The Other Side of Summer (7 page)

A sound bounced off the bare walls. A doorbell.
Our
doorbell? I’d never heard it before. It was an electronic ding-dong sound and nothing like the sharp sleighbell one we used to have. I was upstairs in bed but heard it as clearly as if I had been standing in the downstairs hall. Everything was louder in an empty house.

The three of us had been on different planets since we’d arrived; awake, asleep and hungry at different times. I’d heard Wren in the shower in the middle of the night. More than once I thought I’d seen Dad standing in my doorway, watching me sleep. But in the white light of morning I would wonder if he’d really been there. Jet lag had muffled all my feelings, and the
days and nights were running loose, like something we’d spilled.

The times I’d gone downstairs to find food, Dad’s door had been closed. There was white bread, margarine, milk and pre-sliced cheese in the fridge, a little less every time I looked. I felt like a Borrower, scratching around completely unnoticed. I’d folded flat squares of cheese into my mouth and eaten white bread separately, wishing it could be comforting cheese on toast but not willing to try the cold, unused grill. Dad obviously hadn’t found a health-food shop yet. Or maybe he’d left all that behind too.

The doorbell ringing was the first sign that life had noticed we’d been holed up in here for days. Now, in bed, I stared at the ceiling, wondering if Dad or Wren would answer the door. Then I sat bolt upright, switched on by a thought that should have been the first thing on my mind. Today wasn’t just an ordinary day of the week.
Today
was … Well, today might mean the doorbell was for me. My heart inflated like a balloon given one sudden puff of air.

The doorbell rang again. I grabbed some shorts and nearly fell over in my rush to get my legs inside. What if it was Mum? What if she’d really come after all? Today of all days, which would be perfect.

I stopped at the top of the stairs when I heard Dad
call out, ‘Coming!’ That was when doubt bloomed in my chest. Was that the voice he’d use if it were Mum? And … wait, wouldn’t Dad have told us she was landing this morning? Wouldn’t he have picked her up from the airport?

But still, today was …

I ran down the stairs and flung myself around the corner and through the living room until I arrived breathlessly in the hallway. Over Dad’s shoulder were a couple and two kids. I blinked but it was still true. No Mum.

Dad turned around. ‘Summer! Come and meet our new neighbours.’

I tucked myself into his side and couldn’t meet their eyes.

‘This is my youngest. These are the Witkins from next door. Mike and Julie.’

‘G’day, Summer. That’s a very pretty name.’ The woman crouched down to speak to me as if I were a kid half my age. She wore a white visor and all-black gym gear. She was tanned and toned with iridescent cheeks like the inside of a shell.

‘Um … well …’ I went blank.

‘She’s not usually this shy,’ said Dad.

‘Probably still jet-lagged.’ The man lowered himself to say this to me, just like his wife had done. Then he
ruffled the top of my hair. ‘Mind you,’ he continued, straightening up, ‘we can barely get a word out of my boy, either, and he hardly goes further than the end of the street! So what’s his excuse? Hahaaa!’ He slapped the tall boy beside him on the back and the boy’s body gave in to the shove as if he was used to it.

‘Mike, cut it out,’ the woman said through gritted teeth. They were the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. ‘Summer, this is our son, Milo, and this is our daughter, Sophie. Sophie’s nine, aren’t you, Soph?’

Sophie nodded and smiled as her mother steered her by the shoulders and parked her right in front of me. Sophie had a few missing teeth and she was holding a doll that looked like it was wearing even more make-up than my sister. It felt like this lady was suggesting that I should be friends with Sophie just because we were the same height. I had to say some thing, fast.

‘I turn thirteen today.’

‘You’re joshing me!’ said Mrs Witkin. ‘Well, you’re only a couple of years younger than Milo, here. What a sweet petite thing you are!’

Dad was staring at me, and I knew why. It wasn’t because he was thinking, like I was, that this woman was annoying. It was because he’d forgotten what today was: my birthday. Completely and utterly forgotten.
I watched his face as he pictured a mental calendar and realised how stupid he was, by which time mine was hot with shame. I should never have come downstairs.

‘We were inviting you all to come round to ours tonight,’ said Mrs Witkin. ‘Just a barbecue, nothing fancy. But now it can be a birthday party! Hey, Summer? What do you think of that?’

I so badly wanted to tell Mrs Witkin
exactly
what I thought. That where I’d kept every loving feeling I’d once had for my family was now an infected wound. That despite everything, my thirteenth birthday could still slip their minds. I wanted to say, ‘Mrs Witkin, naturally I also hate
myself
.’ And, ‘Mrs Witkin, I cannot stand to be around a single human being on this planet, let alone strangers, let alone strangers like you who smile this much.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, in a puny voice. I tried to nudge Dad’s foot so he’d deal with the situation for me. Surely he wasn’t going to let this happen, this last-minute, pretend thirteenth birthday party with complete strangers.

