The State of Grace by Rachael Lucas (25)

CHAPTER THIRTY

I wake in Aunty Lou’s bedroom and it smells of old books and dusty wallpaper. Grandma doesn’t believe in duvets, and I’m compressed under a pile of thick linen sheets and heavy blankets and there’s a smell of toast coming underneath the door and it feels safe, and familiar, and I half wonder if I could just stay here and go to school round the corner and just pretend my old life didn’t exist.

I get up, pull on the dressing gown that’s hanging on the back of the glass-panelled bedroom door and make my way downstairs.

Grandma is reading the paper at the breakfast table. And she’s got everything laid out, just like she always does. There’s toast sitting neatly in a rack, and the marmalade is in a jar with a saucer and a little silver spoon beside it. The butter’s not in the plastic tub with the foil crinkled back and crumbs all around the edges – it’s a neat shape in a white china butter dish. And there’s a crisp, white tablecloth with flowers round the edges. Grandma embroidered them herself when she was first married.

‘There’s tea in the pot, dear,’ says Grandma, looking at me over the top of her glasses. ‘And I’ve made some fruit salad if you’d like that first before toast. It’s through the hatch, there, look –’

She motions to the old-fashioned wooden hatch that opens up above the dining table and into the kitchen. Grandma’s house is like stepping back in time. It’s safe here. Newspaper crosswords and half days working in the charity shop and dead-heading roses and none of that social-media nonsense, darling. I realize with a lurch that it’s the first day back at school.

‘You know –’ Grandma folds the paper and watches me as I scoop up fruit salad and put it in my bowl. I’m starving, suddenly, and I feel as if I could eat the whole lot – ‘your dad and your Aunty Lou got into some pretty disastrous scrapes when they were teenagers too.’

‘Not like this,’ I say, and I feel the corners of my mouth turning downwards.

‘Oh, just like this.’ Grandma nods her head. She takes off her reading glasses and slides them into a case as she continues. ‘And it was always the end of the world, especially for your Aunty Lou. Nothing was ever just a bit of a problem. It was all or nothing with her.’

I think of Aunty Lou and her amazing white-washed house in Spain and her cats and her horses and her dream life.

‘But she’s so –’ I scrabble for the word. Grown up, I think, probably. Together. Cool. Calm. All the things I’m not and I will never be.

‘She wasn’t always. I tell you, we had some disasters in our day. When your granddad was alive, he had to drive to Carlisle to rescue her once. She fell out with a friend and sneaked on board the bus to Inverness.’

The clock above the fireplace chimes the half hour. Grandma’s dog Elsa looks up, still lying flat on the hearth rug. Anticipating her walk, she gives a hopeful beat of her tail. She’s a creature of habit, just like Grandma. Just like me, I think.

‘Anyway . . .’ Grandma smiles again, and there’s a far-off look on her face, as if she’s remembering something. ‘I think what I’m trying to tell you, my dear, is that it’s OK to get things wrong. We’re all still learning.’

‘Not you,’ I say.

‘Oh, even me,’ says Grandma. ‘The day you stop learning, my love, is the day you stop living.’

I can’t imagine Grandma, who seems to know everything about everything, and is a proper grown-up sort of grown-up, ever being lost and confused and not knowing what to do.

‘Look at your mum,’ she carries on. ‘Between you and me, I had no idea what to do about that Eve. I could see she was a bad influence – my goodness, I had enough trouble with your Aunty Lou when she was growing up – but I couldn’t work out how to tell your mum I didn’t like her much.’

‘No.’ I swirl my teaspoon round in my cup. ‘She wasn’t exactly – nice.’

‘She showed her true colours in the end, though,’ Grandma said. ‘Where was she when your mum needed her?’

I think back to Lisa turning up on the doorstep when Leah was being tended to by the paramedics. Mum had been out with Eve. She’d left her to come searching for me after Mabel ran off. I didn’t even think about where Eve had gone.

‘She wasn’t interested in your mum the way she is now. She just wanted her the way she remembered her – carefree and wanting to have a good time. And I’m not surprised Julia enjoyed that. It’s pretty hard work being a parent, and she’s been doing it all by herself for far too long. Your father needs to realize that.’

‘He doesn’t even know what’s happened,’ I realize, thinking out loud.

‘Oh, he does. Believe me, he does.’ Grandma shakes her head, and I think she looks disapproving.

We do Grandma things all day. I put on one of her big old dog-walking coats and we take Elsa along the beach. She canters along at the edges of the path, her legs loping along, covering the ground, a piece of driftwood in her mouth. She’s gentle and beautiful, like a huge wild wolf dog, but I watch as other people skirt around her cautiously, fearful of her German shepherd reputation, though she couldn’t be kinder.

