The Kindness Club on Mapleberry Lane - Part One: A Summer Surprise Page 6

  ‘Mum, are you there?’ Sam was getting impatient now, adopting the same frustrated tone she often used with Veronica when she couldn’t be the mother she wanted her to be.

  Veronica, leaning against the kitchen bench, cleared her throat. ‘I’m here.’

  Sam’s voice juddered again, irritation replaced by worry. ‘I don’t know what to do with Audrey. I’m worried, about me, about her… If I don’t make a change, I’m scared I’ll lose her for good.’

  Veronica held her breath, hoping her daughter had a plan, that she wouldn’t make the same mistakes as she had and drive a permanent wedge between herself and her daughter. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I want to send her to you,’ said Sam all of a sudden.

  Veronica heard a big exhale down the phone. She knew how hard those words would’ve been for Sam to say, to admit she needed help from the one person she never thought she’d ever have to ask.

  ‘Mum, say something…’

  Unsure of the reaction she’d get, she braved speaking up. ‘Surely you can’t think sending her here would be better than having her with you.’ They never spoke about it but Sam’s childhood hadn’t been a happy one and Veronica had played the starring role. ‘I barely know Audrey.’

  ‘Then maybe it’s about time you got to know her.’ Sam’s anger must have been brewing beneath the surface of all the other emotions she was feeling and now it was unleashed in a voice that said, you owe me, you can’t let me down again. ‘I’m begging you, Mum, I don’t know which way to turn.’ She garbled on about all the turmoil over the years since Simon had left. Veronica had never much liked him but now wasn’t the time to share her opinions.

  By the time Veronica had finished on the phone with Sam, Layla’s inquisitiveness had seen her abandon the piano and come into the kitchen to find Veronica looking out of the kitchen window, wringing her hands in the tea towel she’d left lying on the draining board.

  ‘Can we keep this a secret from my daddy?’

  Veronica turned and smiled, trying to get back to the girl who was here right now. ‘Keep what a secret?’

  ‘The piano playing. I want to come here and learn and then surprise him.’

  ‘I’m not sure I like keeping secrets, but I think on this occasion I can make an exception. Any special reason you want to surprise him?’

  ‘I just think it will make him happy. Like Mummy did when she played.’

  When Bea knocked on the door, Layla winked at her and put a finger to her lips. Veronica repeated the action and sent Layla on her way.

  In the quiet of her house and her own space, Veronica wondered how she was going to cope with having her teenage granddaughter come to stay with her. If she messed it up in any way, she’d fail Sam yet again and push her even further away.

  But if she got it right, maybe – just maybe – she could put their fragile relationship back together again.

  Chapter Four

  Audrey

  Audrey stomped down the stairs to ask her mother where the bigger suitcase was hiding. She still needed to pack before being sent to her gran’s in the middle of nowhere, like an evacuee being sent away for safety. Ridiculous. Sid was one of the few friends she had, and just because he knew how to have a laugh and joke, her mum thought they needed to be separated by more than one hundred and fifty miles. She’d at least had the decency to let Audrey send him a text message to tell him she was leaving.

  Sid was a friend, nothing more. In fact, Sid was gay, the whole school knew. But her mum didn’t, so Audrey wasn’t going to be the one to enlighten her. Where was the fun in that?

  ‘Where were you anyway?’ Audrey called when Sam finally came back inside with a whole load of cardboard from the car. ‘What are they for?’

  ‘Packing. I’ll help you make up the boxes. I got four, that should do for now.’

  ‘Mum, I only need a suitcase, that’s way over the top.’ In the kitchen she opened the fridge and pulled out the bottle of orange juice.

  ‘A suitcase isn’t enough.’ With a huff of frustration, she added, ‘You need to spend some time away from here.’

  Audrey set down the bottle of juice and reached for a glass. Maybe this was about more than Sid. ‘You said that already and I’ve agreed. I’m going to Gran’s for a couple of weeks, I get it.’ Her mum had dragged her up to the school for a meeting and they refused to budge on the suspension, saying she’d had enough warnings about her behaviour and the punishment fit the crime. Mr Burgess’s eyes had twinkled when he’d said that word, as though he loved nothing more than to set an example by dishing out punishments. But whatever, it didn’t bother Audrey all that much; she could use the online portal to keep up with her schoolwork for the next two weeks and she didn’t plan to spend that many hours cooped up with her gran anyway. She planned to get out and about, find the nearest town, hopefully somewhere with a bit of life.

