The Rose Petal Beach (37 page)

‘Now, come on, let’s get you out of the bath and into bed for storytime.’

I’m fine. Whatever that was, it’s from the same place as the running water. It’s just my imagination. It is not a piece of the jigsaw that is that night. It is not proof that I did it. It can’t be because I wouldn’t do that.

Sweetheart, I know she knows. Just talk to me. I think you owe me that much. Bea x

Four months ago

‘I want a baby.’

It was early on a Saturday morning, he was officially at the gym, he was actually here, in my bed, making all kinds of delectable love to me. Our bodies were intertwined as we lazily whiled away the morning.

‘Come on, Bea, what am I supposed to do with that?’ he asked.

‘I want a baby, Scotty. I’m not getting any younger and if you can’t or won’t, I’ll have to find someone who will.’ I wouldn’t, I wanted his baby, no one else’s. I hadn’t ever felt that urge before, but with him, I wanted him to look at me and love me as the mother of his children. I wanted him to have on his face the expression he had the day I first met him when he talked about her. I wanted him to be like that about me.

‘Don’t do that,’ he said.

‘I’m letting you know as a courtesy – I’m stopping the Pill, so as of now, you’re going to have to take care of contraception.’

‘Don’t do that,’ he repeated.

‘I’m not asking your permission. I’m serious – if you want to have sex, then you either wear a condom or take your chances.’

‘Bea, this isn’t fair. What you’re basically saying is I won’t get to live with at least one of my children if I keep on making love to you. I’ll have to choose between Cora and Anansy or your child. You know I can’t give you up.’

‘No, what I’m saying is you need to take care of contraception from now on or it’s likely I’ll get pregnant with your baby.’

‘And that’s your final word on the matter?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK.’

‘Can you tell me about my mother?’

I had no choice but to come here. Noah is great, but he doesn’t understand. His mother died when he was young and he was brought up by his grandmother and his dad and his sisters. He grew up with a family around him, with people who loved him, who knew him and who didn’t lie to him.

Mrs C lied to me, but she admitted it almost straightaway. She’s the only person I’ve met in a while who is honest with me.

She looked apprehensive when she opened the door, then her face relaxed into a grin as she saw it was me. ‘Fleur,’ she said, a smile in her voice. ‘It’s great to see you. I thought I’d alienated you for ever. Come in.’

I asked her if she would tell me about my mother before I stepped in. I was only there to get her to tell me about Mirabelle. Having the knowledge now that she hadn’t willingly abandoned me like I thought has been churning me up inside again. I’d been feeling settled, then I discovered the deal she made to get me a better life; the promises she probably made to the school to keep the smoking
incident off my record. I had to find out about her. I had to find out what she was like because I only knew her in pieces. I want the whole picture. I need to know about her.

‘Of course, I’ll tell you anything you want.’

Noah is up in London today at a meeting, so I was at a loose end. I walked around the North Laines for a bit, looking in all the little shops, doing that thing where I look for stuff that’s going to fit. I need sometimes to buy stuff that will fit in that part of me that is missing a piece. Out there is something that will fill the hole in me; will complete me. Weaving in and out of the shops not finding anything and feeling my anxiety rising, I had to get out. I ended up running to the seafront, getting somewhere that was wide open and free, that had space for me to breathe.

With the strong sea air blowing through me, clearing away the fog and the claustrophobia, I knew I had to find out about her. I was stuck where I was in my life because I didn’t know about her. She was gone, and so much was lost to me. Shut away. I had no way of getting her back. The house was still off limits and I couldn’t speak to my dad because he was a liar. I was without a phone because he was a liar.

‘Please don’t lie to me,’ I ask her as I follow her into the house.

Her house is so welcoming, so much like a home. My house growing up felt like a home, but it didn’t feel like this. There is so much of the people who live here jumping out at me from everywhere. The coats hooked over the banister at the bottom of the stairs, the assortment of shoes at the top end of the tiled corridor, where the overloaded coat stand lives. The large, brass-framed mirror as you walk in that is adorned with small fingerprints. The corridor walls covered with drawings by the girls, each one framed and mounted, with their name and age at the foot of it, a reminder of what they did at different stages of their young lives. The walls in every room I have seen have pictures of the girls. They had a couple of Mrs C and her husband, but not as many as the girls.

