The Calico Cat

by Amanda James

  The flavour of a cold pasty is more intense than a hot one, I find, and just as my mouth is about to wrap itself around one, Caleb turns, flaps his hand at me and hisses something I can’t catch.

  ‘Speak up!’ I say through a mouthful of pasty, because in the end I’d rather stuff my face rather than find out what he’s on about. And he knows I don’t like flappy hands.

  He pulls a puzzled face and flaps again. I realise he can’t hear what I said because of my pasty-filled mouth, so I shove the pasty back in its bag and drag my feet over to him in an exaggerated show of disgruntlement. When I’m about two feet away, he points at a sign that tells me this is Mutton Cove and that there are seals basking on the rocks below. It further informs us that if we make a noise or allow our dogs to bark we could scare them off.

  I’m considering pointing out that we have no dogs when he grabs my arm and hisses in my ear. ‘Look, there are three seals down there and now a baby one with its mum’s just arrived.’

  It takes a while for my eyes to distinguish between rocks and seals but then I see them and I’m glad I made the effort. Most have grey pelts sprinkled with brown bits like chocolate on a cappuccino, but some have more of a Horlicks effect going on. ‘They are delightful,’ I say in a low voice and lean my elbows against the railing alongside Caleb’s.

  We stand and watch for a while in silence and then he says, ‘What the hell is that?’ and points to our left past the first assembly of rocks and out into the turquoise shallows.

  A round pale shape about six feet across (though it’s hard to tell from this height) is moving slowly through the water, propelled by what looks to be a single fin. Whatever the creature is it looks like it could be ill or wounded – it’s flopping its fin about and not getting very far doing it. ‘It looks like a sea turtle that could be injured,’ I venture.

  ‘No idea, never seen anything like it in my life.’ Caleb shades his eyes to try and get a better view.

  A few other visitors have gathered, some with binoculars. Caleb asks one man if he can see what the creature is, and the man trains his bins on it. ‘By ’eck. I reckon it’s a sunfish, lad,’ he says in a voice he’s borrowed from Wallace, the character in Wallace and Gromit. On closer inspection I find that in profile he looks very much like him too.

  I want to ask him if he likes Wensleydale cheese in the same accent, but gut instinct tells me that would be too ‘out there’ for an opener. ‘A sunfish?’ I say instead. ‘Are they supposed to flop about like that?’

  ‘Oh aye. That’s what they do, they’re not in any rush to get about. We should take a leaf from their book if you ask me.’

  My imagination presents a picture of a sunfish trying to read a book with its floppy fin and I hide a smile. ‘Are they quite rare? You seemed surprised to see one.’

  ‘They’re getting more common round this coast over recent years due to the sea temperature rising, but you certainly don’t see them too often and not at all further up the country.’ Wallace turns to look at me and gives me an even-toothed smile. ‘Water’s too cold up north, see?’

  I nod and then he says goodbye and moves off, a silent and very well-behaved dog at his heels. ‘Do you think that dog’s called Gromit?’ I whisper to Caleb.

  Caleb smiles. ‘Possibly.’ Then he walks back to our picnic muttering, ‘A sunfish. What a lovely surprise.’

  I finish my pasty, look in the rucksack for a wet wipe and notice that Algernon has a disturbing orange stain on his backside. I pull him out and examine it. Looks like a squashed satsuma segment. The poor bear might have been happier at home on my bed after all, rather than stuffed upside down in a rucksack every day. Still, there is nothing to be done about that now and I guess he might enjoy the sea air. I scrub at the stain with a wet wipe and sit him on the grass next to us.

  ‘I see we do have another visitor for lunch after all,’ Caleb says, pretending to give Algernon a sip of coffee. I give him an enquiring look. ‘Well, every day so far we’ve had very interesting lunch guests. I thought today would be an exception.’

  ‘Oh yes, so we have,’ I say, thinking of Peter, Neave and Leo and wonder where they are on the path at this very minute. What a shame we’ve had none today.’ I pat the bear’s head. ‘Not that you’re not exciting, old bear, it’s just that you don’t say much, do you?’

