‘I had to.’
Mum moves. Her hand is on my shoulder. She steps between Dad and me. ‘Leave this house, Declan.’
Dad drags his attention to Mum, his eyes sharpening themselves on her words. ‘Excuse me?’
Then I’m aware of someone else behind me. It’s Paula. I feel her hand on my back.
‘I said, get out, Declan,’ Mum says. ‘You have raised your hand and your voice to this family for the last time. I’m leaving you, Declan.’
‘No,’ he states as fact, ‘you are not.’
Dad is wearing his lopsided grin. He knows that he can win. That Mum won’t be able to get him to leave. It doesn’t matter what she says. What she thinks. He doesn’t care. He won’t listen.
Behind him, I see the journalist through the window. Standing around. Waiting for a story. A story about Dad. Suddenly I think of something better than a gun.
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘There’s a journalist out there, looking for a story.’ I turn my eyes to the floor so I can’t see Dad and I take the tiniest step backwards.
It’s Mum that gets what I mean first.
‘That’s right, Lucy,’ she says. ‘There certainly is. And he’s looking for the inside scoop on Declan Fitzsimmons, the husband, the father, the liar, the bully. I bet they’d love to know about all the fights, the arguments, all the times you’ve bullied us.’
My eyes flick to Dad’s, and just like that, the lines loosen on his face again.
It’s working. Dad’s eyes dart from me to Mum.
‘I’ll back up every word she says,’ Paula says.
Dad only seems to realize Paula’s here now.
‘By the way, I applied for a job,’ Mum says. ‘I got it. I start on Monday. The pay’s not great. But it’s enough. And it’s mine.’
Mum has a job? That’s what she was trying to tell me the other day! Not that she was thinking of it, but that she’d actually done it! And it’s why she kept sneaking out for the last week. She really did it, after all these years. Without him even knowing.
‘You can’t—’ Dad starts but Mum cuts him off.
‘I can, Declan. And I am. I was leaving you anyway and now is as good a time as any. You’ve lost. And unless you want to lose your reputation too, I suggest you get out right now.’
‘You can’t do this,’ he says again, but his voice no longer matches his words.
Mum doesn’t reply. She just takes my hand and with her other, she points to the door again. Paula moves towards it first.
‘You can turn and walk out there alone, Declan,’ Mum says, ‘or we can all go, and make a God-awful scene on the street, it’s up to you.’
Dad backs away, step by step, slowly, like he’s trying to find a way out of this. Mum and me follow. Now he’s by the hall door. His eyes rise to the ceiling like he can’t believe what is happening. But then they fall on me.
You did this, they say. And I want the ground to swallow me.
Paula opens the door for him.
‘I’ve no problem going out there, Declan, unless you go first,’ Mum says.
Dad glances out, then back at Paula, then Mum.
‘I’ll put everything you need out the back gate if you leave right now,’ Mum says. ‘Or I’ll make a scene.’
Dad shakes his head. Mum nods. He looks over his shoulder again. Then back at us.
‘Go. Now,’ Mum says.
His face empties. Then, finally, it flattens out into the general smile he shows to the world. He turns and goes outside.
Mum slams the door shut. Locks it from the inside.
And the silence he leaves behind is as sad and sweet as the end of summer.
Mum and Paula take a few deep breaths.
‘Are you okay?’ Mum asks me, even though she looks far from it.
What am I supposed to say?
‘I don’t want you to be afraid,’ Mum says. ‘Ask me. Anything. Everything.’
I don’t know where to start. I mean, is he just going to come back in the door?
‘Are you okay?’ she asks again.
I don’t answer directly. ‘Are you really leaving him?’
‘Yes,’ she says. She leans forward so she’s closer to me. ‘I am.’
But it can’t be that easy, can it?
Worry lines fan out from Mum’s eyes like whiskers on a cat. ‘You listen to me now,’ she says. ‘This is nothing to do with you. This is my decision, okay?’
