by Sanjida Kay
He smiled at her and stepped out into the night. Laura, watching him vanish into the darkness, wondered if he’d call her, if perhaps he might come around and drink red wine and black coffee and talk to her about the planets.
Vanessa raised an eyebrow at her as Laura locked the kitchen door.
‘He’s into astronomy,’ she explained. ‘He wants to do a bit of star-gazing on his way home.’
They waited at the window until they heard the gate click shut and then Vanessa said, ‘Autumn’s very tired, poor dear. Unsurprisingly. As must you be. There’s pizza for you. We thought you would be starving by now.’
Laura, a little woozy from the wine, nodded.
‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said and hugged her. It was the first time she’d called her mother Mum and not Vanessa since she was seven, she suddenly realized. She was glad her mother was here, she thought. If only she could stay until Monday – see Mrs Sibson with her, talk to Levi’s parents. Take charge.
‘I’ll just go and say goodnight to Autumn,’ Laura said.
I’ll tell her that it’s all over now, she thought. I’ll say: Levi won’t dare bully you again.
AUTUMN
Autumn lined her toys up in her bed as she had done every night since they’d moved into the new house: Little Bear; Big Bear; Ruby, a patchwork alligator; Jerome, a black boy doll complete with male genitalia wearing a pink dress; Stephanie, a rabbit with a missing ear; Hum Drum the elephant; and George, a lion with a mane that Autumn had brushed until only a few wisps remained. They looked back at her with their glassine eyes, a small, raggedy army assembled to protect her from all the creaks and moans and groans in this eerie house. They all used to be in her bed but, during the night, her mother would always remove them. This was the compromise: they were still tucked in but at the foot of the bed.
She’d asked her grandmother to read her a bedtime story and her mother had looked pained. Autumn hated it when she hurt her feelings, and then, even worse, her mum tried to pretend she hadn’t. But the alternative had been to hurt Granny’s feelings and Granny was only here for a little bit. She’d said she was holding the fort while her mum was working over the weekend, but she was only holding it for a short time. Really, thought Autumn, she felt guilty about not visiting them sooner. Granny was leaving on Sunday. Autumn counted to herself: two more sleeps, if you included tonight.
She looked around the room. It glowed with an alien blue light that didn’t quite diminish the dark or light up the deepest recesses and shadows in her bedroom. It was from a clock her mum had bought her when she was two. It had stars on it and when it was the proper time to get up, it turned yellow and the stars became a sun with a smiley face. It had been supposed to make her stay in bed until morning but it hadn’t worked, Mum had said.
Her dad hadn’t approved of the clock because he said children shouldn’t have lights in their bedroom.
It’s bad for your eyes. And aren’t you too old for that?
He’d set it to the dimmest possible background light, a weak blue that barely banished any shadows. That was before he moved into his new girlfriend’s flat. In their new house Autumn had been frightened to even get out of bed and creep across the creaking floorboards. Once she’d wet the bed in the night because she was too scared to get up. She didn’t know which was worse: the fear or the humiliation of weeing in her bed like a baby.
She’d found the instructions for the clock – Dad had kept a file in his office labelled Autumn, with boring paperwork about school, report cards, her red medical record book, and what he called Odds and Ends. He’d given it to her mum when he went and Autumn had found it in one of the boxes. Her mum hadn’t even unpacked it. Autumn read the instructions through carefully first and then sat down with it and the clock in front of her and followed each step, like Dad did. She was pleased when she managed to increase the brightness of the clock and it was now as light as it could be. She’d replaced the instruction manual in the file. She was sure her Mum didn’t even remember there was an Autumn folder.
She felt funny thinking about her dad. He loved her, she knew that, and she loved him, but it was a kind of sharp love that hurt inside. He didn’t really understand her. He wanted her to be more. He wished she was bigger, somehow – but not taller or older. The ruts in his forehead grew deeper when he looked at her pictures and, although he always said they were nice, really he wanted her to go and play outside. Actually, she thought, he’d be a lot happier if she was a boy. A proper boy, not one like Caius, from her old class, who was thin and mild-mannered and had blond hair in mad corkscrews and read poetry books.
