by Freya North
‘Hi Scott.’ Sam was back from school.
‘Hey.’
‘I’m listening to Smashing Pumpkins.’
‘A great way to welcome in the weekend.’
Sam slung his bag onto the patio and sat on a chair next to Scott.
‘Mum getting Annabel?’
‘Yes – she says we’re going out for dinner.’
‘Cool as!’
‘Fish ’n’ chips,’ said Scott, congratulating himself on his inflection.
‘Have you heard of a band called Wayward?’ Sam asked him.
Scott frowned. ‘No. Can’t say I have.’
Sam grinned but reddened. ‘If I ever get to be in a band, it would be called Wayward.’
‘You were testing me?’ Scott laughed.
‘Yes?’ Sam squinted at him, the sun in his eyes.
‘So – I passed?’
They sat in affable silence.
‘What’s in there?’ Scott nodded to the back of the garden. ‘I’m thinking of cutting the grass.’
‘Oh it’s not a shed,’ said Sam. ‘It’s my mum’s office – or at least it’s meant to be. We spent one entire weekend decorating it but she’s never been in there. She just faffs around at the kitchen table these days, getting in a bad mood.’
‘It’s her office? It looks like a shed.’
‘From this angle, yes – but come.’
Wooden and windowless on the elevation facing the house, the opposite side was one long window with views out over the fields. They were standing inside, Scott and Sam.
‘It took us all weekend, the three of us. What a waste of time. We had to paint it white – some really expensive fancy white with a dumb name like Swan’s Neck or Pillow Puff or something.’
‘Looks like white to me,’ said Scott, patting the wall. ‘You did a good job, though.’
‘I don’t know why she doesn’t like it.’
Scott looked around. An old frayed rug on the floor, a flimsy-looking table and a dull office chair. Boxes of books in a corner. He looked through those nearest the top. Alice, Alice and more Alice.
‘Anyway, we’d better go,’ said Sam. ‘It’s kind of off limits and see – no lawnmower.’
‘Does she have one?’
‘No – she had some blokes come a while ago but they weren’t very good, they were a bit weird.’
‘How so?’
Sam scuffed at the rug with his foot. He shrugged. ‘I didn’t like the way they were – the way they spoke to her. You could tell – they were being friendly but, I don’t know, not sincere. They cost a lot of money. I heard her say to them – you hacked my plants and scalped my lawn and now you want how much?’
‘But she paid?’
Sam shrugged. ‘Yes.’ He looked at Scott very straight. ‘Sometimes I think my mum could run the country – but other times she seems quite small.’
Annabel regarded Scott warily.
‘Hey,’ he said and he walked past her placing his hand gently on her arm as he went. He kissed Frankie softly on the cheek.
‘So – fish ’n’ chips?’ he asked Annabel. She shrugged. ‘It’s Fry Day,’ he said but she pretended not to understand.
Off to Wells they went, Annabel looking defiantly out of the window as they drove while Sam fixated on the world in his phone; Frankie pointing out this view or that when the hedges thinned out or the road rolled and dipped to afford a vista. Sitting at a melamine table in their favourite fish shop in Wells, with plates heaped with food, Annabel pretended she wasn’t actually starving, sprinkling vinegar and dolloping ketchup as if it was a tiresome task. She was sitting next to Scott, trying to keep her body concaved away from him. She ached all over, really. And then Scott did what Annabel considered the unthinkable. It was so heinous all she could do was stare. Despite having food on his plate, he started helping himself to hers. Chip after chip after chip. She looked at him in horror, and looked at her mother and brother in horror because they weren’t looking at her or Scott. They were too busy eating, shovelling it in. So she hooked her arm around her plate, as though it was work at school she didn’t want her neighbour to copy. But Scott had long arms and he reached over her shoulder and took another chip. He actually broke off the end of the cod, where it’s at its battery best, and ate it. He actually did that.
‘I’m going home to Canada tomorrow,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want to think of this plate of good food going in the trash – best fish ’n’ chips I ever had.’
‘Get off!’ she hissed.
‘Oh – you’re hungry?’
‘Yes!’
‘Why didn’t you say? What did you have for lunch at school?’
‘Diarrhoea with worms.’