‘But, the email—’
‘I was leaving him anyway and I . . .’ She looks up and tears pool in her eyes. ‘I had no idea that you were so . . . that you worried . . . that you felt you had to . . .’ She jams the heels of her hands against her eyes and rubs. Then she drops them and looks at me. ‘I’m sorry. This is my fault. And your father’s. This never has been, and never will be, your fault. Do you hear me?’
I nod because I’m supposed to. But I don’t feel it, deep down.
‘How do you feel?’ Mum says.
‘Good and bad all mixed up together.’
I didn’t mean for it to, but this makes Mum cry. She hugs me tight.
I don’t cry, though. I feel too many things to cry.
CHAPTER 29
Mum and Paula go to the kitchen, and I go to my room and climb into the attic and switch on the lamp. Then I go up to his face, puffed with pride from something funny he just said. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. I reach out and tear it down.
I turn to the next. Anger rises off the page, the day he burned the picture I drew. ‘I had to do it, Dad,’ I tell him and rip that down too.
Now his face is beaming. It’s the night I came second in the Young Artist competition. I thought he was proud of me. But then we went for a celebratory dinner. And I realized we were really celebrating the fact that he won the bid to develop The Old Mill. ‘It was the only way things would change,’ I say as I take it away.
I take down his lopsided grin. Then another. And another. I keep going. Mum, Ms Cusack, Megan; all the other faces, I take each one down until the ceiling is bare.
He’s gone. He’s actually gone.
And she’s got a job.
This is what I wanted, isn’t it? Dad gone. The chance for things to get better.
In my hand, my drawings weigh nothing. Like if I left them up here unpinned, they’d just float around in the darkness for ever. I turn my head towards the rest of the attics. Ms Cusack’s and Hazel’s and Mr Reynolds’s. ‘I’m sorry for what I did,’ I say.
I imagine all the wishes that have drifted up here over the years like warm air and settled between the splinters of wood in the rafters. And I take the note from my pocket. I hope you feel safe all day. In the space left behind by my drawings, I pin it to the ceiling.
Then, holding my drawings tight, I drop back down into my room.
Listening as I go, I make my way downstairs. The house sounds different. At the bottom, Mum and Paula’s conversation escapes through the kitchen door and wanders around the halls. It’s in no hurry to go anywhere.
I pick up a sketch pad and sit in the window nook.
And I draw. A picture of a house. Not in a city but not in the country. It’s in a small town. An old house, with stables renovated into a painter’s lodge, overlooking a river. There’s no one there. But the house isn’t empty. It’s filled with paintings and books and cats and dogs and birds.
Much later, Mum opens the double doors to the kitchen and Paula comes into the sitting room holding her handbag.
‘I’m off, Lucy,’ Paula says. She comes up to me and gives me a hug, which is the first time Paula has ever hugged me. ‘See you tomorrow?’
I nod. She nods. And that’s it; she goes out the front door.
Mum’s eyes are puffy but she walks through the room like she’s just taken off a heavy backpack. She runs her hands through her hair. ‘I was thinking of getting a start on dinner. Any ideas?’
The first thing I think is, Not spaghetti bolognese, Dad wouldn’t be happy.
‘I don’t know
,’ I say.
‘Burger and chips?’
I don’t care. I nod.
Mum tilts her head towards the kitchen. She means, Join me, so I get down and go into the kitchen.
At the countertop, I open out my sketch pad and keep drawing. The river is high and I try to make it look like it’s roaring. ‘Mum?’ I say. ‘Where is your new job?’
She pours oven chips onto a tray. ‘Just up the road. It’s with a charity that does a lot of online campaigns on behalf of people with no voice.’ She talks for a while about what her role would be as she makes a salad and puts burgers under the grill.
‘Mum,’ I say. ‘Are you really leaving him?’
She puts everything down and pulls up a stool. ‘Yes.’ She watches me. ‘We’ve grown apart, Lucy. Changed.’
