The shriek of terror was so piercing that he thought for a moment it might bring the cliff down with it. When he dared to turn around, he saw Ella, sprawled face-down on the grass.
“Ella!” He threw himself on the ground beside her.
Her fingers were clutching two handfuls of grass. “I tripped, I think I fell over my lace. I can’t get up, if I get up the whole cliff’s going to come down, I know it is.”
“No it’s not, I promise it’s not. You’re miles from the edge.”
“I can hear it, I can hear it crumbling away, if we move it’ll all go.”
“You’re imagining it, I promise.” But what if she wasn’t? What if her fall had disturbed the earth? “We’re not far from home, we’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“I can’t get up, I’ll fall, we’ll both fall and it’ll be my fault.”
“No, we won’t. You don’t have to get up. Lift your head and take a look.” He put his hand on her back and stroked gently, feeling the slow slackening of tension in her shoulder blades as he petted her. “I promise I won’t let anything bad happen to you.”
A deep breath, and for a brief frightened second her face appeared from the grass.
“See? We’re miles from the edge.” She looked again, for longer this time. “Try sitting up.”
“But what if –” she caught herself. “No. I know I’m being silly. The cliff’s not going to fall, it’s solid.” As she talked to herself, she was pushing herself slowly up into a sitting position. “It’s all right, it’s all right, oh Jesus I can’t do this. Yes, I can. I can. We’re safe, aren’t we?”
“Course we are.”
“Okay, I’ll get up now.” She scrambled to her feet, but her knees wouldn’t hold her and she stumbled against him and he had to catch her by the arms and waist. “I’m sorry. I’m being so stupid.”
“No you’re not. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made you come out here.”
“You didn’t make me, it was my fault. I should have realised we’d been too long. I know we left him – Dad, I mean – on his own.”
Her belief in his selflessness made him cringe.
“It wasn’t that,” he admitted. “It was just seeing Mrs Armitage being so nice to you. She’s never that nice to me. I know that’s pathetic, but it’s the truth.” He tried to laugh. “I suppose I’ve got mother issues.” She was heavier than she looked; her weight pressed against him made him breathless. “Ella, I’m sorry but I’ve got to ask you – what happened that night? I woke up the next morning and you’d both disappeared…”
The words shocked him. He hadn’t meant to speak them. They’d crept out beneath his guard. He wondered if he’d done something terrible.
“Okay,” Ella whispered. “Can we sit down, though?”
“Of course we can.”
Side by side, they sat on the tough tussocky grass and listened to the sound of their hearts banging in their ears.
“I remember Mum coming into my room,” Ella said at last. “It was really late, I think. The storm had blown out but the rain was still pouring down. She was really wet, and she wasn’t wearing her clothes.”
“She was naked?”
“No, no! Just – not wearing her clothes. They were someone else’s. They smelled different. I noticed it when she took me out of bed.”
Somewhere nearby, a gull threw back its head and screamed, a long pure cry that broke into a series of yark-yark-yarks and then grumbled into silence.
“She carried me downstairs and into the car,” Ella continued. “I had this idea we were going on holiday or something, like flying from an airport. I knew you have to get to airports really early. I tried to ask, but she put her hand over my mouth and told me we had to be really quiet in case we woke Dad.”
“Were you scared?”
“I wasn’t, not at first. I still thought it was some sort of nice surprise for everyone. I mean, I wasn’t even properly awake, I kept falling asleep and then waking up again, so it’s all in little pieces. Then we were in the car, and I thought you were in there too because there was something on your seat, but it wasn’t you, it was a big heap of clothes. I was going to ask where you were, but Mum wrapped me up in a couple of coats, and it was so warm…”
He waited silently.
“When I woke up we were somewhere else. It was a house I didn’t recognise. We had one room and everything else was shared.”
“Were you scared then?”
“I don’t really remember. I think I thought it was a holiday somehow, I kept waiting for you and Dad to come and join us. I know I was worried because I wasn’t sure where you’d sleep – there were only two single beds. But I thought maybe there’d be another room somewhere, and you and me might have the first one and Mum and Dad would have the other one. And I was hoping you’d bring me some of my books and toys and stuff. This is sounding really maudlin now.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“Yes it does. I mean, I obviously wasn’t in any danger or anything, I wasn’t cold or hungry or on my own. I just wasn’t sure what was going on.” She took a deep breath. “So anyway, we lived there for a while. I don’t really know how long. We went out quite a lot, I remember that, museums and libraries and things. We used to play this hiding game, where we had to get behind pillars and things and watch out for people following us. I mean, I thought it was a game at the time.” She put her hand to her mouth and nipped at the skin beside her thumbnail. “Then one day Mum was really happy, and she packed all our stuff up into bags and said we were going somewhere new. She must have got rid of the car somehow, maybe she sold it or something, I’m not sure, so we got in a taxi with all our things. I was really excited because I thought we were coming back home. Then we stopped outside this new house, I mean, not a new house, it was old, but somewhere we hadn’t been before, a little terrace with a front door that opened right out onto the street.”
