The Pearl in the Attic

by Karen McCombie

  I mean, maybe Mum and Uncle Dean are hoping that Nana’s going to wander in here, shouting “Yoo hoo! Get the kettle on!”

  But the hospital is a long, long walk away along busy roads. Someone would have noticed her, wouldn’t they? An older lady with glinting hair clips.

  It’s been over an hour now, and nobody has a clue where she’s gone.

  One minute, she was asking the nice nurse if she could change the water in her vase of sunflowers for her; the next, she had vanished.

  Padded straight out of the hospital in her bright yellow Crocs and PJs.

  At least everyone presumes she’s not in the hospital; calls have pinged around every department. Every loo has been checked. She’s not in the café sipping tea, and she’s not browsing magazines in the hospital shop.

  They do have CCTV cameras around the place, so that’s the next step, Mum says, but it could take a little while to access the footage. (She’s sounding so tense I can just imagine her clenched jaw from here.)

  In the meantime, we’re just supposed to play the wait-and-see game.

  “Where’s Mr Spinks?” I ask Zephyr, who’s on his dad’s laptop, zooming in and out of a street map of the area around the hospital.

  “Don’t know,” he says, his blond eyebrows knitted together in a frown as he stares at the screen.

  I feel like I need to find him. And since Nana’s flat is a lot neater than it was when we first arrived nearly two days ago, it shouldn’t be that hard.

  I call out his name, and am rewarded with a little whimper from Nana’s bedroom-cum-art-studio. Walking in, I see Mr Spinks curled up on Nana’s bed, his head on his paws, looking miserable. He knows something bad has happened. He’s sensed our gloom and worry like it’s a mist drifting through the flat.

  I sit down beside him and stroke his head.

  “I don’t understand,” I admit to him. “Why would Nana disappear? Is she so worried about Mum trying to get her diagnosed with dementia? Maybe she thinks she’ll be taken away from all her things?”

  I push myself up off the bed, and go to take a look at some of those things. Nana’s bedroom is the one room Mum and Uncle Dean haven’t touched, since it’s full of something personal and special – Nana’s artwork.

  And all she’s been drawing and painting are these circular images. Versions of the balloon, the pearl and the Rose Window canvases that are hanging in the living room. Smaller half-finished canvases are propped up against the walls.

  And here on the big desk are scattered loose pages that are the same images but done in dreamy watercolours, pencil sketches, scratchy black pen work…

  “Mr Spinks,” I say, an idea coming to my head. “Walkies!”

  Zephyr wanted to come, but what if Nana did turn up at the flat? Someone had to stay.

  Still, he was almost by my side…

  “Where are you now?” he asks in my ear.

  “Going up a very, very steep hill,” I say into the phone, panting for breath, but that’s partly because me and Mr Spinks ran all the way to Ally Pally, and not just ’cause of the incline.

  “Getting closer to the palace?” he asks.

  “It’s right up ahead,” I tell him, gazing up at the building in awe, the stained glass of the great Rose Window glowing blue and red in the sunlight.

  “Why don’t you let Mr Spinks off the lead and see if he can find her?” Zephyr suggests.

  “Because I’m too good at losing Nana’s pets,” I tell him. “Anyway, I’m nearly at the terrace. I’ve just got to get across a road and go up a flight of steps and I should be…”

  “Should be… ?” Zephyr repeats.

  But the swoop and glide of a particular bird has caught my eye. Anyone else, not looking too closely, might think it’s just a particularly large pigeon, but of course, it’s not.

  “I think it’s Angie!” I say, hurrying now that I see the bird coming in to land along the terrace wall.

  “Do the whistle, the one to get her in her cage!” Zephyr urges me, as I look first one way, then another, checking for traffic on the road directly in front of the palace.

  “WHEEEEEEEP!” I try, and sure enough the bird turns, wobbling from one foot to another, looking down at me and Mr Spinks with curiosity.

  “Well, well, well!” I hear her caw.

  “I heard that!” I hear Zephyr say in my ear.

  Mr Spinks hears it too, and – for the second time today – pulls so hard that the lead slips right out of my hand, and he hurtles up the set of steps.