‘Since we moved here?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Over time, is all.’
I keep drawing. ‘Do you think he’ll change?’
I can almost hear her knock my question around her head. ‘We all make mistakes and we learn from them. Your father is no different.’
I look up. Her face is open to anything I want to say. And I don’t want to pretend. ‘Mum, he would have hit you.’
She blinks. Looks at the wall behind me for a while. Then her eyes are back on mine. She doesn’t answer directly, she says, ‘I thought I could hide how bad things were getting from you. That was a mistake. But it’s only today that I realize how much of a mistake.’
‘Things would have kept getting worse, wouldn’t they?’
Mum nods.
‘How did you know it was me?’ I ask. ‘The email.’
‘How did you know about Declan’s loan from Reynolds?’ she asks.
‘I overheard Dad and Oly talking.’
Mum nods. ‘Well, you let that slip so I knew you knew about the loan. And that email came from here. And I didn’t send it.’
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ I say.
‘Honey, it’s okay,’ she says.
‘No, I mean . . .’ What do I mean? I mean for Dad. For the fights. For leaving her alone on the bottom of the ocean all those times. For never, ever thinking that she would be able to do what she did today. ‘I didn’t think you’d really do it, Mum. Get a job.’
Mum smiles. ‘Yeah, it took a while. I didn’t want anyone to know until I was sure I had it.’
All this time, Mum’s been planning to do what she wanted to do. Without telling Dad. Without asking his permission.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes, sweetheart?’
‘Can I take Art in school?’
Mum’s smile turns into a frown. ‘Why on earth wouldn’t you?’ But then she starts nodding slowly, like she understands. ‘Okay, Lucy. I promise you two things,’ she says, tapping the table. ‘Firstly, you can take Art. You can take dancing lessons. You can take up any subject or hobby you are interested in. You can be whoever you want to be, Lucy. Okay?’ She watches me.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘And secondly . . .’ She looks into my eyes for a long moment. ‘I promise you that everything’s going to be fine from now on.’
And I smile. Because I can tell that she’s not pretending. Not this time.
‘I hope you feel safe all day,’ I whisper. Then I smile.
Mum stands and comes over and hugs me. And I don’t want to let go. But after a while, I have to say, ‘Mum?’
‘Yes?’
‘I think the burgers are burning.’
TUESDAY
CHAPTER 30
Mum’s in my bed. I open my eyes but she says, ‘It’s early, go back to sleep.’ I close my eyes.
Where did he sleep last night? What’s to stop him just walking in the front door and going to the kitchen and putting on the coffee machine?
‘Mum?’ I say. I open my eyes again. ‘What if Dad decides he’s coming home today?’
She slides a hand between her cheek and the pillow and watches me. ‘I’ve already arranged for someone to change the locks at nine a.m.’
‘When did you do that?’
‘Immediately,’ she says.
It’s strange, but that actually makes me feel better. Because it means she’s been planning.
Last night was weird. But in a good way. After dinner, neither of us talked, like we had used up all our words for the day. We turned our phones off. I drew, Mum wasted time on her laptop or stared out the window. And the house was silent. But it wasn’t a silence that waits or builds or churns and it didn’t hang around outside the door when I went to bed.
‘Did you go up to the museum the other day?’ Mum asks.
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘No.’ I broke into Ms Cusack’s house instead.
‘Well, I think you should. Today.’
I know it’s more about keeping me busy than getting me to draw, but still, I’m happy she reminded me, and that she wants me to.
‘What’ll you do?’ I ask.
‘Pack up your father’s stuff. He’s coming here at midday to collect essentials. I’ll organize a truck for the rest.’
I give her a look.
‘What?’ she asks.
She just seems so . . . confident.
‘How long have you been planning this?’
But Mum doesn’t answer that, instead she says, ‘I’m telling you so that you can decide where you want to be when he comes.’
I think that means that she’s been planning this a while.
