“I hope this young man, Charlie Hargreaves, isn’t the gold digger his mother was.”
“No, he’s studying ecology at university.”
Jane sniffed. “I’m surprised he’s got the brains to study any subject at university. Agnes considered his mother to be decidedly lacking in intellect. A flibbertigibbet. She had absolutely nothing in common with your father.” Jane sniffed again. “Of course he always pandered to his baser instincts.”
I wanted to get everything out into the open. “We found out that Father went to prison three times.” I twisted the hem of the Dog Breeds apron. The living room door was wide open. I thought I heard a faint muffled exclamation of Apron! from Mother’s jar. There was a sharp intake of breath at the other end of the phone as well, as if someone had pricked Jane with a pin.
“Dreadful business. He was on the front page of the Daily Telegraph for days.” She tutted. “Your mother tried to keep it from you. Said you’d always brought out the best in Gregory, or some such nonsense.” My toes clenched at her words.
There was one last secret. I held the apron tighter. “Did you know Father’s name wasn’t Gregory? His real name was Gordon.”
“Gordon!” There was another harsher laugh. “He even made up his own name, did he? Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. I held the phone tightly to stop myself from slamming it down.
“I always suspected he was from a far-humbler background than he appeared. Appearances are deceptive as your poor Mother discovered. He was a liar, a bigamist, and a criminal. I’m sorry you’ve had to find all that out—ignorance is bliss in some cases—but it is the truth. The man had no redeeming features. He even tried to flirt with me. Me! With my spine! If I were you, dear, I’d forget all about him and concentrate on cherishing your dear mother’s memory.”
“Mmm,” I said, my heart pounding.
“I must say, dear, you do sound very well, all things considered. Quite a surprise!” Jane laughed her tinkling laugh again. “Well, I’ve been standing here for some time, dear, and, nice though it is to chat, my spine is beginning to protest. I’ll have to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye.” I wanted to bang down the phone, but remembering politeness (Rule One), I made myself put it down carefully. Then I ran upstairs, picked up Father’s photo from the bedroom carpet, dusted it off with my sleeve, and returned it, facing outward, to Mother’s dressing table.
44.
Change can be good.
—Charlie Hargreaves (Carr), half brother
Sylvia went for a brisk walk every morning now. She overtook me one Friday as I came back from Asda and slowed down for a breather.
“Ten points off my blood pressure,” she said. She tried to encircle her waist with both hands. “Tah-dah! Four inches off my tummy! I’m a new woman.”
“But you’re…” I stopped. I was going to add, still quite an old woman, but Rule Six (It’s better to be too Diplomatic than too Honest) sprang to mind just in time. Sylvia was a big fan of this Rule, in spite of Father’s dishonesty having caused so much havoc.
She stopped walking altogether for a moment. “Shelbie and that photographer, Lewis, are officially an item. I did have my suspicions.” She paused to get her breath back. “Josh and her have never been right for each other, not really. She’s too ambitious for Josh. He needs a placid type, someone who’ll take an interest in his bike and let him make the decisions.”
“Tell me more about Josh’s Internet dating,” I said. Josh had posted a photo of himself, astride his bike, on a dating website.
“Yes! He’s quite in demand. Not met anyone serious yet, but that’s only a matter of time. Trev’s got some news too. I must say, it’s all change in our house at the moment.” Sylvia bent down to smooth a wrinkle from her leggings. “Yes, Trev’s been going to an open mike night down at the club. He took Josh there once. I don’t know if you remember?”
I nodded, my face flushing. You learn by making Mistakes, I reminded myself. “I thought they were going to watch a man called Mike open something. I couldn’t see how that could be interesting.”
“Bless you, pet. No, it’s where people who think they’re funny tell each other jokes, and the audience laughs or boos. Anyway…” Sylvia took off her leopard-print headband and shook her hair loose. I didn’t know what the gesture meant, or if it meant anything at all. “It turns out,” she went on, “Trev’s been quite a hit there. They’ve asked him to come back. Even put his name on a poster.” She prodded my arm. “It says: ‘Think your dad’s grumpy? Come and meet Trevor!’”
