‘I’m so pleased,’ I told him, and his face broke into a huge grin that went right up to his eyes.
I’d spotted him on my first day at school: he was standing alone on the other side of the playground, pressing himself against the wire fence that surrounded it, as if he thought he might disappear if he pushed hard enough. He was wearing enormously thick glasses, ill-fitting clothes, and must have been a good two inches taller than any other four-year-old in the playground. He seemed ill at ease, and had the sort of awkwardness that made other children keep their distance. I wanted to talk to him.
I had a tangerine in my pocket. ‘Be good.’ Mum had pushed it into my hand like some sort of good-luck charm.
I concentrated on peeling it as I walked towards the boy, trying to keep the skin in one long snake. He looked up and half smiled, unsure. ‘Do you want a pig?’ I offered him a segment.
‘A pig?’ He looked confused.
‘A piece of this.’
‘Why do you call it a pig?’
‘Everybody does.’ The expression was a relic of my mother’s Irish roots. Everyone but her called pieces of citrus fruit ‘segments’.
‘Thank you.’
‘Do you want to jump off those?’ I nodded to a part of the playground where a flower bed was bordered by an assortment of small rocks trailing on to the concrete and forming a line of stepping-stones across it.
‘Why?’ He’d moved forward, ready to follow me, still unsure.
‘For fun.’ I willed him to come and try it.
‘Fun,’ he repeated, but he followed me as I stepped on to the first rock then jumped off it onto the concrete. I looked back at him, smiling, encouraging him to follow.
We jumped for the next few minutes: from rock to rock, from rock to the ground, round and round, smiling without saying anything, until ‘It is fun!’ He laughed.
‘I’m hot.’ I took my coat off and hung it on the fence by the nametape sewn inside the collar.
On cue, he asked my name.
‘Well …’ I hesitated ‘… that says “TRENT”.’
‘Is that your surname?’
‘Yes. The nametapes say “Jon Trent Catherine”. Jon and Cathy are my brother and sister. My mum sews under whichever name isn’t the right one. I just get Trent.’
‘I have old clothes,’ he said, shrugging off his coat and taking a step closer. ‘What’s your Christian name?’
‘Ivy.’ I hated my name. I’d been called after my maternal grandmother, one of the many relatives on my mother’s side who had died before I was born. It was an old person’s name or the name of a poisonous plant. It couldn’t be shortened or trailed, the way the plant could, only commented on.
‘That’s a nice name.’
Relief and a surge of warmth. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Abraham.’ He shuffled awkwardly. ‘But everyone calls me Abe.’
‘Ivy and Abe.’ I liked the way the two names sounded.
I’d got used to hearing our names, rolled into one ‘Ivy’n’Abe’ when it happened.
I knew because of the way Mum and Dad were talking to each other that something bad had taken place. They didn’t talk to each other much. It wasn’t a deliberate ignoring, rather that family life didn’t leave much room for the two of them. It was unusual when one specifically solicited a word with the other.
They never did our bedtimes together either. It was Dad first, for a quick chat and a kiss, Mum after.
Dad was sitting on the edge of my bed, reeling off an account of his day, which, to me, sounded so exotic he might as well have been reading from The Hobbit.
‘You’ll never guess what Mr Piper did today?’ He’d imbued his boss with the mystique of Gandalf.
‘What?’
‘He ate a yoghurt at his desk!’
‘He ate a yoghurt at his desk?’ I was delighted. It was the daftest, silliest thing anyone could do. A grown man, who worked in an office, eating yoghurt at his desk? Who even ate yoghurt? Nobody.
I could hear the phone ringing, unusual at this time of night, but Dad took no notice. ‘He did! He keeps a spoon in his drawer, specifically for the purpose!’
Just wait till I told Abe. He’d laugh as much as I had.
Mum came in. ‘Can I have a word?’
‘But he’s saying goodnight. And you haven’t kissed me.’
Mum walked over to my bed and did so.
That was it. The nightly routine was all messed up. Mr Piper and his yoghurt were no longer funny. But I didn’t know why.
