Bringing the Summer

by Julia Green

  ‘He’s a bit of a mess . . . Well, more than a bit, actually. It’s all much too complicated.’

  ‘Things with you always are!’ Miranda laughs. ‘Oh, Freya!’

  It’s good to be laughing together again. We make more coffee, and we eat the biscuits Mum’s left out for us on the kitchen table.

  Miranda wants to see the new pieces in my art portfolio, and it begins to feel easier between us again. She flips through the pictures I’ve mounted on card for my project. ‘I love this one of the beach, with the torn-up bits of photograph. You definitely should do Art at college.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I don’t want to just do one thing. I like learning about everything. I want to go places and find out more about me, who I am, who I might be. I want my life to be bigger, somehow. To mean something.’

  Miranda wrinkles up her nose. ‘Don’t start getting all serious and deep and philosophical now. Please, Freya?’

  It’s not the right time to tell Miranda about Theo’s problems, about Bridie and all that. Instead, I tell her the happy things: the Christmas meal and sledging.

  Mum calls up. ‘Do you two want lunch?’

  ‘Do we?’ I ask Miranda.

  ‘Of course!’

  We trek back downstairs. Mum’s made tomato and basil soup.

  Miranda knows exactly how to win over my parents. She tells Mum how amazing her cooking is, and gushes about our house to Dad, which makes him feel good. I notice how it tips the balance back, having a fourth person at the kitchen table again. We’re a bit more like a family with Miranda chatting and Mum asking questions and Dad flirting a bit: he can’t help himself when Miranda is so bright and gorgeous.

  Late afternoon, after Miranda’s gone home, Dad calls up to me in my room. ‘Come and watch a film with us, Freya!’

  Mum’s making tea in the kitchen. She looks up as I come into the sitting room. ‘Home-made Christmas cake? Or a slice of stollen?’

  ‘You made a cake?’

  ‘Don’t sound so shocked, Freya!’

  ‘I didn’t know, that’s all. I didn’t think you’d done any Christmas cooking.’

  This is the first time she’s made a Christmas cake since Joe died. I join her in the kitchen to have a proper look. She’s iced it and everything. Glossy white, with peaks like snow.

  ‘Do you want to put the decorations on it?’ She points to the small grey cardboard box on the table.

  My heart gives a lurch. I’d almost forgotten about them. I open the lid. Inside, nestled in tissue paper, are the little china decorations that Evie gave us when Joe and I were small: a seal, a polar bear, a penguin and an Arctic fox. Every year, we’d put them on the Christmas cake.

  ‘They might need a dust!’ Mum says.

  I wipe each one carefully with a tea towel and arrange them on the cake. I find two little fir trees in the box too, totally out of scale, and a robin. I put them all on to make a little winter scene.

  Mum laughs. ‘I don’t think it will pass Dad’s good taste test!’

  He’s lit the wood-burning stove in the sitting room. It changes the light in the room: makes everything softer and more cosy. We sit together on the cream sofa, me in the middle, and for once Mum doesn’t fuss about plates and crumbs.

  ‘It’s a long time since we’ve done this!’ Dad says. ‘Much too long.’

  ‘Freya’s got her own life, these days,’ Mum says. ‘She doesn’t want to hang around with her boring old parents!’

  ‘That’s so not true,’ I say. ‘It’s not like that at all. You’re hardly ever here. You’re always too busy.’

  She looks genuinely surprised, as if she hasn’t even thought of that before.

  ‘Ready then? I’m pressing Start,’ Dad says. He leans back, and slips his arm round my shoulders. I snuggle into him. It’s ages since I’ve done that, too.

  We watch the film.

  Mum cuts more cake.

  She kicks off her shoes and curls up, her feet in my lap. It’s cosy, snuggling together like this. It seems ages since we were so close. I’d forgotten how safe and good it makes me feel.

  ‘There are a few more presents that we haven’t opened,’ Dad says when the film’s finished. He reaches over the end of the sofa and fishes up two parcels.

  The one from Evie and Gramps is for me. There’s a note inside in careful copperplate handwriting, and a ferry ticket.

  ‘For my next visit. Look!’