‘That’s so kind of you,’ he said. ‘Me and the girls had better get our acts together. We’ll be round at six. What can we bring?’

‘Don’t you dare bring a thing.’ Julie playfully tapped my dad’s arm. ‘See you at six!’

So it was actually going to happen. How could he think
this
was what I felt like doing for the birthday he’d forgotten about? How could I have let myself believe that Mum would actually come? Thinking about her was so painful, I had no choice but to block her from my mind for good.

The woman, Julie Witkin, herded her family down our front path and out the gate, then through their own gate and up their path.

‘Dad.’

‘I’m so sorry about your birthday, sweetheart. I’ll make it up to you.’

‘How about by not making me go? I can’t think of anything worse.’

‘It’ll be great, Summer. They seem like such nice people. I told you us Aussies were like that!’

‘I hate them.’

He laughed. He actually laughed at me.

‘My sweet, sweet Summer. This isn’t like you. Look, I’ll get a cake from down the road. Biggest you’ve seen. And I’ll buy you whatever you like.’ He wrapped his arms around me and lifted me off the ground. I stayed stiff and still. ‘Where’s my Summer, hey? Where’s my little girl? Where did she go?’

I was too angry to give him the answer that was forming hard as a weapon inside me.
That
Summer
already felt as impossible to reach as Floyd or Mum did, a tiny and deeply buried apple pip. My defences from now on would be thick as an oven glove, keeping out the warmth of Dad holding me, keeping everything out.

The morning after the barbecue from hell, I came downstairs to find Wren and Dad wearing fixed grins and holding cards, as if my birthday could just be shifted to the next day with no consequences. There was also a small parcel on the kitchen bench, covered in airmail stickers. To get here from London, it must have been sent before we’d even left.

‘Open it, then,’ said Dad.

I could see it was Mal’s writing. ‘Maybe later.’

‘Mum and Gran sent their love.’

‘When?’

‘Skype. You were fast asleep. We tried to wake you.’ They couldn’t have tried that hard. ‘You’d better
switch on your phone so that people can get in touch with you.’

I’d turned it off when we left London, and that’s how it was going to stay.

Wren’s card was a hand-drawn portrait of me. It was brilliant, but I kept my face stony. Dad’s card had a huge shiny thirteen on the front, and a hundred-dollar note inside. It was the first time I’d held Australian money, and it felt as fake as everything else here did.

‘But wait! That’s not all,’ he said, lifting a huge, long box out from behind the counter. I had already guessed what was inside but I unwrapped it slowly, waiting to feel something like the way opening presents was supposed to feel.

It was a guitar: black, brand-new and three-quarter sized, for shrimps like me.

‘Your first, very own, guitar,’ said Dad.

I held it stiffly and tried to smile because in my head I knew he was being thoughtful. But my heart only wanted the Ibanez Artwood.

Later, Dad said, to make my birthday even more special, we were going to pick up the puppy. I swore I wouldn’t love that thing either. There wasn’t room inside me for anything else but white-hot anger.

Dad honked the horn of the hire car and I trudged slowly down the stairs. Wren was waiting at the bottom, and something about her made me do a double-take. Was she dressed differently? No, even in this raging heat she had on her layers of black clothes and her thick make-up. It was her expression. It didn’t say ‘I hate you’ anymore.

‘What?’ she said. But it was a different kind of ‘what’. Curious instead of murderous.

‘Nothing.’ I realised that, since we’d arrived, Wren hadn’t said a single mean thing to me. It was wasted, though, because I didn’t even have room to feel relief.

The hire car smelled of plastic and lemony boiled sweets.

‘What’s going to happen to Dorrit?’ I said. ‘We just left her at the airport.’

‘Harry said he’d pick her up.’ Harry was Dad’s oldest friend. ‘He’s got a double garage so he’ll take care of her until … Well, he’ll take care of her.’

I caught Dad’s nervous look in the rear-view mirror. Nothing more had been said about when Mum might be coming. Because she wasn’t.

We arrived at a rundown house with a bare and dusty front garden. Some of its weatherboards were broken or missing and the rest were peeling. One window was boarded up and the porch was covered in bits of junk. The house sagged on one side like a shipwreck.

‘Are you sure you’ve bought a puppy, Dad?’ said Wren. ‘This place does not say cute baby animals to me. More like dawn raids and multiple arrests.’

Dad had gone very quiet. A woman came out, carrying a black puppy and using one of its paws to wave at us. At the same time we heard a deeper bark coming from somewhere nearby.

‘There you go. Everything’s fine,’ said Dad.

‘Is that one ours?’ said Wren.

‘No, ours is a golden colour. Come on, let’s go and see.’

We got out of the car and went with Dad. The puppy woman said, ‘Follow me,’ with a smile, and Dad made small talk as we were led down the side of the house towards a tall wooden gate.

