Scarlett

by Cathy Cassidy

  ‘What on earth…?’ Dad exclaims, baffled.

  I could tell them all about the carnage, of course, but would they believe me? No. Would they blame me? Yes.

  ‘I told you to fix that broken bit of wall down by the workshop,’ Clare huffs. ‘Something’s been in here – cattle, or deer, or something.’

  ‘A horse,’ I chip in helpfully.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Scarlett,’ Dad says. ‘There are no horses nearby. It’ll be deer.’

  ‘I don’t care if it was wolves or wild boar,’ Clare grumbles. ‘It’s ruined my garden. Get that wall fixed, Chris. Today.’

  Dad sighs, and I remember that DIY was never his strong point. I think of the pine shelves that he put up in the kitchen in Islington. He huffed and grumbled all afternoon, making me hold the spirit level and find the right Rawlplugs, and after all that Mum still said it was wonky. It didn’t look so bad once we’d camouflaged it with pretty plates and dishes, though. And then, at half-past two in the morning, the whole shelf collapsed and every single plate was smashed to pieces. I remember the three of us standing there, in pyjamas, surrounded by broken cups and dishes and serving bowls, laughing till the tears ran down our cheeks.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Dad says now. ‘I’ll get it sorted, Clare. It’s all dry-stone work, isn’t it? How hard can it be?’

  He looks at me and catches the glint in my eye. ‘Don’t, Scarlett,’ he whispers. ‘Don’t say a word.’

  And somehow, both of us are smiling.

  ‘Scarlett,’ Dad shouts out into the garden, where I am painting Holly’s toenails with a glittery green nail polish called Lime Pickle. ‘Your mum is on the phone again.’

  ‘Don’t want to talk to her.’

  It’s the sixth time Mum has called since the night of my Great Escape. It’s the sixth time I have refused to come to the phone.

  ‘Scarlett, please,’ Dad appeals from the kitchen doorway. ‘You have to talk to her sometime.’

  ‘Do I?’ I ask. ‘Why, exactly?’

  ‘She’s your mother,’ Dad huffs. ‘She’s worried about you. And besides, she’s giving me a really hard time. She thinks I’ve turned you against her.’

  ‘Nope, she managed that all by herself,’ I tell him.

  ‘Go on,’ Holly chips in, wiggling her shimmery green toenails in the evening sun. ‘You’ll hurt her feelings.’

  ‘No chance,’ I reply. ‘She doesn’t have any.’

  Dad trudges back inside, defeated. ‘Serves her right,’ I tell Holly, and she looks at me sadly with those spaniel eyes.

  Clare is sitting in a garden chair a few metres away, stitching at a small piece of patchwork, a work in progress. It looks like a cot quilt for the new baby, little scraps of fabric pieced carefully together with bright, decorative stitching over the top. I wonder if my mum ever sat up late stitching patchwork for me? No chance.

  ‘That’s cool,’ I whisper to Holly. ‘The quilt, I mean.’

  ‘It’s for the baby,’ Holly says. ‘It was my idea. It’s got bits and pieces from all our favourite things, Chris’s old jeans, my dresses, Mum’s flowery skirts…’

  Clare hears us talking and looks up from her sewing. ‘The idea is to give a little bit of something we each love to keep the new baby safe and warm,’ she explains. She looks at me and her eyes light up. ‘I don’t suppose…?’

  She looks at me keenly, like she might be about to ask for a slice of my red fluffy rucksack, but I glare at her and she thinks better of it, gathers up her patchwork and heads inside. She’s learning.

  Holly, by contrast, doesn’t know when to shut up. ‘Talk to your mum,’ she wheedles. ‘You can’t ignore her forever!’

  I frown. ‘Look, Holly, my mum doesn’t want me. Nor does Dad really, and I know I’m just a nuisance to you and Clare. Don’t expect me to start playing happy families, OK? My life’s not like that.’

  ‘We do want you!’ Holly squeaks. ‘Mum really likes you, and I’ve always wanted a sister – sorry, a step sister. As for Dad…’

  A cold silence falls down around us, and my scalp prickles. ‘Holly’ I say quietly. ‘He’s not your dad, OK?’

  Holly bites her lip, dragging a hand across her eyes, but not in time to stem the tears. She makes a little strangled noise, jumps up and runs inside, tipping the Lime Pickle nail polish over. It makes a little puddle of glittery goo on the grass, then seeps slowly away, and I’m left wondering why it’s me who feels like I’m the one to blame.

