‘Mum?’ I hiss. ‘What are you doing?’ I stand up and hold my hand out to her. ‘Sit down, Mum.’
Mum ignores me and pushes herself up to standing.
‘These look like the real deal,’ Clay says. Dust flies up as he pulls another one off the shelf. ‘First editions, I reckon. They’re collector’s items.’ He looks up at Mum. ‘Did you know that, Mrs Tucker?’
When Mum doesn’t answer, Clay keeps flipping through the pages.
Mum pushes over the table. The rest of the crockery and glasses smash and roll around the floor.
‘Mum!’ What the hell is she doing?
‘Leave the books alone,’ Mum says, her voice tight. ‘Please.’
Her legs are shaking. She breathes hard and starts walking.
‘Josie!’ Dad says.
Mum doesn’t hear Dad either. She keeps tearing forward. I don’t remember the last time I saw Mum move this fast.
‘What are you doing, Mum?’
My hand grabs the hem of Mum’s sweatshirt. She yanks it away.
‘Leave it, Feather,’ Mum says.
Her face has gone bright red and her brow has beads of sweat all over it and her eyes are bulging like she’s about to turn into the Incredible Hulk.
Clay drops one of the books.
The spine cracks as it hits the floor.
As Mum grabs Clay’s wrist, she nearly falls on top of him.
‘Leave my books alone.’ She pushes Clay away and pulls the second book out of his hand.
I run over and take Clay’s hand out of Mum’s grip. ‘Why are you doing this, Mum?’ My eyes well up.
No, I don’t know Mum any more.
Clay’s gone even paler than usual. And he gives Mum the same look he must have given his mum back in New York: a look that says, Why the hell’s everything always my fault?
He makes for the door.
Dad comes over, picks the book up off the floor, eases the other one from out of Mum’s hands and puts them back on the shelf.
Mum’s whole body is shaking now, which looks scary on someone as big as her.
‘They’re my things.’ Her voice is quiet and steady.
‘I’m sorry,’ Clay mumbles.
‘You have nothing to be sorry about,’ I blurt out. ‘You didn’t do anything wrong. They’re just a bunch of dusty old books.’
I’ve never taken sides with anyone against Mum before. But right now, I don’t want to have anything to do with her, let alone fight her corner over those stupid books.
‘Come on.’ I join Clay at the door. ‘Let’s go.’
The way Mum looks at me, not angry any more but sad and scared, tells me everything I need to know: she wants me to stay. But I’ve had enough of this.
I walk to the door.
For a moment, Clay doesn’t move. He looks at the shelf of books and then at Mum and then, as if becoming aware of them for the first time, at the mess of broken plates and glasses and food all over the floor.
‘Sorry that I spoilt your meal,’ he says and then turns and walks out into the hall.
I spin round and look at Mum. ‘How could you?’ I throw at her and then follow Clay out to the front door.
18
Clay and I walk silently back to Rev Cootes’s house.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
Clay pushes open the front door.
‘I don’t know what came over her…’ I add.
Clay looks back at me and shrugs. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He pauses. ‘See you around.’ And then he disappears inside.
I know what See you around means: it means, I hope I don’t see you ever again.
I run back to the cottage and then, as I stand outside the front door, I realise that going back in and seeing Mum is the last thing I want to do right now.
‘Come on, buddy,’ I say to Houdini, ‘let’s go for walk.’
I untie him and yank him out across The Green, his bell ringing ahead of us like a warning.
As I walk, I think about how Mum’s been acting lately: the fact that she isn’t even trying to make an effort to lose weight; that weird photo of her at the Lido, which means she’s been lying all this time about being scared of the water – and just now, how rude she was to Clay. It’s like a whole different Mum woke up from that diabetic coma.
I want to talk to Jake, but things have been a bit weird between us lately. I’m beginning to wonder whether I can rely on anyone to stay the same.
‘Feather?’
