Flightsend

by Linda Newbery

  ‘I’ll get a bit of string, and take him round the village to see if anyone’s lost him,’ Charlie said.

  ‘The kettle’s on,’ her mother said. ‘We’ll have some tea and then I’ll shove the dinner in the oven and come with you.’

  The fog had thickened as dusk fell, and there was no one about in the village. The cottage windows were lamplit and curtained. There were no street lights; Charlie found that strange, after years of living on a suburban housing estate. Radbourne House, opposite the church, had carriage lamps along its driveway and a sensor light that clicked on as Charlie and Kathy walked crunchily over the gravel. The plummy woman who opened the door said that the stray dog reminded her of a wolfhound she’d had as a child, but she’d never seen him before.

  The dog walked obediently between Charlie and her mother as they worked their way round the rest of the houses. People looked at him sympathetically, but no one claimed him, or knew where he came from.

  ‘The pub, next,’ said Kathy.

  In the Bull and Horseshoes, an elderly man drinking alone at the bar told them, ‘I seen that dog a few times, hanging round. He been abandoned if you ask me. Lurcher, he is. Coursing dog. He prob’ly weren’t no good.’

  ‘Coursing?’ Charlie asked Kathy outside.

  ‘Chasing hares,’ Kathy said. ‘Two dogs after one hare. A so-called sport. Barbaric. They’re gypsy dogs, aren’t they, lurchers? Hunting dogs. Or poaching, more like.’

  ‘I like hares,’ said Charlie, who had seen a few out in the fields. ‘Good for him, then, if he’s a courser that won’t course.’

  ‘A lurcher that won’t lurch,’ Kathy said. ‘We’ll just try that other big house, shall we, the one round the bend in the road? Then we’d better go home before that casserole turns to charcoal.’

  The big house was called Nightingales, a stone Victorian mansion that kept itself aloof behind high walls.

  ‘Not that people in such a posh house would have a gypsy dog,’ Charlie said doubtfully as they walked along the lane to the entrance gate. ‘I bet some incredibly rich person lives here.’

  ‘Oh, but look!’ Kathy opened the gate ahead of Charlie, who had to wait while the dog cocked a leg against the wall. ‘It’s not a private house after all.’

  Nightingales, said a large signboard inside the walled garden. Residential and non-residential courses. Full programme of courses throughout the year.

  ‘What sort of courses?’ Charlie asked, thinking of school. ‘And what’s the use of putting a sign there, where you can only read it when you’re already inside? It ought to be out on the road.’

  ‘We can ask,’ Kathy said, but then, side-tracked, ‘Just look at this garden, Charlie! It needs taking care of, but someone knew what they were doing – look, garrya elliptica, and that beautiful prunus, oh, and hellebores with the snowdrops—’

  ‘Come on,’ Charlie said firmly, since her mother showed signs of disappearing round the side of the house for a full inspection. She marched up to the studded wooden front door and banged the knocker.

  The woman who opened the door had short dark hair and was about Kathy’s age, perhaps a bit younger. She was drying her hands on the striped apron she wore. Past her, Charlie could see a large entrance hall, with a reception hatch and a noticeboard; a table was set with wine-glasses.

  ‘Hello!’ the woman greeted them. ‘Did you find your way all right? You’re in good time, anyway. You can park in the stableyard, then I’ll help take your bags over to the Well House. We talked on the phone, didn’t we? I’m Fay.’ She held out her hand.

  ‘No, no!’ Kathy said. ‘We’re not whoever you think we are. We’ve come about this lost dog.’

  The woman clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, sorry! I thought you were the Enamelling tutor. She’s bringing a daughter, you see.’

  Kathy explained about the ownerless dog, and Fay shook her head; then she looked hopefully at Charlie. ‘You live in the village, do you? I suppose you’re not looking for casual work?’

  ‘Charlie’s doing her GCSEs this year,’ Kathy said.

  ‘But I’d still like casual work,’ Charlie said quickly. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Waitressing, helping out in the kitchen, odd jobs,’ Fay said. ‘I’m a bit stuck for tonight, to be honest. The usual girl’s off sick and we were short-handed anyway.’

  ‘Well, if—’ Kathy began, looking doubtfully at Charlie.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Charlie said, completely forgetting about practical details like what sort of hours, and how much she would earn.

