by Sue Wallman
Our low-key sniggers turn into proper laughs, and Marc pretends to be hurt. “All right, all right,” he says.
“I run a bit,” says Steve. “5k, mostly.”
Silence. He’s killed the conversation. He blushes slightly and pushes his glasses up his nose.
“I went to my first spinning class the other day,” says Mum. “Anyone tried that?”
I’m grateful to Baz for snuffling up to me. I pat my thighs and he jumps his front legs up and I scoop his back ones up so that he’s sitting in my lap, very pleased with himself.
“Don’t let him get too close to the cake,” warns Auntie Gabs.
I pull my chair back and stroke him under his chin, which blisses him out.
“He’s so cute,” says Tatum, leaning across to touch one of his ears. It twitches and he looks at her adoringly as if he understands what she’s said.
“I’m going to make Baz a bow tie,” says Poppy. She makes a fan shape out of a napkin and twists it in the middle.
I hold it against Baz’s neck. “It really suits him,” I say. Baz is pissed off and tries to eat the napkin, and the others laugh at my surprised face.
I tug the napkin away from him but he holds on tight. “He sometimes chokes on paper,” says Poppy anxiously.
I tug some more but Baz thinks it’s a game.
“Here, Baz,” says Tatum. She holds out her palm with a small piece cake on it.
Baz drops the napkin immediately to wolf it down, and Ivy catches it.
Elaine says, “That dog is so greedy.”
Gabs says, “Yes, he’ll eat anything. No more feeding him. He’s supposed to be on a diet.”
“I gather you and Steve are spending a couple of nights away,” says Elaine to Mum. She smiles but her tone is disapproving. That’s standard for her. “What a shame. Coming all this way and then going off again.”
“It’s the only time we could do it,” says Mum. “Leah’s staying. I wouldn’t be able to drag her away.”
I widen my eyes at the horror of being dragged away to visit Steve’s sister.
“I thought this week was about being together,” says Elaine.
“Two nights, that’s all,” says Mum. “You won’t be any bother, will you, Leah?”
Before I have a chance to say anything sarcastic, Auntie Gabs says, “None of them will be. They’re all lovely. And Ivy’s been a real support to me this year what with one thing and another.” She glances at Poppy, who lowers her head further over her colouring.
“Well done, Ivy,” says Elaine, and then spoils it by saying, “Jakob could do with being a bit more responsible.”
“Cheers, Mum,” says Jakob.
“Before I forget,” says Auntie Gabs, “I’ve put Tatum in with you, Leah, if that’s OK with you?”
“Oh,” I say. I know she’s not really asking if it’s OK with me. She’s telling me. I’m not used to sharing a room and I’d have liked more of a heads-up. “Er…” Everyone’s looking at me. There are two beds in my room. I guess it makes sense, but I hate the way Auntie Gabs is beaming at me as if having a random stranger in my room is nothing.
“It’ll be fun,” she says.
“It’s fine,” I say briskly.
“I’m having two beds this holiday,” says Poppy. “One downstairs and one upstairs.”
Everyone looks at Auntie Gabs.
“Tell them, Mum.”
Auntie Gabs nods. “The thing is, Poppy sometimes has difficulty with stairs, so I said I’d make up an airbed for her in the little lounge next to the conservatory, and she can decide each night if she wants to sleep there or in with Ivy.”
“Oh, right,” says Mum. “Good idea.”
“I might have a think about two beds for myself next year if Marc doesn’t stop snoring,” says Elaine. I think it’s her attempt at lightening the mood.
Last year Poppy was running around the house like your average seven-year-old. Now she has difficulty with stairs like an elderly relative.
“We’ll do the airbed now, if you want,” says Ivy. She means us, the Amigos plus Tatum.
“Would you?” says Auntie Gabs. “Thank you, my lovely.”
We’re eager to leave the adults. Poppy comes with us, her legs stiff and fragile.
“Jakob, don’t forget your violin practice,” calls Elaine after us.
“Tatum’s not too bad,” I whisper to Ivy as we pick up the bed, duvet, pillow and fleecy blanket Auntie Gabs brought in from the car and left in the hallway.
