It is the first warm day of April, the first possible day of spring, and it is impossible to watch any more telly. I feel as though I have woken from hibernation, and my senses are less slothful than they have been since I suffered the agony of having my ears pierced just before Christmas. Today I can actually smell spring mingling with the salt which is always present in the air here, and the village shop had primroses planted in tubs outside the door. Staitheley is quiet at this time of year, only fishermen are out at sea, and a handful of the heartiest sailors, but everyone else’s boats are moored out of the water and lashed with canvas to protect them from the elements. Only the masts clang, a sound as much a part of Staitheley life to me as the call of gulls and the constant rippling whisper of water in the creek.
Staitheley is everyone’s favourite place in the summer, when there are holidaymakers and birdwatchers and nature lovers everywhere. The tide floods in and suddenly the sea fills up with boats and the tiny streets are full of people eating ice creams and having barbecues, and laughter echoes off all the cobbled walls as every garden seems to have a party going on in it. When the tide is in, people queue on the quay, waiting for the boats to take them to Salt Head Island and beyond it to Seal Point, to see the famous local seal colony, or as the tide recedes they stay, teetering on the brink of falling in, dangling orange nylon crab lines and scraps of bacon into the muddy water of the harbour. The six weeks of the summer holidays are when most businesses are making their money, but the rest of the time it’s dead quiet and I sometimes feel like I am the only living entity, and I have to go into Flixby, our nearest town, to remind myself that there are a few people on the planet beyond the Staitheley pensioners. I usually get Mum to give me a lift to the bus when I want to go and meet my best friend, Nell, there, but today, when I asked Mum, she just yelled, ‘You can go on your bike.’ Charming. In fact, I’d forgotten I had a bike until she mentioned it and then it took me a while to find it, or rather to get Mum to find it, because it was right back in the back of the garage under a torn sail from my old Laser boat and two rank-smelling lobster pots. Mum always knows where everything is if you keep asking her.
‘Look, if you want me to go on my bike, I need to know where it is,’ I pointed out, quite reasonably, when I had looked in the obvious places, like outside the back door and outside the front door.
‘Why am I the only person who does anything here?’ Mum shrieked as she strutted out to the garage. ‘It’s your father’s job to look after bicycles, not mine.’
I think of Dad, out on the Sand Bar at the end of Salt Head, in his waders with his binoculars and surrounded by screeching birdlife, and I know that he is far too busy taking care of the nature reserve that is the island to ever give any thought to my bike or anyone else’s. He didn’t even teach me to ride it in the first place – Jack, my grandfather, did that when I was six, and I can remember pedalling along the quay towards Grandma and being full of swooping joy at the new sensation. Dad lives for his job; for him, being warden to the coastline is a vocation, like they say being a nun is. I hope I never get a vocation; I just want a job when I grow up, to get me out and away into the world. Mind you, Mum had a job being a television journalist in London and look where that got her – she met Dad when she came to the North Norfolk coast to make a documentary. They got married and she gave up work when she had me. I think she’s a bit frustrated now and it isn’t really surprising. She certainly went off on one about my bike today.
‘No one is asking you to look after it,’ I soothed, ‘I just need you to help me find it.’
Mum yanked open the garage door, chucked a few boxes around and located my bike beneath the sail. Unfortunately, seeing the bike didn’t improve her temper, and she charged away towards the house again shouting, ‘There’s the bloody thing and I’m not mending any goddam punctures either.’ She should really watch her language. Anyway, I got it out and was delighted that there were no punctures, but no one has been looking after it, least of all me. But now I suppose it isn’t surprising that the bike is groaning and listing and its wheel is catching on something, and I’ve only got a few hundred metres away from home. While I’m glad Mum can’t see that I’ve already ground to a halt, I do also wish she would just drive past in her car and give me a lift to the bus stop after all because I’ve got to meet Nell, and now I think I’m going to miss the bus.
