Came Back to Show You I Could Fly Read online

  ‘As he deserves to be!’ Thelma said tartly. ‘I don’t know how you can sit there and defend him after all the trouble he’s caused! That shiftless…Why, he never ever got a proper home together for you all, not to mention Marie having to work all these years to meet the bills. If anyone deserves your support, young man, it’s your poor mother.’

  ‘Well, anyhow, he didn’t come charging down Victoria Road and take off with me,’ Seymour muttered. ‘I never even thought he would. It was just Mum, carrying on…It was just a waste, a pain in the neck, all this. Three-and-a-half weeks of sticking around inside and not being allowed out…’ He stopped, guiltily conscious that he hadn’t really been doing anything of the sort, and added hastily, ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Mum kept saying she didn’t know what else she would have done if you hadn’t let me stay here. I hope I wasn’t too much trouble.’

  ‘Well, I can understand it hasn’t been easy for you,’ Thelma said unexpectedly, ‘I told Marie at the time it wasn’t the ideal solution, this house being so small and not much space out the back. Children don’t like being cooped up and you’ve been very good about it, on the whole. Heaven knows, I’m not the ideal companion when I get home from work, either. Too set in my ways. I’m not used to having kids about the place. It’s not much longer, though, only till the weekend, then you’ll be moving out to Carrucan with your mother.’

  Seymour gaped at her, for it was the first expression of sympathy he’d heard since coming there to stay. Obviously it paid to rock the boat a little and not always absorb things that happened to you without complaint. He wasn’t sure if it were worth the effort, though. His heart was racing from that uncharacteristic outburst.

  ‘Well, I suppose I should consult your mother first, but I don’t really think it would do any harm if you went out occasionally during the day,’ Thelma added briskly. ‘Just down to the shops, or there’s a public swimming pool on the other side of the park. Only be careful, mind. Keep a sharp eye out and if you see your dad hanging around, you get yourself back here quickly and phone me at work. Here’s a dollar if you want to go swimming tomorrow.’

  Seymour was pleased and grateful, though he still had all the money he’d won at the races carefully hidden in the back room. ‘I can’t take this,’ he protested, embarrassed. ‘You’re still paying off your house, Mum told me. It’ll be okay when we move out to Carrucan, anyhow. I might get a paper round.’

  A paper round, he thought wryly, remembering the last time he’d tried that. It had lasted exactly three days, and he’d been so bluffed by the territorial dogs in that area he’d made some pathetic excuse to the newsagency about his bike having been stolen.

  Thelma insisted that he take the money and he reflected that he’d never been so rich in his life. Only now it seemed an empty thing without much joy. Angie wasn’t there. He couldn’t run across the alleyway and say casually, ‘Come on, Angie, get your earrings on, I’m taking us both out today!’ He thought bleakly of the empty flat opposite.

  ‘Thelma, have you ever heard of a hospital called Rankin House?’ he asked, clearing the table while she had a cup of tea, and making his voice as offhand as possible.

  ‘Rankin House,’ she said absently, reading the letters to the editor in the paper. It was the first page she always turned to, but it didn’t seem to give her much satisfaction. She was given to reading the letters aloud, making scathing comments about the views of each correspondent. ‘Yes, I know where that is, it’s quite close to the city. You can see it on the left when you go through Knudsen railway station. A red-brick building and it’s got a sign over the gate, private hospital, I think.’

  ‘Just an ordinary hospital?’

  Please let it be…

  ‘Goodness, Seymour, I don’t know. I’ve never taken all that much notice, it’s just a place you see from the train. Why do you want to know about it?’

  He tried to think of reasons. School holiday project on hospitals, he thought wildly, knowing that wouldn’t do at all, since he’d left his last school and was to start a new one. ‘Nothing in particular,’ he said evasively, for she was peering at him over the top of her reading glasses. ‘I mean, I heard someone mention it once, just the name…I thought it might be a…a school or…maybe a prison or something like that…’

  ‘Then why did you ask if it was a hospital?’ she said and then cried with exasperation, ‘Really, Seymour, that’s a sloppy way to stack the dishes! Rinse them under the cold tap first as I showed you.’

