The lounge is just under my bedroom, so I can hear everything that goes on in there. Including Mum’s snoring and, until we put the TV in the garage, her re-runs of Strictly.
I close my eyes and imagine Dad getting into his stripy PJs and slipping into his bed pressed up against Mum’s double bed. I even imagine him curling up to Mum, putting his arm across her – even if he can’t quite reach all the way round.
The backs of my eyes go hot and prickly: he does still love her, I know he does.
A few moments later, I hear banging.
‘What was that?’
We stand up and go to the landing.
More banging comes from the lounge.
I shake my head. ‘I’m an idiot. Dad hasn’t gone to join Mum, he’s gone downstairs to get his bed.’
‘You can’t be sure…’ Jake says.
‘I’m sure.’
The banging goes on for a while and then, when Jake and I go back to my bedroom and squeeze onto my bed and stare up at the ceiling, we hear Dad stomping up and down the stairs as he carries the bed back upstairs, a plank at a time.
And you know the worst of it? He and Mum don’t say a word to each other. Our cottage is so small you can hear everything. And I know it’s not because Mum’s asleep because she doesn’t sleep at night: she has naps in the day in front of the telly. Or she did when she had the telly. And anyway, she’d have been woken up by all his banging.
No, they don’t exchange a single word.
‘Your parents are made for each other,’ Jake says. ‘They’ll work it out.’
I shake my head. ‘Dad’s not going to help me. After everything that’s happened in the last few days, he’s not even going to make an effort to get closer to Mum.’
I don’t know how I’m going to help Mum get better on my own. Even Steph, who usually always makes things better, can’t help because Mum’s blanking her. And Mum won’t help herself because she doesn’t get it, how sick she is.
‘I’m here, Feather,’ Jake says.
I turn to face him. His eyes look glassy in the blue shadows of my bedroom.
‘I’m not going to sit back and risk losing Mum,’ I say.
‘I know. We’re going to work on this together. We’ll do whatever it takes.’
‘You really mean that?’
He nods. ‘I really mean that. It’s going to be okay, Feather. It’s all going to be okay.’
I lean my head on his shoulder and close my eyes and my heartbeat slows and I try really hard to believe him.
On Saturday morning my alarm goes off at 5.30am. It’s dark outside and the cars along The Green look like white ice-lollies. There’s ice on the inside of my window too. I asked Dad, once, why we couldn’t have the windows replaced, and he said the same old thing that he says to any of my suggestions about fixing things or replacing things or buying new things to make the cottage nicer: We’re a mend-and-make-do kind of family, Feather. Well, sometimes, mending and making do doesn’t cut it. I’m freezing.
I get into my tracksuit and grab my swim bag. If we don’t go early, the pool gets too full to practise properly.
There’s no sound coming from the lounge, which feels weird. I’m used to hearing the buzz of Mum’s cookery programmes or the music from her re-runs of Strictly.
I think about popping my head round the door to say Hi, like I usually do before my swim practice, but I’ve had this hollow feeling in my stomach since the salad incident last night. Mum should be the one to say sorry, otherwise she’ll think I’m not serious about getting her to lose weight.
I walk past Dad’s open door and my heart sinks. I really thought he might give it a go, sleeping downstairs with Mum.
Dad and I take it in turns to do mornings. When he’s got an early plumbing job, he helps Mum get ready and when he needs a lie-in because he’s been out on a late job, I do it.
Everyone in Willingdon knows Dad’s white van with GEORGE AND JO’S EMERGENCY PLUMBING written in red letters along the side. Dad told me that before Mum stopped leaving the house, she was his PA. She did all the accounting and the paperwork and the advertising and telephone calls. She was good at keeping people happy and had all these creative ideas for how to get new customers. Mum’s got a clever reading and writing brain. She trained to be a lawyer but then decided she wanted to be a full-time mum and ended up helping Dad with the business instead. Dad and I have the non-writing and reading brains. We’re better at fixing things than reading things.
Without your mum, I’d have gone out of business years ago, Dad says. She’s the magic-maker. He used to say that all the time, that she was the magic-maker. And she was. Steph told me that, as well as helping Dad and looking after me, she did bits and bobs around the village, like first aid training. She ran weekly workshops in Newton Primary.
When I was little, Dad joked that Mum had magical powers. He told me about how she was always in the right place at the right time when someone needed her, like when one of the fryers exploded in Mr Ding’s restaurant and burnt his arms and when Steph got stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock and when some random guy visiting the village had a heart attack right in the middle of The Green. Mum was better than a magic-maker: she brought people back to life. I wish I’d been a bit older when Mum still walked around the village, so I could have seen her doing all those cool things.
She stopped doing Dad’s paperwork about five years ago, said it made her tired. I sometimes wonder how Dad’s been coping all this time without her. I went into his room once and there was paperwork lying everywhere; most of the envelopes looked like bills and some of them had words like URGENT and LAST REMINDER stamped across the top. But I knew Dad would take care of it. He might not be the best at admin, but he works harder than anyone I know. This last year he’s been doing call-outs every hour of the night and day. So the business must be doing okay.
‘Hi, Houdini,’ I say as I walk down the front steps. He steps out of his kennel and gives me a bleat. Dad’s put a yellow woolly coat on him because of the cold weather, which makes him look like a fuzzy egg yolk. Houdini nudges my swim bag.
When I give his beard a stroke, Houdini looks up and holds my gaze for a moment. I reckon that animals have life more sussed than we do: I bet he’d think of a good plan to get Mum healthy.
As I look across The Green to the rectory, I notice a suitcase sitting on Rev Cootes’s front doorstep. Rev Cootes is really old and wrinkly and lives alone and never has any visitors; and he doesn’t have family either, or any family that drop by anyway. And no one really goes to his services, except Steph, who started going after the divorce. So, basically, Rev Cootes is weird. And not cool-weird: he’s scary-weird. I wouldn’t ever go to see Rev Cootes alone. He’s probably got those children from the kids’ bit of the cemetery chopped up and pickled in jars in his basement.
I check to make sure he’s not crouching behind one of the gravestones and then walk across The Green to the vicarage until I’m close enough to get a good look at the suitcase. It’s got an American Airlines tag on it and an I LOVE NYC sticker on the side. Rev Cootes knowing someone from New York is about as likely as Mum coming out to do pirouettes in the middle of The Green.
The front door flies open. Rev Cootes stands in the doorway, holding his watering can, glaring at me. It’s the same glare he uses whenever we have to come over and get Houdini from his front garden. No matter what system