No Going Back Read online

  “I’m doing what I can,” Mum replied softly.

  “Well I’m sorry, Liz, but it’s not enough.”

  My hand hovered in mid-air. I was holding the ten of diamonds. Those diamonds seemed to blur into a mass of red in front of my eyes. The kitchen was suddenly uncharacteristically still. It felt as if the whole house was waiting for something. Outside there was the sound of a football being kicked. Thud, thud, thud like a slowed-down heartbeat. Uncle Pete’s eyes were bulging, his body squared up as if ready for a fight.

  “If you won’t do more, we’ll have to get someone in – or Margaret will have to go into a home and you have no idea how much that will cost.”

  “Oh yes I do,” Mum flashed back. “But that’s not what I want and I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  “I’m just looking for practical solutions to the problem,” Uncle Pete replied.

  Mum’s chin was lifted, her jaw set. “She’s my mother. She’s not a problem and that is not the answer.”

  “Well, what is?” Heads swivelled to where Aunt Jane stood in the doorway, wearing a fluffy pink dressing gown, dark circles under her eyes. She walked to the table and sank onto a chair, Uncle Pete immediately resting his hands on her shoulders.

  “It’s all right for you swanning up here at the weekend,” she said to Mum. “Mother’s so pleased to see you that she makes a special effort. You don’t get all of the moaning, the depression. You don’t bear the brunt of it. And after a couple of days you just go back to your normal life without a care in the world.”

  For a few seconds I was shell-shocked. Where had all this come from? I knew that the tension had been building since Gran’s accident but I wasn’t prepared for this. Obviously neither was Mum.

  “You know that’s not true,” she said quietly.

  For about the millionth time in my life I wished that Dad was here. He wouldn’t have let them talk to Mum like that. But he wasn’t, so, without looking at Liberty, I placed my cards down on the green linen cushion and went to stand next to Mum. She leaned against me slightly.

  “I may not have a job at the moment but I’ve got Laura to think of,” she said. “I can’t just pull her out of school in the middle of term.”

  “That’s right,” Aunt Jane retorted, “use Laura as a way of avoiding your responsibilities. Let’s face it, that’s why you’ve stayed in London all these years, so you don’t have to deal with any of the difficult stuff.”

  I felt Mum flinch. “That’s not fair.” The words spurted out of me with the suddenness of one of those Icelandic geysers we’d studied in geography. Everyone stared at me in surprise, everyone except Liberty. She had studiously begun to play clock patience on the coffee table in front of her.

  “Stay out of this, Laura,” Uncle Pete warned. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

  “It’s got everything to do with me,” I shouted. “We’ve been coming up here every weekend for weeks to help out and do you appreciate it? No!” I glared at my aunt and uncle. “It’s not all about you, you know.”

  Uncle Pete was purple in the face now and Aunt Jane had twisted to grab hold of his arm.

  “That’s enough, Laura,” Mum murmured. She moved to the table and sat down, opposite Aunt Jane.

  “You are right about one thing,” she said, sounding calmer than she looked. “We can’t go on like this, so I think the best thing is if we move up here at the beginning of the summer holidays. Can you manage until then?”

  Even then I didn’t realise what she was saying. No one did.

  “I suppose we’ll have to,” Aunt Jane replied ungraciously.

  “And what if six weeks isn’t enough?” Uncle Pete added. “What if your mother still isn’t back on her feet? What if she never gets back to how she was before?”

  Mum traced her finger over a knot in the pine table. She looked up, but at them, not at me.

  She should have looked at me, given me some warning. We were a team, that’s what she used to say and I believed her. I trusted her completely. If you’re part of a team you consult each other, don’t you? You don’t have any secrets, or that’s what I thought. I was in complete ignorance as I stood behind her chair. There wasn’t a voice in my head that said, Brace yourself, Laura. Things are about to change. Big time. That’s what made everything so much worse: the fact that I wasn’t prepared.

  “I wasn’t talking about just moving up here for the holidays,” Mum said. “I meant for good.”

