Erin Kaye - Always You

‘I’m thirty years old, Sarah,’ smiled Becky, ‘I think I can look after myself.’

Sarah returned the smile but knew in her heart that this wasn’t true. Becky was always borrowing money off her, though to be fair she did pay it back – eventually. She’d been thrown out of accommodation twice in her early twenties for not paying her rent and she was still living in a rented flat with no prospect of buying somewhere of her own.

Becky bent down, picked up a couple of glassy, grey, sharp-edged stones and stood up again, holding them in her mittened palm for Sarah to see. ‘Do you know they found evidence of Neolithic people living in this bay? They made tools from this flint. It’s over two hundred million years old.’ She turned the stone in her hand and gazed dreamily along the beach. ‘It’s amazing to think that we’re walking in the footsteps of Stone Age humans who lived over six thousand years ago. They reckon they lived in caves up there on the hill.’ She pointed at the green plateau that rose high above sea level. ‘And came down to the seashore to forage for shellfish.’

‘How do you know that?’

Becky slipped the flintstones into her pocket. ‘I quite often go to the library at lunchtime. I like the idea of learning about our ancestors by the evidence they left behind.’

‘Well,’ said Sarah, pulling the collar of her coat tighter. ‘I wouldn’t have fancied running about in nothing but animal furs, trying to kill your dinner with a bit of stone tied to the end of a stick. It must’ve been a bleak existence.’

Becky laughed. ‘A short one too, by all accounts. They rarely made it past forty.’

The age at which their mother had died. And their father, whom Sarah had believed invincible, had fallen apart.

It was shortly after the funeral. She was filling a glass with water at the kitchen sink, her swollen eyes gritty and sore from crying. Dad was in the back garden bringing in the washing, an expression of grim determination on his face. When he came to Mum’s favourite pink nightdress, he unpegged it tenderly and stood for some moments with it clutched against his breast.

Suddenly, he dropped to his knees on the damp grass, wooden pegs spilling out from the bag in his hand like kindling. Sarah rushed to the door but stalled at the sound of his sobbing, coming through the opened window. A kind of mewling, like a cat caught in a trap. It was unbearable, a private moment of grief never meant for sharing. Quickly, she turned and walked away.

Sarah’s heart pounded in her chest. It astounded her how, all these years later, she could still be so unexpectedly ambushed by moments of grief. She pushed the image resolutely out of her mind and focused on the present.

The children were absorbed by something in the seaweed which Molly was poking with a big stick. ‘Hey,’ she called out. ‘Time to go.’ She peeled back the sleeve of her coat to consult her watch and said to Becky, ‘We’d better make tracks. If we don’t hurry up we’ll be late meeting Dad and Aunt Vi for lunch.’

‘And we’ll never hear the end of it if we are,’ said Becky, rolling her eyes.

Lewis came over and held up fingers, as red and stiff as a cooked lobster. ‘My hands are cold, Mum.’

Sarah smiled indulgently. ‘No wonder, sweetheart, when you refuse to wear gloves.’ She put her arm around him and kissed his coarse hair.

‘Last one back to the car’s the loser,’ cried Becky and she set off across the shingle followed by the children.

By the time they’d all made it back to the car and driven the short distance to the Londonderry Arms Hotel in the middle of Carnlough village – where good home cooking was the order of the day and attracted clientele from the length and breadth of County Antrim – they found Aunt Vi and Dad already seated at a table by the window.

‘Thank goodness, you’re here at last,’ was the first thing Aunt Vi said from behind steel-rimmed glasses, her right hand splayed on her sternum like a starfish, her lined face full of anxiety. ‘We were getting worried.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Sarah, peeling off her scarf. ‘Lewis, don’t leave your coat lying there on the floor. Put it on the back of a chair. That’s a good boy.’

‘Come and sit by me,’ Dad said to the boy, patting the seat beside him. ‘Molly, pet, you sit on the other side.’

Sarah and Becky shed their outdoor things and filled the two remaining seats beside their aunt, who was still bristling with annoyance.

‘Sorry Aunt Vi,’ said Sarah again. ‘We didn’t mean to be late. We were on the beach. We lost track of time.’

‘That’s okay, love,’ said Dad, staring wistfully out the window, with eyes the palest shade of sky blue. ‘Your Mum used to love walking on the beach here.’

Sarah smiled at him warmly, taking in his white dentures and thinning white-grey hair. His gnarled hands lay motionless on the table – the skin across his knuckles was wrinkled and papery. An old man’s hands.

Becky said softly, ‘Yes, Dad, I remember. We used to take a run up the coast most Sundays in the summer. We’d get an ice cream and eat it over there, on the harbour wall.’ She pointed through the window to the limestone harbour constructed in the 1850s. The white stone had weathered, tinged now with a golden yellow, reminding Sarah of another childhood treat.

‘Do you remember Yellow Man?’ she said, referring to the brittle honeycomb toffee that had been one of the highlights of ‘a day up the coast’.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Becky. ‘I loved that stuff when I was little.’

Aunt Vi jumped into the brief lull in the conversation. ‘All I’m saying is that you should’ve phoned.’ She glanced at the mobile phone poised squarely on the table in front of her, like a reproach. ‘Or texted.’ Despite the fact that she cut a decidedly old-fashioned figure with her steel grey hair scraped back in a bun and a stern black roll-neck, adorned only with a simple gold locket, she was surprisingly up to speed when it came to cutting-edge technology.

Becky said, ‘Who’s for a drink?’ and caught the eye of a waiter.

Sarah lowered her voice and said patiently, ‘We were only ten minutes late, Aunt Vi.’

The children chattered excitedly to Dad and Aunt Vi said, folding her arms across her chest, ‘Ten minutes is a long time when you’re waiting for someone. Anything could’ve happened for all we knew.’

Dad looked up sharply. ‘That’s enough, now, Vi,’ he said gently.

Aunt Vi unfolded her arms and pushed up the bridge of her glasses and soon everyone was distracted by ordering drinks and food.

‘Well, Molly, you’ll be moving up to the high school after the summer,’ said Becky, when the waiter had left.

‘I hope she’s not in the same class as those nasty girls,’ said Aunt Vi under her breath. Sarah hoped so too. Lately, some girls in her class had been picking on Molly.

‘I can’t believe you’re growing up so fast,’ said Becky. ‘Next thing we know you’ll be a teenager!’

Molly sat up straighter in her chair and beamed. ‘Mum says I can cycle to school and back every day.’

‘Even in the winter?’ quizzed Aunt Vi. ‘When it’s dark?’

Sarah bit her tongue, reminding herself that Aunt Vi couldn’t help herself. She’d moved in shortly after their mother died – and with her came a new era of curfews and surveillance on a par with the secret service. Dad, stricken with depression, had pretty much let Vi take charge of the running of the house and the raising of his daughters. Sarah didn’t blame him for it – he’d done the best he could.

And, on the whole, Aunt Vi had done a good job, certainly the best she knew how, considering she’d never married or had children. There was no doubting Vi’s love for Sarah and Becky, nor her compassion – she had given up her job as matron in Coleraine hospital to help her brother raise his two motherless daughters.