by Julia Crouch
‘What I don’t understand,’ Bella said, as she set to work with the dustpan and brush that Lara handed her, ‘is how that cereal got out of the cupboard. I’m sure we left nothing out when we cleared up lunch.’
‘I know. I was unusually impressed,’ Lara said. ‘Perhaps Marcus got it out.’ It wasn’t unlikely. Marcus was famous for reaching things out of cupboards to snack on, then not putting them away.
‘And what I don’t get, right,’ Olly said, ‘is how that little chipmunk guy got in here. I mean, he opened the door, climbed up to the cupboard and got the cereal out?’
‘There must be some sort of hole somewhere,’ Lara said. ‘Perhaps under the house. Have you noticed how it seems to be standing up on a sort of stone wall? We’ll take a look tomorrow. Right. That’s the floor done. Bedtime now.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ Olly said, and disappeared upstairs immediately.
Bella hugged herself. ‘I don’t want to sleep in this house tonight.’
Lara knew what she meant. But she was so exhausted by the roller-coaster evening that she felt if she didn’t get to bed soon, she might pass out. To reassure Bella, she led her through the house as she wedged chairs up against the outside doors.
‘I’ll get the keys off James tomorrow, or get some bolts fitted,’ she said, as she tucked Bella into her bed. ‘And we’re going to scour the place from top to bottom, clean out all the gloomy bits. Are you up for helping?’
‘You bet,’ Bella said. She looked very tiny lying there, as if she were six again. Lara switched on the fan, and the air in the room started to move.
‘Is everything OK, Bell?’ Lara asked. ‘Between you and Olly?’
‘He’s just being a bit of a twat, that’s all,’ Bella sighed.
‘What about that boy? Did you see him tonight?’
‘What boy?’ Bella said quickly, and Lara remembered she wasn’t supposed to know about Sean yet.
‘Sorry. I’m a bit confused. A few too many bevvies.’
‘There’s no boy,’ Bella said, turning her back to her mother, dismissing her.
‘I’ll leave all the bedroom doors open and the hall light on. It’ll be like we’re in the same room.’
Lara tiptoed across the landing to Olly’s room to see if he was all right, but he was already fast asleep, lying on his back, his big feet sticking out of the bottom of his bed-sheet and his young man’s chest naked to the night. His fan was on, and she could see little goosebumps where the cool air caught him. How different in every way he and Bella were, and how proud she was of both of them. They amounted to two-thirds of the best job she had done in her life.
She was just crossing the landing to her own room when she remembered her promise to Jack. Cursing, she went downstairs, unwedged the back door and crossed the yard to the car. After ten minutes of searching, she had to concede defeat. Cyril Bear was not there. Jack must have left him at the party.
On her way back through the kitchen, she caught sight of the blue vase of roses. She bent over them and breathed in deeply to catch their scent, which seemed stronger in the still of the hot night. Then she looked again. Weren’t there more flowers here than before – many more? She shook her head, trying to focus. She had encountered so much oddness since arriving in Trout Island.
No. Her wine mind must be playing tricks on her.
Tiredness pulled at her eyes. She went upstairs to the bedroom, where Marcus was already snoring, and Jack was curled up on the little nest she had made for him on a mattress on the floor. Although he was asleep, he was clearly too hot, so she got rid of two of the three blankets Marcus had laid over him, thinking about how she’d have to deal with the fallout over the missing bear in the morning. Then she threw off her clothes and slipped, wearing only her underwear, into the bed beside her husband.
She lay down and tried to sleep, but now the scenes of the evening intruded, playing underneath her eyelids, peeling away like the skins of an onion. First, all the animals, then that woman in the car. And finally she was down to the kernel, the thought that coloured everything else.
Stephen Molloy, looking into her eyes and telling her she was the biggest what-if of his life.
And then that kiss.
What on earth was she going to do about that?
Sixteen
BELLA’S NIGHT WAS PUNCTUATED BY DREAMS OF GIANT CHIPMUNKS lurking in dark corners while she and Sean tried to find an unoccupied attic for some kissing. Just before she woke, the woman in the parked car leered close to her, opened her mouth, and let out a series of pulsing, halitosed roars right into her face.