  Next morning after she’d gone to work, he collected the key from under the flowerpot and crept into Angie’s flat, thankful that its door couldn’t be seen from the main house. He was afraid of that formidable landlady, and although he had a speech prepared—‘Angie’s been in hospital for a few days. With flu. But she’s coming home soon, so I’ve just dropped in to clean out the fridge for her.’—he was sure he’d muff it if she just happened to be around and demanded to know what he was doing there. He wasn’t planning to tackle the fridge only—he meant to clean up the whole place as a welcome-home surprise. He remembered the mess on his last visit and had come prepared for hours of hard labour, but when he shut the door behind him and turned around, he found that someone had already been in and done it. The bed was neatly made and all the things on the sink had been washed and set to drain. The linoleum under his feet shone, its pattern now visible, and there was a tang of pine-scented cleaner in the air.

  Seymour’s first reaction was disappointment. He’d spent all the previous evening planning how he was going to spring-clean the flat and have it glowing to welcome Angie home. A couple of days, Lynne had said. Well, in that couple of days someone, the landlady he supposed, had got there before him. Perhaps Mrs Easterbrook had phoned and told her about Angie being in hospital and she’d had a twinge of conscience for being so heavy about the rent. Angie wouldn’t be at all pleased about her messing around in here. However, there was one small job he could do. He went importantly to the fridge with a cloth he’d brought with him, soaked in vanilla essence. Thelma did that whenever she cleaned her fridge, to make it smell fresh.

  But someone had already defrosted and scrubbed out Angie’s fridge, and forgotten to switch it back on. Seymour attended to that and closed its door, so it would be ready for storing food. Somehow he was going to have to find the courage to go all the way down the alley to the shopping centre, risk facing that gang of local kids, and buy a stock of food. Healthy, nourishing food, like oatmeal porridge and fruit and wholemeal bread, using his race money. It was the last thing he could do for Angie before he left with his mother tomorrow afternoon.

  The bathroom recess was spotless, too, with the grouting between the tiles scrubbed, and the shower mat hanging bone dry on the rail. There was no cleaning left to do there, but in the far section a pile of Angie’s clothes lay on the bed. It looked as though someone had begun to straighten out the wardrobe and hadn’t had time to finish. Well, that was one other thing he could do for her—re-hang all her clothes neatly in the wardrobe.

  He worked deftly and methodically, taking wire hangers from a bundle on the floor, and became so engrossed in creating order from chaos that he didn’t hear someone walking into the back yard and opening the door. Sunlight flooded in across the freshly washed linoleum and he looked up, startled, to find Lynne staring at him.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ she demanded aggressively. ‘Why’s the door unlocked?’

  ‘The spare key…Angie keeps one under the flowerpot in the garden. I’m not doing anything, just hanging all this lot up for her…tidying up…’ His voice trailed away in embarrassment, he felt incredibly foolish standing there clutching an armful of gauze flounces. It was some outfit of Angie’s he’d never seen her wear, some kind of glittering party dress, though knowing Angie, he guessed she would have worn it any time of the day she felt like it. He quickly put the frivolous dress on the hanger inside the wardrobe and stood shuffling his feet. Lynne’s expression made him feel a
s though he were an intruder, prying into someone else’s possessions when he had no right to.

  ‘Well, you’ve been wasting your time,’ Lynne said. ‘They’ve got to be packed away. We slaved all yesterday afternoon to get this place cleaned and we’re just finishing off now. Mum dropped me off because she’s got some urgent shopping to do, but she’ll be back in an hour and I can’t work and chat at the same time. I’m sorry, but you’d better go now, okay? Oh God, where do I start? All these awful clothes…Didn’t you hear me, Seymour? Go on, run along back to your place! You shouldn’t even be here. Does Angie know you just pop in and out when she’s not home?’

