‘My Richard?’ I feel the blood drain from my face now. Why did she – oh, God, she’s just told me she’s expecting in November, not December. Does that mean she was already pregnant in February when the two of them slept together? I’m shaking, unable to think straight. It’s too much. Too much to take in, all at once.
‘Mine first,’ she says, almost inaudibly. ‘I met him first.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I met him. That day out along Rochester Esplanade when Ruffles got run over, have you forgotten? He came over to me. He wrapped Ruffles up in his jacket and he walked with me down to the vet’s. He didn’t take his car because he said I should never get into a car with a stranger. He made me call you,’ she gulps, ‘to say where we were.’
‘So – he took you to the vet’s? What’s that got to do with anything?’ My voice is rising though I’m trying hard to keep it level. Scarlett is…she’s obviously fraught and upset and hormonal and conflicted and saying lots of things that she doesn’t really mean. She can’t mean them. She’s talking rubbish. She’s got to be.
‘You can’t know how I felt about him all that summer. When we were teaching each other to dance…’
‘In the vet’s old cow shed you mean? Oh, Scarlett! Are you talking about the time I came in and found you two dancing together?’ I search my memory and all I can come up with is that I thought she looked so sweet. And…so happy and I was glad she’d found a hobby that would take her mind off all the bad things that had happened that year.
‘But there was never anything between you. You were thirteen, for pity’s sake.’ Her face looks like thunder but I continue on regardless. ‘So you had a crush on him? Maybe you did. I’m sorry I didn’t notice. I had plenty enough on my own plate if you recall – I was only twenty-one myself, and I’d had to take on the house, looking after you, everything.’ I had to leave my creative arts university degree at Canterbury unfinished so I could look after her -has she forgotten? I lost it all! Not just Flo – the only person who’d ever been a parent to me, but the education that would give me a shot at the fashion career I’d always dreamed of.
‘I was due to have gone away to do my year abroad.’ I stutter now at her white face. Does she remember any of that? If she was ever even aware of it she doesn’t care.
‘I wanted you to go abroad, don’t you know that?’ she shoots back. ‘I was looking forward to your going. I never wanted you to stay behind and ruin everything for me, make the sacrifice, be such a bloody martyr
I stop. She is distraught, my sister. She is hysterical. Is this what the pregnancy is doing to her? Filling her so full of hormones that she can’t think straight anymore? I have to be the one who stays calm here. I have to.
‘I’m sorry if…if I didn’t notice how you felt about him, but let’s face it, that was over ten years ago, Scarlett. You’re a grown woman now…’
‘You didn’t notice because…everything I ever did back in those days was always put down to me “going through some teenage phase”. You and Beatrice used to sit in the kitchen for hours on end discussing me, don’t think I didn’t used to hear you. You were both very fond of droning on about how I was “going off the rails”.’
‘I had to talk to someone about you,’ I defend. ‘I didn’t have anyone else. And you did go off the rails! You were totally out of control and you gave me hell so don’t deny it.’
Scarlett laughs hysterically.
‘I only went out with Aaron and all that crowd at the Blue Jazz café because I wanted some friends of my own. People that had nothing to do with you! I never wanted you to get involved, Hollie. I never asked you to intervene between me and Aaron.’
‘Don’t even talk to me about Aaron, OK? Don’t ever mention his name again.’
‘No,’ she says bitterly. ‘We can’t mention it. We can’t talk about anything that went on that night, can we? Even though I know you blame me for what happened. Even though I never wanted…’
‘You put yourself in danger, Scarlett. I had to come out and get you—’
‘I didn’t want you to come, you fool! I wanted…I hoped Rich would come. Not you. After you two started dating I never had another moment with him alone. You stole him away from me. I wanted him back, that’s all.’
‘I didn’t steal him away from you, because Richard has never loved you, has he? Not that way.’
‘He didn’t have much trouble getting it up for me when we were together, that’s for sure!’ she shoots back.
I stare at my sister in horror. It feels as if she’s scooping out my entire innards with the cruel pick and shovel of her words.