I look up. Mrs Zas is sitting on the doorstep of her shop. She’s wearing a three-piece suit and a bowler hat over her purple headscarf and, like always, between the puffs of her electric cigarette, she’s humming that tune that does circles on itself: To everything there is a season… turn… turn… turn…
‘I’m trying to quit,’ she says, holding the e-cigarette. Her nails are purple too.
‘At least you’re making an effort.’
She switches it off, and then she stands up.
‘I think I might have a job for you, Feather.’
I want to tell her that I don’t need a job any more. Mum won’t even come for a walk with me, so persuading her to have personal training or a massive operation to have a gastric band fitted isn’t exactly likely, is it? But then I think that maybe the job will give me an excuse for getting out of the house and at least I won’t have to keep scrounging off Jake for money all the time.
‘Would you like to come in?’ Mrs Zas asks.
I nod then tie Houdini’s lead to a lamppost.
‘Don’t go anywhere.’ I pat his head.
He tilts his head and gives me one of his cheeky goat-grins. I don’t trust him to stay in one place any more than I trust Mum to stay away from prawn cocktail crisps.
Mrs Zas disappears into the shop and comes back holding a purple cabbage.
‘There you go, Houdini, that should keep you busy.’ She places the cabbage in front of him and then turns to me. ‘I used to have goats, back home in Ukraine.’
‘I thought you were Russian.’
She takes the electric cigarette out of her mouth, glares at me and says, ‘What did you say?’
I’ve never seen anyone snap so quickly from friendly and relaxed to scary – scarier than Rev Cootes.
‘It’s what most people say… that you’re Russian.’
‘Russia and Ukraine are as different from each other as the sun and an electric light bulb.’
From her tone, I take it that the Ukraine is the sun.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘It’s all right. It is what you English people call, a sore point for us Ukrainians. The Russians and the Ukrainians do not get on very well.’
I think of a way to make Mrs Zas flip back to happy mode. ‘So you had goats, in the Ukraine?’ I ask.
Her shoulders relax. ‘Yes, for milk. And cheese. We loved them too.’
I wonder who she means by we, but I’m scared to ask another question in case I upset her.
Houdini starts munching through the cabbage and making all these happy grunting sounds.
As I follow Mrs Zas into the shop, I’m reminded of how amazing this place is – the smells, the colours, the clashing fabrics, it’s like the costume cupboard at school: millions of characters just waiting to be brought to life.
‘Are you any good at sewing?’ Mrs Zas asks, leading me to the storeroom at the back of the shop.
I look around at the heaps of costumes and the two old sewing machines set up on a rickety trestle table. No, I’m not good at sewing.
‘I’m a fast learner,’ I say.
‘I cannot be in two places at once, especially on a Saturday afternoon when I have the greatest number of customers. I cannot be here, mending things, and out there, welcoming customers. Perhaps we can take it in turns to sew and to welcome?’
‘I’m good at being welcoming,’ I say.
‘That was my feeling when I met you,’ she says. ‘And I imagine you will know most of the clients, though we do get
visitors from further afield. Or people who used to live in the village who come back to visit and stop in the shop because it’s new.’
Meeting people from outside the village would be like a breath of fresh air. And maybe I can ask some of the old villagers questions about Mum and what she used to be like. Just as I’m thinking of new people, I glance through one of the storeroom windows and spot Clay jogging across The Green.
Mrs Zas follows my gaze. ‘You like him, don’t you?’
I shrug. ‘Not really.’
I’ve decided to put a stop to my feelings for Clay. Fancying him is pointless. He’s never going to be interested in someone like me and even if there was the tiniest chance he might like me in the asking me out kind of way, Mum’s scared him off. Maybe I’m just not made for having a boyfriend.
‘Would you like some of my special warm cinnamon milk?’
After the morning I’ve just had, warm milk sounds like heaven, especially as my lunch ended up on the lounge floor.
‘I’d love to.’
I follow her to the flat above the store. Mrs Zas leads the way, humming.
‘What’s the song?’ I ask.
‘The Byrds and the Bible, I think.’ She clears her throat. ‘To everything, turn, turn, turn… There is a season, turn, turn, turn…’ Her voice is rich and deep and gravelly.
