There was nothing but the wind in the trees and the hum of traffic in the distance.
‘Toby!’ Please be all right. Please be all right. Please be all right. I had two choices. I could run and get help, or I could try and get in myself to rescue them.
I wasn’t a good swimmer so I decided on the first option. I was already running up the path towards the road, when I heard a shout. I turned to see Toby pulling himself out of the water. Milo stood, dazed and shivering, on the riverbank.
‘Thank goodness!’ I ran to help him. Part of me wanted to shout at him for being so stupid, but he’d been brave too – he’d rescued Milo and it seemed that they were both all right.
‘It was OK,’ said Toby, panting. ‘But for a small dog like him it would have been pretty scary.’
His hair was stuck to his forehead in sodden strands and his eyes looked bewildered without the protection of his glasses.
‘Thank you,’ I said. It was such a meaningless couple of words for what he’d just done. ‘I can’t believe you did that.’
‘It’s fine. I could see he was in trouble.’
Toby propped his glasses back on his nose and they promptly steamed up. Water was pouring from his trousers and I instinctively lifted his feet and wrung out first one trouser leg, then the other. His knees felt sharp and thin through the fabric. He was shivering badly, so I took off my coat and draped it round his shoulders. The awful possibility of what might have happened was replaying itself on a loop through my mind and I had to force myself to breathe slowly – in through my nose, out through my mouth.
It was OK. Nothing bad happened. It wouldn’t be like…
Toby’s teeth chattered, but he had a grin on his face and a faraway look as if he was thinking about something.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘We need to get back home. It’s freezing!’
But I could tell that he wasn’t listening.
‘It reminded me a bit of the old days. You know… before.’
‘Before?’
‘Pass me my hoodie. I want to show you something,’ he said, furiously rubbing the goose bumps on his arms. There were wet leaves still stuck to his back, which left muddy stamps when I peeled them off. Mum and I used to make leaf stencils when I was little. We would walk together collecting a bunch of skeleton leaves and press them hard on to a piece of paper to make patterns.
I took the green hoodie from his wheelchair and Toby dug his wet hand into one of the pockets and pulled out a crumpled photo of a boy in a football strip running after a ball. It took me a moment to recognise him.
‘I was team captain. I used to win awards in swimming too. At least that’s something that I can still do.’
I stared at the photo. I felt so sad for him that I didn’t know how to respond.
In the end, I pulled my eyes away from the determined sports star in the picture, and handed him back to Toby.
‘You’re brilliant,’ I said quietly, ‘but you’re also about to freeze and so is Milo. We need to get home.’
The discarded fishing rod lay propped up against the mulberry bush. I gazed at the darkening water. There was still no sign of Spike. But I was surprised to find that I no longer felt as frightened for him as I had done when we’d first arrived. Something made me believe that Spike was stronger than we thought. I looked at Toby and knew he was thinking the same.
‘We’ll just have to try again,’ he insisted. ‘We’ll leave our stuff in the van and come tomorrow or the day after. But first I need to get myself back in the driving seat. Will you help me, please? I’m much better at getting off this thing than I am getting on. I need someone to hold it steady for me.’
‘Sure.’
I wedged my foot behind the back wheels of his chair, keeping one eye on Milo, who was busy licking himself after his ordeal. Toby heaved himself up and I had barely managed to step back, when he was already on his way up to the paved path.
To my amazement, he beckoned to Milo and, within moments, my dog was sitting on his lap, his head curled against his saviour’s chest. I suppose that I normally would have felt jealous, but things were different because it was Toby.
‘Won’t your mum be mad about you being all wet?’ I asked him, when we were almost at the main road. My footprints left a speckled pattern on either side of Toby’s wheel tracks.
‘Nah. She’s not the type to get mad. She usually just worries loads, but that’s about things that haven’t happened yet. She won’t worry if she sees I’m safe.’
She sounded so much like my mum. I hoped I’d get to meet her someday soon.