She takes me through to the kitchen and pulls out a chair for me to sit on.

On the butter-yellow sofa that is pushed up against the wall, little Anansy is installed under a pink duvet. She has her hair in bunches and she is wearing pink sheep-covered pjs.

‘Hello,’ she says, raising her hand briefly before going back to trying to push a large green frog into a small silver box.

‘Hello, I’m Fleur.’

‘Yes, I remember you. You’re Auntie Mirabelle’s daughter.’

‘That’s right,’ I say. That thing happens to me where I get a lump in my throat and my heart starts to race. It was so easy for her to say that. She knew it and she said it. It’s odd being around people like that.

‘Anansy is ill,’ Mrs C says with a slight raise of her eyebrows that tells me she thinks Anansy is pulling a fast one but has let her stay off school all the same.

Dutifully, Anansy forces out a little cough and rearranges her face to look pitiful enough to have been let off school.

‘I thought it was your tummy that felt funny?’ Mrs C says with another raised eyebrow.

‘It is, Mama, but my throat is a little bit coughy, too.’

‘Right,’ Mrs C replies with a ‘give me strength’ expression.
Just like a real mother would
, I think. I don’t remember if she, Mirabelle, was the kind of mother who let me stay off school if I was ill. I reckon she was all, ‘your head has to be falling off before I think about maybe letting you stay off’. Dad was always keen to keep me at home, but only when he had someone to look after me. When he was between ‘friends’ I had to go in no matter what. I push aside thoughts of him. I bet he’s been ringing my phone non-stop. I bet he’s getting himself all worked up and probably thinking about coming down here to drag my sorry ass back up to London. Well, that’s what happens to you when you’re a liar – people stop speaking to you.

‘Coffee?’ Mrs C asks me.

‘Yes, please,’ I say. I look at Anansy, and she grins at me, the pitiful look banished in an instant. I look around at Mrs C, to see if she’s noticed that her daughter is clearly not ill. Mrs C is at the other end of the kitchen with the kettle in one hand while staring at the tap as if it’s going to bite her if she touches it. I return my gaze to Anansy, who tells me to come and sit next to her by doing the ‘come here’ gesture quickly with her hand so her mother doesn’t see.

Doing as I’m told, I go over to the sofa and she scooches up, and grins at me again that I’m playing along. She’s cute. Proper cute. There are some girls who are just, you know, cute-looking and pretty-haired, but this one has cuteness running through her. And cheekiness. I’d love to see how Mrs C is going to deal with her when she gets older. There’ll be a line of boys outside the house.

‘Don’t think I haven’t noticed you’re not too sick to get yourself some company over there, Anansy Challey,’ Mrs C says, making both of us jump. We huddle together, pulling ‘we’re in trouble’ faces. Anansy shifts again, this time to put her legs on top of mine then the duvet over the pair of us.

I grin at her and she grins back at me, the hole where her front tooth should be adding to her over-the-top cuteness. She’s examining me, I realise. Looking at me at me like I’m something she’s just seen in her storybook for the first time. ‘You’re the little girl who’s like me, aren’t you?’ she says.

I frown at her, then look at Mrs C, who has apparently got over her fear of the tap and has placed her kettle on its stand, but pauses in switching it on.

Anansy could be right, I maybe looked a little like her when I was growing up, we have similar texture hair, and the same kind of lips, and maybe our eyes are slightly similar in shape, but we’re not really that much alike.

‘What are you saying, Ansy?’ Mrs C asks, her affectionate name for her daughter like a knife in my heart. She, Mirabelle, called me Fleury. And I told her I hated that name so she stopped. It was after
the time she called me Roza to her friend. I wanted to hurt her like she had hurt me by not telling people about me so I made her stop. I didn’t really hate it, I just wanted her to feel how bad I felt for a moment.