We stop and have tea – always tea, so much tea – at the little cafe that’s open all year round, and I crunch down along the pebbles of the beach in search of the perfect skimming stone, remembering holidays we’ve spent here when Dad’s been around. When Elsa’s tired out, we take her back home and Grandma settles down in front of the television to watch her favourite programme. I have a bath and stay in it for hours, reading my book. I don’t get out until my fingers and toes are pruned in the water and the edges of the pages are all speckled with damp.

We eat cottage pie for dinner and sit in the evening watching Coronation Street and eating chocolates from a tin Grandma’s probably had sitting there for months. Elsa balances her head on my lap as I read the last of my book and I look up from the story world as it ends, surprised to discover that I’m here in Kent and not back home in my bedroom. I’d forgotten for a time, and the memory of why I’m here settles like a stone in my stomach again. I kiss Grandma goodnight and take myself upstairs to bed.

Another two days pass. I don’t even know what I’ve done with the ancient brick phone. There’s nobody to call me, and life back home feels like a vague memory. I miss Mabel all the time, though, with an ache that twists inside me. But I shut it off, telling myself that she loves Polly too, and that she’s being cared for and looked after and that I’m better off here, away from everything else. And I miss Leah too, of course, and Anna (will she ever forgive me?) and Gabe (God, I don’t even want to know what he thinks of me now). I don’t want to go home.

Mum calls and I hear Grandma talking to her about routines and tennis training. In the silences between the words I can hear her asking, but not asking, if Eve has been around. Telling Mum how amazing she thinks she is and what a good job she does. Telling her dad will be back soon and that she needs to book a spa break or something lovely. And then she hands the phone to me.

‘Leah,’ she says.

‘Hey,’ I say. We don’t really do phone conversations, so this is a new one.

‘Hello,’ says Leah. ‘What’s happening in Grandma world?’

And I breathe a sigh of relief because she sounds normal and Leah-ish and not the wispy echo of herself that she was when I left.

‘Nothing much,’ I say. ‘What’s happening in Grounded for All Eternity world?’

Leah snorts with laughter. ‘Ah, yes, that.’

‘I assume you are, right?’

‘Yeah, well, I haven’t exactly asked if I can go out.’

‘So what’ve you been doing?’ I picture Leah scrubbing the floors on her hands and knees, but decide that she’s probably got off relatively lightly. ‘Seriously, Lee, you gave us a massive fright.’

‘I gave me a massive fright.’

‘So you’re not planning on going out on the piss with Lily Carmichael and her gang in the near future?’

‘Uh . . .’ There’s a pause, and I imagine Leah shaking her head violently. ‘No. Not so much. No. I don’t think we’re destined to be best friends.’

I don’t say it, but I’m relieved.

‘So how did you . . .’

‘End up unconscious with cider poisoning?’ Leah finishes my sentence. ‘I dunno. Mum wasn’t in, Lily got a load of it from somewhere, we were drinking in the sitting room when Mum was out with Eve, and . . .’

She sort of tails off. I think again about Lily and the rest of them walking off and leaving Leah at the house, so drunk she couldn’t even walk or think, and I want to kill them for putting her in danger.

‘They’re not your friends.’ I think of Anna and her kind face and I feel a wave of sadness that I’ve messed things up too.

‘Er, no,’ says Leah. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve had Anna and all that lot doing the surrogate big sister bit on them.’

‘Anna?’

‘Yeah, she sorted it with – oh, hang on – Meg’s here. Got to go. We’re having a Harry Potter marathon with popcorn and pizza. See you.’

And she’s gone before I can even say goodbye, so some things really have gone back to normal.

I wake up on the fourth morning when the sun shines in on my face through a gap in the curtains. It feels late, later than usual.

‘Morning, sleepyhead,’ says Grandma. She’s outside the kitchen door in the garage that joins on the side, folding washing as she pulls it out of the machine. She puts the last pillowcase on the top of the pile and picks up a peg bag from the hook on the wall.

‘Would you like to help me hang these out, as we’ve got a bit of sun?’

Only Grandma would fold up washing before she hangs it out. I pick up the basket for her and carry it out on to the patio. The last of the climbing roses are spilling petals on to the lavender bushes below them. The coloured flagstones remind me of games of hopscotch when Leah and I were little. I hand the washing to Grandma, one item at a time. There are birds singing in the big fuchsia bush where we used to collect the flowers, which looked like little ballerinas. It’s so peaceful here, and I want to stay forever.

There’s the ringing of a bell and clamouring as we turn to go inside. The wind carries the sound of the secondary school across the playing field that backs on to the garden and my knees go liquidy with fear for a moment. I don’t want to go back but I can’t not. And that’s a terrifying feeling.

I pick up the empty washing basket and follow Grandma back into the house.

‘The post gets later every day,’ Grandma says from the hall. I climb in over the step and into the kitchen. My stomach is growling for breakfast and I’m dying for some coffee.

‘One for you,’ says Grandma, putting a huge, fat, pale blue envelope on the table where I’m about to sit down.

‘Me?’

