Cherry Blossom Dreams (6 page)

‘Hi, Granny!’ he said breezily. ‘Mum was phoning you to tell you that she and Leo got engaged on holiday! It’s cool, isn’t it? Leo’s going to be your new son-in-law.’

Leo stood there gaping at him.

A long silence followed, and then Sean said, ‘Granny, are you still there?’

Her delayed but extremely loud exclamation of disbelief was audible to all of us. Sean grinned as he reassured Granny that of course he wasn’t joking and even offered to hand her over to Leo again to corroborate the news.

Leo shook his head furiously at that idea but he needn’t have worried because the only person Granny really wanted to speak to was Mum. Sean told her to try Mum on her mobile and then he listened for a few more minutes, murmuring, ‘OK, Granny, see you then,’ a couple of times. Finally he hung up, looking very pleased with himself.

‘Mum’s going to kill you, Sean,’ I told him.

‘Not if I do it first,’ Leo said grimly.

‘Look, Mum didn’t want to tell Granny, so now I’ve done the job for her. She’s going to thank me,’ my brother protested.

‘Not after your grandmother’s called her at work and given her an earful,’ Leo pointed out.

‘Mum’ll see it’s Granny and she won’t answer,’ Sean said smoothly. ‘That’s why you
have
caller display, Leo. So you can see who it is
before
you pick up the phone. Oh … before I forget, Granny wants to come and visit us this week. I think she wants to make sure you haven’t brainwashed Mum into marrying you or anything!’

‘This week?
When
this week?’ Leo sounded horrified.

‘Wednesday or Thursday probably. She’s ringing back to let us know.’

Leo pulled such a face that I couldn’t help wondering if he was having second thoughts about joining our family.

Mum got home half an hour later and was full of smiles, even though she’d had a conversation with Granny. Leo and Sean and I were watching an action movie with lots of shooting in it. Mum walked straight into the living room, picked up the remote and switched off the TV.

‘HEY!’ the three of us shouted indignantly.

‘You shouldn’t be watching such a violent film. It’s not good for you.’ She sounded just like Granny, though none of us dared tell her that.

‘Don’t worry, Annie. There were no really gross scenes,’ Leo said jokily. ‘The blood didn’t even look real, did it, kids?’

Mum gave him a
you’re-not-funny
sort of look as she turned to us. ‘Guess what? It looks like we might have a buyer for Blossom House.’

‘No way!’ Instantly I felt panicked. I looked at Sean, who was clearly equally horrified.

‘Yes. We’ve got a new client who’s actually considering paying the full asking price. Miranda showed him round while we were in Greece apparently.

‘But, Mum, you said nobody would ever be interested in Blossom House while it was so overpriced,’ I protested.

Mum was nodding. ‘Yes. It’s a bit of a surprise, I must say! Miranda thinks he must have more money than sense.’

‘But –’ I gulped. I didn’t know what to say.

‘Are you all right, Sasha?’ Leo asked.

I quickly put a fake smile on my face and stood up. ‘Sure. I’m going upstairs. I want to catch up on my homework before school.’

Sean started to follow – I could tell he was worried now about that stupid snake – but Mum called out sharply from the living room. ‘Sean! Come back in here! I want to talk to you!’

‘She probably wants to talk about what you said to Granny,’ I murmured. He rolled his eyes and turned back.

As I continued upstairs I passed the picture of Grandpa in his magician’s costume, then the blown-up photograph of white cherry blossom our dad had taken in the park a few weeks before he died.

I felt my eyes fill up at the thought that we might be about to lose Blossom House after all this time. I forced the tears back down and gave myself a fierce talking to:
Come on, Sasha! It’s just a house. No matter how much you love it, it’s not like you’re losing an actual person …

Maybe this is the point where I should tell you a bit about our dad.

Sean and I were five when he collapsed suddenly one afternoon on the floor of our living room. As I watched him being taken away in the ambulance, I don’t think I had any actual thoughts at the time about not seeing him ever again. But I do remember a certain feeling that I had – as if something catastrophic was happening or was about to happen.

It had started out as a perfectly ordinary day. Sean and I were playing ‘Knights and Princesses’ and Sean was rescuing me. At first we didn’t notice anything was wrong, then Mum was all panicky, talking and crying on the phone, and rushing us out of the room. An ambulance appeared and we watched our dad being loaded into it on a stretcher. Our neighbour came to look after us while Mum went with him to the hospital. She fed us lots of biscuits and let us watch TV until really late, and when we woke up the next morning Granny was there and Mum was in her room in bed as if
she
was the one who was ill. Granny had to sit with Mum the whole time until the doctor came and gave her some medicine to help her sleep.

Granny and the doctor sat Sean and me down and told us together that our daddy had died in the night.

I can remember a few bits about the funeral service. I remember thinking our dad might actually be there in some form or another, and being quite disappointed when he wasn’t. I think I asked Granny where he was in the church and she pointed to the coffin, but I still didn’t really understand what was going on.

Afterwards a lot of people came back to our house and I remember sitting with Sean on the patio, trying to change the direction of an army of ants by feeding them a trail of breadcrumbs. It was a sunny day and people were standing on the grass in black clothes, talking to each other and eating party food.

Some grown-ups we didn’t know came over to talk to us, wanting to know what we were doing. They immediately donated some of their strawberry tart to our ant project, advising us that ants especially liked sweet things. Sure enough we soon had that ant army under our control.