‘You know you’re always welcome to come to ours,’ Toby said, again guessing what I’d been thinking. ‘Mum’s been going on about wanting to meet some of the new neighbours. I think she’s feeling a bit lonely. She doesn’t know anyone around here.’
‘Do you feel lonely?’ I asked him.
He turned to me. ‘I did for a bit. I don’t so much any more.’
He did a funny gentlemanly flourish with his hand, which implied that I should follow him in through his front door, but I checked my watch and saw that it was getting late. Dad would probably be home from the hospital and wondering what I was doing.
‘I can’t tonight,’ I told him, grabbing Milo’s lead. ‘I’ll definitely see you tomorrow, though.’
I turned to make my way home, still thinking about Dad, and slowly, the spidery sensation started up in my stomach once more. I knew that he would want to talk about Mum and the hospital. I breathed in and braced myself.
Seven
When I opened the back door, I immediately sensed that something had changed. The house smelled different. There was a scent of flowers and something sharp and tangy that I vaguely recognised.
I walked into the kitchen to find Aunty Lyn in full tidying-up mode, spraying detergent on every surface.
‘Izzy, there you are, love! I was beginning to worry. Where have you been?’
She embraced me so hard that I felt winded.
Aunty Lyn was Dad’s sister, but she couldn’t have been more different to him. Where Dad was easy-going, she was ruthlessly organised.
When I was smaller, I used to think of her as one of those old-fashioned watchmakers – the ones who are always fiddling with the screws in the backs of clocks, making sure that every tick-tock is as even as can be.
Except Aunty Lyn looked nothing like a watchmaker. In fact, she didn’t even look like an aunt should look. She wore matching slim-fitted trouser suits and heels, and her hair was perfectly arranged in short ginger layers falling like waves around her face, not a single strand out of place. She always had her dark red lipstick on, even to do the vacuuming.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked her.
‘That’s a lovely welcome, isn’t it?’
‘Sorry. Sorry.’
‘I’ve come to stay with you and your dad for a while,’ she said brightly, though her smile was forced.
And then she looked at me, and enveloped me in an unexpected hug. It was so sudden that I didn’t have a chance to dodge.
‘How have you been, Izzy? Honestly?’ she asked, looking deep into my eyes.
I stayed quiet. What was there left to say?
‘I know you didn’t want to speak to me on the phone, and that’s OK. But I want you to know that I’m here for you, any time that you need me.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘How long are you staying?’
It sounded unwelcoming, and I knew it, but Aunty Lyn didn’t flinch.
‘It’s not for ever, it’s just to, you know, help out a bit.’
‘To… help out?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to interfere with things – I’m just going to support you with some of the day-to-day stuff.’
Of course she would interfere – interfering was what Aunty Lyn did best. I felt tired just thinking about how regimented life would become under her reign, but it looked like I had no other option. A part of me h
ad to admit that maybe it would be good to have somebody making decisions for a bit. I felt like they’d been taking up a huge amount of space in my head and I needed that space to think about the colour thief.
‘Goodness, your uniform. You’re going to have to take that off, Izzy. Here, go upstairs and get changed. I’m putting on a wash, so I’ll pop that in with it. And put that dog out in the garden. He looks filthy. I don’t want him muddying the kitchen floor. I’ve just washed it.’
‘But he needs to get warm and dry, and he always has his dinner in the kitchen.’ The regime was beginning already.
‘OK – put it in his bowl then and give it to him outside. I’ll dry his paws afterwards and he can come back in for the evening.’
‘Where’s Dad?’
‘He’s at the hospital, darling. He may be there a while.’
I’m not sure why I even asked. Dad had been at the hospital every day for the past forty. Yesterday in maths, I worked out that Mum had been there almost six weeks, or nearly a thousand hours. Dad used to ask me every morning to go with him and every morning I pretended not to hear. After a while he stopped asking.