‘She’s the little girl who’s like me,’ the six-year-old on the sofa says to her mother. ‘Auntie Mirabelle told me.’

‘My mother told you I’m like you?’

‘She said there was a little girl who looked like me but she had hair that went all gold in the sun. And she said the little girl asked questions all the time and she liked the beach story too. She said she had to tell the little girl the beach story every night to go to sleep.’

‘When did she tell you this?’ Mrs C asks.

‘All the time. She told Cora too, but Cora didn’t really like to listen ’cos the little girl wasn’t like her, she was like me. Auntie Mirabelle said the little girl used to sometimes get freckles on her nose. And she was always trying to count the stars even though she couldn’t see them from her bedroom window.’

That little piece of me that is missing is opening up, it is getting wider and wider inside me. In bed every night I’d tell her I was going to count the stars after I had my story.
‘How are you going to do that, Fleury-Boo, when you can’t see the stars from your bed?’ she would ask.

‘I know they’re there, Mum,’ I would say back. ‘So I just have to count them in my pretending.’

‘That’s a good idea,’ she’d say.

‘What else did she say?’ Mrs C asks, which I’m grateful for because I can’t speak.

Anansy shrugs her little pj’d shoulders and goes back to concentrating on stuffing the frog in the box, even though bits of it keep springing out. ‘I think I don’t remember, actually.’

‘Just try,’ Mrs C coaxes.

‘OK. She said the little girl liked cows and she used to buy her little toy cows all the time. And I said that wasn’t like me because
I like sheep. And frogs. And pigs. And rabbits. And horses. And Auntie Mirabelle said the little girl liked all of those, too, but she liked cows most of all. She said she sewed the little girl a cow blanket once that felt all soft like a cow, so the little girl could cuddle it when she went to sleep.’

‘I was never there when she said these things,’ Mrs C says.

‘Yes you were, Mama. She said it all the time. But you were too busy making the dinner, I think.’

‘Oh, OK,’ Mrs C says.

‘I asked if I could play with the little girl but Auntie Mirabelle said she was all grown up now. And I said that doesn’t matter I could still play with her. And Auntie Mirabelle said “I would like that, and so would she. I’ll ask her one day, shall I?” And I said, yes.’ Anansy raises her forefinger to point at me. ‘That little girl is you, isn’t it?’

My head is nodding because I still can’t speak. I feel like my heart is caving in, like everything she is saying is causing me to crumble inside.

‘Do you still have your cow blanket?’ she asks.

I do, I want to tell her. I packed it up and took it with me. It’s so old and the soft furriness of it now threadbare, the black cow splodges almost completely faded out, but I’d had it since I was tiny, and every night I slept at home, I folded it under my chin and would hold onto it. I brought it with me because it was as much a part of me as the skin on my body, but I’d put it away since Noah had arrived. (Didn’t want him thinking I was a freak or nothing like that.)

I didn’t know she had made it for me. It was obviously handmade, the seams all crooked and the stitching uneven, but I’d had it as long as I could remember, so just assumed it’d been given to me by a relative who couldn’t sew straight. I didn’t realise that all these years, I’d had something she had made with love for me. I nod at the little girl again.

‘Can I see it?’

‘She hasn’t got it here, you know, Ansy. Maybe you can see it another time.’

‘Would you like to play with me?’ Anansy asks, holding out the frog and the little silver box. ‘I’m trying to make a frog in a box to surprise Cora. I want it to jump and say boo at her. I have to do the boo bit, but I think I can do it if I get it into the box. Do you want to play?’

‘Yes,’ I say and have to clear my throat twice of the lump in it to say that word. ‘I would like to play with you very much.’

Anansy grins again. ‘Auntie Mirabelle was right.’

Sixteen years ago

‘Do you want me to tell you the story of The Rose Petal Beach?’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’

‘Well then, Fleury-Boo, get into bed and I will start. But you mustn’t be sad if you fall asleep, I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow.’

‘I won’t fall asleep, Mum.’

‘You say that every night and every night you fall asleep.’