot; usually it’s late at night when Mum thinks I’m asleep.

  ‘What a good idea,’ I heard Mum say, sounding happier. ‘What a lovely thing to suggest. It would be really lovely to see you again. What’s it been, twenty-five years?’

  Twenty-five years? What was she talking about? We saw Hannah just last month. It didn’t make sense.

  ‘You’re right. That’s so kind of you. Zack really needs to try again and if it doesn’t work this time we can keep trying. Get back in the saddle and all that.’

  Trying what? What was a good idea? What was she talking about? Who was she talking to? A saddle? But I didn’t even have a bike any more. Perhaps I was going to get a bike?

  Then Mum’s voice went really quiet and I couldn’t hear her any more. I tried to stay awake because I really wanted to know what the phone call was about, and what she’d been going to tell me about Culver Cove, but my eyes were too heavy and I drifted off to sleep.

  The next morning was cloudy and kind of misty. I went to Culver Manor again, but I hadn’t long been in the garden when it started to rain. It was the sort of big splashy rain that you sometimes get in really hot countries. It started suddenly as though a rain switch had just been flicked. One minute I was standing by the cedar tree, perfectly dry, and the next I was soaking wet and racing up the garden with David.

  ‘I’d say that’s it for today, wouldn’t you?’ he said, sort of laughing and wiping the rainwater from his face. ‘Come inside and dry off; we can have a bite to eat and if it still hasn’t stopped raining I’ll take you home.’

  We were sitting at the long kitchen table eating sandwiches when Sophie came into the room carrying the baby. For once it wasn’t actually crying and I peered over at the wriggling little one.

  ‘What’s her name?’ I asked.

  Sophie just shrugged her shoulders. ‘We can’t decide, can we?’

  David shook his head. ‘We were hoping Alice would help us choose.’

  When he said her name, I felt awkward and for a second I wanted to go home, but Sophie had another idea about what we could do while it was raining.

  ‘Come on,’ David said and we climbed up the hidden wooden spiral st
aircase that Alice had told me all about and I saw that the room at the top of the stairs must be Alice’s bedroom. I’m not some kind of clever detective or anything like that, but there was, like, a massive pink and silver ALICE sign on the door. We climbed up another narrow flight of stairs to the attic room, but it wasn’t creepy and full of cobwebs. In fact, by the time we’d got to it, the rain had stopped as quickly as it started, so the room was actually really bright and sunny. It was kind of huge and it had these sort of high-up windows that I could just about see out of. They looked down over the gardens so you had a kind of bird’s eye view of everywhere.

  I could see the walled garden where the roses are and the door that goes down to the beach. I looked over to the cedar tree and past the fields out to sea where a lone white sailing boat was moving fast along the shore. I looked right down the beach and towards the harbour wall, and I could just about see the cottage, the marshes and Porlock Hill where I had discovered George, his amazing collection of cars and the glass house that kind of looked like it was from another planet.

  ‘Right, Zack,’ David said, looking around at the piles of boxes and unwanted bits of furniture. ‘Over there are some of Alice’s old baby clothes and Sophie wants us to bring them downstairs. She said to look for the boxes marked nought to one years and I’ll go dig out some of my old books for you; you might like them.’

  OK, so it wasn’t the best job that I’d ever been given and I would’ve much preferred to be outside rather than searching through boxes of baby stuff. I lifted up one box, then another and another. It took me ages to find the right one and, as I pulled it down from the pile, it slipped out of my hand and skidded right across the floor to the far corner of the attic. I wandered over and bent down to pick it up, but as I did something caught my eye. A door. A slightly open door.

  I craned my neck to look and, to my surprise, I saw there was actually another little room. Without thinking, I slowly pushed open the door and stepped inside. I looked around me. Hanging from the ceiling were little planes and, as I reached out to one of them, I took a deep breath. A Tiger Moth. Its wings had been painted very carefully and every single detail was perfect. No smudges, no dripped paint, no mistakes. They hung all around me like Christmas tree decorations and I realised that I could name them all. We could have named them all.