Butterfly Summer
Authors: Anne-Marie Conway
For Mum, with all my love
First published in the UK in 2012 by Usborne Publishing Ltd., Usborne House,
83-85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England.
www.usborne.com
Text copyright © Anne-Marie Conway, 2012
The right of Anne-Marie Conway to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Cover photography: floral decoration by Purestock/Alamy;
Cloud and rippling water by Digital Vision.
Title lettering by Stephen Raw. Butterfly illustrations by Joyce Bee.
The name Usborne and the devices
are Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or used in any way except as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or loaned or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Epub ISBN 9781409541738
Kindle ISBN 9781409541745
Batch no. 02507/02
Contents
We’d been living in our new house in Oakbridge for just over a week and I hated everything about it. When Mum said we were moving to the country, I’d imagined a pretty, old-fashioned cottage with roses round the door – I got the
old
bit right, but it was dark and gloomy with massive spiders, and cobwebs so thick it was impossible to see light through them. We’d spent every spare minute trying to get it sorted, but it still gave me the creeps.
“New house, new job, new beginning,” Mum kept saying, doing her best to sound cheery. But the “new beginning” bit was hard – at least, it was for me.
It was alright for Mum – she’d lived in Oakbridge before I was born so it wasn’t really a
new beginning
for her anyway. But I’d barely had time to finish Year Seven before I was packing my old life up in a stack of brown cardboard boxes and leaving everything I knew behind me.
“I still don’t get why we had to move here in the first place,” I grumbled, sitting down to lunch that first week – pizza
again
, served on an upturned crate. We’d had pizza every day since we arrived. Hot pizza for lunch, and cold leftover pizza for tea. I never thought I could get sick of pizza – but seriously!
Mum looked across at me, frowning. “What do you mean, you don’t understand? How many times do I have to keep explaining?”
“I know, I know, ‘it’s a great job, too good to pass up’, but you were happy at your old job, weren’t you? And what about me? What am I supposed to do without Laura? And what about my wildlife photography course? You know how much I loved going...”
“Look I’m really sorry, Becky.” Mum pressed her fingers to the side of her head as if she was in pain. “I know it’s difficult for you, but I’m sure Laura will come and visit later on in the summer, and there’ll be loads more opportunities for you to take wildlife photos around here.” She started to clear away the pizza. “Jobs like this don’t come along very often, you know, not when you get to my age. I’ll be
running my own department
. It’s a huge step up.”
We were so busy those first few days I didn’t have much time to think about what I was going to do once Mum actually started her
great new job
. It was the summer holidays – the hottest July on record, the weatherman kept saying – and six empty weeks stretched out in front of me. We weren’t connected to the internet yet, and I could barely get a phone signal for long enough to call anyone. Talk about being stuck in the middle of nowhere.
We worked our way through all the big boxes the first weekend we arrived. We’d been unpacking for over three hours solid and I was just about ready to collapse from heat exhaustion when Mum’s old friend, Stella, popped by to help us.
“Tracy Miller, I can’t believe you’re back!” she cried, bursting in and throwing her arms round Mum. “It is
so
good to see you. And you must be the beautiful Becky!” She turned round to face me, grabbing hold of my hands and squeezing them tight.
I shook my head, blushing. No one had ever called me beautiful before. Neat brown hair, a turned-up nose and freckles don’t exactly add up to beautiful. Cute maybe – but not beautiful.
“We go back years, your mum and me,” Stella went on, her eyes full of mischief. “I’ve known her since primary school, can you believe...?”
I couldn’t imagine my mum at primary school. She was always so sensible and grown up. More like a head teacher than anything else. “Was she naughty?” I asked, knowing what the answer would be. “
Naughty?
” Stella roared. “Scared of her own shadow, your mum. Wouldn’t say boo to a goose.”
I liked Stella straight away. She was the same age as Mum but she seemed years younger. She had wavy brown hair with white-blonde streaks and she never stopped smiling. She swept into our dark, empty house, filling it with noise and laughter. When she got fed up with unwrapping cups and saucers, and cleaning out cupboards, she put on an old disco CD and danced around the room – grabbing me and Mum in turn and swinging us round until we were dripping with sweat and out of breath.
“It’s too hot, Stella,” Mum groaned, pushing her away, but I could tell she didn’t mind.
“We used to dance all night,” cried Stella. “And I don’t remember you complaining back then!”
“It was you who used to dance all night,” said Mum, laughing. “I was the one trying to drag you home! But I have missed you,” she added. “It’s been far too long.”
“I’ve missed you too, Trace,” said Stella, serious for a moment.
It was great to meet someone from Mum’s past. She’d never really talked much about why she left Oakbridge.
She split with my dad and moved away before I was born, and any mention of him – or “that time” as she called it – was guaranteed to bring on one of her headaches. I know it sounds weird, but meeting Stella was like getting a tiny step closer to finding out what really happened back then.
“Why don’t I ask my son Mack to show you around?” she said to me as she was leaving. “He’ll only drive me mad getting under my feet all summer if he stops at home!”
I nodded, smiling, although inside my tummy clenched up. I couldn’t imagine going off around the village with some boy I’d never met before.
There were quite a few visitors after that. Stella must’ve passed the word round that Mum was back. That’s the thing with small villages – it doesn’t take long for news to spread. At the end of the week, someone called Mrs. Wilson came by from the church. She was small and bony and all buttoned up, even though it was easily the hottest day so far.
“Are the two of you planning to come to church?” she asked primly, while Mum poured us all a cup of tea. I noticed she’d used the best cups
and
a proper teapot. “There’s a very nice service next Sunday if you’d like to attend.”
Mum half-nodded. “We’ll certainly do our best, although I’m due to start my new job tomorrow and what with all the unpacking and everything...” She trailed off and we sat in silence for a moment.
Mrs. Wilson gave me the creeps big time. There was something sour about her – like she’d eaten too many lemons. She kept staring at me in this really intense way, and when Mum offered her a cookie she muttered something random about gluttony and sin. I could just imagine Laura saying,
What
is
that lady’s problem?
and I had to stop myself from snorting into my cup.
“How do you think you’ll like Oakbridge, Becky?” she asked after a bit. “It’s not the most exciting place for a girl of your age.”
“She’ll be fine,” said Mum quickly. “It’s just the two of us, so Becky’s used to her own company, and she’ll soon make friends when school starts. I’ve enrolled her at Farnsbury High; it’s supposed to be very good.”
Mrs. Wilson sniffed. “There’s no discipline these days, not like when I was at school.”
When was that then?
I felt like saying.
In the Ice Age?
Mrs. Wilson ended up staying for another cup of tea, prattling on about the house and how old it was and other boring stuff like that. Mum kept looking at her watch and clearing her throat in a really obvious way, but it didn’t seem to make the slightest difference.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve still got some unpacking to do,” I said, first chance I got, and escaped upstairs.
I couldn’t stand my new room. It was small and dark and airless, even with the window open. But it wasn’t the size, or the lack of light that bothered me so much, it was the way it felt. Leaving my old room behind was one of the hardest things about moving; like losing a part of who I was. I tried to explain to Mum but she didn’t get it. She said that by the end of the summer I’d be so settled, I wouldn’t even remember what my old room looked like.
The night before we moved had been the worst. I’d started to think about all the people who would live in my room after I’d gone, and how it wouldn’t be mine any more, and how no one would know I’d spent the first twelve years of my life there. At some point I got up and scratched
Becky Miller
into the window sill. I used an old nail from the back of my door, where my dressing gown used to hang. I spent ages scraping away at the wood until the letters were really deep. I just wanted to make sure a tiny part of me was left behind, even if it was only my name.