“Yes,” Ivy says. “A probationary Amigo, maybe.”
I wouldn’t go that far.
In the little lounge, Poppy sits on one of the stiff armchairs and watches while the rest of us assemble the bed how she likes it. She shows us the little two-way radio Auntie Gabs has borrowed for the week, with three receivers, so that she can call her mum or Ivy in the night if she needs them. When the bed’s ready, Ivy suggests she tests it out, and while she’s lying there, I flop down beside her and pretend to snore, then Baz joins us, followed by Jakob and Ivy, and Tatum stands over us and says, “That airbed is going to deflate any second now with all your weight on it.”
We scramble off, Baz barking with excitement, Jakob searching for his hat, Ivy and me trying to get the bedding sorted again, Poppy announcing she’s going back to the kitchen, and I say, “Let’s go up to the attic.”
THREE
We have our allotted positions. Jakob and I have a saggy sofa each, and Ivy likes to nestle down into the armchair. There are beanbags too, but we tend to use those for throwing at each other or games.
The attic’s a long way from the kitchen and lounge – down a corridor, across a hallway, another corridor, up a set of stairs, along the landing to another staircase, narrower and steeper. It means the adults rarely bother us when we’re up here.
We raced to keep ourselves warm, pointing out the treacherous section of loose carpet on the first set of stairs to Tatum, the Amigos jostling each other against the wall on the attic staircase, while Tatum kept a slight distance, and now Jakob is out of breath.
He points to the sofa nearest the bookshelves. “Tatum, you have that. I’ll share with Leah.” He bounces onto my sofa and snatches at the tartan blanket on the back of it.
“Hey!” I tussle it from him and shake it out, so that it covers both of us up to our waists as we sit at either end.
There’s a blanket on the other sofa and on the armchair too. Tatum picks hers up slowly, hunched up from the cold.
“Even when the boiler works, it’s freezing up here,” I tell her. “At least you’re wearing a jumper. Jakob should have listened to his mum.”
Jakob curls up under his section of blanket and pulls his hat down even further. “I’m too cold to get a jumper. I’ll die on the way.”
“It’s gloomy up here, even with the lights on,” says Tatum. “Why aren’t there any blinds or curtains?”
There’s a window near the desk, a skylight that opens on to the roof, and a couple of Velux windows on the slopey part. The room could do with being cosied-up, it’s true, but the sofas are comfy and there are blankets.
I point at a light bulb which has blown. “That’s why it’s gloomy.”
“So what do you do up here?” asks Tatum. She pulls her phone from her jeans pocket. “No signal. Seriously?”
“We once got one near the desk,” I say. “For about thirty seconds. Sometimes you can get one by the fridge in the kitchen, but the nearest guaranteed place is by the wall at the end of the drive.”
Tatum stands up and wafts her phone around the desk, up high then low, angling her screen so she can see it. We watch with interest but zero expectation. “Nothing,” she says and returns to the sofa with a massive sigh. “No offence, but this place is a shithole. My bedroom smells of damp, and the toilet handle needs pushing down three times before it will flush.”
We take a second or two to register this. Ivy straightens up in her armchair, and Jakob says, “Whoa,” under his breath.
“No offence, but I don’t think you had anywhere else to go, did you?” I say, letting my blanket drop a moment.
“My dad’s working in Dubai. I could have gone there. Sunshine. A pool. Maid service.”
“So why didn’t you?” asks Jakob.
Tatum is doing something with her phone. “Mum said with Dad working it would be boring and I’d have more fun here.” She looks up, hoping we get her irony.
“Give Roeshot House a chance,” says Ivy.
“You need to go through the initiation ceremony,” says Jakob.
Tatum places her phone down beside her. “You have an initiation ceremony?”
Jakob tweaks my big toe under the blanket. “Yeah, you have to drink our blood.”
I nod.
Tatum’s head jerks back. “What?”
Ivy and I laugh. “We once did that,” Ivy says. “Sort of.”
