Away From It All (6 page)

‘Oh it's you Alice! Here for long?' she said, then went on without waiting for a response. ‘The sea air will put the colour back in your cheeks. And how's your mother? Getting better? Not like her to have the doctor in. We were only saying . . .'

‘Hello Mrs Rice, it's good to be back. Joss is much better thanks – should be fine,' Alice declared breezily, stepping quickly past to find bread, milk and the
Independent
as well as a restock of basic cleaning material. Mo had asked for help – the best Alice could do for now, she decided, was to sort out the health hazard that passed for a kitchen and give Gosling a complete overhaul. She didn't look back at Mrs Rice's face. She knew that disappointment would be etched in every sun-baked jowl. Like Cilla Black anticipating
a
Blind Date
wedding, she'd have been eagerly trimming new magpie feathers onto her best funeral hat.

At the back of Penmorrow, close to where Harry's polytunnels hid both illicit and legal crops, there were many rickety sheds that Noel had once rudely (and ignorantly, Grace had thought) compared to a small Third World shanty town. Some had slabs of corrugated iron patching rotted roofs, others had mismatched chunks of old fencing where whole sides had given way. One was simply a bare skeleton of a structure, covered with a blue tarpaulin as if it had grown itself a protective tent beneath which to decay in private. At least it was rainproof and was where Harry kept the ancient ride-on mower for cutting down the meadow and the orchard twice a year.

Theo and Grace went to see if Alice's old cart was still hidden away among dismantled hen houses, perished goat-tethers and the heaps of ancient compost on which, Alice had said, mushrooms used to be grown for the household. Theo was treading carefully – his new Globe CT-V skate shoes were not really built for accidentally stepping on the sharp side of an abandoned scythe or paddling in spilled chainsaw oil. ‘You've got shoes that look like bumper cars at the price of a family saloon,' his father had commented sourly when Theo had first worn them. Oh funny ha ha, Dad, Theo had thought, wondering if Noel had spent his own fifteen-to-twenty years in a deep cavern somewhere in a remote mountain revising schoolwork.

‘Can you see anything?' Grace called to him from the far side of a heap of old paint cans.

‘Like what? Like just
what
are we looking for?'

Grace didn't snap back. She recognized he was just doing an ‘I'm too cool for this stuff' act.

‘I told you. A little pull-along cart, bits of wood on pram wheels. Mum said Arthur used to tow her around on it when she was really small. It'll be just what we need: I'm not lugging that rabbit all the way up the cliffs by hand.'

‘I don't know any Arthur, who's Arthur? Can't you just let it go in the garden like you always used to?' Theo had got something sticky on his hands. He wiped them down his jeans and hoped it wasn't paint or something that stank.

‘You do know Arthur, well you know
about
him – he lived here with all of them. One of Joss's men. Did the statues. There's two in the Tate. He's – was – famous. Oh come on Theo, you heard what Chas and Sam said. Harry's been shooting rabbits. And this one's white – even a crap shot could hardly miss him. He'll look like a fat pillow, sitting on the grass at dusk.'

‘You should've got a black one then,' Theo muttered, edging towards the sunlight beyond the door. ‘Come on, there's nothing in here.'

As they made their way to the next shed, Mo's chickens in their tatty baked-earth run started up a warning cluck.

‘See, they're being watch-hens. Geese are better though – Mum says geese really scare away burglars.'

‘So do Rottweilers and burglar alarms and video entry systems,' Theo grunted moodily. Grace always did this at Penmorrow – she went on about her mother's childhood as if she'd been there herself. She was all right in Richmond – she watched telly and wore little cropped-off tops and played computer games and read stupid-girl magazines just like everyone else. It was here she changed. A couple of weeks
of this, Theo thought, and she'd be dressing up in hippy beads and going veggie and whittling herself a wand. Just rad. Not.

Alice left the bags of shopping with Mrs Rice, who'd promised that her grandson Jason would deliver them later on his moped.

‘It's good to see the traditional village-shop service still going,' Aidan commented as they left the shop and turned off along the seafront towards the beach café.

