The Brilliant Light of Amber Sunrise (22 page)

“Dennis was just leaving,” Mum said as DS Bradshaw put on his coat. I shrugged and went to sit down next to Chris, who shook his head.

“Nice to meet you, Christopher,” the visitor said, shaking his hand. Chris even stood up to do it. He was obviously more fearful of authority than I was. I refused to let myself be intimidated by The Man.

“And, Frankie, glad to see you on the mend. You keep yourself out of bother, for your mam's sake,” he said.

Mum saw him to the front door and stood there for upwards of three minutes. There was whispering and laughter—no doubt about me—and all the while an icy blast blew through the front passage and into the living room, threatening us all with pneumonia or worse.

“What is your problem?” Chris asked me. “She's happy, can't you see that?”

“He's probably trying to trick her. He can't be trusted,” I said, confident in my diagnosis of the situation.

“Just lay off.”

Chris didn't side with Mum. He never sided with Mum. The car had obviously been her attempt to bribe him over to her side from mine. I hated that car.

“We'll see.”

“Be cool, Francis. This is a big deal for her.”

“Fine,” I said, as Mum came back into the front room. “But I'm not happy.”

“Not a word,”
she said, clearing away.

“I like him,” Chris said as Mum picked up the bowl of chips and the two empty beer bottles that Dennis had been drinking from. While she was tidying she had a stupid sort of smile on her face. The type you get at school when someone hands you a note but you can't laugh out loud.

“Well, thank you,” she said, tipping the rest of the wine into a small glass.

“He's all right,” I said, eventually. “I suppose.”

Mum put all the things onto a tray and hoisted it off the coffee table.

“You'll always be my guy, Francis. Just you remember that,” she said, kissing me on the head before making her way to the kitchen.

In the weeks after DS Bradshaw came into our home Mum started behaving suspiciously. She would take phone calls while locked in the bathroom, with the taps running,
­sometimes for up to an hour. I'd time her with the stopwatch on my phone.

More than once she left the house, too, in the middle of the night, then denied all knowledge of her nocturnal activities the following morning.

“I watched you leave,” I told her while I was making my way through my oatmeal, having jotted down a brief timescale on the notepad I'd bought to take onto the unit.

“It must have been a dream,” she said, and seemed unwilling to consider the concrete evidence in the form of my Diary of Observations.

Even Chris became distant with me. When I told him about Mum's activities he would simply shrug off my concerns and try to change the subject.

“I think she might be running drugs,” I said eventually, feeling lighter for having voiced my deepest fear.

“Well, if she was only gone an hour and twenty-two minutes, then I very much doubt she could have made it to Colombia and back,” Fiona said, when I tried to make an ally of her too.

That night, in the bath, I lay back and dragged my hands through the proud stubs of hair that had begun to sprout from my head. I poured a glob of shampoo into my palm, the size of a fifty-pence piece, as the bottle recommended, and lathered my soon-to-be mane.

Just as I was about to rinse and repeat my phone buzzed and began to jerk wildly on the toilet lid.

I grabbed the sandwich bag and felt the zip-lock slip between my soapy fingers twice as I furiously tried to yank it aside.

I managed to unfurl my phone from its wet suit and felt a shiver as I saw the two words I'd been dreaming of for weeks:

Message Received

Then, in bleak slow motion, the phone slipped from my lubed hand and sank straight to the bottom of the bathtub. The “crack” it made against the porcelain seemed to vibrate through my whole body.

I retrieved it from its watery grave and dirty water trickled from the battery slot. The screen was blank, each button unresponsive.

I yelled for Mum, pulling on my clothes without drying myself. She didn't answer. Her bathroom door was locked, but I could hear that she was on the phone.

“Mum, there's been an emergency!”

“Hold on one second . . .”
I heard her say down the line. “Are you okay?” she called to me.

“My phone dropped in the bath and Amber texted me and I need it sorted
now
.”

There was a long pause. Mum said something else
down the phone and then shouted through the door again.

“Chris is downstairs. He'll sort it for you.”

“But I need it now,” I called. “It's an emergency.”

“Francis,” Mum said, “I'm warning you.
Not now
.”

Even if the phone was a lost cause, one thing I knew for certain was that Mum's campaign of deceit was coming to an end. She was no match for me when it came to cunning and innovation.

All the laptops in our house had wireless Internet. Only the battered old PC in the spare bedroom was dial-up. If you tried to connect it to the Internet when someone was on the phone their conversation would play out through the furry speakers that slotted into the monitor.

Mum would rue the day she'd tried to get one over on me, I thought as I turned on the machine. It coughed and spluttered and then gave the old-fashioned six-bar refrain that meant Microsoft was welcoming you to its world. Three different virus warnings sprang onto the screen but I ignored them, like an action hero wading through heavy fire to defeat the enemy.

