like it here, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Annabel said. ‘I’ve only been here two and a bit terms but I like it much more than my old school. In fact, I hardly ever think about London.’
‘Nowadays we have the sea,’ said Frankie.
‘And a big garden,’ said Annabel, ‘and a room of my own.’
‘I’m truly sorry I was late, darling.’
‘Sometimes I really hate Alice.’
‘Why? What happened? Shall I speak to Mrs Paterson? Hate is a terrible emotion.’
‘Not Alice in my class, Mum. Your Alice. She’s like this stepsister or something. It’s like you favouritize her. What’s for supper?’
‘Baked beans, chips. Tomato and cucumber. Possibly.’ She paused. ‘I didn’t have time to go to the shops. I was working.’
‘Does that mean there are no crisps?’
‘I’m so sorry, darling.’
It was Annabel’s forlorn silence, the way her little fingers slackened as if sighing, that made Frankie feel suddenly useless at everything. She knew Annabel blamed Alice. But Frankie had no one to blame but herself.
‘Come on – let’s go via Howell’s and I’ll buy you two packets and one for tomorrow.’
But then she realized she’d come out in a rush without her purse. And she wondered, does nine months living here warrant credit at the local shop?
* * *
Alice & the Ditch Monster
Alice & the Ditch Monster Hatch a Plan
Alice & the Ditch Monster Brave the Storm
Alice & the Ditch Monster Save the Day
Alice & the Ditch Monster Go for Gold
Alice & the Ditch Monster Halloween Howls
Alice & the Ditch Monster Wonder What the Fuck They’re Going to Do Next
Children quiet in bed, one asleep, the other reading. A glass of Rioja to hand. The paper is still stark white and glaringly empty in front of Frankie. It’s raining outside and it shouldn’t be. All that relocation research done quietly in Muswell Hill over a two-year period was proving pointless, the websites and books were inaccurate. North Norfolk in May should have lower-than-average rainfall. It should be neck and neck with Cornwall in terms of daily sunshine hours and be the driest county in England. But look at it out there – streaming and soaking and that huge sky dense with more to come. She’d overheard Sam calling it Norfuck yesterday.
Alice – we have a book to write.
But there was neither sight nor sound of Alice. Frankie trickled a little wine onto the page, folded it in half and vigorously rubbed her hand over it. She opened it out and stared hard. It looked nothing like the butterflies or strange beings that the children had created with poster paints at nursery school all those years ago. Even Freud – or whoever it was who’d used the exercise in therapy – would have had a hard time reading anything into it. It was simply an amoebic splodge and a waste of wine.
Alice and the Ditch Monster Do Absolutely Nothing
‘It’s Daddy!’
Momentarily, Frankie’s heart ached for her daughter who was so used to fathers coming through the post that she brandished the envelope like it was a missive from royalty, running it in a lap of honour around the kitchen table before placing it carefully in front of Sam.
‘Can you tell where it’s from?’
Sam looked at the stamp and the franked mark. ‘Ecuador,’ he said as if it was some tiresome general-knowledge quiz set up by his father.
‘Ecuador,’ Annabel marvelled. ‘Is that the capital of the equator? Is Daddy at the centre of the universe?’
‘South America,’ said Frankie.
‘Open it then,’ said Sam.
Frankie’s heart creaked again as she watched Annabel slip her little finger into a gap and serrate the envelope as carefully as she could as if in anticipation of its contents bettering a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s. You never knew what Miles would send the children. Previously, they’d received a torn label from Israel which said Coca Cola in Hebrew, a wrapping from a ready meal in Japan called SuShitSu, a beer mat from Tasmania, a shrivelled-up floral lei from Hawaii, something from Venezuela they had thought was a dead beetle but turned out to be some type of bean that they’d planted without success. Occasionally, there were notes, mostly not. Usually there were months between letters but then again Miles might bombard the children for a while, like friendly fire. These days, Sam was inured to all of it, whereas Annabel’s life still depended on them.
Annabel eased out of the envelope a slim, rectangular piece of paper. It was torn carelessly from a Barclays Bank cheque book. Attached to it was the smallest yellow Post-it note imaginable.
Kids!
It’s amazing here!
I’ve struck gold!
Give this to your mother.
Dad xx
Annabel wasn’t bothered about the cheque addressed to her mother. All she cared about was that her father had travelled to the equator for her, had dug for gold and found it. She peeled off the sticky note, placed it on her fingertips as if it was a rare butterfly, and left for her room.
‘Four thousand quid!’ Sam was hard-pressed not to love his dad just a little bit more just then. He passed it to Frankie. ‘Look.’
Four thousand pounds, made out to her and signed, legibly, by Miles.
‘Sick!’ said Sam, leaving the table. ‘Four grand.’
‘Sam – please, no tweetering or facebookgramming about this.’
‘Seriously?’ His mother’s terminology wasn’t even amusing, just annoying.
‘Yes seriously.’
‘But you’re not on Twitter.’
‘That’s irrelevant. It might buy you a few more followers – but not friends. Anyway – it’s vulgar to talk about money. And anyway – it’s private.’
Sam huffed his way out leaving Frankie alone in the kitchen with all that money. If there’s four grand in your English bank Miles, God knows what you have squirrelled away under your Ecuadorian mattress. And not for the first time,
