AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“It just looks like another Darker family home movie,” Rosereplies, as Conor removes the tape from its cover. We can all see the white sticky label on the side of it.SEAGLASS—1980written in Nana’s swirly handwriting. Rose takes the tape from Conor’s hands.
“Should we watch it?” asks my mother. The rest of us exchange glances. “What else are we going to do for five hours? Sitting here in silence while we wait for the tide to go out will only make the hours pass more slowly, and things surely can’t get any worse. Personally, I’d welcome any distraction to take my mind off what has happened here tonight, and it might be nice for all of us to remember happier times?”
“What about Trixie?” Conor asks, looking at the sleeping teenager in the corner of the room. “Shall I turn the volume down?”
“Don’t worry, nothing wakes her when she’s like this. She’ll be out for the count until morning,” Lily replies.
“Is that normal for a teenager?”
“It is when I’ve given her a strong sedative.”
“You did what?”
Conor looks genuinely shocked, but the rest of us barely react. All families have their own version of normal, and I confess that ours is a little different from most.
Lily shrugs. “I asked Nancy to crush one of her pills and put it in Trixie’s tea earlier—”
“I used to secretly givemydaughters sleeping pills all the time when they were kids,” Nancy interrupts, as though proud of the fact.
“Andweturned out just fine!” says Lily, with a large dose of irony. She smiles before turning to our mother. “I remember catching you putting the pills inside gummy bears, so we thought it was a bedtime treat before brushing our teeth. Mine were hidden inside green bears, Rose got the red ones, Daisy’s were always gold. Wenever questioned it, just did as we were told. Trixie wouldn’t stop crying after finding Nana. Hopefully she’ll just sleep now until the tide goes out and we can leave.”
Lily opens a new packet of cigarettes, her fingers shaking with impatience while she lights one. Any guilt I felt regarding my feelings about her evaporates. Nobody says anything about Lily smoking, or the fact that she drugged her own daughter to stop her from crying. We all have bad habits, some we let the world see, some we only reveal with family, and some we’re too ashamed to share with anyone except ourselves. She lights up and instantly looks calmer, appearing to breathe out her unease with a puff of smoke.
Conor shakes his head, but Lily ignores him. Rose—I think sensing that a distraction might be good for the whole family—switches on Nana’s old TV set. It slowly comes to life, displaying fuzzy gray and white pixels.
“The tape says WATCH ME, so let’s see what happens when we do,” she says, sliding the video into the VHS machine, which swallows the tape whole. An image fills the screen, and it feels like the past is coming back to haunt us all.
15
SEAGLASS
1980
The face of my nine-year-old sister fills the screen. It appears to be Lily’s turn to be the star of the family home movie. Some people are born to be the stars of their own show, and she was never interested in learning life’s lines unless they were from her own script. Other people are viewed as little more than extras in Lily’s rather narrow field of vision. If you don’t have a scene in her story, you don’t exist in her world.
Our summers at Seaglass were always my favorite time of year as a young child. As soon as school was over for my sisters, my mother would load up the car with suitcases, food, wine, and us; then we’d make the journey from London to Cornwall and escape the city for six weeks. Inevitably we would always time it wrong, arriving when the tide was in so we couldn’t cross the causeway, but that didn’t matter. As soon as I could see the old house, with its turquoise turrets, it always felt like I was home. We would play on the thin strip of remaining black sand while we waited for thesea to retreat. Sometimes having to wait for something just makes you want it more.
Nana was always so happy to see us. She would cross the sandy causeway as soon as it was safe to do so, always with the rusty old wheelbarrow in front of her and a dog close behind. I remember a black Labrador called Bob before Poppins came along. Nana would hug and kiss us all, then load our bags onto the wheelbarrow, to make it easier to transport everything to the house. It took a few trips back and forth, and we’d take it in turns to ride on top. Our bedrooms were always as we’d left them, but with clean sheets, fresh flowers, and a chocolate coin beneath the pillow of each bed. Nana always knew how to make us feel welcome and loved when we were children.
Dad was rarely there, even before the divorce. My father would normally join us for at least a couple of weeks, but I don’t remember him being there at all during the summer of 1980, until afterithappened. Which makes me wonder if my parents’ marriage was already in trouble, way back then. It was also around that time that our mother insisted we call her Nancy—she said that to keep calling her anything else made her feel old.