The truth was, I couldn’t. I couldn’t bear seeing her so pale and fragile and still. And not going to see her now, after having been once, was worse than before when I hadn’t been at all. It had been my fault and I couldn’t explain that to Dad so I avoided the subject altogether. If he was mad at me for not going, he didn’t say anything.
‘I’m going to pop out in a second to do the shopping. You hardly had anything in the fridge,’ said Aunty Lyn.
‘I got milk and bread the other day and there’s the veg from last week…’ I began. I stopped when I heard how feeble it sounded, and remembered the hairy carrots. She was right.
‘Honestly, I don’t know how you’ve been managing. I mean, if I lived here…’
But you don’t live here, I thought. And you don’t know what it’s been like. We’ve been managing, Dad and me. I wished someone would recognise that.
I left Aunty Lyn to write her shopping list, dried Milo with an old towel and let him out into the garden.
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered into the soft fur of his ears.
I picked him up and pulled him on to the bench swing in the garden, because he loved to sit on it. It was one of my own favourite spots. I could lie across it and be swayed gently from side to side, and look up at the perfect, undisturbed stretch of sky above. I could get lost in the endless summer blue, or watch pictures formed by the clouds in the autumn. Once I even managed to get a photo on Mum’s phone of a cloud that looked exactly like Milo mid-jump. On a clear night I could make out all the main stars – the Big Dipper, Orion and Cancer.
Today, the sky was grey, but I shuffled into position. There was the dark shadow on the left armrest, which I knew had been made by our heads. Mum’s and mine. We would snuggle up, Mum on the left side, me on the right and she would sketch in her pad. Sometimes it was an abstract thing from a dream and other times it was what she could see, like the sunflowers that bloomed at the end of the garden in late August, or the neighbours’ cat sleeping in the middle of the lawn. Sometimes she would sketch me. I would read or listen to stuff on my headphones and watch her as she worked. I never felt calmer or happier.
That dark shadow made me miss her so powerfully that I got up suddenly and went into the kitchen.
‘I want to go and see her,’ I announced to Aunty Lyn. ‘Could you drive me to the hospital, please?’
She stopped midway through her shopping list.
‘Or I could just walk there.’
‘No. I’ll drive you on the way to the shops.’ She didn’t sigh or tut. She just got her coat and car keys and we left.
I saw Dad through the glass. He sat on the edge of the bed, holding Mum’s good hand in between his. He was talking, although I couldn’t hear the words. I saw him stroke her cheek, the same way he used to when he came home and was leaning in for a kiss. She would sometimes pull away. ‘Stop tickling me with your beard!’ she’d say, laughing.
I half-expected her to do that now, but she just lay still, so still. Then Dad saw me and smiled, beckoning me to join him.
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said. ‘Speak to your mum. Speak to her. The doctors say that she might be able to hear it in her subconscious. Sometimes little things like that can help people who are… in this state.’
I swallowed hard. My throat was dry. I opened my mouth but I had nothing to say. I felt as though I was being asked to act in front of an audience, though no script had been given to me.
‘I’ll wait outside,’ Dad said, as the silent seconds stretched between us. ‘I know you probably want to be alone with her.’
I was left in the room with Mum for the second time in two days. The heart monitor beeped mercilessly. It was good that it beeped, I repeated over and over in my head. It was a good thing.
There was so much I wanted to tell her. She would have been the first to know about Toby, and I felt bad for having told Dad and Aunty Lyn before her. And I was scared about the audition – I didn’t realise until now quite how scared. I felt that when I got on stage, I would end up being bland and boring… and grey – like the outline of a person that Mum had drawn before she started painting, or like the images the colour thief left behind. There was nothing worse in acting than being boring.
‘I’m scared, Mum,’ I whispered.
I held her hand. It was warmer than I had expected, and it encouraged me to keep talking. ‘I don’t know what to do about Macbeth. Lou doesn’t want me to do it, though she knows that I’ve been looking forward to it for months, even if I did forget about the auditions. And even if she hadn’t said that, I’m not sure whether I’d be any good any more. It’s a big role and I’m sure there are loads of people who’d be better than me.’
