Lucky Girl

by Fiona Gibson

  I fish out my mobile from my bag and call Maggie again. ‘I was going to come,’ I babble at her, ‘but the car won’t start—battery, I think—and I don’t know how—’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she says, being the calm one now. ‘It’d be dark when you got here anyway. There’s nothing we can do in the dark.’

  ‘I’ll catch the first train tomorrow.’

  ‘He’ll be home by then,’ she says bravely.

  ‘Yes, of course he will.’

  From upstairs comes the rumbling voice of a story-tape narrator. A girl’s brothers have been turned into swans. Diane’s living-room floor is strewn with snippets of synthetic fabric. ‘For my rugs,’ she says. ‘What I do, when stuff’s getting on top of me, is get my rugs things out. Keeps my mind occupied.’

  She opens a drawer in the sideboard and pulls out a metal hook with a curved wooden handle. ‘I’ll show you,’ she says. ‘It’s offcuts they sweep up from the factory floor. We’re allowed to bring bags of it home. You find all sorts in the bags—ciggie ends, bits of sandwich. Last time I found half an orange.’

  From under the sofa she extracts a piece of rug backing. One corner is tufted with nylon strips in jarring colors. She snags a piece of nylon onto the hook, performs a twisting motion with her wrist and says, ‘You try.’

  The story-tape man sounds as if he’s talking into a cardboard tube. The sister is weaving nettles to make coats, which she’ll throw over the swans to turn them into her brothers again. Diane presses the hook, the backing and a fistful of nylon strands into my hands. I hook a piece through, come up and catch the loop—and soon I’ve made a small purple lawn.

  ‘Good girl,’ Diane says, as if she’s acquired an additional child. The swans’ sister has one coat to finish. But the king is angry because Elise—that’s the girl’s name—won’t speak. If she does, the spell will never be broken. He doesn’t understand that she has something important to make out of weeds, out of nothing.

  ‘I should go home,’ I say. ‘I hardly slept last night.’

  Diane squeezes my hand and says, ‘It’ll be a fuss over nothing. You know what parents are like.’

  No, I think. No, I don’t.

  Next morning I take my coffee from the plaited girl at the Orange Tree. ‘Stella?’ Ed says behind me. ‘You’re early today.’ I have started to pick up a coffee each morning to take to school. It’s just better coffee than I make at home, that’s all.

  ‘I’m going to Cornwall,’ I tell him. ‘Catching the eight-twenty train.’

  ‘Not school holidays, is it?’

  ‘No, I’m going to see my Dad.’ My vision mists as I correct myself: ‘I’m going to find Dad.’

  ‘Something’s happened,’ he says gently.

  I can feel the steam from my coffee rising through the hole in its lid. ‘He’s missing. There’s probably some explanation. He’ll have taken himself off on some trip, worrying us stupid….’

  ‘If there’s anything I can do—’ he starts, then scribbles a phone number onto a paper napkin. ‘You can call me anytime.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m sure he’s fine.’ I stuff the number into my jeans pocket. It feels so right, the very opposite of awkward, when he pulls me into the warmth of his chest.

  I don’t care about the girl I saw him with. All I care about is Dad.

  Ed’s coffee has gone dishwater cool before I remember to drink it. I watch parched, yellowy fields drift past the carriage’s window. When I get off this train I’ll take a taxi from the station to Penjoy Point. Maggie tried to insist on collecting me from the station, but I didn’t want her driving anywhere in case something happened, in case she was needed.

  There are only five other people in the train carriage. It’s an ordinary Monday morning, not a holiday. I buy another coffee but by the time I’ve carried it back from the buffet car, half of it’s slopped down the side of the cup and the rest looks too muddy to drink. The woman sitting opposite is patiently filling in a crossword with green pen. Beware the green pen, Dad said. The woman looks up at me. Her mouth is heavily smeared with oily-looking lipstick.

  I call Charlie again, and his voice mail tells me to leave my name and number. ‘Where are you?’ I bark into the phone.

  The woman opposite gives me a brief, prim smile. Then my mobile rings, and I assume it’s Charlie, finally taking an interest in our father’s disappearance.

  There’s a hollow crackle. A voice paused, not daring to speak. ‘Hello?’ I say.