‘Maybe that’s why he doesn’t want to see me again. I’m not a thirteen-year-old any more am I, Hollie? Maybe he’s scared he’s fallen for me, too? Has that ever occurred to you?’
What is she trying to do to me?
‘Just tell me one thing,’ I get my voice back at last. ‘Because I know I have played my part in this. I asked you two to be together. You both…’I stumble over the words ‘…begged me not to ask it of you, but I insisted and I know that is my doing and I’m paying for that now, aren’t I? Just tell me. In March, when you were both together, did you know?’
‘About the pregnancy?’ My sister lets out a strangled cry. She puts her hands to her face, shaking her head. Then she looks up at me piteously, her tongue planted firmly into her cheek once more and her face glowing pink.
‘God, you’re lying, aren’t you! You did know you were pregnant, Scarlett.’ I grab hold of both of her shoulders. I want to shake her till her teeth rattle. I want to shake her till they all drop out. ‘Admit to me that you knew it!’
‘Let go of me!’ She looks up at me at last, eyes blazing. ‘I’ll come clean,’ she throws back. ‘I did know it. But I only lied to spare you, Hollie, because now you know that I betrayed you, I can never take it back again, can I?’
‘You…you’re telling me that you slept with him even though you didn’t need to? You knew you were already pregnant? Why?’
‘Why?’ Her face is swimming before my eyes, I can barely see her any more and there’s a rushing sound in my ears like all my blood is flowing out of me and my heart is giving up because she has broken it but beyond all that there is something else -something small and spindly and weedy like a forgotten shrub at the bottom of a neglected garden that has just woken up and realised it’s still there, it’s still alive…
She shakes her head now, because there is no satisfactory why. She did it because she could, that is all.
‘And – and Richard,’ I whisper in trepidation, ‘did he know too?’
‘Of course he didn’t know! He loves you, doesn’t he? He never wanted to do it. He only did it because he loves you.’ She’s telling the truth now, the complete and utter truth, I see it. She flinches her shoulders back and I let her go.
‘What do you want to do now, Hollie?’
‘I want…for you to go away from here now and I don’t want to see you again as long as I live.’ I walk over to the blue and yellow estate agent’s ‘For Sale’ sign that I finally agreed she could have put up last week and grab hold of it with both hands, wrenching it out of the ground. All the wet turf comes up with it when I hurl it to the floor. ‘And I am not selling Florence Cottage. I am not letting you chuck me out of the only home I have ever known. I am not looking after you any more, either.’
‘Where will I go?’ she begins. She has her head so deeply buried in her hands that I can’t see her face and I don’t know if she’s crying. It sounds as if she is but I don’t care.
This girl is carrying my precious baby. All my hopes and dreams are still inside of her but I see now I have made the biggest mistake of my life.
And what can I do about it? Nothing, that’s what. Nothing ever comes back to haunt Scarlett, does it? It’s always the people around her, the people who love her who lose out and Scarlett seems to sail on through.
Well. If I have to lose the one thing that gave my life meaning then I�
�ll let it go now.
I want her out of my life for good.
Red Balloon
‘Hey, man. How’d you get on?’
Jamie Liddell turns at the sound of the voice echoing down the school hall, experiencing the same cringing feeling in his belly he’s had every day since retaking his exams. He shakes his head once, briefly.
‘If you mean my A2s I think I pretty much ballsed them up,’ he mutters softly. The college student who’s come out to meet him pulls a disappointed face at that. Liddell won’t want to buy his laptop, then? No A levels, no uni – probably no need for a laptop, he reckons silently.
‘It mightn’t be all that bad, mate,’ he consoles. ‘And,’ he hesitates, ‘everything happens for a reason.’
