A nurse takes me to her little apartment across the courtyard, and the sound of her voice flows through the door at the knock.
‘Your brother has come to visit you, Miss Cavendish.’ The nurse addresses her first and I linger behind her in the doorway.
‘Artie?’ The turmoil in my stomach plateaus, hearing my name from her lips.
‘Lizzie?’ I say, stepping into the room. ‘How are you?’
‘I’m good, thank you, my baby brother is coming to visit me.’ She smiles at me politely, as one would a stranger. Though it stings, the sight of her – her mousy hair slicked perfectly around her ears, her dark eyes framed by her glasses, and her bright pink pyjamas – brings me enough solace not to linger on it.
‘Is he?’ I reply.
‘Are you all right? You’re crying,’ she says bluntly, though still kindly.
‘No, I don’t think I am, Lizzie.’ Getting up out of her armchair, she walks over to me, laces an arm around me and pats me on the back until I break down into her shoulder.
‘Come on, silly billy. Come and have a cup of tea.’ She guides me carefully to her own armchair and disappears into her little kitchenette before coming back a few moments later with a glass of orange juice.
Though she doesn’t know me in this moment, I talkto her, unreservedly, for what feels like hours. I tell her everything: about New York, about the film, about Beatrice. And she listens.
When I finally finish and am suitably exhausted, she finally speaks again. ‘Then what on earth are you doing sat here? Sounds to me like you’ve got a film to make.’
‘I’ve fucked up too many chances already, Lizzie. I’m not sure I have any left.’
‘Ah, you’re not sure. You don’t know for definite. And you won’t know at all if you just keep moping around.’ She shakes her head as if it’s obvious. ‘You’re a fool, but you’ve a good heart. You know what’s right. You know what you need to do.’
I just sit with her words for a moment, and I watch her, just there, existing with glimmers of her old self making every difficult day worthwhile. ‘Thank you, Lizzie.’
‘I’m tired now,’ she says, giving me my rather explicit cue to leave and I do. When I reach the door and look back one final time to savour her image, she speaks again. ‘Love you, Artie.’
‘I love you too, Lizzie.’
Chapter 31
Beatrice
All of my childhood, I grew up planning to get out. I was convinced that ending up in New York would be proof that I was a failure. No one at school ever had the dream of sticking around, of being just another one of the locals. For years, forever, I have tried to run from this tiny village, all its people, and its insignificance in the world. I wanted to be more than New York. I didn’t want to be like my parents; I didn’t want to be like their parents.
A few years ago, I did my family tree, hoping to find something interesting, some connection to a person of great importance: a saviour, a leader, someone that people actually remembered. I got back about as far as the seventeenth century. The only news articles were those of farmers and their crops, or poachers and their convictions. Every man, woman, and child on that family tree was born and died within a forty-mile radius of this very village. It’s astrange feeling, wanting to be something, but knowing it’s in your DNA to simply exist, to just add to a population, to witness centuries of stories of great people, never destined to be one yourself.
It’s only now that I see it differently. Sat in the passenger seat beside my grandad as he drives me home from the train station, I realise all of this flat land around us, bountiful with crops, filled with life, was cultivated by generations of my family. They’ve taken it from marshland and barren flatlands and turned it into my home. Without every single one of them and their ‘insignificant’ lives, this land wouldn’t thrive, it wouldn’t be my home, it wouldn’t have raised me. It’s thanks to all of those people that I even have the space to dream, that I have the freedom to know there are opportunities out there.
There is no greater feeling than coming home to a place that was built for you, a place that I will always belong, I will always be welcome, I will always be loved. Maybe I won’t be remembered, maybe none of my work will ever be seen by the masses, but I know that in this tiny pocket of the world, I am something special, and that’s more than I could ask for.
Arthur hasn’t called and he’s not miraculously waiting for me at my front door when I get home. Grandad doesn’t ask why I’m alone, or why I got the train home; he just waits up for me to crawl into bed, then kisses me on the forehead as he tucks me in, just like he used to when I was a kid. He knows he doesn’t need to say anything, but in every way apart from words, he tells me that he’s here for me.
When I wake again in the morning, though my body feels heavy, I drag myself out of bed. Nan and Grandad are already up and out when I go down for breakfast and the house is so silent that I can hear my own breaths and the occasional hum of a car on the road two streets over. Deciding that I can’t sit here, doing nothing, with only my own thoughts running around my head, I wander down to the Big Apple and hope Tracy isn’t too busy for a chat like old times.
The morning is crisp, the wind races across the fields until it bundles me up in a throwback to winter and I have to keep my head down in defence against it as I hurry into the pub.
‘Are we back to winter again or what?’ I announce to the room as I walk in, my hair still shrouding my flushed face from the cold, but the chatter is so loud I don’t think anyone hears me.
Wrestling the strands out of my face, I finally see the cause for the commotion: Arthur is in the centre of the room, surrounded by a crate of mental equipment and a hoard of eager OAPs. They all watch him with such fervour and fuss around his stockpile so manically that it’s as if they’re a flock of hungry pigeons and he’s a dropped a chip, slathered in salt and vinegar, and tasty enough to fight over. Even my nan and grandad huddle around him, clamouring for a camera or a boom mic. Traitors.
He came back. I should have a thousand feelings at the sight of him here, at home. But I don’t. All I can think is that he came back. Okay, maybe I’m a little angry. More than a little. Rather a lot. How can he have come to seeevery soul in the village except me? Why send me home alone if only to rock up the next day as though nothing has happened?
‘What the fu—’ I begin but Arthur cuts me off.
‘Ladies and gentleman, our fantastic writer and director, Beatrice Norton.’ He swings out his arm as though inviting me on stage and they all clap as if I’m not just the girl who fetches them a packet of Nobby’s Nuts every Friday night. Instinctively I walk into the crowd as directed and see the array of equipment he has strewn across the carpet. It’s high-spec stuff, none of the old camcorder shite that I was begging people for only last week. No wonder they think he’s a hero.
