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Alex heard her father’s voice falter. ‘Dillon Edward Foster. You cough it up, son … or your mother is going to be awful upset.’
I only left him for a minute … But Alex wasn’t as sure now. She’d been distracted.
‘Dillon Foster, BREATHE!’
Alex watched in silence as her dad tried to breathe life into his child, his huge hands grappling at Dill’s expressionless face for better purchase. Alex felt the agitation lurch inside her chest. Her father wasn’t being gentle any more, he shouldn’t be so rough with him! Didn’t he realise? He was going to hurt him.
Something warm spilled down both of Alex’s cheeks.
‘BREATHE, GOD DAMN IT, BREATHE!’ Ted shook Dill as if trying to rouse him from a stubborn sleep. He sank his mouth over his son’s again and, at last! Alex thought she saw Dill shift beneath their father’s solid frame. She held her breath … Yes! She could definitely hear it, a new sound! A breathy, jarring sound! Struggling to make its way clear of where it originated.
Something gave in the pit of her stomach. Oh, Dill! Thank—
Ted turned his head from the little boy’s face, strain etched in his eyes. Alex watched her father’s chest convulsing in short, sudden jerks beneath his shirt. She’d never seen her father cry, not for anything. Alex looked to those two legs again, the shoed and the shoeless. Nothing. Dill’s body was limp again with the loss of their father’s movements to animate him.
Finn began pushing his hands up through the sides of his wet hair. He turned away to face the alder tree hanging mournfully over the passing waters, a cork archery target hanging forgotten from its trunk. Alex watched as Finn slowly crouched down to the earth again, his broad teenage shoulders closing in on him like a pair of redundant wings.
No … No! This was wrong! They’d only left him for a minute.
A broken gravelled voice cut through Alex’s fragmented thoughts.
‘Where were you?’
It didn’t sound like her dad. It didn’t look like him either. Ted’s features were contorted in a way that made his face almost foreign; laughter lines suddenly gnarled and hostile. Alex opened her mouth to speak, but there was nothing.
‘Where the hell were you?’ her father demanded, taking in the state of Alex’s nettle-stung arms and legs. Alex watched him look accusingly at Finn’s lower body, Finn’s matching affliction where the stingers had got him too. Finn’s shirt was inside out. Ted was piecing it together, Alex could see the furious disbelief growing in her father’s eyes and waited uselessly for him to turn that look on her. When he did, it came like a hot iron through her chest, his voice broken and deformed.
‘YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE WATCHING MY SON!’
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_de78a12f-3f90-582e-83c6-6079e4acd0e7)
Not everything can be damned-well helped! Sometimes, all you can hope for is time and if you’re goddamned lucky … distance.
Alex was buttering her way through another loaf of bread with enough vigour that the bulbous handle of the butter knife had indented her fingers. She stopped herself before tearing through another slice of extra value wholemeal and shook the words from her head. There had been other words too, following her down the years like a long shadow. But these were the only words she could do anything with – all she had to offer her family as pitiful recompense for the damage that could never be undone. Time and distance.
Alex pushed her father from her thoughts and reacquainted herself with the view through the kitchen hatch. The twins were still eating their lunch, too busy devouring their own meals to notice their dad, stealthily enveloping his jacket potato inside one of the flimsy serviettes. Alex bulk bought them from the wholesaler’s every other Wednesday along with the rest of the food bank’s sundries. The 2-ply napkins weren’t really built for doggy-bagging, enshrouding food like a precious treasure to be hidden in the earth for safekeeping, but the father quietly sitting across the dining room wasn’t deterred, already slipping the wrapped jacket potato into the rucksack at his feet. Alex felt something inside her ache for him the way it had ached for Bob Cratchit when her dad had taken her and Jem to see A Christmas Carol at the Tower House Theatre. It had been a treat for being such good big sisters to their new baby brother, but Alex hadn’t been able to eat her ice-cream at the interval, she’d been so worried for poor Mr Cratchit. Alex remembered how her dad had gently patted her back through every scene, his broad hand ready with fatherly reassurance. Back when he could still look at her.
