We've Come to Take You Home (3 page)

FIVE

S
AM SAT UP IN
bed, her body knotted tight, her senses stretched thin. Her father was driving away from the home, where the three of them lived together, for what could be the last time. And she had overslept.

She hurled herself out of bed. She ran out of her room and along the landing towards the stairs. The door of her parents' bedroom opened.

‘Sam?'

She kept running.

‘Where are you going?'

She pulled open the front door, ran down the steps, down the path, through the gate and out onto the pavement. Her father's car was moving away, down the hill, towards the promenade. There was still time.

‘Sam? What are you doing?'

She was grabbed from behind, so roughly that her arm was almost wrenched out of its socket.

‘Come here.'

She twisted and turned but her mother's grip only tightened.

‘Sam, enough of this, now, do you hear?'

The left indicator flashed. The car slowed down and then stopped. She dragged herself out of her mother's arms and ran, her feet slapping down hard against the wet tarmac. She didn't notice the sea, grey in the dawn, the first ferry of the day on its way over to France. She didn't see the streetlights,
snaking away down the hill, switch off one by one. She just ran, the freezing cold rain beating up against the warmth of her body, towards the car where her father was sitting, leaning forward, clipping on his seat belt.

‘Dad! Stop! Stop! Wait…'

But now the car was accelerating away. And still she pushed herself forward.

‘Dad!' she screamed.

Seconds before, she'd been wearing jeans, jumper and socks, the clothes she'd gone to bed in, and she'd been shivering with cold. Now she was wearing a heavy coat, tightly laced boots and she was sweating. She had been running down the road towards her father's car. Now she was walking down a narrow footpath squeezed between a wire fence and high, brick wall. Who was she? Where was she going? What was she doing here? She had no option other than to obey the feet of the person whose clothes she was wearing.

A low, insistent drumming was getting, slowly and steadily, louder and nearer. A dull thump and the ground beneath her rocked and heaved. And now the drumming was no longer background, but foreground, drilling its way into every bone and sinew of her body. Up ahead, flying towards her out of the early morning sun, was a plane. Another thump was followed by another rock and heave. A huge ball of fire billowed up into the sky.

The footpath opened out into a yard between two derelict warehouses. The metallic throb of the plane's engine was so loud there might have been ten, twenty, thirty planes up there, flying towards her, rather than just the one.

Out here, if the plane dropped a bomb, she would be killed. She had to get inside. She ran towards the nearest warehouse. She pushed on the door. It stayed closed. She threw herself at the door. It refused to move. She tried one more time. Metal clanked down onto concrete. The door opened.

She was in a hallway. In front of her was a staircase lit by a single window. It would be safer on the ground floor. And she would be safer further inside. To her right was a set of double doors. She pushed. They opened easily. Ahead of her was the main storage area of the warehouse. It was empty and instead of being dark, which was what she had been expecting, it was light. She looked up. Above her was a glass roof. Directly over the roof was the plane.

A deep boom reverberated up towards the sky, the air around her shuddered, and then the warehouse disappeared in a blinding flash of white light.

The light faded to grey. And Sam was left, standing, trembling, in the middle of the road, staring at her father's car driving off into the distance.

‘Sam, come on now, you're soaked through…'

How could she explain?

‘I'll make us some tea.'

It had happened again, just like it had happened yesterday – the slip out of her life into another's.

‘Why don't you run yourself a bath? Put on some dry clothes. I'll make us some breakfast…'

Sam pushed past her mother. She ran up the stairs, along the landing and into her bedroom. She grabbed her mobile. She punched in her father's number. If she rang enough times, again and again, there was a good chance that he would pull over and answer. But what was she going to say? That yesterday, at the fairground, she'd suddenly found herself standing on the platform of a station where hundreds of wounded were being loaded off a train? That she'd been running towards his car, the road had disappeared and then she was walking down a footpath and there was this plane flying towards her? She couldn't. He would think that she was crazy.

SIX

‘B
UT WHERE IS HE
going to live?'

‘I don't know Sam. He'll probably rent or share a flat or something…'

Her mother hurtled, without indicating, into the right hand lane of the roundabout.

‘But will I still see him?'

‘Of course you will.'

‘But how? If he's always away and when he's at home, he's not living with us, but sharing a flat–'

‘Everything will be all right.'

