I chose to eat breakfast with Mum in her bedroom the next morning. This seemed to concern Rosaleen, who hung around Mum’s bedroom a little too long, moving furniture, setting up a table for both of us in front of the window, adjusting the curtains, opening a window, closing it a little, opening it a little more, questioning me on whether it was too breezy.
‘Rosaleen, please,’ I said gently.
‘Yes child,’ she said as she continued to make the bed, furiously thumping pillows, tucking in the blankets so tightly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d licked the undersheets before turning them over the blanket and sealing them like an envelope.
‘You don’t have to do that. I’ll make it after breakfast,’ I said. ‘You go downstairs to Arthur. I’m sure he’ll want to see you before he goes to work.’
‘His lunch is on the counter all ready to go—he knows where it is.’ She kept plumping, smoothing, and if it wasn’t right she’d start again.
‘Rosaleen,’ I repeated, gently.
Even though I knew she didn’t want to, she quickly glanced
at me. When our eyes clicked, she knew her game was up but she just stared at me and in those eyes she dared me to say it. She didn’t think I would. I swallowed.
‘If you wouldn’t mind, I’d just like to spend a little time with Mum. On our own, please.’ There I’d said it. Tamara Grown-Up had spoken up for herself. But my request was inevitably followed by the wounded look, the slow release of the pillows falling to the bed, followed by a whispery, ‘Well.’
I didn’t feel bad.
Finally she left the room and I remained quiet for a while. Not hearing the creak of the landing, I knew she was still outside the door. Listening, guarding, protecting or locking us in—I wasn’t sure. What was she so afraid of?
Instead of trying to drag conversation out of Mum as I’d been trying to do for the past month, I decided to stop fighting her silence and instead sit with her patiently in the silence that seemed to comfort her. Occasionally I lifted a slice of fruit to her and she took it and nibbled on it. I watched her face. She looked totally enchanted, as though she was watching a great big screen which I couldn’t see, outside in the back garden. Her eyebrows rose and fell as she reacted to something somebody said, her lips smiled coyly as she remembered a secret. Her face hid a million secrets.
Having spent enough time with her, I kissed her on the forehead and left the room. The diary I had been previously hugging proudly was now hidden under my bed. I felt as if I was running off somewhere to hide a big secret. I was also kind of embarrassed, I must admit. My friends and I didn’t keep diaries. We didn’t even write to each other. We kept in touch through Twitter and Facebook, posting up photos of ourselves whilst on holiday, of our nights out, trying on dresses in department-store changing rooms and looking for second
opinions. We texted one another continuously, we emailed gossip and forwarded generic funny emails but it was all on-the-surface stuff. We talked about things you can see, things you can touch, nothing deeper. Nothing emotional.
This diary is the kind of thing Fiona would do—the girl in our class who nobody spoke to apart from Sabrina, the other dork, but she was out of school more than in because of some kind of migraine problem. But this is what she used to do: find a quiet place to go to on her own, a corner of a classroom when the teacher wasn’t in, or beneath a tree in the school grounds at lunch time and bury her nose deep in a book or furiously scribble something in a notebook. I used to laugh at her. But the joke was clearly on me. Who knew what she was writing.
There was only one place I could possibly go to write the diary. I reached for it under my bed and ran down the stairs shouting, ‘Rosaleen, I’m going out…’ My flip-flops banged down the creaky stairs, and as I leaped off the final step and landed on the ground with all the grace of an elephant, Rosaleen appeared before me.
‘Jesus, Rosaleen!’ My hand flew to my heart.
Her eyes moved over me quickly, registered my diary, then went to my face. I wrapped my arms around it protectively, making sure one side of my cardigan covered half the book.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked quietly.
‘Just out…and about.’
Her eyes flicked down to the diary again. She just couldn’t help herself.
‘Can I fix you some food to have with you? You’ll be starving hungry.’
Starving hungry. Hot sun. Long goodbye. Very dead.
‘There’s some fresh brown bread and chicken, some potato salad and baby tomatoes…’
‘No, thanks, I’m still full from breakfast.’ I made a move to the door again.
‘Some sliced fruit maybe?’ She raised her voice slightly. ‘A ham and cheese sandwich? There’s leftover coleslaw from—’
‘Rosaleen. No. Thank you.’
‘Okay.’ More wounded looks. ‘Well, be safe now, won’t you? Don’t go wandering too far. Stay within the grounds. Within eyeshot of the house.’
Within eyeshot of her, more like.