I listened to their footsteps on the stairs, heard the doors, then murmuring directly below my bedroom but not what was said.
Maybe ten minutes later, maybe three-quarters of an hour, Mum came back up again. I pretended to be asleep as she bent down, smoothed my hair and kissed my cheek. Her face was wet.
‘Mum?’
‘I thought you were asleep.’ Her voice was all wrong.
‘What did you need to talk to Dad about?’
‘Oh, Ivy …’ she took a deep breath ‘… I’ll tell you in the morning. You get some sleep now.’
‘But –’
‘Go to sleep. There’s nothing for you to worry about tonight. I’ll see you in the morning, sweetheart.’ The giveaway endearment. Terms of affection were as rare as Mars bars and swear words. And when someone doesn’t tell you what’s wrong immediately, you imagine the worst.
Mum and Dad sent me to school the next day, with reassurances that everything was ‘fine’, but as soon as I got there I knew it wasn’t.
Abe was not at school.
I needed his reassuring presence. I wanted to tell him about Mr Piper eating yoghurt at his desk. I wanted to make him laugh. I might even have told him that Mum and Dad were behaving oddly and perhaps he’d have told me that something was worrying his parents too.
But I understood, at school that day, that something was not right. Abe’s desk was empty and our teacher was behaving strangely. She didn’t read Abe’s name when she took the register, as she usually did, even if she already knew that a particular child was absent.
‘William?’ she’d say. Then, ‘Oh, no, William’s not well today.’
When she reached the place in the register where Abe’s name was, there was no ‘Abe?’ she just skipped his name and moved directly from Rachel to Stephen.
I put up my hand.
‘Yes, Ivy.’ She busied herself with something on her desk.
‘You didn’t call Abe’s name. He’s not here today.’
‘I know, Ivy,’ she said, in a voice I’d never heard before.
The teacher supervising playtime found me crying. ‘Oh, Ivy. You poor little thing. ‘
‘Why?’
‘You’re bound to be upset,’ she said kindly, gesturing for me to sit beside her on the playground wall.
‘Has something happened to Abe?’
‘I thought you knew, dear. He’s quite all right. He’ll be back at school in a few days. You don’t need to upset yourself. Perhaps we should ask your mother to collect you and take you home.’
‘Ivy! Come and join in!’ someone in a group of girls skipping called.
I ran to them.
‘I’ve got doughnuts,’ Mum said, when she picked me up. ‘I stopped at the baker on the way here.’
‘For tea?’ We never had doughnuts for tea.
‘Yes.’
She allowed her mouth to smile but the rest of her face was not involved. There was no light behind her eyes or crinkles spreading around them.
‘What’s happened?’
‘At tea.’
We walked home in silence.
Abe was the youngest of five siblings. Alan was three years older than my brother Jon, Jackie in the year above him at school. Kirsty was in the year between Jackie and my sister Cathy, and Tessa in the year below. They lived in an old farmhouse in the country, equidistant to our school and another in a different village.
‘If you’d gone to that school we’d never ha
ve met,’ I used to say to him.
Sometimes Abe’s mother picked her children up from school in the car. If the weather was good, they usually walked. Occasionally, if one of the older ones decided to cycle, Abe was allowed to ride his bike with them.
Sometimes in summer, if I went home with Abe after school to have tea and roam in their large garden, or play in the disused barns, his mum’s car would get stuck behind a lorry piled high with hay bales. They moved slowly and Mrs McFadden would brake, maintaining her distance.
‘Ivy, something bad has happened.’ Mum sat next to me at the kitchen table. ‘You know how Mrs McFadden always likes to keep her distance from those lorries carrying the hay?’
I nodded.
‘I used to think she was a bit too anxious,’ Mum took a sip of her tea, ‘but there was one on the road the day before yesterday, just after school, and the bales weren’t secure. Not at all.’ She paused. ‘Kirsty was cycling home.’ She took a deep breath. ‘If she’d been just a second or two later it would have been all right. But she was cycling behind the lorry, and when the bales fell, one hit her and she came off her bike.’
‘Is she hurt?’