I gaze up and down the High Street, and as usual there is no one about except a very old lady with a tweed hat on taking a dachshund for a walk. She is Miss Mills from Bridge House, and I hope she can’t see this far because I really don’t want to talk to her right now. There is a gang of old ladies in Staitheley and they are all friends, or all sworn enemies, of my grandma. She and Jack are not in the thick of it, as they live just out of the village in their house on the edge of the marshes, but she knows every ailment and every complaint that is discussed by the Staitheley ladies. Their three favourite topics are: illnesses, their own and one another’s; dogs, and whom they have bitten; and the vicar, Reverend Horace Wells, and what he has done wrong. I have been into almost every old lady’s house in Staitheley in the fourteen years of my life, and apart from the holiday-cottage owners who are never here, I know just about everyone in the village. It isn’t hard to know everyone because there are a few hundred permanent residents and my dad grew up here too, and my grandfather, so Staitheley is home to my family history as much as it is to me. This is one of the boring things about it.
I would actually like to live in a town where no one has known me since I was a baby, and where cinemas, clothes shops, chemists and cafes lined the streets. It would be so great if I could go and buy a CD without having to make a special half-day pilgrimage on the bus to Flixby. And it would be great if no one ever made either of the following remarks about me again: ‘My, with all that dark hair and those big blue eyes you remind me of your daddy when he was small,’ or, ‘But look at you now, Lola Jordan, haven’t you grown into a fine young lady! I should ask your grandmother to buy you a nice new cardy, you seem to have grown out of that one.’ This comment usually comes with a bony old hand prodding my waist which makes me squeal, so the Staitheley grannies think I am a true joker among them and seek me out again and again. It is a big pressure being one of very few children in a very small village. I think it was selfish of Mum and Dad to only have me. A brother or a sister would really take the spotlight off me. Mum is so not sympathetic; whenever I moan, she says I bring it on myself. ‘You know you could cover up your midriff when you go round to get Miss Mills’s shopping list,’ she points out. And she’s always telling me to take my coat when taking Enid Selby’s naughty West Highland terrier for a walk along with my own darling Jack Russell, and friend through thick and thin, Cactus.
‘I could wear old sacks all the time,’ I agree, ‘but then I wouldn’t be being true to myself, Mum.’
That floors her, because Mum’s big thing in life is being true to oneself. And communicating. God knows how she manages with Dad because he never communicates anything. He hardly talks. Come to think of it, Mum doesn’t talk much to Dad, but she talks to me, and she talks on the phone to her friends in London, especially my Aunt Jane, her sister. Sometimes she cries after that. I think that even after all these years, she misses the excitement of being a working girl in a big city.
Thankfully, Miss Mills has teetered away down towards the quay with Deborah the dachshund undulating along beside her, a bit like a worm on a lead, I always think, but each to her own. Cactus, who is more like a cement-filled rugby ball than a worm, because he is so greedy, is in my rucksack, but I’ve been hanging around too long and he has noticed a cat. Suddenly he wriggles out and dashes away after it. He vanishes down one of the little alleyways that criss-cross between walled gardens and courtyards which make up the heart of Staitheley and that I am sure must have been built by smugglers no matter how Dad insists they were just for taking coal to houses. Anyway, I can’t be bothered to go after Cactus. He’ll just go home when he’s finished hell-raising and I’ll see him when I get back. No one can get lost in our village, so I never worry about him.
Staitheley is small. It still spans both sides of the creek but once, as Dad has told me more times than I can be bothered to remember, it was a great port. All that is left of the port now is the quay and the merchants’ houses that line it. They face out across the salt marshes to the limitless sea, as if protecting the flint cottages clustered between the two main streets, which reach back from the quay like arms wrapped around the heart of Staitheley.
