Just for the Holidays

by Sue Moorcroft

  ‘It would be irresponsible of either of us to let a thirteen-year-old travel up here alone without any arrangements in place for when he arrived. Anything could have happened.’

  ‘I knew where Natasha was from the Find Friends app and nothing did happen. And I’m nearly fourteen.’

  ‘True. But I wouldn’t let a fourteen-year-old boy travel up here alone, either, so the point is moot.’

  Curtis couldn’t remember much about moot points, though he knew they’d done them in English last year, so stuck to the part of the argument he understood. ‘But nothing happened. I looked up the trains, I bought the ticket and I got here. Orpington to Victoria, tube to Liverpool Street, train to Bettsbrough.’ He didn’t mention the knots in his stomach from fear and the moments that he’d at least half-wished that he’d stayed home and simply told his dad what he’d overheard his mum saying, and wait for the adults to sort it out. ‘So, maybe you ought to, like, trust me.’

  His dad raised an eyebrow a couple of millimetres. ‘How did you pay for the ticket?’

  Curtis let his gaze drop. ‘Mum’s credit card.’ He brought out his nearly empty wallet and handed it over. ‘I only kept it because I needed it to pick up the ticket from the machine.’

  His dad’s voice was like silk. ‘Using someone else’s credit card without their consent is deception, a criminal offence. And you want us to trust you? But we can circle back to that. You got here, you found Natasha at Leah’s – thank goodness – and you made yourself an uninvited guest. What did you expect to happen next?’

  Curtis shrugged. He hated it when adults asked unanswerable questions then waited with exaggerated patience for the answer.

  ‘Where would you stay tonight?’

  Well … here?

  ‘What would you do for food?’

  Leah always had loads of food.

  ‘When did you expect to come home? Have you bought a return ticket?’

  Unexpectedly, Curtis felt his eyes begin to burn. ‘No. Where’s home, anyway? Have I got one?’ His nose burned, too, and he had to give a giant sniff.

  His dad frowned. ‘Of course you have a home! With me.’ Then his voice gentled. ‘Is there more to this than taking off to see your girlfriend? Are you in trouble? Has something worried you? You can tell me. Whatever it is, I’ll help you sort it out.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Curtis said dolefully.

  ‘I will, you know. There’s nobody more important to me than you. You’ll have a home with me as long as you want it.’

  The love and concern in his dad’s voice turned the key on everything Curtis had been keeping tightly shut away. When he opened his mouth, what came out was suspiciously like a sob. ‘Mum’s planning to take me somewhere. I heard her on the phone to Darren. She said she was leaving as soon as she’d talked to me about it.’ Another treacherous sob escaped between his words. ‘I thought if she couldn’t talk to me, she couldn’t go. I thought she didn’t care what I wanted. I thought I might never see you again.’

  Then somehow his dad was kneeling beside him and pulling him against the comfort of his chest, growling, ‘I will never let that happen.’

  Curtis realised to his horror that he was proper crying, and every sob was so loud he was sure Natasha would hear.

  But he couldn’t stop.

  His dad just hugged him harder. ‘There’s got to be some explanation for what you overheard. Mum’s never purposely let you down.’

  ‘But I heard her.’

  ‘OK. When you’re ready, we’ll put my phone on speakerphone and talk to her together.’

  Curtis nodded and blew his nose on tissues from a box under Leah’s table but the tears took a while to stop.

  Finally, he got over himself, feeling sort of cleaned out but headachey. His dad rang his mum and put the phone on the table between them. Haltingly, encouraged by his dad, Curtis explained how he’d overheard her plans. He had to blow his nose again and take a gulp from his glass of Coke.

  His mum’s squawk of dismay sounded tinny over speakerphone. ‘I didn’t say I was going off somewhere and taking you with me!’

  ‘You said you were going to a whole new place!’

  She had to pause and blow her nose herself, which made Curtis feel a bit guilty. ‘Darren does want me to live with him again but what we were talking about was us declaring bankruptcy.’

  ‘Is that when you lose all your money, like in Monopoly?’