‘What does it mean?’
‘It means that things come and go, that there’s a time for everything – that we can’t always fight it.’
That’s the sort of thing that Miss Pierce would say.
‘Come on, let’s get you some milk.’
The flat upstairs has two bedrooms and a bathroom and a tiny kitchen with two spirally rings for a hob. She takes a bottle of full fat milk out of the fridge, adds a splash of cream, tips it into a dented saucepan and heats it up. I think about how different this is from Rev Cootes’s tea ceremony.
‘How do you make it?’ I ask
She snaps a cinnamon stick into the saucepan and, when the milk is nearly boiling, she pours it into two mugs. Then she dollops a spoonful of honey into the milk along with a few scrapes from a vanilla pod and gives the mugs a stir.
The room fills with the smell of cinnamon and vanilla and everything bad from the day floats away.
I take a sip and close my eyes. It’s delicious. Delicious in a completely different way from Rev Cootes’s sunshine tea. It’s thick and sweet and tastes like Christmas.
I notice a photo frame on the kitchen wall. It’s of a woman with the same red lips as Mrs Zas and eyes as brown and silky looking as Mum’s Galaxy bars. Which makes me think of Mum again and how she flipped out at Clay. Maybe the diabetes or the meds are upsetting her hormones or getting to her brain or something. I wish I could get Mum out of my head, even for a few minutes.
The woman has a headscarf too, a strawberry-red. Maybe headscarves are a Ukrainian thing.
‘She’s very pretty,’ I say.
Mr Zas nods. ‘She was my little sister, Irinka. We lived together before I came here.’
My throat goes tight. ‘She’s not your sister any more?’
Mrs Zas takes off her bowler hat and puts it on the table and then she stares down at the picture.
‘She will always be my sister.’
I wait for her to go on.
‘She was very ill.’
My stomach churns even more as I think of how, if Mum doesn’t lose weight, she won’t be around for much longer and it’ll be me looking at a picture of her with tears in my eyes. I can’t stop worrying, even when I’m meant to be angry with her.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘About your sister. Her being ill must have made you very sad.’
‘Yes. For a long time, I was very depressed. My heart could not understand that such a young, beautiful girl should be allowed to get so ill.’ She sniffs. ‘I kept thinking – it should have been me.’
‘Was your sister a dancer, like you?’
‘She was a much better dancer than me. At the age of twenty, she was the ballroom dancing champion of Ukraine.’ She takes a sip of her cinnamon milk. ‘I coached her.’
‘Wow – you coached the Ukrainian champion?’
That’s another thing Rev Cootes should know about Mrs Zas. He’d be really impressed if he found out how good she was at teaching.
‘It must be strange,’ I say. ‘Going from preparing people for national competitions to running a waltz competition in the smallest village in England.’
She shakes her head. ‘People are people. Dancers are dancers. It doesn’t matter where you are.’ She glances out of the small kitchen window, which overlooks The Green. ‘And I like it here.’
‘You can teach anyone to dance?’
I think about how clumsy I am and how I couldn’t do ballroom dancing in a million years. If it’s true about Mum and Dad doing competitions with Rev Cootes and his wife, their dancing gene must have run a mile when I was conceived.
‘Yes, I believe I can.’ Mrs Zas looks around the shop. ‘My gift – if I have one – is that I make people believe they can dance. And once they believe they can dance, they begin to dance well.’ She smiles. ‘Look at children, at how they move their bodies when they hear music – dancing is a natural part of who we are.’
‘Why did you come to England?’
‘It was my sister’s idea – she dreamt of us opening a costume shop in a beautiful small village.’ Her eyes are bloodshot and I’m worried she’s going to cry.
‘She loved dressing-up even more than I do,’ Mrs Zas goes on. She takes out a blue handkerchief and blows her nose really loudly.
‘She’d be happy that the shop is doing so well then,’ I say.