  ‘Nice one,’ Dad says. ‘Good old Gramps.’

  I pull out a small package wrapped in turquoise tissue paper and tied with silver string. Inside is a new sketchbook, hand-made, with a deep blue marbled cover and thick cream paper with bits of leaf and petal pressed into the fibre.

  ‘How lovely,’ Mum says. ‘Isn’t Evie clever?’

  The other parcel is the one from me to Mum and Dad, which they’ve saved for today so I can see them open it. They unwrap it together, giggling and silly. I’m suddenly nervous in case they don’t like it.

  But they do. For a moment I think they might even cry.

  It’s the small square watercolour painting of Beady Pool. Just sand, and sea, and the curve of the rocky bay, in bright sunlight under a blue summer sky. The frame is bleached wood, like driftwood.

  ‘It’s so beautiful,’ Mum says. ‘It’s to treasure for ever.’

  ‘It’s a happy painting,’ Dad says. ‘Full of light and love. Thank you.’

  Mum comes upstairs after I’ve had my bath; she taps lightly on my bedroom door. ‘Can I come in, Freya?’

  ‘Yes. I’m in bed. But it’s fine.’

  She comes in and sits down on the edge of my bed. She sighs. ‘It seems I keep on getting it wrong.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Something you said downstairs, about us always being busy.’

  ‘You are. It’s the truth. I know I’m busy too and going out more these days, but you and Dad are hardly ever here. That’s why we hardly do anything together any more.’ I’m surprised how sad it makes me feel, saying this out loud.

  ‘I didn’t realise,’ Mum says. ‘I thought you didn’t want to. I thought it was all part of you growing up and not needing us any more. I was doing my best to give you some space. My own mother was so useless at that.’ She looks miserable.

  I don’t say anything. I don’t know where to begin. So many things I could tell her, if I could only start.

  Mum leans over and kisses the top of my head. ‘Sweet sixteen,’ she says, wistfully. ‘Almost grown up.’

  ‘Not really,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t feel like that to me.’ And then the words begin to come, and I start to tell her, about Gabes, and Theo, and Bridie, and me and everything.

  All of it comes tumbling out.

  Afterwards, she looks shocked. Stunned into silence.

  I wait.

  ‘It’s a lot to take in,’ she says eventually. ‘I’m so sad you couldn’t tell me before. And I’m so, so pleased you have now, Freya. Everything makes much more sense to me now.’

  ‘Really?’ I say. Tears come into my eyes. I can’t stop them.

  ‘Oh, Freya!’ Mum holds me in her arms and lets me cry. She wipes my face with a tissue and smooths my hair. She smiles at me. ‘You’ve brought it all back to me so vividly, what it was like for me being sixteen, seventeen. First loves, the terrible complications! And how exciting it all is, too. Life opening out, and all the different possibilities!’

  ‘It was like that for you, too?’

  ‘Yes! I think it’s how it’s meant to be, Freya, when you’re sixteen.’ She laughs, softly. ‘Can I tell some of this to Dad? Do you mind? I think it would help him too.’

  ‘Not everything. Just tell him a bit,’ I say.

  ‘The edited highlights.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not anything that will make him worry too much.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘And you mustn’t worry either, Mum.’ I yawn, exhausted.

  ‘No. I’ll do my best. Though w
orrying is a mother’s prerogative. Part of the job description, I’m afraid!’ She kisses me. ‘Please, please try to talk to me when you’re anxious about things in future. Tell me what’s going on. I will always make time to listen to you, Freya. Even when I am busy.’ She stands up. ‘But right now I’ll leave you to get your beauty sleep!’

  She stops at the doorway to look back at me. ‘Sweet dreams, Freya. My dearest, darling daughter!’

  After she’s gone, I snuggle down under the duvet. I am really sleepy, now, but there’s a kind of lightness inside me, a sense that something has lifted at last.

  Twenty-six

  To begin with, I was bowled over by Gabes’ family, by all the life and love I found in that beautiful house with its wild garden tucked into the bottom of the hidden valley among the woods and fields. It was just like falling in love. I so wanted to belong to them all, to feel safe and loved and surrounded too. And falling for Gabes and Theo was all part of that.