  ‘Kind of. But there’s more to it. It’s a financial state – Darren’s been talking to the Insolvency Service about it. You acknowledge that you can’t pay your debts and it means you can’t have certain things like a normal bank account or a mortgage. It’s good from the point of view of letting you leave your debts behind but it’s bad because of all the financial restrictions it brings with it. So that’s what I meant when I said it would take us to a “whole new place”. A new way of living.’

  ‘Oh.’ Curtis tried to digest the information. ‘I was scared you were going to take me away with Darren and I wouldn’t see Dad any more.’

  ‘Oh, Curtis!’ gasped his mum, tearfully. ‘It was your dad and me who split up. Neither of us has ever tried to stop the other seeing you. I might have made a lot of mistakes but I chose you a good dad.’

  It was his dad who had to blow his nose this time.

  When the phone call was over, Curtis wiped his face for the last time and drained his drink. ‘Sorry,’ he offered.

  His dad smiled the first proper smile since he’d arrived. ‘Promise me you won’t do anything like this again. You can’t run away from problems and put yourself in danger.’

  ‘I wanted to see Natasha, too, though. She didn’t speak to me for weeks then when she did I just wanted to be with her.’

  ‘I know. Heartache sucks, eh?’

  Curtis felt suddenly old. Or, at least, a bit more grown up. ‘Is that how you’ve been feeling about Leah?’

  His dad looked rueful. Then he looked as if he was fighting with himself. Finally he admitted, in that growl that he used when he really meant something, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because Mum spoiled it when she turned up in France?’

  His dad shrugged but his eyes looked as if he’d like to say ‘Yes’ to that, too.

  Curtis felt that rocky feeling inside that came with awkwardness between his parents. ‘Mum was desperate.’

  His dad nodded. ‘I know. And whatever has gone on between Mum and me, I won’t let her sleep in doorways. We’ll work something out.’

  Curtis got another glimpse of how it was to be a grown-up, to realise someone was protecting you by saying what you wanted to hear. And to suddenly see things from that person’s point of view. He sighed. ‘But that’s not fair. She’s got Darren, so you should be able to have a girlfriend, and Leah only went funny when Mum turned up to live with us.’

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  It was past seven when Ronan ushered Curtis into the kitchen where Leah was wiping surfaces, Natasha drifting about vaguely as if she were helping, and Michele drinking coffee at the table. Ronan looked tired but managed a smile that felt as if it were just for Leah.

  Natasha swung round when she saw Ronan. ‘You’re not going to take Curtis away, are you?’

  ‘Not till tomorrow.’ Ronan smiled. ‘How about I take you guys up for a flight experience before we head back?’

  ‘Did you fly here?’ Curtis demanded, having apparently given no thought to his dad’s method of arrival till now. ‘Cool beans!’

  ‘Amazeballs!’ breathed Natasha, eyes alight. ‘We can, can’t we, Mum? Can Dad come?’

  Voices rose in a babble as everyone tried to establish how many the aircraft seated – six and the pilot – and whether a pregnant woman and a man with his lower leg in plaster would make good passengers.

  Leah listened quietly as Ronan joked about getting Alister in the helicopter by shoving him in bum first, one thought having absorbed her while the father-son talk took place in her conservatory. Ronan had arrived
without Selina.

  And she’d have to be blind not to see the hunger in his eyes whenever he looked her way. In fact, she shied away from meeting his gaze in case he could read hers just as easily, the jumble of thoughts and emotions that she hadn’t yet acknowledged the full meaning of, even to herself.

  Taking refuge in what she did know about, Leah began supper.

  ‘Is Curtis invited? And Ronan?’ demanded Natasha.

  ‘Of course.’ Leah clattered busily with a heavy based pan.

  ‘To stay over?’ Natasha pressed hopefully, ignoring reprovingly raised eyebrows from her mother.

  ‘They can have the spare room if they want to.’ Leah reached down her chopping board.

  ‘That would be incredibly helpful, if it doesn’t put you out.’ Ronan didn’t bother hiding his relief.

  ‘Awesome.’ Curtis grinned.

  ‘Can I stay, too?’ added Natasha. ‘I could sleep on your sofa.’

  Feeling somehow that there might be safety in numbers, Leah agreed. ‘If your mum says it’s OK and you sleep on the chairbed in my room.’