  ‘Audrey, it’s not only for the rest of this term.’

  ‘Then how long is it for?’ She supposed she was getting off lightly going to a village to hang around instead of here. Sid was being hauled into his dad’s office every day, doing boring things like photocopying and making cups of tea for people, although he said it was marginally better than school apart from the fact nobody in the office really spoke. He said one day he did an experiment: he held a pin up high above his dad’s desk and asked the lady sitting at the desk next to him if she heard anything. When she said she did and he announced it was a pin dropping, she failed to see the funny side. All that happened was that he got told by his dad to stop clowning around.

  And her mum wondered why she didn’t want an office job?

  ‘It’s for the two weeks and the summer holidays,’ Sam announced.

  ‘Please tell me you’re kidding.’ What was she supposed to do in a village all summer? Sit around and watch the flowers grow and the sun set later in the day?

  Sam was busy trying to make the folded-down boxes lean against the wall without slipping down until she gave up and shoved them out in the hall. ‘Audrey, I’ve thought long and hard about this. It’s a temporary solution I think might help us both. We need some time away from each other.’

  She’d been right to think Sid was only part of the problem. ‘You want to get rid of me, more like.’

  ‘I never said that.’

  ‘You didn’t have to.’

  ‘Audrey, I love you, you’re my daughter. But let’s use this time to turn things around. You’ll have the summer holidays in Mapleberry and then you can come back ready to knuckle down in Year Eleven. And we’ll talk about what happens after that at a later date.’

  Audrey pulled a hand through her hair, tugging the wisps of fringe usually artfully separated on her forehead out of the way. She didn’t have many friends, but she had Sid. And one friend, a single ally, was better than none. She’d have nobody in Mapleberry except for her gran and the murmurings she’d heard about her over the years, not to mention the awkward couple of visits she’d been subjected to, hadn’t exacted filled her with warmth and love. She wasn’t surprised Mum didn’t talk about her that often and now here she was, going to stay with her.

  ‘Audrey, do you understand what I’m saying?’ Sam pulled one of the boxes into the kitchen and began to fold it along the creases already made until the bottom was formed. She flipped it up the right way and frowned Audrey’s way.

  ‘Of course I do, I’m not stupid.’ And actually, not having to go to school for a fortnight was already a blessing. At least she wouldn’t have to face the Wotsits – the gang who went around lording it over everyone else including Audrey and made her daily life a misery – they’d earned their name because of their overuse of fake tan, which made them look orange. And they all wore tons of make-up too, and one day one of them fell on the trampoline in P.E. wiping off one of the eyebrows she’d carefully coloured in, leaving a big black smudge above one eye. Sid and Audrey had laughed so much they’d both been crying. But usually Audrey wasn’t laughing;
she was facing the spite and the daggers and the nasty online messages or posts that came her way. The picking on Audrey was never physical, it was hidden, they did it all from behind their phones. Part of Audrey wanted to tell the teachers but she did that once and after that, worse came her way because she’d told tales.

  Audrey had never shared how miserable school was; her mum was always so stressed and busy trying to make their lives perfect, setting ground rules, refusing to listen when Audrey told her she didn’t want a desk job, not ever. But there was nothing her mum could say or do to bring back her dad who had left when he couldn’t stand it anymore. Perhaps she’d done the same to him, fussed around him, always worried about what he was thinking and doing until he couldn’t take it anymore and walked away. There was nothing her mum could do to make up for the fact that her dad wasn’t in her life much anymore, that he now had children with his new wife and they had all become his focus. Well one day, before too long, that would change. Audrey was his first child and he’d never turn his back on her.

  Sam had stopped folding the next box to gauge her daughter’s reaction. ‘I thought you’d be furious I was making you leave here.’ She looked suspicious, her default look.

