The Family

If I wasn’t family.

If I wasn’t a friend.

Who was I?

I stepped into the hallway and Mum came barging out of the kitchen, just as Rhianon sauntered through the front door with her overnight bag. Her silent yawn shouting she’d had a brilliant sleepover.

I pushed my way past Mum and her, running out towards the car. I never got to tell Aunt Anwyn that even without Dad around to tie her to Mum, I was still her niece. Somehow, even then, I knew I would never be back.

I would never see her again.

Chapter Eight (#ulink_6e950ea6-dd51-5f72-aad2-5ff794de910f)

LAURA

Tilly thundered upstairs as soon as we got back from Anwyn’s. I didn’t follow her, knowing I had to make the call straight away before my courage drained away. I sat in the kitchen still wearing my coat. My knee jigging up and down as I conjured up the keypad on my mobile. This wasn’t a number that was stored in my contacts, instead it was stored in the dark corners of my mind where cobwebs hung, and memories that were too painful to revisit gathered dust.

Acid rose in my throat as my shaking finger pressed the digits slowly. Through the stretch of time I could see the phone vibrating on the mahogany table with the vase of fake flowers with their too-shiny leaves. I could hear my mother’s voice reciting the number every time she answered, in the unlikely event the caller was unaware of who they were trying to reach.

A soft click.

‘Hello.’ The voice was bright and breezy. Too young to belong to my dad. Too cheerful.

‘Hello. I… I’m trying to reach Donald or Linda?’

‘You’ve got the wrong number.’

‘Sorry. I… I don’t suppose that line is still connected to fourteen Acacia Avenue is it?’

‘Yes. But we’ve been here eight years—’

Numb, I ended the call. Stupid that I’d expected everything in my childhood to have remained the same. Stupid that I’d ever thought my parents would help me, even if they still lived there.

‘Laura, you’ve made your own bed. You’re not family to us anymore,’ my father had spat after he’d ordered me out of his life. I had hefted a black bag crammed with my possessions over my shoulder, my duvet rolled under my arm, as my scared and confused seventeen-year-old self had stumbled out into the cutting night air. The door slammed behind me but I didn’t move. Couldn’t co-ordinate my legs and brain to work together. Minutes later I had been flooded with relief as there was the sound of unlocking, my mum framed in the doorway, honeycomb light spilling out into the porch. ‘Mum!’ Slowly, uncertainly, I had stepped towards her but she had shaken her head, creating an invisible barrier between us, before stretching out her palm.

‘Give me your key,’ were her last words to me before I handed over my keyring and my identity as a daughter. The door closed once more, leaving me standing alone on the step, my breath coming too fast, white clouds billowing from my mouth like mist, instantaneously disappearing like it had never existed. The kitchen light brightened the garden. I had crouched in the flower bed and peeped through the window as Mum stuck a couple of pork chops under the grill while Dad laid the table for two, and as I turned away I knew – for my parents – it was as if I had never existed.

Still, I couldn’t believe how much it hurt to learn they had moved, and I had no idea where they were. If they were alive even. My eyes cast around the tiny kitchen as though somehow I might find them there, coming to rest by the back door. The pencil marks made by Gavan as he balanced a ruler on Tilly’s head while she asked, ‘How tall am I now, Daddy?’ We’d outgrown this house years ago, but I always had an excuse not to move. It was too convenient for Tilly’s nursery; for her school. Later, we’d spent the deposit we’d saved to buy our own house on setting up Gavan’s business. We’d saved again, but that time our hard-earned cash went on the florist shop. Gavan never complained. Now and then he’d grumble about renting being a waste of money, and that it was ridiculous we didn’t own a home when he built them for a living, but he knew that deep down the reason I didn’t want to leave was because there, my parents knew where I was. We’d sent them a photo of Tilly asleep in her pram after she was born, with our address scrawled on the back. How could they resist her sweet face? Somehow they did. The void of loss had never fully left me, but gradually over the years I had filled it with a new family: Gavan, Tilly, Iwan, Anwyn, Rhianon; but I always retained the tiniest sliver of hope that one day they might come for me and if that day came I wanted them, I needed them, to be able to find us.

And now they’d moved.

When Tilly thumped downstairs hours later, proclaiming that she was starving, I was still sitting at the kitchen table.

Still wearing my coat.

The following day, I was rifling through the fridge, seeing which withering vegetables from the Oak Leaf Organics bag I could salvage for Sunday lunch, when the doorbell chimed.