Trevor would be able to jut his beard at an audience, frown over his glasses at them, and make sharp comments. It sounded like they’d enjoy him behaving like that. Good. It might make him forget about me and Sheltered Accommodation.
• • •
Charlie and I took Akira to the park. The last dog I’d walked had been Tosca. I held Akira’s leash tightly, feeling the weight of being in charge.
Akira trotted sedately by my side, looking up at me at intervals, one ear drooping. “Nothing to worry about, boy,” Charlie soothed him. “I’m leaving you in good hands.” Akira waved his feathery tail, ears flat against his head. “He often puts his ears back like that. Makes him look apologetic. I think he’s trying to make up for his short legs.” He laughed. “Like Dad! With those shoes that were supposed to make him look taller.”
I was glad I hadn’t told Jane the secret about the shoes. She would have called Father another horrible name. I related our conversation to Charlie. “She said Father had no redeeming features. He was just a liar and a criminal. And a bigamist.” I’d looked up the word earlier. I didn’t have to use it all the time. I just wanted to know what it meant.
Charlie’s pace slowed. He stared out over Sandhaven Park Lake. There was a faint honking from a Canada goose. Akira’s ears pricked up, even the drooping one.
“He was all those things.” Charlie snorted. “Well, not quite a bigamist because he never actually married Mum.” Akira looked up at him. We hadn’t done dogs’ Facial Expressions at school, but Akira’s looked like Worry or Concern.
I stopped to let him sniff a tree trunk. “Jane was only partly right about Father. She didn’t say anything good about him.”
Charlie looked down at me. “Remind me about the good things ’cause I’m struggling to remember any.”
“Well…he brought Mother back flowers and chocolates, expensive, handmade ones and…”
“But”—Charlie stood stock-still in the middle of the footpath—“that was to soften the blow of where he was coming back from: prison or Mum’s, not from some jaunt abroad! Shameless beyond belief!” Akira looked at him, his head on one side, and Charlie lowered his voice. “Most prisoners come home with a black bin bag of dirty laundry, don’t they? I mean that’s the usual thing!”
I’d never seen Father with a black bin bag. It had usually been me who put the bins out. I patted Akira. “Father was a cheerful person, though. He was always smiling.”
“Huh.” Charlie snorted. “Probably congratulating himself on how well he was deceiving us.” He frowned. “And, if you remember, he mostly smiled at women. Ladies’ man is the polite way of putting it.”
“Mmm. He always smiled at me”—I guided Akira past two Yorkshire terriers with pink ribbons in their topknots—“and not everybody did. Or does,” I added.
“OK.” Charlie stuck his hands in his pockets. “Yeah, he was a cheery bloke. He could be a lot of fun. That was how he got around people, I suppose.”
“He was always patient.” Words were ordering themselves in my brain. “He never minded explaining things or waiting for me to understand.”
“No.” Charlie sighed. “We built a lot of Lego stuff together, bridges mostly, now that I come to think of it. Sometimes they took the whole morning.”
“Anot
her good thing about him was”—I tightened the leash as Akira pulled ahead, ears pricked, spotting a family of swans—“he was really affectionate. He used to call me Vivi.” I swallowed. “Darling Vivi.”
Charlie reached out to squeeze my shoulder. “That makes it all the worse somehow.”
“Even in prison he had those tiny pieces of furniture made for me.”
“Yeah.” Charlie gazed out over the lake, suddenly silent. Then he turned to me and said, “That was why your mum stayed with him, wasn’t it? The real reason? For you.” He looked back at the water, at the swans gliding toward us. I remembered they were another species that mated for life. “Crook though he was, maybe that was his saving grace.”