‘I’m not going off to war,’ I laughed. ‘Just…around.’
In the closed space of the house, where everyone always knew where everyone else was at any time, I wanted a few hours of my place, my time.
‘All right,’ she said.
‘Don’t look so worried.’
‘I’m just not sure…’ She looked down at the floor, unclasped her hands to smooth down her tea-dress. ‘Would your mother let you go?’
‘Mum? Mum would let me go to the moon, if it kept me from whinging all day.’
I’m not sure if relief was what passed over Rosaleen’s face. Just more worry. Suddenly a few chips fell into place for me, and I relaxed a little. Rosaleen wasn’t a mother, but all of a sudden, in her quiet house, as my mum had switched to sleep mode, Rosaleen had to do the mothering of both of us.
‘Oh, I understand,’ I said softly. I reached out a hand and I touched her. Her body tensed so much that I quickly let go. ‘You don’t have to worry about me. Mum and Dad pretty much let me go wherever I wanted. I used to spend the entire day in town with my friends. I even went to London one day with my friend. We were over and back in a day. Her dad has his own jet. It was totally cool. There were only, like, six seats and it was just for me and Emily—that’s the girl whose plane
it was. Then for her seventeenth birthday her parents let us all fly to Paris. Her older sister came with us to keep an eye on us, though. She was nineteen, in college and everything.’
She listened intently; far too eagerly, too anxiously, too quickly, far too desperately.
‘Oh, isn’t that lovely,’ she said brightly, her green eyes hungry for all the words that came from my mouth. I could see her gobbling them up as soon as I’d said them. ‘Your birthday isn’t far off. Is that the kind of thing you’d get for your birthday?’ She looked around the hallway of the gatehouse as if she might find a plane in there somewhere. ‘Well, we wouldn’t be able for the likes of that…’
‘No, no, that’s not what I meant. That’s not why I told you the story. It was just…it doesn’t matter, Rosaleen,’ I said quickly. ‘I’d better go.’ I pushed past her to get to the door. ‘Thanks, though,’ I said. The last thing I saw before I closed the door was her concerned look, as though she’d said something wrong. Worrying about what their life could and couldn’t offer me. Turns out my old life was offering me more than it could, anyway. Like a desperate lover it was offering me the moon and stars when it knew there was no way it could ever deliver. I stupidly believed it. I used to think that it was better to have too much than too little, but now I think if the too much was never supposed to be yours, you should just take what is yours and give the rest back. I’ll take Rosaleen and Arthur’s simplicity any day. That way, you never have to give back the things you love.
As I was walking down the garden path the postman came toward me. Excited to see another person, I greeted him with a big smile.
‘Hi.’ I stopped and blocked him in his path.
‘Hello, miss.’ He tipped his hat, which I thought was very old-fashioned and kind.
‘I’m Tamara.’ I held out my hand.
‘Nice to meet you, Tamara.’ He thought I was holding my hand out for the post and he plonked some envelopes into my palm.
Behind me I heard the door open and Rosaleen came rushing out.
‘Morning, Jack,’ she called, power-walking down the path. ‘I’ll take those.’ She practically tore them from my grasp. ‘Thank you, Jack.’ She looked at him sternly while stuffing them into her apron pouch like a mother kangaroo.
‘Right so.’ He bent his head as though he’d just been told off. ‘And for over the road.’ He handed her more envelopes, then he turned on his heel, hopped on his bike and cycled off around the corner.
‘I wasn’t going to eat them,’ I said to Rosaleen’s back, slightly stunned.
She laughed and went inside the house. Curiouser and curiouser.
There was only one place that I could go to write this diary. Feeling the heat of the road beneath my rubber flip-flops, I made my way toward the castle. I smiled when the trees gave away like a curtain parting for the main act.
‘Hello again,’ I said.
With great respect I wandered through its rooms. I couldn’t believe that a fire had done all of this damage. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to suggest that anybody had lived here for at least a century. No fireplaces left on the walls, no tiles, no wallpaper. Absolutely nothing but bricks, weeds and a staircase that climbed to a second floor that didn’t exist, leading up to the skies, as though with one giant leap you could reach a cloud. A stairway to heaven.
I took my place on the bottom steps and set the diary on my lap. I twirled in my hand the heavy pen that I’d stolen
from Arthur’s writing desk and stared at the closed book, trying to think of what to write. I wanted my first words to mean something, I didn’t want to make a mistake. Finally I thought of a beginning and opened the book.
