Once the Clouds Have Gone

by KE Payne

  “Well I can pay you for Schofield when I see you.” Anna almost purred. Tag shuddered. “Then you can take me out for dinner. How about that? We can have a catch-up.” It was decided. If Anna said that was what was going to happen, then it was a certainty.

  “I have to go.” Anna’s voice was clipped. That meant she was annoyed. “I just wanted to tell you about the Branson deal.”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ll talk again later.” The call was killed before Tag could respond. Nothing new there.

  Tag tossed her phone over her shoulder and up onto the bed. She stared at the wall for a few seconds, digesting her conversation with Anna, then scrambled over on all fours to gather up some papers. This was more important right now. She clutched them to her chest and sat back against the bed. Why did they have to get the Branson deal now? It felt too soon to go back to Liverpool just yet. She knew she wasn’t ready to stop doing what she was doing in Balfour. She mattered here; she was making a difference. She was helping.

  Tag stared down at the patterned carpet. What was up with her? She hated Balfour, didn’t she? Had spent all these years forgetting it existed, and yet now she was nauseous at the thought of leaving it again. Leaving Freddie.

  Where was Freddie now, anyway? Not sitting opposite Tag in a warm cafe, that’s for sure. A thought struck her. Maybe Freddie was trying to make a point. Telling Tag she wanted her to back off a bit. Tag pursed her lips. Boy, hadn’t she been there before? Tag lost count the number of times over the years Anna had stood her up at the last minute.

  This rankled more, though. And it ate into her specifically because it was Freddie that had done it, not Anna. Pure and simple. Tag drew her knees up. With Anna, she’d laughed it off with a resigned shrug. She’d brood for a few minutes, then find someone else to hang out with instead. But Freddie was different. Freddie wasn’t like anyone else. Even before their awesome afternoon in the park she had burrowed under her skin quicker and deeper than any of the others. Freddie stayed with her more than any of the others had as well. She was there 24/7. Freddie was in her head when she woke and was still there at bedtime. Kind of hung around all day too.

  “Shit.” Tag rocked her head back against the mattress and groaned up at the ceiling.

  The paperwork in her arms called to her. She bobbed her head back down and glared at the spreadsheets.

  “Shit.”

  *

  Tag squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again. The papers were still there. In black and white, with some red. And all of her scribbles. A lot of scribbles.

  She looked over to Blair, sitting opposite her. He looked annoyed; not a great start to their meeting.

  “You wrote WTF on this.” Blair tapped a pencil on the paper.

  “I was bored.” Understatement of the century, Tag thought. Three hours locked up at Four Winds having numbers swimming in front of your face would make anyone bored, she figured.

  “Text-speak on official accountancy paper. Mature.”

  “Whatever.”

  Blair slid his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “So, in essence, all these scribbles tell us what?”

  “Well, they tell us we’re in trouble, for a start,” Tag said.

  “How much trouble?”

  “I’m no accountant,” Tag said. “But I’ve compared like-for-like figures for the last five years.”

  “And?”

  “And we’ve lost a total of this”—she pointed to a spreadsheet—“over that time.”

  “Bloody hell.” Blair moved closer. “So what are these figures here?”

  “Salaries.”

  “And these?”

  “Consumables.”

  “These?” Blair asked.

  “Utilities. Gas, electric.”

  “As much as that?”

  “You want them to freeze in the cafe? Sit in darkness?” Tag pulled out a sheaf of papers from a plastic file. “This is income from sales. See what it was back then?” She jabbed a finger at it. “And now present day.”

  “That was the year they built the bypass.” Blair swept his hand across the page. “The rot really set in after that. The year after that, the summer was a washout. That, combined with less passing trade, did for us.”