And now she hardly saw him and she felt bad for even thinking about loving him differently than other kids loved their dads. When they talked every Saturday on Skype it felt tricky. He always asked the same questions about school and friends, and he said the same thing whenever he said goodbye: Be good for your mother. Which showed a serious lack of imagination because she always was good for her mum.
She was trying not to think about what had happened today. After the slugs yesterday, and her mum talking to Mrs Sibson this morning, the rain on her way home had been like an extra, final punishment as she ran, shivering and slipping in the mud, clutching her portfolio under one arm. Until, that is, she saw Levi and his boys at the end of the metal bridge. He was smiling, the crooked, wicked smile that he reserved especially for her.
The boys that were with him banged sticks and their hands against the bars. Their voices warped and echoed within the cage and ricocheted across the humming railway lines. They were like the chimpanzees in London Zoo: loud and strong and out of control. She felt as if she had no bones, like a jellyfish, hooked from the sea. She walked slowly towards them, her ears ringing, but they ignored her. All except for Levi, who stood at the end, his hands in his pockets, smiling.
She walked past them and they stopped banging and shouting. The silence was far more frightening. Levi stopped smiling. They closed around her in a circle. One of them pushed her. Another one pulled her hood down. And then one snatched her portfolio. She cried out but they just laughed. They passed it between them and then to Levi. She ran towards him, trying to retrieve it, but he held it above his head and opened the zip, and her paintings cascaded out.
And then her mum had come – too late. They’d already torn all her pictures up and scattered them in handfuls of bleeding ink into the rain and tossed them across the grass. Her mum had shouted at him and the boys had backed off. She thought of her mum, white and shaking, her face wet with rain, her voice trembling, frightened and angry; and Levi, beautiful, glowing, smiling, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. And his horrid laugh. It had made her shiver.
She clutched Big Bear to her.
And then her mum had pushed him and he’d fallen, and when he looked up his eyes were funny and unfocused and his cheek was bleeding and all bruised. Autumn shuddered. She couldn’t bear to think of what might have happened. What if her mum hadn’t come and got her? What would happen now?
She’d tried not to dwell on it when she was out with Granny but she was worried. Her mum had looked terrible when they’d left: pale and hurt, as if she wanted some sort of reassurance, as if she wanted Autumn to tell her that it would all be okay. She couldn’t do it, she couldn’t think of the right words.
‘Let’s choose a special pizza for Mum,’ she’d said, and they’d ordered one with extra toppings, all of Mum’s favourite food.
When they’d arrived home, she’d felt sick. She thought they might walk in and find Levi’s parents talking to her mum. But she was sitting upstairs, half in her office, half on the landing, with a man. The one who’d come to fix her laptop. He didn’t look like a computer repair man. He looked… Autumn struggled to describe him… charming, like a prince in a fairy story.
Her mum was clutching a glass of wine and leaning towards him as if he was the most fascinating person she’d met. I
t had shocked Autumn, this still tableau, lit with a single lamp, burning in the darkness of the house. And he was odd, this man, Aaron. He’d shaken her hand as if she were a grown-up, but he hadn’t looked at her. He hadn’t seen her.
She’d grown agitated and run up the stairs, turning on all the lights. She hoped he would go, this strange man with the blankness inside him, who seemed to have enchanted her mother. Would he become her mum’s new boyfriend? Her mum had come up to say goodnight and she’d stroked her hair and told her that Levi would never bother her again.
It was wrong to push him, she’d said, as she’d said several times before, but I stood up to him. He won’t hurt you now.
She was frightened of Levi, Autumn thought, but she still came to get me, she told him to stop bullying me in front of all those boys. Maybe it will be okay.
She hugged Big Bear more tightly.
Saturday 27 October
LAURA
‘You could try British Military Fitness,’ said Jacob.