He was silent again except for a deep sigh. The father swan, in the lead, stared at us beadily, hoping for food. I crumbled up the four cookies from my backpack’s Safety Kit and threw them to him. “Maybe Mum was right, maybe he wasn’t a totally bad dad.” Charlie stuck his hands deep into his pockets. “Perhaps he even loved us in his own slightly shop-soiled way.”
Now it was my turn to stop, until I realized he’d used a FOS. Goose bumps rose on my arms as I thought about the rest of Charlie’s words and Akira looked up at me anxiously. “Good boy,” I murmured, and then my throat seemed to close up and I couldn’t say anything else.
We walked around the rest of the lake in silence, until Akira, straining on the leash to greet a golden retriever, brought us back to the present.
“We’ve been through a lot together, Ells, haven’t we, these last few months?” Charlie said, smiling down at me. “And even in the short time I’ve known you, you’ve changed, you know.”
I stopped again. Akira fidgeted at the end of his leash and gave a short, polite bark. “Have I? I don’t like change,” I said. “It’s things staying the same that make me feel safe.”
“But things change all the time. And people. You can’t stop change. It can be good!” He stretched his long arms wide. “Makes things less boring. It’s how you grow.” He looked at me. “You’ve had to cope with loads of it since your mum died, Ells. And you have coped.”
We carried on walking. I stumbled; it was hard to keep my toes from bouncing with pleasure. “I still don’t like it, though. I just get someone in a sort of box and think I know what they’re like, and then they do something unexpected and I have to completely rethink things.”
Mark’s panted swear words as he forced me against the orangutans’ fence came back to me, and I kicked at a stone. It went a surprisingly long way. Akira chased after it, as far as his leash would let him. “Father particularly, and Mother, but all NeuroTypicals really. It’s exhausting.”
Charlie put hands in his pockets. “Not so much of the NeuroTypicals, if you don’t mind. I thought you wanted to get away from labels. I’m just me. And rethinking things… Well, that’s one of your rules, Rules change depending—”
“On the Situation and the Person you are speaking to,” I finished. “I always have trouble with that one. I could add a note underneath: Change can be good.”
“Yeah! Make people change your new mantra. Hark at me, preaching, when I’m not sure of things myself! Don’t follow those rules of yours slavishly, though, Ells. You can’t reduce something as complex as human communication down to seven rules.”
Couldn’t you? But that was the whole point of them.
“You’re fine as you are,” he went on. “Your condition’s part of what you are. The world would be a much duller place without people like you around.”
My toes flexed, bounced again. I bounced, I couldn’t stop myself, then—“Come on boy!” I called to Akira. I held on to his leash and ran, leaping and jumping, Charlie loping behind, until all three of us were out of breath.
RULE 7
Rules change depending on the Situation and the Person you are speaking to.
Reason behind rule:
No rule is absolute, unchanging, right for every occasion. Every rule has an exception.
Some rules are more important than others. For example, “you shouldn’t physically harm someone” is more important than “you shouldn’t smoke here.”
Sometimes it’s all right to break a rule. For example, “you should always tell the truth” may hurt someone’s feelings.
People often hide their true feelings to avoid hurting another person or themselves.
People can feel one emotion but act out its opposite for the same reason.
Hints and tips:
This Rule takes practice and exposure to different situations; you have to apply rules differently and see them from other people’s perspectives.
Change can be good!
Don’t enforce other people’s behavior and rule-keeping. You’re not the police!
Rule followed?
45.
“…only dust and memories now.”
—Charlie Hargreaves (Carr), half brother
I unclipped Akira’s leash. “I’m trusting you not to chase anything except the ball and to come back when I call you,” I said in a pack leader’s voice. Mother had been pack leader, I thought suddenly. Each wolf team had a lead female wolf and a lead male one. Mother had definitely been a lead female.
Father had probably been a lead male. I thought of the short-haired men at his funeral—henchmen, Charlie said they must have been—and the postcard from Tel about Father meeting up with the lads. Akira’s ears were flat against his head but whether that was because of the wind or because he was listening to me, I wasn’t sure. Sand flew underneath his claws as he wriggled free.
