Miss You (11 page)

I didn’t tell them about Ross going off-piste. Didn’t see the point in worrying them unnecessarily.

After about an hour, Mum started getting fidgety and looking at her watch every few minutes.

‘He’s probably bumped into someone and gone for a drink,’ I suggested.

‘He’s probably gone back to the room to dry off,’ said Dad.

‘It seems to be clearing up now,’ said Mum. ‘Perhaps he took shelter and waited for it to pass over?’

We were all keen to imagine possible scenarios that would explain the unnatural delay.

I think perhaps all of us were frightened of Ross. My mother didn’t dare to be thought of as a worrier; my dad revelled in his older son’s courage and prowess and didn’t want
to be seen to be questioning that; my own growing anxiety was compounded by not having told them the full facts.

‘Do you think we should alert someone?’ I finally asked. ‘It’s just that I think he was planning to ski off-piste . . .’

‘What? Why the hell didn’t you say before?’

My father had already decided to blame me.

By the time we’d ascertained what we were supposed to do in the circumstances and the rescue team had set off, three hours had passed since I’d last seen my brother. They found him
at nine o’clock that night, still alive but hypothermic, with a shattered arm and catastrophic head injuries. It appeared that, just a minute or so after we’d parted, Ross had skied
into a tree at speed. They were able to pinpoint the time because the watch on his broken arm had stopped. I always pictured him hurtling through the whiteness, glancing back over his shoulder to
see if I was catching him up, losing the crucial split second he needed to avoid the suddenly looming obstacle.

‘Why did you let him go . . . ?’ my mother screamed at me when she saw the stretcher.

‘. . . alone?’ added my father.

They must have known that I couldn’t have stopped him, but they needed someone to blame and they couldn’t blame Ross, because Ross was clearly going to die. And those who die young
must always be heroes.

On Christmas morning, I woke up to the distant clatter of saucepans. Leaping out of bed, I ran downstairs in my nightie and bare feet. In the kitchen, Mum was crouching down to
look at the progress of the turkey through the glass door of the oven. She turned and smiled up at me. ‘How was Midnight Mass?’

‘I knew it couldn’t be true!!’ I was bursting with joy as I ran towards her, arms outstretched. Then I woke up, the cocoon of exquisite happiness shattered by crushing
disappointment.

The room was dark, the blankets and pink candlewick bedspread heavier than my duvet at home. The warm aroma of roasting turkey and distinctive clatter of someone cooking filtered up from the
kitchen below. The O’Neills’ guest room, I remembered.

I wondered how long my dream had lasted. Was it a few minutes, or just a second? How did the brain do that? How did the sleeping consciousness manage to construct a story to interpret the smells
and sounds around it? And why did I have to wake up so soon? I closed my eyes tight, trying to conjure Mum back, but she’d gone.

Was this the sign? I suddenly thought.

Mum could have said anything, but she’d mentioned Mass.

Hope was sleeping in the twin bed an arm’s length from mine.

‘Happy Christmas, Tree!’ she said, opening her eyes. ‘Christmas Tree!’ she repeated, delighted.

I don’t think I ever saw Hope being sad. Obstinate, yes, angry for no reason, yes, but she’d always been like that. Sometimes I looked at my sister and I wondered whether she missed
Mum at all. I didn’t ask, because I wasn’t going to introduce unhappiness if there was none. Sometimes I asked myself, if a five-year-old child can get over it, why can’t you?

‘How was Midnight Mass?’ Mrs O’Neill said as we gathered in their living room to open presents.

‘Same as usual,’ said Doll, straight out.

She’d always been much better at lying than me, keeping it simple, gambling on getting away with it, rather than making up a narrative to explain our absence in case any of the
congregation reported back on us.

I wondered if it was my guilt for going to the pub the previous evening instead of going to church that had subconsciously put the words into Mum’s mouth? Her presence still felt so
strong, I was strangely disorientated.

‘Which ones are my presents?’ asked Hope.

With money Dad had given me, I’d got Hope a CD player from him. I’d bought her a carol compilation. Santa Claus had got her a selection stocking, although he didn’t actually
visit our house or the O’Neills’ because we didn’t have chimneys: Hope was very literal-minded and the idea of a big man with a beard sneaking around at night frightened the life
out of her.