‘Three more soups please, Alex my love,’ Dan smiled, blustering into the community centre’s kitchen so quickly that his flop of black hair looked windswept. He began promptly dispensing a flurry of fresh cups of tea from the urn while Alex’s attention returned to the family out in the dining room. There was something voyeuristic about watching a grown adult hiding food for his children. Something akin to slowing down for a better look at a car accident. But then this was what it was all about, wasn’t it? This life she’d chosen. To play her small part, do good – as if a person could even up the tally of all the right and wrong they’d been party to somehow. One of the twin boys glanced up and caught Alex staring. She looked away too suddenly and immediately felt as if she’d short-changed the kid a smile. Alex hated starers. She remembered the staring as they’d all been sat in St Cuthbert’s chapel saying their goodbyes to Dill in front of all of those people. All those eyes. Tragedy and rubber-necking were old friends, her father had said with the arrival of weeping relatives to the church. Wailing like banshees, despite having never sent Dill so much as a birthday card when he was alive. Alex tried to recall their faces now, those obscure weeping relatives who’d come to support the four of them with their lingering embraces and heavy knowing looks, but her memory had clung to very little of that day beyond the desolation in her mother’s features and the stiffness in her father’s back.
‘Bugger me, Alex! How many sarnies are you making? What are you going for … edible Jenga?’
Another slice of bread gave under the rigours of clumsy buttering. Alex took stock of the bread mountain and grimaced. ‘Sorry. I was just …’
‘Away with the fairies?’ Dan’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you OK today? You look tired. A bit spun-out.’
Alex had told Dan, once. The very brief version. Peppered with a few hazy justifications for not visiting her hometown much any more. Busy lives. Long car journeys. A troublesome allergy to her mum’s beloved dogs. ‘No, I’m good, thanks. I didn’t sleep much last night. Bloody car alarm outside the flats,’ she groaned.
‘Yeah, I really hate that.’ Dan looked justly sceptical, but of course he wouldn’t realise what today meant. Few people would, not even the banshees. Would they be thinking of Dill today? Would they remember to imagine him turning nineteen, handsome and strong, towering over his mother and sisters? It was official. As of today, there had been more birthdays spent lighting a candle for Dill than watching him blow one out. Nine years with; ten years without. His short life seemed to get shorter each year.
‘Sure you didn’t just have a hedonistic weekend, Foster? Been out larging it with Mr Right, maybe? About time he turned up.’
Alex smiled. Her weekend had consisted largely of a thousand variations of Dill’s imagined adult life. Drinking in The Cavern with their dad. Globetrotting with a girlfriend. Teaching his kids to ride their bikes. The fantasies were endless, but they always ended the same way – a warm summer’s evening back in Eilidh Falls, a family gathered again, laughter, children with Dill’s quirky dimple or other features of his, running around the same gardens they’d all played in as children.
‘You wouldn’t tell me anyway, would you?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Mr Right? If he’d turned up and rocked your world?’
Alex took a deep breath and centred herself. ‘Sorry. I guess a lady never tells.’
‘Blimey, twins.’ Dan exclaimed pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘Can’t be easy. How old are they, seven? Eight maybe?’
The children out in the dining area were finishing the last of their bangers and mash almost simultaneously. They were at that threshold between little boys and young lads; a few adult teeth peeping from lips unapologetically slathered in gravy. The age of mischief, her mum had called it. Dill had taught them all a lot about mischief.
Alex watched those two boys and swallowed against an unexpected snag in her throat. ‘They’re seven. Dad’s first time. He’s just squirrelled.’
‘Ah,’ Dan acknowledged, his head furrowing beneath his flop of hair. ‘Well no wonder I couldn’t tempt him with the soup. He wasn’t gonna slip that into his backpack for later. Spud was it?’
‘I probably should’ve made the situation clearer,’ Alex replied. But she hated it. Walking bemused newcomers through the procedure, hitting them with the spiel on support workers and benefits entitlement before they could sit down and enjoy a meal in peace. The twins’ father had wandered in to the Trust’s lunchtime session more wide-eyed and bewildered than the kids; that familiar mixed heavy look of desperation and gratitude nearly always held together by a debilitating undercurrent of this is not my life! Alex got it. This wasn’t really her life either, at least not the one she’d once envisaged.
Dan sighed, retrieving a replacement jacket potato from one of the ovens ‘Well, he’s going to need all his strength while the kids are still off for the summer hols. Is Mum here too?’
Alex regarded the two young boys, wondering when their last opportunity to get into mischief had been. ‘I think Mum’s left. After Dad was made redundant.’
Dan finished bothering with the potato and shook his head. ‘Blimey. Tough break for the kids. But who are we to judge, right?’
