by Sue Wallman
Auntie Gabs is placing a bowl of rice on the table. She lets it drop the last little bit so it wobbles for a second, threatening to tip over.
Mum is right behind her with green beans. She gives us a proper reaction. “Oh, Jakob. You look … what a transformation!”
His parents are by the oven. “What’s going on?” says Marc. He’s frowning.
“Let me introduce my sister, Jane,” says Tatum, with a large grin.
She’s pitching it so wrong. I shrivel with awkwardness by the fridge.
“We just picked Jane up from the coach,” continues Tatum. “She’s doing a little holiday swap with your son, Jakob. She’ll be with us for dinner. Please make her feel welcome.” She opens her arm in a theatrical gesture. “Jane, please meet Jakob’s parents. They aren’t normally lost for words.” Finally she stops.
“Ta-da!” says Jakob. His voice is too small. The air has thinned.
“Is this a dare?” asks Elaine.
“I guess so,” says Jakob.
“You look absurd,” says Marc.
Elaine’s face is tight. “D’you want to explain this, Jakob?”
“It’s funny – don’t you think it’s funny?” says Jakob.
Before she can reply, Marc says coldly. “Go upstairs and sort yourself out.”
“Sort myself out?” says Jakob.
“Just go!” roars Marc.
Jakob goes, his cheeks bright with more than blusher.
Elaine fixes her gaze on Tatum. “I presume you’re responsible for that dye. Is it permanent?”
“Er, yes. But he can cut the ends off if his school gives him grief.”
Steve, who has blended into the background until now, says, “It’s a creative way to spend the afternoon, I suppose.” Master of the unhelpful comment.
Elaine glares at him.
“Count yourself lucky you don’t have children,” says Marc. “Especially a teenager.”
Steve reels slightly, and takes his glasses off and polishes them with the bottom of his sweatshirt.
Auntie Gabs clears her throat. “Come on, you two, you’ll be laughing about this next year. There are far bigger things to worry about.” Like your husband dying and your kid being ill is what she probably means, except she’s more considerate of Elaine’s feelings.
“I like a joke, Gabs,” says Marc. “But that was pushing things too far.”
We eat stiffly. Gabs thanks Steve for driving all the way to the supermarket in Riddingham for the chillies for the Thai fishcakes. She doesn’t know how she managed to forget them. The adults talk about a drama series from years ago. Poppy draws a zigzag design on the inside of her wrist in felt-tip pen and tells us that she’s going to have a tattoo as soon as she can.
“Eighteen,” says Ivy.
Poppy says, “I’ll make my own until then.”
We wait for Jakob to reappear, but he doesn’t. As we stack our plates and Mum assembles pudding for the next course, out of meringue, cream and strawberries, I suggest taking up some food for him.
“Leave him, Leah,” says Marc.
Someone needs to tell him it should be OK for Jakob to experiment like that. I wish Tatum hadn’t made it into something so awkward. Or pushed it so far.
Mum places dessert on the table.
“That looks good,” says Steve.
Mum smiles. “Before you ask, Gabs, no I didn’t make the meringues.”
“Where’s Baz?” asks Poppy.
“Asleep in the lounge,” says Auntie Gabs.
“I heard he ate something on the walk,” says Marc.
Auntie Gabs sighs. “I’ve got him under observation. I’ll have to take him to the vet tomorrow if he’s still not well.”
As we clear the table, Tatum whispers that Jakob should have stood up for himself better.
“He wouldn’t have wanted a massive row,” I whisper back, but I wonder if she’s right.
“What does everyone want to do this evening?” asks Auntie Gabs. She sounds tired.
Elaine pours herself another glass of wine from the bottle that’s been cleared away to the counter. “Quick game of cards, Gabs? Then I’ll take a sandwich up to Jakob.”
“Mum, Baz isn’t in the lounge,” says Poppy.
“Oh,” says Auntie Gabs. “Did anyone let him outside?”
“He might have got out when I went to get more wood for the fire,” says Steve. He goes to open the back door and calls for him. He uses the wrong intonation – it’s too polite.