  My mouth dropped open. I could hardly believe it. But instantly I knew it was true. Once Mum made up her mind about something that was it. The wheels had been set in motion. There was no going back.

  FLOWERS

  We didn’t speak all the way back to London. As we pulled up outside our house, the light from the hall shone through the stained glass window at the top of the front door. Mum always had the lamp on an automatic timer and I loved the welcoming glow it gave when we arrived home after dark. The glass picture was of a beautiful blue boat balanced on little curly waves and, at that moment, I just wanted to sail away to a desert island, away from everyone and everything.

  “Laura, come on! It’s late and you’ve got school tomorrow.”

  Mum opened the passenger door and held my overnight bag out to me. I grabbed it, slammed the car door shut and followed her up the garden path, keeping my head down. As soon as the front door was open I pushed past her, pulled off my trainers and left them where they landed in an easy-to-trip-over place.

  “I’ll get something to eat,” Mum said, dropping her keys with a familiar clink into the little turquoise bowl on the radiator shelf.

  “Yeah right,” I replied, climbing the stairs. “Food, that’ll solve everything, won’t it?”

  I heard her suck in her breath, sensed her using a heroic amount of willpower to prevent the snap back.

  “Just some toast and a hot drink?” she called after me. Persuasively. Verging on pleading.

  “Don’t bother,” I shouted, slamming my bedroom door even harder than the car door, so hard that my best photo of Dad collapsed face down on the bedside table. I flung myself face down on the bed in sympathy, pulling the pillow over my head. Two minutes later I heard a muffled tap, tap, tap.

  “Laura, can I come in?”

  Too late to say no. She was already there, tilting the mattress as she perched on the edge of my bed, her hand resting lightly on my shoulder.

  “I’m sorry, Laura. I didn’t mean for it to come out like that.”

  I didn’t reply. She waited. Grown-ups are good at that. Waiting. It was getting hot under that pillow and I couldn’t breathe properly. I had to emerge eventually, didn’t I?

  “So how did you mean for it to come out then, Mum?” I mumbled, turning onto my side, half lifting the pillow, feeling the dampness where sweat had stuck my hair to the nape of my neck. “When were you going to tell me about all of these plans you’ve been making behind my back?”

  “It’s not like that, Laura. I’m just trying to do what’s best for everyone.”

  I turned around properly then, propped myself up on my elbows, felt the anger, boiling hot, inside of me.

  “Not for me you’re not. Were you even going to ask what I wanted?”

  She shifted, bent down, picked a piece of fluff up from the carpet.

  “It’s not a decision that I’ve made on a whim. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, even before I lost my job, even before Gran broke her hip. I’ll be forty in a couple of years, Laura, and you’re growing up fast. You’ll have your own life, away from here. If we’re going to make a change, now is as good a time as any.”

  “And what about school, my friends, the house? What about Dad? We’re the only family he had. Who will look after the grave if we’re not here?”

  “You can move school and Derbyshire’s not that far. You can come back and see your friends. We’ll come back and keep an eye on the grave too.”

  “Every week or two?”

  “No, but—”
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  “He wouldn’t have wanted you to do this to me. He wouldn’t have wanted you to take me away from where I grew up, from everything I know. This is my home, Mum. It’s our home.”

  My throat felt all tight and my voice was horribly high-pitched.

  “Oh, Laura.” Mum stood up, sadness sweeping across her face. “You have no idea what your father would have wanted. You think you do, but…” She shrugged, stood up and moved towards the door. “I’m not going to change my mind about this. The move will be good for us, you wait and see.” I flung myself over to face the wall and clamped my hands over my ears. I didn’t want to hear any more. I just wanted to pretend it wasn’t happening.

