The Rose Petal Beach (23 page)

I don’t talk much, just listen. And when he’s finished talking, when I’ve told him I’m fine several times, I hang up. I sit stock-still, the phone balanced on my outstretched limp hand, my eyes focused on a point in the distance.

‘Is everything all right?’ Noah asks when several minutes have passed in silence.

I shake my head, still trying to assimilate it all. Trying to make it all fit together so I can understand what I’ve just heard. ‘No,’ I reply. ‘Nothing is all right.’

I hear him sit up. His hand is on the small of my back, his chin rests lightly on my shoulder, both actions significant reassurances of his presence. ‘What’s happened?’ he asks.

What has happened? What has happened is this: ‘My mother has been murdered.’

This doesn’t seem real. Mirabelle is gone, dead,
murdered
. Three words that describe the fact that I will never get the chance to speak to her again.

I thought Beatrix was lying. It was so surreal, and Beatrix was behaving in a completely inappropriate way. The way she said it, you’d think she’d been about to tell me that she’d walked in on the vicar shagging stuck-up Mrs Plake from two doors down. Not that one of my best friends had been taken away from me, from life.

I’d actually said, ‘Not at all funny.’ Her face fell as she dropped the inappropriateness, and the serious crime chat I’d had with the police officer came filtering in and suddenly time seemed to slow right down. I wanted to fall over, fall down, but I was frozen; every part of me rigid and locked. It was true. She was dead. I could feel it.

I haven’t been able to think or feel properly since then.

Scott came home at lunch, he must have heard, he’d probably tried to ring – the house phone and my mobile had rung several times – but I couldn’t answer either. His eyes were wide, haunted, as he dropped onto a chair between me and Beatrix. We all sat in silence, staring at the space in the centre of the table or into our teacups, trying to make sense of it.

Last night I had felt murderous towards Mirabelle. Today it had come true. I put that thought ‘out there’. I didn’t keep those toxic words and dangerous thoughts locked away in the dungeon of my mind, I had set them free into the world and this was what had happened. That wasn’t true, of course, but it
felt
true.

The other thing that was niggling at my mind, worrying at the edges of my memory, was the sensation that I saw her in her house. That I was there and she had talked to me. ‘
You believe me now, don’t you?
’ I kept hearing in my head. But that couldn’t have been right because the last time I was in her house was the last time we argued there. Everything would be a lot clearer if I hadn’t drunk myself into oblivion pretty much every night since I found out about the affair.

‘You believe me now, don’t you?
’ I couldn’t nail down when that memory was from.

The phone in my pocket bleeped and the three of us at the table jumped. I got up without saying anything to either of them and picked up my keys and went to get the girls. Halfway down our road, I stopped. I could feel the weight of the police cordon, the investigators meticulously working, and the heavy, clinging sense of a death that they were trying to unravel behind me and I realised I would have to tell Cora and Anansy, I would have to tell them that someone they loved wasn’t around any more because if I didn’t, someone else would and I couldn’t let that happen.

Shaking, because that’s all I could do, I turned and went back to my kitchen where Scott was standing staring out of the back door and Beatrix was in front of the boiling kettle, two cups beside it, about to make more tea, which is what she’d done all day. ‘You have to come with me,’ I said to Scott.

He nodded. ‘We’ll tell them together,’ he said.

‘I’ll get going,’ Beatrix said.

‘No,’ I said, ‘stay. Have dinner with us. We all need to be around each other right now.’

The dinner that night was quiet. Anansy didn’t really understand, she nodded and said she was sad, but I could tell she hadn’t really grasped the length and permanence of what we were saying; Cora listened and said nothing much, in that way of hers. I told them they could talk to us any time they wanted, that it was OK to cry if they felt sad and that Mirabelle – even saying her name
mined deep sorrow at the centre of my being – had loved them both very much.

We were subdued, but Beatrix did her best at carrying the conversation, and then it was bedtime without a bath.

‘I think we should say our prayers,’ Cora told Anansy before they got into bed.

About a year ago, when they’d seen a young girl in a movie kneeling by her bed at night with her eyes closed and her hands clasped together, they’d asked what she was doing. I explained about praying and I said that when I was younger I had to say my prayers every night. Anansy asked if they had to do it and I had said if they wanted to, they could. If they didn’t it was fine, too. They’d done it every night for about a week, then lost interest. This was the first time in a long time that either of them had suggested it.