‘There is nothing between us and the North Pole,’ Dad likes to tell me. In the winter I have no trouble believing him. Dad knows everything about this coastline and its web of creeks, which flow through the salt marshes, flooding them with the incoming tide and receding again when the tide ebbs so that mousse-thick mud oozes wherever you walk. It always feels to me like the marshes and the island, Salt Head, belong to Dad and not to the Trust for whom he works. Occasionally he puts on a tie with his tweed jacket and goes to their head office in Cambridge for a meeting, where they ask him stuff like, ‘Where is the erosion happening?’ or, ‘Do you have a policy on pollution?’ but mainly they just leave him to manage it for them and so the huge sweep of sometimes land (low tide) and sometimes sea (high tide) which stretches from the tiny village of Salt along the coast to the west part of Staitheley and on to Hinkley Marshes and Beetley Creek and the weirdly popular village of Burdon Water is Dad’s kingdom.
When I was much younger, as soon as I could come back from school I would run up to Dad’s study, where the curved window and the large telescope gave a wide panoramic view of the marshes. If I saw his familiar figure somewhere out on the edge of the water, light dancing silver streaks around him, I would hurry out with Cactus, following the path between pink-tinged heather clumps, sometimes taking half an hour or more to reach him.
These days I find some parts of Dad’s job really embarrassing: for example, in the summer he drives around with binoculars on the beaches and if he sees a plume of smoke he zooms across and throws sand over people’s barbecues.
‘I’m sorry, it’s the Trust’s policy, and we’ve had problems with fire every summer,’ he always says. If they’re understanding and easy with him, he stands at a distance and lets them finish cooking, but if they’re rude or try to threaten him, he pours a bottle of water right into the flames and he doesn’t even move the sausages or whatever they’re cooking. I try to avoid going with him when he’s doing this sort of beach patrol, it’s just too cringe-making, and I don’t like to get involved when he takes school parties out on to Salt Head and he tells his repertoire of a whole lot of lame jokes which I have heard too many times before. But when we go out on our own together, and he shows me where the seals go to have their pups and he tells me how a sea mist comes in on a hot summer day when the wind is in the north, I am caught up in the magic of the coast that is my home and I succumb to its spell. Today is not magical, although spring beckons. A cloud like a purple bruise hangs over the village. The air is mild and the wind has dropped to a breeze which catches my hair and whips it into my eyes.
I wiggle the front wheel of my bike hopefully. Perhaps it will fix itself in a minute. A boy skims past on a skateboard, but U-turns gracefully back to me.
‘What’s happened?’ He crouches by my bike. He has thick hair flopping over his forehead and I am struck too by the hollow of his cheekbone and his mouth. He looks at me and a grin bursts on my face involuntarily and unstoppably. I can’t stop grinning as he takes my bike and turns it upside down on the edge of the road. In fact I have to turn away and push my hair back from my face, dragging my hands across my eyes and mouth to make myself sensible again. A small self-administered slap helps, but I have a sneaking feeling that he might have seen me do it. So now he will think I am a total weirdo. I turn back to him, suddenly aware again that he is very kindly fixing my bike and needs praise and attention.
‘You’ve bent the wheel,’ he says, spinning it with his hand flat, hovering just above the ridged rubber of the tyre. ‘Come back with me, and I can fix it for you in the workshop.’ He gestures over his shoulder. I know where he is pointing. I know who he is. How could I not in such a small village? His name is Josh Christie, and his dad is a fisherman and a boatbuilder called Ian. The Christies used to live a few miles away in a smaller village than Staitheley but recently they moved into a big boatyard which sprawls on to the road between wide cobbled walls just along the quay from our house. I know all about them, or a version of them, because Ian Christie grew up with my dad, and they were friends once.
Josh gives me his skateboard to carry, and he wheels my bike into the boatyard. In the open shed, the hull of a boat is suspended from ropes that are wrapped around the beams, and curls of wood shavings litter the floor. Outside, a line of different-coloured buoys glow red and orange against the flint wall. I have been to this boatyard many times, before the Christies came to live here, but now my dad prefers to drive to Salt. He avoids Ian Christie like a bad smell, and says I’m imagining it when I challenge him. I can’t be bothered with the way grown-ups fall out. It obviously happens more and more as you get older; just look at all my grandma’s cronies, arguing and having feuds. Everyone knows everyone here, and although I find it pretty annoying at times, mostly it is a friendly feeling.
