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  ‘The problem is, I’m being paid by her daughter, who’s going to be annoyed if Rita tells her she’s been fannying about on an allotment rather than having proper exercise sessions.’ Rachel folded her arms crossly. ‘Did you have her do any of the exercises I wrote up for you?’

  ‘No. But listen—’

  ‘No, you listen. You’ve got to stop interfering like this, thinking you know best. Stop meddling with everything.’

  ‘Okay! Got it! You don’t have to keep repeating yourself!’ Becca was right on the edge of losing her temper by this point. ‘Just shut up, all right? I’m not in the mood.’

  No longer caring about tea, she marched out into the back garden before her sister could say another word. God! Where had all that come from? And why was Rachel being so vile today? Interfering in people’s lives indeed – meddling! – how dare she? It was called helping. Being kind. Doing favours. If Rachel had such a problem with her so-called ‘interfering’, then why had she asked Becca to come back for another week and keep the house running while she was out of action? Her ‘interfering’ had suited Rachel just fine then, hadn’t it? Talk about two-faced!

  The Jacksons’ back garden was long and narrow and there was a hammock conveniently strung between the cherry tree and the maple, down at the far end. She strode past the rampant lilac, which was humming pleasantly with bees, and breathed in the sweet delicate fragrance, the too-long grass tickling her ankles. (Another thing that would need doing around here, she thought grumpily. Lawn-mowing: add it to the never-ending list of chores for ‘interfering’ Becca!)

  She was about to fling herself full-huff into the hammock when she realized that Luke was already in there, playing some sort of game with his wooden-spoon people. ‘Oh! Sorry,’ she said, stepping back at the last second. ‘I nearly sat on you. Are you all right? Hey!’ she added, spotting several additions to the second wooden spoon that must have been made over the weekend. ‘You finished the other one too. Can I see?’

  Luke gave a toothy smile and squinched up his pale bony knees so that she could lower herself in beside him. He handed Becca the second spoon: a figure with wild brown woollen hair, eyebrows that sloped down towards the centre and a big wide open mouth. A pipe cleaner had been wound around the stem to form arms, and he’d bent one halfway so that it pointed up at a right angle. Ahh, waving, that was nice. Two paper triangles, scribblingly coloured with grey felt-tip and stuck together around the base, formed a skirt. ‘Who’s this, then?’ Becca said. ‘Is she the other spoon’s friend?’ She gave Luke a little nudge. ‘Is it his girlfriend?’

  Luke shook his head, and she noticed that his sooty lashes were lowered. ‘That’s Mean Girl,’ he replied.

  Oh. Perhaps not girlfriend material, then. ‘Mean Girl,’ she repeated, peering at the spoon face again. ‘Her mouth looks a bit . . . shouty.’

  ‘Yes, and she’s got a punching arm, too,’ he said, pointing at it.

  So much for the friendly waving arm Becca had imagined. ‘I’m not too sure I like the sound of Mean Girl,’ she said.

  ‘No, she’s really horrible. She says mean things to the boy.’

  ‘The boy?’

  Luke held up his other spoon, the one that had originally been ‘him’, and Becca felt disconcerted. How much of this was in his imagination? she wondered. Or was he trying to tell her something? ‘Oh dear,’ she said, wiggling an arm around him so that he leaned against her, his soft dark hair flopping forward. ‘What sort of things does she say?’

  Luke was silent for a moment and she thought he wasn’t going to reply but then he held up the Mean Girl spoon so that it towered over the Luke spoon, and said in a high voice, ‘Your mum looks weird!’

  Becca’s jaw dropped. ‘What a nasty thing to say,’ she replied indignantly. She could see the nape of his neck, white and vulnerable, as he leaned forward, and for some reason it gave her a pain in her chest. Who had said that to Luke?

  ‘She looks like a science experiment gone wrong!’ came Mean Girl’s high voice as she whacked the boy spoon with her own demented-looking head.

  A science experiment gone wrong . . . Ugh. Those were spiteful adult words, put in a child’s mouth by someone cruel and unthinking. But who? And how? Rachel had barely left the house since she’d come home from Manchester. Who had even seen her since the accident? Unless . . . Her mind spun. Unless this was something that had happened over the weekend. Something that had put Rachel in such a foul mood, perhaps?

  ‘Mean Girl is being very unkind to the boy,’ Becca said firmly. ‘Nobody should say things like that. They just shouldn’t.’