  Michele glanced thoughtfully from Leah to Ronan. ‘It’s OK, if she’s not in your way. But I’ve got a mountain of marking so I’ll go now and see you tomorrow.’

  ‘Great,’ returned Natasha, unflatteringly, as Michele made for the door. ‘Hunger Games.’ And the kids disappeared back into the conservatory, shutting the adults out with the sliding door.

  The kitchen was suddenly ultra-quiet. The safety-in-numbers strategy hadn’t quite come off, Leah thought, as she foraged in the fridge for red and yellow peppers, courgette, onion, carrot, mushrooms and a lime.

  Ronan came up beside her. ‘Let me help.’

  His voice, so close to her ear, scrambled a squadron of butterflies. She decanted into the sink the veg and a handful of coriander from her pots on the windowsill. ‘Thanks. These need washing.’ Breezing around as if in a working kitchen, she collected her eight-inch knife, olive oil, soy sauce, chilli oil and a pack of fresh noodles. When he brought over the washed veg she put a light under the pan and added a splash of olive oil.

  After topping and tailing the onion she slit the jacket and shucked it off, halved the acid flesh, arranged the two parts flat side down and ch-ch-ch-chopped them in a couple of seconds. Then she threw the coriander on top, cross-chopped the two finely, tossed the mixture into the hot oil, shook and tossed it again, then began on the carrot and peppers.

  Ronan watched as Leah reduced the vegetables to a shredded rainbow across her chopping board. ‘I don’t know whether to be impressed or scared.’

  As he seemed at ease in the moment, not referring to what had gone between them in the past or might in the future, Leah relaxed enough to grin as she used the flat of her knife to scrape the veg into the pan. ‘Could you put plates in to warm, set the table and get us drinks? You’ve got about four minutes before you need to wrench the kids away from the DVD.’ She tossed the noodles and added soy sauce and chilli oil, halved the lime and squeezed the juice into the mixture.

  Five minutes later they were seated at the table, forking up sizzling stir-fry and chatting to Natasha and Curtis.

  Leah’s heart felt peculiar and bouncy. It made her leap up as soon as the stir-fry had vanished. ‘Chocolate baskets! We didn’t get around to making muffins so let’s go with fresh fruit and chocolate sauce.’

  The next hour passed in a happy clamour as Leah demonstrated how to artistically arrange strawberries and grapes they had washed and halved, before she whipped up chocolate sauce on the hob. Then Curtis and Natasha took phone videos and before-and-after photos as Leah swooshed on the hot sauce and the baskets began to melt. Then every scrap was eaten, even the fruit, since it was satisfactorily coated in chocolate.

  The clearing up was accomplished with lots of slacking, giggling and getting in each other’s way. Ronan tried to send the kids off to finish watching Hunger Games but they were too hyped to settle and brimmed with noisy jokes and laughter. With mixed feelings about having almost no time alone with Ronan, Leah embarked on meeting everyone’s needs in the way of bedclothes and towels and, finally, what seemed like hours later, the teens yawned enough to be despatched to their respective beds.

  Finding herself in a queue for her own bathroom, Leah slipped back downstairs to brew a nice solitary cup of fresh mint tea in the hope it would help her sleep, even with Ronan in the next room.

  She was just deciding that now was the ideal time to text Scott, having waited in vain for him to contact her with an explanation that would stop her feeling hollow and dismal whenever she thought about him, when Ronan padded into the kitchen and shut the door.

  He was still wearing a white shirt with epaulettes and black trousers but his feet were bare. With no regard for whether she wanted him in her personal space, he moved straight into it and took her hands. ‘I’m so grateful that Natasha was at your house and for the app that brought Curtis to her. Thank you for being someone he saw as a safe harbour and giving him a place to be until I got here. For giving us somewhere to stay. And just for being you.’ He lowered his head and brushed a kiss against her mouth, moving closer until their bodies fit together as if they’d never been apart. ‘You smell of chocolate,’ he murmured. ‘The rich, dark, slightly bitter kind.’

  Leah’s stomach flipped like a pancake and she melted against him as he made the kiss deeper, stroking her tongue with his, cradling her as if she were precious. Growing hard against her and making the sort of approving noise that wasn’t a word but said a lot.

