Now he realised that fairness wasn’t going to come into the transaction. He tried to give himself some small measure of satisfaction by meticulously listing ‘pilot’s personal effects’ to add to your insurance claim, Henry. His headset alone would cost over a grand to replace.
As, this time, Henry returned no immediate reply, Ronan stoked his irritation by having another go at getting hold of Selina, trying Facetime on his phone and Skype and Facebook voice messaging on his laptop. Every single one of those channels proving unresponsive, he texted her:
Ronan: Would appreciate that chat soon.
Frustrated and unsettled, he performed his daily physio, working grimly through the heaviness and stiffness that came with challenging a post-operative area, and waited in vain for Selina to respond. Typical. She was always available when she wanted to put on him or change arrangements.
Circling his left arm slowly forward and back, he couldn’t regret having made Curtis but it was hard to remember how it had felt to love Selina. The feelings seemed too far in the past to connect with.
When the fate of the marriage had been taken out of his hands and he’d supported Curtis over the worst of its end, Ronan had considered his life sorted, splitting the majority of his time between Curtis and the only career he’d ever wanted, content with whatever was left over for himself. Two sobering thoughts flashed into his mind: what would he be without the title of ‘helicopter pilot’? And was Curtis the only living person he loved in a meaningful way?
Leah drifted into his mind.
She was there a lot these days, all golden brown hair and determined eyes. Through being married to Selina he’d learned to be wary of women who needed a lot of emotional support, so he was fascinated by Leah’s contrasting ability to cope, whether with a roll of her pretty eyes or a rolling up of her sleeves.
Just for the intellectual exercise, because he and Leah were definitely in agreement that this thing they were trying to try out was just for the holidays, he found himself wondering how the title of ‘boyfriend’ would feel. To fall asleep with Leah snuggled up to him, wake up with her hair spread across the pillow next to his, have company at meals other than just when Curtis was around, uncover the mysteries of track days or watch a fiercely independent woman pushing on with her career.
In short, what his life would be like if the feelings he had for Leah weren’t just for the holidays.
Curtis went in search of his dad and found him in his bedroom, stretching his arms about. ‘OK for me to go round to Jordan’s?’ The atmosphere between them had thawed a bit but Curtis still wasn’t totally over his dad taking control of his laptop.
Ronan paused. ‘We could go and see.’
Curtis backed up. ‘It’s OK. You probably want to start work in the kitchen. I only want to see if Jordan wants to hang out down the park.’ Really, he wanted to see if Natasha was over yesterday’s weirdness. He’d been shocked at how hurt he’d felt when she’d pretended to gag at the idea of hanging out with him and Jordan. He knew the gesture had been aimed at Jordan but it had still caused a snag in Curtis’s breathing, as if someone had poked him hard in the chest.
His dad proved difficult to sideline. ‘I want few things less than to start work in the kitchen. It would be neighbourly to check whether Leah needs a hand with anything.’ He kicked his way into deck shoes and picked up his wallet.
Curtis sighed. That was the dull thing about holidays. Grown-ups tended to be less preoccupied with their own crap than usual. ‘I can ask for you.’
But his dad was already jogging downstairs and opening the front door. ‘Has your mum texted you lately?’
Curtis sent him a sidelong look. ‘Yep. This morning, like usual.’
‘Right.’ His dad frowned, but said no more as they rounded the dividing fence that divided Chez Shea from the gîte.
They found Leah in the back garden of the gîte, hanging out washing and dancing to whatever sounds were coming through her earbuds. She shuffled a couple of steps to her right and bent to the laundry basket for the next item. Her gaze must have fallen on their shadows behind her because she spun around with a tiny yelp. Clutching at her heart, she dragged the earbuds from her ears, laughing. ‘That was scary!’
Curtis didn’t have a chance to open the conversation before his dad jumped in.
‘Curtis wanted to see if Jordan’s up for the park, so I thought I’d come and see if you need anything.’
‘Only if you fancy joining me in doing the laundry,’ she joked. ‘Alister’s having his operation today so we won’t be visiting him.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘In fact, the op might have started.’ Anxiety flitted across her face. Then she sent Curtis a smile. ‘It would be great if you did get the kids out of the house for a couple of hours. They’ve never had a parent in hospital before, let alone have an operation. I think they feel a bit weird.’
