The Twice-Lived Summer of Bluebell Jones (7 page)

If Red was here, I guess she'd be hissing in my ear, urging me to follow them.

I should. It's only a body. I'll have a new one soon, one like Red's. Who cares if they see the not-quite-finished version I've got now?

Merlin flops down next to the bags, leans back against the rocks, and plonks his top hat back on to his head, half over his face like he's going to sleep.

“You're not going in?” I ask.

He tilts the hat up. “I don't swim,” he says, and drops the hat brim back over his eyes. Then he lifts it again. “I
can
swim. I just, you know. Don't.”

He crosses his ankles, slides his hands inside their opposite sleeves as if they're cold, and yawns.

I look at the splashy happy people in the water.

“I don't swim either,” I say. I drop my bag down. I stretch out beside him, and it's that simple.

It's not quite that simple.

This is the first time it's been the two of us, alone. I don't know Merlin. I know he lives in a big white house. I know he doesn't have an official fairground job, but whenever we pass a deckchair, he plucks playing cards from his pocket and launches smoothly into his patter, Find The Lady, Pick A Card, all gentleman's charm and hand-kisses for the old ladies in return for a quid or two. I know when he switches it off, he sinks out of sight. He looks like he's been drawn into technicolour Penkerry by a different artist, with pen and black ink: a little black cloud in the blue sky.

I just don't know why.

He answers my questions – yes, his accent's a little different from the others', he was a proper Valleys boy till they moved when he was ten; no, he doesn't have brothers or sisters; yes, I can try on his hat – but it's all shrugs and mumbles, like he's at the dentist and I've got the drill.

It's only when I shut up and take out my camera that he relaxes. I click away, shifting near to the water to capture Dan's wide mouth, Fozzie's legs up in the air as she handstands underwater. Then a few close-ups: Merlin's battered Converse frosted with damp sand. The crinkled red rose tucked into his hatband. The angle of his nose against the blue sky, cheekbones and chin shadowed by the hat brim, bottom lip dangling plump and unaware.

It's a good face. For photographs, I mean. I stare at it through the viewfinder. Not taking any pictures. Just looking.

He shifts when he realizes, wrapping his sleeves tighter over his chest, though I can feel my arms itchily pinking in the heat from the sun.

His cheekbones are pink too, in two high spots.

I lower the camera, suddenly understanding. “Sorry. I hate having my picture taken too,” I say.

He frowns at me from under his hat, like I've stolen something he didn't know he had. “Suppose that's why you're the girl behind the camera,” he says dryly.

I fiddle with the lens, wondering if it's that obvious to everyone else.

Merlin idly watches the waves for a moment. Then he seems to make a decision. He sits up, tilting the hat back so I can see his eyes, smiling charmingly behind their rings of eyeliner. He reaches into his coat pocket for a deck of cards, shuffling them deftly with his long thin fingers, eyeing me like a dare.

He doesn't see me as a friend, then. Only a mark, one of the tourists he tricks on the prom.

I nod towards the cards as they flick together. “So what do those make you?” I say.

“I'm the boy who doesn't like to be tricked.” He's smiling, assembling all his charm, but I don't think he's joking. “Confession time. The Red Dragon reopening on the Friday? Lucky guess, fine. But how did you do the rest of that riff on Madame Soso? Fozzie swears blind she never told you those names.”

Merlin keeps his eyes on the cards as he asks, but I realize he's serious; genuinely desperate to know.

“I told you,” I shrug. “I can see into the future.”

He stares at me intently, as if hoping the eyeliner will hypnotize it out of me, then drops his head with a low chuckle.

“You're good,” he says. “It's almost like you believe it. Go on, then.” He slides the deck out in a fan on a flat bit of rock. “Which card am I going to pick?”

“Oh, I'd need my, er, spirit guide for that. And she's not here today.”

“Really?” he says, witheringly. “What a shame.”

“You think? I'm kind of enjoying the peace and quiet.”

It's out of my mouth before I've even thought it. But it's true, I realize. It's a relief, not to be concentrating on not talking back to someone no one else can see. Not trying to live up to her expectations.

“Cheers, says a lot for my company,” Merlin says ruefully.

“Oh, I didn't mean—” I blush. “I only meant. . . It's nice to just be yourself, sometimes, you know? Instead of trying to be something you're not.”

His eyes travel over my face. I don't know what he's looking for.

We play Guess the Card on the flat bit of rock, and he gets it right every time.

