by Julia Crouch
‘Oh!’ Lara stopped in her tracks. Coming through the doorway, hand in hand, their attention so wholly focused on each other they might have been the only people in the world, were Bella and Sean. He cradled her hand as she lifted a peach for him to smell. She pointed out the corn and he picked out a yard-high stem of basil, presenting it to her like a bouquet. It was almost a parody of young love, and for a moment Lara felt a stab of jealousy.
Then Bella turned to look at the ice cream and saw her mother and baby brother standing there, gawping at her.
‘Mum?’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What does it look like?’ Lara said, licking her ice cream, which was beginning to dribble down the cone on to her fingers. It was delicious, a muted sweetness of pumpkin riding a little cinnamon on an almost powdery texture.
‘Ice cream, Bell. Nice,’ Jack said, scrambling on to a seat, already with more chocolate sauce round his mouth than he had in his dish.
Bella towed Sean up to their table. ‘Mum, this is Sean.’
‘I know. We’ve met,’ Lara said, smiling up to him. ‘I thought you were swimming in a pond.’
‘Well we were,’ Bella said. ‘But we started to get pruney, so Sean brought me here. Isn’t it cool?’
‘So you drove here,’ Lara said. ‘I hope you wore a seat belt.’
‘Hi, I’m Bella, Lara’s daughter?’ Bella reached across her mother and held out her hand to Stephen, who had joined them and was wiping the chocolate from Jack’s face. He took her fingertips, then leaned over and whispered something in her ear. Bella’s eyes widened as she stood back and looked at him. Then she smiled. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Now I see it.’
Stephen held his finger up to his lips.
‘Hey, “Sam”,’ Sean said.
‘You know?’ Bella turned to her boyfriend open-mouthed.
‘I thought only James, Betty and that Trudi knew?’ Lara said to Stephen.
‘Well, Sean sort of rumbled me round at the farm once. But he’s a good kid. I’d trust him with my life,’ Stephen said in a low voice.
‘And you have every reason to,’ Sean said seriously.
‘I wish I’d known. You don’t know how much it hurt not telling you,’ Bella said to Sean. Then she turned back to look at Stephen’s disguise. ‘Too weird.’
‘So: do you kids want to treat yourselves?’ Stephen said more loudly, now in his Sam voice. He reached in his wallet and handed them a ten-dollar note. ‘Go on, guys. It’s on your Uncle Sam.’
‘Thanks, Sam,’ Bella said.
Lara watched as they went over to the ice-cream counter. Sean showed the flavours to Bella, resting his hand on her waist so that she was close to him. The way Bella turned to him, the look in her eyes as she spoke, and the new shape her mouth took as she listened to what he said told Lara more than she wanted to know about just how far this friendship had progressed. She sighed as she finished off her ice cream. So soon after meeting, and with Bella so young. She was in deep – anyone could see that. Lara braced herself. The best she could hope for was that her daughter had her heart broken, or broke a heart herself. Anything else would be unthinkable, this young.
‘Remind you of anyone?’ Stephen leaned forward and whispered to her, in his own voice.
Lara bought a basket full of produce. She invited Sean and Stephen back to supper, which she had already planned to be pasta with fresh basil and tomato sauce, and local pecorino on top, followed by a Pretty Fly blueberry pie. After a moment’s hesitation involving an agonised glance at Bella, Sean accepted, but Stephen said he had to get back to feed his chickens. They drove back over the hill in convoy, Stephen with Lara and Jack in the lead, Sean and Bella following behind in his car, which Lara noted with relief was a sensible, not-too-old Nissan.
As they climbed the steep hill on the other side of the freeway, Lara remembered she had to stop by the laundromat. When they got back to Trout Island, she asked Stephen to pull over. She ran out to tell Sean and Bella, who had tucked in behind them, to go back to the house while she went with Stephen to pick up the washing.
As before, the laundromat was completely deserted. Lara got the buggy first, lobbing it into the back of the Wrangler. Then she went into the shed. The machine she thought she had left her laundry in was empty. Thinking she must have made another supermarket-car-park-type mistake, she checked all the others, but they too contained nothing but their shiny stainless-steel drums. She looked into the tumble dryers, thinking perhaps that someone had, with the best of intentions, moved her washing on, but there was no sign of it. And the plastic laundry baskets were all empty, too.