Mrs Zas sniffs and then she gives me one of her massive, red-lipped smiles. Then she steps forward and hugs me. I can smell the menthol from her electric cigarette and mothballs from her three-piece suit and perfume and nail polish. She holds onto me so hard that I think I’m going to suffocate, but it feels good too, especially as I haven’t been getting any hugs from Mum lately.
When she lets go, she looks at me and says:
‘You are a very special young lady, you know that, don’t you?’
I shrug. I don’t feel very special. Not in a good way, anyway. But maybe, if I help Mrs Zas and if I find a way to get Mum healthy, at least I’ll have done something good. Plus, I reckon that if I spend time talking to lots of people in the village, I could ask them questions about what life was like when I was born – before I was born. Maybe I could find out about Mum and why so many things I thought I knew about her don’t add up any more.
We both stare out of the window. Clay’s come back from his jog, he’s doing stretches in front of the rectory.
‘So, are you going to explain to me why you don’t like that boy?’ she asks.
Which is a weird way to put it.
‘There’s no point to liking him. He’ll never notice me.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘I’m not pretty…’ I look down at my baggy jumper and jeans. ‘I don’t wear the right clothes. And I don’t have the right hair. And I don’t even know how to put on make-up.’
Every single girl at Newton Academy seems to have had a masterclass in hitching up their skirts and putting on eyeliner and sparkly lip-gloss and shiny nail polish. Whenever I see Amy, she looks like she’s done a detour via the John Lewis make-up counter. Mum says I don’t need make-up, and I don’t even like make-up, or I don’t think I do, but boys notice those girls and they don’t notice me so there must be something in it.
I look at Mrs Zas’s red lips and her long, black eyelashes and her shimmery eye shadow.
‘Could you show me?’ I blurt out. ‘I mean, how to put it on?’ My face burns up and I realise how pathetic I must sound and wish I could take back the words.
There’s bleating and clanging outside. I’d forgotten about Houdini. I stand up and push in my chair.
‘Don’t worry. I’d better get him home, Houdini’s gett
ing impatient… And Mum will be waiting.’
Mrs Zas catches my hand.
‘Wait here, Miss Feather.’
She dashes out of the kitchen and comes back a minute later with a small wash bag.
‘Sit down for a moment.’ She kneels in front of me and unscrews her mascara wand. ‘The secret is to enhance your beauty, not to distort it. And to be true to your character.’ She leans in. ‘Open your eyes wide.’ I stretch my eyeballs and eyelids and then feel a tickling sensation as Mrs Zas brushes the mascara up through my top lashes and then dabs at my bottom lashes. She hums a few lines from her turn, turn, turn song and then says, ‘You see, some of us are like the bold, bright flowers of the world.’ She leans back, closes the mascara and smiles. ‘Red roses and yellow tulips and pink carnations. Like me.’ She takes a small pot of pearly eye shadow, dabs her little finger in it. ‘Close your eyes.’ I feel her fingertips brushing my eyelids. ‘And there are others, like you, dear Feather, who are like delicate flowers.’ She takes a small mirror out of her wash bag and holds it up. ‘Like bluebells and snowdrops.’ I stare at my reflection. My eyes sparkle. Half of me doesn’t recognise the person or the eyes in the mirror and part of me feels like the girl looking back at me is a brighter, clearer, truer version of me than I’ve ever seen before.
‘A light touch, Miss Feather, that’s all it will take to turn his head.’
I gulp and nod. ‘Thank you.’
She presses the mascara and the pot of eye shadow into my hand. ‘Take these. You can practise.’
At that moment, I wish Mrs Zas were my mum. A mum who actually goes out of the house and shows me stuff. Who understands what it’s like to be a teenager. And then I feel guilty – Mum’s been my best friend ever since I can remember.
‘I’d better get back home,’ I say.
As we step out of her shop, Jake comes running across The Green.
‘Hey – Feather…’ he says out of breath.
I wonder whether he went to see Clay before he came to look for me. And then I brush away the thought and feel grateful that he’s here. I give him a big hug and close my eyes. I need him right now.
When we stop hugging, Jake steps back, frowns and says:
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