  Luke heaved a world-weary sigh and leaned against her. ‘But they do,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I think the boy should tell somebody, then. Tell his mum or his kind aunty, who both think he is the awesomest. They might be able to help make her stop.’

  He was silent, considering. Becca tried again. ‘Is Mean Girl . . . someone at school?’ she guessed. ‘Or someone who lives nearby?’ If it was Sara Fortescue’s daughter, she found herself thinking furiously, she would be over there in a shot and bawl them out, mother and child, just see if she didn’t.

  ‘Someone at school,’ Luke mumbled eventually.

  Becca pushed against the ground with her bare foot so that the hammock rocked gently between the trees, the rope creaking with the movement. A breeze set the leaves whispering above them. ‘Does Mean Girl have a name?’ she said. ‘I bet she has a really horrible name, doesn’t she, like Witchy McWartbottom. Or Smellyface Weeweebreath?’

  To her relief, a tiny smile quirked his mouth. Good old toilet humour. It never let you down. ‘Am I right?’ Becca pressed. Come on, Luke. Tell me.

  He shook his head, and she decided to wait it out. Sometimes silence was the best way to get a person talking. She rocked the hammock again and gazed up at the dappled canopy of leaves above their heads, just able to detect the faint smell of the pastel-pink sweet peas scrambling up a beanpole wigwam in a nearby flower bed. Luke remained silent, his thin shoulders tense. Tell me, Becca thought again, as the seconds ticked by. Just give me a name.

  ‘It’s Jodie,’ he said after a minute or so, his voice so low and mumbly she could hardly make out the words.

  ‘Jodie?’

  ‘Yeah. Jodie Cripps, she’s in my class.’

  Cripps . . . that rang a bell. Someone in the playground? There were so many of them, the super-mummies, vying with their competitive talk and displays of superior parenting, like peacocks jostling to peck one another’s eyes out. Wait, though. Not in the playground. She remembered now: the overbearing woman who’d freaked Rachel out in the fracture clinic the other day. Gotcha. ‘I don’t think I like this Jodie Cripps very much,’ she said, wondering how much Rachel knew about this.

  ‘Nor do I,’ he said, head lowered. Then he haltingly confessed, ‘I kicked her.’

  ‘Ahh,’ said Becca, vaguely remembering a dinnertime story about him fighting. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘And then I got into trouble with Mrs Jenkins. And Jodie said on Friday she’s going to get her big brother on me, so at school tomorrow he’ll . . .’ He drew a line across his throat, then gazed up worriedly at her, his freckles standing out on his pale skin.

  Not if she had anything to do with it, Becca thought fiercely. ‘Maybe me and your mum should have a little word with Mrs Jenkins ourselves,’ she suggested. ‘Or even a chat with Mrs Cripps.’

  ‘No!’ cried Luke, appalled. Obviously the Don’t Snitch laws of the playground were still a thing.

  ‘Well, we can’t have Mean Girl’s big brother duffing you up, can we?’ Becca replied. She felt like snapping the Jodie wooden spoon over her knee and throwing the pieces against the nearest tree. Take that, you . . . you wooden spoon, you. Better not. Rachel had already given her the evils that time over dinner for saying she wanted to punch Adam. Violence was not the answer, et cetera. Blah. But what was?

  ‘How about if I just talk to your teacher tomorrow morning, ask her to k
eep an eye on you?’ she said in the end. ‘I don’t have to mention Jodie’s name’ – she so was going to mention Jodie’s name, and her hooligan brother’s – ‘so it’s not like you’re telling tales or anything. But at least then someone will be there if you do feel like talking to her.’ She ruffled his hair. ‘It’s either that, or I dress up as your bodyguard for the day, big dark sunglasses on my big stern face, ready to do some business.’ She punched a fist menacingly into the palm of her other hand before remembering she wasn’t supposed to be advocating violent solutions. Whoops.

  But there was another small smile on her nephew’s face at least, which was something. ‘Okay,’ he said reluctantly. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘What, me dress up as your bodyguard? Okay, no prob—’

  ‘No! You tell Miss Ellis. But not say Jodie’s name.’

  ‘Got it. I’ll tell Miss Ellis. And she’ll make sure you’re safe.’

  He nestled against her, his body soft and relaxed once more. There was just something about having a child lean on you that she found inexplicably lovely. Like they completely trusted you. Accepted you. ‘Thanks, Aunty Bec,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Any time, Captain.’