Perturbed, she looked for a phone number on one of the crude notices dotted around the place. They were full of misspelled instructions like DO NOT OVERLODE THE MACHINES, and CHECK ALL POKETS BEFORE LODEING. CUSTOMERS ARE LIBEL FOR BLOKAGES. Then she found a small, handwritten sign tucked down underneath the washing powder dispenser, which gave a contact IN CASE OF MALFUNTION. Lara scribbled the number on her arm.
‘Bastards,’ she said as she went out to the Wrangler. Stephen was sitting in the back, reading We’re Going on a Bear Hunt – which he must have got out of her bag – to Jack. ‘Someone’s taken all our washing. Someone’s nicked our laundry.’
‘That’s weird. Kids?’ Stephen said.
‘Or perhaps Olly or Marcus came and got it?’ Lara said. ‘Though I doubt that.’
‘Nasty lady,’ Jack said.
‘You’re right, Jack,’ Lara said. ‘Perhaps it was the nasty lady.’
‘What nasty lady?’ Stephen turned to face her.
‘Some idiot nearly ran us over as we came out here this afternoon,’ Lara explained as she climbed into the Wrangler. ‘But I’m sure it couldn’t be her. What would she want with all our clothes?’
‘What did she look like?’ Stephen moved forward into the driving seat.
‘I didn’t really see her. Sort of brownish, middle aged-ish. Angry. She whacked her car down the lane, nearly ran us over, swore at us then went in there.’ Lara pointed at the laundromat. Then she turned back to Stephen and noticed his eyes had darkened.
‘It’s my fault,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No. What?’
He broke away and put his hands behind his neck, bowed his head and sighed. ‘Strange things happen around me,’ he said.
She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. There’s probably some simple explanation. I’ll call this number when I get back,’ she pointed to the scrawl on her arm, ‘and I’m sure we’ll trace it. If someone in the village starts wearing Olly’s Made in Brighton T-shirt, we’ll have our man. Marcus will be cross about the Paul Smith shirt though. Oh damn,’ she said, remembering. ‘Your shirt was in there, too.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ve got hundreds,’ Stephen said. ‘But I’ll be sure to get your top back to you as soon as possible, given the reduced clothing situation.’ He started the engine. ‘I’d better get you back. Marcus will be home in a few minutes.’
‘You seem to know his rehearsal schedule very well,’ Lara said, putting on her seat belt.
‘I have my sources,’ he said, smiling.
He drove them slowly round the block to the house. Stopping in the street, he got out and helped Lara get her shopping from the back, then he lifted Jack out, detached the car seat and put it on the front deck.
‘I’ll see you soon, Lara. Very soon.’ He touched her shoulder, leaned in to kiss her on the cheek, then jumped back into the Wrangler and sped off.
Lara stood there waving, her shopping at her feet. Her cheek burned where his lips had touched it. A breeze shook the maples that towered around the house, rattling their leaves so for a second they were all she could hear. Hadn’t she resolved, just this morning, not to see Stephen again? And hadn’t she just spent the whole afternoon with him, drawing Jack into it all as well?
Then she saw Marcus at the far end of Main Street, the unmistakab
le shape and colour of him as he loped along, a heavy satchel on one shoulder, a cigarette in his hand. The low, late afternoon sun illuminated his hair, making him look as if he were on fire. From the spring in his step, he must have had a good day at work. He looked strangely complete, as if he at last belonged in the space he took up in the world.
‘Daddy!’ Jack said, running towards his father.
And here am I, she thought. His Lara, contemplating murdering all of that happiness.
Twenty-Five
BELLA LAY IN THE DARK IN HER SWELTERING BEDROOM, LISTENING to the whine of a mosquito as it homed in on her skin, adding to her agitation after an awkward evening. One of the fly screens had a small tear, and when she went out the night before she must have left the light on. So she had to spend a good half-hour before getting into bed creeping about with a sandal, squashing the wily insects that had found their way into the room in bloody splatters on the mildewed wallpaper.