I explain that we pricked our thumbs with a needle and each added a drop of blood into half a glass of champagne we nicked from downstairs then sipped a tiny bit of it to swear allegiance to each other. “At the time it was pretty exciting. We were a lot younger.”
“Ew,” says Tatum. “That’s vile. You might have got some disgusting disease.”
“Yeah,” says Jakob. “I googled it afterwards. I wouldn’t do it again.”
“We used to have an Amigo salute,” I say. “It was the Brownie salute but with two fingers, crossed for luck. There was a sequence to it.”
The three of us sit up straight and salute as one, and Ivy says, “Hmm, that was after Marc made us sit through some old war film, and Leah was into dystopian novels.”
Tatum sniffs the cushion on her sofa, then places it behind her head. “What d’you do these days?”
“We always come up with something,” says Ivy, which sounds vague but is the best way of explaining how it is.
“Jakob likes reading out sex scenes in books that other people have left up here,” I say.
“True,” says Jakob. “Very true.”
“Remember when we fenced with bananas?” I say, giggling. “I was doing really well but then my banana skin split and a bit of banana landed on the floor.” I point to the patch of floor near the door, and I snort as I remember, “And … and…” I can’t speak now for hysterical laughter. “She … she…” I point at Ivy.
“I slipped on it,” says Ivy and re-enacts the moment and my stomach aches from laughing.
“Right,” says Tatum. She re-tucks her blanket round her feet.
I stop laughing. She’s only a year older than us but she clearly thinks we’re really childish.
“We do normal things too,” says Jakob, “like talk, listen to music, watch films.”
“And make predictions,” says Ivy.
“Oooh,” says Tatum, perking up finally.
“We keep them in a secret place,” I say. “We tick off any that come true.”
“Can I see?” asks Tatum.
“No, they’re boring,” says Jakob.
“Yeah,” says Ivy. “They need chucking away.” She can’t help looking at the rug. The predictions lie underneath, in the floor cavity, accessed via a floorboard that’s never fitted properly.
I bite my lip. Last year’s predictions were far from boring. They freaked us out.
Tatum moans. “You guys are no fun.”
“Tell us some interesting things about you, Tatum,” I say. I move closer to Jakob, so I can have more blanket. He rearranges his long legs and lets me slide in between him and the back of the sofa. It’s a lot warmer like this.
“Ah, so cute, you two,” says Ivy. She brings out her phone to take a photo, and Jakob and I tilt our heads towards each other and pout obligingly for her.
“How many interesting things d’you want to know?” asks Tatum.
“As many as you can think of,” says Ivy.
“OK…” says Tatum. “My favourite subject is Film Studies. I want to go to film school. I live in London. I’ve recently split up with my boyfriend because he was becoming too needy. We went out together for about eighteen months.”
I’ve never met anyone who talked about film school as if it were a serious possibility. None of us Amigos have been out with anyone, and eighteen months – that’s a considerable length of time.
“Another interesting fact: for my next birthday I’m going skydiving, a tandem jump with my dad,” says Tatum.
“Wow,” says Ivy.
“I’m going to wear two different cameras on my helmet,” says Tatum, and she veers off into explaining which cameras.
Jakob sits up. “That’s awesome.”
“My dad would never do that,” I say, but I shouldn’t have. I don’t want to think about him, and I’ve broken the unspoken pact. I make an apologetic face to Ivy.
She lifts a hand a tiny bit to mean don’t worry, it’s OK.
“Yup, my dad can be quite cool when he tries,” says Tatum.
Jakob changes the subject, saying, “We like a good ghost story. Leah’s the best at telling them. But here’s the thing – she hates scary films. How does that work?”
“I’m complicated, that’s how,” I say.
Tatum says, “I love scary films.” Right on cue, the window by the desk rattles from the wind outside and there’s a mournful screeching coming from somewhere. “What’s that?” she asks, clutching her blanket.
Ivy and I laugh.
“A fox in the woods behind the house. Don’t panic,” says Jakob, the Amigo who understands the country best, even though he’d rather be living in London, New York or Milan. I live on the coast, where it’s all about seagulls and mists off the sea, and people eating sandwiches in cars.