  “Call you back!” I yell at Zephyr, though I think I may have pressed the off button before he heard that.

  I take the steps two at a time, and before I reach the top, I see her.

  Nana’s on a bench to the left of me, smiling at the sight of Angie, as if she’s never seen anything so comical. Then she gives a delighted “Oh!” as Mr Spinks jumps up at her.

  “Nana?” I call out.

  “Hello, Sita, sweetheart!” she says cheerfully. “Have you finished your shift at the hospital?”

  My heart sinks as I sit down beside her.

  “Nana, I’m Scarlet…” I say softly, noticing that Nana’s curls are coming unpinned, unfurling, glinting clips coming undone.

  “More lilac, I’d say,” says Nana, nodding at my hair and smiling as if she’s made the best joke. “So, is this your doggy?”

  “No, it yours – it’s Mr Spinks!” I tell her.

  “Oh, no, sweetheart, Mr Spinks is next door’s cat. He always comes under the gap in the fence. Don’t you remember?”

  OK, so now I suddenly do remember that it was the name of next door’s cat back at Nana’s old house in Southend, the one in the bent photo Zephyr gave me last night. Nana must have named her Staffie after him, then. But why is she talking as if—

  “Ha! Whoo! What on earth kind of bird is this, do you think?” she asks in delight, as Angie flutters on to the arm of the bench beside her.

  “It’s a parrot, Nana,” I tell her, wriggling my arms out of my hoodie. I’ll need it to bundle around Angie so I can keep her safe and get her home.

  “Oh, aren’t you clever?” says Nana, leaning back as I lunge for Angie and successfully catch her.

  The parrot struggles a little as I tuck her under my arm, but when I pull the hood of my top over her eyes, she seems to settle.

  “What will you do with it?” Nana asks.

  “Well, take it back to your flat,” I say, feeling the tears start to prickle in my eyes. I’m a bit scared about what this means.

  “Do you know where that is, dear? I can’t quite remember. And I’m getting a bit cold now…”

  Nana looks down at her feet. Her yellow Crocs are muddy.

  “Did you come along the walk where the old railway line used to be?” I ask her. It’s how I guessed Nana might get here. She’d talked about the walk starting not too far from the hospital, and how it took you – as a shortcut, I suppose – straight into Ally Pally Park.

  “Yes, I did! Clever you! It’s such a pretty walk. I must take Manny sometime. He’d love it…”

  You know, I have never been so glad to see my mum as I am now. She’s walking along the terrace from a different direction than the one I took. She’s smiling at me, hurrying, holding a fleecy blanket she keeps in the car.

  “Hello, Mum!” she says to Nana, sounding bright and perky, even though she must be jelly inside. Mum in Practical Mode, one hundred per cent.

  “Hello, Renuka!” says Nana, looking delighted to see her. “Is Daddy with you?”

  “No,” says Mum, still smiling, but with a little choking sound in her voice. “Here, let’s get this around you. The sun’s out, but there’s quite a breeze up here, isn’t there?”

  “Oh, but you don’t feel it when you’re in love!” laughs Nana, standing up and taking a few steps towards the stone balustrade of the terrace.

  She stands there looking out over the trees and the grass to the rooftops of Hornsey down below and the high-rise tips of ce
ntral London in the distance, swaying gently while she hums a tuneless song.

  “I’m sorry,” I say quietly to Mum as I start to cry. “I didn’t want to believe it was true.”

  “I’m sorry too,” says Mum, sliding over to put her arm around me as we watch Nana, lost in her strange but happy bubble. “And I didn’t want it to be true either. But well done for finding her, Scarlet.”

  “And I found Angie,” I say, managing a snotty smile, as I show Mum the softly moving bundle under my arm. “But how did you know I was coming to look for Nana here?”

  “Zephyr was emailing his dad while he was on the phone to you. When Dean told me, I drove straight up here. Dean is in his car and should be here soon too.”

  And in this bizarre, sad and odd moment, I think I want to ask her something.

  “Mum … what did you and Nana fight about that day when she was moving?” I ask.