The drone of this last remaining mosquito stopped and she felt the prick as its proboscis pierced the flesh on her belly. Holding her breath, she lifted her hand up high and brought it down on herself with a slap. She rubbed the grainy remains of the creature between her fingers. If she turned on the light she would see her own blood, ample motive for the killing. But she just couldn’t be bothered to lean over and fiddle with the annoying switch.
The downside of not having the mosquito buzzing around was that she could hear Olly more clearly. He was writing a song, which meant he was making a racket, singing in that gruff wail of his that irritated her so much. It sounded so false, as if it were manufactured expressly to annoy her. He was, he had declared at the uncomfortable supper table the Waylands had shared with Sean, setting to music a Byron poem from the book Stephen had lent him. So now she was plagued with Olly’s voice, in the room next to hers, droning on.
‘Like me in lineaments: her eyes
Her hair, her features, all to the very tone
Even of her voice, they said were like to mine …’
‘Shut up,’ Bella groaned into the dense darkness of her room. She knew his game exactly. She hadn’t studied the Romantic poets without learning about Byron’s goings-on with his half-sister. This was Olly, typically, trying to ennoble what had happened between them. He’d done it before, back home, swaying stoned at the top of the stairs when their parents were out, blocking her way, jabbering on about how in Bali fraternal twins used to have to marry because it was assumed they had already had sex in the womb.
Any sort of intellectual justification made it all right for Olly. But Bella felt only shame. She wanted to forget all about it, to make it something only she knew. But how could she, with him knowing it too? With him in her face all the time?
Olly finally finished his ‘songwriting’. Bella tried to breathe the tension in her shoulders down, out through the tips of her fingers and on to the wrinkled bed sheet. She forced her mind to empty its trash, trying instead to fill it with the good things.
It was so hot her chest felt blocked. Another storm was on its way. She ‘felt it in her waters’ as Marcus would say. She wasn’t going to waste electricity by turning on her fan, though. That afternoon, after their wonderful skinny dip and everything else – she gave a hum of pleasure at the memory of that everything else – Sean had driven her from his cousin’s remote pond into the town with the unpronounceable name he said was of Native American origin.
All the shops had their doors open to the stifling air, yet inside they were like fridges. She and Sean tried to work out how much energy all the shops across America wasted chilling their customers so they had to carry warm clothing, even when temperatures outside soared. It was obscene. Sweating in her bed was Bella’s personal direct action for climate change. She thought with a smile that if she had another body in there beside her, she would be even hotter and her protest even greater.
Fat chance of that with her brother around, though.
And there she was, thinking about Olly again, allowing him to poison her brain. She ran back again over the evening’s events, and, not for the first time, she groaned.
She lifted up her sheet and let it fall down, wafting air over her that was, if not cooler, at least not stagnant.
Everything Sean said at the table Olly did his best to do down with little underhand remarks and snarky comments. Sean hadn’t risen to the bait, but she could tell he was upset.
‘You could have knocked me over when I bumped into the pair of them in Pretty Fly Pie …’ her mother had said.
‘Lucky it wasn’t me bumping into you,’ Olly muttered with his head angled so only Bella and Sean could hear.
And Marcus had been so gushy, forcing wine on to Sean, asking him about his plans for the future, interviewing him as if he were a potential son-in-law. It was excruciating. But it was inevitable with Marcus, she supposed. He always liked to dole out the Wayland charm offensive when they had guests. And he was particularly full of himself that evening because his read-through had gone so well.
But her mother had been acting oddly too, knocking back the wine, smiling at them with this stupid look in her eyes, referring to them both as ‘you two’ and making little jokes about holding hands and billing and cooing. It had taken all of Bella’s strength to stop herself withering away in embarrassment.
Then there had been the detailed list of which bits of her underwear had gone missing in the stolen laundry. And what was that about? Bella sat up and tried to pummel some life into her lumpy pillow. Her favourite sundress and an irreplaceable bra, gone for good, nicked by some pervert because her mother had swanned off with Stephen Molloy and forgotten all about them. And now her parents had turned it into some big joke.