  How had Freddie coped, that summer? Her wonderful cafe, recently modernized so they’d attract more customers, empty because some idiots in suits chose to build a bypass that very same year. Tag’s mind swam to Freddie. Lovely, sweet Freddie who’d do anything for the business, who loved her cafe, loved being part of the Grainger family. Tag stared back down at the file, shame burning at her. She’d been bored reading the accounts yesterday. She’d scribbled on them because she was bored and frustrated at being blown off by Freddie, when she should have just accepted Freddie’s decision, then knuckled down and got on with the work. How could she have been so blasé about the accounts when Freddie’s future was at stake?

  “So we’ve been playing catch-up since then?” Tag asked.

  “Looks like it.”

  “And then there are the debts.” Tag pulled a red file towards her. “At least Dad kept those in a separate file. Very organized.”

  “We owe money?” Blair sank back. “On top of everything else?”

  “The garage in town.” Tag read down a list. “Suppliers. Logistics companies.”

  “Great. Just great.” Blair pulled his glasses off. “We keep this up, we’ll have gone under this time next year.”

  “The only people we don’t owe to are the staff,” Tag said. “Whatever else has been happening, they’ve always been paid on time.”

  “But we owe money everywhere else?” Blair asked.

  Tag nodded.

  “I don’t believe this.” Blair rubbed at his face.

  “You sound surprised.” Was Blair for real? “Like this has come as a shock to you.”

  “Because it has.”

  “You didn’t realize it was this bad?”

  “Would I be looking like this if I did?” Blair pointed to his ashen face.

  “How could you not have known?” Tag was incredulous. “What, you just jumped in your tractor each day? Ploughed merrily up and down? Got paid at the end of each month and never asked how things were going back here?” How could he have been so uninterested? So clueless?

  “No, of course I didn’t.”

  “Dad must have known, though.” Tag paced the room. “Was he blind?”

  “You think you’re so superior, don’t you?” Blair snapped. “Swanning back here and criticizing everything we’ve done?”

  “Not superior.” Tag stopped pacing. “Just realistic enough to know I needed to look at the books now I own part of this place.”

  “So I’m what?” Blair countered. “Some dumb farmer boy who doesn’t know an ear of wheat from an ear of corn?”

  “No,” Tag said, “you’re a son whose father never gave him the responsibilities he needed to run this place. A pig-headed father who thought he knew best. And look where it’s got us.”

  “That’s right.” Blair stood up. He brushed past Tag. “Blame the father who’s not here to defend himself any more.”

  “You think storming off is going to push profits back up?” Tag winced at the sound of the door slamming. “Way to go, Blair,” she shouted at the door. “Way to go.”

  *

  “That went well, then.” Tag rested a foot up on the small garden wall surrounding Ellen’s vegetable patch.

  “I take it the slamming of the kitchen door was my husband?” Ellen stood up and batted her gloved hands together to remove the earth that was caked on them. “Sounds about right.”

  “He stormed upstairs.” Tag bent over and pulled a stray spindly weed from the patch. “Like he’s going to find the answers to our problems up there.”

  “Our problems?” Ellen looked knowingly at Tag. “Not mine and Blair’s problems?”

  “Since I’ve been looking at the books and realized how bad things were,” Tag said, “the proble
ms became all of ours. Mine included.” Since Freddie became her problem too.

  “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?”

  “Worse.”

  “You know it’s not Blair’s fault, don’t you?” Ellen said.

  “No, but he could have—”

  “You know what your father was like.”

  “I know how controlling he was,” Tag admitted.

  “He never let Blair have an inch,” Ellen said. “Never gave him control. Never let him get involved in the money side of things.”

  “But Blair surely knew—”

  “Adam refused to let him look at the books.” Ellen shrugged. “He kept it all to himself. Thought he could deal with it all himself.”

  “Sounds about right.” Tag rubbed the weed between her finger and thumb, then let it drop to the ground. “He never did trust any of us to do it as well as he thought he could.”

  “Right up to the day he died, Adam kept those accounts books under lock and key,” Ellen said. “As far as he was concerned, he was still paying everyone’s wages, so there wasn’t a problem.”

  “Blair didn’t think to ask to see the figures?”