I’d got Dad some Homer Simpson socks from Hope and a bottle of Jameson’s from me, because that was the whiskey Mum always used to buy him. Dad seemed pleasantly surprised, as if he
hadn’t expected anything.

Then it was my turn to open the gift of dangly earrings from Accessorize that I’d bought from Hope for me.

‘Where’s your present for Tree?’ Hope asked Dad.

I probably should have realized I was meant to buy myself something from him too. I felt like an idiot for believing Mum’s exclamations of surprise when she opened his gift of cheap
perfume each year.

‘Well now,’ said my father, uncomfortably. ‘I didn’t really know what to get you, Tess, so you’ll be better off getting something for yourself.’

He stood up, took the money clip out of his back pocket and peeled off first five, then, aware of Mrs O’Neill watching him, a further five ten-pound notes, which was generous, but
I’d have preferred it if he’d thought of buying me a gift.

Mum always got me a diary, a normal A5 page-a-day from WHSmith which she customized with a fabric cover she embroidered with my name and the year. It was the first Christmas I hadn’t
received a diary since I was ten years old.

At lunch, there was a box of twelve crackers, which we never had at home because of the cost. After the shock of the initial bang, Hope became obsessed and went around the table insisting on
pulling every single one, collecting up all the little gifts in the pink handbag Doll had bought her, but allowing us, after a small debate, to keep our tissue crowns.

‘It’s what Christmas is all about, children, isn’t it?’ Mr O’Neill remarked, on several occasions, as if to remind himself.

Mrs O’Neill made turkey with all the trimmings, with extra little sausages for Hope, and, for dessert, her very own Ice Cream Factory, which was a tub of soft-scoop Cornish and a selection
of Smarties, jelly beans and chocolate buttons, because Mrs O’Neill had had enough little ones of her own to know that they didn’t always like Christmas pudding.

In the afternoon, Dad and Mr O’Neill went to the pub and Hope settled down with Mrs O’Neill in front of the big TV to watch the Disney film. After Doll and I had done the washing-up,
she suggested we go for a walk.

There was a pale, silver path across the water towards the wintry sun. When the colours were mistily muted like this, you could see why the town had attracted artists in its
heyday, including Turner himself. Nowadays, most of the Victorian villas where well-to-do Londoners used to enjoy their holidays had become old folk’s homes, or hostels for what everyone
referred to as ‘Care in the Community’, a motley collection of addicts and people with mental-health problems who wandered around the town during the day. Dingy loops of tinsel hung in
joyless windows.

There were a few other people out and about, walking off their lunch. Without the usual bleep and rattle of slot machines from the amusement arcades, my ears tuned into tiny snippets of
conversation.

‘Sad for those boys . . .’ an older woman in a wheelchair said to the younger woman who was pushing her along.

‘A tragedy . . .’

Were they talking about a bereavement of their own, I wondered, or the Royal Family’s?

I guessed the two men in their thirties walking towards us were brothers who’d come home for Christmas. Or perhaps a gay couple? As they approached, one of them clocked Doll. So not gay.
The other one was talking.

‘. . . that’s the thing about living the dream . . .’ From the look of him – cheap jeans and a leather jacket the colour of diarrhoea – I didn’t think things
had worked out the way he’d hoped.

‘What do you think the dream was?’ I asked Doll.

‘What dream?’

‘Never mind.’

I’m always listening in to other people’s conversations and making up stories in my head to explain their history. Mum was the same. We’d go for a cup of tea in a cafe on the
seafront and we’d be having this perfectly normal chat, but when the couple at the next table left, we’d immediately start discussing everything we’d overheard: ‘He’s
feeling guilty about something . . . I didn’t believe him when he said he was sorry, did you? Do you think she was his bit on the side . . . ?’

Doll didn’t really do that, because she usually had a lot to say herself.

We went down onto the beach. The tide was out and the sea was very calm, with waves no bigger than ripples of silk breaking over the flat, wet sand.

‘Lapping with low sounds by the shore . . .’

‘You what?’ said Doll.

‘It’s from Mum’s poem.’

‘Oh.’

Was there a time limit on grief? Three months? Six? Even Doll wouldn’t be patient for ever. Wasn’t it time I ‘came to terms with’ or ‘got over’ it, or were
these just phrases clung to by those who had never suffered a loss?