‘Oh my. You mean spaghetti bolognese?’
‘Yes. It’s school diarrhoea.’ She was finding it difficult to hiss while having to answer his questions. ‘With worms.’
‘That’s child cruelty,’ he colluded. ‘You must be gut-foundered. Here. I apologize.’ He pushed his plate over and nodded at Annabel who methodically took back the precise quota of chips and pried off some batter until she considered the score to have been evened.
Scott had a notion about Annabel. It had started to germinate when he caught the way she glanced at her mother while her mother was smiling at him yesterday. He saw it again when he took Frankie’s hand while they stood in the car park at Wells and marvelled at the tiniest one-up-one-down house he’d ever seen. There was a glower to the little girl’s face but behind it – something else. He recalled seeing it in Jenna a long time ago. He’d forgotten about it and now he remembered. It made him long for his daughter. He looked again at Annabel and then he thought, it might be that the kid just doesn’t like me.
‘Don’t go tomorrow.’
Frankie loitered in the doorway of the spare room watching Scott sort his bag.
‘A voice in my head has been saying the same,’ he said.
‘But you have to go tomorrow?’
‘I have to go tomorrow.’
They were standing either end of the room. Downstairs, the children were watching a prequel or a sequel to some film that shouldn’t have been made in the first place but gave Frankie and Scott the ideal opportunity to leave them to it.
Frankie leant heavily against the door frame.
‘You can come in, you know.’ Scott laughed quietly.
She sat on the edge of the bed and he sat alongside her. Out of the window they gazed. It was dusk outside, the clarity of details gone now, replaced instead with a strange non-light that infused all it touched with an ethereal weightlessness.
‘I like having you here,’ Frankie whispered.
He took her hand and held it in his lap, stroking his thumb rhythmically over her fingers.
‘I – don’t think I’ve ever.’ She paused. It had been very easy previously to blurb out platitudes to men she only now realized she hadn’t actually loved. She laid her head on Scott’s shoulder. He kissed her, inhaling deeply.
‘I made a note of what hair products you use,’ he said. ‘So I can buy them at the airport. So I can have them in my home.’
‘For when I visit?’
‘I didn’t think of that so much – as knowing there’ll be times when I just need to have you close. So I’ll flip the lid and breathe you in.’
My God, he thought, that sounded lame.
Not to Frankie though. ‘You’ll sniff my shampoo and try and conjure me?’
‘Something like that,’ he laughed.
She thought about it. ‘Will you leave me one of your tops? Maybe your grey shirt?’
‘My all-time favourite grey shirt? That I’ve had for years? That’s my second skin?’
‘Yes,’ said Frankie, ‘that one.’
He thought of her here without him. He thought of bullish gardeners ripping her off, of the white office devoid of creative warmth. He thought of her kids driving her nuts in the mornings. He thought of her turning the house upside down looking for a screwdri
ver some day and forgetting there was one in the tangle of the bottom drawer of the kitchen. And then Scott thought of home. His kitchen. His garden, his gardeners. Hey Dan! Hey Richard! He thought of his daughter whom he drove crazy with his fretting and his nagging. His tools, neat and organized in the shed. His studio, all the tech, his haven.
‘What?’
‘Huh?’
‘You seem miles away.’
‘I was.’
‘But come back – because tomorrow, you’ll really be gone.’
‘I know.’
‘Scott.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know – I just like the sound of me saying your name.’
‘Frankie –’
‘I like the sound of that too!’
‘No – I mean, Frankie – you think we can do this? Make it happen? With you – here. And me – there?’
She looked distraught. And there was his answer. ‘Of course I do.’
‘So, I do too,’ he said. ‘It’s not going to be straightforward – you know that, right?’
She nodded. She stood and went over to the window. ‘I love this time – when the day just dissolves. I never noticed it when I lived in the city.’
He stood behind her, wrapping her inside his arms. ‘We have this time of day where I live, too.’ He kissed her neck and brushed his cheek against hers. And she was just about to turn to him when a rustle brought their attention to the door. There stood Annabel, transfixed until she was seen, backing away and going downstairs, shutting the door to the living room, taking her place tight against her brother saying switch it up, Sam, switch it up a bit.