Josh has the wheel off my bike, and whistling absently he clamps it into a vice on the workbench.
‘How do you know what to do?’
I wasn’t really expecting to bump into a boy today, especially not Josh Christie, although as he is the only boy anywhere near my age around the village, I suppose he is the only one I am at all likely to see. But me and Nell, who is the person apart from Cactus that I am closest to on earth, and who I have sat next to at school in every class since we started at primary together, have been eyeing him up on the bus for a while. Not that he’d have noticed us lowly fourteen-year-olds. But it’s so weird that now here he is, very interested in my bike but not actually saying anything to me. The silence yawns between us and I babble to fill it.
‘I’m catching the bus to Flixby to meet my friend Nell at the cinema. Do you want to come?’
Ohmigod. I have to dig my fingernails into the palm of my hand to stop myself apologizing straight away, and I bite my lip so as not to take the words back. That will only make things worse. Of course he will say no. What an idiot I am. Nell will crucify me. I can just imagine exactly what she’ll say: ‘You can’t just invite boys to come to the cinema with you! It’s like going on a date, to be anywhere near a cinema with a boy. You know that, Lola, don’t you?’
Josh straightens up from gazing intently at the vice and the bent wheel and looks at me.
‘What are you going to see?’
‘Err, umm, yess . . .’ Oh God. Why did I say the cinema? I suppose it made sense because it is where I’m meeting Nell, but we haven’t planned to actually see anything. We might go to Woolworths and look through the CDs. Maybe buy one. But seeing a film? Not a priority today, not with only five pounds left to last me until the end of the holidays, unless I get a job. I could kick myself. Of course he would want to know what we are seeing. What might be on? Think of a film. There must be a film title somewhere in my brain. Any old one will do. I shift from foot to foot, rolling my eyes. Josh, looking perplexed, stares at me then turns back to the wheel.
‘I’ve straightened this, and I’ve moved the brake pads, so I think it’ll be OK now.’
He begins to untwist the vice, spinning the bar, bouncing the tyre and whistling.
‘Oh no!’ Accidentally my thoughts erupt out of my mouth: the only film title to ping into my otherwise blank and panicking mind is a French one. The one I read the review of this morning in the paper. How could anyone possibly try to speak even two or three French words to a boy they have just met? I’ll have to get round it somehow.
‘It’s that French one about . . . about . . .’ Shit! I should never have pursued this line of chatting. Never. The French film is about kissing. Nothing else, just kissing. The reviewer was scathing about it. Said it was a teen flick all dressed up and nowhere to go and it would give you glandular fever just to watch it. Oops, how do I convey this to Josh without mentioning anything about snogging? Impossible. Gulping, I grab the handlebars of the bike as Josh tightens the last nut, and mumble, ‘Better go. Thanks. G’dbye.’
‘Hey. Wait.’ Josh stands in front of my bike, blocking the path to the road. His hair flops across his forehead, and he pushes it back impatiently. ‘I’d like to see the French film. I’ll meet you outside the cinema at two o’clock.’ He grins suddenly. ‘You do mean the one about . . . ?’ and he pauses, his eyes lit with laughter.
I can feel my face turning scarlet. I press my hands on my cheeks, but I feel as if I am about to melt, and escape is the only answer. Anyway, I am late for the bus. I’m going to have to pedal like a lunatic to get there on time. I swing up on to the bicycle and, wobbling into my stride, say, as casually as I can muster, ‘Mmm. Yes. That one. I’m really glad you can come. Good.’
So off I go, blathering away like a total idiot, as I explain to Nell in Burger King opposite the cinema. Nell drains her Coke and rolls the paper beaker along the table towards me. ‘Well, you’re not a total one hundred per cent idiot, because he’s coming, isn’t he?’
Mindlessly, I roll the cup back. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll turn up.’