  ‘Great!’ Fay glanced at her watch. ‘Gosh, look at the time. Can you start straight away? Oh – you’ll need to wear a skirt. Black, preferably.’

  ‘It’ll have to be her school uniform skirt—’ Kathy began. Then she stopped abruptly, looking into the entrance hall behind Fay. Charlie looked, and saw a little toddling girl, about two years old, in a red pinafore dress over a striped sweater. The girl came up to Fay and stood behind her, hugging Fay’s legs and peeping out at Charlie and Kathy. Charlie was aware of Kathy’s tenseness, her eyes fixed on the child.

  ‘Oh, this is Rosie,’ Fay said, smiling. She reached both arms behind her. ‘Come on out, Rosie, you don’t have to be shy.’

  Rosie. Of all names. Charlie felt her mother receive it like a punch in the stomach. Rosie was a beautiful child, with brown eyes like her mother’s, and hair brushed back under a velvet headband to fall in loose curls.

  Charlie stood helplessly, her mouth opening to say something polite. She couldn’t think of anything. Kathy made a sort of gulping sound, pushed the dog’s string in Charlie’s direction, then turned and walked away fast down the path.

  ‘Mum—’ Charlie tried.

  The gate clunked shut. The lurcher pulled on his lead and gazed alertly after Kathy, giving a faint whine.

  Fay looked from the shut gate to Charlie, baffled. ‘Oh, what did I—?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Charlie said quickly. Then, feeling like a traitor: ‘OK, then – I’ll just go home to change. Back in ten minutes.’

  Rose

  Charlie hurried after her mother, towed by the lurcher. He seemed to have accepted Flightsend as home and was pulling at his lead, his mouth parted in a grin. He knew his way round the side of the house, and pawed at the back door, eager for praise or food.

  Charlie, fully expecting her mother to be upstairs crying in her room, found her instead in the kitchen, mashing potatoes.

  ‘We’ll keep the dog, shall we, unless someone claims him?’ Kathy said, not looking at Charlie.

  Charlie knew the symptoms. The blocked-up nose, the catch in the voice, the careful avoidance of the real subject.

  ‘Could we?’

  ‘It’d be nice to have a dog. Company,’ Kathy said stiffly. ‘And he’s a good dog, you can tell. Kind-natured. Obliging.’

  Sean’s kind-natured and obliging, Charlie thought. Why couldn’t we have kept him?

  ‘You’d better go up and change,’ Kathy said. ‘Will you eat before you go?’

  ‘No, there isn’t time. I’ll have it when I get back,’ Charlie said, though her stomach felt hollow. ‘Perhaps waitressing will make me eat less. Make me sick of the sight of food.’

  ‘Don’t be daft,’ her mother said. ‘I’ve told you before. You’ve got a large frame and you’re a healthy adolescent and you need to eat. You’ll never be stick-thin like those supermodels, thank God. There’s nothing wrong with being well-built.’ She served out a small helping of casserole for herself. Kathy’s insistence on proper eating applied only to Charlie. During her breakdown, she’d got so thin that Charlie had been seriously worried about her starving herself. She was much thinner than Charlie, and at least two stones lighter.

  Sometimes, comparing herself unfavourably with her best friend Rowan, Charlie made half-hearted attempts at eating less, but it was no good thinking that missing out on a few potatoes or abstaining from chocolate would ever produce a slim, graceful body like Rowan’s. Still, if the
y were keeping the dog – she thought of taking him out for walks, of long-shadowed summer evenings out in the fields and down by the river. She could become fitter even if not slimmer.

  ‘What shall we call him?’ she asked.

  Her mother thought for a moment.

  ‘How about Caspar?’ she suggested.

  ‘Caspar. What do you think, dog? Do you want to be Caspar?’ Charlie asked. The dog looked at her and thumped his tail. ‘OK, Caspar it is.’

  ‘I’ll borrow some dog food from Mrs Webster and get some more from the shop tomorrow,’ her mother said. ‘But we’d better not get too attached to him, yet. He might still be claimed.’

  ‘There are other dogs. Now that we’ve decided to have one. We could go to a rescue place,’ Charlie said.