‘I’m thinking of taking some time out, anyway.’ Jamie sticks his hands in his pockets, his fingers brushing against the ten crisp ten-pound notes he’s got in there. He’s already accepted that he’s never going to be any good at exams. That dream of uni he had – was it ever even his dream? – is fading fast. He’d come here this morning to check out the notice board, see if there’s any student work going. You’re not going to need any computers now, are you, his mum had reminded him on his way out. He hadn’t intended to buy it. He was going to say he’d changed his mind, but…his eyes glitter covetously as the student unzips the bag. It’s a top-of-the-range model. At a knock-down price.
‘I still want the laptop,’ he assures the guy. ‘It works OK, right?’
‘It works.’ The student pulls it out of its smart black case. A couple of worksheets flutter down to the ground as he does so. ‘Didn’t get to sort all this stuff out,’ he grins half-heartedly. ‘I can do it now…’he half-looks over his shoulder, ‘or you can just chuck anything you find in there in the bin. If you need me to show you how anything works on it I can stay but my girlfriend’s waiting in town and you know how it is…’ His eyes light up involuntarily as Jamie produces the hundred quid.
‘Nah. These things are a piece of cake. I’ll take it from here.’ Rush back to your girlfriend, he thinks enviously. I’ve never had one so, no, I don’t know ‘how it is’.
‘Good luck with it. Hope your plans work out, dude.’ The guy’s backing out towards the door already, waving a cheery goodbye.
Plans, Jamie thinks, his brain a fumbling mass of half-baked ideas, unexplored possibilities fanning out in all directions. What plans? He hasn’t got any now he’s flunked the exams – he’s not holding out any hope for miracles when the results come out. Now there’s just this messy void in which all the structure of the known world has been left behind – school, childhood – and there’s no handy platform in sight to lift him up onto the next phase…
Man, that guy wasn’t kidding about leaving his trash in here. When Jamie unzippers the side compartment, two one pound coins come rolling out. And some empty chocolate wrappers, one condom packet (empty, he notes enviously), a wad of crushed worksheets and – what’s this? Jamie tugs at the piece of string and there appears to be a whole deflated red metallic balloon tethered to the end of it. It’s even got a letter attached. He glances up through the glass doors just in time to see the student sailing off on his bike, oblivious. Damn.
Who’s the letter for? Jamie turns it round. Scarlett L. Hudson. He does a double take. Hasn’t he already seen that name once this morning? He has, he furrows his brow, trying to recall where. It was up on the student notice board, that’s where it was. She was one of the contact names on the bottom of that ‘Amazon volunteering’ card. She was a looker too, there was a little picture of her stuck onto the bottom of it. Oh, yes, he’d like to meet her. He’d thought about taking the number down. He’d imagined himself turning up back at his house announcing he was off to the rainforest for the summer – how envious his younger siblings would be.
Everything happens for a reason.
Well, now he’s got this letter…maybe he has got a reason to go out to Brazil. He can deliver it to that girl Scarlett Hudson himself, can’t he, and won’t she be blown away?
Hollie
I cannot believe I am sitting here at this table in this restaurant, pretending to be normal. But I don’t know what else to do. I have told her to go. And she has done so. My sister crawled down off the coal bunker and she scuttled off. I didn’t call her back and I didn’t feel any remorse for all the things I’d said to her, I just wanted her gone. And right now maybe I should be feeling a great big gaping hole in my life, torn out of the centre of me because she – and the baby she’s carrying – are gone, but I feel nothing. Just numb.
And the funny thing is, from my little table in the corner of the restaurant, I can see the rest of the world carrying on as normal all around me, as if nothing has changed. The waitresses here are still bustling up and down, still taking the drinks orders, still delivering food in their brisk, efficient way; the proprietor – a paunchy Italian in his mid-fifties – is still standing at the doorway, greeting the early evening customers. The couple who came in before me are still minutely examining their menu as if their whole lives depended on the choices they make tonight and I want to stand up and scream: ‘No, no, it doesn’t matter what you decide on. It’s me who’s made the most momentous decision of my life tonight, not you. I just told my sister to get out of my life forever.’
And still I feel nothing.