“Here, Acky, Acky, Acky!” Paul hurled a tennis ball along the shoreline. Nose pointing, short legs gathered under him, Akira raced after it.
At home, Akira and I both kept to a routine. He had a different flavor of dog food for each day of the week, and we went out for two walks a day, morning and afternoon.
Charlie sent us regular emails from India. I read them to Akira, who listened carefully at the beginning, one ear pricked, but got fidgety toward the end. The tigers had satnavs on their collars, like in his car, Charlie said, but smaller, and he recorded what they got up to. One had even had a swim in a river last week. He was enjoying the feeling of doing some good in the world, Charlie put at the end.
• • •
Charlie emailed Karen too, because she’d sent him the information about the Big Cat Sanctuary in the first place, but she didn’t read out his messages. She did tell me she’d finished with Matt, her boyfriend, though.
“Yeah. Dumped him last month.” Her sticking-up crest of hair quivered like a small angry animal on the top of her head. “I mean”—she turned to me—“there were three people in our relationship: me, him, and his bloody surfboard.”
I wanted to explain that a surfboard wasn’t a person, and had to dig my nails into my palms to stop myself. Karen would know this already; it was either an FOS or a joke. “Mmm,” I commented, shaking out and refolding a striped sheet.
“Anyway”—Karen turned back to her screen—“he can spend all of his time with it, now that he’s single.”
“Does that mean you’re single as well?” I asked, adding the sheet to the pile.
Karen tapped the side of her nose, where her stud had been until last week, in a gesture I now knew meant I know something you don’t know, but don’t ask me what. I was going to use it myself before I next gave someone an unusual Fact about cookie packaging. “Ellie, my little NCO,” Karen said, “that is top secret information which I am not at liberty to disclose. But,” she added, with a beaming smile and an upward flick of her crest of hair, “watch this space!”
Since I’d understood nothing of what she said, I had to rely on her facial expression which was Happy. I stretched my mouth upward. “That’s good,” I said. Then I took a deep breath and asked, “Karen, what is an NCO?”
• • •
Paul and Akira were far ahead, racing each other along the sand. Close behind me was Paul’s dad, chatting and laughing on his cell phone.
“He’s got a new girlfriend, well, woman friend,” Paul had told me last week, taking off his glasses and polishing them. “He met her on an Internet dating site. Time to move on from Mum, he said.” Paul looked at me, blinking. “Her name’s Debbie. I’m not keen, actually. There’s a lot of giggling. And worse. And she’s brought a fruit bowl. But,” he added, his eyes sparkling behind the newly clean glasses, “she has got a dog!”
Paul threw the ball again, and he and Akira tore after it. I gazed out to sea. Far beyond it was Charlie, tracking tigers; fifty miles down the coast was Lyme Regis, where Father, in a suit, tie, and cuff links, had rescued me from drowning. Brave, kind Father. With me, beside this part of the world’s ocean, were my good friend Paul and his dad, and my foster dog, Akira. It was a moment where everything seemed to fit together into an orderly and satisfying pattern.
• • •
Akira and I went out with Paul and Paul’s dad and Debbie, his new woman friend, and her dog, Trixie, a bossy sheepdog cross with a strong herding instinct.
I’d been told many times I wasn’t a team player, but with Trixie, there was no choice. While Akira raced ahead, looking back for Trixie to follow, she nudged the back of my calves, pushing me forward to join the others, and if I got too far in front, she blocked my path, ears pricked, black-speckled nose on front paws.
“Been watching too much TV. One Man and His Dog,” Debbie commented.
I asked about her favorite TV programs, my toes twitching when they included Casualty and Coronation Street. Her favorite food was pineapple. We had a six-minute, twenty-second conversation about vegetarian meals, and I only mentioned cookies once.
• • •
The Seven Rules of Elvira Carr Page 31