I wait for him to switch back into charm mode, dip his hat for me to throw him a coin, but instead he hands me the cards, and starts trying to teach me the trick. I play at reading his mind:
Two of clubs. Three of clubs? A club? A diamond? A card of some kind, with maybe a number on it?

It makes him laugh out loud.

Lunch is a messy picnic, everything we've brought piled on to a sandy towel, help yourself. My sandwich and banana look feeble. Fozzie and Mags have Shed goodies in packets. Dan's brought cold pizza and doughnuts and a bottle of Coke. Merlin's is all shop-bought fancy stuff, Mexican wraps and posh crisps – and I wish Red was here after all for me to yell at her, because foodfail is exactly the kind of thing she should be rescuing me from.

No one seems to mind, though. Everything tastes like sand and suncream anyway. Dan eats the banana, under protest at the idea of unprocessed food entering the sacred temple of his body, and we give him a round of applause.

Fozzie scoops all the rubbish into a plastic bag, and we take it to the bin together.

“Hey. Thanks for hanging out with Merlin,” she says, once we're too far off for them to hear. “He always says he wants to come, and then he just sits there looking like a sad crow, and we all feel crap about having a laugh without him, even if it's his own fault.”

“Oh. That's OK. I don't mind.”

“You don't have to, though. I know he's a weirdo. He wasn't rude to you or nothing, was he?”

She puts a cigarette between her lips, her hand fumbling with the lighter awkwardly.

“Oh, look at me. That's 'cos I feel bad, 'cos that sounded awful, didn't it? I do like him, don't get me wrong. But, well. You know. All that ‘ooh, I'm so spooky and meaningful' stuff's a bit much. And there's the whole nerdy magician thing.”

“Is that nerdy? I thought it was cool.”

Fozzie brushes sand off her face, wiping at the smudges of washed-away make-up. She nods, and laughs,
argh argh argh
. “Yeah? I suppose it's that, too.”

Penkerry's so different. At home, things are either in or out with Grace and Monique. They don't get to be nerdy and cool at the same time. I haven't thought about Grace for ages. I wonder what Bali's like, and realize I don't really care.

We lounge around on towels while lunch goes down, watching kids and dogs mess around as the next boat arrives and the beach gets busier. Dan and Fozzie roll more cigarettes, while Merlin does big fake coughs, and Mags pretends to die of a tragic lung disease. Fozzie blows smoke in her eyes, as revenge.

Fozzie, Dan and Mags go back in the water.

I hesitate. I could strip off, right now, and follow them. I should. It's what Red would be telling me to do.

But I'm not far enough down Bluebell Road yet. We'll come back here, I know it. I'll get another chance. Instead I dig a hole with my hands, letting the light golden stuff trickle through my fingers; scooping the darker, damper sand out and building a mountain, a castle, a mermaid lying marooned on the beach. I spend for ever sculpting her face: smooth cheeks, curved chin. Her nose crumbles as the sand dries out. I try to fix it, but the rest crumbles too, ruined. It's weirdly upsetting.

Merlin says, “Hey,” and curls a finger, beckoning.

By the time the others stagger back up the beach, ready to finish off Merlin's posh crisps, I have learned how to flip a top hat on to my head with one sharp flick of my wrist.

Nearly.

“She got it twice in a row earlier, no lie,” says Merlin, as attempted demonstration number three bounces off my nose. “All down to the excellent teacher, of course,” he adds.

Fozzie catches my eye and gives me a grateful nod.

I manage it on the fourth try: not straight, and it's too big so it slips down over my eyes, but undeniably square on my head. It earns a round of applause, and I skip triumphantly up the beach and on to the steep path off the beach before Merlin can snatch it back off my head.

“Oi! You let that blow away up there, there will be consequences!” he shouts, and I remember to clamp my arms over it just in time, as I reach the top of the slope and get hit by the wind.

I stand up on the top, gazing out across the sparkling water, to the stripy Bee rock, to Penkerry. It looks tiny and unreal from here: a strip of pebble beach, pier, the fair just a flicker of sunlight on metal.

I want a photograph, but I've left the camera on the beach.

When I turn to fetch it, Diana's already in Merlin's hands, already lifted to his eye. He makes the shot before I have time to hide.

“Hey!” I yell.

He lowers the camera and shrugs, exaggerating it so I can see from up here.

“You steal my hat, I steal your camera,” he shouts, the words drifting on the wind alongside laughter as Fozzie and Mags team up to tackle him.