I wanted more than anything for her to say, ‘Diz, you’re being ridiculous, aren’t you? You’ll be amazing, and you know it, no matter what anyone says.’ And then I wanted her to ruffle my hair and say that I should recite the hardest speech in front of her.
So I imagined that she had said that. I stood up and shut my eyes. ‘OK, Mum.’ I began: ‘Out, out damned spot…’ I’d barely managed those four words when my eyes flew open and I saw the reality: her lying there with her eyes shut and her face expressionless. What had I done? And then the red anger started bubbling inside me, because of course there was no reaction from her at all. I thought that I might at least get a feeling – that her advice might seep into me, that I would understand what to do. But I was filled with nothing except the awful redness which crashed down on me with an almighty force. The high-pitched beeps grew louder and louder in my head. I picked up my coat and quickly walked out.
Eight
I went to my room the moment we got back home. I lay on my bed trying to get the image of the hospital with Mum in it out of my head. I thought about Toby and the swans and, slowly, slowly, felt calmer – we would find Spike and help him. I was somehow certain that we would. Milo padded into my room and settled at the foot of the bed, by my feet.
I went over to the big bookcase and pulled out Mum’s battered copy of Macbeth, remembering that I’d marked Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene with one of Dad’s Project Elephant brochures. Instead of focusing on memorising the lines for the audition, I picked up the brochure and began flicking through.
‘“Ivory has been prized for thousands of years in certain cultures, and elephants have been killed for it,”’ I read. ‘“Around twenty thousand elephants were killed last year for their tusks.”’
I looked at the number in horror. Surely it couldn’t be true? But Dad never lied – I trusted him. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to kill these beautiful animals. I looked at the photograph of a mother elephant with her baby. She had a smattering of deep wrinkles around her eyes and she looked as if she was laughing. I opened my desk drawer and pulled out my red folder. I flicked through it frantically, worrying that I had
accidentally binned it, but there it was. The elephant card Mum had made me for my tenth birthday. I’d had an obsession with elephants then, after one had eaten from my hand in the safari park. Dad had told me about how endangered they were, and looked at Mum meaningfully. It turned out that he’d already spoken to Simon about starting Project Elephant. But in the meantime, I had the card she had painted for me, each wrinkle carefully drawn on to the skin, in thick pencil.
I stared at the elephant for a long while and then tucked the card carefully back into the red folder.
She was everywhere and yet so unreachable.
I found that I couldn’t speak about her when I sat down at the dinner table half an hour later, even though I could sense that Dad wanted to. Instead, I talked about Toby.
‘He’s moved into Mason’s old place?’ asked Aunty Lyn. She’d insisted on sitting at Nanna Tessa’s table in the dining room. ‘About time, eh? That’s been empty for ages. They’ll have loads of work to do on the house, though. It’s an absolute ruin.’
‘Is he a good lad, this Toby?’ asked Dad.
‘Yes and yes,’ I said, putting a mouthful of Aunty Lyn’s spaghetti bolognese into my mouth. I hadn’t eaten anything so good since Nanna left, and I finished my helping before Dad and Aunty Lyn had even managed to work their way through half of theirs.
‘That’s great,’ said Dad.
‘And how are you managing with everything at school, Izzy?’ asked Aunty Lyn, her eyebrows meeting in the centre of her forehead in an expression of concern. It was an innocent question, but I could sense the pity in her voice.
‘I’m managing OK,’ I snapped. Couldn’t they just spend a few minutes talking about other things? Didn’t they see that was what I wanted?
‘Are you on top of your homework, darling? Is there anything that you want me to help with?’
‘No, I’m good. I’ll do it in a sec.’
‘Great,’ said Aunty Lyn. ‘What lessons did you have today?’
I just wanted to go upstairs, but they still hadn’t finished eating and I didn’t want to be completely rude.
The Mystery of the Colour Thief Page 4