‘I want Cyril Bear,’ Jack said, pointing out towards the car.
‘Mummy’ll bring him up in a bit, won’t you Mummy?’ Marcus said, clearly desperate to get upstairs.
‘I promise,’ Lara said to Jack, kissing his hair. ‘Night night.’
The three bolder Waylands got down on their knees and cornered the little beast to examine it. Then Lara burst out laughing.
‘What is it Mum? What?’ Bella said.
‘If my cartoon watching doesn’t let me down, our “rat” is a chipmunk. Look!’
The small creature levelled its shining eyes at them one by one, as they leaned in under the kitchen table. It was still chewing the last remnants of its breakfast cereal feast, moving its swollen cheeks around like tiny balloons under its tawny fur. The three stripes down its back bristled as it made itself look as big as possible, its long, skinny striped tail bushing up in feeble imitation of a squirrel.
‘Hey, Alvin,’ Olly said.
‘Deer, skunk, chipmunk. It’s like we’ve wandered on to the set of
Bambi
,’ Lara said. ‘Be careful, I don’t know if they bite.’
‘He can’t be all that dangerous. He’s tiny,’ Bella said.
‘But remember Dad, the stream and the rat,’ Olly sniggered. ‘It could damage us psychologically for life.’
‘OK, we’ll lure him out with Reese’s Puffs,’ Lara said. ‘You two stay down there, and make sure he doesn’t disappear under the cooker.’ She got up and laid a trail of cereal to the back door, hooking open the fly screen so he had a clear run. But the chipmunk stayed put, guarding its ground against Bella and Olly.
‘I think he’s had enough to eat,’ Bella said, kneeling back and looking up at Lara.
‘Watch out, stupid,’ Olly yelled, as the little creature, seeing its opportunity, broke away from its spot under the table and made a break for the cooker. Olly dived across the floor like a goalie and managed to get there first, lying right across the gap between the base of the appliance and the floor, barring its way.
‘Eurgh,’ he shuddered as the chipmunk barrelled into him then ricocheted away to be shooed by Lara and Bella over the worn lino to the back door, skittering across the round cereal pieces and scattering them like ball-bearings as it went.
‘Shoo,’ Lara said, slamming the door behind it.
She turned to see her two eldest children looking at her, their eyes shining in triumph.
‘Man, that floor’s a mess,’ Olly said, brushing crushed cereal from his sleeves.
Indeed, the room looked as if someone had whirled around it like a cereal-flinging dervish.
‘We should clear it up now,’ Lara said. ‘Or we’ll end up with a menagerie of critters in here.’
‘What I don’t understand,’ Bella said, as she set to work with the dustpan and brush that Lara handed her, ‘is how that cereal got out of the cupboard. I’m sure we left nothing out when we cleared up lunch.’
‘I know. I was unusually impressed,’ Lara said. ‘Perhaps Marcus got it out.’ It wasn’t unlikely. Marcus was famous for reaching things out of cupboards to snack on, then not putting them away.
‘And what I don’t get, right,’ Olly said, ‘is how that little chipmunk guy got in here. I mean, he opened the door, climbed up to the cupboard and got the cereal out?’
‘There must be some sort of hole somewhere,’ Lara said. ‘Perhaps under the house. Have you noticed how it seems to be standing up on a sort of stone wall? We’ll take a look tomorrow. Right. That’s the floor done. Bedtime now.’
‘Thank Christ for that,’ Olly said, and disappeared upstairs immediately.
Bella hugged herself. ‘I don’t want to sleep in this house tonight.’
Lara knew what she meant. But she was so exhausted by the roller-coaster evening that she felt if she didn’t get to bed soon, she might pass out. To reassure Bella, she led her through the house as she wedged chairs up against the outside doors.
‘I’ll get the keys off James tomorrow, or get some bolts fitted,’ she said, as she tucked Bella into her bed. ‘And we’re going to scour the place from top to bottom, clean out all the gloomy bits. Are you up for helping?’
‘You bet,’ Bella said. She looked very tiny lying there, as if she were six again. Lara switched on the fan, and the air in the room started to move.
‘Is everything OK, Bell?’ Lara asked. ‘Between you and Olly?’
‘He’s just being a bit of a twat, that’s all,’ Bella sighed.
‘What about that boy? Did you see him tonight?’