  ‘You know, I’ve been thinking quite a bit about your brother, Lottie. You have loved meeting new people on this trip, so I think we could try and get him to come around after we get back—’

  ‘What the hell has my brother got to do with new people?’ I say perhaps a bit too stabbily, but the connection Caleb’s made here is beyond comprehension, and totally random.

  ‘He is new really – you haven’t met him,’ Caleb says in a soothing voice. It’s the kind of voice one would use with an overwrought person or perhaps a child on the verge of a tantrum. This makes me very unsoothed. ‘I think if you did meet, it would help the healing process, make the past a more friendly place to visit.’

  What the fuck? That’s the second time in the past few weeks that he’s mentioned the healing process, and that last bit he said about the past makes me feel… actually it’s beyond description. The expression he’s trying on is overly sympathetic and my hands itch to slap it from his face. ‘What’s all this about healing and friendly visits to my past, Caleb? It’s not the first time you’ve said stuff like this and I don’t get it.’ I congratulate myself on keeping the tone of my words cool and my anger locked in.

  ‘I think it’s because yesterday you mentioned the fact that you’d been suicidal.’ Caleb puts his hand on mine, but I withdraw.

  ‘You talked about healing before we came away,’ I say, wishing I had been able to keep my bloody mouth shut about walking off clifftops and wanting to die.

  ‘But I think you do still have issues, don’t you? When you told me about your brother coming back and the way your mother behaved, you wouldn’t tell me why you had to have counselling, well, not all of it. And if you’d come to terms with it all, you wouldn’t have had a problem. Then yesterday you told me about the suicidal thoughts and—’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, Caleb! You sound like a counsellor yourself now, talking about issues and coming to terms. Next you’ll be banging on about bloody closure.’

  ‘I hate that word,’ he says and smirks.

  I am not in a smirking mood. ‘I hate it too, and I’m not over-fond of all this concern for my mental health, either.’

  Caleb pulls his eyebrows into a furrow and does that pouty grumpy thing with his mouth which I normally find endearing, but at the moment irritates the hell out of me. ‘I’m not suggesting there’s anything wrong with your mental health, Lottie.’

  ‘Really? Then what are you suggesting?’

  ‘That you should meet your brother and tell me why you had to have counselling. I think it would help you put the past in perspective and make you feel better about the future.’

  ‘What are you, a problem page personified?’

  He looks away and tips the last dregs of coffee from the flask into his cup. ‘I hope not. It’s just that I care for you… care for you an awful lot, and I want you to be happy.’

  ‘I am happy, thank you. In fact, I’m happier than I have been for some time.’ I realise that this is true but that I hadn’t known it until this minute. ‘I’ve left my job, started out in a new direction, have a best friend in you, and the future looks pretty cool, if you ask me.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Caleb says, then he leans in and I feel his soft lips on my cheek. ‘I’d like to think we’re more than best friends, too.’

  There are a number of replies lining up for release but none of them sound right – they’re all a bit spiky and reproachful. What do you want me to say, that you’re my boyfriend? That’s a bit juvenile isn’t it? Or I think being someone’s best friend is a fine thing to be, what’s the problem? The rest of the replies are similar and won’t make the situation we have found ou
rselves in any better, so I say, ‘Yes, of course you are.’

  I get up and walk over to the railings and watch the seals sunbathing. The sunfish has wobbled off and so have the other people. I can hear Caleb packing away behind me, whistling something cheery. I can tell it’s a whistle that he’s organised to try and make us feel as if we’ve not argued; that the afternoon is still as sunny, bright and hopeful as it ever was. But it isn’t. It isn’t, and it feels false. The sun looks too bright, as if it’s trying too hard, the ocean too blue and the seals too cute, and my chest wall is pressing against my heart so hard that I wonder if it will stop beating.

  Aware that part of this heavy feeling is because I’m leaning all my weight against the railing, I step back and grip it with my hands instead. It helps a little, but my heart still feels squeezed. Caleb said that I was brave and different and bold and other stuff, but was he thinking that I needed help all that time? Am I some sort of project for him, a broken toy that needs mending?