Laura made a face.
‘I’m not kidding,’ said Jacob. ‘It would get you fit extremely quickly. You could go into the blue group, the easiest one.’
‘I’d hate it.’
Laura was barely listening. The first thing she’d thought of when she’d woken that morning had been Levi. The child’s face when she’d pushed him. His eyes opening wide with shock, his head rolling back. Thank God she wasn’t at home this morning. Would his parents be able to find her address? How could she explain why she’d done something so terrible?
‘Don’t know until you try,’ Jacob continued. ‘You never know, big hulking soldiers yelling at you might turn out to be your thing.’ He smiled at her expression. ‘I’m kidding. We only yell a bit.’
Jacob was small and wiry with tattoos covering both arms; he’d been discharged from the marines two years ago. He and Laura had met just after she’d moved from London in the summer. UWE had held a study day in August for the students on the horticulture course she’d transferred to. Laura had been nervous: she was moving onto a degree that had been running part-time for a couple of years already. The others were friendly but, as Laura had expected, they’d already established friendships. Jacob, like her, was an outsider. He’d also swapped from another college, joining last year when he’d moved to Bristol. Like her, he also seemed a little adrift.
He’d told her about the garden-design business he was starting up and, as he’d described it, she saw immediately how they could be partners, instead of setting up a rival company of her own. With her BBC training and background, she would be better than him at designing publicity material and marketing the company. She also had several years of practical experience from growing plants in her allotment – experience that Jacob was lacking. Over lunch that day, she discovered that he’d spent a few years in Africa as a child too: his father had been a lieutenant in the army in Rhodesia, as Jacob called it, correcting himself quickly, and giving her a lopsided grin, as if in acknowledgement of their expat pasts.
He’d liked the idea of working with her. Neither of them had any money or much time though – Laura had Autumn to take care of and her job at Bronze Beech, and Jacob ran British Military Fitness classes. Today she and Jacob were creating a new garden for their first client, Ruth Jones. Like all the planning for their fledgling business, working on Ruth’s garden had to be done sporadically and usually at the weekends.
It was a perfect autumnal morning: it had finally stopped raining and the sky was a brilliant blue. The sun was warm, although the early morning air was still chilly. Vanessa had taken Autumn shopping, to her delight. Laura was pleased: it meant Vanessa and Autumn would be out of the house if Levi’s parents came round.
Ruth lived in a beautiful flat in Clifton, the wealthiest part of Bristol, but, as it was their first job, Laura and Jacob were charging less than she knew Barney would if his company redesigned the garden. Laura’s ideas seemed to chime with Jacob and Ruth. She couldn’t quite call it a design, it was more of a concept: a wind garden inspired by Namibia. She hadn’t been able to explain it properly, she recalled with embarrassment, but Jacob and Ruth had grasped what she meant instinctively; Ruth had lived in South Africa as a child too. In any case, Laura thought as she dug in forkfuls of sand, it had to work: this garden would be a showpiece to attract new customers. And it was only through running her own business that she’d have the flexibility – and, eventually, the money – she needed to look after Autumn as a single mother.
They were shaping the part of the garden that Laura thought of as the wind section: a large curved bed they were going to fill with grasses that differed subtly in height and colour. As they grew they would rustle and whisper in the slightest breeze, their leaves stirring like a current passing through the savannah or sand shape-shifting in the desert.
The sand was to leaven the clay soil that trapped water and would kill their grasses, which all stood in little hessian wraps in a pile at one end of the garden, ready for planting. Laura disliked sand: it was beautiful at a distance, but she couldn’t abide the gritty feeling of it against her fingers and the memories it conjured, of sand in her eyes, her shoes, every fold of her skin; her utter loneliness as her mother disappeared again, like a mirage into the desert.
Jacob turned over great clods of soil and dug in spadefuls of the stuff as easily as if they weighed next to nothing while she puffed and sweated and managed child-sized forkfuls. It had been easy to tell Jacob that she was unfit without him suspecting an ulterior motive; without having to explain about Autumn and Levi and how weak she’d felt when she’d confronted him, how determined she was to be strong enough to protect her daughter.