Scott watched Frankie staring at the space Annabel had left.
‘Don’t take it personally,’ Frankie told him. ‘It’s not you – it’s me. My daughter detests me.’
But Scott shook his head. ‘You’ve got that wrong, Frankie.’
‘Did you not see the way she looked at me? The way she’s been?’
He nodded at the empty hallway, as if it held all that Annabel felt. ‘She doesn’t hate you, baby,’ he said. ‘It’s not hate at all. It’s fear. It’s fear.’ He thought back over the years. ‘Jenna – it’s the same look Jenna gave me when there was a woman I liked, who hung around for a while. It’s fear – Frankie. She’s had you all to herself all this time, she’s never known you with a man, never seen you siphon off love for someone who’s not her or her brother. When I was just a concept – sure, she thought that sounded cool. But when I turned up here, in her home – no. She didn’t like that. She doesn’t like seeing you and me together. She doesn’t want change. She’s worried the love you give me is from the reservoir you have for her. She’s scared that you’ll leave her – for me.’ Scott paused. Frankie was very quiet.
‘Perhaps.’ He shrugged. ‘Something like that. I’m not a shrink. I can’t explain it better. But from one parent to another – that’s what I saw.’
‘But you put Jenna first,’ Frankie said, her voice cracking. ‘You told me – there hasn’t been anyone, because you put your daughter first.’
‘Only because no one came close, Frankie. Love wasn’t there.’ He turned her towards him. Deep shadows and silvery slicks to her face from the moonrise outside. ‘But it’s here now.’
‘What do I do?’
‘You look after your little girl,’ he said. ‘Show her there’s nothing to fear. Show her love’s a good thing, that it’s expansive, limitless. Surely that must be the best example a parent can set.’
How Frankie hugged Scott just then, as if sensing she could absorb by osmosis some of his solid goodness the tighter she held him.
‘You’re a wise soul, Scott Emerson. And I love you.’
He caught Annabel on her own the next morning, drawing at the kitchen table. Sam was in the shower and Frankie was on the phone to Ruth.
‘Can I ask you a favour?’
She looked up at him suspiciously, glancing around as if for backup or escape routes.
‘If your mom is struggling with her work can you tell her one thing?’
‘We’re always moaning at her,’ Annabel assured him while engrossed in creating a page of bubble writing.
‘So try this – tell her you can’t take a break if you haven’t been to work. Does that make sense?’
Scott looked out over the top of Annabel’s head, outside to the high hedge over the top of which a tractor was rumbling past. ‘I thought maybe you’d like to take a holiday – out to where I live. There’s bears you know. And my dog. I know you work hard at school – so you deserve a holiday. But your mom? I’m not so sure.’
‘She has Writer’s Block,’ Annabel said, tapping her pens vehemently against the paper for spots.
‘I know. Can you help shift it, do you think?’
‘She tears up paper and stabs pencils into the table.’
‘Do you think you can be clever and bribe her?’
‘I can try,’ Annabel mumbled.
‘Would you like to visit Canada? Meet the bears, meet my dog?’
She shrugged, concentrating on her artwork.
‘Meet my daughter, Jenna?’
Her shrug turned into a just perceptible nod.
‘I’m asking you – not Sam, you know,’ said Scott. ‘Because when my daughter was your age she made sure I worked hard. She was clever – like you. She had this way that I’d feel guilty if I didn’t work.’
‘Is it true your daughter is poorly?’
Scott looked at Annabel. ‘Not so much poorly in that she isn’t sick all the time. But yes she has an illness that makes her sick some of the time.’
‘Is she sick sick, do you mean?’
‘Huh? You mean throwing up, sick sick?’
Annabel nodded.
‘No – sorry, that’s my language. So, she has epilepsy – have you heard of that?’
Annabel shook her head. She put down her pens and looked at him, ready to listen.
He wondered how best to explain it to a nine-year-old. Then he remembered how Jenna herself would describe it at that age. ‘There’s a part of her brain that sometimes has a meltdown where everything fires at once,’ he said. ‘It means she has a seizure – a fit. It’s scary for her – and for us.’ He flinched away from a vivid recall of a young Jenna convulsing. ‘But she can’t help it.’
