by Gwyneth Rees
‘Sorry …’ I started to fumble with my phone and saw that she was right about the text. I looked at Lily questioningly after I’d read it. ‘A party?’
To be honest I was feeling a bit miffed. How come my best friend had made party plans with Clara and Hanna rather than me?
‘We only just decided,’ Lily told me as if she could read my mind. ‘It was Raffy’s idea. I mean, it’s his party really.’
‘Raffy’s?’ I felt myself getting a tiny bit more interested when I heard that.
‘Yeah, we just found out that Mum and Dad are going away next weekend,’ she told me. ‘It’s just for one night and for the first time ever they’re actually going to leave us on our own. Raffy’s in charge and Auntie Jo is going to pop in to check up on us. But, basically, we’ve got the place to ourselves.’
‘So it’ll be an “empty”, you mean?’ I couldn’t imagine that Lily’s mum would give her permission for this. I knew Mum would freak if Sean and I ever held a party like that behind her back when she wasn’t at home, and I don’t think I’d even want to. Call me boring if you like, but I just can’t see the attraction of risking your house getting trashed or the entire Sixth Form turning up, smoking and drinking and refusing to leave.
‘It’ll be mostly Year Tens,’ Lily explained, ‘but Raffy says I get to invite some of my friends as well. So … do you want to come? I need an answer now so I know how many other people I can invite. Raffy is being very strict about the numbers. He says he doesn’t want too many little kids hanging around. I said we’re not little kids. But anyway, he says if we have too many people it could get out of hand.’
‘That’s sensible of him,’ I said, thinking that I really hoped Raffy didn’t think I was a little kid. ‘So how many people is he inviting?’
‘A hundred.’
‘A hundred?’ I gaped at her.
‘Raffy thinks they won’t all come and we can’t risk not having enough people there,’ Lily continued. ‘Anyway, you’re invited.’
‘And Sean,’ said Hanna, flicking back her wiry red hair as she came back over to join us along with Clara. ‘Tell him it’s going to be a really cool party.’
‘But you can’t bring any of your dorky friends from school,’ Clara told me. ‘And tell Sean not to bring Zack.’
‘What’s wrong with Zack?’ I demanded. (Goodness knows why I was sticking up for him all of a sudden.)
‘Nothing – apart from the fact he’s a total weirdo,’ Clara replied.
‘Sasha’s dorky friends probably wouldn’t want to come anyway,’ Hanna said matter-of-factly. ‘It wouldn’t be their scene. I mean, can you imagine Jillian or Priti actually enjoying themselves at our party?’
‘That’s true,’ Clara laughed. ‘It’d be way too much fun for them! In fact Jillian would probably bring her chess set.’
The others giggled.
I glared at them all. Jillian and Priti are two of the new friends I’ve made at Helensfield High. Jillian is super-bright and chess-mad. She’s been playing since she was three, and all her chess tournaments keep her very busy outside school. Priti is the new friend I’ve become really close to. She’s clever and quite studious and she’s always reading books and writing stuff. She wants to be a professional poet when she grows up. Leo is her English teacher and apparently he’s the only one who encourages her to be a poet, though even he says she’ll probably have to combine it with another career if she wants to earn a living.
‘You’d better be careful, Lily,’ I warned her shirtily. ‘You don’t want your neighbours calling the police, and let’s face it, with a hundred people partying in your house, then they’re probably going to.’
‘Oh … stop being such a killjoy, Sasha,’ Lily snapped.
‘Hey … right up until the police arrive I’m sure it’ll be a great party,’ I added with a smirk.
‘Ha. Ha.’
‘Remember, Sasha,’ Hanna said gravely, ‘you have to keep this a total secret. Clara and I are telling our parents we’re going to Lily’s for a sleepover. If you want to come then you’d better tell your mum the same thing.’
I glared at Hanna, feeling like telling her to stop being so patronising.