‘What boy?’ Bella said quickly, and Lara remembered she wasn’t supposed to know about Sean yet.
‘Sorry. I’m a bit confused. A few too many bevvies.’
‘There’s no boy,’ Bella said, turning her back to her mother, dismissing her.
‘I’ll leave all the bedroom doors open and the hall light on. It’ll be like we’re in the same room.’
Lara tiptoed across the landing to Olly’s room to see if he was all right, but he was already fast asleep, lying on his back, his big feet sticking out of the bottom of his bed-sheet and his young man’s chest naked to the night. His fan was on, and she could see little goosebumps where the cool air caught him. How different in every way he and Bella were, and how proud she was of both of them. They amounted to two-thirds of the best job she had done in her life.
She was just crossing the landing to her own room when she remembered her promise to Jack. Cursing, she went downstairs, unwedged the back door and crossed the yard to the car. After ten minutes of searching, she had to concede defeat. Cyril Bear was not there. Jack must have left him at the party.
On her way back through the kitchen, she caught sight of the blue vase of roses. She bent over them and breathed in deeply to catch their scent, which seemed stronger in the still of the hot night. Then she looked again. Weren’t there more flowers here than before – many more? She shook her head, trying to focus. She had encountered so much oddness since arriving in Trout Island.
No. Her wine mind must be playing tricks on her.
Tiredness pulled at her eyes. She went upstairs to the bedroom, where Marcus was already snoring, and Jack was curled up on the little nest she had made for him on a mattress on the floor. Although he was asleep, he was clearly too hot, so she got rid of two of the three blankets Marcus had laid over him, thinking about how she’d have to deal with the fallout over the missing bear in the morning. Then she threw off her clothes and slipped, wearing only her underwear, into the bed beside her husband.
She lay down and tried to sleep, but now the scenes of the evening intruded, playing underneath her eyelids, peeling away like the skins of an onion. First, all the animals, then that woman in the car. And finally she was down to the kernel, the thought that coloured everything else.
Stephen Molloy, looking into her eyes and telling her she was the biggest
what-if
of his life.
And then that kiss.
What on earth was she going to do about that?
BELLA’S NIGHT WAS PUNCTUATED BY DREAMS OF GIANT CHIPMUNKS
lurking in dark corners while she and Sean tried to find an unoccupied attic for some kissing. Just before she woke, the woman in the parked car leered close to her, opened her mouth, and let out a series of pulsing, halitosed roars right into her face.
She would have sprung from her bed had her sheets, tangled after her disturbed night, not knotted her to it. The sound that had woken her was in fact her fan as it rotated on its white plastic foot, wheezing after its nightlong exertions.
She rubbed her face, grinding sweaty dust into her skin. She was glad they were going to clean this horrible house today. It helped her deal with the gloominess she felt about what had happened the night before with Sean and Olly.
Slipping her feet into her flip-flops, she stumbled across the floor and heaved up the window, letting the grassy morning air thread into the stale bedroom. It also brought with it a lingering touch of skunk, but it appeared that someone or something – a bear, or a wolf perhaps – had removed the corpse in the night, leaving nothing but a bloody smudge on the tarmac.
Looking out on the empty street, Bella wondered how somewhere so dead could produce a boy like Sean. But something was going on outside. A sign of life. Someone was running towards the house. She pressed her nose against the fly screen.
It was only her mother though, in cycle shorts and a too-tight vest, sweating her way along the pavement. She appeared to be having a conversation with herself, or possibly she was talking to the rather incongruous big black dog that loped along beside her. Bella tried to push away her embarrassment at witnessing those jiggling maternal breasts and thighs, that red face plastered with sticky hair. She was glad no one else was around to see it all. Unless, of course, the whole street was full of people who were, like her, imprinting their faces with fly-screen mesh.
Pulling on her dressing gown, she went downstairs. Everyone else was still asleep, even Jack, thank goodness. As the only other early riser, she knew she would be lumbered with him in the mornings if her mother wanted to go out for dawn jogs.
‘Hiya.’ Her mother burst in through the back door, all panting and sweat.
‘You’ve been for a run.’
‘Good work, Sherlock.’ She bent forward with one leg extended, stretching out her hamstrings.
‘What’s with the dog?’
‘Oh, he’s my new chum. Looks out for me on my run. Fancy a cuppa?’