‘Ivy.’ Mum put out her hand and took mine. ‘They fell from such a height it must have been like being struck by a large rock. And then she hit the road.’
I said nothing.
‘She fractured her skull, Ivy,’ Mum said.
‘But she’ll get better?’
‘No. I’m so sorry, love. The ambulance took her to hospital but they couldn’t do anything.’
‘You mean …’ I couldn’t say it.
‘She died, Ivy, before they got her to hospital.’
I nodded and tried not to cry
‘Shall we walk the dog, love?’
When Abe came back to school, after the weekend, I wanted to say something to him but I couldn’t think what. It wasn’t just me. There were fewer than a hundred pupils at our school. Everyone knew Abe and Tessa, and everyone knew Kirsty had died, but no one said anything to them.
‘Abe, would you help me put the books away?’ our teacher said, at the end of the morning’s lessons on his first day back.
It was a solicitous gesture and I echoed it when I took out my tangerine to eat during break.
‘Would you like a pig?’ was probably the closest I came to offering condolences.
The McFaddens had never taken holidays, even before Kirsty died. Mr McFadden occasionally went away on work trips. He’d been to Berlin, and seen the Wall, and to Washington and New York, which he’d loved. He’d brought back gramophone records bearing names I’d never heard of: Little Richard, Ray Charles and Woody Guthrie, who looked out from beneath a hat, like the one Mr McFadden had, on the cover.
‘I’d like to take the family to America one day,’ he said. ‘But it’s expensive. We’ll have to wait till I win the pools.’
‘Which will be a long time coming, since you never actually do them,’ Mrs McFadden rejoined.
She didn’t seem to mind about holidays. Instead, they had a huge tent, which could take up to ten people. They put it up in the back garden for the whole summer. I’d camped in it. ‘Can Ivy stay?’ Abe would ask his mother.
‘Of course,’ Mrs McFadden replied, as she cut us both a slice of cake. ‘How many minutes, Ivy?’ She divided cakes and tarts into minutes rather than approximate sizes or fractions.
‘Four, please! Is it really all right if I stay?’
‘Of course. You don’t need to ask – you’re part of the family.’
I liked it when she said that and I liked the nights in the McFaddens’ garden better than the holidays we’d spent in a caravan in Wales. There were always so many people.
‘Abe, you and Ivy go and fetch wood.’ We were happy to take orders from Jackie as he supervised the building of a campfire.
‘Everyone keep quiet. It’s Ivy’s turn.’ Tessa would force everyone to listen to me, as we took it in turns to tell a story while we were sitting around it, line by line.
‘Push the blade away from you, Ivy.’ Alan taught me how to whittle a stick and use it to toast marshmallows.
They all made me feel part of the family and I loved being with them, but I looked forward to the point in the evening when everyone retired in groups of two or three to the separate sleeping compartments and I could snuggle down in my sleeping bag next to Abe.
In the mornings we were woken by Fred, Abe’s tortoise, whose name I’d helped paint on his shell in large white letters in case he got lost. Abe left him in the outer area of the tent, free to roam and eat the grass, and when the sun rose, we’d hear him exploring the canvas of our sleeping compartment with his nose and feet, snuffling noisily, as if asking to come in.
But the summer after Kirsty died, the tent never went up.
Erecting it was a monumental team effort. There were so many poles needing to be pushed into the right bit of canvas at the right time. It took all of the McFaddens a good day to put up. It was like building a giant Meccano structure and covering it with complicated folds of canvas – one of the rituals of summer that Abe loved most. Seeing the steel structure of the tent take shape gave him as much pleasure as the buildings he screwed together in his bedroom.
But two weeks after Kirsty’s funeral, when the summer holidays began, the tent stayed in its bag in the barn. I still went round to the McFaddens’ house, played in the woods and the barn, but Abe was quieter – subdued. We didn’t talk about Kirsty.
I wanted to ask him if he missed her but I never seemed to find the right moment or the right words.
‘It’s a shame you don’t have the tent up this year.’ We were sitting on a log by a stream, which ran through the woods at the bottom of the McFaddens’ garden.
Abe was picking bits of bark and throwing them absentmindedly towards the stream.