‘Oh, Sasha’s mum wouldn’t rat us out in any case,’ Lily informed them swiftly. ‘She’s more like a really cool big sister than a mum. Do you remember that time she took us with her to that cocktail party, Sasha?’ She turned to the other two, adding, ‘My mum nearly had a fit when she found out, even though we only drank non-alcoholic cocktails.’
I sighed. It was a story Lily never tired of telling.
‘Hey, I like your flip-flops, Sasha!’ Hanna suddenly said. ‘Did your mum get them for you?’
I glared at her. ‘No.’
‘Sasha actually has much better taste in clothes and shoes and stuff than you’d think,’ Lily told them.
‘Lily!’ I felt my cheeks flaming and I was about to tell her she could stuff her stupid party, but just in time I stopped myself.
‘I’ll try and make it to your party,’ I said frostily. ‘If you’re sure you wouldn’t rather have my mum instead?’
‘Don’t be daft.’ Lily was frowning, looking like she might be about to say more.
Before she had the chance I stalked off with my head held high. And if I hadn’t tripped on my loose flip-flop five seconds later, I reckon I’d have made a passably cool exit.
I can’t explain why I didn’t stand up for Priti and Jillian when Lily and her friends were so rude about them. I felt really disloyal afterwards, but at the time I was just flattered that I was invited to Raffy’s party. And after Lily called me a killjoy, I suppose I got a bit preoccupied wondering if she could be right.
Leo and my brother were both in the kitchen when I got inside. There were pizza cartons sitting on the table and the smell immediately set my stomach rumbling.
‘Hey, Sasha. How are you doing?’ Leo greeted me as he helped himself to a beer from our fridge. He pushed a chunk of dark unruly hair out of his eyes as he straightened up, adding, ‘Your mum’s had to go into work for a bit. She won’t be long but she said for us to go ahead and eat without her.’
‘Sasha, look! He actually remembered my extra pep- peroni,’ Sean told me with a grin, opening the lid of the top pizza box and inhaling dramatically.
I didn’t say anything. I still felt too angry with Sean to talk to him properly.
Leo went over and whacked the cardboard lid down on top of Sean’s fingers. ‘Paws off, greedy-guts. Now Sasha’s here we can sit at the table and eat in a civilised fashion.’
‘Or we could eat in an uncivilised fashion in front of the telly,’ Sean quipped.
Leo laughed as he handed my brother the top pizza carton. Unlike Mum, whose mood tends to go up and down a lot, Leo is almost always cheerful. At least he is at home. At school he can be pretty serious and strict if you start mucking about in his class. Or so I’ve heard. Luckily, Sean and I aren’t in his class for English, though he’d told us on holiday that he was going to be standing in for our registration teacher for a couple of weeks after Easter. That was going to be weird. Even thinking about it made me feel a bit odd.
Just then the phone rang and Leo picked it up, clearly expecting it to be Mum.
Too late, we looked at the caller display. It was Granny.
Leo’s eyes narrowed as he listened to whatever our grandmother was saying at the other end. ‘Did she? I see … Well, sorry, but I’m afraid she’s had to pop out … Yes, I’ll get her to call you … Yes … OK …’ Leo was clearly planning to hang up the phone, but Sean snatched it from him.
‘Hi, Granny!’ he said breezily. ‘Mum was phoning you to tell you that she and Leo got engaged on holiday! It’s cool, isn’t it? Leo’s going to be your new son-in-law.’
Leo stood there gaping at him.
A long silence followed, and then Sean said, ‘Granny, are you still there?’
Her delayed but extremely loud exclamation of disbelief was audible to
all of us. Sean grinned as he reassured Granny that of course he wasn’t joking and even offered to hand her over to Leo again to corroborate the news.
Leo shook his head furiously at that idea but he needn’t have worried because the only person Granny really wanted to speak to was Mum. Sean told her to try Mum on her mobile and then he listened for a few more minutes, murmuring, ‘OK, Granny, see you then,’ a couple of times. Finally he hung up, looking very pleased with himself.
‘Mum’s going to kill you, Sean,’ I told him.
‘Not if I do it first,’ Leo said grimly.
‘Look, Mum didn’t want to tell Granny, so now I’ve done the job for her. She’s going to thank me,’ my brother protested.