  We weren’t selling the house, just renting it out. That was something, I suppose. Some small bit of hope to grasp hold of. It meant that one day we might be able to come back. In the meantime someone else would be sleeping in my bed, sitting at our kitchen table, sunning themselves on our little bit of decking. I hated that and I hated them, whoever they were, and I hated Mum. At least I pretended I did. Those last few weeks in London were horrible. I wanted to enjoy myself, to make the most of everything, but whatever I did felt spoiled. Part of me wanted to be in the house all the time (but not when Mum was there), but the other part of me couldn’t bear to mooch around listening to the imaginary clock in my head ticking down to the day we’d close the gate for the last time. So I went out – a lot. If my friends weren’t around I visited Dad’s grave. Sometimes, on the warm and sunny days, I sat on the grass under a cherry tree, listening to the baby blue tits cheeping for food.

  A few months after Dad died I’d helped Mum to fix a nesting box to the tree trunk. She’d borrowed a ladder from the caretaker and I had stood at the bottom holding the little bag of nails. The blue tits arrived the following spring and they’ve returned every year since then. If I sat very still on the grass, the parents would fly right over my head with beaks full of fat worms. If it was cold or had been raining, I settled on one of the oak benches and read a book or did a bit of homework.

  Once a week I took some flowers, usually lemon-coloured chrysanthemums or, in the spring, daffodils. Yellow was Dad’s favourite colour. Every so often, someone else would place flowers on the grave too. They weren’t shop-bought like ours, but small, soft posies of garden flowers such as forget-me-nots, pretty pink dahlias or Michaelmas daisies. The blooms were tied together with raffia or a scrap of ribbon and squashed into a jam jar. They appeared every month or two and Mum said they were probably from Dad’s cousin Penny. I used to move those flowers slightly to one side, so that mine could take centre stage. When they withered I would chuck the posies away, tucking the jam jar behind the headstone, out of sight. I didn’t think that Penny would mind. I knew that she must be a nice person to take the trouble to come and put flowers on Dad’s grave, especially after all that time. Mum said that she lived on the other side of London and, although it wasn’t that far away, I’d never met her. I’d have liked to because, like me, Dad was an only child and his parents died before I was born, but Mum never seemed to be able to get hold of Penny.

  I did hope that one day I’d just bump into her. Those last few weeks in London I really wanted her to turn up, to ask her if she’d keep an eye on the grave for me, make sure it didn’t get vandalised or begin to look unloved. One day, as I was sitting on the bench, slightly out of sight of the main gate, I looked up to see a woman walking in my direction. She had swingy brown hair and wore a bright green mac. She held a small bunch of flowers and my heart did a sort of somersault. This was it, I thought. This must be her.

  The woman almost stopped walking when she saw me. I smiled. She hesitated, but not as if she was making that split second decision about whether or not to return my smile. Instead I got the impression that she wanted to turn around and hurry back the way she had come. But she picked up her pace and carried on walking straight past, her eyes fixed determinedly straight ahead.

  I watched as she picked her way across the grass, the heels of her black patent shoes sinking into the soft turf. She placed the flowers on a really old grave, one with a cracked vase at the base. One that looked as if it hadn’t had any visitors for decades. She didn’t stop to reflect, just turned, weaving her way in and out of the headstones, avoiding the path in her rush to get to the gate. After she’d gone I went over and looked at those flowers. It was a posy, similar to the ones that sometimes appeared on Dad’s grave.

  LEAVING

  That last night at home I couldn’t sleep. I lay awake for hours, sifting through the memories: precious moments with Dad in this house, sitting beside me on the bed, reading a story, his warm impulsive kisses in the middle of my forehead as we snuggled on the sofa together watching 101 Dalmatians; or all those hours spent in the back garden as he tried to teach me how to balance on my bike without stabilisers. I wasn’t sure whether some of them were real memories or things I had made up from stories Mum had told me or mental images from photographs I had seen. But it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Dad had been here with me, in this house, being the perfect father.

  “I don’t want to leave you, Dad,” I whispered into the darkness. “I wish I could take you with me. They do it in films. They have an urn on the mantelpiece containing the ashes of their loved one. Mum could have done that, put you in an urn instead of burying you in the ground – then we could have taken you with us, wherever we went.”