‘Did your dad not want to put it up?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘He probably didn’t.’
‘I don’t think it’s even occurred to him that he should.’
‘No.’ I nodded. ‘It’s a shame it’s so big.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it’s too big to put up without your dad and everyone helping,’ I said. ‘Because I know they can’t.’
‘We’ve got another tent,’ Abe said suddenly, looking at me.
‘Have you?’
‘Yes, a little one. Jackie took it to Scout Camp one year.’
‘And it’s yours?’
‘Yes. I think it’s in the garage.’
‘The garage?’
‘We could put it up easily.’
‘Maybe we should ask your mum and dad if that would be all right?’
‘They won’t mind,’ Abe said, jumping down off the log.
‘I think we should. They might not want anyone camping.’
‘Why not?’
‘They just might not.’
‘Well, we’ll ask them,’ Abe said. ‘But I don’t think they’ll mind, not if we can put it up ourselves.’
He was right.
‘Of course,’ was all Mrs McFadden said when he asked.
She didn’t seem interested, or when Abe asked, ‘Can Ivy stay tonight, if we put it up? Will you ask her mum?’
‘Whatever you like, Abe.’
‘I don’t want to be a nuisance,’ I said. ‘It was just an idea.’
She smiled a small sad smile. ‘Oh, Ivy, you are sweet.’ She got up from the kitchen table and stroked my head briefly, muttering something about ‘Titian’ as she walked towards the hall. ‘I’ll phone your mother now.’
When Mum appeared later with a sleeping bag and my overnight things, we were in the garden and the tent almost up. ‘I’m just going to say hello to Mrs McFadden. I’ll come and say goodbye before I go home.’
She hadn’t come out by the time we’d finished, so we went in to find them in the kitchen. Abe stopped ahead of me. ‘Let’s go upstairs and get pillows.’
‘But …’ I saw
what he’d already seen through the kitchen doorway: Mrs McFadden sitting at the table, her head in her arms, her body heaving. Mum was beside her, her arm round her shoulders, saying nothing.
She came out later, looking sad but being extra jolly. ‘Bye, Ivy.’ She poked her head through the tent flap. ‘Gosh, it looks cosy in here. Don’t be a nuisance, will you?’
‘I won’t.’
Mrs McFadden was fine again by suppertime. ‘We’re having ham and salad,’ she said.
Everything seemed normal, which was what made it feel so odd.
We had supper. We helped to wash up and tidy the kitchen. We went out to play in the garden, then came in and got ready for bed. We said goodnight to Mr and Mrs McFadden, who were sitting in the living room with cups of coffee on the table between them.
It was all normal but not quite right.
Lying in the dark of our tent, I asked Abe, ‘Is your mum all right?’
‘I’ve put the torch in this pocket by the door,’ he replied.
‘Oh.’ I changed tack. ‘I like this tent. Funny that it’s been in your garage all the time.’
‘Why’s that funny?’
‘Just that I didn’t know.’
‘There’s other things,’ Abe said, ‘that you don’t know.’
I couldn’t tell if he was cross.
‘Mum’s supposed to take these pills. But she doesn’t always. Dad found the bottle in the bathroom cabinet this morning and there were too many left. So he knew.’
‘Oh.’ I felt embarrassed because I’d found pills in the bathroom once before. I’d been there after school and Abe had a headache. He’d left his glasses at school and Mrs McFadden thought that might be the cause. She had told me to look for aspirin in the bathroom cabinet. ‘I can’t find any.’ I came back, holding the only packet of pills I’d spotted. ‘Only these.’ They were tiny tablets, smaller than aspirin, in a foil strip. Each one was marked with a day of the week. Half had gone.
‘Give them to me!’ She had snatched the packet and Jackie had laughed. ‘Jackie, that’s enough.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, unsure what I’d done wrong.
‘I’ll go and have a look.’ She took the packet with her upstairs and Jackie smirked.
‘What?’
‘They’re Mum’s contraceptive pills, Ivy.’ Jackie watched me as if expecting some sort of reaction but the only one he got was of slight confusion.
Ivy and Abe Page 29