  He scrambled out of the hammock and went to bounce on the trampoline and Becca watched him, chewing her lip and hoping she’d said the right things. When she’d agreed to step in and help Rachel look after the children, she had never expected to feel quite like this – so fierce about them, so protective. Being here at Rachel’s had caused all sorts of new emotions to unfold in her brain, in her heart; flashes of joy, pain, pride, love. Tiny real moments that made her remember what it was to be a human, rather than a grief-zombie trudging from week to week.

  She lay in the hammock, watching the leaves dreamily swaying in the breeze above her head, listening to their soft whispers. Since her dad had died, it had been as if there was a block of ice lodged in her chest the whole time, the feeling that she could never quite be warm again. Maybe, just maybe, the ice was finally starting to melt.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Becca wanted to have a word with Rachel about Luke that evening, but her sister seemed to be avoiding her, claiming a splitting headache and sloping off to bed early. This left Becca to supervise Scarlet’s violin practice, assist Mabel with researching the ‘fascist–communist horseshoe’ for her history homework and help Luke draw an entire comic strip, featuring SuperLuke and his Bad-Ass Aunty B who went flying around the world together, sorting out all the bullies and botherers. She didn’t mind doing any of this, of course. She had come to absolutely love spending time with her nieces and nephew and enjoyed their company, especially when she was rewarded by three separate bedtime hugs for her efforts later on. Nonetheless, as she put on her pyjamas and snuggled down in Scarlet’s bed that night, pictures of the tongue-lolling Harvey beaming dementedly from the wall, a flatness descended upon her. It was all very well stepping into her sister’s shoes for the duration of her injuries, but this was not her place, her home, these were not her children. She was here on borrowed time, and before long she would have to return to Birmingham and start over, with the rest of her life looming uncertainly ahead. And what, exactly, would she do with it?

  Good weekend? Wendy had texted earlier that evening, freshly home from her face-packs and salt scrubs. What did you get up to?

  They both knew what that meant. How is the New Life plan coming along? Any snogging to report? Are you leaping out of bed with a smile on your face yet?

  Becca had deliberated over her reply. Home for the weekend, catching up with friends, she eventually wrote with faux cheer, but felt horrible for lying to her own mother. Back with R now, here for at least another week. All good!

  All good! No, it wasn’t. Her nephew was having a tough time at school, her sister thought she was a meddler (and possibly worse), plus she had just spent the quietest weekend of her life back home. Pressing Send on her deceitful text made her feel hollow inside, especially when Wendy replied with a single FAB! and a row of smiling emoji. Still, silver linings, she thought the next day: at least being here gave her precious little time to dwell on such failings. Barely had her eyes closed on Sunday night than it was Monday morning, alarms trilling around the house, Scarlet screeching ‘SHIT!’ at the sight of a huge spider in the bathroom, and off they went all over again.

  Monday’s weather matched her mood – drizzly and damp, more like October than mid-June. It was the kind of low-spirited day that might have seen her staying in bed ordinarily, making excuses to whoever was employing her at the time. Not today, though. She had the children to badger into their uniforms, packed lunches to make, the usual last-minute sprint up to school and then a quick word with Luke’s teacher begging her to save him from any potential fisticuffs with Mean Girl’s Mean Big Brother. All that, and she had a session booked in with Hayley at ten o’clock, too. Go, go, go.

  Rachel had provided her with a new list of exercises for Hayley, including a whole range of ‘bingo-wings banishers’ that she insisted Becca perform in front of her before setting off so that she could check her stand-in was up to the job. ‘I’m not wasting my time here, am I?’ she asked. ‘You will do all these exercises with her, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Becca indignantly. ‘Of course I will. You don’t have to keep going on at me.’

  Rachel provided her with two pairs of dumb-bells (‘One each, so you can demonstrate’), and a skipping rope for Hayley to use in the aerobic part of the routine. She looked kind of sad as Becca packed it all up ready to go, and there were dark circles under her eyes. ‘I miss skipping,’ she said wistfully. ‘I miss all of it, to be honest. I can’t bear sitting around the house feeling sorry for myself day after day like this.’

  Here’s an idea, then, Becca felt like retorting. Don’t. Get out of your pyjamas, brush your hair and try re-engaging with the rest of the world again, maybe starting with your own son, who’s unhappy at school, by the way.