  “He tried.” Ellen sat on the wall. “We all tried so hard to make Adam hand some responsibility over to us. But he always insisted everything was okay and that nothing needed to change.”

  “Stubborn bugger.” Tag sat next to her.

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “I can see us having to lay people off, you know,” Tag said, “if things don’t pick up.” The thought turned her heart to lead. How could she even begin to tell Freddie all this? Freddie relied on her, didn’t she? Slowly and surely, Tag was gaining her trust, allowing Freddie to have faith in her ability to do the right thing for both her and Skye. Freddie would hate her, would blame her for everything, when none of it was her fault. All this had happened way before she’d come back, hadn’t it? But would Freddie see it that way? She’d lash out at the first person available, and Tag knew who that person would be.

  “I thought you might say that,” Ellen said. She glanced up as she heard a door slam inside the house. “He’s still crashing about in there, I hear.”

  “Crashing about isn’t going to make the profits better,” Tag said.

  Raised voices floated into the garden.

  “Now he’s having a go at Magnus.” Ellen sighed. “Great.”

  “Like it’s Magnus’s fault?” Tag shot a look towards the back door. “Want me to go sort them out?”

  “No.” Ellen gave a resigned shrug. “Magnus can give as good as he gets,” she said. “He’ll argue back, then bugger off up to his room.”

  “They argue a lot?”

  “They don’t argue as such,” Ellen said. “Just more like father and son bickering.”

  “About?”

  “The usual.” Ellen raised her eyes to the sky. “School and working hard and—”

  “The sort of stuff parents and kids row about all over the world, huh?”

  Ellen nodded. “Yeah, but I’m the one always stuck in the middle.”

  “Magnus is a good kid,” Tag said. “If he was my son, I’d be very proud of him.”

  “He is,” Ellen replied, “and I’m extremely proud of him, but…”

  “But?”

  “Well, he spends a lot of his time daydreaming,” Ellen said, “and it really rubs his father up the wrong way.”

  “Nothing wrong with a bit of daydreaming.”

  “No, but Blair wants him to be more involved in the mill,” Ellen said.

  “And Magnus doesn’t. I know. He told me.”

  “He’s spoken to you?”

  “We had a chat up on the mountain.”

  “Well I wish he’d talk to us,” Ellen said. “I think that’s what seems to annoy his father the most.”

  “He’s barely fourteen though,” Tag replied. “Show me a fourteen-year-old who wants to be working in a dusty old mill.”

  “Yes, but as Blair likes to point out,” Ellen said, “at fourteen he was already putting in the hours up there.”

  “Because we were a one-parent family,” Tag said, “and we’d just lost our mother, and—”

  Another slammed door made Tag stop talking.

  “There you go.” Ellen followed Tag’s gaze to the door. “Just like I said. They both just go round in circles.”

  “You want me to have a word with Magnus?” Tag offered. “I don’t mind.”

  “Can’t hurt, can it?” Ellen said. “He does like you.”

  “Does he?”

  “Oh, he thinks you’re the coolest thing ever.”

  “Because I am.” Tag struck a pose.

  The back door opened. Magnus’s worried face peeked out from behind it.

  “You need to come,” he shouted to Ellen. His face was blanched. “Dad’s collapsed in the kitchen. I can’t wake him up.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Her brother was sleeping when Tag finally found herself alone with him. She sat at his bedside and watched as his chest rose and fell in a slow, deep rhythm. Worry brimmed in her eyes. She pulled her gaze from his face and concentrated on a tumbler of water on the table next to him, afraid that just one more look at his pale face would make the tears spill over. Blair, normally fit and strong, looked so much smaller and more vulnerable now. It was nearly killing her. His face had a grey hue to it, so unlike his normal, healthy-looking complexion, made ruddy from hours out in the fields.

  Tag looked back at him. Her big brother.