He sounds smug, and I run down, to point out to him that I've got the sun right behind me, and even if he's got the focus anywhere close to sharp and the framing anywhere close to me, that shot will never come out. But I stop a few footsteps down, just enough to be out of the tearing wind. This is the picture I want to take. Not Penkerry in miniature, but this, them, today, right now: Merlin half-buried under sand, Mags and Dan trying to drag him into the sea, Fozzie doubled up laughing. Me and my friends, on Mulvey Island.

I suck in breath, sharply. That's why Red didn't come.

This wouldn't have happened if she'd been here. If she were here I'd have been waiting for her to tell me what to do, what to say, how to get it all perfect.

And instead, I've lived it.

My phone rings in my pocket. I'm smiling already as I pick up, ready to tell her I understand; to thank her for showing me I could do it by myself.

“Hi, look, I can't really talk,” I whisper.

“You don't have to talk, just listen,” says a breathy voice, loud. I stare at the caller ID. It's not my number ringing me. It's Tiger's.

“Are you still on the island? How soon can you get back?”

“What? I mean, why?”

There's a scrumply sound, like someone blowing their nose.

“It's Mum,” says Tiger. “She's in the hospital.”

 

 

7.
Mum

 

It takes thirty minutes for the boat to arrive, another twenty-five to make the crossing, fifteen more in the back of a taxi to the hospital, a damp twenty-pound note from Fozzie clutched in my hand. Too long.

Tiger isn't answering her phone.

Dad neither.

I don't try Mum's.

By the time I find the right room in the maze of plasticky corridors, I've imagined every awful thing that could possibly have happened, twice.

“Oh, baby, look at your face,” says Mum, sitting up in bed looking pink and healthy and perfectly well. “Everything's fine!”

Dad's on one side of the bed, reading the newspaper. Tiger's on the other, tying one side of Mum's hair into tiny plaits. They don't look panicked. To be honest, they look pretty bored.

My shoulders drop, and the bowl of fear in my insides empties out.

“What's going on? I was . . . I thought. . .”

“Come here, darling,” says Dad, folding up the paper and standing, beckoning me over to sit in his chair. “What the hell did you say on the phone, Tiger?”

Tiger shrugs. “Mum's in the hospital, come back now. Something like that?”

“Nice,” sighs Dad. “Reassuring. Not going to give anyone heart failure, that.”

Tiger squints. “Sorry. Didn't think.”

“What happened?”

Mum grabs my hand and squeezes it twice, fast like a heartbeat. “Nothing major. We went for a walk up along the cliffs, and I had a bit of a funny turn. Thought for a minute Peanut was going to try to make an early entrance.”

Dad rolls up his sleeves. “I was all set to be the heroic father delivering his own child, but your mum crossed her legs and held it in, like a wee.”

Can you do that?
I think to myself.

Mum slides him a look, and he kisses the top of her head, leaving his hand resting there, stroking.

Probably not
.

“Were you frightened?” I ask.

Dad's hand goes still on the top of her head.

Mum squeezes my hand again: one two, one two.

“Only for a second. Only when we didn't know what was going on. I had a little bit of bleeding, which has stopped now, and they've given me some stuff to make sure it won't start again. And I need to take it really, really easy. But, baby, we're both going to be fine, the doctors say it's all manageable.” She smiles. “To be honest, I'm pretty sure half of it was indigestion.”

“Extra large chips
and
a White Magnum,” whispers Dad.

“Eating for two!”

I decide now is not the moment to quote that article in
Health
magazine about expectant mummies not really needing extra calories. She wasn't impressed last time.

“I'm sorry I wasn't here,” I mumble, fiddling with my sock. It's got Mulvey Island sand in it, gritty between my toes.

Mum shakes her head and tells me it's fine, she's fine, there was no need for me to rush back here at all, that she'd much rather I spent my day in the sun instead of fretting in here for no reason – but I'm only half-listening. There's a movement behind me, soft low breathing.

I turn my head and Red's there, leaning against the wall just inside the door.

She's been here all along, taking my place.

“How could you?”

We're in the smelly bit by the bins round the back of the hospital café, where I'm supposed to be fetching cups of tea for everyone. I'm shouting and if anyone passes there are far too many men in white coats standing by to cart me off for talking to myself, but I don't care. I don't think I've ever been this angry before.

Even Red looks shocked. “Calm down, will you?” she says. “Mum's fine. ‘Peanut' is going to be fine.” She makes air-quotes round the word “Peanut”, like she wants to rub in the fact that I still don't know its name, when she does. When she knows
everything
.

“I know that now! But I didn't before. I was terrified! And you
knew
everything was going to be OK!” My heart twists. “You even knew this was going to happen today, didn't you? That's why you wouldn't get on the boat this morning, isn't it?”