It had been part of the training when Alex had first started here after ditching uni. Listen, yes. Encourage, yes. Second-guess the mechanics of a family’s downfall? Who was ever really qualified to do that?
‘Put the butter straight on it this time, Dan, don’t give him the little tubs.’ It was a small deterrent to squirrellers, but a deterrent nonetheless.
‘You know, it always stuns me when the mum jumps ship,’ Dan’s said quietly. ‘We bang on about equality and all that, but it’s still a shocker when it’s the dad left picking up the pieces. Know what I mean?’
Alex shrugged, but she knew exactly. Mothers pressed on, held everyone else together while their own hearts broke quietly. Hers had. Blythe would be pressing on right now, right this minute, two hundred miles away.
‘You sure you’re OK today?’ Dan was watching Alex readying the soup bowls with the same look he reserved for the elderly visitors to the food bank he worried needed more help than the trust could offer. ‘I thought it might be love but on second thoughts, you seem a bit …’
Alex’s smile was automatic. ‘Manic Mondays, Dan!’ she lied. Dan was a good guy. He’d be quick to offer his sympathies but it always felt like borrowing clothes she liked the look of, knowing they’d never fit right. ‘Now hurry up and get those soups out, they’re going cold!’
‘OK, OK … I’m going, I’m going.’ Dan loaded the last teas onto his tray and jostled back out through the kitchen doors. Alex’s thoughts meandered straight back to Eilidh Falls. She would call them all later, before they sat down to dinner together. Six o’clock, same time every year, no variations, no surprises. Alex dreaded it. She dreaded the thanks her mother would lavish on her for sending flowers and she dreaded hearing the consolatory lilt in Jem’s voice planted there by Alex’s perpetual absence. But most of all, Alex dreaded the complete normality of the conversation she would have with her dad. The shooting of the breeze. She had to wonder what they would have done for conversation all these years had it not been for oil changes and tyre pressure.
‘Oi.’ Dan’s face popped through from the other side of the hatch and startled her. ‘You don’t fool me, Alex. I might be a speccy kitchen hand with a flair for jazzy garnishes,’ Dan waved the tray of food and drinks flamboyantly past the servery hatch for Alex’s appraisal, ‘but I’m tuned in to the ways of women, you know. I know what’s eating you.’ He looked over his shoulder towards the twins playing air hockey with the condiments on the table. ‘You’re really worrying about them, aren’t you?’ Alex’s thoughts shifted from one broken family to another. She sent a small request into the universe that a little time and distance might help them too.
‘They’ll be OK, Alex,’ Dan reassured. ‘Look at them.’ One of the twins began giggling at something his father had just done with the pepper pot. ‘They might be going through the wringer but they’re still a family. A family can get through anything if they just stick together. Am I right?’
Alex could already feel the return of that automatic smile.
CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_a36a4e48-c84f-54c9-a795-598f10ab8318)
‘Crappy neon, Alex. Neon! It’s a florist’s not a bloody tattoo parlour! You should see it all lit up at night. One big, craptastic eyesore.’
‘Jem, please stop saying craptastic, darling. You sound like a teenage boy.’ Alex heard their mother sigh in the background and allowed herself a little one of her own so the other two Foster women couldn’t hear it. The call was on loudspeaker. It was Blythe’s way of pulling Alex as best she could back into the heart of the family home while she prepared the meal Alex never came back to eat.
Jem exhaled irritably again. ‘Carrie always did have a flair for cheapening her environment.’
‘Jaime Foster, you catty girl.’ Alex heard their mother tease.
‘Better a cat than a total bitch, Mum.’
‘Oh, Jem.’ Their mum didn’t like bad language of any sort. Never had, although Blythe would turn a deaf ear if Ted or the girls used an obscenity so long as there was a legitimate reason. Like stubbing a toe, or winning the lottery. Not that anyone had ever won the lottery.
‘Alex knows what I mean, mum,’ Jem called back to Blythe. ‘You know what I mean, right Al?’
Alex was decompressing, gradually leaving the carnage of Dill’s birthday the way those crazy scuba divers she sometimes watched on Discovery would gradually leave a doomed shipwreck in the murky depths, steadily and cautiously in case they got ‘the bends’. Returning to the surface of Foster family life felt a lot like that sometimes. Something to take steady before the change in pressure did something catastrophic to Alex’s system. Thankfully, although Jem’s evergreen hang-ups with Carrie Logan – arch-frenemy since their days at Eilidh High – had never made much sense to Alex, they were good enough to change the subject from Blythe and Jem’s visit down to the churchyard earlier. (It had been one of those trivial fallings out between teenage girls, Jem had claimed, the kind that burn on ferociously like the light from a dead star, years after the main event.)