‘Well, so what?’ Nell stands up, looking at her watch. ‘It’s not like we came specially to meet him, or planned the whole thing around him, is it? If he doesn’t come, we’re saved the embarrassment of sitting with a boy watching snogging for two hours.’
Collapsing on one another, giggling, we stagger out and across the road to the cinema. No one is waiting for us by the door.
‘He’s late,’ I point out. Nell does not reply. I nudge her. ‘He’s late, I said. I don’t think he’s coming. We should go in or we’ll miss it.’
Nell grabs my hand and pinches it.
‘No he’s not late,’ she says under her breath. ‘He’s there.’
The Hollywood cinema fills the block in the small terraced side street of Flixby. At one end the road gives way to the main street down to the station, at the other a car park defined by high flint walls is the site of the Tuesday market. Today, though, under the spilling weight of a blossom-heavy cherry tree, a small, dark blue motorbike has drawn up. Opening the box on the back of the bike, the rider takes off his helmet and gloves and stows them away before turning towards the cinema, unzipping his jacket as he approaches. It is Josh.
How could anyone have ever imagined that Josh Christie would become friends with me? Nell says it’s because it’s the holidays and none of his friends live as near as I do, but she admitted she was only jealous, so I just giggle when she says it on the phone a week after the cinema. As I put the phone down and rush through the kitchen, I shout to Mum, ‘I’m going round to the Christies for tea.’
Mum is lying on the sofa doing nothing, which seems to be the way she spends most of her time at the moment. In a way I am grateful because it means she isn’t being nosy about my life. Normally she would want to know what it was like there, what we talk about and, nosiest of all, what I feel about Josh. Mum is one of those people who like to talk about feelings. She used to hate me watching television on Saturday mornings until one day she sat with me through an episode of Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, where Sabrina went on a Guilt Trip on a bus. Mum was fantastic.
‘God, I wish there’d been programmes like that in my day to help me deal with adolescence,’ she said after the programme was finished. ‘Tell me, Lola, how do you sort out that sort of thing? Are you and your friends open about it?’
‘Er, yup.’
I am hoping this is the answer which will get her off my back quickest. Sometimes I feel she is trying to get a torch and look at all the corners of my mind that I don’t think about, and I wish I was not an only child so there’d be someone else for her to focus her attention on. Or else I wish she would get a job, but when I suggest it, she rolls her eyes and says, ‘There isn’t much I can do here apart from waitressing in the pub. The media world is limited to the church newsletter and I don’t think Enid Selby would like me to help with that, do you?’
It’s true, I can’t see Mum reporting on local jam sales at the Women’s Institute and taking what she finds out back to Mrs Selby, widow of a former rector, to edit for her. It is a long way from news documentaries, I guess. She may as well stick with the self-help books I have noticed piling up around her bed. The latest is called Boundaries: Where I End and You Begin. I am grateful to this book, however daft it sounds, because I think it must be what has stopped her cross-questioning me about Josh.
It is only a few minutes from my house on the quay to the Christies’ and I run most of the way, wanting as much time there as possible today because tomorrow I am meant to start work on Salt Head with Dad. He’s going to pay me to help him log the birds and other wildlife for one week. He is supposed to be doing some sort of report for English Nature about the seals and their environment. Although I love it on the island, and I have been looking forward to working with Dad, I am a bit torn now. I just want to hang out with Josh and Nell and listen to music and stuff. I have spent so much of my time with Dad out on the marshes, I can’t help feeling it will be a bit lonely and quiet. And I’ll have to wear wellies and an anorak all the time, which is such a waste of all the new clothes I bought with my Christmas money and have hardly worn as I am always in school uniform or wet-weather kit.
Josh’s mum, Caroline, is making bread when I arrive there, and the kitchen is warm and friendly and very untidy.
‘Hello, Lola, come and have some tea.’ She smiles, and I sit down in front of a patch of flour. ‘Do you fancy doing some kneading?’