‘Do you know our daddy?’ I remember asking them.

At the mention of our dad, Sean started looking around the garden as if he was trying to spot him. He’d been doing that a lot.

‘Daddy’s not here,’ I reminded him in my most grown-up, talking-to-a-baby sort of voice. ‘He’s
dead
, remember?’

‘I know that,
stupid
!’ And he gave me a massive shove and started stamping all over the ants.

Mum thinks that Sean and I were too young to experience proper grief when our dad died. She even thinks it’s a blessing we didn’t lose him later on, when she reckons it would have hurt us more. But I don’t agree with her on that. I wish I could remember him as an actual person a lot better, instead of just being left with some faint and disjointed memories and that achy feeling of
wanting him
that I can remember as clearly as anything.

Mum seemed to cry all the time after he died and sometimes it felt like she was never going to stop. Granny gave up trying to distract her in the end, and basically left her to it when she was crying, concentrating on looking after Sean and me instead.

Mum says her heart broke that day and I’m sure it was true because for a long time it was as if she’d just sort of ground to a halt. Sometimes she wanted to be left alone. Other times she couldn’t bear to be on her own, not even to sleep, and we’d all go to sleep together, me, Sean and Mum, in her big bed. Lily’s mum used to come in the mornings to take us to school, and on really bad days Mum wouldn’t even be up and she’d tell Sean and me not to bother answering the door. Granny came over every day to check up on us (she still lived in the same town as us then) and after a while she ended up moving in with us. She told Sean and me we had to be very grown up and help her look after Mum.

At home I tried to be as grown up and helpful as possible but at school all I wanted to do was draw pictures. I drew lots of different pictures of heaven, all with blue skies, beaches, flowers, bright sunshine, with my dad standing in the middle with his sunhat on and his camera round his neck and a big smile on his face. I drew him a little house to live in and a dog, because I knew he’d always wanted one.

I remember Sean and I went to see a lady who was especially interested in our drawings and the same lady helped Sean and me write goodbye messages to our dad on little coloured labels, which we tied to red balloons and let go of one windy day, watching and waving until they were tiny red dots in the sky. I wrote ‘GOODBYE, DADDY, I LOVE YOU’ on mine, though I had to get some help with the spelling. Sean wasn’t very good at writing so he drew a picture of Dad and him holding hands.

When we were a bit older it was Granny who explained why our dad had died that day. We already knew that it had started with a headache that was so bad it had made him fall on to the floor. I always got worried whenever Mum had a headache and once, when she had a really bad one, I started to cry. That was what prompted Granny to talk to us and she pointed out that mostly when you have a headache it
doesn’t
mean you’re about to die. Our dad’s headache wasn’t anything like a normal one, she said. It had happened because a faulty blood vessel in his brain had suddenly burst and caused too much brain damage for his brain to carry on working. It was an extremely rare thing to have a faulty blood vessel in your brain, she said, and we didn’t have to worry about it happening to Mum or to us because our blood vessels were all perfectly healthy. And as usual she had said it so firmly and with such certainty that I had been instantly reassured.

It’s been seven years now since our dad died and I honestly can’t remember him very well at all. I have hazy memories of sitting on his lap while he read me a story, and of playing ball in the park with him and Sean. But I can’t remember his face very clearly, or what his voice sounded like.

I do have one very precious memory of him though. He’d taken me outside to see a spider’s web glistening in the early morning dew and I remember being both terrified and mesmerised as we watched that big spider dangling by a silver thread right in front of our noses. I remember giggling as he took a photograph of me standing as close to the web and its hairy occupant as I dared. And even now, especially on a frosty morning, I can still remember the thrill of being there with him that day, just the two of us in our yet-to-be-shattered world.

Monday was our first day back at school after the Easter break. I rolled my eyes at my brother when I came downstairs and saw him trying to scrape off a bit of breakfast from his school tie. At least the rest of his clothes – dark grey trousers, white school shirt and grey V-necked jumper with our school logo on it – still looked freshly washed and ironed though I knew they wouldn’t stay that way for long. Sean looks a lot younger in his school uniform, though I know better than to tell him that.

Helensfield High has a very strict uniform policy – even Leo says that whoever wrote it was clearly a bit obsessional. The rules include wearing your tie with ‘at least three double stripes visible below a small neat knot’ and wearing skirts of a length ‘no more than two inches above the knee’. Wearing make-up is a total no-no, though I once wore some of Mum’s mascara to school to test out Lily’s theory that my eyelashes are so short that mascara only makes them look normal. (And unfortunately it turned out she was right, because nobody noticed.)

Lily, Clara and Hanna came up to talk to me the second I walked into the playground.

‘Sasha, we’ve all been talking,’ Lily began, ‘and we really want you to hang out with
us
today.’

‘You do?’ I’m ashamed to say that I actually felt quite flattered. Right up until they started their recruitment spiel, that is.

‘Yes,’ Hanna said. ‘Because Lily’s got a point about how you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.’

‘Its cover?’

‘Yeah.’ Lily explained hastily, ‘I was telling them how you might not
look
as if you’d fit into our group, Sasha, but how all that surface stuff isn’t what’s important. I mean, you’re pretty cool on the
inside
. That’s what I keep saying.’