  ‘I don’t exactly have a choice – no point getting annoyed.’ She was only happy that sending her away meant she got her phone back because Sam couldn’t stand the thought of her daughter being so far away yet not able to communicate with her. She liked to stay in control, and without a phone, Audrey would be free to float around wherever the wind took her.

  ‘I think this will do us both good,’ said Sam.

  ‘Whatever.’

  ‘See, this is what I mean.’ She wrestled with the last box, the flaps refusing to bend the way she wanted. ‘One minute you talk to me, the next you’re rude. I don’t know where I stand half the time.’

  ‘Welcome to parenting.’ If the doorway wasn’t blocked with these cardboard boxes, she’d go shut herself in her room. It was bad enough she was going to have to sit in a car for more than three hours with her mum this afternoon. ‘When am I coming back here then?’ Audrey asked. ‘At the end of the summer break? Mum?’ She knew that look, there was something she wasn’t telling her.

  ‘I’ve got no choice but to sell this house, Audrey. The mortgage is crippling, which was one thing when I had a job but totally another when I don’t.’

  ‘But you’ll buy another one, right?’ She wasn’t sure she could handle living with an old lady she didn’t even know indefinitely.

  ‘I might rent for a while.’

  ‘Rent?’

  ‘Yes, Audrey. Plenty of people do it,’ she snapped.

  Audrey dragged the boxes upstairs, refusing any help from her mum. She’d go away for the summer, then come back up here to whatever pit her mum found for them to stay in, but deep down she couldn’t wait to put her own plans into action as soon as she could, then she’d be free from this; she’d do things on her own terms.

  ‘Mum, please, you have to go back,’ Audrey insisted. They’d only gone ten minutes down the road.

  ‘Why? What did you forget?’

  ‘One of my books, I’m in the middle of reading it.’

  ‘We’re already late – I told your gran when we’d be there and I still have to get petrol. I’ll send it on to you, I really don’t mind, or read something else and you can come back to it when you’re home again.’

  ‘No, I want to go back and get it.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Audrey. Tell me where it is, I’ll post it.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she grumped. There was no way she was going to tell her mum what the book was.

  The journey took a little over three hours and Audrey swung between being annoyed they hadn’t gone back as she’d asked, talking about Mapleberry to pass the time – it didn’t sound all that exciting a place but at least it had a café and a few shops – and shutting her eyes to be with her own thoughts. She wondered what Sid was up to now. She hoped he would lie low over the summer and not run into the mean girls from school who liked to go to the local bowling alley as much as Audrey and Sid did. The Wotsits sounded tame, but they were nasty. She hoped they wouldn’t up the ante with Sid; they laughed at him with his dyslexia and taunted him when he got extra time in school tests, and the last time they’d gone bowling and Sid slipped on the shiny floor and banged his head, that had made their day.

  As they got closer and followed the signs into Mapleberry, Audrey sat up and took interest. Mapleberry was pretty, she supposed, albeit in a dull sort of way. As you drove in at one end of the village, there were rolling fields on either side of the road that narrowed and went into single lane over a bridge with walls low enough to see a winding stream below. A thatched-roofed house with enormous gates came next, then a pub, then shops on either side of a street with black iron lampposts dotted at intervals, each with a garden bed at the base, full of colourful flowers.

  They drove past a playground, two kids on a seesaw, and then the road bent back round and passed it in the opposite direction before they pulled up outside Gran’s house.

  The house was well kept with its cute front garden and prim flowerbeds. Audrey had a vague memory of the inside being clean too, not a thing out of place. At least her gran wasn’t living in squalor or was one of those hoarders you saw on the news – imagine trying to add in those big boxes on the back seat and in the boot if she was – although from what her mum had mentioned, Audrey deduced she was somewhat of a recluse. Loosely translated, that meant she didn’t like people and didn’t have any friends. What a fun summer this was going to be.

  ‘Come on, Mum,’ Audrey urged, but Sam couldn’t seem to bring herself to get out of the car.

  Audrey got fed up waiting and went to ring the doorbell herself. If she waited for her mum to get herself together, she could be standing there until the summer was over.

