Coming Home. Annabel Kantaria

OK to ‘friend’ him, didn’t it? It had been weird-in-a-nice-way to bump into Luca after so long. Just hearing his voice again had made me feel safe; it was as if he dropped an invisible cloak of protection over my shoulders. Luca was so different to the men I met in Dubai; so very, very different to the razzle-dazzling, lying, cheating James. Luca was what he was; there was no pretence, no show, and I liked that. He knew about Graham. He knew the scars that lay inside my heart. With Luca, I could be myself: no explanations.

      ‘To see what Luca Rossi shares with his friends, send a Friend Request.’ I stared at the tiny picture of Luca that came up on the screen, my finger hesitating over the mouse. Would ‘friending’ him send the wrong signals? I was still reeling from my break-up with James, the word ‘rebound’ pulsing in my mind’s eye, and I didn’t want Luca to think I wanted anything more than a connection for old times’ sake.

      But the pull of seeing someone who knew my past was too strong and I fired off the request, adding in a message: ‘It was great to see you. I’m around for a bit. Let me know if you fancy a coffee. Cheers, Evie.’ Just the thought of being Facebook friends with Luca made me smile. Although I was totally off men, he was different … I knew him. I knew his family, his background, his people. It wasn’t like he could spin a web of lies like James had.

      James had dazzled me from the night we’d met—I’d never in my life come across anyone so handsome, so charming, so fearless and spontaneous. On our first date—the morning after we’d met in the wine bar—he’d taken me skydiving over Palm Jumeirah for goodness’ sake. He’d told me he dabbled in a bit of commodities trading but made most of his money working as an advisor to a Sheikh. New to Dubai and green as they come, I’d lapped it all up, naively believing that James really was ‘working on an important project at the palace’ when he was actually sleeping with Shelley or Susan or Tracey at their airline crew accommodation. Our engagement had come to an abrupt end when Shelley had bumped into us having a cosy dinner in the beach restaurant of the very hotel at which we’d got engaged.

      ‘What are you doing with my fiancé?’ she’d asked before turning her fury on James. I liked to imagine someone had managed to retrieve both our engagement rings from the sea where we’d flung them. Now I shuddered thinking about that night.

      I flicked once more through my address book, concluding that, after being away for so long, I had no real friends currently residing in Woodside. But I had one more thing to do. Opening my email, I looked up the address I had stored so recently.

      ‘Dear Miss Dawson,’ I typed. ‘It was lovely to speak to you today, and thank you for being so kind. As it happens, I am quite worried about Mum. She’s not herself (obviously)—she had a really bad reaction to a police car that went past with its sirens on, and now she’s told me she’s selling the house we’ve lived in all my life. Dad’s not been gone a few days. More seriously, though, she’s confused Dad’s death with Graham’s twice now. Once I could have overlooked, but twice? Is this to be expected? Should I try to get her to see you? Sorry to ask, but you’re the only person who knows all the background. With thanks and warm regards, Evie.’

       CHAPTER 17

      It was a perilous climb up to the attic. Mum positioned the ladder as best she could, adjacent to the door, and held it steady, but I had to haul myself up a good foot between the top of the ladder and the floor of the attic, then transfer myself across sideways. Dignified it was not.

      ‘Right, are you up?’ she called, as I dusted myself off and felt around for a light switch. ‘If you’re OK up there I’ll just pop up to the High Street,’ she said. ‘Do you need anything?’

      I said that I didn’t. I had mixed feelings about going through the attic and I was glad Mum wasn’t going to be hanging around at the bottom of the ladder, waiting to see what I found. I was curious to see what was up there but, like her, I was also slightly nervous of what I might find, of the memories that might resurface.

      Easing myself along the ancient floor beams (I vaguely remembered Dad telling me as a child that I must stand only on the beams—was it true? I didn’t know), I looked around. The air smelled musty and particles of dust floated languidly in the yellow of the weak electric light.

      Every available inch of floor space was choked with boxes. Empty ones, full ones, mysterious ones, labelled ones. Toys, clothes, books, old computers, old stereos, speakers and suitcases. There was more than thirty years’ worth of family junk but, as I looked more closely, I realised there was at least some method to the madness: my old toys were grouped together, as were bunches of suitcases, boxes of clothes, hardware, empty boxes and other items. I realised I wasn’t going to be able to make a dent in the clearing today—once I’d had a good look around I’d hire a skip and blitz the whole place in a couple of sessions.

      In a dusty corner, balanced on the beams near the other toys, I spotted the old wooden doll’s house Dad had made for me when I was six. I went over—it was smaller than I remembered but, even under a coat of dust, it was still lovely. Looking at it now, as an adult, I couldn’t believe the attention to detail Dad had put into it: different rooms were sectioned off, each with hinged doors and each wallpapered a different colour; there was tiny home-made furniture; a pipe-cleaner family for whom Mum had made wool bodies and tiny clothes; and there were even electric lights.

      Feeling like a giant, I slid my hand inside the living room and clicked a tiny switch—long ago, the lights had even worked. Running my fingertips over the neatly painted window frames, I understood for the first time what a labour of love making this house must have been for Dad. I’d played with it countless times as a child, assuming that everyone’s fathers hand-crafted wooden doll’s houses for them. It was only now—too late—that I realised how special it had been; how much Dad must have loved me. I looked up at the rafters and whispered, ‘I loved it. Thank you.’

      Reluctantly, I turned back to the attic. By the door was a messy pile of empty boxes—the box that the new retro phone had come in; the new DVD-player’s box; the bread-making machine’s box. My mother hated to throw anything away—she must have tossed these boxes up into the attic without actually coming up the ladder; she can’t have been up for years. As I started to stack the boxes neatly away from the door, I noticed a camp chair and a small table set back behind the door, in a corner where you wouldn’t naturally look when climbing into the attic. On the table, there was a lamp, crudely wired into the mains supply, a couple of books and an opened jumbo packet of Minstrels—Dad’s favourite sweets.

      After stepping carefully past the door, I went over. Surprisingly, the chair, table and books weren’t covered in the dust that veiled everything else in the attic. The thinnest book was a school exercise book. My breath caught as I saw Graham’s careless writing scrawled on the front: ‘NEWS’. I flicked through the book, dipping in and out of Graham’s accounts of our weekends, written for Monday morning ‘news’ at school.

      ‘On Saturday we went to Greenwich Park,’ he’d written. ‘Me and Evie played hide n seek in the adventur playground. I won. We had Mr Whippy 99s. Evie dropped hers so I shared mine.’ He’d drawn a picture of two children holding huge ice creams. He’d put us in identical outfits, but made me smaller and scribbled me some mad brown hair. I sank into the chair and flicked through the book, absorbed in the events so crudely described: our childhood on the page.

      Next I pulled the thick book towards me—it was a photo album and, even before I looked, I knew what I’d find inside: Graham. Hundreds of pictures of Graham. His whole life, lovingly tracked out in pictures, with captions written in my father’s neat handwriting. I hugged the album tightly to my chest, and squeezed my eyes shut. So this is how Dad coped with Graham’s death? He came up to the attic and sat, alone, remembering his dead son? I sat there for some time, imagining how Dad must have felt, the sounds of family life, such as it was, drifting up from the house below as he—as he what? Remembered? Cried? Blamed himself? Talked to Graham?

      ‘Oh, Dad,’ I whispered. ‘I didn’t know. I would have talked to you. Why didn’t you talk to me?’