‘I’ll do it,’ Bella said, reaching for a saucepan. ‘Where did you go?’
‘End of the village and round the school playing fields down by the river.’ Lara was now bent forward straight-legged, with her face against her knees. ‘Oh,’ she said, straightening up, her face even redder than before, ‘did you know there’s a swimming pool down there?’
‘No!’ Bella said, suddenly interested. She loved swimming, and it was so hot here.
‘And it seems it’s free to use, and open all day,’ Lara went on. ‘A nice young man working down there told me. Name of Sean.’
‘Oh.’ Bella looked at her mum. So she did know. She had thought as much last night.
‘He was getting it ready for the day, but it opens at eight, if you’d like a quick – and I mean quick, because I need your help – morning swim before we get stuck in here.’
‘I might do that,’ Bella said. She didn’t know whether to be pleased that there was a pool and that Sean was down there, or annoyed that her mother not only knew what was going on, but had also gone up and talked to him when the few clothes she was wearing were striped with sweat.
‘But have a cup of tea and something to eat first,’ Lara said. ‘Keep me company.’
By half past seven, Bella was tripping along the bumpy pavement to the school, her bikini on under her shorts and T-shirt, her towel in the maroon duffel bag she wore slung over her shoulder. She went to the playground and looked over the ridge on which it stood. A dirt path led down to the baseball and football pitches below. She supposed that was where her mother had meant the swimming pool was, so she set off down the slope. As she turned a bend she got a whiff of chlorine – a smell that always filled her with both the anticipation of diving into the blue and a desire for the vending machine hot chocolate Lara always bought her after their regular trips to the Prince Regent baths in Brighton.
At the bottom of the dip, across an empty car park and surrounded by a seven-foot-high chain-link fence was a perfect blue rectangle of a pool. To one side stood a small brick building with three doors in it, on the other a sandpit, a couple of picnic benches and some white plastic chairs.
The place appeared to be empty. The only sound Bella could hear above the crickets rubbing their legs in the morning sunshine was the pool pump whirring and reverberating around the edges of the hollow.
She traced along the fence and found a gate, but it was padlocked. A sign at the side said that opening hours were ‘8 a.m. until 6 p.m., seven days a week, May thru August, except thunderstorms’. Underneath this followed a long list of forbidden activities, which included diving, consuming alcohol, running, rough play or horseplay, eating or drinking in the pool area or bringing in glass or plastic that could shatter. The sign went on to tell visitors not to swim alone, not to swim if they had had diarrhoea in the past two weeks or if there were thunderstorms, and always to have a cleansing shower before bathing. Bella wondered if she would be let in, as she was clearly on her own.
The water, so close and yet so out of reach, was driving her crazy. Even at this hour, the heat had already built to something incredible. The sky was so blue it almost made a noise, and she could feel the sweat trickling down the backs of her legs.
‘Hello!’ she called through the fence. ‘Hello?’
A door in the outhouse opened and her heart leaped as Sean’s smiling blue eyes met hers. He wore baggy swimming trunks and nothing else. She couldn’t help noticing how his tanned chest was smooth and firm.
‘You came,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ She beamed at him through the fence.
‘And no brothers?’
‘Still asleep. Olly doesn’t ever wake up till eleven in the holidays.’
‘Come on in,’ he said, unlocking the big old padlock that kept the gate shut. ‘It’s usually pretty quiet first thing. Then all the moms come down with the little kids around nine.’
‘This is great,’ Bella said, her eyes on the water. She couldn’t think of anything else to say. ‘And it’s completely free?’
‘All the villages around here have a pool and we high-school students man them during the summer.’
‘What’s this?’ She motioned to the brick building.
‘That’s where you get changed. We don’t allow poolside changing.’
‘So many rules.’
‘Ah, we’re pretty relaxed really, believe me. We just have the signs up so no one can sue us.’
‘Which one do I use?’ Bella asked.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Which changing room?’
‘Well, that’s the women’s, but why don’t you use the lifeguard hut as you’re a special friend. It’s more spacious and private. Bobby, the other guard, isn’t coming in till later today because he has an orthodontics appointment.’
‘Do you think I should?’ Bella asked.
‘’Course you should. Go on in,’ he said, opening the middle door for her. ‘I’ve got to skim the water now.’