‘No!’ I say, pushing his hand away. ‘It’s not for you. It’s for Martha.’
‘OK.’ Frog looks at me. ‘What’s she supposed to do with it, then?’
For a split second I consider not telling him. Just making it MY thing. But then I remember how generous he was with the Wii and a picture of him wiping Martha’s chin pops into my head and I know that this will be far more fun with Frog than without him.
So I show him what I’ve found. And his mouth drops open and his eyes light up and when he looks at me I feel like he is REALLY looking at me, in a way that makes my face feel a bit hot.
‘That is properly brilliant, Erin,’ he tells me.
‘I know, right?’ I could pretend to be modest but I won’t pull it off so there’s no point. It IS properly brilliant!
‘Shall we go and find Martha now?’ he asks. I nod and together we walk down the path.
It’s easy to track her down. She’s in the dayroom with Frog’s grandad playing on the Wii.
They’re playing baseball, which from the sounds of it, is a bit of an extreme activity. I can hear Frog’s grandad laughing before we even open the door and I’m glad that Martha has made a friend. It’ll be good for her when Frog and I are back at school and can only visit at weekends.
‘Hi, Grandad,’ calls Frog, going over to give him a hug. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Well, apart from not understanding the rules of this ridiculous game, I’m very well,’ his grandad says, winking at me. ‘Martha, my dear, shall we go back to the more civilized sport of tennis?’
‘Sorry, Grandad,’ says Frog. ‘Erin needs to borrow Martha for a bit. She’s got another plan.’
Martha looks at me and raises her eyebrows.
‘You’ll love it,’ I tell her. ‘I promise.’
‘Oh well, another time, then,’ says Grandad. Then he calls across the room to a lady who is snoozing in a chair. ‘Hey, Doris! Fancy a quick round of golf before Beatrice brings the tea trolley in?’
I push Martha out of the room, Frog following behind us. When we’re in the corridor I lean round the chair.
‘Are you OK if we go for a walk?’ I ask her. She nods, so Frog pushes open the side door and I carefully manoeuvre her on to the path. We’ve decided to take Martha to our secret hideaway. That way we won’t be disturbed by anyone.
It turns out that pushing a wheelchair for any kind of distance on a gravel path is actually quite tricky. We take it in turns but still, I’m sweating and puffing and panting by the time we make it through the trees. The last part is super-difficult and I’m grateful that it hasn’t rained for a while, otherwise the wheels would just sink straight into the grass. I know Uncaring said that Martha could walk if she wanted to, but I think that was just her being a cow. Martha’s old. Her legs are probably really tired.
By the time we get to our bench I am exhausted, but I’m too excited to wait any longer. I’ve been carrying the iPad in my rucksack and I pull it out now and put it on Martha’s lap.
She looks at it in confusion.
‘This is going to help you talk again,’ I tell her. ‘Look.’
And then I turn it on and open the app that I bought with some of my savings. I get to the right page and start to explain, pointing out the buttons on the screen that need to be pressed.
‘I’ve customized some of them to make them more personal, but there’s loads of words already downloaded and if you want anything else we can create it ourselves. Look – I even added Picasso,’ I tell her. ‘You have a go.’
But Martha just sits, staring at the screen, looking as if she hasn’t got a clue what I’m talking about.
I look in desperation at Frog. This HAS to work. Why isn’t she trying it?
With his freaky mind-reading powers he answers my question.
‘Show her again,’ he whispers. So I do.
I show her how to swipe the pages to find different categories. I find the animal page and show her the button for ‘frog’. I find the basic communication page and show her how to build a sentence. I show her everything and she doesn’t make a single sound. She doesn’t even twitch. She just sits, looking at the screen.
Eventually I get up and walk a few steps towards the stream. Frog follows me and puts his hand on my shoulder. He can tell I’m upset.
‘She hates it,’ I whisper, trying not to cry.
‘I’m sure she doesn’t,’ Frog says but his voice isn’t convincing.