‘But how will everything be all right?'

There were so many things that made her parents so different from each other that it was, perhaps, surprising they'd lasted together this long.

Her mother liked her garden to grow wild, so the plants, even the weeds, could reveal their true shape and character. Her father preferred to prune everything into order. Her mother's idea of heaven was a long, lazy afternoon sipping wine on the terrace of a Greek taverna. Her father didn't think a holiday was a holiday until he'd ridden the largest wave. Her mother disliked cars and anything to do with cars, describing them as ‘boring, little metal boxes on wheels', while her father insisted on driving the largest and the fastest.

‘We'll sort something out.'

‘Like what?'

‘Now what do you want for supper? I could do that new recipe…'

Her mother wasn't talking to Sam. She was talking at her as if she was a teacher standing on a platform at the front of the classroom and Sam was some rather small, stupid child, sitting down below, squeezed behind a desk.

‘I saw it on the television, on that Saturday morning cookery programme…'

Sam closed her eyes. If she had a brother or sister, there would be someone to talk to, to share all this with.

‘Rosemary chicken with tomato sauce…'

Her father had told her that when she was very small, not more than two years old, she'd had invisible friends. They'd come in the evening, after she'd been put to bed, when her mother was reading a story. These friends weren't children. When they walked into the room, she would look up, not down. And whoever, or whatever they were, she wasn't frightened of them. Her eyes would light up and she would laugh and giggle, tugging at her mother's hand, whenever they appeared.

But it gave her mother the spooks. When her father told her that she should be grateful that their daughter's invisible friends were at least people, not animals, lolloping, great horses galloping around the place, or heavy-weight tigers whose favourite past-time was lolling around on the sofa, her mother hadn't found it particularly funny.

She'd taken Sam straight to the doctor. He just laughed and said there wasn't anything to worry about. All children went through the invisible friends phase and, in Sam's case, it wasn't in the least surprising given she was an only child, but they ought to come back if the ‘friends' were still around when she reached sixteen. Because then there really would be something to worry about.

And then one night, during a thunderstorm, her mother
had come into Sam's bedroom. She had expected to find her daughter curled up, shivering with fear, under the duvet. Instead she had found Sam standing on a stool, in front of the window, waving at the lightning forking through the sky. When, a few seconds later, thunder rumbled and cracked over the house Sam had jumped up and down, clapping her hands. How had she got onto the stool? It was too high even for the most determined two-year-old. And how had she opened the curtains? Which her father swore, again and again, he had pulled, tight shut, over the window before putting Sam to bed.

Her mother had insisted that they move; if Sam's invisible friends were ghosts, people who had died in the house, they would want to remain where they were, not follow them to their new home. Sam's father, a committed ghost non-believer, had agreed but very reluctantly.

So they left the two-hundred-year-old cottage, with its dark corners, low ceilings and sloping walls, in the town with a castle, a ruined priory and steep, cobbled streets. And they moved, just a half-hour drive away, to a newly built house, so new that it would be impossible for anyone to have had the time to die in it, on a hill overlooking the sea.

‘Sam, did you hear what I said?'

There was a squeal of brakes followed by an angry honking. Sam opened her eyes. She was still alive. But only just.

‘What would you like for supper? Because I'd like to have a go at that new recipe, rosemary chicken in tomato sauce? The one I was telling you about when you weren't listening?'

Her mother adored food; she talked about it endlessly, read every magazine, watched every television programme, browsed every website. But, after hours of slaving away in the kitchen whatever it was, a fish pie, spaghetti bolognese, even an omelette, would always end up a dried up, burnt disaster. Her father used to joke that if he hadn't learnt to throw a chop
on a plate they would have starved. But the next time he flew back he would not be coming home.

‘We could have baked potatoes. Or pasta…'

Her mother's phone rang out.

‘Answer it, Sam.'

‘Hello?'

There was a pause and then a voice asked if she was Mrs Rachel Foster.

‘I'm Sam. Sam Foster. Rachel Foster's my mother.'

The voice asked if her mother was there and, if so, was it possible to speak to her.

‘Mum, it's someone, a woman, she wants to speak to you.'

Her mother pulled up at the side of the road.

‘It's probably the office…'

It was rare, very rare indeed, for her mother to get a phone call from work on a Sunday.