  In honour of Holly’s first veggie weekend, Clare makes banana curry with poppadoms and onion bhajis. Holly kicks my foot under the table, giving me a sad, wide-eyed look designed to say sorry. I wink back, relaxing a bit. She didn’t mean to upset me.

  ‘Good to see you two girls getting on,’ Dad says, snaffling yet another onion bhaji. ‘It’s been a good weekend.’

  ‘Don’t know how I’ve lived through the excitement,’ I say.

  ‘I liked it,’ Holly argues. ‘This is the weekend I went vegetarian! And we fixed up the wall, we played Cluedo, I got my toenails painted. You even helped me dye my bedsheets orange!’

  ‘Bedsheets?’ Dad echoes, looking alarmed, but Clare hushes him. She picks up a bowl of ripe strawberries, fresh from the garden, and sets it on the table along with a dish of thick, yellow cream. Everybody digs in.

  ‘You’ll need to talk to your mother sometime, though,’ Dad says, biting into a strawberry. ‘And to us, come to that. We need to get things sorted, talk to the school, get you settled properly.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I won’t talk to Mum and I won’t go back to that school, OK? It’s not happening.’

  ‘It’s only a fortnight until the end of term,’ Clare says lightly. ‘Perhaps a fresh start, after the summer?’

  Dad wavers for a moment, unsure whether to stick with the tough-dad attitude or grab on to Clare’s suggestion. He hates fighting, I remember that much. He’s way better at the fun stuff.

  ‘We do need to talk, Scarlett,’ he appeals.

  ‘Sure,’ I say carelessly. ‘We’ll talk later. Have a strawberry, OK?’ I feed him one of the red berries from my dish, to shut him up and sweeten him up, and pretty soon everyone is feeding everyone else ripe strawberries and laughing.

  As a diversionary tactic, it lasts a whole thirty seconds.

  ‘Come on, Scarlett, open up!’ Dad grins, and like a fool I open my mouth and wait for the soft, ripe strawberry to land on my tongue. It doesn’t. Dad just stares, and Holly gulps and when Clare finally looks up to see what’s going on she drops her spoon, spattering cream across the tablecloth. I close my mouth pretty sharpish, but by then it’s too late.

  ‘Oh, Scarlett,’ Clare breathes.

  Dad just puts his head in his hands, distraught. You’d think I just bit the heads off a couple of his pet chickens.

  ‘It’s just a piercing, Dad,’ I say, but my voice sounds kind of thin and wavery. ‘It’s no big deal.’

  ‘No big deal?’ Dad repeats, quietly. ‘No big deal? Scarlett, what the hell was your mother thinking of?’

  ‘She didn’t know about it until later,’ I tell him. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

  ‘No?’ Dad is struggling to keep his voice steady, and his eyes glitter with pain. ‘You are twelve years old, Scarlett, and you’re acting like you’re on a self-destruct mission! Your hair, your clothes, the way you act – now this! What’s happened to you, Scarlett?’

  ‘My life’s a mess,’ I tell him. ‘Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘I’ve noticed,’ Dad says. ‘And I think maybe your mum is right – we need to find a counsellor, someone who knows how to help troubled teenagers. We need help. You need help, Scarlett.’

  I stand up, a little unsteadily, and walk slowly out of the kitchen and up the stairs to the sky-blue room with the nursery border. I feel sick. My tongue is heavy and my mouth is filled with a sour, metallic taste. I’d take the gold stud out of my tongue, but that would leave a hole, a wound that might never heal. Besides, I’m k
ind of used to the sour taste, these days.

  I think of Kian, I think of Dad and Clare and Holly, and I pull the gold stud loose and chuck it across the room. It rolls across the rug and disappears down a crack in the floorboards, and I’m glad. I don’t care if I never see it again.

  There’s a creak on the landing and someone knocks. I ignore it, but Clare’s face peers round the door.

  ‘Get lost,’ I snap, but she doesn’t seem to notice. She comes right on in and sits down on the end of my bed.

  Stepmothers are not meant to be soft and smiley and pregnant, they are meant to be hook-nosed and spiteful, stirring up trouble and making you sleep in the cinders. Clare can’t fool me. I don’t want her pity, I don’t want her kindness. I don’t want her.

  Trouble is, what I want isn’t top of anybody’s wish list right now.

