The Best in Blountmere Street (The Blountmere Street Series Book 2) (25 page)

‘I’m not sure.’  I’m completely sure.  It’s all arranged.  I’ll tell Damielle after I’ve told Dad.

‘And the boy upstairs you were always talking about when you first came.  Is he still missing?’

‘I suppose you could say that.  He was probably fostered or adopted by a family somewhere, but he’s never contacted Mrs Addington or Angela.’  I place Christopher’s train that had collided with a table leg in an upright position and load the bricks back into the truck.

‘You must truly miss him.’

‘Yes, I do.’ 

Through my letters I’ll take him with me.  He’d love to be going where I’m going and meet who I’m going to meet.  I might be going a long way away, but I won’t leave him behind.  He’ll come with me.  I’d be lonely without him.

That evening while we’re sitting in our armchairs and after Dad has finished reading the paper, I judge it the right time to tell him what I’m about to do.  It reminds me of the time when Dad had told Mum and me about his plan to become a window cleaner.  I remember Mum’s measured enthusiasm, and I scrutinise Dad’s face and try to gauge his expression. 

‘So what d’you think?’  I ask after I’ve told him.

Dad folds his paper and places it on the floor next to his chair.  ‘You’ll have to answer that one for yourself.  I’ve never interfered with your life and I’m not about to now.’

What he says isn’t true.  He had interfered about Riversham College and with catastrophic results.  If that isn’t interfering, I don’t know what is, yet I no longer feel any resentment towards him.  I’ve forgiven him drop by drop to the last dreg.

‘You’ve got guts, that I
will
say.’

“Guts”.  Wasn’t it guts I’d always coveted and thought were most lacking in my make-up?  I still don’t think I’ve got them, but at least Dad considers I possess them.  That in itself makes me feel braver.

‘So you’ll arrive on New Year’s Eve, not a bad way to start the year,’ Dad says as if we’re merely talking about me shifting to a nearby village, although I can see the effort he’s making to keep his voice even.

‘I’ll come back,’ I say.  ‘I’m not going for good.  And I’ll write to you and tell you all about it.  You have to promise to reply with all the news from here.’

Dad makes a choking sound.  ‘Newton Abbott’s not the bleedin’ Mecca of the Western World, but I’ll do what I can.  Don’t worry, girl, we’ll keep in touch.’

I’d intended spending my remaining time in Devon cleaning Dad’s cottage.  As it is, Dad cleans it himself with obsessive fervour.  Every surface glistens my reflection, spiders scurry in fear before they can contemplate weaving a web, and linen is stacked in pure white piles like pillars in a temple.  I remember the man who sat in his armchair in Blountmere Street served, cosseted, fetched and carried for, and the woman for whom servitude was all she thought she deserved. 

I spend the Autumn days walking with Damielle and Christopher or, when it’s warm enough, I laze on the beach, in a field or under a hedgerow, where I let my thoughts cavort and pirouette around my head. They are too agile to catch. 
I wish you were with me Mum and Tony to help me capture them,
I whisper inside my head, and my heart whispers back,

One day.  One day.

Epilogue

The New Zealand landscape is yellowed like a continuous and flattened haystack.  There are no houses or people, just the road which shimmers in front of us and disappears into the horizon.  The sun plays on Fred, Lori and me through the windows of the bus and the heat seeps through the roof like someone directing a blow torch on to us.  It causes the children to squabble, and Ron, Fred’s son, to tell them for the umpteenth time they will soon be home.  Elaine, his wife, shuts her eyes in an effort to block out their arguing. 

As a concession to the airless atmosphere, Fred loosens his tie and undoes the top button of his shirt, while Lori unwinds her scarf, although she can’t bring herself to take it from her neck completely.  It hangs in two yellow chiffon strands like two streaks of sunshine.  She continues to cling to my hand with her frail veined one, as it rests in my lap.  She’s held it practically all the time since I disembarked from the ship.  The moisture between our palms causes them to slide and leave damp patches on my pleated skirt.  My skirt is too thick and the rough material rubs my legs, but I’d wanted to wear it to meet Fred and Lori as a reminder to them of my younger days in Blountmere Street.

Lori’s hair is sparse but still a frizzy halo and her face is creased and sags with years of longing to be in a dingy London street, and with struggling to make the unfamiliar, familiar.  She says she wants to hear every single detail about Blountmere Street and everyone in it since they’ve been gone.  For now, however, she’s content to gaze out the window, and I wonder if she’s letting the children’s altercations remind her of Tony and Angela years before.

From time to time, Fred, still as naval, but stooped more than I remember him, smiles at the two of us, and Ron calls back to him something or the other in his strange accent.  He calls him “Dad”.  It’s something Tony had longed to call him.  Suddenly I feel our reunion is incomplete.

Outside, the road is edged on either side by arid fields that Ron calls paddocks, and that are dotted with sheep and intersected here and there by rows of tall trees Fred informs me are macrocarpas.  In the distance, mountains shimmer like the silver paper cut-outs Mum had made into crowns.

We turn off the main road, and the children begin to cheer as a large building comes into sight, appearing from the middle of a quilt of paddocks. 

‘We usually drive straight up to our place, but I need to talk to my business partner, Roger,’ Ron says, continuing, ‘Looks as if his mother’s arrived too.  Her husband will have been too busy at this time of year to bring her.  I suppose she got the young English bloke who worked on their farm for a few years to drive her down.  He was one of those migrant orphans, as far as I can remember.’  

That’s when I see him.

It’s a mirage. 

Too much sun. 

I jump from the bus.

He stumbles and almost falls.

He’s getting closer.

My legs quiver as if they are not going to hold me.

The light is playing games with my eyes. 

But now he’s shouting our names. 

The journey must have affected my hearing. 

He’s near us now; waving his arms above him, and still he calls our names.

It isn’t until he falls sobbing into Fred’s arms that I truly know it’s Tony.