by Joanna Glen
The next day we went beachcombing on a different beach with our metal detectors, and we didn’t find anything, and Bridget and I were never on our own long enough to go back to our conversation.
The next day we went beachcombing again. About five minutes after we arrived, Bridget uncovered a gold crucifix, and everyone got very excited even though it was just a normal modern one and not really worth anything.
I felt angrier and angrier with Bridget, and this was a horrible shock for me, as I thought I would only ever have nice warm thoughts about her. But the fact was this: she knew I had evidence that I’d been stolen when I was a baby, and she didn’t care enough to want to see it or ask one single question about it.
I kept a bit of a distance from her, but she came over to me, and her hair was windswept, and her face was freckly and radiant, and she threw her arms around me and said, ‘Forever Eva,’ as she sometimes did. This was our code for the fact that we were going to be best friends forever.
Oh forever, you are the cruellest trickster of a word.
I didn’t know then that time always runs out.
‘You’re my best-ever sister,’ said Bridget, putting her arm around me, and all my angry thoughts started to dissolve in the glow of her love.
‘Do you think everyone thinks we’re sisters?’ I said.
‘Hardly!’ she said, laughing. ‘We’re all white as snow.’
‘Not the most original simile, Bridge!’ I said, trying out a new abbreviated nickname at the same time as a new Blumey jokey tone, which sounded a bit weird on me.
Bridget wasn’t offended at all.
‘Give it a score,’ she said.
‘Really only about four out of ten,’ I said, in my new teasing voice. ‘Being generous.’
Bridget laughed her head off. I loved the way she laughed her head off, all loose and easy-breezy like her mother, and I tried to let go of all my pent-up anger.
I knew if I could be more Blumey, I’d be happier.
‘Four out of ten is crap!’ said Bridget.
We were both trying out mild swearwords – it made us feel fantastic.
‘That’s because the simile was crap,’ I said.
And saying crap felt as wonderful as the wind blowing over the beach and the sound of Barnaby’s voice and the depth of his dark eyes. I felt a curious whoosh inside my heart, which apparently was what you felt when you had sex, Bridget had told me, except not in your heart, but in your vagina.
This was the first I’d heard about this whoosh, and I couldn’t really imagine it at all, though Bridget and I had started to talk about sex when we were alone, and it was beginning to feel like something we would want to do at some point. Possibly. I wasn’t totally sure.
Barnaby shouted at us, so we stopped hoovering the beach and ran towards him.
He’d found an old-fashioned gold locket on a gold chain.
Mr Blume got a cloth out of his pocket and gave it to Barnaby, and Barnaby sat cross-legged and started to clean it.
‘I think this is Victorian,’ said Mr Blume, turning it over in his hand and giving it back to Barnaby. ‘A little piece of history.’
My face lit up – a little piece of history – how cool!
‘Real history?’ I said.
‘Yes, the owner of this locket was making history simply by being herself,’ said Mr Blume.
‘Wow!’ I said.
These were the sort of amazing things Blumes said: big enormous things.
‘It’s the same for all of us,’ said Mr Blume.
‘Is it?’ I said. ‘I thought kings and queens made history. I’ve got one of those royal family tree posters with all the dates and everything.’
‘No,’ said Mr Blume. ‘We all have our own family tree, and the branch we’re on is the bit of history we’re making …’
I felt strange.
I was on a branch making my bit of history.
I was going to ask Mr Blume if he was absolutely sure that everyone had a family tree, but Barnaby, to my astonishment said, ‘Would you like to open the locket, Eva?’
Lightning flashed.
Thunder rolled.
Barnaby handed me the locket.
Our hands brushed each other’s.
Whoosh!
Through my hands and up my arm.
‘I love the way everyone has a story,’ said Bridget’s mother.
I must have a story, I thought.
But I don’t know what it is.
I started to prise open the locket, and my fingers were shaking.
‘Before you open it, let’s guess what the photo is,’ said Bridget’s mother.
People guessed grandmothers, and babies, a handsome man with a dark moustache, a kitten, a pet rabbit.
Very carefully, I slid my fingernail between the two sides of the locket, and it started to open.
I held up the locket.
There was nothing in it.
Of course there wasn’t.
I came from nothing, and I was nothing.
‘You have it,’ said Barnaby.
He tried to put it round my neck.
But the clasp was broken.
I held it in my sweating palm.
‘Will you keep it forever?’ said Bridget.
That word again!
I tried to nod in a very matter-of-fact way.
I felt like crying.
‘Perhaps you’ll put a photograph of your husband in it,’ said Bessie.
My husband!
I’d never really imagined myself as someone who would have one of those.
Chapter 25
The next morning, we got up in the dark and went to the beach to watch the sunrise.
Bridget’s mother hitched up her dress and paddled in the sea.
My heart jolted.
Because she was – exactly – Blue Mother in The Rainbow Rained Us, at the edge of the sea, laughing, the wind in her hair and her blue children around her.
Us!
How I loved being us – and not me!
