As my sisters and I walked back to our car ahead of Mum and Dad, Bella seemed to have whipped herself up into a new state of bad temper. ‘Oh look, guys, you can tick off “squirrel”!’ she declared in a mocking tone.
‘Where?’ Grace asked excitedly.
‘If it’s dead it doesn’t count,’ I said, having already spotted the remains of a small furry creature on the grey tarmac close to the exit road. ‘Don’t worry, Gracie. We’ll see plenty of live squirrels in the countryside … rabbits too, I expect.’
Grace was frowning. ‘How will we make sure we don’t run them over?’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry about it,’ Bella said. ‘Dad says when you live in the country you’ve got to expect a bit of roadkill.’
‘BELLA!’ I snapped crossly.
‘What’s roadkill?’ Grace wanted to know.
‘It’s what you call an animal that’s been run over. If it’s fresh and not too badly mangled, you can take it home and eat it,’ Bella informed her.
Grace’s mouth had fallen open. ‘You’re lying!’
‘I’m not. You can’t afford to be squeamish about these things in the countryside, Gracie. Did you know when Dad was a boy his father used to take him out shooting rabbits?’
‘BELLA!’ I snarled. ‘He did not!’
‘Yes he did. Aunt Thecla told me. They used to make rabbit pies.’
Grace’s face had gone pale and she looked like she might be starting to feel sick again.
‘Stop being so mean,’ I said, because I knew exactly what Bella was doing. She was trying to make Grace feel as bad about moving as she did.
Bella has done the same thing to me plenty of times in the past. It’s as if she can’t stand me not being equally upset about anything that’s upsetting her. The most notable time was when Grace was born. That was when I was six and Bella was nine. We were really close in those days. At primary school Bella was confident and popular, whereas I was shy and tended to stay in the background. She would always stand up for me and help me out if anything went wrong, and I used to follow her around – both at home and at school – like a faithful puppy. But when Grace was born I remember being excited and wanting to help Mum with our new baby, whereas Bella was more worried about the baby taking up all of Mum’s time.
After a couple of days of failing to get me to see that our new baby sister was going to be a big problem for both of us, she told me she felt especially sorry for me because I was now a ‘middle child’. According to Bella, it was a well-known fact that parents didn’t love middle children as much as the oldest and youngest ones. I got really upset, until Mum found out about it and reassured me that she loved me just as much as she always had. I suppose, looking back, Bella just needed me to feel as jealous and insecure as she clearly felt at the time.
We stayed close until she hit her teens, when I guess she just became less interested in having me trailing around as her loyal sidekick and Number One Fan. She seemed to stop confiding in me, and whenever I tried to get her to open up the way she used to she’d snap that I was ‘too young’ or ‘too immature’ to understand whatever it was she was worrying about. Gradually more and more distance grew between us. She became a lot more self-conscious and the list of things she found embarrassing was endless. And the worst thing was that I seemed to be on this list!
Ever since I’d started Year Seven she’d hassled me on and off about my appearance, making me worry about things I’d been totally relaxed about before – my hairstyle, my shoes, even the coat I wore. She’d warned me that I was ‘prone to looking dorky’ and that I needed to ‘keep on top of it’ if I didn’t want to end up in the dorky group. She said it didn’t help that I was always sucking up to my teachers, and whenever I put lots of effort into my homework or got especially high marks for some piece of work, all I heard was, ‘You’re such a swot!’ or ‘It’s just not cool!’.
Strangely it was Aunt Thecla who stood up for me about that. She happened to be staying with us one time when Bella was having a go at me for getting top marks in a history test. Suddenly Aunt Thecla declared, ‘My dear Bella, I do feel sorry for you! It’s always so horrible to feel jealous. Believe me, I’ve been there myself many times – so exhausting and unpleasant!’
‘Unpleasant for me, you mean!’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘One thing you ought to know by now, Elisabeth, is that I always say exactly what I mean.’
I still couldn’t accept that Bella could ever be envious of me. After all, she was the cool older sister while I was the dorky younger one. ‘You’re not jealous, are you, Bella?’ I said with a dismissive laugh.
‘Of course not!’ But she’d looked sulky and slightly pink in the face all the same.
Dad’s phone rang when we were back on the motorway, so Mum answered it for him. We could tell by the way Mum spoke that it was Aunt Thecla. Mum always sounds a bit impatient whenever she has to speak to her, chiefly because Aunt Thecla always asks too many questions. ‘Yes, Thecla. Don’t worry, Thecla. We’ll phone you when we arrive at the cottage.’ She came off the phone saying, ‘Honestly, it’s like she wants this cottage to turn out to be awful, just so she’s proved right.’
Aunt Thecla had wanted to find us a house to rent in the village, and she’d been horrified when Mum had looked online and found a quaint little country cottage that wasn’t actually in the village itself. Aunt Thecla had done her best to put Mum off by telling her that the lady who was renting it out also lived in the village and she’d met her a couple of times and hadn’t liked her. But Mum said Mrs Fuller had seemed perfectly nice when they’d spoken on the phone. ‘She seemed very relaxed about everything,’ Mum told us. ‘The complete opposite of Thecla, so I can see why they wouldn’t get along.’
‘Well, I agree with Aunt Thecla for once,’ Bella piped up now. ‘At least if we were renting a house in the village then we could walk to school and walk to the shops and stuff.’
‘There isn’t much “stuff” to walk to, Bella, not even in the village,’ Dad warned her gently. ‘You’ll need to go to Castle Westbury, which is our nearest town, if you want proper shops.’
‘And if we’d rented in the village like Thecla suggested, then she could just walk to see us whenever she liked,’ Mum put in, not so gently.
‘Well, I think our cottage sounds really sweet,’ I said before Mum and Bella could start arguing about it. I’d loved the photos of the cottage. According to the online advert it was situated in a small hamlet just a few miles from the village itself. There were three cottages in total, set back from the road in a little row, with gardens that backed on to a field with horses in it. Grace was really excited when she heard about the horses, and even I had started thinking about the possibility of riding lessons.
I was soon lost in a daydream about my perfect pony, thinking up names for it and closing my eyes to better imagine how it looked. I must have dozed off because soon I was dreaming about a pony disappearing into the distance with Bella on its back. And in the dream I couldn’t work out if Bella was riding away from us on purpose or because she didn’t have any control over her pony.
When I woke up I realised I must have been asleep for ages because we’d left the motorway and Mum was driving instead of Dad. We were crawling along behind a tractor on a windy country road and through the rear window I could see a long queue of cars behind us.
‘You have to be brave about overtaking in the country, Mum,’ Bella was saying impatiently. ‘Otherwise you’re going to get stuck behind tractors all the time.’
‘Be quiet, Bella,’ Mum snapped.
But of course Bella didn’t. ‘Hey, did you know Aunt Thecla’s overtaking record is two tractors with four cars in between?’
‘Now that’s what we country folk call a tractor sandwich,’ Dad joked.
We all laughed except Mum, who said, ‘Really? Well, that’s what I call driving like a maniac!’