  When you fall in love, Mum says, sometimes you see everything through a bit of a golden haze. Or you choose what to see, and what to ignore. I think that’s what I did. It’s more obvious to me now that Gabes and Theo and Beth – the whole family, probably – have got their own problems and struggles and secrets too. Of course they have. They aren’t any more perfect than my own family.

  And I do have a family of my own.

  Even though it’s small.

  Even without my brother, Joe.

  There’s still Dad and Mum and me, Evie and Gramps. And they love me. I can tell them stuff. I don’t have to be quite so secretive, or pretend I don’t need them, when really I do.

  I think about all this as I lie in bed, listening to the sounds of a normal Saturday morning drifting upstairs. Voices; Radio 4; the clink of cups on the kitchen table.

  I’ve decided something else important, too. Miranda was right: talking about things did help.

  I thought I could make Theo better, but I can’t. And while he’s so messed up, so not well, I’ll be his friend but I don’t want to be anything more than that. He’s too unpredictable. Too caught up with himself.

  As Theo’s friend, there’s something I still want to do for him. I know Gabes was doubtful about it, and he might be right. Maybe it won’t help Theo much, but I’m going to try. I phone him to say I want us to go on a secret trip, but we’ll need transport, so can he borrow Maddie’s van? Or Beth’s car? For a whole day, starting early? And he says yes.

  Theo collects me from our house on Sunday morning in Beth’s car, so Mum and Dad get to meet him very briefly. Everyone’s on best behaviour. Theo does his posh Oxford voice. Dad goes on a bit too much about safe driving, and taking breaks, and absolutely nothing to drink. But they let me go.

  I don’t tell Theo exactly where we’re going until we’ve started driving. I’ve got the map on my knees. I give him directions to the M4.

  Theo swears as a lorry in front slows to go up the hill. He doesn’t like overtaking. He’d hoped to drive the whole way in the slow lane. He’s so not the reckless driver.

  ‘Where next?’ he says. He changes down a gear.

  ‘We just keep going, ‘I say, ‘across the bridge into Wales.’

  He frowns. ‘Freya, this is all a bit mad.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I say. I’ve got the road map open on my knees. I’ve worked it all out. I trace the roads with my finger. ‘M4 to Swansea, then it’s smaller roads, all the way to the Gower coast. We’re going to the beach in your story.’

  Theo goes very quiet.

  ‘Bridie’s beach,’ I say, firmly. ‘The one she wanted to go to because she went there once when she was little and it was a happy place for her.’

  ‘I know what beach,’ Theo says.

  ‘Did you go there for real, ever, with Bridie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But she wanted to go there with you, right? It was special for her?’

  ‘Yes.’ Theo sucks in his breath. He’s concentrating on driving.

  I keep going, regardless. ‘I thought, if we went to that beach and you thought about Bridie there and remembered her and we did some sort of ceremony – like lighting a fire for her, or making something out of driftwood, or . . . I don’t know . . . writing a poem in the sand – maybe it would help you to say goodbye. And then the voices might stop.’

  The road surface changes and the tyres sound extra noisy. The motorway is busy, people going home, going on holidays, visiting friends . . . the whole world on the move for the New Year.

  Theo stays silent. But he keeps on driving westwards.

  Inside the car’s getting hot and stuffy. I turn the dial on the fan to waft some air on my face. The landscape flashes past, a blur of fields and hedges and trees, the odd building.

  I just pray it works out; it will all be my fault if it doesn’t. But to me it seems exactly the right thing to do. Theo can start the New Year with a new feeling. It’ll be a proper fresh start.

  The bridge is just ahead now. There’s more sky, somehow: air and light and a different smell.

  Now we’re through the toll and into Wales, Theo seems to catch my mood. ‘Put some music on,’ he says. ‘Beth’s CDs are in there.’

  I open the glove compartment and flip through her CD case. I look for the song she played for me that time she gave me a lift back home, but I can only remember fragments of the lyrics, not the title or even the band. I find an album I recognise; it’s got this amazing song on it that Mum used to play all the time.