Alice laughed. ‘I think it's more a case of old traditional curiosity,' she told him. ‘Penmorrow has always been a great source of gossip. I bet you'll still hear the words “hippy commune” if you hang out long enough.'

‘That's what I need for Joss's book – the locals' perspective,' Aidan said. ‘Joss has got plenty of fantastic stories about her own life but I need to fill in more background. I need to know how the outside-world part of this village fitted in. Can you help me with that while you're here? Would you mind?'

Alice thought for a moment, stopping to lean on the sea wall and staring out at the incoming waves. ‘No I don't mind,' she told him. ‘Obviously I don't remember the early years – I was only born six months after Joss bought Penmorrow and she'd already had her book published and got the most out of being famous. But I can remember what growing up here was like.' She frowned and turned to Aidan. ‘I bet Joss made it all sound completely idyllic.'

Aidan smiled. ‘Yes she did, rather. Lots of waving her arms around and accusing me of having a stifled upbringing, just because I had two parents, one ordinary home and regular schooling. Apparently,
I need to be “freed from my imprisoning demons”, whatever that means.'

‘I think it means “lie back and chill”,' Alice told him. ‘Which is all very well but you've got a job to do and probably a deadline to meet.'

‘And a publisher who's terrified Joss will die and I won't even be halfway through.' He shuffled a bit. ‘Sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned the “D” word, not tactful of me.'

‘It's OK. It's time I stopped thinking of her as immortal – though she's fairly young really, compared with most who get ill. If it wasn't for all the smoke she's inhaled over the years . . .'

‘Not all of it the stuff you can buy at the village shop, I'd guess,' he chuckled.

‘Now that reminds me – something I thought of this morning. Come down to the café and I'll tell you,' she said, leading the way to the few steps down to the sand.

The beach café, was a long timber shack painted to resemble someone's idea of a Caribbean roadside bar. Dancing figures holding cans of drink cavorted on the sun-faded blue paintwork, with fronds of exotic blooms swagged above them beneath the overhanging rusted tin roof. Outside, sun-paled wooden tables and chairs were filling with a mixture of families and tanned young surfers enjoying the warming sun. It was going to be a good day, profit-wise, Alice guessed. Joss had bought the café years before to thwart the council's proposal to pull it down, and Harry had been installed as manager. These days his only involvement was collecting the annual rent from whoever had applied to take on the lease for the current season, as well as hanging out with the boys who ran the adjoining surf school in the hope that their youth and vitality would rub off on him.

Aidan fetched two mugs of coffee and sat beside Alice facing the sea.

‘Surf's a whole culture down here, isn't it?' he commented, watching a girl riding her board effortlessly across the bay. ‘It's a language and dress code miles away from up-country cities.'

‘Oh I don't know – Grace and her friends wear a lot of stuff made by surf companies. Though I suppose some of them might not realize it. I mean look at you – surf-label man.'

Aidan looked down at his clothes with mild surprise. ‘Hey, the cream of St Ives this lot, bought on a sad conformist urge to fit in.' He sipped his coffee and looked at her intently. ‘Tell me what you remembered. Do you mind if I use this?' He produced a tiny chrome gadget from his jeans. ‘It's a tape recorder, except it's electronic, no tape, too clever.'

‘No, go ahead. I haven't got anything profound to tell you though. It's just . . . well this morning when a mouse jumped out of the fridge . . .'

‘They're everywhere up there, aren't they?' Aidan cut in. ‘I saw Mo step over one, really politely, in the kitchen yesterday.'

‘I'll sneak in a few humane traps. Anyway . . . I said something about mushrooms growing in the fridge and I remembered a time when Joss and Milly cooked some that none of us kids were allowed to eat. We thought they were mad – especially as they didn't eat them either, they just strained off the juice and made a kind of tea with it. All the grown-ups drank it. But we had a cat called Brian who sneaked onto the table and wolfed down some of the cooked mushrooms. All the next day he was seen out in the village, sitting under cars, howling and growling to himself and getting spooked by shadows – poor thing was
obviously hallucinating. I think that's where all the rumours of witchcraft started. The poor cat was never the same again, damaged and paranoid for evermore.'