  Then I feel his hands on my shoulders and a kiss in my hair and I tell him what I’m thinking. I can’t see the point in pretending that the afternoon isn’t just a backdrop to a stage play. A play that’s too sad for any audience.

  He turns me around to face him and says, ‘Of course you’re not a project. I honestly think it would make you feel better if you told me everything, that’s all.’ Caleb’s eyes hold mine and I find it hard to look away. Then he takes a deep breath and opens his mouth.

  Quickly I turn back to the ocean because I am fairly sure he’s going to say something romantic. I certainly don’t want to think about that right now and once again my mouth takes over before my brain has time to properly decide what I’m going to say. ‘I had counselling for many reasons, as I said that day in Bustopher Jones. I told you anger management, and unpredictable behaviour.’

  Caleb joins me and grips the rail, mirroring my stance. He says nothing, just looks at the seals. Then he says, ‘Yes. But don’t feel pressured to tell me anything else. I’m sorry if I—’

  ‘The night after my mother said all those cruel and hateful things to me when I said I wouldn’t see James, and that I preferred our life before he came along, I crept into my parents’ bedroom and cut off all her hair on one side with kitchen scissors as she slept. It was a Friday night and she’d had her usual two or three glasses of red, so she didn’t wake up, nor did Dad. Before they’d gone to bed I’d taken all her best clothes from the wardrobe and hidden them.’

  I hear Caleb clear his throat and sigh but I daren’t look at him or I’ll dry up, and he asked for this, didn’t he?

  I say to the sky, ‘Anyway, after I’d cut her hair, I took the clothes out to the shed and poured paraffin on them. Then I set the shed on fire. They only woke up when they heard the sirens of the fire engines. Mrs Kelly next door had called them.’

  ‘Bloody hell, Lottie.’ Caleb speaks quietly, but the emotion in his voice hurts my ears.

  ‘I think I chose the shed because Dad was the one that used it most. He had to shoulder some of the blame. After that, I found myself in counselling so fast it made my head spin, which as I said before made me feel like an alien. And the anger management bit actually made me more furious because I was made to feel like I was the one in the wrong – abnormal. That’s when the self-harming and suicidal thoughts came in.’

  A seal slips into the water and I wish I could too, as a sneaky glance shows me the look on Caleb’s face. He recovers quickly, but not quickly enough, because the expression of shock and pity takes a sledgehammer to my confidence and self-assurance.

  ‘My poor Lottie. What a terrible thing you went through,’ he says and tries to pull me into his arms.

  I back away. ‘I saw that look on your face just now, Caleb. You think I must have been crazy to do those things. You wanted to know the truth, but now you wish you didn’t know it.’

  ‘Hey, that’s not fair. It was a bit of a shock, that’s true. But I can see why you went off the rails—’

  ‘Went off the rails.’ I laugh humourlessly. ‘Damn right I did. They said I wasn’t acting in a normal way, and I wasn’t. Because the counsellors said that even though what Mother and Dad had done wasn’t the best way to handle the situation, it didn’t warrant my reaction. I’d had what they called a psychotic episode and needed help.’ I throw my arms out to the sides and thrust my neck forward. ‘Me. I was the one that needed help, not Mother!’

  He tries to hold me again, but I walk back to the rucksacks letting my words flow behind me like a vapour trail.

  ‘But you know what, Caleb? If normal is talking about your daughter as if she’s worthless, if normal is saying your daughter isn’t what she expected, like I was some kind of faulty mail-order fucking vacuum cleaner that she could send back, write a shite review about and get a refund on or something, then I didn’t want to be normal. Still don’t want to be normal.’

  ‘Lottie, I’m on your side. I totally agree. You mother was so wrong to do what she did, and teenage years are tough at the best of times. It’s a wonder you got through school in the end.’ Caleb follows my lead and hoists his rucksack.

  ‘I didn’t. I was expelled after the Mr Baldwin incidents. The worse one I haven’t told you about. One day after a lesson where we’d had another set-to, I tipped sausage, mash and gravy over his head in the dinner hall.’ The memory of the sheer horror on Baldwin’s face makes me laugh out loud and I feel a bit of tension leave my chest.