‘Iwan!’ My eyes darted left and then right. He was alone. ‘Come in.’ I stepped back and gestured for him to go into the lounge as I returned to the kitchen to make tea, putting some space between us. I gathered my thoughts as I gathered the milk and the sugar. I needed to repair my shrinking family. Iwan was my last link to Gavan. Their dad had passed from cancer two years ago, and their mum followed six months later. A cardiac arrest, the young doctor had said, but privately we thought that grief had broken her heart in two. There were no other relatives.

My breath caught in my throat as I carried the mugs through. Iwan was filling Gavan’s chair, his elbows resting on the arms, fingers steepled together in front of his mouth the way Gavan used to sit when I’d laugh and tell him it looked like he was praying.

‘Praying for a kiss,’ he’d say and I’d roll my eyes but kiss him anyway.

I’d never noticed before how similar their fingers were, their mannerisms. Iwan cleared his throat. The brothers even had the same husky undertone and I had a crazy impulse to close my eyes. To ask him to whisper ‘I love you,’ just to hear it one more time.

‘Laura, I’m sorry about yesterday, about Anwyn,’ he said and the spell was broken.

‘I’m sorry too. I should never have slapped her.’ Just the thought of it made my palm sting.

‘She has a knack of bringing out the worst in people sometimes.’ It was a strange thing for him to say about his wife. Again, I wondered what they had been arguing about before we had arrived. The silence stretched. He spoke first. ‘I miss him too. It was never… It should never have ended that way. He was my brother and I let him down.’

‘He understood.’ I told him what he needed to hear. ‘That night… He was excited about the business.’

‘There was a deal agreed in principle,’ he said.

‘And now?’ Iwan couldn’t meet my eye. He didn’t speak. ‘You’ve taken the deal to your new firm haven’t you?’ There was a sour taste in my mouth.

‘It’s not that, it’s… complicated. Look, I’ll make some enquiries. See if there’s anything I can do. If I can get you some money, Laura, I will. You know what Tilly means to me, what you both mean to me.’ He rubbed his fingers over his lips the way Gavan used to whenever he felt uncomfortable. Trying to press the words back inside.

‘Thank you.’ The pressure on my chest eased.

‘Don’t thank me yet. Even if I can do anything, it will be a slow process. Months if not longer. There’s a situation.’ He sipped his tea which was still steaming and I knew it was a delaying tactic.

‘Anything I should know about?’ I asked.

‘Laura.’ His eyes met mine. ‘Sometimes there are things you’re better off never knowing.’

‘Sorry, there’s nothing we can do.’

That was the phase I heard over and over that week. Each day was a battle. After I’d drop Tilly at school there were endless phone calls and visits. The benefits office was sorry but there was a backlog and they couldn’t process my claim for weeks. My landlord wouldn’t accept housing benefit tenants. There were some flats which would but they were in a rough area and quite far from Tilly’s school. The insurance company smothered me with terms and clauses and legalities I couldn’t understand. Citizen’s Advice couldn’t fit me in until the New Year. The landlord of the shop was sorry, but in light of the arrears he’d found a new tenant and he’d be keeping my deposit to cover some of the rent I’d missed.

Sorry. Everyone was sorry.

It was Friday that finally broke me. Although I’d applied for every job going, from cleaning to waitressing, it was the position in the flower department of my local supermarket I had pinned all my hopes upon. I knew it would only be unpacking cellophane-wrapped bouquets from boxes and dumping them in plastic buckets but I was certain I’d get the job.

The white envelope imprinted with the shop’s logo dropped onto the doormat. I pounced on it eagerly.

We regret to inform you…

The rejection punched the back of my knees, tore sobs from my throat. I slid to the floor, curling myself as small as possible. The hessian doormat bristled against my cheek as I cried for the things I didn’t have; a job, money, a home, but most of all I cried for Gavan, his name rising from the pit of my stomach, spilling out into the cold empty hallway where he would never again kick off muddy boots and trail brick dust over the carpet.

Eventually, I exhausted myself. I shuffled on my knees to the bottom of the stairs and unhooked my handbag from the bannister. It was while I was rooting around for a packet of tissues that my fingers brushed against the piece of paper Saffron had given me.

‘If it weren’t for Alex I honestly don’t know where I’d be.’

Was there such a thing as a truly altruistic person?

I had nothing to lose by asking, but still it was gargantuan to tentatively dial her number, not allowing myself to hope.