‘Hello, Rachel Foster speaking.'

Sam stared out at the road ahead.

‘Michael Foster? Yes, he's my husband.'

She darted a look across at her mother.

‘He's been in an accident?'

The smile had been replaced by a tight-lipped frown.

‘Which hospital?'

The knuckles of her mother's left hand, where she was grasping hold of the steering wheel, were white with tension.

‘Yes. I understand. Thank you. I'll come straight away.'

SEVEN

April 1916

‘R
OCK - A - BYE BABY
on the tree top…'

The official looking envelope, addressed to her father, with OHMS printed on the front, had been delivered just three days earlier.

‘When the wind blows the cradle will rock…'

It had arrived on Saturday. Now it was Tuesday.

‘When the bough breaks the cradle will fall…'

Her father had to report to the barracks in Winchester, a train journey away, no later than two o'clock.

‘There's some cheese…'

Her mother's face was blotched and swollen with crying.

‘And some pickle…'

Her father held her tight.

‘… And down will come baby, cradle and all.'

It was the same lullaby her mother had sung to Jess when she was a baby. And now she was singing it to her brother.

Her father whispered something and then he pushed her mother gently back out of his embrace. He turned to Jess and lifted her brother out of her arms. He'd woken up, crying, in the middle of the night. He had continued to cry into the morning and was still crying now.

Her father bounced the kicking and screaming baby up and down, up and down, singing to him softly. Her brother's eyes fluttered, once, twice, and then closed – and stayed closed as her father handed him over to her mother.

‘Jess, will you walk with me, just up the hill? Will you come with me?'

They were the same words she had said to her father, almost begged of him, the morning of her first day at school. And he had walked her, his large, strong hand holding her small, trembling hand, up the hill and down into the valley. But now, almost ten years later, as they walked down the path towards the gate, it was her hand that was steady and her father's that was trembling.

They climbed the white chalk track that led up onto the ridge. It was her favourite place, standing there on top of the world: to the east and west, Mount Caburn, Firle Beacon, Seaford Head, Kingston Hill and Hollingbury Castle; to the south, the English Channel stretching away to France; to the north, the fields and copses of the Weald rolling away, mile upon mile, towards London.

But now, standing there on top of the Downs, her father's smiling eyes had changed. They were like those of a fox, surrounded by a pack of hounds, knowing there was no escape.

She had seen the end of a chase, just the once, in the field at the bottom of Cradle Hill. She had been beside the stream, collecting firewood, when a fox had limped down towards her. It had sunk down, exhausted, in a ditch just a short distance from where she was standing.

‘Come away now, Jess, there's nothing you can do.'

Her father had put his arm around her.

‘The day we're born is the day we die. It don't matter if we're rich or poor, man, woman, or beast. When it's your time there's nothing you can do about it. We're all the same…'

Her father had led her away, along the path through the trees, as the hounds streamed down the slope to where the fox sat, hunched, waiting in the ditch.

The same father now stepped forward and put his arms around her. She buried herself in his familiar warmth.

‘Promise me, however bad it gets… promise me, you'll not give up, not ever. Promise me…'

Usually, when she was standing up on the top of the Downs, it would be silent except for the wind sighing through the gorse bushes and the call of a solitary buzzard or kestrel circling overhead. But today there was a sound she'd never heard before; a low, insistent drumming which was getting, slowly and steadily, louder and nearer. Then, out of nowhere, without any warning, an enormous, white, insect-like object swooped down out of the sky.

She'd heard people talk about them. There had been pictures in the newspapers. But this was the first time she'd actually seen one.

‘Look, a flying machine.'

She raised her arm to wave. Her father took hold of her wrist.

‘Those black crosses on its wings, it's an enemy plane.'

‘What's it doing here?'

His grip tightened.

‘Go home now, Jess.'

‘But –'

He pushed her away.

‘Do as I say.'

She went back down the track. Every few paces she turned to look back. Each time her father was still there, exactly where she had left him. When she reached the bottom of the hill she turned and she waved. And he waved back.

She didn't move. She didn't turn off towards the cottage. She couldn't. She just stood there, waving and waiting. And when he gestured with his arm, she knew that he was saying, ‘Go on, you must go home now'. And that is what she did, leaving him, a small, dark figure, standing alone on top of the hill, still waving.