I sigh and look up at the sky. There are more clouds now and there’s a bit of a chill in the air. I hug myself, rubbing my hands up and down my arms. This is not at all how I thought it would be.
‘We should probably get her back to the house before it rains,’ I tell Frog. I feel completely miserable and for some reason, I wouldn’t mind sharing a flask of tea with my dad right now.
‘I guess,’ says Frog. ‘And then we can figure out something new to do with Martha. A new challenge.’
I haven’t got anything to say to that. How can I tell him that I’m done? I’m out of ideas. I was so sure that this would work. My failure to improve Martha’s life feels like a bad head cold – it’s filling up my mind and making me feel stuffy and tired.
‘Maybe she’s too old for new technology,’ I mutter. ‘You know – that saying about how you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’
‘I don’t know,’ says Frog thoughtfully. ‘She handled the Wii pretty well.’
‘Yeah, OK, no need to gloat,’ I snap, without turning to look at him. ‘Why don’t you just say it – I’m never going to work out how to make her better.’
‘Erin, it’s not about making her better,’ starts Frog. ‘I think you should know that I was talking about Martha with my mum the other day and she told me that –’
But before he can tell me whatever it was his mum told him, we are interrupted by a sound. No, actually by a voice. A robotic voice that I’m sure sounds nothing like Martha’s real voice, but a voice all the same.
‘I like Picasso.’
We spin round and gape at Martha. She is sitting up very straight in her chair, iPad on her lap and smiling the biggest smile that I have ever seen. I walk over to her and stand, looking down at the iPad.
‘Can you do it again?’ I ask her, holding my breath. Frog is next to me and I grab his hand, squeezing it tightly. I wouldn’t normally be so brave but I need the moral support right now. I really think this idea might work!
Martha bends her head over the iPad so that I can’t see what she’s doing. Then she sits up and touches the screen. The iPad speaks to us.
‘Thank you, Erin.’
And I burst into tears. Which is highly embarrassing, especially as Frog doesn’t let go of my hand, so I can’t reach for a tissue and end up having to wipe my face with my sleeve.
Martha moves her fingers slowly across the iPad and I’ve started to get a grip when the next sentence arrives.
‘No cry face,’ she makes the robot voice say, which makes me cry a little bit more.
When I’ve stopped being lame we sit with Martha for half an hour, talking. It is the best thirty minutes of my life. Martha gets the hang of the communication app really quickly for such an old person and by the time we realize that the sky is getting dark, she’s told us that her favourite food is trifle, she loves the rain and she wants us to keep practising the jitterbug.
The first raindrop splashes on to the iPad screen and I hurriedly grab it off Martha’s knee and ram it into my rucksack.
‘You might love the rain,’ I tell her as Frog and I both take a wheelchair handle and shove her across the grass with all our strength, ‘but Beatrice will not love us if we take you back soaking wet!’
And as the sky opens and chucks its contents down on to our heads, we race down the path, Martha shaking with laughter and Frog whooping like some kind of demented cowboy, and me feeling like I’m part of something important and special that will last forever.
Four days later I am sitting by the wate
r fountain. It’s just Martha and me today – Frog’s mum insisted on taking him for a haircut and to buy new school uniform.
‘I don’t even want to think about this summer being over,’ I tell Martha, plucking a blade of grass and trying for the millionth time to make that whistling sound that Frog’s so good at. ‘It’ll be horrible thinking of you here on your own all day.’
‘I am lucky,’ Martha says. Well, obviously the iPad says it but she’s getting quite speedy at selecting her sentences and we’ve programmed in loads of extra words so she can pretty much talk about anything.
‘Yes, but it won’t be the same when we can only come over at weekends,’ I say.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot. It’s not just Martha I’m going to miss when September starts. I can’t seem to stop thinking about Frog when we’re not together and he’s always so friendly and funny but I have no idea if he likes me in the way I’m starting to like him. And he’s in the year above me at school so I’m barely going to even see him during the week.
