wormhole could have opened on the other side of the room and Ernest would have been less surprised, less terrified. He looked around for confirmation that he was awake and alive, not dead already, not sucked back in time, not dreaming.
“Hannah?” He breathed her name into the receiver. “Is that you?”
I could hear his voice, small and tinny through the back of the phone, like a man trapped in a cookie jar. I stayed close and listened. I’d never heard my real father speak before, not that I could remember anyway. He’d washed his hands of us a long time ago, and that was that.
“Yes, Ernest,” my mother said, assessing her face in the mirror, smoothing out the lines around her mouth with her free hand then letting go, facial time-travel, back and forth, back and forth. “It’s me.”
It must have stripped him right back to the bone, her sudden call, her carrying on like nothing had happened all those years. I didn’t think about it then but I do now, all the time.
“God, this place is a dump,” she said, over his stunned silence. “So grey and so cold.”
“Is Iris with you?” Ernest asked her.
She didn’t answer him directly. It’s one of the few things about Hannah you can always count on – her lack of generosity, her guaranteed refusal to give a person what they want. The question bounced off her and she just moved right along.
“We’ve got some work with the BBC.”
“News to me,” I said under my breath, because as far as I knew, we’d been running from a mountain of debt and other trouble, not headed towards a bright new future. Hannah slapped me on the back of the arm and gestured at me to zip it or get out.
“It’s a really good move for us,” she said, “apart from the weather.”
“Why have you called, Hannah?” I heard him say. “What do you want?”
My mother has a special voice for deal making. It’s sharp and flinty, like a rock face, like gritted teeth. She locks everything into a safe and then she opens her mouth. “Shall we meet?”
There was a pause, just quiet on the line like he was thinking about it. The way I saw it, he wasn’t exactly jumping at the chance.
“Why now?” he said.
“Don’t you want to?” Hannah put her hand over the mouthpiece and hissed, “See?” like this was proof she’d always been right about him. I got ready to be rejected all over again. I hadn’t been expecting anything different. It wasn’t even that big a deal.
“It’s not that,” he said.
“So what is it?”
“I’d need you to come here.”
I figured that was that. I was about to leave the room and get on with the rest of my Ernest-less life. Hannah told me once that Ernest lived alone in the middle of nowhere and that she’d never go back because it was just about the dullest place on earth, with no shops or Wi-Fi or bars or people or tarmac or houses. My mother was a fish out of water in a place like that, a bird of paradise in a cesspit.
“Just sheep,” she’d said, “and grass. And Ernest,” and she’d shuddered at the horror of it. “Never, ever again.”
“Why’s that?” she asked him now in an I’m-holding-all-the-cards, mountain-to-Mohammed, over-my-dead-body kind of way. “Why don’t you come to London? I thought we could meet at the Royal Academy. You can buy me tea at Fortnum’s, like you used to.”
A trip like that was beyond him. Just getting out of bed was a half-hour operation, followed by a three-hour sleep. Ernest wasn’t going anywhere. He said so.
“Bring Iris if you can,” he said. “I’d really like to get another look at her before I’m gone.”
“Another look?” I whispered. “What am I? A vase?”
“Gone?” she said, swatting me away. “Where are you going?”
“I’m sick,” he told her.
“What’s wrong with you?”
He paused. I could hear it. “Lung, liver, bone,” he said. “Oh, and brain. I forgot to say brain.”
He could have lied. He could have made something up, I suppose, but he gave it to her straight. He was dying.
I felt the base of my stomach drop out, just for a second, like it does on a rollercoaster, when you’re at the top and about to tip over and it’s too late to change your mind and go back. Thurston was always looking for that feeling. He said he went after it because he could never tell if it was the tail end of excitement or the beginning of remorse. I said maybe it was both and wasn’t that possible and he said that was exactly why he liked me, precisely how come we were friends.
Hannah’s pupils deepened like wells and she gripped the receiver harder, until her knuckles went white. She made the right noises but they didn’t match the look on her face.
“Oh God,” she said. “How long have you got?”
“Hard to tell,” I heard Ernest say. “Weeks, if I’m lucky.”
“And how long have you known?”
“Not nearly long enough.”
“And you’re sure?”
“I’m sure, Hannah,” he said. “It’s over. I’m out.”
I watched her wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, like she could taste something sweet. Hannah saw me watching and turned away. “She’s sixteen, you know,” she said, twirling at her hair with her fingers, sliding it past her teeth, checking for split ends. “Iris. Can you believe it?”
Ernest breathed for a bit, which sounded like someone walking on bubble-wrap, and then he said, “There are things I’ve been hoping to give her. Family things. It would mean a lot, to be able to tell her myself.”
It didn’t mean much to me one way or another, not back then. I was too busy working out how I was ever going to get home, worrying about how I was going to find Thurston. Family wasn’t high on my list. Blood is no thicker than water, not when you’ve been on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean for most of your life, not when the one person you care about is still over there, and not talking to you, and you haven’t had a chance to say sorry, or goodbye. Hannah looked at me, all worked up and wide-eyed, but I just shrugged.
“What things?” she said, too fast if you ask me, too hungry.
“Just some paintings.”
“Just some paintings,” she echoed through her Cheshire Cat smile.
“If she wants them.”
“Oh, Iris is into her art,” she drooled. “She’ll want them.”
“So bring her,” he said. “Come and visit.”
She