  Go, Leave . . . Listening to it now, it seems strangely appropriate for Theo. It suddenly dawns on me why Mum played it so much. It’s a song about letting go of someone you love, even though your heart is aching. The words are sad and beautiful.

  The road stretches out in front of us, a long grey ribbon.

  As we get past Newport and Cardiff, the landscape changes again. Hills. Forest. Rows of houses. More hills. The sky is grey: at one point it starts to snow, small, hard icy flakes. It stops again. The sky clears.

  It takes longer than I expected. Two hours before we’re off the motorway and on to smaller roads. It gets harder to read the map. Theo stops the car in a layby so he can look too: he shows me the beach we are aiming for. He’s been to Wales before, but to me the place names are all strange, unfamiliar.

  At last we turn off the main road and bump down a track, and Theo parks the car. We’re both stiff from sitting still.

  ‘Here we are, then,’ Theo says. ‘Bridie’s beach.’

  It’s a long walk down the cliff to the beach. We run the last bit once it flattens out: it’s a river estuary, and at low tide the beach is a vast stretch of sand with the river winding through the middle, dividing it into two, with stepping stones across, exactly like in Theo’s story. It’s exhilarating to be able to run in the fresh air after being cooped up so long. We race each other, laughing and shouting – impossible to hear as the wind snatches our voices and whisks them away to nothing. There are miles of empty sand, a few birds, no people at all.

  Theo grabs my hand and we run together down to the water’s edge. The sea is wild, stormy. Waves roll in, a constant line of breakers, spreading out into lace over the ridged sand. The air is damp with spray, Theo’s hair covered in a mass of tiny water droplets; even his eyebrows and eyelashes are beaded with it.

  We break apart and run again parallel to the sea, dodging the waves as they break and spread out and send foaming water further up the sand.

  ‘I think the tide’s coming in,’ I say, but Theo doesn’t hear.

  The wind and the spray scour my face, cold and clean. I smooth my wet hair out of my stinging eyes. I turn my back to the wind and begin walking up the huge beach, searching for stones, for polished sea glass and other magic. Further along there are three jagged rocks, and a deep pool, and then, as I keep walking, I find you can get round to another, smaller sandy beach, more sheltered from the wind. I beckon Theo over.

  He follows me round the rocks.

  At the top of th
is beach the cliff rises sharply, not like the way we came down on the other beach where the river has carved a wide valley.

  Theo points up. ‘Look!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘See there? That dark space beneath the overhanging rock? That’s the cave!’

  I’m not sure I want to go clambering so high up; for now, I’m trying to think what we should do to say a final goodbye to Bridie.

  There’s loads of wood that’s been washed up by storms. I start collecting it, piling it up to help it dry out more so we can have a fire later, if we want. Theo’s a small dark speck at the far end of the beach now. I try to remember what he wrote in his story – they made a fire, didn’t they? And they planned to swim in the moonlight . . . only the tide was too high . . .

  When I next look for him, I can’t see Theo anywhere. I scan the beach. No sign of him. Surely he wouldn’t think of trying to swim? Not in such rough sea? You would drown in an instant. I turn around again to the cliff. I screw my eyes up to see better. The light is too bright, but there’s something – someone – moving along towards the ledge about halfway up. Now I know he’s safe – sort of – I go back to collecting firewood. There are beautiful shells too: I line them up in a row. I rearrange them to make the shapes of the letters for Bridie’s name, collect some more. I stand back, so I can see how they’d look from Theo’s viewpoint on the cliff, but I guess they’re too small for him to see from up there. I pick up some bigger stones to make a fireplace. I wish I’d packed proper food for cooking on a fire.

  I go searching for more treasures. The tide’s definitely coming in; it’s already much closer than I expected. I start to run towards the sea; I know Theo’s still up on the cliff, but I run anyway, down to the edge of the rocks we walked round earlier, to check we can still get back round to the main part of the beach.

  But it’s already too late. I’m so mad with myself I could cry. Such a stupid, stupid mistake to make! How could I? Me, Freya, who’s always so careful about tides! It’s been bred into me from when I was born, practically; all those island summers with Evie and Gramps, the thousands of time they’ve drummed it into me . . .