‘I thought this summer was going to be rubbish,’ I say. Martha grins. ‘But it hasn’t been,’ I rush to tell her. ‘Things have changed since that first week. Me and Dad are getting on quite well now and I can kind of see that him and Mum are better off apart.’
I saw Mum yesterday. I hadn’t been sure about going but Martha persuaded me. Well, she didn’t exactly persuade me because that suggests that there was a certain degree of discussion about the whole thing. Which there was not. I mentioned that I hadn’t seen Mum for a few weeks but that she wouldn’t stop ringing the house now that she’s back from her holiday, and that she wanted me to go for tea with her and Mark and the mother-stealing children. Martha wrote a message in her notepad and wouldn’t stop waving it at me until I eventually caved in and agreed to go just to shut her up. Her note was simple.
Your mum loves you. New beginnings.
And it wasn’t that bad, actually. Dad dropped me off and as soon as Mum opened the door she pulled me into a huge hug that felt really good. And Mark was OK, I suppose. He didn’t try and act like my dad, which is a good job because I’d have definitely told him where to go if he’d tried that. The kids were pretty sweet. Annoying and noisy, but sweet. I ended up feeling bad that they didn’t have a mum. I mean, my mum might not live in my house but at least she’s alive. At least I can talk to her if I want to.
Dad was in a great mood when I got home and we stayed up late, watching a film and eating popcorn with Picasso snuggled up next to us on the sofa and trying to sneak popcorn when he thought we weren’t looking. Dad was singing this morning when I got downstairs for breakfast. I think we’re going to be OK.
‘Anyway,’ I tell Martha. ‘It’ll be no time really until October half-term and after that we’ve got two weeks off for Christmas. Then it’ll be next year and before you know it we’ll be nearly at the summer holidays and we can all be together for the whole six weeks!’
Martha is smiling as she chooses her words.
‘Don’t wish time away,’ she tells me.
‘I’m not!’ I say. ‘I’m just thinking ahead. We should make plans for next summer – really get out and do some stuff. We could take you for days out – maybe the beach, or shopping. What d’you reckon?’
I look at Martha to get her reaction. I know it might sound weird – after all, she’s totally ancient and I didn’t even know her at the start of the holidays – but I feel like she’s almost family now. Like she matters. I want to make sure that we don’t all drift apart just because of something rubbish like school and I’m sure that Martha will be pleased I’m making plans for our time together.
But she isn’t smiling any more. She’s looking at me with a worried expression on her face, and when she puts the iPad to one side so that she can write her reply in her notepad, it seems to take her longer than normal to choose the right words. The iPad is brilliant but sometimes Martha still finds it easier to write things down, even though her hand is all shaky.
Finally she sits up and shows me what she’s written.
Nobody will tell you when it’s your last summer and you probably won’t even know it.
I frown at her.
‘What does that even mean?’
She underlines the first part of her message.
Nobody will tell you when it’s your last summer.
I don’t understand what Martha is trying to tell me. How can this possibly be my last summer? She must be able to see my confusion because she turns to a fresh page and writes again.
Things change. You are changing. I am changing. Growing older.
‘Oh, I get it,’ I say. ‘Yeah – things ARE different now to how they were before.’ I grin at her, feeling a bit sheepish. ‘I was a bit of a cow at the start of the summer, wasn’t I?’
Martha shakes her head but she’s smiling at me.
‘I was completely childish about Mum and Dad splitting up. I acted like a right brat. I wasn’t that great to you, either.’
Martha is furiously writing so I pause to give her time.
You’ll be all right.
I think for a moment. ‘Of course I will. And so will you. But you’re right – I’m getting older. This is my last summer of being a kid. Next year I’m going to be utterly responsible and mature and Beatrice will let me and Frog take you out and we’ll have a brilliant time!’
Martha looks tired and I stand up.