“I’ll go and find him,” says Auntie Gabs. “Poppy, go and do your teeth and get into bed. You had a late night yesterday, so it’s early to bed this evening.”
“Are you sleeping upstairs or downstairs?” asks Ivy.
“Downstairs,” says Poppy.
“Sure?” I say. I don’t want to remind her about her nightmare, but surely sleeping in the same room as Ivy would be better.
“I like the little lounge,” says Poppy.
“All right,” says Ivy, “but call me on the walkie-talkie if you need anything. Mum needs her sleep.” To Elaine, she says, “We’ll skip the cards and go upstairs.”
As we leave the kitchen, Ivy points to her hoodie pocket and whispers to me, “Biscuits and sweets for Jakob.”
Jakob is lying on his bed, changed into his tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, his face clear of make-up, his pink-tipped hair mesmerizing. “Hi,” he says without enthusiasm. “That didn’t go so well, did it?”
“Forget about it,” I say, sitting on his bed. “We’re here to cheer you up.”
Ivy empties her pocket and Jakob perks up. He unwraps a chocolate and shoves it into his mouth.
“Your mum’s bringing up a sandwich soon,” Ivy says and apologizes for us having persuaded him to go downstairs dressed as a girl.
Strictly speaking, it was Tatum who dared him.
Tatum picks up the can of hair mousse on his bedside table and says, “This brand’s rubbish. You need to up your game now your hair is more out there.” She wanders over to the music stand in the corner of the room, next to his closed violin case, and thumbs through the music. “Being able to read music must be cool.”
Jakob shrugs and sits up. His nose is reddish, as if he might have been crying. “My dad does my head in. He goes on about things being appropriate or inappropriate. Like who is he to decide that?”
I scootch further on to the bed to make room for the other two. “Sorry to break it to you, Jakob, but your dad is nowhere near as annoying as Steve. Have you seen his polishing-the-glasses routine? He’s always pushing them up his nose too. Why doesn’t he go to an optician and get them tightened if they keep slipping down? And have you heard him grunt when he sits down?”
Ivy’s laughing.
“I could go on,” I say.
“Go on,” she says.
“He’s always losing his effing binoculars. He can have whole conversations about those binoculars. About the high-spec optics. How they were some big present from his dad back in the day.”
“I don’t know,” says Tatum. “Steve doesn’t seem too bad to me.” She pulls a face as if something’s just occurred to her. “Obsessed with binoculars, though? Like, how obsessed? He doesn’t look out of the window with them when you’re sunbathing or anything like that, does he?”
I recoil. “No. He’s weird enough without any of that stuff. He rubs his bald patch like this. Have you seen him do that? And when he concentrates his mouth is open like this.” I do an impression.
“You do this when you’re concentrating, Leah,” says Ivy. She gently chews the inside of her lip.
Jakob sits up. “You’re so right, Ivy! She does.”
I do it, and they laugh.
It makes me laugh too.
Tatum has zoned out of the conversation. She’s trying to find a signal on her phone. I don’t know why she bothers. We’ve tried before in every inch of our bedrooms, and we’ve told her that.
There’s a knock on the door, and we shout, “Come in!�
�� Tatum calls, “Is it room service?”
Elaine comes in with a tray – there are two sandwiches and a glass of milk. The sandwich is surrounded by cutup chunks of tomato and cucumber. “Ooh, salad garnish too,” says Tatum, but Ivy and I don’t laugh because we don’t want to antagonize Elaine. When she’s in a mood, she can be scary. She looks as if she has something to say, but it’s not what we expect.
“Baz didn’t come up here, did he?” Elaine asks with a frown. “He’s not coming when he’s called. Gabs is really worried about him.”
“I’m going to look for him,” says Ivy.
“I’ll come,” I say.
“Outside?” says Tatum. “Yes, me too. You can join us when you’ve eaten your sandwich, Jakob.”
Elaine comes downstairs with us. Mum and Steve are putting their coats on.
“Baz doesn’t normally run off, does he?” asks Mum.
Ivy shakes her head. “Only if he’s chasing a squirrel or something.”