Annabel had become very thoughtful. ‘But will she get better?’
Scott shook his head.
‘There isn’t medicine? Or a pill? An operation or a cure?’
Scott shook his head. ‘There are pills and operations – but they only help a little and they don’t suit everyone. Like a Band-Aid might help with a wound but can’t stop you getting that wound in the first place.’ Annabel nodded. ‘You know, forty million people worldwide have epilepsy – but thirty-two million of them have no access to any treatment because they live in poor countries.’ Scott could see how mammoth the figures were to Annabel. ‘So Jenna and I – we help raise money to send to those countries, for the children who have this disorder.’
‘But how did Jenna get it?’ Annabel was asking. ‘And is it catching?’
‘No – it’s not a disease, you can’t catch it. And we don’t know why Jenna has it – she was born early, that may have something to do with it.’
‘How do you know when it’s about to happen though?’
‘We don’t,’ said Scott. ‘But Buddy is trained to try and warn her – he can pick up on the tiniest changes in her behaviour. Things we can’t see.’
‘Dogs are amazing. My mum says we can’t have one. But what I want to know is, what happens when Jenna’s brain fires up?’
‘Well, seizures can look and sound very scary indeed. Sometimes she has a focal seizure – and she just stands staring, she can’t hear you, she isn’t aware of anything. Mostly, this leads to tonic-clonic seizures – that’s when all her muscles go stiff and she falls down. Then her body jerks really badly.’ He blinked away another memory. ‘It can last a couple of mi
nutes. It’s very dangerous if it lasts longer. Sometimes she hurts herself when she falls, if something’s in the way. Then, she goes all limp and she can be pretty confused and sleepy for a long while after.’
‘Might she – die?’ Annabel whispered.
‘There’s not a day I don’t worry about that,’ said Scott and Annabel detected his tired grown-up’s voice.
She let him have a think while she thought hard as well. ‘We raise money at school for charity,’ she told him. ‘We bring in cakes to sell. For about 10p.’ She thought about it. ‘I can ask if we can help epilepsy, if you like?’
For some reason, the thought of Annabel and her friends and their ten-pence pieces brought a knot to the base of Scott’s throat.
‘I think that would be excellent. You can be our UK ambassador,’ he said, clearing his voice. ‘You can tell the class about epilepsy. I can write down words like tonic-clonic. You see, many people who have epilepsy are very shy about it – because most strangers don’t know enough about it so they don’t understand it – and oftentimes, they don’t know what to do to help. People often don’t come forward to help because they find it scary.’
Annabel sat there, appalled. She looked hard at Scott. ‘I’m very sorry to hear about all of this.’ She intended for it to sound formal and grown up.
Scott knew that. He smiled at her and finally he sat down, a careful distance on the opposite side of the table. ‘I’m sorry I ate your food last night.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Annabel, resuming her colouring. ‘They give you loads at that restaurant. They’re much more generous here than in London. We’re regulars now.’
‘You like it here? Better than London?’
‘Yes.’
‘What are you drawing?’
‘The names of the friends in my class. In bubble writing.’ She turned the page so it faced him. ‘Each friend has a different design. Do you see?’
Tiffany, Ella, Grace, Tilly. And then Scott spied his own name, very small and facing the side of the paper shyly. In careful bubble writing, filled with tiny blue dots.
Frankie and Ruth’s texts had been like a frenetic game of ping-pong. But it was sorted. Frankie was to drop the children over to the Ingrams’ to save traipsing them to Stansted and back. Sam was not impressed. He liked the Ingram kids well enough – but they were little kids. He rolled his eyes at Scott who raised the palms of his hands as if to say what can I do – I’m not the boss around here. Annabel didn’t mind. But she told her mother that she didn’t mind about coming to Stansted and proposed that it would give her company on the drive back to Norfolk again. Frankie glanced at Scott who gave her a very distinct don’t look at me response. The truth was Frankie trusted Sam to be home without her – he was sensible enough to invigilate Annabel too – but it was likely that she’d be gone most of the day, really. And actually, what Frankie wanted was an opportunity for Scott and Ruth to meet – and then to have him to herself.