“I hate foxes,” says Tatum. “They just stand and stare when I’m walking home on my own, and they chew our recycling bins. One went through a cat flap three doors down from us and we could hear our neighbour screaming from our house.”
“I’d have screamed too,” I say.
The sound, like someone being attacked, comes again, and I’m glad I’m inside, safe and relatively warm, wedged up against Jakob. Ivy aims a table-tennis ball for the bowl on the shelves, on the other side of the room. It lands with a hollow plastic ping followed by lots of little bouncy pings. “Yesss!” she says. There was a table-tennis table up here for a few years until the legs kept collapsing. She misses it.
“Ivy,” I say cautiously. “I didn’t realize Poppy was so ill. That’s really tough.”
Ivy seems to sink into the armchair. “Her health is up and down. I guess I haven’t properly noticed her getting worse because I see her every day,” she says. “It’s kind of tiring looking after her though. Especially when Mum has one of her days. You know, when things get too much for her.”
“That sucks,” says Tatum in too cheerful a voice.
“We can help you this week,” I say.
“Thanks,” Ivy says. “She’s quite a sweet kid, really.”
“Remember her panda phase?” says Jakob. “When she’d be in a strop if she couldn’t wear black-and-white clothes?”
Ivy rolls her eyes. “She’s out of that, thank goodness, but she’s still into pandas. I’ve promised that when she’s well enough I’ll take her to see a real one in Edinburgh zoo. She loves the live panda cam.”
“There’s a live panda cam?” asks Tatum. She picks up her phone before remembering there’s no signal and chucks it back down beside her.
Jakob shifts further down the sofa, taking too much blanket with him, and asks us what our most tragic Christmas presents were. Nothing has ever topped the Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas (age 4–5) he was given by his godfather a couple of years ago. He brought them to Roeshot House and modelled the stretched-to-the-max top for us, but we drew the line at him leaping around in the bottoms.
We hear the sound of a gong far away. It must be an adult hitting it because there are three perfectly timed rings. If it was Poppy there would have been a frenzied bashing. Maybe she doesn’t have the st
rength to do it any more.
“Time for dinner,” Jakob says to Tatum. He throws back the blanket and rushes to gain a head start.
FOUR
I’m not surprised to see Clive in the kitchen. He owns and runs the holiday rental company Pinhurst Properties, which consists of a few holiday homes in the area. He’s often here fixing things, and Elaine had said he was coming to sort out the boiler, but I’m surprised to see the boy with him. He’s around our age: a real-life Pinhurst teenager. I catch the look of boredom on his face as we charge in, but he switches to a smile.
“Hi there,” says Clive to us, lifting his toolbox. “Boiler’s up and running again. We’ll leave you good people to eat your meal in peace. It does smell nice, I must say.”
“It’s Elaine’s signature dish,” says Auntie Gabs.
I picture thick gravy spelling out Elaine’s signature. I’ve seen her writing on birthday and Christmas cards. It’s very precise.
“Lovely to see you, Clive,” says Mum. “And you, Evan.”
“Yes, he’s sixteen now. Time for him to earn his keep,” says Clive. He laughs heartily, while Evan cringes, but in a way that suggests he gets on all right with his dad. He’s not as tall as Jakob but he’s sturdier. He looks down to the floor and notices that I’m wearing the same trainers as him. I smile as he raises an eyebrow in recognition.
Clive shifts his toolbox to his other hand, and Marc says, “Is business booming?”
“Not too bad,” says Clive. “All things considered.”
“Market not as buoyant as it was? Grown the business too fast?” Marc says.
Elaine takes hold of Marc’s arm. “Food’s on the table. Don’t get into a long conversation.”
“It’s just this house,” says Evan defensively. “The rest are doing well.”
“Oh?” says Tatum, leaning in towards him. “Why’s that? Maybe you should install Wi-Fi.”
“Well, people saw the news and—” Evan suddenly freezes, as if realizing he’s just made a terrible error. His face reddens as his eyes flick to his dad.
“What news?” asks Tatum.
“Evan!” snaps his dad.
“Sounds intriguing,” says Tatum.