  “She said – she said some pretty upsetting things to me, darling,” Mum says softly. “But I’ve been reading up about dementia, and it can make you insensitive to other people’s feelings. So perhaps it was starting even back then. Or maybe she was just being her usual, difficult self! Ha!”

  “Nana is difficult?” I frown. I’ve only ever seen her as funny and bright and wonderful.

  “It was very hard, growing up just me and Nana, Scarlet. It was always her way or no way. She always seemed very disappointed in me for being … ordinary. For not liking adventure. And she told me in no uncertain terms that day what a fool she’s thought I’d been over the years, letting things slip through my fingers.”

  “Like my dad?” I ask.

  Mum looks at me sharply, but we don’t say any more about it, because Uncle Dean is hurrying towards us, Nana has started to sing at the top of her voice, and Mr Spinks is keeping her company with a yodelling sort of howl.

  “You have GOT to be joking!” says Mum, but she is laughing, tilting her head back and laughing, till I can’t help laughing too, at the strange new version of our useless little family…

  Family #notsofail

  Melbourne, Australia, 2017

  “I thought Australia was meant to be hot,” I moan, fastening the buttons on the pink tweed jacket I stole from Nana’s clothes rack all those weeks ago.

  “Quiet!” Zephyr orders me. “If you come to visit us in Melbourne in the summer holidays, you get our winter. Deal with it. And Missy’s the only one supposed to moan in this family!”

  Well, that’s not exactly true. Nana’s been moaning a bit, wondering how much longer it’s going to take to get to this “special” café that Zephyr wants us to see.

  Great-Aunt Sita has already moaned about the distance, even though Uncle Dean was pushing her in her wheelchair. My aunt Angie – Zephyr’s mum – just rolled her eyes good-naturedly and steered Sita off to have a coffee overlooking the ocean, while the rest of us mosey a bit further into town.

  “Come on, Nana Patsy!” Missy insists, slipping her small hand into Nana’s. Her other hand is held by her granny Kate, the widow of Manny. I worried that they might get a bit prickly with each other, being first wife and second wife and everything, but Nana and Kate have been getting on like a house on fire, laughing at all the annoying things “their” Manny used to do.

  “So what’s so special about this ‘special’ café?” I ask my cousin. Zephyr’s been very mysterious about it, ever since we arrived a couple of days ago.

  I think Mum and Dean are both in on the secret; they keep swapping matching sibling grins at each other.

  “Well,” says Zephyr, “remember when we went to visit Tom at the old folks’ home, and saw his Gem Girls poster, and I thought it looked kind of familiar?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” I say, trying to remember the details of that crazy day.

  The day I faced up to the fact that my beloved nana really did have dementia. (And also wasn’t as perfect as I thought she was, same as Mum isn’t as annoying as I thought she was… )

  The whole shock of the dementia diagnosis being true: it felt huge and awful and upsettingly weird at first, but it’s now sort of OK, sort of normal.

  Especially since Nana’s just in the early stages. She hadn’t been eating or looking after herself properly before her fall, so it had worsened a bit. But now she’s on medication that keeps her pretty level, and she has a carer who pops in to check on her, plus all the lovely locals in her street to keep an eye on her too.

  “Well, this is why it felt like I recognized the name,” says Zephyr.

  He points to a cute café with mismatching pastel-painted tables and chairs outside. The name of it is painted in this swirly art deco style.

  The Gem Girls Café.

  “What is this?” I ask, uncertain what I’m seeing.

  “This version of the café has only been open a couple of years,” says Dean as he ushers Nana and Kate to sit at one of the outdoor tables. “But the new owners named it after the original Gem Girls tea shop, which was on this site for decades.”

  “Check it out!” says Zephyr, passing me a menu, and making sure Nana has one too. “Ruby and Pearl!”

  The cover of the menu is a patchwork of photos from all different eras. The only thing that’s the same is the name of the shop in them all, and the two women pictured in their pretty aprons, one in glasses and one without. In some of the pictures they look in their late twenties, and then they get progressively older, their hairstyles gradually changing, till they’re women in their sixties, still in pretty aprons, still smiling.

  “Really?” says Nana. “This is the real Ruby and Pearl?”