She shuffles her shoulders, hands stuffed into her pockets. “That's . . . complicated.”

“No it isn't. You did this on purpose. You lied, so I'd go off to Mulvey Island without a clue, and you could stay behind and be with them.”

“Yeah. No. It's not what you think.” She runs her fingers through her hair, tucking the wing behind her ear. It makes her look so much more like me: blameless Blue, only doing her best.

I get it now, how annoying that is.

“I did want you to go off and do it on your own. That totally was part of it. Did you go swimming? What was it like?”

She sounds bright, as if she expects me to launch into happy sharing time about sunburn and picnics.

“Brilliant, yeah, I was off building a sandcastle while my dad was phoning an ambulance. What a great day, lucky me. Only, if I'd known Mum was going to get ill I'd never have gone.
If only
there was some way I could've peeked into the future and seen it coming.”

I've never been this sarcastic before, either. It's like I'm turning into all the narky bits of Red in one go.

“But that's why I didn't tell you! If you'd known, you wouldn't have gone off on the boat, you'd have stayed behind worrying and fretting – about something you couldn't do anything about. Apparently.” She swallows, flipping her hair over her eyes again and staring moodily at the floor. “Knowing the future doesn't mean you can change it, Blue. I thought, maybe . . . maybe I could drive us down a different road. But there are fixed points: big, unchangeable moments that even a wish can't take back. Some things are going to happen, whether you want them to or not. Things you're better off not knowing.”

“I don't believe that.”

“You will,” she says softly. She shakes her head, meeting my eye and smiling again. “Short sharp shock, like ripping off a plaster: that's the best way. Not watching and waiting and knowing too much. Look, it was a compromise, OK? I figured since there are two of us, we'd get the best of both worlds. You could go off and hang out, do the whole Mulvey Island thing, and I'd stay back and look after Mum.”

“You're invisible! How is that looking after her? She didn't even know you were there.”

“Maybe she did,” Red shrugs. “She might have, I don't know,
sensed my presence
or something.”

“I don't want her to!” I shout, chilled by the thought. “Leave her alone, all right? She's
my
mum.”

“She's my mum too,” says Red evenly. “Come on, there's more than enough of her to go round at the moment, right? We can share.”

She laughs, as if she can smile her way out of this.

“No, we can't. She's not your mum. You don't need a mum. You're not even a real person. You're just a wish.”

She steps back as if I've pushed her, her shoulder melting into a wisp of smoke when it nudges the wall.

“See?”

Her face closes down. “Yeah, that's me: your wish come true,” she says bitterly. “You get my help, and all the rest. Friends to hang out with, a shiny new camera, happy happy family time with Mummy. Did you ever stop to think about what I've got out of this deal? I don't sleep. I don't smell, but oh my god I need to have a shower, change clothes, change
anything
. I've watched the beautiful glorious sparkly sunrise over Penkerry Pier every single morning and guess what? Bored now. I've ridden the Red Dragon twenty-seven times in a row: not scary any more. While you've been tucked up in your bunk bed I've sat in the cinema listening to people crunching their way through popcorn I can't eat, while some hot actor guy says the same lines over and over again, and he doesn't even take his shirt off – which I know already because he didn't take it off the first time and it's the same bloody film, over and over and over. You're the only one I can talk to, the only person I could ever tell – only you don't even care.”

“I'm supposed to feel bad for you because you're
bored
?” I'm the one laughing now, though nothing is funny today.

Red goes very still. “So that's it? I'm here for you, to rescue you – and that's it? Doesn't go both ways?”

“What would
you
need to be rescued from?”

Red looks down at the ground, up at the sky, and finally at me. She opens her mouth, words on her lips, but she catches herself, and looks me dead in the eye.

Then she raises one finger, and tap-tap-taps the side of her nose.

Mum gets discharged that afternoon, and Dad drives back to Penkerry at fifteen miles an hour.

We spend the evening with all four-and-a-half of us curled on the narrow caravan sofa, my head tucked neatly on top of Mum's bump, watching bad reality TV and eating blueberries. A superfood, packed with antioxidants.

If Red's outside, being too polite about potential nudity to come in, I don't care.

That night, I dream we are a family made of sand: Dad, Tiger, and a sleepy smooth-cheeked Peanut-baby, held close in Mum's arms as they ride the Red Dragon.

Red's not there.

I'm not there either.

When they reach the top of the highest loop, the ride gets stuck, upside-down. They crumble. They trickle out like sand emptying from a bucket, my golden family disappearing one by one.