‘Not after your grandmother’s called her at work and given her an earful,’ Leo pointed out.
‘Mum’ll see it’s Granny and she won’t answer,’ Sean said smoothly. ‘That’s why you have caller display, Leo. So you can see who it is before you pick up the phone. Oh … before I forget, Granny wants to come and visit us this week. I think she wants to make sure you haven’t brainwashed Mum into marrying you or anything!’
‘This week? When this week?’ Leo sounded horrified.
‘Wednesday or Thursday probably. She’s ringing back to let us know.’
Leo pulled such a face that I couldn’t help wondering if he was having second thoughts about joining our family.
Mum got home half an hour later and was full of smiles, even though she’d had a conversation with Granny. Leo and Sean and I were watching an action movie with lots of shooting in it. Mum walked straight into the living room, picked up the remote and switched off the TV.
‘HEY!’ the three of us shouted indignantly.
‘You shouldn’t be watching such a violent film. It’s not good for you.’ She sounded just like Granny, though none of us dared tell her that.
‘Don’t worry, Annie. There were no really gross scenes,’ Leo said jokily. ‘The blood didn’t even look real, did it, kids?’
Mum gave him a you’re-not-funny sort of look as she turned to us. ‘Guess what? It looks like we might have a buyer for Blossom House.’
‘No way!’ Instantly I felt panicked. I looked at Sean, who was clearly equally horrified.
‘Yes. We’ve got a new client who’s actually considering paying the full asking price. Miranda showed him round while we were in Greece apparently.
‘But, Mum, you said nobody would ever be interested in Blossom House while it was so overpriced,’ I protested.
Mum was nodding. ‘Yes. It’s a bit of a surprise, I must say! Miranda thinks he must have more money than sense.’
‘But –’ I gulped. I didn’t know what to say.
‘Are you all right, Sasha?’ Leo asked.
I quickly put a fake smile on my face and stood up. ‘Sure. I’m going upstairs. I want to catch up on my homework before school.’
Sean started to follow – I could tell he was worried now about that stupid snake – but Mum called out sharply from the living room. ‘Sean! Come back in here! I want to talk to you!’
‘She probably wants to talk about what you said to Granny,’ I murmured. He rolled his eyes and turned back.
As I continued upstairs I passed the picture of Grandpa in his magician’s costume, then the blown-up photograph of white cherry blossom our dad had taken in the park a few weeks before he died.
I felt my eyes fill up at the thought that we might be about to lose Blossom House after all this time. I forced the tears back down and gave myself a fierce talking to: Come on, Sasha! It’s just a house. No matter how much you love it, it’s not like you’re losing an actual person …
Maybe this is the point where I should tell you a bit about our dad.
Sean and I were five when he collapsed suddenly one afternoon on the floor of our living room. As I watched him being taken away in the ambulance, I don’t think I had any actual thoughts at the time about not seeing him ever again. But I do remember a certain feeling that I had – as if something catastrophic was happening or was about to happen.
It had started out as a perfectly ordinary day. Sean and I were playing ‘Knights and Princesses’ and Sean was rescuing me. At first we didn’t notice anything was wrong, then Mum was all panicky, talking and crying on the phone, and rushing us out of the room. An ambulance appeared and we watched our dad being loaded into it on a stretcher. Our neighbour came to look after us while Mum went with him to the hospital. She fed us lots of biscuits and let us watch TV until really late, and when we woke up the next morning Granny was there and Mum was in her room in bed as if she was the one who was ill. Granny had to sit with Mum the whole time until the doctor came and gave her some medicine to help her sleep.
Granny and the doctor sat Sean and me down and told us together that our daddy had died in the night.
I can remember a few bits about the funeral service. I remember thinking our dad might actually be there in some form or another, and being quite disappointed when he wasn’t. I think I asked Granny where he was in the church and she pointed to the coffin, but I still didn’t really understand what was going on.
