Once upon a time, there was a house in a garden full of cherry trees, and the little girl who lived in that house was the happiest girl in the world. In summer she could pick cherries straight off the tree outside her bedroom window, and one spring night, when the tree was a cloud of pink flowers, she tried to sleep in it because it was just how she imagined a princess’s castle …
Jesse and Fergus watched, concerned.
‘What’s she doing?’ Jesse asked. ‘Why is she just sitting there?’
‘I think …’ Fergus narrowed his eyes. Alice sat staring into space, absolutely still except for … her left hand, gently twitching. ‘I think she’s writing.’
The little girl’s mother wouldn’t let her sleep in the tree, and ordered her back inside. But secretly, she hoped her daughter would always be …
Alice stood up, her chin set at its most stubborn angle.
She knew the story’s ending.
‘Now what?’ Jesse whispered.
Fergus shrugged. ‘I don’t know!’
Alice, steely voiced, said, ‘Show me how I get down.’
*
‘Whatever you do, do not just slide down the rope, or you’ll burn your hands.’ Jesse peppered Alice with instructions as she prepared to go over the top of the cliff. ‘One hand over the other, and keep your legs braced. It’s not too high, so if you fall, you might break a leg, but you’re unlikely to die. Oh, and don’t look down.’
Alice had intended to be fearless. She didn’t feel it now. The drop beneath her made her want to howl. Or hide. Or be sick. Or all three together.
And this wasn’t even the most frightening thing she had to confront.
‘Way to help, Jesse,’ said Fergus. ‘She’s gone green.’
‘That’s not helping either,’ Jesse reproved. ‘Alice, you OK?’
She gripped the rope with both hands and slid over the edge of the cliff.
‘To be fearless,’ she informed them, in a barely shaking voice, ‘you have to confront your fears.’
Confronting fears, Alice decided, was horrible. Her stomach flipped into her mouth then lurched to her guts, before settling to spin uncontrollably somewhere near her lungs. Her palms grew so damp she thought they could never grip the rope. A hundred miles beneath her, the cove was a blurred mess of white and blue.
‘Eyes straight ahead,’ said Jesse, from somewhere on a different planet. ‘One hand over the other. You can do it.’
Step by excruciating step, she inched towards the cove. Jesse, lying on the grass with his face and shoulders hanging over the cliff, grew smaller, his encouragements fainter. The crash of the waves grew louder. Her blood began to dance, her fingers and toes to tingle. This was easy. It was almost fun. All she had to do, to reach the bottom, was …
‘There’s a boat!’ Fergus’s shout broke into her concentration. She glanced up, saw that he had climbed to the top of the highest battlement, Jesse’s binoculars clamped to this eyes.
Alice’s world grew fuzzy again.
‘Alice!’ Barney’s shout floated up from miles below, urgent. ‘You have to hurry!’
‘Don’t push her!’ Jesse yelled. ‘She’s scared of heights!’
Surely, Alice thought with a sudden return to clarity, Barney knew that?
Something was shifting again in Alice’s mind – the vertigo, which she had always thought started when Mum died – it hadn’t started immediately, but weeks after the funeral, when Alice had climbed up her favourite tree because Dad had gone away, and refused to come down until he came back, and then panicked, and froze. In the end, Aunt Patience had had to call the fire brigade to rescue her. Everyone knew that story.
She saw it now. It wasn’t Mum’s death that had made her fearful, it was Barney. Barney, who could charm a furious boy with a well-told story … Barney with his snow angels and escapades …
Barney, who could always make her do exactly what he wanted … who she was always looking for in her dreams, running down empty corridors …
‘It’s not the Leopard!’ Fergus yelled. ‘The boat! It’s the coastguard! The coastguard! They’re … NO! They’re heading to the landing jetty! They haven’t seen us! Over here! Over here! Come back!’
‘Alice!’ Barney was panicking now. ‘Alice, please! I can’t let the coastguard find me!’
Slowly but steadily, she resumed her descent. One hand over the other, step by step, but when she reached the bottom of the cliff, she held on to the rope.
‘Alice, hurry!’ He was waving her over, already pushing his stolen boat towards the sea. Alice didn’t move. She wondered if he would even wait for the others.
‘Where will you go?’ she shouted.
‘What?’
‘When you have the money? Where will you go?’
He was walking over, still half turned towards the boat. ‘Can we talk about this later?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I want to talk about it now.’
He ran his hands through his hair, so that it stuck up all over his head. Alice used to love it when he did that. Sometimes, he did it on purpose to make her laugh, crossing his eyes and pulling his shirt sideways until he was a dishevelled mess, and Alice a writhing, giggling heap, and Patience would invariably say ‘For heaven’s sake, Barney, grow up!’.
But that was the thing, she realised. He was supposed to be the grown-up. He was the one who should be telling them what to do – not a twelve-year-old boy like Jesse with a twisted ankle, still hanging anxiously over the cliff. And it wasn’t Alice’s fault that they were here – not entirely. It was his. She saw that now.
Even so – one last time, because she loved him, she gave him the benefit of the doubt. It wasn’t like anyone had actually been hurt, he had said … And if the money was for them … If he would only say that he had done it so that they would never again be separated – that he would never disappear again on trips that they all knew had nothing to do with the theatre – if he would only say that he loved her, Alice thought, with a sudden stab of pain.
Like Aunt Patience did, she realised, in every single one of her letters and emails. Like Fergus had said at Calva – do you remember? – and even Jesse had begrudgingly admitted.
‘What will you do with the money?’ she repeated.
‘I … I don’t know,’ Barney faltered. ‘I haven’t really thought.’
Alice turned away.
‘There’s another boat!’ Fergus yelled from the top of the cliff. ‘I think it’s the Leopard! It is the Leopard!’
Alice took the rope in both hands.
‘Is everything OK?’ Jesse called down.
‘Alice, what are you doing?’ Barney had run up to her now, and was pleading. ‘Alice, come to the boat!’
‘No thank you,’ she said, very politely. ‘I think I’d rather take my chances with the cliff.’
Afterwards, she said it felt as if the world had slowed right down. She looked up and saw her friends, Fergus’s skinny silhouette outlined against the sky on the battlement, Jesse’s anxious face pinched with pain, and she thought how much they had done for her. Then she looked at Barney and knew that he would never change.
‘I love you, Dad.’ She sniffed, wiped her nose on her sleeve, rubbed away her tears with the heels of her hands, then pulled him close for a brief, fierce hug. ‘And I’ll miss you, but I’m used to that. And now you’d better go.’
One hand over the other, eyes in front, legs braced as Jesse had told her, she started to climb. Unafraid, up and up, never looking down and never stopping, not even when she heard the sound of an engine starting below, or when the sky exploded with purple smoke.
Fearless.
Her mother would have been proud.