‘OK,’ Anansy said and carefully put Fee-Fu, her pink bear, down on her bed and got on her knees, placed her hands together and closed her eyes. Cora came over from her bed and got down on her knees beside her little sister, assuming the position.

‘Dear God. Please look after Auntie Mirabelle,’ Cora said. ‘She’s a nice lady. Thank you. Love, Cora.’ She waited a few seconds, then used her elbow to nudge Anansy as a prompt.

‘Yes. Thank you. Love, Anansy, aged six and a quarter. Which means I’m not quite six and a half, but I will be.’

‘God knows that,’ Cora hissed at her.

‘Oh. Sorry, God,’ Anansy whispered to match Cora’s tone. ‘I forgot you knew everything.’

Cora’s body sagged in that despair and loving disappointment she had only for her sister. ‘Sorry, God,’ she said, earnestly. ‘It’s just ’cos she’s so young.’

‘He knows that,’ Anansy reminded Cora, still in a whisper.

Cora sighed, then said, ‘Goodnight, God. Goodnight, Auntie Mirabelle.’

‘Goodnight, God; goodnight, Auntie Mirabelle,’ Anansy repeated.
They both scrambled upwards, Cora came to me, hugged me and then said, ‘Goodnight, Mama,’ before returning to her side of the bedroom and slipping under the covers.

Anansy ran to me, threw her arms around me. ‘Night, Mama,’ she said, before bounding back to bed, picking up Fee-Fu and diving under her covers.

I liked that they had no real idea of what had happened. I turned off their light and sat on the space on the carpet between their two beds. They didn’t need me there to go to sleep any more, but that night after Mirabelle was gone I wanted to listen to the unsynchronised hush of their breathing, I needed to feel the almost imperceptible vibrations their presence in the world created. I had to be near them because, at that moment, not being with them would have been a physical impossibility.

I’ve only ever been to one funeral in all my life.

And that was Dad’s friend’s third wife who I didn’t really know that well. Didn’t really think the next funeral I went to would be
hers
. My mother’s. I often call her ‘her’ because I don’t know what to call her. ‘Mirabelle’ feels a bit disrespectful when I’ve been taught to call people Uncle or Auntie whether they’re family friends or relations, and ‘Mum’ wouldn’t feel right ’cos she wasn’t. I mean, she was, but then, she wasn’t.

That short little word, probably one of the most regularly used words across the world, sticks in my throat. As does ‘mother’. She was a good person, so friendly and we got on really well when I got older, but I don’t think I loved her as my mother. I’m always wondering if that, not really loving her as my mother, makes me a terrible person.

I’m struggling, though, with what’s happened. I feel churned up inside, like nothing will help me settle. I want to find a way to sit, lay or stand that will stop the churning, will let me feel calm and relaxed like I was before that phone call. If anyone had asked me, I would have told them all about my troubles and anxieties, all about the little things that bug me. Now I realise they weren’t that
big, I wasn’t that stressed. It’s weird how I didn’t realise how unburdened I was until I wasn’t.

Sitting back in this train seat in first class – I treated myself – my concern for Dad starts up in my chest again. I’ve been worrying about him since I can remember. But this is different. This is all the usual worries with a few more tagged on for good luck. He hadn’t wanted me to come to the funeral. Dad doesn’t know how much I’ve been in contact with her,
Mirabelle.

Dad thinks I’ve exchanged a few emails with her and met her a couple of times. He doesn’t know that we emailed and texted constantly, and that I’ve been seeing her at least once a month since I was sixteen. For five years, I’ve been getting to know this woman who is my mother but wasn’t my mum, and my dad has no clue about it. He’d only worry himself over it. Seriously, sometimes I have to be grateful that he lets me walk out the door in the morning. Those are the days when he’s been particularly anxious or it’s coming up to her, Mirabelle’s, birthday or something, and he’ll want to barricade us in against the outside world. Dad thinks that one day I’m just not going to come back.