She would have sprung from her bed had her sheets, tangled after her disturbed night, not knotted her to it. The sound that had woken her was in fact her fan as it rotated on its white plastic foot, wheezing after its nightlong exertions.
She rubbed her face, grinding sweaty dust into her skin. She was glad they were going to clean this horrible house today. It helped her deal with the gloominess she felt about what had happened the night before with Sean and Olly.
Slipping her feet into her flip-flops, she stumbled across the floor and heaved up the window, letting the grassy morning air thread into the stale bedroom. It also brought with it a lingering touch of skunk, but it appeared that someone or something – a bear, or a wolf perhaps – had removed the corpse in the night, leaving nothing but a bloody smudge on the tarmac.
Looking out on the empty street, Bella wondered how somewhere so dead could produce a boy like Sean. But something was going on outside. A sign of life. Someone was running towards the house. She pressed her nose against the fly screen.
It was only her mother though, in cycle shorts and a too-tight vest, sweating her way along the pavement. She appeared to be having a conversation with herself, or possibly she was talking to the rather incongruous big black dog that loped along beside her. Bella tried to push away her embarrassment at witnessing those jiggling maternal breasts and thighs, that red face plastered with sticky hair. She was glad no one else was around to see it all. Unless, of course, the whole street was full of people who were, like her, imprinting their faces with fly-screen mesh.
Pulling on her dressing gown, she went downstairs. Everyone else was still asleep, even Jack, thank goodness. As the only other early riser, she knew she would be lumbered with him in the mornings if her mother wanted to go out for dawn jogs.
‘Hiya.’ Her mother burst in through the back door, all panting and sweat.
‘You’ve been for a run.’
‘Good work, Sherlock.’ She bent forward with one leg extended, stretching out her hamstrings.
‘What’s with the dog?’
‘Oh, he’s my new chum. Looks out for me on my run. Fancy a cuppa?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Bella said, reaching for a saucepan. ‘Where did you go?’
‘End of the village and round the school playing fields down by the river.’ Lara was now bent forward straight-legged, with her face against her knees. ‘Oh,’ she said, straightening up, her face even redder than before, ‘did you know there’s a swimming pool down there?’
‘No!’ Bella said, suddenly interested. She loved swimming, and it was so hot here.
‘And it seems it’s free to use, and open all day,’ Lara went on. ‘A nice young man working down there told me. Name of Sean.’
‘Oh.’ Bella looked at her mum. So she did know. She had thought as much last night.
‘He was getting it ready for the day, but it opens at eight, if you’d like a quick – and I mean quick, because I need your help – morning swim before we get stuck in here.’
‘I might do that,’ Bella said. She didn’t know whether to be pleased that there was a pool and that Sean was down there, or annoyed that her mother not only knew what was going on, but had also gone up and talked to him when the few clothes she was wearing were striped with sweat.
‘But have a cup of tea and something to eat first,’ Lara said. ‘Keep me company.’
By hal
f past seven, Bella was tripping along the bumpy pavement to the school, her bikini on under her shorts and T-shirt, her towel in the maroon duffel bag she wore slung over her shoulder. She went to the playground and looked over the ridge on which it stood. A dirt path led down to the baseball and football pitches below. She supposed that was where her mother had meant the swimming pool was, so she set off down the slope. As she turned a bend she got a whiff of chlorine – a smell that always filled her with both the anticipation of diving into the blue and a desire for the vending machine hot chocolate Lara always bought her after their regular trips to the Prince Regent baths in Brighton.
At the bottom of the dip, across an empty car park and surrounded by a seven-foot-high chain-link fence was a perfect blue rectangle of a pool. To one side stood a small brick building with three doors in it, on the other a sandpit, a couple of picnic benches and some white plastic chairs.
The place appeared to be empty. The only sound Bella could hear above the crickets rubbing their legs in the morning sunshine was the pool pump whirring and reverberating around the edges of the hollow.