My jaw dropped. The first page had already been written, each line neatly filled…in
my
handwriting.
I stood up, alert, rigid, and the diary fell from my lap and down the concrete steps to the floor. I looked around quickly, my heart racing, trying to see if this was somebody’s idea of a cruel joke. The crumbling walls stared back at me and suddenly there were movements and noises all around me that I hadn’t noticed before. Shrubs and weeds rustled, rocks moved, I heard footsteps from behind and inside the walls, but nothing surfaced or showed itself. It was all my imagination. Perhaps the filled pages of the diary were too.
I took a few deep breaths and retrieved the diary from the ground. The leather, scraped by the stones and rocks, was dusty, and I wiped it against my shorts. The first page had been ripped by the fall but the writing hadn’t been my mind playing tricks. It was still there—the first page, second page—and as I furiously flicked through, I could see my hand-writing on the used pages.
It was impossible. I compared the date on the top to the date on my watch. It was dated tomorrow, Saturday. Today was Friday. My watch must have been wrong. I immediately thought about Rosaleen, how her eyes had run over the diary that morning. Was it she who had written it? She couldn’t have. The diary had been safely stored under my bed. Feeling dizzy, I sat back down on the staircase and read the entry. My eyes jumping over the words manically, I had to go back a few times and start again.
4 July, Saturday
Dear Diary,
Is that what I’m supposed to write? I’ve never written one of these before, and I feel like an absolute dork, beyond words. Okay so, Dear Diary, I hate my life. Here it is in a nutshell. My dad killed himself, we lost our house and absolutely everything. I lost my life, Mum lost her mind and now we’re living in hicksville with two sociopaths. A few days ago I spent the afternoon with a really cute guy called Marcus who is Vice President of Dork Central, a travelling library. Two days ago I met a nun who keeps bees and breaks locks and yesterday I spent most of the morning sitting in a ruin-
‘Ruin’ had been crossed out and beside it was:
castle on a stairway to heaven that looked very tempting to climb and leap for a cloud that would carry me away from here. Now it’s night-time and I’m back in my bedroom writing this dorky diary that Sister Ignatius talked me into doing. Yes, she’s a nun and not a transvestite, as I’d previously thought.
I sighed and looked up from the page. How could this be? I searched around me for answers. I thought about running back to the house to tell Mum, to tell Rosaleen, to phone Zoey and Laura. Who on earth would believe me? And even if they did, what could they do that could help me?
The castle was so still, it seemed like the clouds, so perfectly round and white like cherubs, were moving at a hundred miles an hour. There was the occasional rustle under a weed, dandelion seeds drifted through the air, taunting me to catch them, drifting close and then darting away suddenly as the breeze
took them. I took a deep breath, lifted my face to the hot sun—hot sun. Very dead—closed my eyes and exhaled slowly. I really loved spending time in the castle. I opened my eyes and continued reading, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up.
I love spending time in the castle. It should be ugly but it’s not. Like Jessie Stevens with his broken nose and cauliflower ears from rugby, he should be ugly, but he’s not. I should have done this sooner, this writing lark. I was denied my rant in Zoey’s, when she and Laura just wouldn’t shut up about the no-knickers story. Anyway.
Mum still hasn’t come out of her room. Despite feeling like I wanted to curl up and die—I’m smothered with a cold after yesterday’s soaking—I decided to eat breakfast in the back garden beside the tree this morning because I knew that she’d see me. I rolled out the blue cashmere blanket from my room and laid out some sliced fruit. It felt and tasted like cardboard. I wasn’t hungry, all of my energy was going into trying to will Mum to come outside. I tried to look so carefree, I lay back on my elbows and crossed my ankles and looked around as though I hadn’t a care in the world. It was my attempt to entice her outside but she didn’t join me. I just thought that if she got some air, if she took a look around this place, came to this castle, maybe she’d see what I see, that she’d snap out of the trance she’s caught in. Of course she doesn’t want life to go on while she’s sitting up there in that bedroom. It’s only when you come outside and realise life is moving on, that you just have to go with the flow.
I don’t know why Rosaleen and Arthur aren’t doing more to help her. Breakfast, lunch and dinner big enough
to feed an elephant aren’t going to cure her. Nor is silence. I should bring it up again with Rosaleen. Maybe mention it to Arthur. He’s her brother, he should be helping. As far as I can see, apart from the bizarre forehead-touching greeting they had when we arrived, he hasn’t said one word to her. How weird is that?After the rain of yesterday…