The room is completely quiet as the video begins. Nine-year-old Lily is standing in the hallway full of clocks at Seaglass… There are still spaces on the wall for the extra twenty or so clocks Nana has collected since. I remember this as Lily’sFamephase. I think we all do, and Nancy smiles in the present when her favorite daughter smiles in the past. Lily takes a few steps back from the camera to reveal a 1980s outfit that these days would be mistaken for dress-up. The neon-pink T-shirt, purple leggings, tutu, headband, and pink leg warmers bring it all back. I notice the others smiling as the child on the screen dances to the music and sings along, knowing every word of theFametheme tune. Her endless singing about living forever seems to bother me the most, along with the other word she repeats a few seconds later, staring straight at the camera.
“Remember. Remember. Remember. Remember.”
I do remember that summer at Seaglass. I wish that I didn’t.
If you were to walk into Nana’s house, there are three doors on the left of the hallway, two at the end, and one on the right. On the left you’d find a lounge, then a small library, then the music room. At the far end of the clock-filled hall is a door to the enormous kitchen, and a door to a tiny bathroom. An elaborate staircase is on the right of the hallway, but just before that, there is one other door. Which was almost always locked. Nana’s studio, or “the West Wing,” as she sometimes liked to call it, was very much out of bounds when my sisters came to stay. It runs the full length of the house, with a door at each end, and is where she liked to write and illustrate her children’s books. These days, there are giant framed book covers on the walls, includingDaisy Darker’s Little Secretand some of Nana’s other favorites:Suzy Smith’s Best Birthday, Danny Delaney’s Lost Dog, Poppy Patel’s First Fib,andCharlie Cho’s Worst Weekend.But back in 1980, Nana was still illustrating other people’s books and had yet to write one of her own.
Inside the studio, there were three large desks permanently covered in sketch books and drawings, four windows letting in lots of light, endless rows of different watercolor paints, pots full of ink, pens, pencils and brushes, and enormous drawers filled with different colored paper. There were shelves crammed full of all sorts of paraphernalia that Nana once described as “a few of my favorite things,” and there was a huge easel with a white sheet over the top on the day this home movie was filmed. The sheet was hiding Nana’s latest work in progress—she didn’t like anyone to see herwork until it was finished. A newspaper once described Nana as the female Quentin Blake. She was furious, and said that they should have calledhimthe male Beatrice Darker.
Nana’s studio was the only room at Seaglass where my sisters were not allowed to look at anything, touch anything, or even venture inside.Iwas allowed, when it was just Nana and I, and so was Conor, but she never trusted my sisters. Even back then. They both knew and understood the rules, but Lily was never very good at following them. When she got a pair of roller skates for her birthday, all she wanted to do was skate around the house. With all the internal doors open, it was possible to skate from the hall, to the lounge, through to the library, then the music room, the kitchen, and Nana’s studio in a giant loop, and there was nothing Rose or I could say to persuade her that this was a very bad idea.
As soon as Nana had left that morning to cycle into town for supplies, Lily put on her skates. She insisted that Rose time her skating laps and film her doing them. It was my job to watch the causeway from my bedroom window upstairs and warn my sisters when Nana returned. Which I fully intended to do. But the sky was extremely blue that day, and the clouds drifting across it made very interesting shapes.
I spotted a cloud pony and a cloud castle, both of which were distracting for a four-year-old with a big imagination. I’d been taught to name a few clouds by Rose, the walking, talking encyclopedia of the family. There is nothing more calming than a good fluffy white cumulus in a bright blue sky, or the birdlike beauty of cirrus clouds made from tiny ice crystals,ora sky full of thick stratocumulus, because in real life we all contain shades of light and dark. There are as many different kinds of clouds as there are different kinds of people and, like people, they all float and drift as they please, being one thing one minute, transforming into somethingquite different the next. Unrecognizable in the blink of an eye. The circle of life exists in every aspect of nature, and we all just play our part for as long as the universe decides.
The home movie begins with Rose filming from the hallway as Lily shoots past, skating through every room and singing theFametheme tune at the same time.
