She was sitting in the classroom, marking homework during her lunch break. Year Three were studying the Tudors. She had asked them to draw a scene from Tudor times and had been amazed that over half of the artwork was of executions and decapitated heads. Perhaps she should have asked for pictures of people who were alive instead.
“I’m so proud of you,” her mum had said when Lucy qualified as a teacher. They’d gone out for lunch together and got a bit tiddly on a bottle of wine, before going to Debenhams and testing lots of perfumes. “You’ll look after those children as if they’re your own.”
Lucy still loved her job. It was just that she sometimes felt she spent all her time looking after others. After hours of looking after kids, escorting them to the toilet, helping to cut up sausages, washing paint out of school skirts, helping to track down stray PE pumps, she now had her father to worry about, too.
She’d once thought, in a darker moment, that out of both parents her dad would probably go first. She was sure that her mother would get by. She was self-sufficient and sensible. Her dad on the other hand had a permanently bewildered air about him as if everything was a surprise. He was now acting in a way that she had never imagined.
“Look after Mum and Dad,” Dan had said as he kissed her on the cheek before he boarded his flight to start his new life in Australia. It seemed so easy for him to utter these five words and then disappear to construct his own happy family Down Under.
Relations between Dan and Dad were strained. Dad thought that Dan should stay in York, to keep the Pepper family where it had roots. That he shouldn’t leave Mum behind or allow for his kids to grow up without knowing their grandparents. Lucy phoned Dan to remind him whenever it was Mum’s and Dad’s birthdays. She made excuses to Dad when Dan didn’t call. She sometimes felt like the spider in the middle of the family web, trying to hold all the threads together.
When they were younger, Dan used to hang around with a group of lads from the estate. They all smoked and mooched around the street corners, the local shops, the park—wherever they could have a crafty cigarette and heckle girls who had the misfortune of passing by. When she was eleven Lucy had once seen Dan sitting on the top of the climbing frame. He had a cigarette dangling from his lips and was busy daubing graffiti on the red metal with a black marker pen. He hadn’t seen his sister and her friend Eliza strolling past as he wrote the word bollocks in foot-high bubble letters.
“Is that your Dan?” Eliza asked. She was short and had long black plaits that swung like pendulums.
“I think so.” She had tried to act nonchalant, merely glancing in his direction.
“He is going to get in trouble for doing that.”
Lucy felt a strange mix of admiration and anger at her brother. He was older, in the last year of secondary school. He was hanging out, showing off—and that made him edgy. He had his own secret life away from Mum and Dad that she didn’t have. She had to tell them where she was going and who with and what time she’d be back. Dan could mutter, “I’m going out,” and slam the front door without receiving the third degree.
“Do you know anything about Dan up to no good in the playground?” her dad asked.
“No,” Lucy lied. Her brother had charm and the ability to feign such innocence that if he hadn’t become a motor mechanic, then he would surely have won an Oscar for his acting. What was the point of dropping him in it? “I don’t know anything.”
Afterward she had chastised Dan, who had just laughed and told her not to be such a nerd.
Her brother had confidence and swagger that Lucy yearned for. He left school and set up his own business, contacting the bank, securing premises and buying car parts on his own and without a doubt in his head. He seemed to be able to hone in on a goal and pursue it single-mindedly, without emotion or doubt getting in the way.
Lucy wished she could address her own life and worries like that; that she could get a message from her father saying that he had been attacked by a tiger and think, Oh, well, at least he’s alive. These things happen. That’s how Dan would tackle it.
Sometimes Lucy let the pressure get to her. Too tired to move after a day at school and full of reluctance to phone her father and hear how much he was missing Mum, she would unscrew the top off a bottle of red wine and not bother with a glass while she watched an American crime drama. She rather fancied one of the auburn-haired detectives because he never seemed to mind what life threw at him. He had the same attitude to life as her brother. A corpse in his own garage? No worries. A van full of illegal immigrants killed through an arson attack? He would find who did it.
She stood at the window watching the kids in the playground. Tapping her mobile phone against her chin she thought about her brother. I bet Dan’s sunbathing, she thought. It would be so lovely to live near the beach with the waves crashing up to your front lawn. She’d not made it out to Australia yet but she saw his Facebook photos and always made sure she “liked” them.
She didn’t have a clue what time it was over there when she scrolled to find his number. All she knew was that she had to speak to him. She wanted to hear his take on the situation with their father. He would be practical and have an answer for everything.
A child with an Australian accent answered the phone.
Lucy’s mind whirred. How old were Marina and Kyle now? Old enough to answer the phone, anyway. She still thought of them as babies.
“Oh, hi. Is that Kyle?”
“Yes.”
“Can I speak to Dan. I mean, your dad?”
“Who is it?”
“It’s Auntie Lucy, back in the UK. I don’t know if you’ll remember me...” She tailed off her words when she realized that Kyle had already gone.
She heard Dan’s voice before he picked up the phone. “Who is it, mate?”
“Some lady. I don’t know.”
The phone rattled. “Pepper Car Mechanics.”
“Hello, Dan. It’s me.”
“Lucy?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. It’s good to hear from you. It’s been a while.”
She resisted saying that it had been a while because he never phoned. “I know. A couple of months now.”
“That long? Time flies out here.” Worry then crept into his voice. Lucy welcomed hearing it. “Everything is okay, isn’t it?” he said.
“Kind of. I just thought I’d phone. You know, seeing as it’s a year since Mum passed on.”
“Yeah. I knew it was coming up. I decided to deal with it by keeping busy.”
“The anniversary was last week.”
“Oh. Right. I knew it was close. My plan worked, then.”
Lucy felt a jolt of anger at his joke. Sometimes he had the ability to make her feel eleven again. “I’m worried about Dad,” she said more sharply than she meant to. “He’s been acting rather strangely recently.”
“Why, what’s up with him?”
“Well, he never really leaves the house, only to go to the village. He’s turned into a hermit. He wears the same clothes every day and has got a bit obsessed with this motley fern that Mum used to have. And then, without warning or explanation, he took off on a trip with his neighbor Bernadette. I went ’round to the house and he wasn’t here. He’d traveled down to Bath.”
“That doesn’t sound too much to worry about. He probably forgot to tell you.”
“I don’t think so. It sounded like there was something he wasn’t telling me.”
“Well, that doesn’t sound like him but I suppose it got him out of the house.”
“That’s not all. While he was on his travels he says he went to a stately home to see a lord. And I think he said he was attacked by a tiger.”
Dan burst into laughter. “A what?”
“A tiger.”
“Are there any tigers in the UK? Are they not in zoos?”
“I believe this Lord Graystock keeps them in his grounds.”
Dan didn’t speak for a moment and Lucy wondered if he thought that she was the one going crazy. “That sounds really very unlikely,” he said.
“It’s true.”
“Well, that’s great, though, isn’t it? You don’t want him to stay in the house and mope around day in and day out, do you? It shows that he’s starting to enjoy life again.”
Lucy sighed. “Perhaps he shouldn’t be enjoying life again yet. It’s only been twelve months since Mum died.”