  ‘Of course I don’t!’ Seymour said furiously. ‘I only came over to tidy things up for when she gets back. I was going to put milk and stuff in the fridge. You said she only ever stays a couple of days in…’

  ‘Well, she’s not coming back here. This time she’s made other plans. And you’d better give me that spare key, too, before I forget about it. They have to be returned to the lady who owns this place. Look, if you don’t mind, I have to get all this stuff packed and ready to go in the car when Mum comes. There’s really nothing for you to do.’

  The dismissal was as clear as though she’d typed it out and handed it to him in an envelope, but Seymour stood his ground and watched as she began to take the garments from the wardrobe. All his careful, painstaking work had been in vain. Lynne just crammed things impatiently into a large plastic bag as though she wanted to get the whole business over and done with.

  ‘Angie likes it here,’ he said distantly. ‘She was going to get some rolls of wallpaper from this discount shop she knows about and do it all up. She’s got the colour scheme all worked out and everything. And she was going to ask if she could dig up the flower bed and plant climbing roses and stuff there. How do you know she’s not planning to come back? Did she tell you herself?’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Seymour, you don’t know the first thing about it! Angie’s obviously been trotting out all her usual fantasies, and you’ve just been dumb enough to believe them. She’s definitely not coming back here, she’s going away interstate, leaving tonight. Dad’s picking her up from Rankin House when he finishes work and driving her to the airport. I wish you’d go home. Can’t you take a hint? You’re holding me up, standing there chattering about things you don’t even understand. Oh, I’ve had this cleaning up! Honestly, all the tacky rubbish Angie manages to collect…’ She tried unsuccessfully to wedge several pairs of shoes into the overladen bag, swearing irately under her breath. Seymour stared at her. Lynne was normally so cool and composed, it was rather unnerving to discover that she not only knew bad words, but would actually use them.

  ‘And there’s no sign of her suitcase,’ she finished bitterly. ‘Lovely beige leather, with an overnight bag to match. We got it for her on her last birthday. What on earth are you doing? There’s no use looking under the bed and up on the wardrobe for it! Probably sold it, didn’t she, like she does with any expensive present anyone gives her. Only she never ever says “sold”, it’s always “lost”. When I think how David and I put all our holiday savings towards that birthday present…’

  ‘There’s some more plastic bags on the sink,’ Seymour said. ‘You could pack the rest of the things in those.’ He went to fetch them, battling to keep all expression from his face and to empty his mind of any feeling. He’d had plenty of experience with saying goodbye to people and places before, he reminded himself. You didn’t let yourself become too involved, that was the secret. Angie was just a person he’d met by chance during this particular holiday break, and in a couple of months he’d probably forget all about her, wouldn’t even be able to remember the outline of her face or how her voice had sounded. A troubled person, someone it was best to forget, anyway. It was pointless to be hanging around here where he obviously wasn’t wanted. Futile to watch Lynne handle all those possessions so unkindly, stuffing them away out of sight as though she found each one repugnant.

  ‘I guess I’d better be going,’ he said woodenly and moved to the door.

  ‘Hang on a minute…if you really want to help, you could clear out the things from the kitchen cupboard,’ Lynne said, and her voice was less sharp, as though she regretted biting his head off like that and was ashamed of it. Seymour hesitated, then turned back and silently began to remove everything from the shelves and stack them on the sink. There weren’t many items—a few mismatched plates, the wobbly saucepan, a chipped teapot. ‘They’re not really worthwhile keeping,’ Lynne said. ‘I don’t suppose the next person who moves in here would want them. The whole lot could go out in the rubbish bin.’

  ‘This, too? This looks too good to throw out,’ Seymour said, finding a small cup and saucer of fine china right at the back. He wiped them clean with a cloth and they shone with resurrected bright colour, waterlilies and dragonflies emerging vividly from a layer of dust. They looked unused, as though Angie had perhaps valued them too much to risk in everyday use. He carried them carefully over to the bed. ‘Funny Angie having something like this, all in one piece,’ he said. ‘She was always breaking things. She told me that’s why she bought cheap stuff at op shops for the kitchen, so it wouldn’t matter much if…what’s the matter?’