At the museum’s reception I ask about this year’s competition and the lady there tells me that they’ll send someone out to talk to me.
I haven’t come back to see the portrait since the awards night. Entering the room where it’s hanging, I sit on the bench in the middle. There are two paintings and a drawing on the wall under a sign that says:
Young Artist of the Year Award Winners.
Theme: Hidden.
On the left is a painting of a box or a vase or something, all twisted up. On the right, a young couple sit on rocks by the shore, sharing a smile, with a dark storm cloud coming in off the sea. And in the middle is an old woman’s face lined with loneliness. My drawing.
There’s a note on the wall beside each one that talks about the artist and the inspiration.
If I had the chance again, my drawing would be so different. She wouldn’t be sitting with her hands clasped and her fingers spinning time. Her fingers would be busy making time stand still, painting. And she wouldn’t be Hidden any more. Because all the words that had built up around her would be falling away like bricks from a crumbling house.
‘Lucy!’ It’s the woman who handed out the awards last winter. She has this huge smile and when I stand up, she starts shaking my hand like she’s meeting with a real artist and not just me. She asks me about my summer and how my drawing is coming along and, with a wink, she says how she can’t wait to see what I come up with this year.
‘Is there a theme yet?’ I ask.
She shakes her head. ‘We’re still deciding. It’s trickier than you’d imagine.’ She turns to the pictures on the wall. ‘Hidden was a wonderful theme. It can be specific or abstract. Just look at the huge variations in interpretation in these three entries.’
We both look at the entries for a while.
‘Anyway, we should decide by the end of the month so that the schools can announce it in September.’
She talks for a while about the growing interest nationwide in the competition and introducing new categories. Then she leaves.
I stay where I am. It’s almost eleven-thirty. He’ll be there in thirty minutes. I’m not ready to see him.
‘What should I do?’ I ask the portrait.
My phone vibrates. I check to see if it’s Mum. It’s not. It’s Megan, and it says,
Megan
I know you probably hate me right now, but please read this.
And there’s a link to her blog. I click on it.
The Penny Behind the Pen
Summer is ending. In a week, I’ll start at a new sch
ool. And looking back on the last few months, I realized something. This summer, I cared too much.
For example, I cared that I looked ordinary, so I sulked for three days until Mum let me dye my hair pink.
Truth no. 1. I was worried that I looked too ordinary.
Which, of course, is a disaster. Because how would I be ever be popular if I was ordinary? Then I realized something. I could be popular through my blog!
The thing about a blog is, it’s not real time. You don’t have to be smart on the spot. You get to think about it and play with it and only put it up when it’s good enough.
Truth no. 2. A blog is not real life. You get to pretend to be someone else.
I was going to be popular. I was going to be liked, at least through my blog. But that didn’t work, either. Because,
Truth no. 3. Not everyone likes my blog.
Some people do, because my blog got lots of ‘likes’. But the problem was, one person didn’t. She started leaving nasty comments. And she was supposed to be my best friend in the real world. Which means,
Truth no. 4. Not everyone likes me.
Now, this one was hard to accept. Really, really hard. Because I thought if I was smart enough or funny enough, everyone would like me. But now my best friend had stopped liking me. And even worse, she wouldn’t admit to it! She left anonymous comments but in real life she was a bit more subtle. Things she’d say left me with that I-know-you-don’t-like-me-but-I-can’t-quite-say-why feeling. And in case you don’t know, it’s a horrible feeling.
The big truth: I was hiding behind my blog where a girl was bullying me. But in real life we pretended to be friends. So the more ‘likes’ my blog got, the worse it felt. It wasn’t me they liked, not the real me. No one liked the real me.
Except someone did.
Because this summer I didn’t realize who my real best friend was until it was too late. You see, she’s a girl just like me. Except that she’s not. Because she doesn’t care about being popular. At least, she cares in a normal kind of way, but not in my over-the-top-I-need-a-million-likes kind of way.
The Words That Fly Between Us Page 15