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‘Trust me, I’m not.’ One day she’d tell Courtney about the genitalia she’d drawn on the divorce papers.
‘Are you getting a divorce then?’
A pause, a breath. ‘Yes.’
She imagined Courtney would start wailing at this point that she was officially from a broken home, but she didn’t.
‘That’s very sad,’ she said instead. ‘Morton’s on Tinder but he’s not had a lot of success yet.’
‘Good for him. How’s Little Mort?’
‘He’s okay, Mum. We’re friends again.’ She could hear the smile in her daughter’s voice.
‘And have you heard from Sunny?’
A growl. ‘No, but Bridezilla la Twat was on Insta showing off at a dress fitting and sheishaving grown-up bridesmaids. Six dog-ugly heifers with no necks, a page boy, a flower girl and two baby bridesmaids.’
Shay felt for Courtney. But what could she do? The sooner this wedding was over and done with the better. It was making her son stressed, her daughter was now hurt and there was the horrible possibility that Bruce would bring Les along to it. She couldn’t drum up the slightest enthusiasm for it, only dread, because it was wrong on so many levels.
‘Come home soon, Mum. I love you,’ Courtney said, without any attempt to then butter her up for a loan.
‘I will and I love you too,’ said her mum.
Chapter 35
Shay had only been to Denny’s home – Starling Farm – a handful of times and never inside. Denny, though he never said so, was ashamed of it. They would meet at the outside gate but sometimes when Shay was early, she’d walk down to the farmhouse and Denny would scoot out in a panic.
‘He doesn’t like strangers, he’s really rude,’ he’d say about his grandfather. ‘Please promise me you’ll wait for me at the end.’
And she promised, but she reneged on it because she thought it was amusing to hurry him along. Then she’d witnessed Bradley Smith with his hands on Denny because of her and she waited at the end for him after that, until one fateful day when she’d been forced to use the leverage of his fear.
The next morning was Sunday, late August. The air was drowsy and heavy after a week of relentless sunshine and wisps of cloud began to join up in the sky; a storm was on a slow build. Shay walked up to the shop for a newspaper as usual but then stopped in her tracks when she saw the women across the street. Arm in arm, the bloated, tallerwoman with a carrier bag in her free hand, the smaller woman spindly, with a pronounced bend to her spine reducing her height. They were much aged and looked more like old sisters than mother and daughter; both with dark grey hair, peppered with white, pulled into an untidy ponytail, both in thick coats, despite the heat, lace-up pumps and woolly socks which had slid and pooled around their ankles. Denny’s mother and sister.
Shay felt a rush of adrenaline blast through her veins. As pathetic and withered as Ella looked, Shay’s hands twitched at her sides, itching to sink into that hair and shake her head until the truth was rattled out of her. The ferocity of that emotion scared her, anchored her to the spot as a security measure.
The two women headed towards the bus stop, stood there waiting. Shay watched them, unblinking, hardly daring to move, knowing she was unrehearsed for this moment and unable to predict what she might do if her instincts took over. Shay’s eyes bored into them, willing them to turn to her, find her, see the woman they had made from the girl they had damaged. She heard the bus’s engine round the corner and just before it drew up in front of the stop, Ella’s head swung round. The look on her face was an unmistakable one of recognition. Then the bus pulled away and they were gone.
Shay knew she couldn’t put it off anymore. This was why she was here. She had to face them soon, stop procrastinating. She couldn’t sit in Candlemas for much longer in some odd limbo, pretending she was too busy working, faffing about with the intricacies of how social media functioned – hiding. She needed traction, she hadn’t come here to idle on the spot, but to move forward. She wondered if Ellareally had seen her and if so, what cogs would be grinding in her brain. She wondered if old boxes in her mind would now be springing their rusty locks and if she would feel fear that the day she had dreaded was heading her way, that her reckoning was close. She wondered if Ella looked up at the sky and saw that the clouds were gathering, a warning of the storm to come.
Starling Farm was a couple of bus stops away, but easily walkable. Shay followed the route of the bus on foot, up Starling Hill. She remembered going to Penistone library with Denny and searching in the local history section to find if the lane was named after the farm or vice versa, though she couldn’t recall the answer.
The farm was just before the bus stop. The gradient seemed to have increased, she’d barely felt the pull on her calves when she was young and lighter. The hand-painted wooden sign for the farm was no longer there, rotted and buried under years of sticky-climbing weeds and feathery long grass no doubt. The five-bar gate where she used to wait for Denny had gone too and where there was a rough drive, wide enough for vehicles, now there was only a path which walking feet had trodden.
The landscape had changed. Once there was nothing but fields on three sides but the village of Millspring had spread and a housing estate now butted against their boundary. Starling Farm would be bulldozed in a shot when the Smiths sold it because it was prime building land. Such was the way of progress.
Shay unconsciously took in a breath that filled the capacity of both lungs before her feet began to walk down the forbidden route. She remembered it as being much shorteror maybe the farm, over the years, had retreated further back from the road like a frightened animal. Her mind flagged up what had been there before: the large square concrete yard and ramshackle barn, the farmhouse to the right and a massive greenhouse. All the components were still there but buckled and battered by time. The barn had all but collapsed, the roof fallen in; it would be unusable for its original purpose. The concrete yard had gaping holes in it and weeds growing through the many cracks. Part of the skeletal frame of the greenhouse remained, the glass long gone. Shay stood in front of the farmhouse, her eyes tracing up and across to where Denny’s bedroom had been. She remembered that a triangle of glass had been missing from the bottom left corner pane, something stuffed in it to keep out the draught, and it still was. She willed him to appear there, a flash of a ghost image, a microsecond of his dear smiling face, but there was just a black soulless void.
The farmhouse was built from thick blocks of solid stone three hundred years ago. It would last longer, but it was tired and too old to withstand the ravages of damp. There were too many faults and gaps for the weather to find. Slates were missing from the roof, moss had found a home in every dip and crevice; the rotted wood of the window frames held fast single-width panes of glass; it must have been freezing in winter. Shay could remember the door swinging open and Denny racing out, his pale cheeks flushing and she’d laughed at him, not comprehending then the depth of his embarrassment because she wasn’t mature enough to see it. She had not yet been refined and seasoned by age and experience and empathy.
She pictured Denny’s grandfather loping out of the barnin huge mud-encrusted wellies and rolled-up tatty trousers with braces. He must have only been in his fifties then, but looked ancient with grizzly grey stubble and a coarse, red, complexion. He was massive, powerfully built with arms that had been designed too long for his body, scruffy in an unkempt way rather than in a hard-working in the outdoors way.
‘What do you want?’ he’d barked at her once and his eyes had raked down to her shoes and back up again. She remembered crossing her arms, wearing them in front of her like an extra layer of clothing.
‘I’ve come for Denny.’
He turned, bawled Denny’s name up at his window. Then he’d gone into the house and when Denny came out, he was ejected with a violent push that landed him on the ground, and she’d felt terrible. But the last time she’d turned up at the farmhouse, she was prepared to take on ten of his grandfathers.
Shay closed her eyes, tried to soak in the air of this depressing space, picture it all as it was on that final full day of Denny’s life. She’d been so cross. He’d made her break her promise not to come to the farmhouse but he hadn’t turned up again, and this was the last time they could go camping in the woods before they started the summer jobs. What was wrong with him?