‘She’s back here,’ said the woman.

‘She?’ said Dad. By then the gate had been opened and before he knew it Dad had a pair of legs over his shoulders. ‘Oh my God!’

‘Down, puppy!’ sang the woman.

‘Puppy? What sort of puppy do you call this?’ said Dad, as he tried to angle his mouth away from the dog’s baggy tongue. Standing on her back legs, she was as tall as my six-foot dad. She had wiry fur, a long whiskery snout and a nose like a lump of coal.

‘Technically they’re puppies until they’re two.’

‘And how old is she?’

‘Turns two next week.’

Dad was still being ambushed.

‘But … But the ad said she was a golden retriever.’

The woman addressed the creature in her arms instead of Dad. ‘Exactly. She’s a golden retriever cross, isn’t she, Muffin?’

The dog licking Dad’s face looked nothing like a golden retriever, except for the light gold fur and
maybe
the eyes. She finally stopped licking Dad and ran past us. She lay on her tummy by the gate, regally, like one of the lions in Trafalgar Square. Then she put her head on one paw in the exact same pose as in the photo we had of when she was tiny.

‘Crossed with what?’ said Dad.

‘A donkey?’ said Wren through the corner of her mouth.

‘It didn’t say cross on the website,’ said Dad. ‘I wasn’t expecting something so …’

‘Excuse me, but I think you’ll find it did.’ The woman was still smiling, talking to us in a baby voice as if we were puppies too. But I got the sense she could turn at any moment.

Dad got a piece of paper out of his back pocket: the original print-out. ‘Golden retriever … X. Oh. You mean the X stands for cross?’

‘Exactly. And I don’t do refunds.’

Dad and Wren followed the woman down the path towards the dog. I stayed back. The dog looked up at Dad as he went down on one knee. He stroked her on the top of her scraggly head until she swivelled to make his hand go under her chin instead. Then she started making a low-pitched grunty moan deep inside that made Dad and Wren laugh.

‘She loves that,’ said Wren.

‘You hate dogs,’ I muttered, but I was too far away for them to hear. ‘Dogs are idiots, remember?’

Dad got down lower still and let the dog lick his face.

Wren looked back at me. ‘They’re tragic. Totally tragic.’ The corner of her mouth twitched, hinting at a smile. Without thinking it through, I walked over to her side and said, ‘You got over Charlotte pretty quickly.’

Wren looked at me, stunned, as if I’d actually hit her.

‘Right. One of you has to name her,’ said Dad.

‘You mean we’re actually taking this thing?’ said Wren.

‘Of course you are,’ said the woman. ‘You’re lucky to’ve skipped the chewing phase. This one’s a keeper. Walks by your side, crosses the road by herself – doesn’t even need a lead. I’ll get the papers.’

Dad was completely sold on this giant puppy. That was obvious.

‘Summer? What do you think we should call her?’ said Dad. ‘Or Wren? Even though I know you’re more of a cat person …’

I could see that Wren was thinking. She’d have some smartypants, obscure name that only made sense to her. I looked desperately around for ideas.

‘Come on,’ said Dad. ‘What does she remind you of?’

‘
I
think … I … think …’ I tried to stall. I couldn’t let Wren name her. But there was no inspiration in this place … Until, suddenly, a movement caught my eye around the dried-up lavender bush. ‘Bee.’

‘Bea? That’s lovely! As in Beatrice?’ said Dad.

‘I suppose.’

Dad and Wren were both looking at me.

‘I don’t care, call it whatever you want!’ I stormed out of the front gate, nearly knocking it off its hinges.

On the way home, the dog took up most of the back seat, even with its head sticking out the window.

So the dog was Dad’s, and mostly Dad called her ‘Lady’ instead of Bee anyway. She had a kennel in the garden but she could only get the back half of her body into it. You could tell that Dad never made her use it by the enormous dog-shaped patch of coarse hair at the end of Dad’s bed.

I kept the promise I’d made to myself. Bee was nothing to do with me. Instead, I had decided that I shouldn’t waste the new guitar so I put in the hours, just like Floyd had when he was my age. My fingertips built up their calluses again. Eventually, my chord changes became smoother. In a few weeks I’d learnt enough chords to play tons of songs. The way a tiny change in a chord could take the music from one mood to another captivated me. Like starting with an A major – index finger on the D string, second fret, middle finger on the G string, second fret, and ring finger on the B string, second fret – and then lifting off my index finger. I found out the tricks for playing with small hands, like strumming more precisely so that I didn’t have to put my thumb on the lower E string. There were tricks for having a higher singing voice, too, like using a capo to change the key. I used the hundred-dollar note to buy picks and a tuner.

When I played it wasn’t about feeling or soul, it was just about the notes and being better at playing them than I had been the day before.