  But she wanted this dog, this lurcher, with his smiley mouth and his expressive eyebrows and his air of gratitude. He seemed to want to stay, and having him here made the cottage seem more like home, themselves more like a family. Three of them.

  Upstairs in her room, Charlie forgot her hurry. She sat on her bed examining her fingernails and thinking about the life that could have been.

  Usually she tried – hard – not to let herself do this. She had a new life now. This was what she had to get on with, and it was pointless to waste time thinking about the other one. But it was still there, penned up like water behind a lock gate, ready to flood out and suffocate her when she let it. Mum was the one who’d had the breakdown, but it was Charlie’s loss, too. And Sean’s.

  None of them would ever be the same again.

  They’d been a proper family. Herself, Mum, Sean. There would soon be a fourth person, when the baby was born. They spent so long waiting, planning. The latest ultrasound scan showed that she was a girl; Kathy and Sean named her Rose. Sean and Charlie decorated the spare bedroom for her, choosing curtains and a wallpaper border with a pattern of chickens and ducks. Sean made a mobile and suspended it above the crib. A second daughter for Mum, first child for Sean, baby sister for Charlie. Their lives were all tied up with the future, with the date marked on the calendar. The end of waiting, the start of this new life.

  Until.

  Something went wrong. All the scans had shown a healthy baby; Kathy had felt her kicking. But her heartbeat faltered and stopped, and all the efforts of the obstetricians had been unable to save her. She died before she was born, and Kathy had to give birth anyway, to a stillborn baby.

  Dead baby Rose. A life that never had its beginning. The nurses gave her to Kathy to hold; Kathy wept. They all cried together, Kathy, Sean and Charlie. Then, when it was time for the nurses to take the baby away, Kathy held on tightly, refusing to believe that Rose was dead.

  Charlie would never forget seeing her mother leaving the hospital empty-handed, a few days later, leaning against Sean. The new baby clothes waited uselessly at home: the crocheted shawl and the Babygros and the tiny shoes. The empty nursery was a reproach. Everywhere she looked, Kathy saw emblems of failure. Charlie saw them too, saw her mother seeing them, and had no idea what to say or do. She could only think of the cruel disappointment. All those cells, splitting and dividing, making themselves into fingernails and toenails, lungs, eyes, a heart; all for nothing. Fate, or whatever controlled human fortunes, had played a callous trick. You think you’re going to have a baby, don’t you? it had teased them. You wait. I’ll show you.

  ‘Do you think we should do the room again?’ Charlie asked Sean, when her mother was sleeping upstairs. ‘Get rid of all the baby stuff, make it into a spare bedroom?’

  Sean shook his head. ‘That would be pretending Rose never existed. It wouldn’t help Kathy, or us. You can’t get over things by pretending they haven’t happened.’

  Charlie’s grandparents came to visit, and Sean’s parents from Staffordshire, and some friends. Others stayed away – because they didn’t know what to say, Kathy said. Those who did come offered sympathy and comfort. ‘You can try again,’ they told Kathy. ‘There’ll be other babies.’

  But Kathy only shook her head. No more babies. She wasn’t going through all that again: the hope and the loss, the pain and the defeat.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ she sobbed, when her friend Anne came round. ‘I let her die. I couldn’t hold on to her. I failed her.’

  Charlie overheard snatches of conversation, round and round, over and over: her mother blaming herself, refusing to be comforted. Anne was the only person Kathy would talk to about the baby. She wouldn’t talk to Charlie, nor to Sean. Baffled and hurt, Sean cooked meals for her, tried to plan outings to cheer her up. But wherever they went, they saw babies: healthy babies, beautiful babies, screwed-up-faced babies, in the street, in the supermarket. Babies kicking, crying, sleeping; babies with tiny fingernails and delicate tracings of eyebrows and whorls of soft hair; babies held by parents or grandparents. After a while Kathy refused to go out at all.

  ‘It’s understandable,’ Sean kept saying to Charlie, always generous, always patient. ‘She needs time. We all need time.’

  But what Charlie didn’t find understandable was that her mother was gradually dismissing Sean, pushing him away. At a time when she might have been expected to need him more than ever, she seemed determined only to hurt and reject him.

  Charlie tried not to hear, but the bedroom walls were thin.

  ‘You don’t have to stick around with me.’ Her mother’s voice was tight, accusing. ‘If you want kids, you can find someone ten years younger. Start again. There’s no need to tie yourself down to a failure.’