He could feel her trembling with the fierce will it took not to cry. He wasn’t sure how to feel. Which of them had been hurt the most?
“And Mum said – she said –”
He wanted to shake the words out of her, or perhaps to hug her until she felt safe enough to speak. He forced himself to keep still and hold his silence. When a bee blundered into his face and then away again, he refused to flinch.
“I don’t know if I should tell you this. I know you love him.”
“Tell me.”
“She said we had to leave our old home because it wasn’t safe,” she whispered at last. “She said – I know this must be really horrible to listen to.”
“Tell me. I don’t mind, I promise.”
“She said it was him. She said – well, that she wasn’t safe around him any more, and she’d had to leave. And I wouldn’t be able to see you any more and I’d have to get used to that, but she’d look after me.”
“Are you saying it’s Dad’s fault she left? No. That’s not right. He loved us. He was good to us. He never did anything to hurt us, he never would –”
“Not to us, not to you, but to Mum. She was scared a lot, I know she was. You didn’t see it, but when she’d seen him off to work and you off to school she was like a different person. And you remember how they used to argue.”
“And how was that Dad’s fault? She used to shout as loudly as he did. Even if she wanted to leave him she didn’t have to do it that way, sneaking off in the night and taking you with him and not letting either of us see you ever again.” Ella was trying to speak, but he had to make her understand. “If she was so wonderful and he was so awful, why did she leave me with him? Why did she take you and not me? Actually, don’t bother answering that because I already know. All that crap about us being a family was rubbish. I was never her son. She said that so Dad would like her enough to marry her. And as soon as she’d had enough of him, she cleared off and left him. And now she’s done it to you as well.”
“No, that’s not true! She couldn’t come back for you, she was so afraid, you’ve got
no idea what it was like for her.”
He was an adult. He should be old enough to handle the discovery that Ella saw everything differently. The adult thing to do would be to hug his sister and tell her he understood, that it wasn’t her fault she was the chosen one, that it didn’t matter and he loved her just the same.
Instead, he stood up and, keeping his face turned carefully away from her, strode off across the cliffs to the house where his father would be waking up.
Chapter Eleven
2008
The rain had fallen all evening and all night and on into the morning, and by the afternoon it was still tumbling down. Beneath her feet, the cliffs had that breathless feel that Mrs Armitage associated with an imminent fall. The storms took the biggest toll, tearing great chunks of earth from the base so that the tops had no choice but to follow; but sometimes the weight of water soaking slowly through the mud induced a series of small slides, creating seeming paths to lure the unwary downwards. This image, as so many did these days, made her think of Ella. Of course she wouldn’t see her today; it was too cold and wet. Too cold and too wet and too dangerous. Better for them both to stay at home. The garden could do with weeding, but she disliked the thought of getting closer than she needed to nature, on a day when Nature herself seemed so definitively not at home to visitors.
Then she saw the familiar rattle and shake of the gate that told her Ella was on the other side, struggling with the latch as she always did, and felt her stomach leap with gladness.
If she was a more grandmotherly woman, she might run down the garden in anticipation of a warm hug and a juicy kiss. She could picture this as clearly as if she’d actually done it, with a child who was related to her and not simply a stray who had wandered in. Instead she disciplined herself to wait in the kitchen, feigning unawareness of her imminent visitor, until Ella knocked at the back door.
Today Ella had accessorised her flowery coat and unicorn wellies with an absurd clear plastic rain-bonnet, tied under her chin in a long chain of granny-knots and slipping raffishly down over one ear. Beneath it, her face looked determined and sweaty. When she opened the door, Mrs Armitage had to fight the urge to take the bonnet off and smooth out the crumpled hair beneath.
“Where did you find that hat?” she asked instead.
“It was in a boot.”
“A car boot?”
Ella smiled tolerantly. “No, a foot boot. Like a boot for men to wear.”
“This hat belongs to your father? And he put it inside his boot?”
“No, my dad doesn’t have any boots. It was just a boot that’s in our house. And I looked in it, and this hat was inside.”
It was a typical Ella answer, charming and mysterious and completely devoid of useful content, prompting far more questions than it answered. (Why was a woman’s rain hat hidden in a man’s boot? Whose boot was it and what was it doing in their house? Why was Ella looking in the boot in the first place? Had any of these things even happened?) Ella was removing her own boots, balancing on the doormat so that no part of her grassy, muddy wellies would touch the floor. She hung her coat on the door knob, then began on the knots of her rain-bonnet, picking away with an almost unnatural patience. Another minute and Mrs Armitage would give in to the urge to assist, to nurture, to parent this strange little child.
“I’ll make you some juice,” she said instead. An acceptable compromise. By now there was a cup in the kitchen that was designated as Ella’s, a plate that the biscuits were always arranged on. She put the plate down in the centre of the table and waited. After a minute, Ella, triumphantly free from her hat, climbed up into the chair. She was growing out of all of her clothes. Her sleeves were halfway up her forearms and the crotch of her tights sagged towards her knees. Before she could stop herself, Mrs Armitage pictured the clothing aisles that filled half the superstore she sometimes visited, and of herself returning on the bus with a whole secret wardrobe of rainbow colours. No. It wasn’t her place to dress the child, and besides, she had better things to do with her money than spend it on clothes for other people.
