‘Caz’s. She was wearing them the other week. Can you put it somewhere safe till I can give it back to her? I’ll only lose it.’
‘How did it end up in our driveway?’
Bella shrugs, putting her earbuds back in her ears. ‘Probably fell out of Dad’s car. Don’t call me for dinner,’ she adds, on her way up the stairs. ‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Bella—’
With a sigh, I put the earring in the soap dish on the windowsill, tempted though I am to drop it into the waste disposal, and reach beneath the sink for the cat food. I need to sort out the kids’ dinner early, as I promised I’d go over to my mother’s and help her and Min with arrangements for the party, which is less than three weeks away now. My heart sinks further at the thought. I really wish Mum hadn’t invited Andrew and Caz. This celebration should be a family affair, and instead, I’ll have to deal with Caz and her spiteful games. It seems like I’m never free of her these days.
I grill a couple of burgers on the barbecue outside, and take Tolly’s into him in the sitting room. I don’t normally let them eat food in front of the TV, and he responds as if I’ve just given him the keys to Disneyland. Bella’s dinner I cover and leave on the dining table, in case she changes her mind while I’m out.
I go up to her room and pop my head around her door to let her know I’m leaving. She’s curled up on her bed, facing the wall, a thick fleece blanket pulled up around her shoulders despite the fact it’s July and 29 degrees outside.
‘Bella?’ I say softly. ‘Are you awake?’
She doesn’t say anything, but I can tell from her breathing she’s not asleep.
‘I’m just popping out to see Gree,’ I say. ‘Call me if there’s anything you need. I’ll be back before it gets dark.’
Bella doesn’t stir. I lean over her and straighten the blanket, a fist squeezing my heart. For all her teenage attitude, she’s still my baby, and right now, her face scrubbed of make-up, her slight form dwarfed by the heaped blankets and pillows, she looks not much older than Tolly.
As I turn away, the phone on the bedside table illuminates with an incoming text from Taylor, and I can’t help but read it.
U hv to get it Im desperate.
I feel a flash of maternal concern. What can the girl possibly need that’s so urgent?
Before I can dig too deeply, my own phone pings with a message from Luke. Any idea what’s going on with Dad?
I put a mental pin in the text from Taylor, and reply to my brother as I go downstairs. Is there a problem? Mum didn’t say anything to me.
She said he had a funny turn.
I sigh inwardly. I’m on my way over. Will keep you posted.
Typical of Mum, I think crossly, as I go out to the car. If Dad were really ill, she’d have told me. Instead, she creates a drama by contacting Luke, knowing the first thing he’ll do is come to me. Somehow, my brother avoids getting sucked into her games in a way I’ve never quite managed. He takes after Dad: quiet and self-effacing, he generally glides below Mum’s radar, showing up – literally and metaphorically – just often enough to be left to his own devices the rest of the time. I’ve noticed he follows much the same policy with Min.
I let myself into my parents’ house. ‘Mum?’ I call. ‘You there?’
Dad ambles into the kitchen to greet me, a crumpled copy of the Telegraph in his hand. ‘Hello, poppet,’ he says in surprise. ‘Not at work?’
‘Working from home today, Dad,’ I say, kissing his cheek. ‘You all right? Mum said you had a bit of a turn.’
‘A bit of a turn, is that what she calls it?’ Dad snorts. ‘Didn’t get her own way over having a band at the party, is what she means.’
I scrutinise him carefully. He looks the same as always: tall and thin, as gangly as a teenager, with an unruly halo of white fluff around his ears and a pair of frameless half-moon glasses permanently perched on the end of his nose. He’s more than a decade older than Mum, but there’s a youthful air of mischief about him that even Nicky’s loss didn’t manage to dim. I’ve always thought of him as ageless, but I realise he’ll be eighty next April. He wears his years lightly, but eighty is old by anyone’s standards.
‘I heard that, Brian,’ Mum says, coming in through the back door. She’s been mowing the lawn, and her shoes are covered with grass clippings. I don’t know how she has the energy in this heat. My parents have an old-fashioned push mower, too, not one of those labour-saving petrol ones. ‘Hello, Louise. I like that dress on you. It suits you now you’re carrying that extra weight.’
‘Thank you, Mum,’ I say, not rising to the bait.
She reaches up to smooth Dad’s hair. ‘Honestly, Brian, look at the state of you. You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards.’
‘Fell asleep in my chair,’ Dad says, unruffled.
‘In the middle of the afternoon?’
‘Churchill used to swear by a nap,’ he says serenely, flapping out the pages of his paper and refolding it as he wanders back to his study.
‘Churchill had a country to run and a war to win,’ Mum calls after his retreating back. ‘Well, since you’re here, Louise, perhaps you can help me with the carrots,’ she adds, handing me the peeler. ‘I’ve got Luke and Min descending on me later with the boys. I could use a hand.’
I open the vegetable bin and get the carrots out. ‘Luke said you told him Dad had a turn,’ I say.
‘He’s not getting any younger. Cold water on the carrots, Louise.’
‘But he’s OK?’
‘He’s been a bit forgetful lately, that’s all. Let his eggs boil dry the other day, and he keeps feeding the dog. She had four breakfasts yesterday – she thinks it’s Christmas.’
I want to tell her that if she needs me to come over, she only has to ask; there’s no need to manufacture a crisis. But that’s not Mum’s way. She has never directly asked for help, even in the immediate aftermath of Nicky’s death. She finds our pressure points and uses them to get us to toe the line without seeming to lift a finger.
I pass her a peeled carrot and she dices it deftly, then scrapes it from the board into a saucepan. ‘Min told me you’d moved back home at the weekend,’ she says. ‘You handled that all wrong, you know.’
I pause, a half-peeled carrot in my hand. ‘Handled what all wrong?’
‘I can see what you were doing, moving into Caz’s space,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it unsettled her no end. But you need to be more careful. You gave her a genuine grievance to take to Andrew, and that wasn’t smart.’
‘It was his idea,’ I protest. ‘You think I wanted to stay in their house?’
She puts down the knife and looks straight at me. ‘Well, of course you did.’
‘No, I—’
‘Louise, I spoke to Gary Donahue.’
That silences me.
‘He said the damage to the kitchen wasn’t nearly as bad as it looked. He repaired the ceiling and patched the hole in the wall the first day. The house was perfectly habitable two weeks ago. He says he spoke to you and told you that.’ She turns back to the carrots and begins chopping again. ‘It’s not healthy, what you’re doing. You need to put some distance between you and Andrew.’