‘Time to take you back for your rest,’ I tell her. I pack away the iPad and start pushing her towards the house.
Afterwards, sitting behind Dad’s shed with the sun on my face, I replay our conversation in my head. And I can’t help feeling that Martha was talking about something else. That maybe it isn’t just my last summer. There’s a prickling sensation on the back of my neck and I shake it away. She shouldn’t talk like that. Sure, we’re all getting older, every single day but there’s no point thinking about it. Not while there’s still us. Not while there’s still life.
Martha
Two strikes. They debated for a long time about whether the incident with the dog was serious enough to merit evicting me there and then, but eventually they decided that they would prefer to prolong the agony and keep me a little while longer. I suspect Beatrice was fighting my corner, arguing that I meant no harm. She really shouldn’t have wasted her time.
I was actually feeling very low that day. I’d been thinking more and more about Tommy and Mim and those summer days that I thought would never end. I didn’t think that Erin had it in her to genuinely surprise me but I must admit, when I saw that ridiculous dog standing next to me I was impressed. She’s got something about her, that girl. I think she’ll do well in life, as long as all her spirit and attitude isn’t ground out of her, by those who think they know best.
This has not been a summer that I could have predicted. I have grown quite fond of Erin and Frog. The boy means well and has a good heart but he is not the one for Erin. Not like Tommy and I. The pair of us were well matched. We could have had a happy life together. Frog isn’t strong enough to deal with Erin. He’ll be much happier with someone good-natured like him. She has a darkness that needs to be dealt with by someone who feels it too. Someone who understands.
The summer is nearly at an end. I’ve been wondering about lasts and ends for some time now. When was the last time I rode a bicycle? When was the last time I tied my hair up in a ponytail? Who was the last person to give me a hug? There is a fact – when you do something for the last time you will probably have no idea of the significance. You will have no idea that this is the last time you will eat chocolate or the last time you will listen to music. You are blissfully unaware that this is the last train journey you will ever go on or the last book you will ever read. In fact, the last book you read may be one you dislike. It almost definitely will not be your favourite book.
Do not think, for one second, that these lasts only exist when you are old. They start creeping up on you. When I was thirty-five years ol
d I realized that I had done my last handstand. I couldn’t tell you when I did it but all I knew was that I could no longer perform a handstand if my very life depended upon it. My last handstand had happened.
I don’t remember the last word that I spoke with my own, normal voice. I expect it wasn’t important at the time. It feels quite important now, though.
I do remember my last summer, however. The months after Tommy had gone were the longest months of my life. Every day I waited for news and every day I was disappointed. I took to wearing the wedding ring he had given me, despite my parents’ disapproval, and I bitterly regretted the way I had left him in the woods. I vowed to wait for him for as long as it took and I promised myself that when he returned I would never again leave him alone.
It was a beautiful sunny day when the news came. I remember vividly how the sky was the kind of blue that you see in paintings. It was almost too perfect to be real. I was sitting on the front step, peeling potatoes, and when my mother came down the street I could tell immediately that something was wrong. She stood in front of me and spoke the words and I looked over her shoulder at the sun and was amazed that it wasn’t turning red. How could it continue to shine on a world where Tommy was no more? On a world that let living boys go to war and return as dead men?
Nothing was ever the same after that. Summer never felt like proper summer. But I kept my promise. I have continued to wait for Tommy, even though it has ended up taking a lifetime. My lifetime.
It’s time to go. The children will be gone, back to their real lives and it’s time for the ending. My ending. And, partly thanks to them, it’s going to be a happy ending after all, despite what I’ve always imagined. This summer has brought a surprising end to many lonely years and I am alone no longer. I’m sure she’ll never know it, but Erin has helped me to get better. A good death is as important as a good life and I am ready.
In the Garden*
‘Pass me another sandwich,’ I tell Frog, stuffing the last bits of crust into my mouth.
Five Things They Never Told Me Page 14