‘Fleur, you still haven’t explained properly why you have to go to the funeral,’ he said to me a few days earlier. He took off his glasses and threw them onto the kitchen table. ‘It’s not as if you knew her very well.’ He was growing old, my dad. Him and Mirabelle had me pretty young – they’d both been seventeen – so he hadn’t been an old dad. Not like a lot of my friends at school. But now, his mocha-brown skin had lines pressed into it along his forehead, at the eyes and around his mouth. His black hair was going grey at the sides, so he looked a bit like the plastic guy out of Fantastic Four. And he was getting a bit saggy around the middle. He was still good-looking, definitely the best-looking out of all of my friends’ dads, simply older, ageing.

‘She’s my mother,’ I said to him. I shrugged. ‘She’s my mother,’ I repeated, in case he didn’t understand the significance.

‘You’ll only be upsetting yourself,’ he said. I knew he wanted to
mention that she might have been my mother but she still saw fit to leave me but Dad wouldn’t say something that cruel.

‘I can’t avoid doing things because they might be upsetting, Dad. You taught me that.’

He shook his head, slowly, obviously regretting saying that to me. ‘It’s so far to go in one day,’ he said, ‘especially when you’ll only be upsetting yourself.’

Uh-oh
, I thought. I hadn’t actually mentioned … ‘Thing is, Daddy, I thought I’d stay down there for a few days.’

His whole body sort of pulled in on itself. I felt his wife, Jocelyn, pause in the middle of what she was doing on the other side of the kitchen and close her eyes. We both knew how what I’d just said would push his buttons.

‘I was thinking of coming back straightaway, but then I spoke to her solicitor who said that she’d made a will and that the executor was someone called Tamia Challey and that I was the main beneficiary and he had documents for me to sign and things for me to sort out. I can’t do that in one day and it just doesn’t make sense to keep going and coming back, so I thought I’d stay down there until Mrs Challey and me put all her financial affairs in order, put the house on the market, and then I can leave it all to Mrs Challey and come back. Then I won’t have any reason to go back there.’

I added that last bit to obviously tell him I was coming back. That I wouldn’t run away to live in Brighton like my mother did. I wasn’t actually my mother.

‘I’ll come with you,’ Dad said in that way that meant that was the end of the matter.

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ I said. Mainly because there was no funeral yet. I’d sort of lied about that because I wanted to get down there as soon as possible. There was no one to organise the funeral at the moment, so I thought I’d make contact with Mrs Challey who she, sorry, Mirabelle talked about all the time, and we’d organise the funeral and then I’d see what happens. What I
could find out. If I told Dad that was the plan there’d be no way on Earth he’d let me go. Twenty-one years old and still being forbidden to do stuff by my dad. He had his reasons, but it felt like being in a prison sometimes.

‘Neither do I,’ Jocelyn said from the other side of the kitchen. Dad twisted in his seat to look from me to her to me again. The only times she and I really ever got on was when we were in agreement about something that Dad shouldn’t do. She wasn’t a wicked stepmother or anything, we simply didn’t have much in common.

‘You and her weren’t exactly getting on even all these years after she … after you got divorced,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to be going down there to upset yourself.’

‘You really don’t, Donald. It’s not fair on Fleur, either. She’s going to pay her final respects to her mother, she doesn’t need to be worrying about what you might or might not be feeling as well.’ Jocelyn came over to him, her apron swamping her tiny frame, and put her arms around his neck, rested her head against his. ‘It’d be really selfish to make this about you, Donald. Fleur deserves the chance to do this in her own way.’

Jocelyn’s ice-blue eyes never moved from me as she spoke to my dad: she knew I’d been in regular contact with my mother – probably from snooping in my room. That would have upset me once upon a time, now it seemed quite insignificant compared to the fact my mother was gone. Dead.

‘Let her go and do what she needs to do in her own time. Then she can come back when she’s ready.’

Jocelyn was talking to my dad, but she was telling me not to come back. I’d always known she wasn’t thrilled about having me around, she hadn’t wanted kids, but she did want my dad so she’d pretended she wanted to be my mother figure. Like I say, she wasn’t nasty, more unbothered. Anyone who could see beyond their own hurt at being abandoned by the person they loved, i.e. anyone other than my dad, could see that she was completely uninterested in me. But Jocelyn telling me not to come back was to help me. She
was opening the doors to the beautiful, golden cage that I’d lived in all these years and she was telling me to fly away.
Look back if you need to,
her look was saying,
but don’t come back.