I clicked on to the Internet and pressed connect, turning the speakers to their lowest volume.

“I know . . .”
I heard Mum say through the speakers. Someone was crying down the line, a woman, but I couldn't hear who.
“. . . and I'll have my cell phone on. It's only down the road, so if you need anything, anything at all, you just get in touch.”

There was a long silence before a woman's familiar voice answered her.

“Thank you, Julie.”

It was Colette.

The line went dead.

“What's going on?” I asked Chris. He was sitting at the kitchen table and looked the way he did when he had a hangover, all red-eyed and distant.

“What?” he said, glancing up at me. “Frankie, you're soaking wet. You'll catch your death. . . .”

I told him about the text, about the phone/bath disaster, and about Mum's secret conversations with Colette, but Mum interrupted us before he'd had a chance to reply.

“Right, lads, change of plan.” Mum said that she had rung school and postponed my return. Instead she had arranged a trip to see Aunty Carol in York.

Aunty Carol is not my real aunty; I just call her that because she has known me since I was a baby and Mum says it makes her feel special. She used to live across the road from us, and had four cats and no husband but two children who moved down south and didn't visit very often. Mum used to take her shopping once a week. Aunty Carol met a man on the Internet and moved to Yorkshire to live with him and help him make pottery bowls that they sell at markets. We have visited her just three times. Once when
Emma died. Once when Dad left. And once when the doctors said Granddad wasn't going to get better.

“No,” I said. “Amber texted me. She's better.”

“The text wasn't from Amber,” Mum said.

“Nobody else texts me.”

“He knows you were on the phone to Colette,” Chris said, rubbing his hand across his mouth.

“I demand answers!” I said, holding up my sodden cell phone for dramatic effect.

“Give us a minute, love,” Mum said to Chris. “I'm so proud of you,” she said to me once my brother had shut himself in the conservatory. She'd sat down next to me and was forcing a smile. “My brave lad.”

I shrugged.

“You're coming on in leaps and bounds, you know. You're looking better. Getting better. That's really all we need to be thinking about at the moment.”

“I thought that was all we
were
thinking about.”

Mum nodded, then let out a long, single sigh of exhaustion, like a bouncy castle being burst. Looking down at the table, she began to explain.

“Francis, do you know what ‘palliative' means?”

I said I did, because I hated it when she knew what words meant and I didn't. Mum only completed half of her college entry exams before giving up and taking the first job she could get. With a track record that never strayed
beneath a B, I was already her intellectual superior and didn't want her getting ideas above her station.

“What exactly do you think it means?” she asked me.

I guessed at something to do with color.

Mum shook her head.

“Palliative means they make you comfortable when you're unwell.”

“Like when I was on the unit?”

“No, love,” she said, shaking her head. “It means they make you comfortable because that's all they can do. Because there's nothing else to try. They make you comfortable because they can't make you better.”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Mum said, still not answering my question. The question I hadn't really needed to ask in the first place. When Granddad was ill one last time, they took the tubes out of his nose and left him in his hospital bed until he was quiet and still. Until he just stopped. “Comfortable” was the word everybody kept using then. I never understood why nobody thought to question this. How could they know that? What if he was actually in pain? What if he was fighting it, desperately trying to find the energy to ask us to plug him back into the machines and the drips and the medicine that they'd fed straight into his veins?

“Do you mean Amber?” I said. Mum nodded. “But she's getting better. She texted me.”

“No, sweetheart,” Mum said in a whisper.

“I love her,” I said.

“Francis, you're only fifteen. . . .”

I think there was probably an end to the sentence but I didn't give her the chance.

“What do you know about anything anyway? You never even went to college. And I
do
love Amber and I know I mean it. You wouldn't even understand because if you'd loved Dad more he probably wouldn't have left you in the first place. . . .” I said through tears.

I went on and on like this for minutes, until I had spoken so much I had to inhale two desperate lungfuls of air that made me feel faint. I wanted to hurt Mum. I wanted everything I said to stab straight through her, so she'd double over in agony and feel as ruined as I did. But she didn't. She didn't even react. Everything I said seemed to bounce off her like chucked balls of newspaper.

“Come here,” she said, trying to hug me.

“No.”

I could hardly see through the tears. As I stood up the chair fell over and made a sound like lightning striking the kitchen floor.

“Francis . . .” Mum said as I left. “Francis, where are you going? Francis . . . come back!” she yelled.

I could hear Chris calling my name from the conservatory, but ran to my room and barricaded the door shut.

I dried myself, and changed, and filled my pockets with the essentials I needed. Then I listened carefully until I heard the conservatory door open and shut. This was my moment.