‘Magic mushrooms then.'

‘Exactly, but what I'm trying to say is that it's only years later you can make sense of things. I always thought he was a witch-cat too and for months I wouldn't eat mushrooms because we'd been so firmly told not to that day! I suppose any memories I can give you are likely to be tainted by grown-up knowledge. All that naivety has long gone.'

‘Well it's an autobiography so they're Joss's words,' Aidan said, raising his fingers in the air to indicate quote marks. ‘I get the feeling she's still living in wonderland.'

‘That's why she called me Alice. Disappointing for her though – I turned out to feel far more at home with reality.'

Up on the cliff path, Grace hauled the wheeled cart along behind her and wondered if it had been such a good idea. The path was narrow and stony and the poor rabbit was huddled at the back of his carrier looking as if he was feeling severely sick. Theo was being no use at all. He was skulking along yards behind her with his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his floor-trailing jeans, as if he didn't want to be seen to be part of this plan.

‘We should have left it till the evening,' she called back to him. ‘It wouldn't be so hot.'

‘Well you can change your mind if you want but I'm not coming back up here.'

‘What? Cos it's a bit steep? Wassup you wuss, too much for you is it?' she taunted him. It was true, it was a steep and rocky climb, but at the top was one of her
favourite places in the whole of Tremorwell – a grassy headland with a small glade of gale-bent trees that sheltered a bench overlooking the sea, the village and across to Penmorrow up the hill on the far side of the bay. Ever since she was little she'd found it a good place to run off to when she felt torn between Jocelyn's more extreme notions of free living and Alice's counterbalancing sensible ones.

Joss would say, ‘If you rig up a long rope to the walnut tree, you can swing right down the cliff to the east beach.' At which Grace would be straight out to the sheds plaiting old bailer twine.

Then Alice would get her on her own and it would be, ‘Don't even think of doing it – half the cliff has crumbled away since Joss last swung on a rope. One slip and it's fifty foot onto rocks.'

At the top of the cliff Grace stopped to catch her breath and wait for Theo. The old bench was still there and the surrounding thick patches of thrift showed that not many people had spent long sitting on it, scuffing the ground. That was good. It meant that Grace could still claim it as her own refuge. Chas and Sam wouldn't be up there either, or Harry in pursuit of her rabbit with his shotgun. With luck the animal would be OK – there were plenty of rabbit droppings around so he'd have a chance to make his own free-range rabbit family.

‘OK? Let him out yet?' Theo staggered up the last of the path and slumped down beside her. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his jeans and lit one, cupping his lighter carefully against the sea breeze.

‘Good view,' he commented, looking out towards the sea and across to Penmorrow's perch on the opposite hillside.

‘Glad you like it,' Grace said, wishing that hadn't
come out sounding so sharp and sarky. She really
was
glad he liked it. Sometimes they got on well, sometimes not. She enjoyed the good days – then he was like a real brother. She wanted him to like Cornwall too though, not just ordinary home things like lying around on the sitting-room floor and watching
Malcolm in the Middle
together.

Grace got up to scatter some rabbit food under the trees, then pulled the plastic pet-box off the truck and sat it on the bench beside her.

‘Here we go bunny, freedom for you.' She opened the door and took out the bemused creature who sat for a moment on her lap, stretching his cramped legs.

‘Have a lovely life, rabbit. Off you go.' She put him gently on the ground. The white rabbit looked around, choosing his direction, then, after a few tentative hops, gave a big kicking leap and bolted off into the bushes.

‘He should be all right. Safe from Chas and Sam and Harry anyway,' Grace said, putting the empty box back on the wheeled truck.

‘Shit! What was that?' Theo put his hand to his face and then looked at it, his fingers covered with blood. ‘I've been shot or stung or something! That hurt!'

‘Let's look.' Grace inspected his face. There was a small cut just below his eye. ‘I don't think there's a bullet in there somehow,' she told him. There was a distant whooping below them. Chas and Sam were doing a mad dance down on the beach, waving some kind of weapon over their heads.

‘It was them! They're watching us up here! What've they got? Can you see Theo?'