“He was wobbly when he was upstairs earlier,” I say. “All the coughing and little splatters of blood. Not his usual self at all.” My stomach is balled-up with the worry I see on everyone’s faces.
As we step outside we hear Gabs calling Baz’s name over and over down at the bottom of the drive. Marc appears down the side of the house. “No sign of him in the back garden,” he says. “He must have gone out of the gate.”
We walk down the drive as Marc explains how we can split up and look for Baz in the surrounding roads.
Tatum stops walking and looks at a little heap of clothing next to the bins – then moves away to be sick into a bush.
Ivy and I go closer and see it’s not clothing at all.
It’s Baz.
His head is smashed in, jaw open, swollen tongue split. His bloodied body is stiff with death.
We scream at exactly the same time.
THIRTEEN
We huddle together in the lounge, apart from Poppy, who’s already asleep in the little lounge, and nobody wants to think about how she’ll react when she’s told the news. Jakob has come downstairs and I was the one who had to tell him the news. Ivy cries uncontrollably on the sofa between Auntie Gabs and Elaine; I’ve never seen her like this before, and I hate that nothing any of us says can calm her down. Eventually she cries herself into a stupor, and clutches her head, saying she needs painkillers, which Elaine fetches.
“We’ll report the hit-and-run to the police tomorrow,” says Marc. “Cars go through the village at quite a speed.”
“Baz must have tried to get back to us and only made it as far as the bins,” says Elaine. She puts her hand over her mouth. The thought of Baz dying on his own by the bins is horrific.
“They’d have to have known they’d hit something,” says Auntie Gabs. “Despicable not to stop.” She shakes her head. “I don’t think Baz was himself when he went out of the gate. Perhaps he collapsed before he was run over. But the person still should have stopped.” She lets out a sob.
“I’ve covered his body,” says Marc. “I’ll speak to Clive in the morning. See if he minds us burying him, or whether he’d rather we took him somewhere for, erm, disposal.”
“As long as he doesn’t go where Rose Strathmortimer was buried,” says Tatum.
All three Amigos glare at her. Does she say those stupid things on purpose, or does she never think before she speaks? It’s like she’s enjoying this.
The temperature in the room is falling. The adults have let the fire die down, and the heating must have gone off. I’m so tired, but every time I close my eyes I see Baz, his grotesquely damaged body and his fur matted with blood.
“Why don’t we have some more tea or hot chocolate?” suggests Auntie Gabs.
“I’ll make tea,” I say.
Mum follows me into the kitchen where I cry into a folded tea towel. I didn’t think I had any more tears left. Mum hugs me. The weight of her arms and the smell of her are so familiar and comforting that I’m still for a moment.
“I won’t go away tomorrow if you don’t want me to,” she says softly.
I move away to get some kitchen roll for my nose. “No, you should go,” I say. I don’t want to be around Steve.
I wake from a restless sleep to the sound of Poppy shouting and crying, and I look across at Tatum, who winces from her bed. Wordlessly, we decide to stay in bed longer.
A while later there’s a knock at the door, and Jakob comes in with his duvet round his shoulders.
I can’t stop looking at his pink-tipped hair.
“Did you hear the car?” he asks. “Clive’s here. He’s burying Baz in the back garden with Gabs and Poppy. I knocked on Ivy’s door to see if she was OK, but there was no answer. D’you think we should check on her?”
I scramble out of bed. Ivy’s not in her room. I run downstairs and find her in the kitchen sitting at the table, gazing at a mug of tea. The lights are off. She gives me a half-smile. “I know they’re outside burying Baz, but I’ve already said goodbye to him. I don’t need to watch him being buried.”
“I understand,” I say. I look down at my T-shirt, leggings and bare feet, and wish I’d spent a couple of seconds layering up.
“Put your coat on if you’re cold,” suggests Ivy.
We wore our coats up to bed last night because the house was so cold. The only one here on the hooks by the back door is Steve’s. It smells of his horrible aftershave and I can’t bring myself to put it on, so I go into the lounge for a blanket to drape over me. The room is freezing and I’ve never really noticed how dark and heavy the furniture is in here.
Back in the kitchen, Ivy’s been joined by Jakob and Tatum, and Steve is looking around for his binoculars. Again.