“I thought you might not come today,” she said.
“It’s safe today,” said Ella, looking honestly surprised. “There’s no storm. Only rain.”
Heavy rain could be as dangerous as storms. Someone ought to have told Ella this. But then, would she ever dare to walk along the cliffs at all? How could she get the child safely home again? Would she have to walk her home through the village?
“As long as you’re careful,” she said.
“I’ll be careful,” said Ella, her voice pure patient teenager, and brushed biscuit crumbs from her mouth.
“So what do you want to do?”
“Shall we do some gardening?”
Mrs Armitage thought of the heavy breathless weight of the soil and the water waiting below. “It’s raining.”
“I’ve got my new rain hat.”
If it was sunny, she could suggest re-creosoting the garden furniture, but even Ella wouldn’t believe it was possible to paint in this weather. They could work on the pots and containers, but that wasn’t what Ella meant by gardening. She was thinking of the plug-packs of bedding plants that Mrs Armitage bought and bought and bought, even though it was too late in the season and there were already far more than the soil could support. She was thinking of the endless digging of neat little holes, of the slow inevitable progression from the safety of the borders near the house towards the empty places at the bottom of the fence. In a minute she would say –
“We could go and plant out some flowers at the end where there aren’t any flowers yet. That would look pretty, wouldn’t it?”
Don’t do it, her bones sang. Don’t walk at the end of the garden today. It’s going to fall again and you know it. But how could she say this to the child? Ella’s faith in the power of Mrs Armitage’s fence was unquenchable and irrational.
“It would look pretty,” she said slowly. “But… you know what I’d really like? I’d like you to draw me a picture.”
“But there’s no more room.”
Ella was right. The door of the fridge was covered. When had that happened? She’d put each one of them there herself, looked at them many times each day. She recognised each individual drawing – the vase of flowers, Ella in the garden with the smile so huge it bled over her face, the strange slug of a creature Ella insisted was a seal – but somehow she’d never quite realised how many there were.
“I mean a special one,” she said, desperate now. “One I can put next to my bed.”
“But isn’t that where you keep your husband?”
“I’ll put your picture next to my photograph of him.”
“So he can look at it?”
“He can’t look at it,” said Mrs Armitage firmly, “because he’s dead, and the photograph by my bed is just a photograph. But I’ll be able to look at it and it’ll make me happy.”
She could see the conflict in Ella’s face: her desire to bore holes in the soil and fill them with lobelias and pansies, and her compulsive need to do what Mrs Armitage herself wanted. A kinder woman would feel bad about guilt tripping a child. A kinder woman would let her go out and dig in the dangerous places at the end of the garden. It was lucky for Ella that Mrs Armitage was not kind.
“What would you like a picture of?” Ella asked at last.
“I don’t know, I don’t know anything about drawing. It has to be special, that’s all. What would be a really special thing to draw?”
Ella’s bottom lip was beginning to protrude. “I don’t know what you like.”
“You ought to know by now, you’ve been coming here for long enough.”
“You like the garden.”
“There you go.”
“But I’ve already drawn the garden. So I can’t draw that.”
Sensing mutiny, Mrs Armitage slapped the packet of felt-tipped pens down on the table in front of Ella and added a pad of paper.
“You’ll think of something
.”
She turned away from Ella’s tight little face to the relative safety of the sink, and began washing the few pots that waited in the bowl. The pouring of the water and the clatter of the pots was not quite enough to drown out the silence in the room.
After a minute she risked a brief glance behind her. Ella was sitting heroically still, a black felt-tipped pen clutched like a weapon. Her eyes were scrunched shut and her face was crumpled and red.
“What on earth is wrong with you?” Mrs Armitage demanded.
“Nothing,” Ella whispered, without opening her eyes.
“Of course there’s something wrong. You can’t possibly be crying over a picture you haven’t even drawn yet.”
“I don’t know what to draw!” The words came out in a strange howl, and with their release Ella’s expression dissolved into wet-mouthed misery and she laid her head down on the table and sobbed.
“Oh, good Lord.” Mrs Armitage sat down in the chair nearest to Ella, stretched out a hand to the slim little shoulders, then let it fall again. “Come on, let’s not have all this nonsense. Stop it now.” Ella’s grief shuddered through her body. “Would you like another biscuit? Or some more juice?” More shudders, and a quiet hopeless moaning. “Stop making that awful noise, please, I can’t stand it.” And then, with the brilliance of desperation, “Would you like me to tell you a story?”
For a brief and blessed moment, the moaning stopped.
“Right.” She squared her shoulders. Telling stories must be something she could manage. People did it all the time. “So, once upon a time…” She cast around her kitchen for inspiration, came back to rest on the sight of Ella. “Once upon a time, there was a little girl.”
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