The Blame Game. C.J. Cooke

customer or laid off an employee. Just weeks before I’d persuaded Michael to sack one of our part-timers, Matilda. She doesn’t do anything, I protested. You’re barely paying yourself a salary as it is. The bookshop isn’t a charity for lazy eighteen-year-olds who sit around all day reading Tolkien.

      Michael pointed out that she was Arnold’s daughter, and Arnold had been the first to help him out when he set up the shop, but I won in the end. Matilda was sketchy about her whereabouts at the time of the fire – her parents confirmed she’d been out of the house, and it turned out she’d been with a boy. But for a horrible few days it seemed that perhaps Matilda could have been responsible for the blaze.

      ‘We never ruled out arson,’ Michael says when I remind him that Matilda was found to be innocent. ‘Until the investigation closes, every possibility is on the table.’

      ‘Maybe it was a group of kids messing around,’ I say to his back. I desperately want him to lie back down with me, to recapture the idyllic mood.

      ‘We both know kids didn’t start that fire, Helen,’ Michael snaps, getting out of the hammock.

      ‘Michael?’

      I’m taken aback by the sharpness of his tone. As I watch him head back into the hut I sense he’s exhausted, worn thin by worry. But I wish we could discuss this. Every time we start to talk about something that cuts deep he just walks away.

       3

       Michael

      28th August 2017

      We’ve got a mutiny on our hands right now.

      ‘Pleeease can we stay here, Dad?’ Saskia howls in the kitchen as I make breakfast. This morning our butler (yes, an actual butler – I feel like a Kardashian) dropped off our food parcel, containing waffles (round, so we can tell Reuben they’re pizzas), maple syrup, coconuts, dragon fruit, freshly baked bread, eggs, salad, blueberry pancakes, pineapple, the most mouth-watering bacon I’ve ever tasted in my entire life, and a bottle of wine.

      ‘I’m sorry, my love,’ I say, hugging Sas to my side as I heat the waffles on the hob. She smells of sunlight and the ocean. ‘I’m afraid we can’t change our flight. We’ve got today and tomorrow and then we have to head off to Mexico City to fly home.’

      ‘But Daa-aad, I don’t want to go home. Jack-Jack doesn’t want to go, either.’

      ‘Hmmm,’ I say, tipping waffles on to a plate. ‘So, nobody wants to go home? What do you suggest we do then?’

      She does the same thing as Helen when she thinks. Screws up her nose like there’s a bad smell. Face just her like mother’s, too. Same twinkling blue eyes that show every emotion and absorb every last detail. Same dimple in her left cheek and buttery curls to her shoulders.

      ‘Can’t we just buy a house here?’

      ‘You’d miss everyone, I think. So would Jack-Jack.’

      She gives a dramatic sigh, seven going on seventeen. ‘Like who, exactly?’

      ‘Well, Amber and Holly would miss you. And I bet Oreo can’t wait to see you …’

      ‘But they could come here …’

      ‘What about your ballet recital?’ I ask. She has no answer to that and I know she’s excited for it. I set her plate of waffles on the coffee table and squat down to face as her as she begins to do a couple of ballet moves.

      ‘To tell you the truth, my love, I don’t want to go home either.’

      She widens her eyes. ‘You don’t?’

      I press my lips together, shake my head. ‘But don’t tell Mummy.’

      ‘Is it because you don’t like flying?’

      ‘Nope.’

      ‘Is it because you love this house and the sea and you’d like to live here?’

      ‘Exactly. I like spending my days on the beach instead of having to go to work. I’d like to do it for ever. Wouldn’t you?’

      She nods eagerly, her face all lit up with hope. I wish I could give her everything. I wish I could make the world as perfect as she deserves it to be.

      ‘Here, come and help me put all this food away.’

      She does a little ballet twirl across the floor, arms crooked like she’s holding an invisible beach ball between them, and looks into the box of food that I’m unloading.

      ‘Bacon?’ she says, holding up the packet like it’s a dead rat.

      ‘Not for you, love. Reuben and I will enjoy that.’

      ‘Bacon isn’t even nice, Daddy,’ Saskia says. She’s decided to become vegetarian, like Helen, so all I’ve heard about for the last three months is how meat is Satan. ‘I tried some once and it tasted not very nice. Plus, it’s from pigs and they’re more smarter than dogs and you wouldn’t eat our dog, would you?’

      ‘Hmmm. You know, if he tasted like bacon, I’d consider it.’

      ‘Daddy!’

      I lean over and give her a kiss. She still kisses me on the lips, a quick peck with a big ‘mwah’ at the end, just as she did as a baby. When the day comes that she tells me she’s too old to kiss me anymore I think my heart will break.

      ‘Do the thing,’ she says when I plop one of the blueberry pancakes into a pan on the stove. ‘Do the flip, Dad. Do it!’

      I wait until the pan is nice and hot before planting my feet wide, gripping the pan handle tightly and tossing the pancake as high as I can. It flips into the air, smacks the ceiling, then lands splat in the pan.

      ‘You did it, Dad!’ she squeals, high-fiving me. ‘Five points for Gryffindor!’

      Reuben comes in through the front door, his dark hair and shorts dripping wet. I’m careful to be calm around him. No eye contact. I’m still in his bad books. He dumps a plastic bucket on the floor.

      ‘We can’t go home,’ he announces flatly.

      ‘Daddy pancaked the ceiling,’ Saskia says.

      ‘Five points for Gryffindor,’ Reuben says, deadpan. ‘Look what I found.’

      Saskia peers into his bucket and squeals. I tell her to shush, she’ll upset Reuben, but his focus is on the baby turtle, its head no bigger than the tip of my thumb, its shell covered in zigzag patterns. It sweeps its flippers back and forth as though it wants to swim.

      ‘We should take it back to the water,’ I say as Saskia plucks it out of the bucket and cuddles it to her chest. ‘His mum must be looking for him.’

      ‘Like Finding Nemo?’ Saskia says.

      ‘That was a clown fish,’ Reuben replies.

      ‘Dude,’ I say, imitating the turtles in Finding Nemo. ‘What up, squirt?’

      Reuben falls silent, and I freeze, expecting one of two reactions: he’ll either storm out of the room or he’ll slug me across the face. Reuben isn’t often violent but when he is it’s ugly, given that he has the strength and height of an adult. He looks like he’s thinking really hard about something. Maybe he’s trying to control his anger.

      ‘Righteous!’ he says suddenly, a big grin lighting up his face.

      ‘Curl away, my son,’ I say, suddenly glad that I watched Finding Nemo ten million times.

      I raise my eyebrows at Helen who is standing there with her eyes like saucers and her jaw on the ground, stunned that Reuben has actually spoken to me. He’s