‘Right.’ Curtis nodded, happy that she’d given him the perfect excuse to involve Natasha.
Clumping upstairs he found Jordan playing Assassin’s Creed with ferocious concentration.
Five minutes passed as Jordan’s thumbs worked on the controller and his on-screen persona leapt and kicked through gangs of rivals. Curtis had never really got on top of Assassin’s Creed, what with Templars and Revolutionaries and everything. He got up and mooched over to the window that looked out over the garden. His dad was still standing watching Leah. He could tell they were talking by the way Leah kept looking around from her task. They laughed so loudly that Curtis could hear them through the glass.
He turned away. ‘Want to hang in the village?’
Jordan’s movements continued on the controller. ‘When I’ve completed this. Better ask Gnasher, though. Leah gave me a hard time and I’ve got to be nicer,’ he said, putting on a soppy voice.
‘I don’t mind Natasha coming.’ Curtis wished Jordan was nicer to his sister. At his school there was a girl like Natasha who was obviously unhappy. For some reason, some kids thought that meant they ought to make her unhappier. Her brother stuck up for her and sometimes the kids who were mean to the girl found themselves with a fat lip. Curtis didn’t have a brother or sister but, if he had, he’d have wanted the kind that stuck up for him rather than the kind who gave him added grief.
Jordan, eyes still glued to the TV screen, raised his voice to a bellow. ‘NATASHA? WANT TO COME HANG IN THE VILLAGE WITH ME AND CURTIS?’
A door opened on the floor below. ‘WHEN?’
As Jordan seemed to have reached a particularly gnarly point in the game Curtis went to the top of the stairs so he could see Natasha looking up at him from the floor below. ‘When Jordan’s completed this bit of Creed.’
‘Right. Just a minute.’ She flashed him her small uncertain smile and dived back into her room.
Then Jordan swore and tossed his controller on the sofa. ‘OK,’ he said, as if Curtis had been waiting for his permission before moving.
Natasha appeared as they reached her landing. Curtis jammed his hands in his pockets and gave her a smile. ‘OK?’ She was really pretty when she smiled back. Her hair was shiny and hung from a ponytail at one side of her head.
Despite his allegedly good intentions to be nicer to his sister, Jordan stipulated, ‘You can come with us but don’t yap on all day,’ swinging around the banister and taking the steps down in twos.
‘Give her a chance. She hasn’t said a word yet.’ Curtis began to take the steps in twos as well.
Jordan glanced back over his shoulder and frowned but he didn’t challenge the comment and Curtis was glad he’d stuck up for Natasha, who was looking at him as if he was an Assassin who’d just slaughtered a Templar for her.
In the garden, Leah, put down her laundry long enough to hand Jordan twenty euros. ‘Would you nip into the shop on your way home and bring back a lettuce and four of those big tomatoes, please? Then you can all have ice cream with the change. Be back by one thirty and we’ll have lunch together, if Curtis and Ronan are free.’
&
nbsp; ‘Cool.’ Curtis nodded.
‘That would be great, thank you,’ agreed his dad.
As they turned into the lane, Natasha matched her steps to Curtis’s. ‘Our dad’s having pins put in his ankle today.’ Her eyes were big and apprehensive.
Curtis tried to cheer her up. ‘Like a pin cushion?’
If she didn’t quite laugh, at least some of the angst faded from her eyes and despite Jordan’s earlier admonition, she began to chatter and ask questions as they meandered towards the village centre before turning left under the wooden arch to the park.
The park was a pretty cool place. It led on to the part of the woods with trails for runners and walkers. Curtis had grown up playing there, right from when he was young enough for his mum to take him, in the days before she’d gone off with Darren.
Today they elected to amuse themselves in the area designed for training circuits.
Curtis was pleased to do ten pull-ups without stopping but was chagrined to find that Jordan could do twenty.
‘Do it at football training all the time,’ Jordan panted as he jumped down, red in the face, rubbing his arms. ‘Bailey, our coach, is the only one who can do more than me.’
Curtis felt better when Natasha could only do two pull-ups and thought ten was an amazing number.
