Virginia Macgregor - Wishbones

By the time I get to Jake’s house, he and Steph are already by the car. I want to hug them both. They feel more like family than Mum and Dad right now. Jake says he likes being an only child but I wish I had brothers and sisters. It gets lonely being stuck between Mum and Dad. I mean, I love them, but I wish that there were someone to share stuff with, especially the bad stuff. I once asked Mum why she didn’t have any more kids and she went quiet and then she kissed me and gave me one of her big, warm hugs and said: I have my Feather – and she’s worth a million children – which I didn’t think was a proper answer, but it made me feel good anyway.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ I say.

I’m late for most things. By my reasoning, late people get more out of life because they squeeze extra things in. Anyway, Steph usually has a go at me, because she’s an on-time kind of person, but this time she just gives me a hug. I know she feels sorry for me after everything that’s happened with Mum. I think I’d rather have been told off.

‘Ready to beat your PB?’ Jake asks. He’s Steph’s assistant coach and my timekeeper.

‘I’ll try,’ I say. I’m going to do this for Mum.

I jump into the back.

It was through Steph that I got into swimming. When Mum and Dad were busy with the plumbing business, she’d take Jake and me to the pool on Saturday mornings and she got so into it that she did a coaching qualification and started coaching the Newton team. Jake and I would come and watch her training the older children and then, one summer, Mum and I spent weeks doing nothing but watching the Olympics on TV and, when I saw those amazing swimmers doing butterfly stroke, I knew that I wanted to swim like them. So I asked Steph if I could try out for the team.

They’re holding the Junior UK Championships at the Newton pool this summer and if I make it through the regionals, I’ll be there competing with the best Junior Fly swimmers in the UK.

‘Go! Go! Go!’ I hear Jake’s voice above me as I turn and kick off the end of the pool. ‘Faster!’

My arms and legs feel like they’re pinned to the bottom of the pool by lead weights. If I’m going to make it through the regional heats in March, I’ll have to get a whole lot faster.

‘Focus!’ Steph yells as I push my arms over my head. ‘Arms out… kick harder…’

Usually, swimming’s the only thing guaranteed to get me out of my head. As I pull myself in and out of the water and propel my arms over my head and feel the rush of water along my body, my breath syncs into some weird energy and I disappear into another place, a place where it’s just me and the water. And the more I let myself go to that somewhere place, the better I swim. It’s the best feeling in the world.

But today, all I can think about is Mum.

When I finish, I can tell from Jake’s face that I’m closer to my Personal Worst than my Personal Best. I don’t even ask him to give me my time.

In the changing room, I turn to Steph.

‘What did you and Mum fight about? At Christmas, I mean?’

As usual, she doesn’t answer.

‘Can’t you patch things up?’ I ask.

Steph fiddles with the locker key. ‘Damn thing.’

‘Steph?’

She looks at me. ‘It’s complicated, Feather.’

‘She needs you. Like, really needs you. Now more than ever.’

‘She’ll let me know when she’s ready.’

‘Ready for what?’ I ask.

‘Ow!’

I notice a small droplet of blood on Steph’s thumb. She’s jabbed herself with the safety pin.

‘It’s about something that happened a long time ago.’ Steph’s voice is all jagged.

‘Well, if it happened so long ago,’ I say, ‘it can’t be that important any more, can it?’

‘Just talk to your mum, Feather. It’s not for me to say.’

‘Not for you to say what?’

She shakes her head.

‘Mum won’t talk, Steph. You know she won’t. Not about anything except who’s doing what on Strictly , which is like the least important thing in the world – and now that we’ve taken her TV away, she won’t even talk about that.’

‘It’s not up to you to fix your mum,’ Steph says.

And that’s the end of our conversation.

If Steph won’t tell me what happened, I’ll have to find out some other way. And then I’ll figure out a way to get them to be friends again. If I’m going to get Mum better, I’m going to need all the help I can get.

9

I push through the front door, drop my swim bag in the entrance and run down the hall.

As I stand in the kitchen doorway, my hair dripping down my shoulders, I can’t believe what I’m seeing: Mitch is sitting at the kitchen table next to Mum, who’s sitting in her wheelchair.

‘You opened the door, Mum?’

Mum laughs. ‘You’re looking at me like I let in an axe-murderer.’

‘But you never answer the door.’ I pause. ‘Ever.’

The last time we had guests in the house was four years ago, for my birthday. And it didn’t end well. One of the boys took pictures of Mum on his mobile and sent them to my class. When I worked out what he’d done I punched him on the nose, grabbed his phone, dropped it into his glass of Coke and told him to leave. He ran home and told his parents and, within half an hour, all the kids at my party had been picked up.

Apart from Jake, I haven’t had any friends round since. I don’t really mind – in some ways it’s easier, it means I don’t have to keep explaining about Mum or worrying how people will react. And anyway, I feel about Jake a bit like Mum feels about me: he’s worth a million friends.

‘It took a while for me to get to the front door,’ Mum says. ‘Mitch was already halfway down the drive. But I made it.’ Mum winks at me. ‘I thought you’d approve.’

Every muscle in my body relaxes. So Mum’s finally decided to make an effort. Me ignoring her this morning and showing her that I’m not going to back down must have worked.

I spin round to face Mitch.

‘So why did you come over?’

‘Feather, love, be polite. Mitch is our neighbour. He’s doing up Cuckoo Cottage.’

‘I know.’

People from London and other posh places have been buying up the cottages on The Green as holiday houses. It’s pushed lots of the locals out of their homes and businesses. It’s why Mr Ding had to sell his restaurant space and get a takeaway van. Sometimes, I have dreams about how no one lives on The Green any more except for us, that it’s like a ghost town or a place after there’s been some kind of natural disaster and everyone’s moved out. Our cottage is too small for rich people to be interested in. And anyway, Dad wouldn’t sell, not in a million years.

‘I thought it couldn’t hurt to pop by and see how your mother was doing,’ Mitch says.

‘Mitch was telling me about the meeting you went to.’

She’s going to kill me.

‘Mum, I’m sorry,’ I blurt out. ‘I didn’t mean to. Not without asking you first. I thought I’d just go and check it out—’

Mum holds out her hand and I come over and kneel next to her chair on the kitchen tiles.

‘It’s okay, my darling, I know you meant well.’ Mum turns to Mitch Banks. ‘The group sounds interesting.’

I feel my eyebrows shoot up. ‘It does?’

I still can’t quite believe that Mum’s going along with all this. All Mum’s been talking about since she got back from hospital is that she wants things to go back to normal. And what she means by normal is before New Year’s Eve, when she would spend her days eating and watching TV.

Sometimes I have the same wish: I love how easy things used to be, how we’d spend hours laughing and talking, snuggled up watching TV and eating Chunky Monkey ice cream straight from the tub, as if the rest of the world didn’t exist.