She gives me a piece of dough, and I cut a bit off for Sadie, Josh’s five-year-old sister, who has sidled up next to me.
‘What shall we make?’ Sadie whispers. She has the cutest dimples. I grin at her and we start making a fat dough mermaid. Something about Caroline is so warm and encouraging that I start telling her about the work I am meant to be doing.
‘I feel a bit guilty saying to Dad that I don’t want to do it, and it would be nice to have the money,’ I explain, almost telling myself as much as her, ‘but he only gave me the job to be kind, because he doesn’t really need me. There is a proper student coming to help tomorrow. He just thinks he shouldn’t let me down.’
Caroline squidges the dough into bread tins and slides them into the oven. She looks at me with a kind of arrested expression then she says, ‘Lola, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you work for me? I need some help with Sadie this holidays while we are getting the sailing school up and running. I can help Ian in the office if you could have Sadie for a few hours every day.’
I cannot believe my luck. To be paid for looking after Sadie, who is really adorable, in Josh’s house with Josh around is brilliant.
Nell is almost sick with envy when I phone her to tell her.
‘You are so lucky living up there; I wish I could get a holiday job like yours, I have to do a lame paper round in Flixby.’
‘Well, come and help me. Sadie will love there being two of us,’ I suggest.
And often there is Josh. He seems to be here all the time and Sadie skips up to him when he is standing eating cereal by the Aga or taking the wheels off his skateboard to clean some tiny cog, and she tells him jokes and climbs his legs, with her hands in his, to do a somersault. I feel sad that I have no brother when I see them together, and I almost can’t stop thinking about him when I am not there. But he is seventeen and I can tell that he thinks of me more as an extension of Sadie than a fit female. On my third day of looking after Sadie, she comes to greet me at the door dressed for a deluge.
‘I’ve got my wet-weather clothes on because Josh is taking us to Seal Point and we’re having elevenses,’ she announces. I grin madly and whirl her into my arms to hug her. This is perfect, just me and Josh and Sadie. Almost before the excitement can engulf me my heart starts pounding. Only me and Josh and Sadie for a whole morning. How will we keep talking? I won’t be able to think of anything to say and we will have to shout anyway above the engine and it will take hours to get there.
Josh is on the quay in the boat. It is a very ordinary, grey workboat with ‘Staitheley Sailing School’ painted down its side. Josh is checking the fuel tank attached to the large outboard engine. His hands are brown and he has a faded green-and-silver woven plait of thread around his wrist. My stomach somersaults and I wish I could control myself and not feel like a tongue-tied idiot.
‘I love the seals and the seals love me.’ Sadie skips on to the boat and sits down in the bow, pulling three Barbies out of her pocket and arranging them so that they are perched with their heads looking over the side.
‘Can you untie us?’ Josh starts the engine while I untwist the rope from the cleat on the dockside and we chug out of the harbour, cutting through the smooth grey water, making slow headway towards Salt Head Island and the seals beyond.
Salt Head is not always an island as you can wade out to the eastern end at low tide. There’s a path across the marshes from Salt, with warning notices about the dangers of being caught by fast incoming tides. At the opposite end of Salt Head is the Sand Bar, with its colony of seals.
The seals are a real attraction for tourists, and in Staitheley there are two different businesses running trips out to see them. We are friends with them both, but closest to the Lawsons, two brothers in their twenties who used to babysit me when I was small. I usually get a ride with them if I want to go out round the end of Salt Head. Today their boat is way ahead of ours, and its red bulk is a bright but distant beacon in the heavy flat sea.
Seal Point is a sandbank beyond the island and it isn’t really anywhere most of the time because it is underwater, but at low tide it is exposed and the seals from the Sand Bar go and loll there on the warm wet sands. I don’t go out there on my own because it is too far for my small Laser and the currents are dangerous. Dad won’t let me, so it feels very liberating to be heading off there with just Josh in charge.
Josh still hasn’t looked directly at me and we have been in the boat for ages – at least twenty minutes I should think. Sadie is singing to her Barbies, and I gaze out at the horizon with a totally blank mind.