  He stared in astonishment, finding it hard to believe that Lynne’s self-contained face could so suddenly be flooded with emotion. She took the cup and saucer from his hands and turned them about gently, tracing the bright patterns, obviously fumbling towards some almost forgotten memory.

  ‘Fancy Angie keeping…The shop near the school, that’s where I bought it…’

  ‘Did you give it to her?’

  ‘She used to walk me to school and we’d pass this particular shop and this was in the window. Years ago, when she was still at home, she must have only been about fourteen. She thought it was so pretty, so I saved up all my pocket money in secret. I kept worrying that someone else would buy it before I could. That was the year before it all started, really, before everything went so…She was so nice up to then, I wanted to give her something special, because as well as being my big sister, she was my best friend, too. And then it all changed, there was this really awful crowd of kids she got in with…She used to tell lies all the time about where she’d been…Oh, poor Mum and Dad, the things she put them through!’

  With an effort she regained control, making her face impassive again, and returned briskly to the task of packing.

  ‘We’re storing all this stuff of hers at home as usual,’ she said tonelessly. ‘Until the next time. I’ve lost count of the number of times…Oh, why does she buy these terrible clothes? She can’t possibly want this thing!’ She held up the silver lace shirt Angie had been wearing the first time Seymour had met her, and it seemed now to have no connection with the reality of everyday living. It seemed garishly out of context, like something that belonged to a theatre stage. ‘I’d better not throw it out,’ Lynne muttered. ‘She remembers all the clothes she owns, sometimes months later just when you think she’s forgotten all about them.’ Her glance kept returning to the fragile little cup and saucer which she’d placed so softly in the centre of the bed, and suddenly she stopped what she was doing and sat down and covered her face with her hands.

  Her emotion raged as wildly as a flame. Even though it was soon brought under control, Seymour was shaken by its intensity. His mother’s sadness always manifested itself as long rambling vocal complaints, needing only patience from the onlooker. He didn’t know how to help someone seared by such a profound grief as Lynne’s and stood by helplessly.

  ‘I don’t usually cry about it,’ she said, angrily dabbing at her eyes. ‘It’s so useless. Goodness, if I blubbed about it every time, I’d never get anything else done. It’s been going on for so damned long. You can’t cry that long over someone, no matter how much you love them…how much you used to love them, can you? Five whole years, that’s how long she’s been on drugs…’

  The bats were released from
the compartments of his mind as though someone had treacherously released a spring-catch. They assailed his whole being with their black fluttering. All the elaborate pretences he’d so carefully built were no longer any use, and he stood, stricken, confronting the finality of Lynne putting all his troubled suspicions into ugly words. Drugs…Angie…that’s how things were with Angie.

  ‘Sometimes I feel as though I hate her,’ Lynne said dully. ‘The things she’s done to our family, the terrible times she’s put us all through. All those promises…she goes off to some rehab place and then after a couple of weeks she nicks off and we don’t hear from her for months. A place called Lakeview, that’s where she’s off to tonight, though I don’t even know why they’re bothering to take her back. Three weeks she lasted there last time.’

  ‘Maybe…this time will be different,’ Seymour said wretchedly, and his voice struggled thickly through layers of angry, bewildered sadness. Angie…All those lies she’d told! All that advice she’d given him—she was one to talk! It was as though he’d been marooned on a desert island, and someone had come along and rescued him in a little boat. Promised to take him to safety. Only that person proved to know nothing about navigation, had taken him instead into rough wild seas…

  ‘I’m certainly not getting my hopes up,’ Lynne said. ‘I don’t even know why she’s promised to go back there. I just don’t trust her and her promises. One minute she was yelling at us saying she wouldn’t, then she broke down and started wailing that she didn’t have any choice…Oh God, it was so pathetic, you should have seen how relieved poor Mum and Dad looked last night when she said she’d give it another try. They looked so happy, believing it all. Angie’s going to stay at Lakeview six months like a good little girl and someone up there will wave a magic wand and she’ll come back completely cured…They only believe it because they’ve got to have something to hang on to. I certainly don’t any more. She’s had five years to get her act together. Sometimes I think the best thing is to forget I ever did have a sister.’