She scratched at the lump made by the mosquito. At least she’d get some new clothes out of it. That’s if she found a decent shop out here in the middle of nowhere. The only place she had seen in the unpronounceable town was the grimmest shop in the world, called Fashion Bug, which seemed to sell nothing but lime and pastel polyester.
She cast around for other positive things to think about. The everything else, of course. And Sean. Beautiful Sean. When they said their goodbyes on the porch, he had even said how much he liked her parents, how cool they were, how he hoped to see a lot more of them.
They had kissed – with less abandon than earlier at his cousin’s pond, but still enough to kindle that flame he had set burning in her. He wound his fingers in hers and they made plans to meet again the next day.
But then, of course, bloody Olly had blundered out of the front door and straight into them, making them jump apart.
‘OH GOD,’ Olly said. ‘I’m SO SORRY. I didn’t realise you were out here SNOGGING.’ Then, his face set in an ugly sneer, he shoved Sean away from her, making him stumble down the porch steps.
‘Olly, get in here this instant!’ Bella heard her mother call from inside.
‘I thought I told you to stay away,’ Olly hissed, jumping down, grabbing Sean by the collar and pushing his face right at him. Then, louder, he called, ‘Coming, Mother,’ and went back indoors.
Bella winced as she remembered Sean brushing himself down, trying to conceal his anger behind a set jaw.
‘What is it with your brother?’ he said.
She couldn’t say anything of course. She was utterly stifled by Olly. And her parents, come to that. She had no space in her family. She couldn’t wait to leave home and get away from it all.
She closed her eyes and again tried to clear her mind of the lot of them, tried to wind back to the picture of Sean, smiling down at her as he held her hand, but it was impossible. Olly’s face kept leering in, prising them apart.
Sean must never know what had gone on between her and Olly. It made her feel so dirty. She would die, quite literally, from shame.
And then the unmistakable whine of another mosquito started up by her ear, as if it had been sent to make this night a total misery for her.
It just wasn’t fair. None of it was at a
ll fair.
Twenty-Six
‘I THINK I’D LIKE TO ASK JAMES IF, AS WELL AS HAMMERING UP THAT hideous cellar, we can get some locks put on the doors,’ Lara told Marcus as she cleared away the breakfast things. Her head ached with a cheap wine hangover and her hands seemed disconnected from her body.
‘What on earth for?’ Marcus said, looking up from the online Guardian he was reading on Lara’s laptop.
‘After the launderette thing. I’m not so sure there aren’t some weirdos around, and I’d rather we could lock the doors.’
‘I’ll mention it today,’ Marcus said, but in a way that meant he’d do nothing of the sort.
‘If you’re not going to do it, let me know and I’ll ask him myself.’
‘Didn’t I just say I’d ask him?’
‘What are your plans this morning?’ Lara plunged her hands into the sink to tackle the washing-up. Marcus’s rehearsal didn’t start till after lunch. If he said he was going to sit about and learn his lines, she thought she might explode.
‘I think I’ll look at me lines,’ Marcus said. ‘Steady, old girl,’ he added as a plate slipped from Lara’s hand on to the floor, smashing into several pieces. ‘What are you up to?’
‘There’s that kid’s show at the library,’ she said, scooping up the bits of broken crockery. ‘I thought we’d go along to that. Jack and me, at any rate.’
‘Tell you what,’ Marcus said, shutting the laptop and stretching. ‘Why don’t I come with you? Let the lines go hang for an hour or two. It’d be good to be out together, just the three of us.’
‘OK then.’ Lara swirled the foamy dishwater round, trying to get an ancient stain out of the bottom of a coffee cup. She didn’t know what irritated her more: that Marcus hadn’t noticed she had smashed the plate on purpose, or that he hadn’t offered to take Jack on his own, giving her an hour to herself. She might as well give up on the business plan. It was never going to get written.
‘Has that launderette guy got back yet?’ Marcus said. He was concerned about what he called ‘that exorbitant shirt’. Lara had phoned the number on her arm when she got in the night before, and, after an answerphone greeting in a Russian accent so heavy she couldn’t make out a word, had left a message and the house number.