She traced along the fence and found a gate, but it was padlocked. A sign at the side said that opening hours were ‘8 a.m. until 6 p.m., seven days a week, May thru August, except thunderstorms’. Underneath this followed a long list of forbidden activities, which included diving, consuming alcohol, running, rough play or horseplay, eating or drinking in the pool area or bringing in glass or plastic that could shatter. The sign went on to tell visitors not to swim alone, not to swim if they had had diarrhoea in the past two weeks or if there were thunderstorms, and always to have a cleansing shower before bathing. Bella wondered if she would be let in, as she was clearly on her own.
The water, so close and yet so out of reach, was driving her crazy. Even at this hour, the heat had already built to something incredible. The sky was so blue it almost made a noise, and she could feel the sweat trickling down the backs of her legs.
‘Hello!’ she called through the fence. ‘Hello?’
A door in the outhouse opened and her heart leaped as Sean’s smiling blue eyes met hers. He wore baggy swimming trunks and nothing else. She couldn’t help noticing how his tanned chest was smooth and firm.
‘You came,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She beamed at him through the fence.
‘And no brothers?’
‘Still asleep. Olly doesn’t ever wake up till eleven in the holidays.’
‘Come on in,’ he said, unlocking the big old padlock that kept the gate shut. ‘It’s usually pretty quiet first thing. Then all the moms come down with the little kids around nine.’
‘This is great,’ Bella said, her eyes on the water. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘And it’s completely free?’
‘All the villages around here have a pool and we high-school students man them during the summer.’
‘What’s this?’ She motioned to the brick building.
‘That’s where you get changed. We don’t allow poolside changing.’
‘So many rules.’
‘Ah, we’re pretty relaxed really, believe me. We just have the signs up so no one can sue us.’
‘Which one do I use?’ Bella asked.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Which changing room?’
‘Well, that’s the women’s, but why don’t you use the lifeguard hut as you’re a special friend. It’s more spacious and private. Bobby, the other guard, isn’t coming in till later today because he has an orthodontics appointment.’
‘Do you think I should?’ Bella asked.
‘’Course you should. Go on in,’ he said, opening the middle door for her. ‘I’ve got to skim the water now.’
As Bella’s eyes adjusted to the relative darkness inside the hut, she picked out a desk and chair and a load of life-saving equipment hanging on the wall. To one side was a shower stall, and to the other a row of pegs, on which hung a rucksack and some clothes, presumably Sean’s.
Bella went up to the jeans dangling from one of the pegs and buried her face into them. She could smell him, and the tang of bonfire from the night before. She closed her eyes, and let the tingle in her body reach through to her fingers.
She peeled off her sawn-off shorts and T-shirt, and adjusted her bikini. Taking her towel out first, she bundled her clothes into her duffel bag, hanging it up next to Sean’s things. It felt like staking her claim on him.
‘First take a cleansing shower,’ she recited the rule she had seen on the notice outside the gate, and, reaching into the shower stall, she turned on the tap. At first the water gushed out icy cold, making her gasp as it hit her arm, but soon it heated up and she stepped inside, letting it spray over her and wash away the sweat from her short journey through the village.
The tap still running, she wiped her eyes and opened them to see Sean standing there, watching her. She smiled at him and nodded. He stepped into the shower and took her to him, wrapping his arms around her body and pressing himself against her.
‘Now, where had we got to last night?’ he said, then bent to kiss her. Bella gasped as his hand reached up and under her bikini top.
‘Is this OK?’ he said.
‘Go on,’ she said and pulled him closer to her; his erection burned into her belly. The shower water dissolved them together as her hands reached under his swimming shorts, hooking them down so he sprang free against her. Helped by him, she wriggled out of her bikini bottom.
‘Did you lock the door?’ she asked.
‘And the gate,’ he said.
He lifted her up against the wall. She looped her feet around him and welcomed him, letting his touch, inside and out, erase the traces of shame left by what she and Olly had done when they were younger, the thing no one else, not even Jonny, had done with her since.
