C.J. Cooke - The Blame Game

‘I should have installed CCTV,’ he says in a low voice. ‘Everyone said to do it and I got lazy.’

‘There’s no guarantee that cameras would have picked up anything,’ I say, recalling how we sat in shock at the fire station, covered head to toe in black soot like two Victorian chimney sweeps. The deputy station chief educated us brusquely about the many causes of accidental blazes: sunlight bouncing off a mirror and hitting newspaper reduced a sixteenth century Scottish castle to embers. Hair straighteners left too close to a notebook on a teenager’s dressing table took out a row of houses. Our fire could have been down to a faulty storage heater or a loose wire.

‘They’d have caught who started the fire,’ Michael cuts in, swinging his legs over the side of the hammock to sit upright. I reach forward and stroke his back.

I recall with a shudder the police calling both of us in for separate interviews. They asked whether someone had a grudge against us. If we had upset a customer or laid off an employee. Just weeks before I’d persuaded Michael to sack one of our part-timers, Matilda. She doesn’t do anything, I protested. You’re barely paying yourself a salary as it is. The bookshop isn’t a charity for lazy eighteen-year-olds who sit around all day reading Tolkien.

Michael pointed out that she was Arnold’s daughter, and Arnold had been the first to help him out when he set up the shop, but I won in the end. Matilda was sketchy about her whereabouts at the time of the fire – her parents confirmed she’d been out of the house, and it turned out she’d been with a boy. But for a horrible few days it seemed that perhaps Matilda could have been responsible for the blaze.

‘We never ruled out arson,’ Michael says when I remind him that Matilda was found to be innocent. ‘Until the investigation closes, every possibility is on the table.’

‘Maybe it was a group of kids messing around,’ I say to his back. I desperately want him to lie back down with me, to recapture the idyllic mood.

‘We both know kids didn’t start that fire, Helen,’ Michael snaps, getting out of the hammock.

‘Michael?’

I’m taken aback by the sharpness of his tone. As I watch him head back into the hut I sense he’s exhausted, worn thin by worry. But I wish we could discuss this. Every time we start to talk about something that cuts deep he just walks away.

We’ve got a mutiny on our hands right now.

‘ Pleeease can we stay here, Dad?’ Saskia howls in the kitchen as I make breakfast. This morning our butler (yes, an actual butler – I feel like a Kardashian) dropped off our food parcel, containing waffles (round, so we can tell Reuben they’re pizzas), maple syrup, coconuts, dragon fruit, freshly baked bread, eggs, salad, blueberry pancakes, pineapple, the most mouth-watering bacon I’ve ever tasted in my entire life, and a bottle of wine.

‘I’m sorry, my love,’ I say, hugging Sas to my side as I heat the waffles on the hob. She smells of sunlight and the ocean. ‘I’m afraid we can’t change our flight. We’ve got today and tomorrow and then we have to head off to Mexico City to fly home.’

‘But Daa-aad, I don’t want to go home. Jack-Jack doesn’t want to go, either.’

‘Hmmm,’ I say, tipping waffles on to a plate. ‘So, nobody wants to go home? What do you suggest we do then?’

She does the same thing as Helen when she thinks. Screws up her nose like there’s a bad smell. Face just her like mother’s, too. Same twinkling blue eyes that show every emotion and absorb every last detail. Same dimple in her left cheek and buttery curls to her shoulders.

‘Can’t we just buy a house here?’

‘You’d miss everyone, I think. So would Jack-Jack.’

She gives a dramatic sigh, seven going on seventeen. ‘Like who , exactly?’

‘Well, Amber and Holly would miss you. And I bet Oreo can’t wait to see you …’

‘But they could come here …’

‘What about your ballet recital?’ I ask. She has no answer to that and I know she’s excited for it. I set her plate of waffles on the coffee table and squat down to face as her as she begins to do a couple of ballet moves.

‘To tell you the truth, my love, I don’t want to go home either.’

She widens her eyes. ‘You don’t?’

I press my lips together, shake my head. ‘But don’t tell Mummy.’

‘Is it because you don’t like flying?’

‘Nope.’

‘Is it because you love this house and the sea and you’d like to live here?’

‘Exactly. I like spending my days on the beach instead of having to go to work. I’d like to do it for ever. Wouldn’t you?’

She nods eagerly, her face all lit up with hope. I wish I could give her everything. I wish I could make the world as perfect as she deserves it to be.

‘Here, come and help me put all this food away.’

She does a little ballet twirl across the floor, arms crooked like she’s holding an invisible beach ball between them, and looks into the box of food that I’m unloading.

‘Bacon?’ she says, holding up the packet like it’s a dead rat.

‘Not for you, love. Reuben and I will enjoy that.’

‘Bacon isn’t even nice, Daddy,’ Saskia says. She’s decided to become vegetarian, like Helen, so all I’ve heard about for the last three months is how meat is Satan. ‘I tried some once and it tasted not very nice. Plus, it’s from pigs and they’re more smarter than dogs and you wouldn’t eat our dog, would you?’

‘Hmmm. You know, if he tasted like bacon, I’d consider it.’

‘Daddy!’

I lean over and give her a kiss. She still kisses me on the lips, a quick peck with a big ‘mwah’ at the end, just as she did as a baby. When the day comes that she tells me she’s too old to kiss me anymore I think my heart will break.

‘Do the thing,’ she says when I plop one of the blueberry pancakes into a pan on the stove. ‘Do the flip, Dad. Do it!’

I wait until the pan is nice and hot before planting my feet wide, gripping the pan handle tightly and tossing the pancake as high as I can. It flips into the air, smacks the ceiling, then lands splat in the pan.