  But despite the scratchy sort of tension that still crackled between them, Becca knew better. She couldn’t be quite so brutal when Rachel was pale and drawn and still on painkillers round the clock. She looked exhausted, too, following her weekend alone with the children. And there wasn’t time to get into the whole story of Luke now – she was already on the verge of being late. ‘Yeah, I know,’ she replied instead, wanting to make things better between them. ‘Just another month or so, though, eh? You can do it. I know it must be hellish watching me galumphing off in your place, but one day you’ll look back and this will all seem like a weird dream.’

  Rachel gave a small, crooked smile, which was something, Becca supposed.

  Over at Hayley’s, once they had warmed up, Becca got stuck into the upper-arm exercises that her client had requested for wedding-dress purposes. ‘I normally wouldn’t be seen dead without sleeves,’ Hayley shuddered, a dumb-bell in each hand as Becca demonstrated lateral raises. ‘But the dress I’ve chosen is strapless, so it’s all going to be on show. I need to tone these wobblers right up, basically.’

  ‘Wobblers? Don’t give me that. There is nothing wobbling on you, girl,’ Becca told her, conscious of her own jiggling upper arms as she lowered them again. ‘But I’ll humour you, okay, because Rachel keeps telling me how the client is always right. So give me two sets of ten, on the lateral raises. That’s it, shoulder height. Don’t pull faces, think of how amazing you’ll look in those wedding photos. Gorgeous, darling, gorgeous. You are working that dumb-bell!’

  After a whole series of arm exercises, they went out into the back garden with a skipping rope and Wilf trotted after them like a lean grey shadow, cocking his head in a hopeful way. ‘Sorry, pal, we’ll go out properly later,’ Hayley told him. ‘I’ll try and time it for my daily phone call from the old bag – I mean, my beloved, delightful mother-in-law-to-be,’ she added to Becca.

  Becca laughed at the comic look of disdain on her face. ‘Still giving you grief, is she?’

  ‘And the rest
! She’s started taking matters into her own hands now, can you believe. Actually turned up here the other day with the most hideous tiara she’d bought me. I mean . . . it’s horrible, properly vile. Naff plastic flowers – I’m not even joking.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘The day that thing goes anywhere near my head is the day I’ve officially lost the plot, believe me.’

  ‘Yikes.’ Becca might only ever have seen Hayley in her joggers, but you could tell from her elegant house that plastic flowers were very far from her idea of good taste. ‘Maybe there could be some terribly unfortunate accident involving the dog chewing off the plastic flowers, or burying the whole thing in a flower bed?’ she suggested, reaching down to scratch Wilf behind his ears. ‘You’d do that for your mistress, wouldn’t you, eh?’

  Hayley smiled as he made a low, loyal woof in his throat. ‘I’m just going to have to nip out and buy one myself this week and pretend I had it all along. I wasn’t here when she dropped it off the other day, so at least if I act fast, I might be able to get away with it. Oh sorry, Brenda. So kind of you. You know how much I adore plastic flowery headgear, but . . .’

  ‘Or you could make one,’ suggested Becca, thinking of all the bridal tiaras and other pieces of jewellery she and Debbie had made to flog at the National Wedding Show at the NEC back in the day.

  ‘Make a tiara? I wouldn’t know where to start.’

  ‘Yeah, but I would,’ Becca said, handing her the skipping rope. ‘Five minutes, please. Single steps to begin with, then we’ll go for some evil double-footed jumps.’ She stood well back out of rope-lashing range. ‘I’ve got some kit here at Rachel’s with me, actually. Some gorgeous pearly beads, and proper Swarovski crystals, too. Honestly, I could help you make a really lovely one, and then your mother-in-law would have to shove her stupid flowery thing up her . . . Well, you know.’

  Hayley began skipping as Becca clicked the stopwatch. ‘That’s what you do, is it? Make jewellery?’

  ‘Yeah, I used to,’ Becca replied. ‘My friend and I had a little business a while ago, I’ve just been getting back into it. I made a couple of headpieces for my flatmate and her friend the other day, I can show you pictures on my phone.’ She hesitated, not wanting to give one of Rachel’s clients the hard sell; it was hardly her place to do so, plus Rachel would probably bollock her for it. ‘It’s just an idea, though. I totally understand if you’d rather go out and buy your own tiara, obviously . . .’