I look at the writing on the front and recognize it instantly. It’s Anna’s mad scribble, and there’s a doodle of a horse on one corner, and a little bunch of flowers on the other. The back is covered in rude Shakespeare quotes, and my heart gives a little skip.

Grandma passes me a silver sword thing.

‘It’s a letter opener, darling,’ she says, when I look at her sideways as if she’s gone bonkers. I slide it into the top corner and it tears through the paper.

A picture slips out on to the table. Anna has cut out a photo of Taylor Swift and one of her girlfriends holding hands from Heat magazine or something, and stuck our heads over the top from the day we were sent to get passport photos and spent the fiver messing around in the booth instead. Her mum went mad at us and marched Anna back to the photographer’s studio in town where she chose the most hideous picture for her passport as revenge.

‘You girls,’ says Grandma, laughing. ‘I’ll just pop upstairs.’

She leaves me at the table then and disappears out of the room, leaving me sitting on the edge of the armchair looking at the envelope. My heart is racing now. If Anna’s sent this, she can’t –

I pull out the gigantic card that’s inside. There’s a picture of a guinea pig wearing a pair of goggles on the front.

Anna begins, in her mad, spidery, totally untidy handwriting.

I pull a face at this. But my heart is galloping with excitement and I feel the most Grace-ish I’ve felt in what feels like forever.

I put the card down for a moment and plop from the arm of the chair down on to the cushions.

The trouble with people is they don’t tell you how they feel in words of one syllable or less, so you always imagine the worst. The trouble with being me is I don’t know how to ask because my words get stuck.

For the last few days, I’ve been living in a world where I don’t have an Anna any more, and I’m just on my own. And now I’m in a world where there’s definitely an Anna, and she’s definitely not angry with me, and because she’s so nice and easy-going and all the things I like her for, she doesn’t even seem to be angry. I don’t understand.

I pick up the card again and realize there’s a long PS scribbled on the back.

I feel a wash of horror turning my skin icy cold, then hot, in a split second.

I look away from the card for a moment, letting the words sink in.

I don’t know what to do with any of myself. Inside of me I’m skipping about and doing a celebration dance and I’m crying because I’m so relieved that not everything is awful and I still have a best friend after all and maybe, just maybe, I have a boy who might like me, a little bit, who I like, a little bit. Or even a bit more than that. And another part of me is angry because life is so complicated and nobody tells you anything and there’s so much of being human that’s about unspoken stuff and presuming and well I just thought you knew and I never know anything until it’s too late and I’ve swum to France and given up my old life and started a new one. Or tried to persuade Grandma to enrol me in the secondary school across the field, which I actually hinted at yesterday.

I smoothe the card out on the table and read it all over again. Then I go upstairs and find the ancient brick phone and switch it on.

Grandma seems delighted that I’ve had a card from Anna. She leaves me watching television and disappears off to the shops to buy the ingredients to make her famous pineapple cheesecake for pudding, which is Dad’s favourite, and then later when the kitchen windows are steamed up with baking and dinner and the house smells so delicious I think my stomach might digest itself (but she won’t let me have anything to eat, because she’s old fashioned and says it’ll spoil my dinner, which it absolutely will not), she picks up the car keys again.

‘Forgot pineapple,’ she says, and is gone in a second before I have a chance to say that, no, I saw four tins in the larder cupboard.

I’m sneaking a handful of chocolate chips from the plastic tub on her baking shelf when there’s a bang as the front door shuts and a thud, as if someone’s dropped something heavy on the carpet.

‘You OK?’ I shout as I open the door to the hall.

‘Fine, thank you,’ says my dad, with the biggest, beardiest, scruffiest grin you could possibly imagine.

‘Dad!’ I squeal, and jump up and down on the spot like I’m five.

He catches me mid jump and squishes me into the tightest squeeze. He smells of outside and cold things and Dad-ness and home and being safe.

‘Why are you here?’

‘Because I just got off a flight in Gatwick, and got on the train down here to see my favourite big girl instead of heading up to the studios to pick up my car,’ he says, still smiling.

‘Come out of the hall, you two,’ Grandma says, shooing us through into the little sitting room.

And we eat dinner until we can’t move and Dad tells Grandma that after months of eating whatever he could get his hands on this is the best meal he’s ever tasted, and Grandma says that he should probably save that line for when he gets home to his wife, because she needs all the moral support she can get after the time she’s had.

And Dad frowns a bit and looks at me.

‘Have you three been having a bit of a bad time?’

And I look at Grandma because I’m not sure what I’m supposed to say to that, and she sort of gives me a little nod, and I say –

‘I don’t like it when you go away.’

And he nods then.

And Grandma says –

‘I think the balance is a bit off, Graham . . .’

And Dad nods again and shifts in his chair and I think he’s feeling a bit uncomfortable and that he preferred it when we were all eating cheesecake and smiling and talking about the polar bears he’d seen.

‘Anyway,’ says Grandma, ‘that’s for another day. Let’s get the jet lag over with first, hmm?’