I think all only children dream of us.
I have a photo of all the Blumes in a long line with their arms around each other, and I still love everything about them: the balanced solidity of their bodies, the way they carry their weight evenly, their feet flat on the ground, ready for anything life might throw at them.
Life was about to throw something big.
We didn’t know.
We thought we’d forever climb hills in the sunshine.
We set off with our rucksacks and at the top of the hill we stopped and laid out our rugs and started making our way through the Tupperware boxes of liver pâté sandwiches. Next came brownies, flapjacks, and meringues which were sticky in the middle – and we were allowed to have as many of these as we liked.
Blue Mother covered her head with her crinkly scarf to keep the sun off it, and Mr Blume added some ticks to his butterfly guide and muttered Latin words to himself.
Then Blue Mother took little pots of white chocolate mousse out of her rucksack.
Brownies, flapjacks, meringues and white chocolate mousses?
After we’d eaten our mousses, everyone lay down on the rugs and closed their eyes, but I went with Bridget (who I must have forgiven) to sit together on a grassy ledge, looking out at the sea.
Blue Mother came over and nestled between us, dangling her legs over the little drop, like us, and the sun danced on her earrings, which were shaped like swallows, and she put her cheesecloth arms around us, with her silver bangles clinking around her wrists.
‘Aren’t we lucky?’ she said.
We both nodded.
I loved her so much I wanted to cry.
I wanted to tell her how grateful I was.
I wanted to tell her that at night I thanked God (whoever exactly God was) for giving her to me.
I didn’t say any of these things, but I felt a piercing agony of happiness spread all over my body, down into my limbs, out to the tips of my fingers and toes.
‘I just couldn’t be happier at this moment,’ she said to us. ‘Could you?’
Some days heaven touches earth.
And do we notice it at the time?
Or do we know it later – when heaven is snatched away?
Mr Blume was tidying up the picnic, making a rubbish bag.
He flapped away a wasp.
There’s always a wasp.
However good the picnic.
Chapter 26
When we got in the minibus to go home, I felt quite distraught. As if whatever I’d had for those two weeks I would never have again. I knew that, whatever it was, it was the nicest and most wonderful thing any person could have.
As we drove home, I kept thinking about Pink Mother.
Perhaps she might be better and I would have to go and live with her in Chelsea again.
Or perhaps she might have died.
A terrible thought jumped into my mind: the thought that I would be pleased.
I tried to get rid of this thought, but it jumped back up and wouldn’t leave me alone.
Until Barnaby turned around and said to me, ‘I never thought of this before, but if you took the m out of our surname, we would be blue, and you would be green!’
‘And if you two got married,’ said Bessie, ‘you could be called the Blue-Greens!’
I could feel myself starting to sweat.
Everyone else laughed at the thought of Barnaby and me being called the Blue-Greens but I just tried to keep breathing.
‘I want to be called Bella Blue!’ said Bella, nudging Bessie.
‘I want to be called Bessie Blue!’ said Bessie.
Mr Blume chuckled as he drove, taking his left hand off the steering wheel to drink some water, so that he was driving with only his right, looking in the rear-view mirror to join in the conversation.
‘Shall we change our name, D?’ said Barnaby.
‘We can if you like!’ said Mr Blume, driving quickly and then slowly, like he always did. ‘Why not?’
This why not was another reason I loved the Blumes so much.
It’s so easy to say why, and so much better to say why not.
They did end up changing their name, but for a totally different reason, a reason that I can’t bear to think about.
But anyhow.
We’ll get there.
You can’t change the truth of life, whether you’re living it backwards or forwards.
On our journey home from Lyme Regis, a big white car, coming in the opposite direction, tried to overtake. I remember it heading towards us just as the car behind us pulled out.
Bridget’s mother was in the passenger seat shrieking – and there was a strange fragment of a second when I knew that those overtaking cars were going to meet in the middle. Mr Blume’s water sprayed everywhere as he manoeuvred into the side of the road with one hand. And the black overtaking-car crashed into the white overtaking-car, and then another car appeared from somewhere, and there was an almighty smash, and we all ended up facing in wrong directions.
Chapter 27
‘I hope no one died,’ said Bridget’s mother on our way home in the minibus-taxi, and I thought of those cars buckled up and scattered about, possibly with dead people inside them, dead people who had been alive seconds before. I wondered if cars should ever have been invented when they clearly weren’t safe, and I saw, in a way I hadn’t seen before, how close dying was to living.
I would see this again and again, as everyone does, and especially in eight years’ time, the tragic summer of my A level results.
Why doesn’t everyone get more worked up about the fact that we’re all going to die, I wondered on the way home from Lyme Regis after the car accident. Adults didn’t seem to mention death at all.
I now realise that the reason adults don’t mention death is because they are worked up about it, not because they’re not. It’s not too small to mention – it’s too big.
Now I’m an adult.
And death is too big for me.