  Caleb’s eyes widen, and a sound leaves his mouth – a cross between a cough and a bark. ‘Bloody hell. So how did you get your qualifications, go to uni?’

  ‘Gwendoline paid for private tuition. If it wasn’t for her, I really don’t know where I would have ended up.’ I set off down the path again before Caleb can see how much I miss my grandmother.

  Just around the headland is Godrevy Point. We stand and look at the sweep of the coast to St Ives and the lighthouse on the little island, and I tell Caleb that it’s the lighthouse that inspired Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I also tell him that I don’t want to talk about my past any more today, just in case he’s going to say something further. He says he completely understands, and that he’s glad I told him what happened, and he slips his arm around my shoulder.

  As we set off across Gwithian beach towards Hayle, I have to admit that I do feel a bit lighter inside. Caleb knows all there is to know about me now, and though he was shocked at first, he doesn’t seem to think any less of me. If he did, that would just be too bad, because I’ve had a tough journey to become me, and I like who I am. Just like everyone else, he will have to take or leave me, because I won’t be changing any time soon.

  13

  An Unexpected Turn

  I never expected the fourth day of the holiday to begin in this way. As I said yesterday, I was looking forward to the short walk to St Ives for a spot of pootling around the town and possibly a swim. Now I don’t feel at all like pootling or swimming. Today I feel like hiding under my duvet and pretending that last night didn’t happen. I look at my rucksack on the bed and consider sweeping it onto the floor and doing just that, but then Algernon gives me an encouraging wave and I resist. Yes, I know Algernon is a stuffed bear, and can’t wave, but he’s stuck out of the bag at an angle and looks like he’s waving, so I’ll believe that he is. I need all the encouragement I can get this morning.

  So okay, this is what happened last night. Caleb and I had dinner and then afterwards we decided we were so tired that we’d just go to bed. We still had the two rooms booked because we hadn’t thought to phone ahead and cancel, and besides, I think that neither of us wanted to assume that sleeping together was now a ‘thing’, but he came to my room anyway.

  We lay in each other’s arms afterwards and everything felt wonderful, but just as I was drifting into sleep he said he knew he’d promised not to bring up my past again, but he thought that part of moving on must involve a meeting with my brother. I said in no uncertain terms that I wouldn’t mee
t him, and would Caleb please stop talking about it all. Caleb said it was only important because he was the person Mother had measured me against all my life and that I needed to see he was not some perfect angel but just a man. I mentioned that he might be actually be a perfect angel and then how would I feel? Caleb said, and make sure you’re paying attention because I can hardly believe what I’m going to tell you – Caleb said that he’d already met him, and he was just flesh and blood like everybody else.

  Can you believe it? Caleb had actually gone up to Exeter to the hospital where my brother works and talked to him about me. Yes! And all without my knowledge or consent. I bet you’re in shock, because I was and still am this morning. I mean, how dare he do something like that? To say that I feel betrayed is an understatement. In fact, I can’t really put into words how I feel. My guts are as tangled as my bed sheets, and whenever I think of Caleb, I experience a combination of a kick in the head and a huge sense of loss.

  The loss is because after he’d told me all this I threw him out of my room and told him I never wanted to see him again. He said he understood why I was angry and that after I had thought about it I’d see he was right, then he shoved my brother’s business card in the rucksack. I mean, how arrogant was that? For one, he could never understand why I was angry because he’d not been where I’d been, lived my life, felt what I’d felt, had he? And for two, I will not be thinking about it and he’ll never be right. How can it ever be right to go behind someone’s back to do something that you know is expressly against their wishes? To betray someone’s trust?

  You might be thinking that he only did it because he wants the best for me, but how does he know what’s best for me? I’m not some child that needs guidance and the wisdom of others to put them onto the right path. I am a fully-grown woman with a mind of her own and can find the path just fine on my own, thank you very much! Sorry to be shouty, it’s not you I’m angry with; it’s the whole bloody situation that Caleb created.