  The front door opened slowly and her gran smiled, although it looked a little forced. ‘Audrey, so lovely to see you again, come in.’ Very formal. Her eyes darted to the car and then down the street and again in the opposite direction as though she suspected someone was lurking waiting to pounce.

  Audrey couldn’t remember her gran being much of a hugger so she didn’t even try. ‘Mum’s coming, she must be on the phone or something.’ She wasn’t, but it felt rude to imply that perhaps Sam simply didn’t want to see her own mum, or that it was taking a lot of courage to do so.

  ‘No doubt your mum will follow when she’s ready.’ Gran walked away towards the kitchen. ‘Cup of tea?’

  ‘I’m not a tea drinker. Do you have anything cold? Anything fizzy?’

  ‘I’m afraid not – all those bubbles don’t agree with me. But I can get some in,’ she added as an afterthought as though it might be enough for Audrey to want to stay here.

  ‘I’ll just have a water then, please.’ Audrey hoped they’d get into their groove soon, that they wouldn’t have to be quite this polite for the entire duration of her stay, or it was going to be the least fun summer ever.

  Audrey took the glass of water as the front door opened and Sam finally came in.

  ‘Sam, lovely to see you,’ said Gran, although Audrey picked up on the undercurrent of tension, the same feeling she got the last time she’d seen them both within the same four walls. They didn’t hug either and Audrey wondered what it took to drive such a wedge between the pair. Although maybe she didn’t need to wonder – it was the way things were heading between her and her mum too; perhaps it was a family trait.

  Sam accepted the cup of tea, Audrey busied herself bringing in all of the boxes, although by the time they’d all been taken up to the room that was to be hers until the end of August, the atmosphere was still just as stilted as before. Anyone would think they didn’t know each other at all. Her mum was rambling on about the storm last week, Gran told her about a magnificent rainbow she’d shown to one of the neighbours, and then talk moved to the vegetable curry Gran was making for dinner. Audrey wa
s impressed; curry didn’t sound like a gran thing. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad staying here after all.

  Audrey grabbed a chocolate biscuit from the tin in the kitchen and headed back to her bedroom. She wanted to make it as homely as possible to survive this exile.

  ‘Audrey,’ came Gran’s voice, intercepting her. ‘Please eat that in the kitchen, it’s the place for food, nowhere else.’

  Jeez, even her mum wasn’t this strict.

  Audrey returned down the three stairs she’d progressed up, scoffed the biscuit and then charged up the stairs before anyone could stop her again. She opened up her boxes: onto the white table along one wall went a stack of books, all thrillers. She plugged her phone charger in and got that going, she put out her Hollywood make-up mirror with its lights up each side, she put her make-up bags beside it and her hair accessories on one of the shelves beneath. There was a second table in the room and onto that she dumped her schoolwork. She positioned her laptop there, too, in front of the little window that looked out over the playground opposite.

  The bedding was at least a nice purple rather than the swirly browns or greens you’d expect in an old person’s house, and the bed was a double rather than the single she had at home. And so Audrey put in her earphones, lay back on her bed and blasted out her Billie Eilish album.

  She could get used to this. Away from school, not sharing space with her mum – this was going to be like a holiday in comparison to being at home. Apart from not being allowed to even enjoy a biscuit in her bedroom, that was.

  The next day Audrey had a completely different perspective. It seemed Sam had briefed Gran before she left to travel home, and so rather than Audrey schlepping off to a local shopping centre with the paltry allowance her mum had finally caved in to giving her so she wasn’t a burden to her gran, Audrey was to be at her desk by nine o’clock every morning. Gran checked on her too so she daren’t not abide by the rules. This was Gran’s home, after all, and she was doing her a favour by having her here. It was a pretty sad state of affairs though, that Gran had so much time on her hands that she could spend so long obsessing about where her granddaughter was at any given moment of the day. Didn’t she have her own life to deal with? Mind you, the saving grace in all of this was that Gran could cook and she kept Audrey topped up with delicious meals, cakes and treats. You name it, she made it. Her mum rarely cooked unless it was a necessary meal, so it was a novelty that Audrey was pretty sure wouldn’t wear off.