‘In Italy, you visit your dead relatives on Christmas Day,’ said Doll. ‘There are flower stalls outside the cemeteries. It’s kind of a nice idea, don’t you
think?’

I thought of Mum’s grave, at the end of a row in the cemetery. Apparently, you had to let the earth settle before you put a headstone up, so we hadn’t done that yet. I hated the
thought of her lying there with people she didn’t know, under a litter of dead flowers and rain-soaked teddy bears. On the next grave along there was a shiny black heart-shaped headstone
bearing the message
All ways in our heart’s
which Mum would have hated because she was very particular about spelling and punctuation. I should have gone today, I thought. It
hadn’t even occurred to me, because I didn’t have any real sense she was there.

‘. . . Fred says it’s like including them in the party,’ Doll continued.

‘Fred?’ I tuned back in.

‘Fred Marinello. His dad’s Italian.’

‘Duh!’

What I was asking, and she knew I was asking, was, how come you’re suddenly so familiar with Fred? I should explain that Fred had been the captain of the football team and the coolest boy
in our year at school. At sixteen, he’d been given a contract by a local semi-professional football club, their youngest ever signing, and recently, it was rumoured, been scouted by Arsenal.
The story had been front and back of the local newspaper under the banner
Fred for the Premiership?
Fred was the nearest thing the town had to a celebrity and every girl in our year fancied
him.

Now that I thought about it, he’d been in the Crown the previous evening with a crowd of lads and I’d noticed Doll exchanging a few words on the way to the ladies and pointing back
at me, as if to say, ‘We’re sitting over there.’

‘He comes to the salon for a leg wax,’ she said, breezily. ‘Some of the Premiership players have them, apparently, for the aerodynamics.’

‘Or a wind-up!’ I laughed.

Doll didn’t. She took her profession very seriously. She had wanted to be a beautician since she was five and got a doll for Christmas with hair that grew when you cut it. Being the baby
of her family and the only girl, she’d been allowed to experiment with Mrs O’Neill’s old stubs of lipstick and dried-up pots of eyeliner. On one occasion, when we were about
seven, Doll had used me as her model, horrifying my mother, and causing our families to sit in different rows at Mass for several weeks.

‘As a matter of fact,’ Doll said, ‘he’s invited us to a New Year’s Eve party.’

‘Fred? Us?’

‘Well, me, but I said could you come too.’

‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ I said.

‘Oh, go on. If you’re there, we’ll be able to stay as long as we like. You know how my mum is.’

My mum had been slightly wary of Doll’s influence on me, whereas Mrs O’Neill had always encouraged our friendship because I was the one who read books and knew what homework
we’d been given, and what you were supposed to bring in for cookery classes, that sort of thing.

‘What about Hope?’ I said, searching for an excuse. ‘Dad’s bound to want to go to the pub.’

‘She can stay at ours, can’t she?’ Doll said.

‘But I don’t have anything to wear.’

‘Now you sound like Cinderella.’

‘So it’s all arranged, is it?’ I said.

‘You shall go to the ball,’ said Doll.

It was only when Fred Marinello opened the door on New Year’s Eve that it clicked. Fred’s smile like a sunlamp. He’d had crooked teeth as a child, but
they’d recently been knocked out in a goal-mouth clash, so now he had a full row of even white caps.

His eyes travelled up and down Doll’s body.

Then, as if he’d only just seen me behind her, ‘Tess!’

I was as tall as Fred even in flats, and men like him didn’t quite know how to deal with that.

‘Sorry to hear about your mother,’ he said. ‘She was a nice lady. Your hair suits you like that, by the way.’

Usually I tied my long curly hair back to keep it under control, but this afternoon Doll had insisted on straightening every strand and parting it at the side so that half of it fell across my
face. When I moved my head, I could still detect a slightly scorched smell.

‘Doll did it,’ I said.

‘Talented as well as beautiful . . .’ Fred kissed Doll on the lips.

I felt pretty stupid. I was good at making up stories about the lives of people I’d never met, but I’d missed my best friend’s first big romance. Recalling the conversation
we’d had recently about The One, and all that stuff about Italian families, it had been obvious really.