  And Maggie says, ‘They found him.’

  27

  Falling

  I know from her voice that she doesn’t mean they’ve found Dad, but Dad’s body.

  My phone feels light, plasticky in my hand. The woman looks up, then turns back to her crossword and fills in seven across. I’ve never been able to do cryptic crosswords. I don’t have the right kind of brain. She’s written so firmly her pen’s dug through the paper: BEWILDERED.

  ‘Stella?’ comes Maggie’s faint voice.

  ‘Where?’ I ask.

  The cliff where he walks the dogs—or rather, beneath it—is where they found him.

  I don’t ask who found him, or whether he landed on rocks, or water, or missed his footing and fell or anything else. The woman gnaws the end of her pen. She’s wearing dangling coppery earrings that are trapped like twigs in her hair.

  ‘Oh, Stella,’ Maggie cries.

  My phone falls, and I drop to my hands and knees to try and retrieve it, but it’s slid right under the seat. When I come up the woman rests her pen on the table, and her eyes meet mine. ‘My dear,’ she says, ‘has something happened?’

  I don’t know what I tell her. Only that there’s a swoop of dress, patterned with garish fuchsias, and the stickiness of her lipstick on my cheek.

  A police car and two ordinary cars are parked outside Silverdawn Cottage. A uniformed officer is guarding the door. ‘You must be Stella,’ he says. I nod, feeling not quite awake, as if I’m covered in gauze.

  In the living room, Maggie is sitting close to a woman whom I assume is a friend—Maggie’s hand is resting loosely in hers—but it turns out that she, too, is a police officer. Not just a police officer—a family liaison officer—as is the man in a pale gray shirt and dark trousers who’s talking in a hushed voice on the phone.

  We need these people, apparently. They have been assigned to us.

  Maggie tries to get up to greet me, but can’t coordinate her feet and legs, and sags back into the sofa. I bend down to hug her. Her hair smells of cooking and dogs, all the house smells.

  The man on the phone says, ‘Your sister has just arrived.’ He’s talking to Charlie. He finishes the call, turns to shake my hand. The backs of his brown hands are bumpy, like the batter on fish.

  ‘I’m Helen,’ the woman says, also gripping my hand. I feel as if I’ve walked into a terrible party. She has an ordinary, healthy young face and is wearing a plain navy sweater and trousers. ‘We’re very sorry,’ she says, and I find myself nodding and thanking her, trying to behave well.

  ‘The press have already been here,’ Maggie says shakily. ‘Two reporters from the nationals, one from the Penjoy Bugle—he was the worst. Persistent.’ She spits out the word. It’s these police officers’ job to keep them away, to look after us. We’re being cocooned.

  I squeeze into the space beside Maggie. ‘Matthew, my colleague, can collect your brother from the train,’ Helen says.

  I think: It’s just your job, to be here when things like this happen. You’ve probably done this dozens of times. This is ordinary for you. Matthew is in the kitchen now, turning on taps, opening cupboards, making tea.

  ‘What happened?’ I blurt out, which is stupid as nobody knows. There were no witnesses—only the dogs.

  ‘It’s a dangerous path,’ Helen says. ‘It rained heavily yesterday, there was mud….’

  ‘You think he slipped?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Helen says.

  Then Maggie cries out, ‘Twenty-five
years I’ve known him,’ and smothers her face with her hands.

  Twenty-five years.

  She knew him when Mum was alive.

  She knew him when I was a child.

  Dad sat with her at the allotment, drinking in the last of the sun, not knowing that Charlie and I were watching.

  Her thin shoulders start trembling. I should comfort her but I can’t do a thing; I’m frozen here, trapped on a dog hair-strewn sofa with the woman Dad really loved.

  And I’m sickened. A traitor to Mum, just by being here, breathing in the stale air.

  Maggie turns to me, her lips moving tentatively as if rehearsing words. ‘It’s not what you think,’ she whispers. Then her tears come again, and the sound she makes is so awful, I just want her to stop.