  And Sean’s voice, quieter, insistent: ‘But I don’t want … Don’t talk such rubbish … Why should you think …’ And eventually, rising in angry despair, ‘But I love you, Kathy, for Christ’s sake!’

  Charlie, at fourteen, felt that her life was falling apart. First, there was the loss of the baby sister she had so looked forward to; she’d imagined herself pushing Rose in a buggy, looking at picture books, reading stories at bedtime. The abrupt snuffing out of Rose, and of all the possibilities of her future, was bad enough. Even worse was watching her mother punish herself and Sean, dismantling their life together with what seemed to Charlie a deliberate, callous obstinacy.

  Charlie had to do something. Eventually, after Sean walked out of the house one Saturday evening, with the strained, twisted-mouthed look that meant he was only just holding back tears, she confronted her mother in the kitchen.

  ‘What have you said to him? It’s not Sean’s fault, what happened! Why are you being so horrible?’

  Kathy was standing by the cooker gazing at a fast-boiling saucepan of spaghetti. They’d all been about to sit down and eat. She took no notice of Charlie, nor of the saucepan, which was about to boil over. Charlie snatched the pan handle and pulled it to one side, then turned down the flame.

  ‘Mum!’ It was like talking to a sleepwalker. ‘Where’s he gone? Don’t you care that he’s just walked out?’

  Her mother turned away, studying the instructions on the packet as if she’d never cooked spaghetti before.

  ‘Mum …’

  Then Kathy said, slowly, ‘You don’t understand, Charlie. I know what I’m doing.’

  Charlie stared at her through a cloud of steam. ‘Upsetting Sean? Driving him away? Is that what you want?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake don’t talk like someone in an American soap!’ Kathy said, with a flash of spirit.

  ‘But Sean loves you. He loves us. Why won’t you let him help you?’

  ‘Are you going to drain that spaghetti or not?’

  ‘Yes, OK,’ Charlie shouted. ‘I’ll drain the spaghetti and then you can sit down and eat the meal Sean’s cooked for you. And I hope you’re grateful. You won’t even marry him—’

  ‘No,’ her mother said mildly. ‘You’re too young to understand, Charlie. He’ll be glad, later. When he’s found someone new. He’s eight years younger than me and that’s a big difference. He’s not even thirty yet. There’s plenty of time for him. I don’t want to
wreck his life.’

  ‘But that’s rubbish! You know it is. You are wrecking his life! Sean doesn’t care about the age difference, why should he? Neither did you, till …’

  Kathy shrugged. ‘Everything’s different, now.’

  ‘Only because you’re determined to make it different, to make it even worse than it is – oh, you’re so selfish! Yes, you’ve had an awful time, everyone knows that. But what about Sean? What about me? You’ve got me, haven’t you? Don’t I count? Don’t I mean anything to you?’

  Charlie hadn’t intended to shout, especially not these terrible me me things that made her sound jealous of Rose. But it was a relief to be yelling, words piling out of her mouth, an avalanche of the stored-up frustrations of the last weeks. Everyone had been stepping carefully round her mother as if she was a house of cards that would collapse in a heap if you breathed too hard. Perhaps it was time someone shouted loudly enough to rouse Kathy and make her realize what she was doing.

  But Charlie had heard Sean trying, and should have known it was useless. Her mother seemed to have passed through some boundary to a place unreachable by logic, reason or any amount of emotional pleading.

  ‘I know,’ she said vaguely, ‘and I’m sorry, but—’

  ‘But what? Never mind but! Go after Sean and fetch him back! Do you really want him to go, for good?’

  Kathy considered. ‘Yes. I think I do. It’s for the best.’

  ‘Well, I don’t! Mum, please …’

  Her mother turned and stared at her coldly. ‘Please don’t harangue me, Charlie. It’s not as if Sean’s your father.’

  Charlie was so infuriated by this that she couldn’t answer at all, the words choking themselves off in her throat. She served the spaghetti, tipping it in careless dollops, splashing the sauce. She did three platefuls, putting one in the oven for Sean in case he came back. No, he wasn’t her father; he was better than her real father, who’d cleared off when she was two. That didn’t mean she wasn’t entitled to care whether he stayed or not.