Wishbones

Everyone in Willingdon knows Dad’s white van with GEORGE AND JO’S EMERGENCY PLUMBING written in red letters along the side. Dad told me that before Mum stopped leaving the house, she was his PA. She did all the accounting and the paperwork and the advertising and telephone calls. She was good at keeping people happy and had all these creative ideas for how to get new customers. Mum’s got a clever reading and writing brain. She trained to be a lawyer but then decided she wanted to be a full-time mum and ended up helping Dad with the business instead. Dad and I have the non-writing and reading brains. We’re better at fixing things than reading things.

Without your mum, I’d have gone out of business years ago, Dad says. She’s the magic-maker. He used to say that all the time, that she was the magic-maker. And she was. Steph told me that, as well as helping Dad and looking after me, she did bits and bobs around the village, like first aid training. She ran weekly workshops in Newton Primary.

When I was little, Dad joked that Mum had magical powers. He told me about how she was always in the right place at the right time when someone needed her, like when one of the fryers exploded in Mr Ding’s restaurant and burnt his arms and when Steph got stung by a bee and went into anaphylactic shock and when some random guy visiting the village had a heart attack right in the middle of The Green. Mum was better than a magic-maker: she brought people back to life. I wish I’d been a bit older when Mum still walked around the village, so I could have seen her doing all those cool things.

She stopped doing Dad’s paperwork about five years ago, said it made her tired. I sometimes wonder how Dad’s been coping all this time without her. I went into his room once and there was paperwork lying everywhere; most of the envelopes looked like bills and some of them had words like URGENT and LAST REMINDER stamped across the top. But I knew Dad would take care of it. He might not be the best at admin, but he works harder than anyone I know. This last year he’s been doing call-outs every hour of the night and day. So the business must be doing okay.

‘Hi, Houdini,’ I say as I walk down the front steps. He steps out of his kennel and gives me a bleat. Dad’s put a yellow woolly coat on him because of the cold weather, which makes him look like a fuzzy egg yolk. Houdini nudges my swim bag.

When I give his beard a stroke, Houdini looks up and holds my gaze for a moment. I reckon that animals have life more sussed than we do: I bet he’d think of a good plan to get Mum healthy.

As I look across The Green to the rectory, I notice a suitcase sitting on Rev Cootes’s front doorstep. Rev Cootes is really old and wrinkly and lives alone and never has any visitors; and he doesn’t have family either, or any family that drop by anyway. And no one really goes to his services, except Steph, who started going after the divorce. So, basically, Rev Cootes is weird. And not cool-weird: he’s scary-weird. I wouldn’t ever go to see Rev Cootes alone. He’s probably got those children from the kids’ bit of the cemetery chopped up and pickled in jars in his basement.

I check to make sure he’s not crouching behind one of the gravestones and then walk across The Green to the vicarage until I’m close enough to get a good look at the suitcase. It’s got an American Airlines tag on it and an I LOVE NYC sticker on the side. Rev Cootes knowing someone from New York is about as likely as Mum coming out to do pirouettes in the middle of The Green.

The front door flies open. Rev Cootes stands in the doorway, holding his watering can, glaring at me. It’s the same glare he uses whenever we have to come over and get Houdini from his front garden. No matter what system Dad puts in place to keep Houdini fenced in, he finds a way to wriggle out of his collar and climb out of our garden and scamper over to nibble on his graveyard flowers. Rev Cootes treats the St Mary’s Cemetery like it’s an exhibit in the Chelsea Flower Show. Which means he hates Houdini. And you know the crazy thing? Houdini loves Rev Cootes. I’ve told Houdini about my theory that Rev Cootes is an axe-murderer or a child-abductor, but Houdini doesn’t listen, he just goes up to him and head-butts his shins and tries to nuzzle his hand. It’s properly weird.

I turn to go but before I do, I look past Rev Cootes into the vicarage. There’s someone standing behind him. I see a shimmer of short blond hair under the hall lamp.

The regional swim heats are coming up soon and what with Mum being in a coma and all the plans I’ve been making to get her healthy, I neglected my training. Swimming hasn’t seemed very important next to keeping Mum alive. But I know I shouldn’t throw away all the work I’ve put into making the team and I’ve got this secret hope that if I make it to the regionals, Mum will be so proud of me that she’ll come and watch. I think she’d be proud of how fast I’ve got with my butterfly. But whenever I talk about swimming, she goes quiet and then she changes the subject.

Steph’s my swim coach and she and Jake come along to support me at all my races, which makes up a bit for Mum not being there. I know Steph will be waiting for me this morning, but I take the long way to her house because I want to drop off some notes in the shops on Willingdon Green.

The notes read:

Feather Tucker

Looking for work as a part-time Sales Assistant.

Hard-working. Shows initiative. Good at counting.

Salary negotiable.

Mobile: 07598 223456

If I’m going to save up for Mum’s gastric band and her personal trainer, I’m going to have to start earning some serious money.

When I get to Bewitched, Mrs Zas is kneeling in her front window with a pile of clothes and three naked mannequins. She’s puffing on an electric cigarette and between the puffs she’s humming. Her door sign is flipped to OPEN, which is weird – I can’t imagine anyone wanting to rent a fancy-dress costume at six in the morning. Anyway, I decide it can’t hurt to pop in.

‘Good to see you, Feather,’ Mrs Zas says. She puts down her cigarette and pulls a nun outfit over the plastic boobs of one of her mannequins.

Mrs Zas is wearing a black headscarf and a hoopy gold earring and a pirate outfit, which she’s kind of bursting out of. She’s in bare feet, her clogs tossed behind her.

I hand her one of my leaflets. She takes her purple-rimmed plastic glasses off from the top of her head and peers at my note.

‘I thought you might need some help,’ I explain.

People come from all over to rent Mrs Zas’s fancy dress costumes, plus she has a big rack of ballroom dancing outfits that people use for The Willingdon Waltz competition. And she never seems to have anyone else working in the shop.

Mrs Zas gets up and slips into her heels. ‘I’ll give it some thought.’

‘When do you think you’ll know?’

Mrs Zas raises her eyebrows. ‘You’re – what do they call it in England? Dogged?’

I’m not sure it’s a compliment so I don’t answer.

‘I like it,’ she says, and smiles. ‘You need to take life by the throat.’ She puts her fingers around the neck of a mannequin and shakes it dramatically to make the point. She drops her hands from the mannequin and smiles with her big, red lipsticked mouth. ‘I’ll give it some thought, Feather.’ She taps a bit of forehead through her headscarf.

I wonder why she always wears headscarves – and what her hair’s like underneath. I can picture it being really long and black and shiny, like a witch’s.

‘If you do think of something, I’m afraid I’ll have to be paid,’ I say. I know it’s a bit rude but the whole point of getting a job is earning money and, despite the shop being busy a lot of the time, Mrs Zas always looks strapped for cash. I mean, otherwise she’d buy her own clothes, right?

Mrs Zas nods. ‘Of course.’

I sometimes wonder why, of all the villages in England, Mrs Zas ended up in Willingdon, the place where nothing ever happens. And from all the evidence I’ve seen, she lives alone, which must get pretty lonely. So maybe it will be nice having me around.

‘Thank you for considering giving me a job.’

I head to the door.

Mrs Zas smiles and nods, goes back to putting a Frankenstein’s monster outfit on the mannequin she throttled and starts humming again, mumbling a few words between her hums: turn… turn… turn…

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.