Richard is late. I pour a glass of water from the jug, glance at my watch. Twenty minutes late. Could he have changed his mind and gone back home after his meeting instead? I half get up out of my seat at the thought – could he have come across a distraught Scarlett, running away from Florence Cottage barefoot, tears streaming down her shameless face, and stopped to deal with her? But I can’t go and check that possibility out because he might still turn up here any minute. I sit back down and pick up my glass. After a while I gulp the water down thirstily, stemming the rising flow of panic I feel at the thought that he might not come after all. His mobile phone is switched off.
He could have changed his mind about me and our marriage and our future. He could have. I lick my lips nervously, picking at the olives in the little dish as the proprietor turns and looks at me curiously. He knows how long I’ve been sitting here on my tod without ordering so much as a side salad. He smiles sympathetically.
Things were not good between me and Rich last night. He felt like a stranger even though we were both trying really hard to be normal with each other. I guess I don’t know what normal is any more. He’s had reasons enough – excuse after excuse – to spend time away from here, and we’ve both known that all of them originated from his discomfort at the thought of spending any time in Scarlett’s company. He asked for us to meet up tonight out here, away from the cottage and his mum and my sister, so we could have some time alone together and ‘clear the air’. But my God, how is he going to take this latest development?
I feel the weight of my head sink into my hands and my gaze is glued to the chequered tablecloth beneath me. I don’t even want to think about what Scarlett’s just confessed to me tonight. It’s too terrible. I told her to be careful about what she said. I warned her, that some words can never be taken back.
But I also said that I’d like her and I to be open and honest with each other, didn’t I? I wish I hadn’t now. She could have had my baby and taken her secret back to Brazil with her, buried it deep in the foliage and humus littering the forest floor and we needed never to have spoken of it, ever.
I look up as Rich sits down opposite me. Thank God! His face looks dark and pinched though his eyes are bright with an intensity that I have not seen before.
‘Sorry, traffic on the bridge held me up.’ He sounds strained. ‘Have you ordered for us?’ he asks after a while. An ordinary question for an ordinary day. I shake my head dumbly and the waiter sidles over as if summoned by magic. It’s just starting to hit me how shell-shocked I’m feeling. I didn’t hear him say anything to the man but the waiter’s definitely gone off on a mission.
; ‘So…did it all go well? In Trieste, I mean?’ My voice is strangled with the effort of normality.
‘You should know; my weeks away from home have not all been spent idly.’ He gives me a significant look. ‘Signor Bonomi has offered our firm the contract in Trieste.’
I look at him, startled. ‘He has?’
‘In fact, he’s gone one better than that. He’s offered us permanent employment out there at a rate that seems, frankly, beyond competitive. We wouldn’t have the stress of constantly chasing contracts, and he’s agreed that my dad can work at a pace that’d suit him best. It’s an offer that would take away all the strain of running the business and allow Dad and me to just get on with doing the surveying and assessing of buildings that we love and do best.’
‘Out there?’ I get out at last. ‘We’d have to move out there to – to Italy? What about Florence Cottage? What about my job?’
‘It’s all still at the consideration stage, Hol. You know I wouldn’t make any major decisions without taking your wishes into account.’ He doesn’t add – but look what I have sacrificed for you, because of the child that you wanted so badly, you needed so desperately. ‘You OK?’ Rich leans forward suddenly and grabs hold of both my hands. I shake my head again, unable to speak.
I am not feeling nothing after all, I realise. I am feeling – I’m feeling riddled with remorse and guilt and confusion and above and beyond all that I have the strangest sensation of this thin black line of rage beginning to trickle out of me and I can’t stop it no matter what I try to do with it.
I want to kill her!
‘Rich, I have just told Scarlett to leave,’ I begin thickly. ‘I told her to get out of the house and that I…’ I lower my voice as the old couple opposite smile at us holding hands, ‘I just told her I never want to see her again as long as I live!’
I see Rich’s head lower a fraction, his whole being suddenly silent and still.
‘She betrayed me with you, didn’t she?’ I challenge.
A Sister’s Gift Page 27