Josh leans towards me and shouts, ‘Have you heard about the whale?’
‘What whale? Is it a joke?’ I shout back, and suddenly the ice between us is broken and we both laugh and begin to talk, and once we start we are so easy with one another I feel I have been chatting to him like this all my life. He tells me that a thirty-foot dead whale has been beached further up the coast and people have got caught by the tide wading out to see it. We reach the seals at lunchtime and the water is so clear that we can see their black torpedo bodies as they zoom beneath our boat to emerge, popping up in the sea, with amiable sleek faces which Sadie is convinced are smiling at her.
‘Look – that one is Starburst. I named him last time when Josh and Daddy brought me. He wants to play with Barbie.’ And without so much as a last goodbye, she flings one of her three Barbies into the water.
Josh and I look at one another and the moment is intense before we burst out laughing.
‘Do you live with the Christies now?’ Dad asks sharply at supper one evening a week later. ‘You haven’t been here for days.’
I spear a cherry tomato and eat it before answering.
‘They’re really busy getting the boats ready. The sailing school’s starting any time now and Caroline – I mean Mrs Christie – is doing all the admin for it. It’s going to be brilliant.’
Dad puts down his knife and fork with a clatter.
‘It makes life awkward. I would have thought Caroline would realize that,’ he mutters. I stare at him.
‘Why is it awkward? I’m good with children. I love Sadie and it’s really nice at their house – no one is in a bad mood all the time.’
I am so sick of Dad looking gloomy. I think he might be ill. He used to come home with things he had found to show me and with stories about everyone in the village and lists of things that needed doing. He was the person the old ladies would ask about fixing a gate or putting up a noticeboard, but now he is morose and silent and he doesn’t call Miss Mills back when Mum tells him she telephoned to ask him about the date of the next Parish Council Meeting.
Mum looks at him across the table and her eyes are hard.
‘Come on, Richard, lighten up,’ she says.
Dad pushes his plate away and gets up. He puts on his coat and goes out, calling Cactus to follow him into the dark. Sighing, Mum takes both her plate and his to the sink and I am left, looking at the last two tomatoes in the bowl in front of me, alone at the kitchen table.
‘I’ve got to go too,’ I mutter, ‘I’m babysitting,’ and I rush out of the door.
At the moment I really don’t like being at home. It is so silent: Mum is always sighing or just lying on the sofa with no lights turned on, and Dad is always out.
Tonight when I arrive at Josh’s house to bath Sadie and put her to bed, the noisy chaos of the Christie kitchen envelops me like a warm embrace. The telephone is ringing, Neoprene the African grey parrot is singing a nursery rhyme Sadie has taught him, and Josh is practising guitar chords, settled deep in the sagging sofa beneath the kitchen window. Caroline answers the telephone as I arrive, but she finishes her conversation and comes back to the table, pushing wisps of wild hair back from her face, which is pink and friendly as she smiles a welcome to me and carries on her conversation with Ian. He is smoking a cigarette, his chair back from the table, and he has managed to get himself looking very relaxed in what must be an uncomfortable position for a tall man, on a small kitchen chair, stretched out with his ankles crossed miles in front of him. They are talking about the advertising brochure for the sailing school.
‘I think we should have a picture of Josh and you on the front,’ Caroline says, teasing her husband, ‘wearing stripy T-shirts or smocks and looking nice and nautical.’
‘No way,’ Josh interrupts. ‘Put Dad in the picture with Neoprene. Sailors should have parrots, shouldn’t they?’
Ian laughs and suggests, ‘Maybe you, Caroline, wearing your bikini, might attract more clients?’
Even though Caroline is not the bikini type, she doesn’t seem to be offended in the general laughter and the phone rings again. Sadie picks it up.
‘Hello. This is Sadie’s house. I’m five and they’re all Loony Toons here. Who is that anyway?’ she warbles before anyone else can grab the receiver.