Jacob told her about the British Military Fitness classes he led around Bristol: it was physical fitness for civilians, he said, taught by ex-soldiers.
‘Push-ups, sit-ups, sprints, that kind of thing,’ he added, when she asked him to explain. ‘It’s not pretty but it is effective. I’ve got a class timetable in the car. Remind me and I’ll give it to you when we leave.’
I will hate it and I’ll look stupid, she thought as she hauled over another bag of sand, her back aching with the effort. Laura reminded herself she would be doing it for Autumn’s sake. Besides, she hated gyms and at least BMF was outside in the park.
‘No one cares what you look like,’ said Jacob, as if reading her mind. ‘Everyone ends up covered in mud. Besides, the clocks change on Sunday – it’ll be dark. You’ll hardly be able to see anyone else anyway.’
She wiped her gloved hand across her forehead.
‘First one’s free,’ said Jacob.
‘I’ll give it a go,’ she said reluctantly.
She felt her phone vibrate in her pocket and took one glove off to retrieve it. It was a text from Matt saying that they were setting off on their trek into the Himalayas tomorrow. He would go to an Internet café tonight so he could Skype Autumn.
Would Autumn tell him what she’d done? she wondered. What would he say?
And then she thought of Aaron: the long muscle running down his thigh, his strong fingers balanced delicately on the keyboard, how his eyes had lit up when he’d talked about the planets. She wondered if she would see Aaron again, if he’d contact her to check her laptop was working.
The double doors from the flat opened and Ruth came out, picking her way past the piles of driftwood that Laura and Jacob had salvaged on a walk along Burnham Beach. She was small, in her fifties, with dyed-black hair and tasteful clothes. Today she was wearing a jade jumper and navy trousers with a thin, silk lime-green scarf. Laura had never seen her wear jeans.
‘What a beautiful day,’ she called out as she approached them.
They both stopped working and Jacob hurried to take the tray she was carrying. She’d brought them mugs of coffee and a fruit loaf, cut into thick slices, glacé cherries glistening like cut gems. They sat on wooden chairs, surround
ed by the plastic bags of sand, and let the weak sunshine warm them.
Ruth reminded her a little of Vanessa, Laura thought; she had that same grace and timeless elegance and something indefinable that people who’ve spent many years in Africa have. Entitlement – the kind of superiority that those from developed nations display in poorer countries. But she was being uncharitable. It was more than an expat mentality, she thought; it was as if they’d witnessed something raw and elemental, and everything in life would be measured against that knowledge and fall short. It created a calm grittiness in a person, Laura concluded. Jacob had it too. Calm was the last thing she felt.
Jacob was tapping her foot with his boot.
‘Nice cake,’ she mumbled, putting her piece down. She knew she’d end up eating Jacob’s too, because he would only take a bite to look polite.
‘Ruth was asking us what stage we’re at with the garden,’ said Jacob, smiling at her.
Laura swallowed and tried to concentrate. She turned to Ruth. In the bright sunlight, the silver threads in her hair sparkled. Laura explained that today they’d finish digging in the sand and they’d plant the grasses tomorrow. There was another bed that had to be created, and the patio area – it was going to have large terracotta pots on it containing giant cacti.
‘I’ve found an acacia that’ll survive the frost,’ she said, thinking of the ones in Namibia, with their cruel thorns that grew alongside dry river beds. Elephants would travel for miles to feast on their giant orange seed pods.
It wasn’t the order that everything should be done in, this piecemeal approach, but it depended on when they had time and money and what they’d learnt and managed to source. Everything was new to both of them.
Laura heard a loud rushing noise, a whoosh of air. She looked up. A red balloon was drifting past through the cloudless blue sky, just above their heads. A jet of flame soared upwards and the balloon glowed like a Chinese lantern.