are crystal clear. Each one as crisp and complete as if it happened just hours before.
We met, Edie and I, on the first day of the summer holidays in 1986. Until that moment I didn’t know her name or what she looked like. I didn’t even know she existed.
But I knew the place she lived.
I knew The Cliff House.
Tamsyn
July 1986
I sprang out of bed as soon as I woke. It was the first day of the holidays and I couldn’t wait to escape.
The house was still. It hung with a silence as thick as pea soup. Mum was at work. My brother was in his bedroom. Door closed. I didn’t need to go in to know he was still asleep. Sleeping was pretty much all he’d done since the tin mine shut down. Granfer was also in his room. Although it wasn’t really his room. It was Mum and Dad’s, but Mum had moved to a fold-up bed in the sitting room when Granfer came to live with us. She wanted him to be comfortable, what with the state of his lungs, she said. I remember when the man from the tip came to pick up the double bed. Jago had dragged it on to the street and the three of us watched as the man and his friend hefted it onto the back of a truck in exchange for a six-pack of beer. Though Mum didn’t say, I could tell by her face she was sad to see it go, but, as she said, Granfer needed the space and a chair was more use to him than a bed for two.
His door was open a crack and there he was, in his chair, leaning forward to study the mess of jigsaw pieces scattered on the small table in front of him. I watched him for a minute or two, ready to smile if he noticed me, but he didn’t move a muscle, just stared down at the table.
I turned and walked over to the airing cupboard on the landing. Mum used it to keep her stuff in. She’d put the spare sheets and towels in a cardboard box in the corner of Granfer’s room, then removed the shelves and put up a hanging rail which she made from a length of pine doweling she picked up from the hardware shop in Penzance. She had to cut it to size with our rusted hacksaw and I remember thinking how well she’d done it despite her not being Dad.
I opened the cupboard door and stared at the clothes inside with her shoes lined up below them in happy pairs. There was a variety of boxes with belts and earrings and her winter hat and scarf on a high shelf above. I ran my finger along clothes on their hangers, enjoying the feel of the different fabrics as I looked for something pretty. Something suitable.
My eyes settled on her rainbow dress and I smiled.
‘Perfect.’
A shiver of excitement ran through my body as I took the dress into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. I let my dressing gown fall to the floor and slipped on the dress, smoothing it over my hips and waist, the crepe fabric rough against my skin. Mum kept her make-up in a flowery wash-bag on a wire vegetable rack below the basin along with her shower cap, a soap-on-a-rope we’d never used, and a pot of Oil of Ulay which Jago and I gave her for her last birthday. Inside the wash-bag was a pressed powder she’d had forever, a drying mascara and her lipstick. I took out the lipstick and removed the lid, then turned the base to reveal the scarlet innards. Lifting it to my nose I breathed in. The smell conjured memories of when I was younger, my parents dressed up to go out, perhaps – if it was a special occasion – to the Italian restaurant in Porthleven they loved so much. I pictured her turning a circle for him. Saw him smile, eyes alight, as he leant in to kiss her cheek. It was painful remembering how it was back then. Back then when our house felt like a home.
Home.
Just a memory. Vague and fading. I stared at myself in the mirror above the basin and searched for the ten-year-old girl who’d lived in that happy place. But she was long gone. I drew in a deep breath and touched the tip of my finger to the blood-coloured lipstick, dabbing first its waxy surface and then my lips to add a blush of colour. I dropped the lipstick back into the wash-bag and zipped it up. Then, looking down, I swung left and right to make the rainbow dress swish, imagining my father watching on and smiling.
I went downstairs and glanced into the sitting room as I passed. Her bed was stored neatly behind the settee. The folded duvet and pillow lay on top of it, struck through by a line of sunlight from a gap between the curtains. As I walked into the kitchen I saw two mugs on the table, one with a smudge of lipstick on it, the other without. A sudden sweep of anger washed over me and I snatched them up and marched them to the sink where I turned the tap on, squirted washing-up liquid into the mugs, and reached for the scouring pad. I attacked the one without the red smear the hardest. How had he squirmed his way into the kitchen? I scrubbed, wanting all trace of him gone, then dried the mugs and returned them to the cupboard before squeezing bleach on the table and meticulously cleaning every inch of it, rubbing all the way into the corners and along the edges.
The kitchen hung with the pungent tang of bleach and my mind returned to thoughts of getting out. I stood on tiptoes and reached for the battered biscuit tin on top of the fridge. Inside was a collection of odds and sods, as Mum called them: safety pins, pencil stubs, an assortment of rusted screws and nails, and a variety of keys. Excitement wriggled along my arm and down to the pit of my stomach as I pulled out the key with the green fob. I slipped it into the pocket of the rainbow dress, replaced the tin, then grabbed my bag from the hook in the hallway.
As the front door closed behind me every muscle in my body began to relax. I turned out of our road and headed down towards the Cape, smiling as the breeze took my hair and tossed it playfully about my face. That day the sea was the very same navy as Granfer’s favourite knitted Gansey sweater and sprinkled with diamonds of sunlight. High above my head, a handful of seagulls flew in sweeping circles, their distant cries jubilant. An almost perfect day.
As ever my thoughts drifted to Dad. It was impossible to walk down this stretch of road to the Cape without remembering the feel of his hand gripping mine. Or how I’d had to half-run to keep up with his stride. I could still picture the book folded into his back pocket, dog-eared, marked on the cover with a single perfect tea-ring. I recalled him reaching for it when he spotted a bird, leafing quickly through the pages before pulling me in close.
Do you see it?
My cheek rested against his stubbled face as he pointed. I didn’t care much about the bird. All that mattered was being in his arms.
A golden plover.
Then I’d listen quietly as he told me all about it. That its name came from the word for rain in Latin – or maybe it was Greek – because plovers flock when the weather draws in. After he died, any smidgen of interest I might have had in seabirds waned, but sometimes, when I missed him the most, I’d pretend I loved them and would watch them through the binoculars as they balanced on ledges or dive-bombed for fish, trying to recall their names, population numbers, and the colour of their eggs.
There were only four cars in the car park at Cape Cornwall. It was early though. Later in the day it would be full, vehicles jammed bumper to bumper, with National Trust stickers on their windscreens and woollen picnic rugs folded beneath raincoats in their boots. I joined the coastal path and walked up onto the clifftop where the wind was stronger and my skin spread with goosebumps. I wrapped my arms around my body and told myself off for not bringing a sweater.
The footpath was well worn by walkers who strode from Botallack to Cape Cornwall and on to Sennen Cove in their special boots with canvas sides and long laces double-knotted for safety. My body tingled with excitement as the fields of lush grazing on my left