  Charlie has arrived too soon. Matthew couldn’t have driven to the station and back again so quickly. Then I realize we’ve been sitting here for hours—it’s gone 9:00 p.m.—and time has just slipped away. Charlie is saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ with an arm around Maggie, although I don’t know what for, because he got here as quickly as he could. Matthew had tracked him down at the university. Charlie doesn’t believe in mobile phones. The last thing he wants, when he’s lecturing or scraping around in rock pools, is to be interrupted. His face looks bleached, his eyes as empty and dead as a shark’s.

  Helen is fielding phone calls. Her voice is curt, like a company director’s secretary. I’m glad the phone keeps ringing. It feels as if things are happening around us.

  Harry arrives with his wife, Jean. ‘This is terrible, terrible,’ Harry keeps saying. They both have soft, rounded bodies and are wearing aging sweaters. Jean wraps her arms around Maggie, and Harry stands against the wall, as if waiting to be told what to do. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Stella,’ Harry tells me. ‘Your father was very proud, I hope you know that.’

  It’s after midnight when Charlie says, ‘I think we should get some sleep.’ I follow him upstairs. There’s no longer a bed in the spare room, or even pillows or the roll-out mattress on the floor, because it’s Dad’s office now with framed photos of poppies and irises on the walls—a gift from the photographer who shot the pictures for Frankie’s Flowers.

  The walls are white, and there’s a white desk that wobbles slightly when you lean against it. It hasn’t been assembled properly. On the desk is a marmalade jar filled with pens, a pad of onionskin paper—I didn’t know the sheets came from a pad—and the gray plastic adding machine with its chunky keys and pull-down handle.

  Of course there’s no bedding put out for us. We weren’t expected. No one knew this would happen.

  In the cupboard on the landing I find thick brown blankets that smell of dust, and two damp, sagging pillows. They’re all talking downstairs: Maggie, Harry, Jean and the liaison officers. Maybe Matthew and Helen will stay all night. That’s their job—to comfort, to be here. I carry the bedding into Dad’s study and find Charlie crouched on the floor, running flattened hands over his face and hair. I hold him tight, but I don’t know how to help him.

  An hour, maybe two hours later, I wake to the sound of kitchen cupboards opening and closing and Charlie’s deep, steady breathing. The room is stiflingly hot. I push off the covers and watch as shapes slowly form: the sharp angles of Dad’s desk, the small rectangular windowpanes. I pull myself up and tread lightly across the room, aware of sweat trickling down my temples.

  The window won’t open. The harder I try to pull it up, the more determined it seems to remain firmly shut. I need air in here, so I can breathe properly. Charlie shuffles a limb, trying to kick off the blanket.

  I crouch next to him, so close I can smell coffee on his breath. ‘He lied to us,’ I murmur. ‘Did you know that, Charlie? The nice things he did—taking us to the studios, and to France—he just felt guilty, did you know that?’

  A tear glides down my cheek and lands on Charlie’s forehead. In the moonlight it gleams like a bead of sea glass, waiting to be picked up and stuffed into a pocket. Gently, I wipe it off. I don’t want Charlie to wake up and think it’s his.

  ‘So those things meant nothing,’ I add as raindrops start to pat against the window.

  ‘Go to sleep,’ Charlie whispers.

  I hear the floorboards creak in the hallway. ‘He was having an affair, Charlie. While Mum was still alive.’

  The door creeps open and Maggie stands there in her velvet dressing gown, clutching a china teacup. ‘Whatever you think,’ she says into the darkness, ‘your father was a good man.’

  Although Matthew has gone by the morning, Helen appears to have stayed the night on a makeshift bed in the faded living room. Sheets and a blanket are neatly folded on the sofa. ‘I loved Frankie’s Flowers,’ she says as Maggie stuffs bread into the toaster. ‘Never missed a program. He was so unaffected, so natural.’

  ‘Are you a gardener, Helen?’ Maggie asks with exaggerated brightness.

  ‘Well, I try.’

  ‘Take some plants, anything you want from the garden. Take it all.’ She fills the sink with water, intending to wash up, even though there are only two dirty mugs. She peers into the toaster and realizes she hasn’t switched it on at the wall.

  ‘Perhaps you should leave things as they are for now,’ Helen says.

  Maggie cuts thin slices of butter for toast. ‘Forgot to take it out of the fridge,’ she scolds herself. ‘I keep doing this, forgetting little things. Don’t know where I am half the time.’ She flits around the room like a bird that can’t find its way out.