When they’d exerted themselves enough, they lay in the sun, chewing blades of grass and squinting at the sun, Natasha sighing, ‘I wonder if Dad’s op’s over yet,’ at intervals.
Jordan didn’t stand it for long. ‘Can’t you talk about anything else?’
‘I wonder how Mum is?’
‘Natasha! Don’t give us all shit ache over Mum and Dad. Either shut up or talk about something else.’
Huffily, Natasha chose the ‘talking about something else’ option. ‘I still think Curtis’s dad’s hot for Leah. He’s always looking at her.’
Any good intentions towards his sister with which Jordan might have begun the day seemed to be eroding fast. ‘Like you’re hot for Curtis?’
‘What?’ Curtis levered himself up on his elbow to gape at Jordan.
At the same moment Natasha, face puce, yelped, ‘What?’ in such overdone astonishment that Curtis realised, with a heady mix of shock, pleasure, apprehension and awkwardness, that it might be true. ‘Shut up, Jordan, you douche!’ With a mortified glance at Curtis, Natasha leaped up and began to stalk away.
‘You’re just making it look true!’ Jordan shouted after her. Then, ‘Come back, moron, I was only teasing.’ Natasha just picked up her pace. Jordan scowled. ‘Shit. Little twat. She’ll get me in trouble with Leah.’
Curtis sat up to stare at the older boy. ‘What, just because you gave Natasha a hard time when Leah specifically told you not to? Really?’
Beginning to look sheepish, Jordan lifted his voice again. ‘Come back, Natasha! I didn’t mean anything.’
Without looking round, Natasha broke into a run, her long legs carrying her across the grass and into the shady tunnel of trees that formed the entrance to the wood. In seconds she was out of sight.
‘Well done.’ Curtis settled back down on his stomach, deciding that though his face was hot and his palms sweaty, pretending to be totally cool was the only bearable way out of this situation. ‘You were well nicer. That “moron” was a masterstroke. Auntie Leah’s going to be thrilled.’
For several silent minutes they waited for Natasha to re-emerge from the trees, Jordan snatching up bits of grass and throwing them down again, anger and unease warring on his face.
Finally, Curtis climbed to his feet and set off in Natasha’s footsteps.
‘She’ll come back if you wait long enough,’ Jordan snapped. ‘She always does.’
Apart from flipping Jordan a farewell finger, Curtis ignored him. Partly he wanted to bring Jordan down a notch because he was always an arse to his sister; partly, he wanted to think about Natasha liking him. He hadn’t been liked by a girl for ages. He’d liked Jen Lakey at school last year but she’d screamed with laughter when an old lady in McDonald’s had asked him, ‘Are you one of the fashionable children?’ so she obviously didn’t like him back.
Being liked by a girl made him feel as if his heart had been rolled in sherbet. Natasha was sweet and pretty. It didn’t matter if she’d got to thirteen without knowing words like ‘MILF’.
Once he’d reached the trees, he paused. It was pleasantly cool in their shade but he needed a few moments for his eyes to adjust. A lady strolled past with a little brown dog and said ‘Bonjour’. A man in a red T-shirt pounded down one track and up another. Curtis chose the centre track based on a feeling that a speeding Natasha would’ve simply taken the road ahead.
He was right. He hadn’t been walking long when he heard a tell-tale sniff and the ‘Uhhuh’ sound of someone trying to stop crying. Catching a flash of pink through the trees, he made his footfall as quiet as he could and was able to get close to where Natasha hunched dolefully on a fallen tree trunk before she had the chance to spot him and run away again.
‘Hey,’ he said softly, folding up his long legs so he could sit beside her.
She dropped her face into her hands as if to shut him out.
‘Jordan’s a shit,’ he added, conversationally.
Sniff, sniff. Uhhuh.
‘Don’t worry about him. I’m not.’
Cautiously, she opened the fingers over one eye. ‘Where is he?’
Curtis shrugged, leaving time for Natasha to sniff back her last tears. A French lady with two little children stopped and, from her big mumsy backpack, gave Natasha a wet wipe to clean her face and a tissue to blow her nose. She seemed inclined to linger in her concern but Natasha smiled tremulously and said, ‘Merci, merci beaucoup,’ and Curtis added, laboriously, ‘Elle est blessée la tête, mais elle est bien, maintenant. Merci.’ The lady giggled, so Curtis guessed his French wasn’t perfect, even apart from the fact that he’d lied about Natasha hurting her head because he didn’t know how to translate ‘Her brother’s crappy to her’.