When we arrived at the Blumes’ house, Pink Mother didn’t seem to have died. She’d sent us a letter wishing us a happy holiday. There was a mountain of post on the mat, which we all walked over, and which Mr Blume gathered up. He sat at the dining room table ripping envelopes open with a silver knife and scrunching them up and hurling them in the bin.
I stayed as close as I could to Bridget’s mother because I was feeling wobbly from the car crash, and she stilled and steadied me, simply by existing, which is what happens with the right sort of mother.
I liked to breathe in the lavender smell of her skin and fiddle with her clinking bangles, and she’d often give my shoulder a quick squeeze, or my arm a stroke, or she’d run her fingers through my hair – and this would make me feel like silk blowing in a warm breeze.
But she didn’t do any of those things on the day we got back from Lyme Regis.
She kept going in and out of the downstairs loo.
Mr Blume shouted, ‘I heard from the Family Tree people!’
We all rushed into the dining room.
Except her.
The Family Tree people – these were the people who, if I asked, could possibly find my branch, and on my branch, presumably they could find the first three and a half years of my life.
‘Where’s M?’ said Mr Blume.
I found her lying on the sofa with her arms wrapped around her chest.
It made me think of Pink Mother on the chaise longue.
She closed her eyes.
‘Are you feeling ill?’ I said, stroking the smooth skin of her upper arm.
‘Don’t look so worried,’ she said.
‘I don’t like you lying down,’ I said anxiously.
‘I feel a bit funny,’ she said. ‘I think I’m just a bit car-sick. Or maybe it’s delayed shock.’
‘Mr Blume has heard from the Family Tree people!’ I said. ‘So why don’t you get up?’
It was such a relief to see her standing up again, but I noticed that she looked extra-pale.
We went into the dining room together, with her arm around me.
‘Look at that!’ said Mr Blume. ‘You and me, Eva!’
I couldn’t think what he was about to say about him and me.
‘All the way back in the Middle Ages …’ he said.
‘Yes?’ said Bridget’s mother, looking faraway (she never looked faraway, she was always right here, alert and attentive with alive sparkly eyes). ‘What happened in the Middle Ages?’
‘… my ancestors lived in Spain!’ said Mr Blume. ‘They were Sephardi Jews. In the city of Córdoba!’
‘Córdoba!’ I shouted.
The word rose and fell and shimmered.
‘Is that where you’re from?’ said Barnaby.
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘Or maybe. It could be there. Or Jerez. Or Alvera.’
I was stammering.
‘It’s just I lost the first three and a half years,’ I said.
‘Of what?’
‘Of my life.’
Chapter 28
Bridget rearranged her bedside table with all the things she’d brought back from our holiday, so I copied her, resting the gold ammonite and the gold locket on the base of my bedside lamp. Then we got into bed.
‘Will your mother mind you having the crucifix by your bed?’ I said to Bridget. ‘When it’s not your religion?’
She shook her head.
‘I wish we knew what God meant,’ I said. ‘Like when you say horse. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, it’s still got a mane and a tail.’
Bridget looked at me the way she did when I got too philosophical. But then, to my surprise, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes, and I could tell she was going to join in. It was obvious that Bridget had changed me in multiple ways, but this was one of the moments I realised I’d changed her a tiny bit too. I liked that thought.
‘What do you think w
ould be the ideal god?’ said Bridget, putting her head on her pillow, her eyes still closed.
I lay thinking.
It was a difficult question.
I thought some more.
‘Like a god-version of your mother,’ I said. ‘With her arms around us, at the top of the hill, looking out over the valley to the sea. That would be like a hundred times better than the old man pointing at Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. You know, the one with his willy flopping on his thigh. Adam’s, I mean.’
Although we normally found willies to be the funniest things on earth, Bridget didn’t laugh, or say anything.
I stared at the ammonite, and I thought that maybe this was the moment.
I breathed deeply, and I said: ‘I can’t believe you don’t want to ask me about the fact that I-was-almost-certainly-kidnapped-when-I-was-a-baby.’
It all came out in one breath.
Then I heard Bridget’s heavy asleep-breathing.
She often fell asleep about one second after lying down.
I lay awake, with my heart racing, wondering if God was deliberately preventing me from showing Bridget the photo and also worrying about the way her mother had been lying on the sofa, with a faraway look in her pale face and her arms around her chest.
I wished and wished that we could be back in Lyme Regis with Barnaby’s beautiful face beneath me and no worries buzzing in my head.
I lay worrying so long that I needed a wee.
I walked along the landing in the quiet dark house.
The door to Bridget’s parents’ bedroom was open, as it often was, and the light was on. When I got nearer, I could see Bridget’s mother standing wearing her harem pants with no top on and Bridget’s father kneading her large left breast with his right hand, like it was a lump of pastry.
Her other breast hung down: the pale pink circular areola looked like the sucker-things we put the tea-towels in. Breasts were so fascinating to me before I had proper ones of my own. (They still are a bit, their fruity variety: melons, mangoes, even curling-up ones like bananas. My own, more like plums.)