  By the time the kiss ended he was breathing hard. ‘And thanks for not asking me to apologise for that.’ He backed away. Slowly.

  Leah, watching him turn and head back upstairs, wasn’t sure she could speak anyway.

  Leah woke on Sunday morning to the sound of a man’s voice. Natasha was an unmoving bump under her covers so Leah crept to the top of the stairs to listen. Ronan was standing in her hall, sounding assured and professional, arranging for fuel and notifying someone of his intention to take a family up on a flight experience.

  As he ended the call, Leah bolted for her bedroom to dress. When she made it downstairs it was to find coffee brewing and Ronan flipping through an Autosport magazine that Scott had left a couple of days ago.

  Ronan, though his expression said he had other things on his mind, was back to treating her with restrained courtesy. ‘As we’re not all going to fit into your Porsche, do you think Michele would drive us to the airfield in The Pig?’

  Leah nodded. ‘But I think her mob could do with a little time together so I’ll take you in the Porsche.’ She made the necessary calls to Alister and Michele then made pancakes to eat with fruit for breakfast, because she hadn’t expected all these houseguests and really didn’t have much else.

  During the drive to the airfield, Ronan chatted about his return to work and how his boss had been prepared to let Ronan take a fall to help him out of a financial cesspit. ‘To be fair, he came good in letting me bring Buzzair Three to find Curtis, but it still stings.’

  ‘What a shit.’ Leah glanced away from the road. ‘Aren’t you furious?’

  He shrugged. ‘I was. Now I’m just sad our friendship meant so little to him.’

  Friendship. It made Leah think of Scott, who still hadn’t contacted her, even though she’d left messages. She parked at the airfield and when The Pig lumbered up to disgorge its passengers the mood was all excitement over the impending flight as everyone oohed and ahhed over the gleaming silver helicopter, watching Ronan perform mysterious checks that on occasion seemed as basic as giving bits of the aircraft a shake.

  ‘Right, come on,’ Ronan called, when he was satisfied, and they scurried to join him, except Alister, who hopped, having stowed his crutches in The Pig. Ronan gave a briefing about what to expect, then got Alister in first. He continued to allocate seats and harness people into them until only Leah remained. He closed and fastened the back doors, then opened the front and showed her where t
o put her foot and hand to swing up into the co-pilot’s seat, a stick between her knees and her feet cradled by rudder pedals. He fastened her harness, managing to barely touch her, and then set everyone up with a headset.

  As he took his own seat, Leah suddenly found her heart pounding. It wasn’t from fear of flying – or crashing. It was from the sinking realisation that she and Ronan had talked about nothing important and after this flight was over she would be left on the ground, waving goodbye as he whirred off into the sky to fly Curtis back to their real life in Orpington.

  Ronan swung up into his seat and performed an audio check, voices loud in Leah’s ears as everyone acknowledged into their microphones. He explained some of the dials on his instrument panel, Jordan asked where the parachutes were, Natasha giggled a lot. Then everybody went quiet as the power came in and the rotors whup-whup-whupped above them, first slowly, then escalating into a blur as Ronan talked officialese to the tower.

  Afterwards, Leah had trouble recalling the take-off. She remembered the helicopter dropping its nose as if for a last look at the ground and the slow sweep to skim above the ground away from other parked helicopters. Then suddenly she was high above the world, the kids all talking at once over the headsets.

  Ronan’s reassuring voice broke into the babble. ‘So we’re up at about fifteen hundred feet. Is everybody OK? If I was doing my own job, this is where I’d start pointing out London landmarks. But as this is your home turf, maybe you can do the honours. We’re approaching Bettsbrough now.’

  It didn’t seem possible that they’d covered in three minutes in a helicopter what took twenty minutes in a car. It was amazing, Leah thought, as Natasha and Jordan competed to identify churches and supermarkets. The aircraft bobbed and banked like a giant bee and Leah watched the scenery scrolling beneath them.

  Ronan’s voice intruded on her thoughts. ‘The others can’t hear us.’

  She removed her gaze from between her feet where she’d been watching toy cars threading along a toy road. ‘Why’s that?’