fear that, lately, always seems to be with me grips me again. No. I’m not thinking about that today. Not today, Granny’s funeral, not today. They’ll tell me tomorrow. I just have to get through today.
My phone buzzes and I look down.
Missed you again last night. When are we going to talk? Ox
Now I am going to be sick. No sleep, no breakfast, on top of everything else, and this time I know it. I stumble towards the lavatories, pushing open the rank, sticky doors, and I vomit, retching loudly, bile flooding out of me; it feels almost cleansing. People must be able to hear.
I’m trying not to cry at the same time, pushing my hair out of my mouth. I stand up and look in the mirror, tears running down my cheeks, because I feel so awful, so sad, every protective layer I cover myself with ripped off and suddenly the almost cartoon terribleness of it makes me start to laugh. Suddenly I remember Cathy saying to me, ‘Has anyone ever explained to Oli that when he signs off with his initial and a kiss he’s writing the word “Ox”?’
I smile, I look dreadful, lank brown hair hanging about my sallow face, dark brown shadows under my startlingly green eyes. People at school called me alien because of my eyes; I hated it. I hadn’t thought of that for ages either and it makes me smile again. I wipe my mouth on a tissue. I will go to the canteen and get a coffee, a banana. I feel better, purged.
Slowly, I open the door, embarrassed in case someone is outside and has overheard, and I hear two voices, approaching briskly.
‘My best guess is we’ll be five mins late, no more,’ the first, a male voice, is saying.
‘I’ll call Mummy. God knows she’s got enough to do without us holding her up today.’
I freeze. No way.
‘Bloody good thing Guy’s already there,’ the male voice says, languidly, but with a hint of menace I remember of old. ‘We need someone to sort through that house, make sure the valuable stuff gets treated properly. I mean, those paintings must be worth a bob or two . . .’
Julius and Octavia. I shrink back against the door as they march past, catching only a glimpse of Octavia’s sensible brown flat boots and grey wool skirt and her hand, clutching a twenty-pound note, as they stride purposefully past on their way to the buffet car, a Leighton phalanx of aggressive righteousness. I don’t know why it surprises me – this is the only train from London that gets to Penzance in time for the funeral, but of all people Julius and Octavia are not who I would have chosen to bump into, post-vomit, outside the First Great Western lav.
They are Louisa’s children, and so they are my second cousins, and though I spent almost every summer of my life with them, there is no emotional connection to show for it. If you knew Octavia and Julius, though, you might understand why. They have even been given Roman names, I think to reflect their parents’ passion for discipline and order. I hear Julius’s posh voice again. ‘Bloody good thing Guy’s already there.’
My skin prickles with silent rage. Guy is their uncle on their father’s side. He is an antiques dealer. I never knew he was close to Granny, or our family. I grit my teeth at the thought of Guy going through Granny’s paintings, her jewellery box, with Louisa standing behind with a clipboard, ticking stuff off on a list. They are very definite people, the Leightons. I love Louisa, she’s kind and thoughtful, and she does mean well, I think, but she can be dreadfully bossy. The four of them, her, the Bowler Hat, Julius and Octavia, are all terribly – not hearty exactly, more – confident. The confidence that comes from living in Tunbridge Wells, being a civil servant, going to a public school, being a unit of four, a proper family. All things I am not.
I wait until their voices have faded into the distance and cautiously, I creep back to my seat, a little shaky still, and stare out of the window again. Two fat crows are picking away at the mossy roof of a disused barn. Above them, the skies are opening wider and wider, and birds wheel through the air. We’re getting there, we are nearly in Exeter. My phone buzzes again.
I can’t keep saying I’m sorry. We have to talk. Thinking of you today. When are you back? Ox
Ox. I switch my phone off and close my eyes, turning my head to the window in case the others walk past, and, thankfully, I drift off to sleep.
Chapter Three
It’s always been me and my mother. I don’t know my father. Mum met him at a party, he was a one-night stand and she never saw him again. I found this out when I was a teenager; I had no idea where he was before that. When I was about ten, and impressionable, I saw The Railway Children, and it all suddenly became perfectly clear to me: my father was away, somewhere, but he would come back one day soon. He had been wrongly imprisoned, like Roberta’s daddy, he was on a ship sailing around the world, rescuing people, he was a doctor helping famine victims in Africa, he was a famous actor in America and couldn’t tell people about me and Mum. He was a person in my life, absent for the moment, but he would come back.
One summer, Granny drove me to Penzance; she said she had a surprise for me at the station, and I knew it then with absolute certainty, the kind of certainty that has got me into trouble my whole life. We were going to meet my dad off the train, and he would fling his arms open wide and smile, and I would run towards him, crying, ‘Daddy! My daddy!’ He would hug me tight, and kiss my forehead, and come home with me and Granny, and then he would take me and Mum away from the damp Hammersmith flat to a beautiful castle in the countryside, and we would live – yes, we would – happily ever after.
Under my breath, the rest of the way there, I tried the unfamiliar words out on my tongue. Dad. Daddy. Hi Dad. By the time we got to the station, I was jiggling my legs up and down, I was so excited. Granny had a watchful, sparkling look in her eyes. She kept glancing at me as we waited for the train to pull in to the platform, holding my hand in hers as she was afraid I’d simply run off, mad with anticipation. She was right, I remember it, I felt as if I might.
When the train arrived and the teeming hordes of passengers had hurried off, when the platform was emptying and my neck was aching from craning forward, desperate to see who he was, she finally squeezed my fingers.
‘Look, there he is.’
And there was Jay with Sameena, his mum, walking down the platform, also hand in hand, only he was straining with excitement to see me, and I just looked at him, my heart sinking, sliding my hand out of Granny’s.
‘He’s come early,’ she said. ‘So you’ll have someone to play with now.’
I couldn’t tell her she’d ruined everything, that I’d rather be on my own with dreams of my dad than playing stupid Ghostbusters with Jay. I couldn’t explain how silly I’d been. How could I? She never knew, I never told her, but I couldn’t ever think about that day again. How I tried to picture what my father would look like as he got off the train. From that day on I stopped looking for him. Like Granny’s beauty, it became one of those things that’s just a fact, rather than a changeable situation. The sea is blue. Granny has a scar on her little finger. You don’t know your dad.
The sea isn’t always blue though. Sometimes it’s green. Or grey. Or almost black like tar, with roiling, foaming white waves.
* * *
The sound of movement around me wakes me and I look up, startled. St Michael’s Mount looms up in the distance, the battlements and towers of the old castle rising out of the water, glinting in the midday sun. When I was a child the holidays were one long effort on my part to persuade whomever I could to take
