Letting You Go. Anouska Knight

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СКАЧАТЬ little mind to be left just so too. Sleep was for wimps, anyway, she was fine as she was. Jem had been all set for hiding out behind one of the waterfalls up at Godric’s Gorge and dodging the appointment altogether, but then her mum had given her that look. It had stilled Jem. Dill had gone. Then Alex. Jem had known instantly what that look had meant. Please don’t let me lose this kid too. Anything was preferable to seeing her mum look that way again, even an hour with Dr Bullock.

      ‘I feel that Jem is likely suffering from delayed anxiety. It’s only just been a year since your son’s death, Mrs Foster. Grief can manifest itself months, sometime years, later in all sorts of ways.’

      Jem shook her head against the pillow. Nitwit. Dr Bullock hadn’t the faintest idea that he’d been Jem’s unwitting accomplice.

      ‘The sleep issues have coincided with your sister Alexandra’s leaving for university, haven’t they?’ he’d asked. ‘The start of the Autumn term? Detachment issues? Fear of another sibling leaving the family home? All very explicable.’ All very perceptive of the doctor. Only he’d missed that the sleeplessness had also coincided with the Autumn term at Eilidh High too, and the return of two bus journeys a day with Carrie’s crew.

      It had been a lot like being stuck on the school bus, trundling sluggishly through her own psychoanalysis, sitting politely while Dr Bullock made all the necessary stops on the way to his grand resolution. The friend conversation, the boyfriend conversation, the drastic-new-hair conversation. Jem had felt an inexplicable sense of relief when they’d finally gotten around to the Dill conversation.

      Spilling about her argument with Dill in the days before the accident had been easy. Even sharing how she’d never thought those jagged words she’d thrown at him would be the last ones Dill would ever hear her say. She hadn’t meant to talk so much about that, but she had to give them something. And it had felt good almost, like loosening your fist and realising that your fingernails had been sticking into your palms all that time without you knowing. Her mum had nodded, as if it had all made perfect sense. This was something Blythe could work with; there was light at the end of the tunnel. Jem knew her mum had never suspected that Jem’s opening up had been an exercise in frugality. Give a little here so that the bigger things could be held back.

      Jem remembered her mum’s locket pressing uncomfortably against her ear as Blythe had locked Jem in an embrace in the car park afterwards. She remembered feeling her mother’s fingers deftly teasing strands of Jem’s new hairstyle and she’d known that Blythe was mourning the loss of something more than her little girl’s hair.

      ‘Jem? I don’t want there to be any more secrets between us, OK? Secrets can pull people apart. Even little ones,’ Blythe had whispered.

      Jem could have just said it. Right then. It had practically been a green light situation for sinking bad news. The words had been there, on the tip of her tongue. But then she’d felt the cold press of that tiny locket again, she’d pictured the little photographs it held inside of her conventional parents and their conventional marriage, and the truth had dissolved like sugar on her tongue.

      ‘OK, Mum,’ Jem had said. ‘No more secrets.’

CHAPTER 6

      Alex slowed for the approaching turnoff to Godric’s Gorge and the run of waterfalls after which the town was named. She knew the road by heart, how many dusty laybys there were to allow the occasional passing car making its way to or from the falls, the cluster of properties that lined the dusty track there and each of the families who lived in them. In one of those properties, the large cream farmhouse with the spindly wisteria her mum couldn’t get to grow right, Alex knew her dad would be awake already, drinking his morning coffee out on the front porch, smoking his first roll-up of the day. Alex let her hand hover over her indicator before settling it back onto the gear stick. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. The hospital ward wouldn’t let her in at six-thirty and Jem would probably still be sleeping up at the house, which wasn’t going to make conversation with her dad any easier.

      Jem had accused her of being paranoid. Ted wasn’t awkward around Alex, he was just usually preoccupied, that was all. Running a garage by himself took a lot of energy, didn’t it? Easy for Jem to say, she always had something useful to contribute. Knew how to pull a conversation right out of him.

      Alex automatically shifted up a gear and passed the turnoff for home. No point disturbing them this early. She followed the road down off the valley. Eilidh Falls high street was deserted, the only movement where great swathes of fabric in reds and golds fluttered lazily from the street lamps lining the road through the busiest part of town. Wait, was that a … ‘Bloody hell! There’s a huge dragon hanging off the Town Hall roof …’ Alex blurted.

      Jem hadn’t been kidding. She’d told Alex about Mayor Sinclair’s ramping up of the annual Eilidh Viking Festival a few times but it had never appealed, not that Alex had really grasped just how far the town had taken to gearing up for the festival, loosely based on the arrival of marauding Vikings to the area some 1200 years before.

      ‘Viking Fest is gonna be a national treasure eventually, Al. Like the cheese rolling in Gloucester!’

      Alex let her eyes follow an endless run of circular shields all along the old library gates as she drove past. ‘Flipping heck … It looks like something off the history channel … on acid.’

      Alex let her foot off the accelerator to take a slower look at the settlement of re-enactment tents down by the riverbank. Were they supposed to be the Anglo-Saxon presence then? A few of the tents looked more regal than the others, Alex was trying to get a better view and draw on her sketchy Viking knowledge from her St Cuthbert’s Primary days when something black appeared like an ominous apparition at the front end of her truck.

      ‘Shit!’

      Alex reacted, stamping on the brake, probably harder than was necessary. She bounced in her seat while the truck jarred to a halt around her. The eyes glaring back through the windscreen at her looked amused. Alex felt herself swallow and ready an apology for the burly gentleman in the business suit who’d just stepped straight off the kerb and directly into the bloody road in front of her, but something about his smile made her hesitate. She’d only been travelling at a jogging pace and wasn’t entirely convinced that his hands braced on her bonnet, cigarette still burning away where it was sandwiched between his knuckles, wasn’t a touch overly dramatic.

      Alex looked up at his face again and was reminded of a gorilla. Large and unpredictable. He definitely didn’t look like a local, tourist probably, not that the suit made any sense. Alex had nearly gotten her sorry out when he grinned. He lifted his hands and brought two balled fists down hard on her bonnet. Alex flinched. He seemed to approve of her silly girlish movement. ‘You stupid tart. Watch where you’re going,’ he delivered, his Hollywood smile sharpening the words as they left his mouth. Alex’s mouth dropped open a little, a nervous thumping started in her chest as he pushed himself off her truck and casually strolled over to the black four-by-four parked across the street. Alex swallowed and found her voice again.

      ‘Nice,’ she muttered, once the ape was safely back inside his truck and definitely couldn’t hear her. Alex had a rule about confrontation. She didn’t do it. Jem was the sister for that. Jem wasn’t backwards in going forwards like Alex, she was made of tougher stuff. Jem would’ve smiled sweetly just then and flipped the horrible git the Vs. Jem wouldn’t have been intimidated, she’d singlehandedly confronted a group of teenagers once for calling Millie Fairbanks Clubfoot; the girl had no fear.

      Alex began cruising again along the last СКАЧАТЬ