  ‘You’re doing fine,’ Helen says. ‘You all are.’

  I think, How would you know?

  Maggie starts scrubbing out Surf and Turf’s brown earthenware bowls at the sink. ‘Harry’s taken the dogs,’ she announces.

  ‘That was good of him,’ I say.

  ‘Yes—isn’t everyone good to us?’ She turns from the sink, her eyes glimmering, her face as pale as vanilla ice cream.

  There will be an inquest into Dad’s accident. That’s what we’re saying—’the accident’—like we did with Mum. Maggie is questioned for more than an hour, with Helen present, and two officers talk to me in Dad’s study. One has rough-looking ginger hair that is turning fawn-colored above the ears. The other is younger, with a dark crop and the kind of mouth that moves too much as he speaks. They want to know about Dad’s state of mind, how he was feeling before it happened.

  ‘Was he happy, do you think?’ the younger one asks. ‘I think so,’ I say. ‘He had a new show and was starting to write a book. He was fine, I think—things were going well for him.’

  I realize I’m just making stuff up.

  ‘And you last saw him…’ he prompts me.

  ‘At Christmas. He and Maggie stayed with me. They’d had problems with the house, plumbing problems.’

  The man nods, as if a defective radiator might be significant. ‘And he often went out on his own, with the dogs?’

  ‘Yes, most days. Maggie takes them out occasionally. Dogs need to be walked, especially Surf.’

  ‘A creature of habit,’ the older policeman says. The skin around his eyes is crinkled, as if he smiles a lot.

  ‘He had a favorite place on the cliff. He took the dogs there. He liked looking down at the rocks, being higher than birds.’

  The older man nods. ‘A nature lover.’

  I wish they’d stop summing him up in phrases. I know what they’re doing—trying to find out what sort of man he was. They want to know if he fell from the cliff, mistook overhanging grass for something solid that could bear his weight. Or if it wasn’t an accident.

  ‘He just liked being alone,’ I tell them.

  ‘Of course he did,’ the ginger man says, as if he knows the first thing about him.

  Each night Maggie insists on carrying up the sofa and armchair cushions for Charlie and me to sleep on. He sleeps soundly, having spent the best part of the days dealing with the funeral director and church minister at St Cuthbert’s in Penjoy Village. There are cars to arr
ange, Dad’s friends to contact, flowers to be ordered, reams of paperwork to be sorted through. He is tackling the aftermath of Dad’s death with the dedication and efficiency I assumed he reserved for his final exams.

  I let him do everything, which makes me feel slightly guilty, and immensely relieved. ‘It’s better,’ Charlie says, ‘than the two of us stumbling over each other.’ When I question the graveyard burial, he says, ‘It’s what Maggie wants. She needs a place she can go to.’

  She could go to the cliff, I think, where it happened. That’s what Dad would have chosen. He wanted to be cremated, like Mum was, and scattered—carried away by the wind.

  I hear Maggie at night, padding from kitchen to living room, clicking lights on and off. Sometimes there’s Matthew’s voice, or Helen’s. One morning I find Matthew admiring the barometer on the kitchen wall. ‘I’ve always wanted one of these,’ he says.

  ‘You can have it,’ Maggie says. ‘It’s never worked properly. Perhaps you could take it apart and fix it.’

  ‘There’s no need to start getting rid of his things,’ Matthew says gently. ‘It’s too soon, I think. You might change your mind.’

  Harry Sowerbutt shows up frequently and busies himself by hoiking out bindweed and dandelions from the borders for want of anything better to do. I go out to help him. ‘Don’t do that,’ Harry says, examining the muddle of plants in my hand.

  ‘Why not? I thought—’

  ‘They’re peonies, Stella. They were Frankie’s favorites.’ ‘Sorry,’ I say, trying to jam them back into the ground. There will come a point when Charlie and I will go back to Devon. Harry will stop popping in so often—it’s the lambing season, he’s especially busy—and the liaison officers will stop answering the phone, making tea, fending off stray reporters. We have decided that none of us wishes to speak to the press.

  At nighttime I wrap myself in a coarse brown blanket and stand at the window, looking down at the garden. The climbing roses are beginning to flower now, like tight, bunched little fists.