  “The real deal!” says Zephyr. “Look, there’s even a bit about them on the back of the menu…”

  A panel of information sits to the left of a black-and-white photo of two girls, hanging from the trapeze of a hot air balloon. I scan the info.

  “So they performed in a park in Melbourne in 1928, and their parachute didn’t open fully?” I read.

  “Pearl broke her leg really badly,” says Zephyr, too impatient to let me read on. “So she and Ruby decided that was that; they’d give up performing. And Melbourne seemed as good a place to settle as anywhere. They started running a tea shop, selling cakes like the ones back in Gertrude’s bakery.”

  I look around, and get it. I feel quite at home here already. Same as I feel at home in North London. You never know, I might even feel at home in Ecuador one of these days. Mum and me; we’ve talked about her maybe contacting my dad sometime in the future. She’s done a little digging and found out he’s still there, married to a local woman, and has two kids. So maybe that’s another part of my slowly extending family that I’ll get to know eventually, but I’d better work harder in Miss Kendrick’s Spanish class in the meantime. (“Hola, Papá,” won’t get me too far… )

  “This – this is pretty cool,” I say, nodding down at the actual, animated faces of Ruby and Pearl and feeling prickles on my arms, even though the Australian winter’s day isn’t exactly freezing.

  “And you want to know something else that’s pretty cool?” asks Mum as she settles down beside Nana and takes her hand in hers.

  “Go on,” I say, wondering what’s coming next. Nana’s in on this secret, I can tell, since she’s beaming so much. She’s looking beautiful today, in her denim jacket and with her mermaid blue hair twinkling with jewelled clips.

  “We all know Nana’s doing great at the moment, but she is going to need more help down the line,” says Mum. “So she and I were thinking, Scarlet, how about you and me sell up our place in Chelmsford and move in with Nana, in the Hornsey flat?”

  “What do you think, Scarlet?” asks Nana. “A little adventure for us all?”

  “I – I … yes! Yes, please!” I splutter, smiling at her, smiling at Mum. We’ve been staying at Nana’s most weekends since her fall, and it’s come to feel more like home than anywhere else, especially with Mr Spinks and Angie around. “But won’t that be a long commute for your job, Mum?”

 
“What, that job I hate?” Mum laughs. “Well, I’ve been mulling something over, Scarlet… I was thinking that maybe I should hand my notice in, and turn the old bakery downstairs into a café? You know, all vintage teacups and Nana’s artwork and quirky stuff around the place…”

  My heart skips a beat. The last couple of months, Mum’s done a great job of sorting and selling off lots of Nana’s hoarding mountain on eBay. But she’s been whittling it down to the good stuff, and I can totally see how that would work in a cute, retro café.

  “We can learn to make all those Victorian and Edwardian-style cakes, Scarlet,” Nana says, her eyes shining. “That could be our speciality. Do you remember? Langue de chats cones, genoises, tarts with damson jam and fondant roses…”

  “I do,” I say. I have all of Nana’s story in a folder in my room at her flat. We still haven’t found the original letter she based it on, but it’ll turn up, tucked away safely in some random place, like so many things. Only last week, I came across her original wedding certificate inside the DVD case of Titanic, when we sat down to watch it on Saturday afternoon together.

  And then something hits me as I sit here at the Gem Girls café, with Ruby and Pearl’s faces smiling up at me. Now that we’re going to be living with her, Nana and I can work on the rest of their story, especially now we’ve found out this amazing part of it … and maybe me and Zephyr can do more internet research on them too?

  “So, how about we call our little café in Hornsey after the Gem Girls?” Mum suggests, her face lit up with excitement at the thought of her new venture. “What do you think, Scarlet?”

  “Maybe I have a better idea,” I say.

  I’m thinking of the story that obsessed Nana since she moved to Hornsey, her beautiful paintings, the room I sleep in when we stay, where I sometimes lie in the dark and imagine I can almost hear the distant chat and giggles of two girls…

  There is only one name it can be, isn’t there?

  “We should call it The Pearl in the Attic…”

  Whoops and yeses break out at the two tables we’re all crushed around: me, Mum and Nana, Dean and his mum Kate, Zephyr and Missy. My family.