About bloody time, she thought.
Bobby arrived just as they were coming out of the lifeguard hut. He was clearly not pleased to see the pool still shut and a small queue of mothers and toddlers in sunhats at the gate. He let everyone in, smiling and greeting them by name, then waddled over to Sean and Bella.
‘For fuck’s sake, McLoughlin you faggot, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?’ Bobby said, his post-orthodontist, Novocained mouth sloping down the right hand side of his face.
‘Hi Bobby,’ Sean said, smiling. ‘This is Bella. She’s from England.’
‘Hi,’ she said.
‘Hello,’ Bobby said, without making any eye contact at all.
‘How did it go at the orthodontist?’ Sean said.
‘I am not happy,’ Bobby said. ‘I’ve gotta wear these fucking braces, look.’ He gurned to reveal an expanse of ironmongery surely too large to fit into such a small space – as if someone had tried to cram the George Washington Bridge into a pomegranate. ‘How am I going to get pussy now, McLoughlin?’
‘I apologise for my co-worker,’ Sean said to Bella.
‘Let’s get the show on the road.’ Bobby shuffled off to the lifeguard’s hut.
‘Sorry, Bella. Gotta work now.’ Sean touched her arm, brushing her breast as he drew his hand away.
‘I think I’ll hang around a bit. Have a swim. That sort of thing.’
‘There’s nothing I’d like better.’
Bobby re-emerged and took up his position at the shallow end of the pool, opposite Sean. Bella dived into the cool blue water. As she surfaced, Bobby blew his whistle.
‘No diving,’ he said, as if he were bored with the complete stupidity of people who dared to swim in his pool.
Bella swam a couple of lengths, loving the feel of the water as it streaked along her limbs. Then she pulled herself out and pushed her hair back so it slicked over her head. She looked over at Sean, who was busy overseeing the small children who now filled the pool like so many maggots in a tin.
He turned his gaze over to her, and their eyes locked for a second. Bella smiled at him and he smiled back. She thought perhaps this was what love felt like
.
‘McLoughlin! Eyes on the game!’ Bobby shouted from his seat, his high-pitched voice echoing above the laughter of the children ducking for quarters thrown by their sun-lounging mothers. Sean shrugged an apology to Bella, and looked back towards the middle of the pool.
Bella went into the hut to get her duffel bag. Then she laid her towel on the scrubby grass at the water’s edge and stretched out in the sun like a cat that had got the cream, the early bird and its worm. Her body felt different. She wondered if she looked any different. She hoped not; she couldn’t bear to think what Olly would say – or do – if he found out what she had been up to.
She got her copy of Wuthering Heights out of her bag. Alongside her plans for the photo-journal – which she kept thwarting by forgetting to take her camera out with her – another summer resolution was to start reading around her AS level books for next term. She didn’t hold out much hope for this one – she preferred modern American writers.
Oh, but it was hard to concentrate. She shielded her eyes from the sun and, as she spied on Sean up on his high lifeguard ladder, she had to restrain herself from pulling him down off it and back into the shower.
Was it right that they had done it so soon after meeting? As far as sex went, for Bella the boundaries had been blurred a long time ago, in the separate tent she and Olly shared when their mother took them camping. Lara had been far too preoccupied with her new baby Jack to notice anything odd going on; she just saw what she wanted to see.
‘Olly and Bella live in each other’s pockets,’ was what she said, proudly, to her friends. Then she’d go on about their ‘special connection’.
But Bella had felt sick and ashamed and knew that what had happened was wrong. This, with Sean, though – however premature it might look from the outside – seemed to be nothing but right.
She returned to her book, but her eyes kept blurring over the words. Her hand turned the page, but her mind couldn’t stay with Lockwood’s first encounter with his landlord in that buffeted, bleak landscape. She was lying by a pool in New York in the twenty-first century. How on earth was she supposed to connect with all that stuff from the past? And, oh, she couldn’t help it. She looked up at Sean again, at that dark, curled hair that she had wrapped her fingers in and held on to …