  They’d shared a room when they were children. Back then, he’d always been the one to fall asleep first. Now, listening to him breathe, Tag remembered how she’d lie in bed, looking at the bunched-up blankets that were her brother, and listen to the sound of him sleeping across the other side of the room before sleep overcame her too. Tag sighed. She’d always been envious that he was able to drop off to sleep straight away. Blair had always had the uncanny ability of lying so still that it made him appear as if he was just a part of the room, and not the big lump of her sleeping brother.

  Sleep envy aside, she used to find it comforting, certainly in the immediate years after their mother died, to know that there was someone else that would take care of her. She would often lie in the darkness, wondering what Blair was dreaming about. She’d always ask him the next morning over breakfast if he’d had any dreams, and he’d regale her with tales of fighting dragons and sailing on the seven seas.

  His dreams were always epic—far more exciting than hers, anyway—and Tag was never sure if he was fibbing or not. She didn’t care either way. If Blair had a vivid imagination and chose to make up his dreams just to entertain her, it really didn’t matter. All that mattered to Tag back then was that her brother was occupying her mind, filling it with stories of heroes on horseback, pirates on treasure islands, and spacemen in rockets.

  Anything so that she didn’t have to think about her own grief.

  Each morning brought about a new escapade, something new to think about, which was just as well, as the previous day’s tale would have been exhausted in Tag’s mind by morning. She was only too grateful to have a whole new adventure to think about. Each time her mother tried to creep back into her thoughts, and the awful memory of what had happened, Blair’s tales would come in and take over, and the sadness would be replaced with adventure.

  Watching him now, Tag tried to remember just why she’d left him all those years before. How could she have been so selfish? Blair had been right before; she hadn’t been the only one who’d lost a mother. The guilt overwhelmed her. Without thinking, she pulled out her frayed photo of her, Adam, Blair, and Magnus from her wallet and stared at it. Magnus was so young. Skye’s age. Didn’t every child deserve to have as much love around them as possible? To be swamped with the unconditional love of their family?

  Blair stirred, turning his head slightly, impelling Tag to hastily stuff her photo back and rise to her feet to help him. She didn’t want him to see the so
rrow and regret the picture provoked each time she looked at it, didn’t need his sympathy. She sat back down when he settled once more and rested her elbows on the side of his bed, then resumed watching the rise and fall of his chest.

  “If you’re thinking you’ll have to stay on for my funeral too, I’ve got good news for you,” Blair murmured, peering at her through sleepy eyes. “Doctors say I’m not going to croak it just yet.”

  “Good.” Tag carried on cradling her head, her eyes still on him. His quip made relief wash over her. He was awake. At last. Now all she had to do was hold it together in front of him.

  Finally Blair opened his eyes fully. “I assume all these wires are necessary?” he asked. He waved a hand at them.

  “They’re monitoring your heartbeat, apparently.” Tag sat up. She’d sat and watched that monitor for hours, listening to the steady beep, hoping and praying it kept going. She locked her arms out in front of her and straightened her back. “So, yes, they’re necessary.” Her brusqueness masked her tangible relief.

  “Mm.” Blair closed his eyes again. “What photo were you looking at just now?” He spoke without opening his eyes.

  “Just an old one I had in my wallet.” The same photo she’d taken out and looked at over and over during her years away. The only photo she had left of them all.

  “If you want a newer one of him,” Blair murmured, “I can let you have one.”

  “Of who?”

  “Dad.” He caught her eye. “That’s who it’s of, isn’t it?”

  Tag pulled it from her wallet again and handed it to Blair. Memories flooded back.

  “The harvest festival up at the mill.” Blair nodded. “I remember that. End of September and we were all in shorts and T-shirts still.” He gazed down at the face of his father. “By the next April, you were gone.” He handed it back to her.

  “You look young in it.” Tag looked down at the photo. “Almost handsome.” She made big eyes at him.

  “Fewer grey hairs, that’s for sure.” He sank back into his bed.

  “Ellen said you’ve collapsed before,” Tag said slowly. “Few months back?” She put her photo carefully away.