  ‘Scarlett, please,’ Clare says, biting her lip. ‘We’re worried about you – we just want to help.’

  I can’t answer her. I want to scream, but I’m terrified that all I have left in me is a whimper.

  ‘Count to ten, Scarlett,’ Clare says quietly. ‘And breathe, OK? Calm down!’

  I take a couple of breaths in, but I don’t feel calm. I may never feel calm again.

  ‘I’m not crazy!’ I say.

  ‘I know that, Scarlett.’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘So stop threatening me with counsellors and give me a chance,’ I say with a shaky voice. ‘Listen to me. Believe in me!’

  We sit in silence on the edge of the bed. Whole minutes tick by, and then, finally, Clare speaks.

  ‘I will,’ she says. ‘I do.’

  On Monday afternoon, Dad arrives back from a trip to Westport laden with books, folders and stationery. He dumps them down on to the nearest armchair, while Clare rinses salad leaves and cuts granary bread and cheese for lunch.

  ‘What’s this?’ I ask.

  ‘Work,’ says Dad. ‘If you won’t go to school, we’ll home-school you – for now, at least. I’ve been looking into it on the Internet.’

  I blink. If school is a prison sentence, home-education must be solitary confinement.

  ‘I don’t want to be home-educated!’ I protest. ‘It’s bad enough being stuck here in the middle of nowhere, without being holed up in the cottage all day with just you two for company!’

  ‘We have to educate you, it’s the law,’ Dad says. ‘And I’m afraid Miss Madden isn’t too keen to have you back after last week.’

  ‘Good, because I’m not going back!’ I huff. ‘You can forget the home-education thing too. I don’t want –’

  ‘What do you want, Scarlett?’ Clare asks.

  I frown, because what I want is something I can’t have. It’s long gone. A happy family, a proper home, a bunch of friends, a way of waking up in the morning without feeling like there’s a cold, hard stone lodged in my chest in the place where my heart should be.

  ‘Listen,’ Dad says. ‘Your mum is upset about all this, as you know. She’s been looking at boarding schools on the Net, and found a good one, all girls, not too far from here. Is that what you want?’

  ‘No!’ I choke out. ‘Why are you all trying to get rid of me?’

  ‘We’re not, Scarlett,’ Clare says softly. ‘Your mum is just worried. She wants what’s best for you, and Kilimoor National School clearly wasn’t it. Won’t you give the home-education idea a try?’

  Clare looks at me steadily. She’s on my side.

  ‘Suppose,’ I sigh.

  Dad lets out a long breath, and Clare breaks into a smile so wide her whole face shines. ‘Good girl, Scarlett,’ she says. ‘Good girl.’

  That’s something I haven’t heard in a while.

  ‘You need to do maths and English,’ Dad says, loading up his plate with bread, cheese and salad. ‘They’re basic. I’ve bought books that seem about right for your age, so you can do a page from each every day Otherwise, study whatever interests you. You’ll be working because you want to.’

  ‘What makes you think I want to?’

  ‘You’re a clever girl,’ Clare says. ‘You’ll like this way of learning.’

  ‘Think of a project,’ Dad suggests. ‘Something that covers several subject areas. You can use books and the Net to find your information, and Clare and I can help, of course.’

  I munch my bread and cheese. ‘I could study anything I wanted to?’ I ask. ‘The lough? The woods? The hills?’

  ‘Yup,’ Dad grins. ‘That would be geography, with a bit of science thrown in if you made a study of the trees, plants and animals. There’s history too – and all kinds of local legends, of course, like the one about the hazel at the lough…’

  I think of the wishing tree with its red rags fluttering, and a boy who rode out of the sunset on a horse called Midnight.

  ‘I wouldn’t have to be stuck in the cottage the whole time, would I? I could go out?’

  ‘Sure,’ Clare says. ‘You could draw, write, map, measure, record temperature and rainfall, compare place names in English and Irish…’

  I chew my lip. No teachers, no classrooms, no uniforms, no rules – it’s appealing. I’d still be stuck in the middle of nowhere, but maybe even nowhere can be cool if you know the right people. People like Kian.

  ‘Start with what you are interested in, Scarlett,’ Clare says lightly ‘It’s up to you.’

  I can give the idea a try, or I can mess it up. I can choose to stay prickly, or I can let the anger go. Suddenly, letting it go actually seems like an option, like it’s a skin I can step out of, walk away from.

