The Spark - Jules Wake Page 0,52
happened, the sense of bewilderment at the depth of my mother’s grief still resonated. She’d been unable to get out of bed for months and I’d gone to live with Aunty Lynn and Uncle Richard, the company of my cousin and calm order of their house a blessed relief, although there’d been an overarching sense of guilt. At my aunt and uncle’s house, things were normal again; dinner times were reinstated, adults were in charge and I no longer had a silent empty house to wander around at will, prying and poking into things, spilling the button box on the lounge floor, hearing the skitter-scatter as they bounced across the tiled floor of the hearth in front of the fire, eating illicit biscuits for breakfast and striking matches just because I could.
I looked down at the neat, unimaginative garden. The sparsely planted straight border dotted with aquilegia, bleeding heart and white alyssum which Mum weeded with a fierce sense of duty rather than any pleasure. Since those months of chaos, Mum had stamped order onto every facet of our lives, determined to ensure that the train never went off the rails again. I thought of Victoria and the recent pictures on Instagram; she seemed to be in control, but how did any of us know what was going on beneath the surface?
As I stared at the purple flowers an uncomfortable thought burrowed its way into my mind. I was Victoria’s Alicia.
Alicia Harper. Married to my dad. We shared part of our name and yet I’d never thought of her as real person before. Alicia had always been a figure in the mist, a blurred outline, indeterminate and featureless. I had never troubled to know her. She was the enemy, so I had no idea if she was tall or short, blonde or dark, thin or fat? Did she make my father laugh? Did she work? Did she cook? Were they happy? What did their life together look like? I knew she must be younger than my father. A lot younger. There’d been a letter out of the blue, with a photograph, when I was sixteen and then another, this time containing two photographs, two years later. Addressed to me. The contents of the first one had turned Mum’s lips blue. It was a terrifying moment when I’d thought I might have to call an ambulance. I burned both letters in a fit of adolescent aggrievement and self-righteous ceremony, although I hadn’t quite been able to bring myself to burn the photographs, as if that were some kind of bad voodoo. Mum and I had never spoken about those pictures. Not once. I wasn’t sure if she knew I still had them. They were tucked at the very back of the top drawer of my dressing table in a small brown envelope, which was sealed, so that no one could inadvertently open it. I’d never even told Shelley about the contents.
Mum stood up and even though we were in the garden, bustled about clearing up the teacups, stacking them in each other on top of the saucers. Ever since that window of chaos, when my father had turned our life upside down, she’d become a bustler, always needing to do things – tidying up, wiping up, cleaning up. The house, now, was always spotless and clutter-free and the lounge the sort of room where you felt you should sit neatly, with your knees and ankles together. The minute a crumb was dropped, she’d whip out the handy cordless vacuum – mounted on the wall in the hall, so that it was equidistant to every room on the ground floor – and wield it like St George fending off a dragon.
‘So when am I going to meet this boy?’ she asked, standing under the edge of the parasol, the cups and saucers balanced in one hand as if this important question needed to be answered before she braved the sunshine en route to the back door of the kitchen.
After everything I’d said, I could hardly turn around now and say that it was early days.
‘Er…’
The crockery quivered in her hand. ‘He doesn’t have a tattoo or something, does he?’
‘Mum, everyone has tattoos now but no, Sam doesn’t have a tattoo.’ I lied because it was highly unlikely that she was ever going to see the lion on his left butt cheek. When I say lion, we’re not talking roaring, fearsome king of the jungle; we’re talking cute, cuddly soft-toy style that could