“I’ve looked everywhere,” he mutters. “I’m not sure when I last had them. Perhaps it was…”
There are noises by the back door, and Clive, Auntie Gabs and Poppy trudge in, bringing air that slices through us. Ivy gets up and goes to hug Poppy, who, standing there in her skinny jeans, appears more frail than ever. Her face is puffy from crying.
“I’m so sorry about Baz,” I say to her.
“He was the best dog ever,” sobs Poppy, putting her hands out to steady herself on a chair. She sits down. “He was, like, my only friend.”
I exchange glances with Jakob. I don’t know what to say.
“He was lucky to have you,” says Jakob. “He had a nice life with you.” He places his arm round her shoulder and gives her a mini hug so as not to hurt her.
“Thanks for offering to help me dig the hole,” Clive says to Steve. “I thought there was an old coal shovel in the garage, but I could only find the gardening spade.”
Steve nods. I think to myself, if he was the one to let Baz out, he should have dug the hole himself.
Mum appears at the back door with some scissors and twigs with little yellow flowers. “I thought we could put some winter jasmine in a jam jar for Baz’s grave.”
“That’s nice,” says Auntie Gabs. “But Elaine and Marc have gone into Riddingham to buy a plant to mark the grave. You’ll have a cup of tea with us, won’t you, Clive?”
“All right,” he says. “A quick one. Thanks.” He asks if he can wash his hands, then sits down on a chair, groaning as he does. Somehow it’s not as annoying as when Steve does his sitting-down grunt. “Stiff back,” Clive says. “Not been right for a couple of months, since some idiot swung into this drive too fast, not expecting me and my van to be there. It could have been really nasty, the speed he was going.”
“Car accident?” asks Tatum. She looks at us, her eyes knowing.
Someone in this house will be in a car accident, she mouths. I pray she doesn’t say anything out loud.
Mum says something about physiotherapy and Jakob motions we should go up to the attic. Poppy has taken the twigs from Mum and is carefully arranging them in a glass tumbler. She doesn’t need us right now.
The four of us slide out of the room. As soon as we’re in the attic, Tatum takes
out her phone and says, “We should discuss this on camera.”
“For God’s sake,” I say, but we’re all talking over each other, so I let her get on with it. She’ll have rubbish footage.
The prediction was “Someone in this house will be in a car accident”. Clive wasn’t in the house when the prediction was made.
But he was in a car accident on the grounds. How likely is that?
He’s connected to the house. He owns it.
Maybe he WAS in the house when we did the predictions. He might have dropped something round when we were in the attic and we didn’t know.
How long do predictions last? For the year? Or longer?
You’ve got to admit it’s creepy.
Ivy holds her hand up to shut us up. “What about ‘Someone in this house will die’? Do you think that’s Baz? I know he’s not a person but he was a member of the family. When Poppy was little she told her teacher that she had a brother called Baz.”
“A dog’s not the same as a person,” says Tatum. She holds her phone steady as she films. “No, I think we can only tick off the car accident.”
FOURTEEN
Mum calls us from the bottom of the stairs. “Leah, Steve and I are going now.”
I race downstairs, still with the blanket round my shoulders. I say a brief “Bye then” to Steve, but I give Mum a big hug. Maybe a couple of intense days with Steve will make her see sense.
“Call us if you need us, won’t you?” says Steve. He sounds hesitant. “Look after yourself. Oh, and keep an eye out for my binoculars.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I say.
“I have a message from Clive,” says Mum. “He said to tell you Evan’s coming round at eleven.”
“What’s the time now?” I ask. I haven’t had a shower. I smell of sweat and old blanket.
“Ten to,” says Steve.
I don’t bother to wave them off. I rush upstairs and yell the news to the others and call shotgun on the shower.
When Evan arrives a bit after eleven, the four of us are downstairs and dressed, though my hair is wet and I’ve forgotten to put concealer on the spot that can’t decide whether or not to erupt on my chin. He walks through the back door cautiously after Ivy’s opened it, as if he’s not sure how we’ll be. He knows about Baz; he says how sorry he is.