The lady’s attention must have made Natasha conscious of her appearance, as, face attended to, she took her ponytail down and put it up again. She sent Curtis a bashful glance as if checking she looked OK. He smiled approvingly and her cheeks turned rosy.
‘Want to see the stream?’ Curtis got up and took a few steps toward a stile to a smaller, less used track, encouraging Natasha not to decide she ought to return to the park and make her peace with her brother. ‘There are little paths where we can get right up to the back fence of the gîte, behind the annexe. We can go home that way.’
Sniff. Natasha wiped her cheeks one last time and, looking awed by this turn of events, slowly rose. Shyly, she smiled up at him.
At first they walked in silence, the sunshine blinking on and off through the trees. Curtis stamped down any encroaching nettles and told her about the summers he’d spent exploring the woods. His heart gave an extra beat at what came into his mind next, but he reminded himself that he already knew that Natasha liked him. So, cautiously, he took her hand. He felt his face go as red as fire, as red as Natasha’s. But a smile blazed across her face and she didn’t pull her hand away.
Curtis’s phone bleeped a text alert. When he saw it was from Jordan he switched his phone to ‘do not disturb’ and dropped it back into his pocket without replying.
A few more minutes and Natasha halted, cocking her head. ‘Is that Jordan shouting?’ The sound came from a long way behind them, carried on the breeze.
‘I can’t hear him. I might have gone deaf.’ Curtis grinned, inviting her to conspire with him against Jordan. Natasha giggled and they wandered further along the narrow path where the trees were thick enough to make them feel as if they were in a green tunnel.
Curtis halted where the water ran alongside the path. They were still quite a way from the back fence of the gîte. ‘Have you seen the big water rats that live here? They’re called coypu.’
Natasha drew back. ‘Rats? Bitey ones?’
Curtis kept hold of her hand. It was sweaty in his but if he let go he might not get up the courage to grab it again. ‘Not like ordinary rats. They’re cool because they used to be kept as pets and escaped into the wild. If we hang for a few minutes we might see one.’ Sure enough, before too long a coypu obligingly shoved off from the opposite bank and paddled ponderously to a nearby clump of weed.
‘Oh, cutie,’ breathed Natasha, misgivings about rats forgotten at the sight of the thick brown fur and chubby body. ‘He’s like a little otter but with a string tail.’
They crouched down beside the stream, the leaves above allowing drops of sunlight to dance across the water. ‘He doesn’t usually like humans to know this but his name’s Claude,’ Curtis offered, solemnly.
‘Bonjour Claude!’ Natasha called, laughing. ‘Oh, look, he’s brought his babies!’ Two smaller sleek brown backs glided in Claude’s wake, just visible above the water.
‘He’s so busy being a new dad he hasn’t told me their names yet. I think his wife’s leaving everything to him.’
‘Oh, one of those.’ Natasha nodded wisely, then sighed. ‘Let’s hope that Claude has given his babies a Cool Auntie Leah. That helps.’ Her smile flickered.
‘Une Tante Léonie, absolument.’ Curtis squeezed Natasha’s hand and wished he could protect her from her parents splitting up, Jordan’s mean moods and anything else that washed happiness from her face. It was a completely new feeling to him but he liked the tingly warmth of it.
He began to pull at the laces of his high-top Converses. ‘C’mon. Let’s get in. We can walk in the water and keep cool.’
Chapter Thirteen
When the teenagers had left and the last clothes were pegged to the line, Leah kicked off her sandals and flopped onto a lounger. ‘How long do you think we have?’
Ronan lowered himself onto the edge of the same lounger, his hip against her thigh. ‘They’ll probably take all of the two hours but we can’t rely on it. I’m thinking of tying bells round their necks.’ He lifted up her arm to touch a kiss to her healing graze and fading kaleidoscope of bruises. His eyes smiled. ‘You’ve no idea how much I’ve wanted time alone with you.’
Just for the Holidays Page 16