Alex could feel the tension leaving her shoulders as Jem vented about Carrie. It felt good. Normal. This must be what it felt like for those mental free-divers, Alex always thought, when they found oxygen again after plumbing the depths on just one devoted lungful of air.
Alex had taken a reassuring breath of her own just before dialling her parents’ number. It hadn’t been half as uncomfortable as she always prepared herself for. It never was. She shouldn’t be so hypersensitive; she had no right. They all deserved so much more from her and what did she do? Drag her heels all day as if phoning her family was the worst thing in the world. You will remember this next year, Alex. You will remember that you make it worse, not them. But guilt was a lot like love, doing funny things to the mind.
Jem had railroaded the conversation beautifully as ever. Jem was an excellent railroader, a seasoned expert at smoothing the awkward away with a nice thick layer of normality, as if they were all just enjoying a regular everyday catch-up with each other. Blythe too, as unwaveringly warm as she was thoughtful, had gushed about the flowers Alex had sent home, lest Alex’s woefully inadequate annual gesture ever go un-championed. ‘Oh, Alex … sunflowers and thistles!’ Blithe had delighted, ‘Such a simple posy but, just so beautiful, darling. Really, the perfect choice. Ted? Come tell Alex how beautiful those sunflowers are,’ her mum had encouraged. ‘Your dad commented on them, darling, and you know how oblivious Foster men are. Did you know, your father wanted sunflowers at our wedding? Your grandma Rosalind said they weren’t a traditional choice though, so that was that.’
Alex did know that. She also knew how fond her dad was of the colour the thistles gave to the hillside behind the farmhouse, but she wouldn’t allow herself to question who it was exactly she always sent the flowers for. Ted hadn’t gotten round to mentioning the sunflowers when he’d finally come on the line anyway. He’d had to dash off on a callout, thinning out their already skinny chat about the price Alex was paying for diesel down south.
Alex felt another pang of guilt. As soon as she’d heard the front door closing after her dad at the other end of the line, that tightness in her chest had begun to release. She was resurfacing.
‘Boring you, am I?’ Jem asked.
‘You’re boring me a little bit, darling,’ Blythe echoed. Alex could tell her mother had her head in the Aga. Blythe was exceptional at keeping her kids and cooking in check at the same time.
‘No … Sorry, Jem.’ Alex smiled.
‘You know what I mean, though, don’t you?’
Alex rallied herself. ‘About what?’
‘The neon!’ Jem asserted.
‘Sure. Neon … for a florist’s.’ Alex agreed. ‘I mean, if Carrie’s making crazy decisions like that, what else is she getting up to in there, huh?’ She was teasing, but Jem missed it, her high-school nemesis was still ram-raiding her thoughts. Alex thought she heard her mother laugh but it was difficult to be sure over the clanking of the table being set.
‘Exactly,’ Jem huffed, ‘that cow is not to be trusted.’
‘Jem!’ Blythe implored. ‘Change the record.’
Dill’s birthday had become sacred, more sacred than Christmas even and Christmas wasn’t a day for crap or bitch or cow either.
‘You can’t tell me off, Mum. I’m twenty-four.’ Jem let out a sudden yelp. ‘And you can’t whack me with a wooden spoon, Mum!’
‘Want to bet, young lady?’
Alex smiled into the phone. It was impossible not to feel steadied by her mother. Throughout everything, Blythe had held the balance.
‘I’m sure there are more riveting topics you and Alex can talk about besides Carrie Logan, Jem, surely? Can’t you gossip about men, or diets or something … like normal sisters?’
It had occurred to Alex years ago that she and Jem were not normal sisters, not if swapping juicy titbits about boyfriends and diets was the standard. Alex still wasn’t wholly sure whether she should feel more or less sad about that. It wasn’t love or affection she and Jem were missing, but years. Those intense teenage years where experiences and emotions were heightened and giddy and sisters confided and shared. Alex had left for uni and overnight it was as if something seismic had shifted leaving Alex on one side of a gaping chasm and Jem on the other. Not just their age gap. Alex could feel something else there stuck between them, something more than five big teenage years. Whatever it was, Alex had never poked at it, in case it turned out she was responsible for that too.