  I listened hard in case he was trying to answer me. There was nothing. So I held Teddy tightly, pulled my duvet up over my head and tried to block out the future. All I wanted to do was to keep everything I knew and loved close to me, to feel safe. Was that too much to ask?

  By the morning I was snappy and clumsy. We’d taken some stuff up to Derbyshire already but there was still quite a lot of stuff to pack up. Twice I nearly dropped a box of precious things on the way to the car. Mum exploded as I caught my flip-flop on the edge of the step and the cardboard box crashed against the door frame. Everything inside made a worrying tinkling noise.

  “If you can’t be more careful, Laura, then you’d be better off doing something else.”

  “It’s all fine,” I said, in a voice that sounded more reassured than I felt.

  “At least put some proper shoes on,” she called after me.

  “I’ve packed them all,” I called back.

  We had the only postman in the world who bothered to close the gate behind him, so I had to balance the box on the brick pillar while I negotiated with the catch. I don’t know how it happened but the box toppled over, scraped its way down my shin and landed on my foot with a horrible crash. I didn’t have to look inside to know that something, if not everything, must be broken. Mum tore out of the front door.

  “For goodness’ sake,” she yelled. “I told you to be careful.”

  “I’m sorry.” My foot was throbbing and a huge sob gathered momentum in my chest. “It’s the gate, I couldn’t…”

  “Stop! I don’t want to hear any excuses.”

  She looked so hard all of a sudden. Where had my lovely, kind mum gone over these last few months? The box was still resting on my foot, rooting me to the spot.

  “The trouble is,” I shouted back, “you just don’t want to hear anything at the moment, do you?”

  I yanked my foot out, intending to make a dramatic exit – except my flip-flop was still stuck. “I’m going for a walk,” I said. “You’ll be better off without me anyway.”

  I yanked open the gate and marched out, sharp pieces of gravel embedding themselves in my sole.

  “Laura! Come back here!”

  I ignored her and carried on walking.

  “Laura!” This time it was loud enough to make the neighbours’ curtains twitch. “Don’t be silly.”

  I limped on. She caught up with me just before I turned the corner.

  “Leave me alone.”

  My foot was beginning to feel really sore.

  “I just thought that you might want this.” S
he thrust the flip-flop in front of my face. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But of course I did and she knew too.

  She brushed a strand of hair back from my face. “I’m sorry I shouted.”

  Tears began to stream down my cheeks. “I’m sorry I dropped the box. Everything will be broken.”

  She pulled me close. “They’re only things, Laura. They’re not important.”

  She clasped me to her. I breathed in her scent: citrus fruit, sunshine, elegance.

  “All I want,” she murmured, “is for you to be happy.”

  She pushed me away slightly but held on to the tops of my arms, tilting her head so she could look right into my eyes. “Off you go – don’t be too long.”

  “Don’t you want to come?”

  She stroked my cheek. “Not this time,” she said.

  “This is it,” I said, crouching by the grave, “time to say goodbye. Can’t put it off any longer.”

  I fingered the frilly petals of some lemon carnations I’d put on the grave the day before.

  “I’ll come back loads and loads. I won’t let your grave become all mossy and neglected like some of them. I’m going to get in touch with Penny to make sure she carries on coming and putting those pretty little posies on your grave. If Mum won’t give me her number this time I’ll find it somehow. She must have it written down in her diary or something.”

  The air was so still. Not a leaf moved on the old oak tree. It was the weirdest sensation but it felt as if the whole of the world had stopped for a second. Even my breath seemed to have got stuck in my lungs.

  “I really, really don’t want to go and live with Gran,” I gasped. “If you were around we wouldn’t be doing this – not that I want to make you feel guilty or anything like that. It’s not your fault you’re dead, is it?”

  Again I couldn’t stop the tears. This time I didn’t want to. My fingers splayed against the cool slate headstone, instinctively tracing along the grooves that made up his name:

  GARETH JAMES COOPER