Searching for Arthur (The Return to Camelot #1)(5)
Arthur kept his lips tightly sealed but still spread them out into a knowing smirk-like smile.
“It’s bad enough that I have the world’s biggest klutz for a little sister,” he whispered back, “without everyone thinking she is also the biggest mental-case in the village as well.”
“But you believe me?” I whimpered.
My brother smiled again, this time showing his perfectly straight – and very expensive – top teeth.
“Yeah, I believe you, Titch,” he whispered, “but we know from experience that most people don’t.”
Five days later, Arthur was gone.
Chapter Two
Avalon Cottage
The painkillers helped me sleep a little, but it wasn’t restful. My head – which had required six stitches – throbbed continuously, and my scratched hands were stinging. Afraid of the dark, I left the lights on around my bed. A well-meaning nurse kept coming in to turn them down once I had dozed off. The slightest movement woke me, and that only meant I had to put the lights back on again.
This nurse and mouse game ended at daybreak, and by the time my mother and Arthur came back to collect me, I was beyond exhausted. If Arthur hadn’t placed an arm around my back and gently nudged me forward, I would have slept where I stood.
They arrived in mother’s car: a gleaming black BMW which smelt of leather and pine air freshener. I definitely saw her flinch when I climbed into the back seat. While she and Arthur had brought me a fresh change of clothes: black leggings and a long blue and white striped sweater, neither had thought to replace my Converse sneakers. They were still caked in mud and dirt and microscopic pieces of ancient flaking brains. All of which transferred onto the black carpet of the prized BMW.
I hadn’t told my mother the gruesome details of the previous day’s adventure. I wasn’t stupid. My mother believed what she wanted to hear, not necessarily the truth. So I told her I had fallen. The exchange of words that led to it remained the elephant in the hospital room that nobody wanted to mention.
Falling while running was the basic truth, and so I didn’t feel too guilty.
At least I wasn’t lying.
We arrived back at the cottage we had been renting for several months. It wasn’t home, although Arthur called it that. I knew he was trying to cheer me up, but I really had had enough of being uprooted. I just didn’t think it was normal to have lived in more houses than years I had been alive. I had just turned seventeen, and Avalon Cottage, with its little windows and overgrown garden, was the eighteenth place I had lived in. Even hermit crabs didn’t change shells that often. My parents said the hotel in Bangkok or the serviced Government apartments in New York didn’t count, but as my clothes were hanging in closets, and I was forced to attend school lessons, I thought they did.
Nobody, other than Arthur, understood how hard this was. It wasn’t a matter of geography. My life had become a battle with words. In the US, you order fries and you get fries. In Britain, they are called chips. I get used to calling them chips, move back to the US, order chips and end up with what the British call crisps.
I couldn’t even eat anymore without getting confused.
My father worked as a diplomat: Foreign Affairs. When people asked me what he did, I replied that he took up the crap that nobody else wanted to do. It was the only way I could explain the constant moving, the running, often with no notice.
It wouldn’t matter anymore if there was notice. It wasn’t as if I bothered to make friends. I would watch other girls at other schools, clinging like limpets to one another when it was their turn to leave. A small part of me was jealous at the attention, but once the tears had dried, those left behind carried on as normal. The person who had left was a ghostly imprint, a name on a Facebook page, but nothing more.
But I never forgot them, even if they never gave me a second thought. You can’t forget those who have gone – no matter how hard you try.
Flowers from my father were on the kitchen table: red roses, at least thirty of them. I tried to be cool, but I know I smiled because my head thumped as my jaw muscles stretched.
“Your father will call later, Natasha,” said my mother, placing her burnt orange Birkin handbag – an I’m-sorry-I’m-never-there present from my father – on the kitchen dresser. “I have a luncheon, but I can cancel if you want me to stay and look after you.”
We looked at each other. It was my turn to play at diplomatic relations.
“I’ll be okay, Arthur will be here.”
If she had hugged me, I would have let her.
My mother nodded instead, and called out to my brother who had run upstairs in search of his cell phone. I didn’t wait to hear what she intended to tell him. My hand was already sliding back the thick cast-iron bolt that secured the back door. I hadn’t seen Mr. Rochester for over twenty four hours, and I was worried about him. I wanted to cuddle his little body. I wanted to let him know that it wouldn’t be long before he could come back to where he was safe.
After being thrown out of the box in my bedroom, Mr. Rochester was put at the bottom of the garden in a large two storey chicken coop. There had been chickens, but my mother got rid of them within a week of our arrival. My father was living in London, and we were all supposed to live there – for the third time in six years – but my mother had become paranoid about terrorists and she refused to live in the capital, or anywhere even remotely resembling civilisation. So my mother, Arthur and I all decamped to Wales and some unpronounceable village in the middle of nowhere.