  I try for a smile, and Clare grins back. Even Dad is looking hopeful.

  ‘I know,’ I say slowly. ‘I know what to start with. Home economics. I’ll make fairy cakes for when Holly gets back from school!’

  ‘Flour and sugar are in the cupboard, butter’s in the fridge, eggs you’ll have to hunt around the garden for,’ Clare says. ‘Make plenty!’

  ‘I will!’

  An hour later, I arrange slivers of golden sponge like butterfly wings in the yellow buttercream on top of each little cake. They look cute, and they smell wonderful. Holly’s going to love them.

  ‘Learning at home’s not so bad, is it?’ Dad says.

  ‘It’s OK. And term still ends in a fortnight, right?’ I ask hopefully.

  Dad grins. ‘In the school of life, there are no holidays,’ he says.

  Next morning, I load my fluffy rucksack with apples, fairy cakes, pencils and sketchbook, along with a striped picnic blanket.

  ‘I’m going down to the lough to start my project,’ I tell Dad and Clare. ‘OK? I’ll walk Holly to the bus.’

  Dad looks like he is about to argue, but Clare chips in. ‘Give her some space,’ she says. ‘It’s what she needs.’

  Dad takes a deep breath in. ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘Don’t go too far, now, Scarlett. And don’t be late.’

  I open the door on to freedom.

  ‘Wish I could be home-schooled too,’ Holly sighs as we walk along the lane. ‘Fairy cakes and drawing all day long. You’re so lucky!’

  ‘Nah, it’s still school, isn’t it?’ I argue. ‘Boring!’

  Unless Kian puts in an appearance, of course. Then things could get a whole lot more interesting.

  ‘I’m bad news,’ I tell Holly. ‘Wild, weird, unteachable! That’s what Miss Madden thinks.’

  ‘No,’ Holly corrects me. ‘You’re cool. I want to be just like you.’

  ‘Yeah, well, you’re nuts,’ I laugh.

  The red-and-white school bus looms up amongst the fuchsia hedges. ‘Don’t say bad stuff about yourself,’ Holly tells me seriously. ‘I think you’re great.’

  ‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ I say as she climbs up on to the bus. ‘Just don’t tell anyone I said so.’

  The bus trundles off with Holly waving and pulling tongues from the back seat, and I walk on down the lane, duck into the quiet, green world of the woods and find the path to the lough. I
want to stay a while, wrapped in silence, the way the trees and rocks and the ground beneath my feet are wrapped in moss and ivy and soft, green lichen.

  I leave the woods and settle down beneath the hazel tree, spreading the striped picnic blanket across the grass. I open my sketchbook and draw a tall foxglove with furry leaves and purple, bell-shaped flowers up and down the stem. When you look inside, the petals are pale and speckled. I need paints or crayons to show it properly, but I make my pencil sketch as accurate as I can.

  The sun is warm, and I close my eyes for a moment to soak up the heat. When I open them again, the lough seems dusted with silver. There’s a crunch of twigs just behind me, and rough, warm hands slide over my eyes, blotting out the light.

  ‘Guess who?’

  My heart does some kind of double backflip. Kian.

  ‘Been watching you for a while,’ he says, lifting his hands away and flopping down beside me. I can’t help stealing a sneaky glance at him, and end up getting snagged by the blue-black eyes, the raggedy hair.

  I let a few strands of ketchup-coloured hair fall across my face, hiding my smile. Midnight is drifting across the grass to my left, flicking his tail about in the sunshine.

  ‘So, you’re drawing plants?’ Kian asks. ‘What for?’

  ‘It’s a project I’m doing,’ I explain. ‘About Lough Choill – the woods and the lough and the hillside and the hazel tree. Not just drawings, but research, history, maps, everything.’

  ‘Nightmare,’ Kian says. ‘How can you put a place like Lough Choill on paper?’

  ‘I’m going to try’ I tell him. ‘Dad and Clare are trying this home-schooling thing. It’s got to be better than hanging out with a bunch of little kids, anyhow!’

  ‘Sure, but school is school,’ Kian argues, grabbing my hand and dragging me to my feet. ‘C’mon, let’s cut class! Live dangerously!’

  I stuff my sketchbook into my backpack and abandon the striped blanket to scramble up beside Kian on Midnight’s back. The big black horse snorts and shakes his head, and then we’re off, galloping down the loughside, our hair streaming out behind us, hands woven tightly into Midnight’s mane.