The phone had fallen silent. Something furtive seemed to be going on at the other end. ‘OK, OK,’ Jem whispered. She feigned an over-excited tone. ‘So guess who we saw? At the church?’
Alex ran through the usual suspects. Blythe had already told her how Susannah and Helen had each left flowers for Dill this morning, but other than Blythe’s old choir-buddies and the Reverend no-one else sprang to mind. ‘I give up. Who did you see?’
Jem laughed then. An odd, pre-cursory chortle. ‘Guess.’ But Alex didn’t have time to guess, Jem couldn’t hold it in. ‘Only Finn.’
Alex felt her thoughts slow down, sinking to the bottom of her brain like globules of wax in a lava lamp – heavy, vivid, helpless colour.
Finn. She’d been pressing that name to the back of her mind all day and Jem had just let it loose. Thoughts of Dill nearly always came piggy-backed by thoughts of Finn. Bound together by time and circumstance.
Jem was riding out the pause. All of a sudden, she could wait all day. Alex made a grab for something coherent. ‘Finn? But …’ she managed.
‘I know, right?’
‘Finn’s back in the Falls? But … I thought …’
‘I know. The rover’s returned and, by the looks of things, he’s all done with the intrepid explorer bit.’
Alex could feel a warm uncomfortable sensation brewing over the back of her neck. Jem would test her this way, now and again. She’d poke Alex like a bruise just to gauge if she was still tender, and all Alex could do was do her best not to flinch. It was like being ambushed. Stupid really, that she would be ambushed by this of all news. Eilidh Falls was his home, after all, of course he wasn’t going to stay away forever.
Alex held the phone, waiting to hear the next nuggets of Jem’s reconnaissance back home to filter down the line. Surprise began to twist into resignation. Finn had gone back to settle down, with a wife probably. And a family. Children. Beautiful children, sharing his glorious scruffy hair and playful eyes. He could’ve met a thousand women as he’d backpacked and odd-jobbed his way around the planet, exotic and captivating like the places he’d daubed on his bedroom wall. His ‘Great Adventure List!’ Their list.
Alex waited for news of the impossibly beautiful wife and their impossibly beautiful offspring to sock her one through the earpiece. Blythe had gone quiet in the background. She’d have been pleased for sure to bump into him, Alex knew it. Her mum’s fondness for Finn had never waned. Blythe had never blamed Finn.
‘Mum turned into a bashful teenager when she saw him, didn’t you, Ma? She thinks he’s even more handsome with a bit of colour on him.’
‘I was not bashful, Jem. I just think it’s a shame that boy hasn’t been snapped up. He should be bouncing a small child around on those lovely broad shoulders of his by now. “Too busy for love”? How can anyone ever be too busy for love?’
No wife. No impossibly beautiful children. Something briefly floated inside Alex before she could stop it, like a hot air balloon momentarily lifting a few inches from the earth before bobbing back down again with a thud. Finn was single then. Fab. Just as it was fab whenever George Clooney came back onto the market. Fab and uplifting and irrelevant all at once.
‘I wonder,’ Blythe lilted, ‘perhaps he’s gay now. He has been broadening his horizons for the last two years. I’ll bet he’s tried all sorts of new things. Food and … well, whatnot.’
Alex startled. Gay? Gay? Finn was not gay! No way. You couldn’t be that close to a person and not know something like that, Alex decided with ultimate certainty.
At the other end of the phone Jem was being uncharacteristically quiet, waiting for Alex to bite. Alex shrugged as if her sister could see it. ‘Susannah must be happy. To have him back safe and sound,’ she bumbled.
Finn had spent the last two years somewhere the ogher side of the planet. Had he been walking it all out of his system the way he used to, only instead of rambling around the countryside he’d gone rambling around the globe? Two years as far away as he could …
‘I guess. He was painting the railings on St Cuthbert’s wall, you know. Finn’s the new maintenance guy about town. He’s got the contract for the church. He’s re-opened Torben’s hardware shop too. On the high street.’ Jem’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘And in case you were wondering, throwing tools around hasn’t done him any harm either, Al. He’s like … buff now. No more noodle arms,’ Jem chirped.
Alex’s lava lamp brain was heating up. Torben’s? Right across the street from the garage? Alex imagined her father’s mood each time he looked out across the high street. They would be virtually face to face, every single day. Alex swallowed. Her dad would have an ulcer by New Year.
‘He asked after you, Al.’