Afterwards a lot of people came back to our house and I remember sitting with Sean on the patio, trying to change the direction of an army of ants by feeding them a trail of breadcrumbs. It was a sunny day and people were standing on the grass in black clothes, talking to each other and eating party food.
Some grown-ups we didn’t know came over to talk to us, wanting to know what we were doing. They immediately donated some of their strawberry tart to our ant project, advising us that ants especially liked sweet things. Sure enough we soon had that ant army under our control.
‘Do you know our daddy?’ I remember asking them.
At the mention of our dad, Sean started looking around the garden as if he was trying to spot him. He’d been doing that a lot.
‘Daddy’s not here,’ I reminded him in my most grown-up, talking-to-a-baby sort of voice. ‘He’s dead, remember?’
‘I know that, stupid!’ And he gave me a massive shove and started stamping all over the ants.
Mum thinks that Sean and I were too young to experience proper grief when our dad died. She even thinks it’s a blessing we didn’t lose him later on, when she reckons it would have hurt us more. But I don’t agree with her on that. I wish I could remember him as an actual person a lot better, instead of just being left with some faint and disjointed memories and that achy feeling of wanting him that I can remember as clearly as anything.
Mum seemed to cry all the time after he died and sometimes it felt like she was never going to stop. Granny gave up trying to distract her in the end, and basically left her to it when she was crying, concentrating on looking after Sean and me instead.
Mum says her heart broke that day and I’m sure it was true because for a long time it was as if she’d just sort of ground to a halt. Sometimes she wanted to be left alone. Other times she couldn’t bear to be on her own, not even to sleep, and we’d all go to sleep together, me, Sean and Mum, in her big bed. Lily’s mum used to come in the mornings to take us to school, and on really bad days Mum wouldn’t even be up and she’d tell Sean and me not to bother answering the door. Granny came over every day to check up on us (she still lived in the same town as us then) and after a while she ended up moving in with us. She told Sean and me we had to be very grown up and help her look after Mum.
At home I tried to be as grown up and helpful as possible but at school all I wanted to do was draw pictures. I drew lots of different pictures of heaven, all with blue skies, beaches, flowers, bright sunshine, with my dad standing in the middle with his sunhat on and his camera round his neck and a big smile on his face. I drew him a little house to live in and a dog, because I knew he’d always wanted one.
I remember Sean and I went to see a lady who was especially interested in our drawings and the same lady helped Sean and me write goodbye messages to our dad on little coloured labels, which we
tied to red balloons and let go of one windy day, watching and waving until they were tiny red dots in the sky. I wrote ‘GOODBYE, DADDY, I LOVE YOU’ on mine, though I had to get some help with the spelling. Sean wasn’t very good at writing so he drew a picture of Dad and him holding hands.
When we were a bit older it was Granny who explained why our dad had died that day. We already knew that it had started with a headache that was so bad it had made him fall on to the floor. I always got worried whenever Mum had a headache and once, when she had a really bad one, I started to cry. That was what prompted Granny to talk to us and she pointed out that mostly when you have a headache it doesn’t mean you’re about to die. Our dad’s headache wasn’t anything like a normal one, she said. It had happened because a faulty blood vessel in his brain had suddenly burst and caused too much brain damage for his brain to carry on working. It was an extremely rare thing to have a faulty blood vessel in your brain, she said, and we didn’t have to worry about it happening to Mum or to us because our blood vessels were all perfectly healthy. And as usual she had said it so firmly and with such certainty that I had been instantly reassured.
It’s been seven years now since our dad died and I honestly can’t remember him very well at all. I have hazy memories of sitting on his lap while he read me a story, and of playing ball in the park with him and Sean. But I can’t remember his face very clearly, or what his voice sounded like.
I do have one very precious memory of him though. He’d taken me outside to see a spider’s web glistening in the early morning dew and I remember being both terrified and mesmerised as we watched that big spider dangling by a silver thread right in front of our noses. I remember giggling as he took a photograph of me standing as close to the web and its hairy occupant as I dared. And even now, especially on a frosty morning, I can still remember the thrill of being there with him that day, just the two of us in our yet-to-be-shattered world.