The Cliff House: A beautiful and addictive story of loss and longing. Amanda Jennings
His eyes drifted back to the pieces again. ‘With two and a half… please.’
‘Mum says no more than one.’
He made a face.
‘So don’t tell her, okay?’
He winked and tapped the side of his nose. As he did he erupted into a fit of coughing. Though I’d seen this a hundred times – coughing, spluttering, fingers bent into claws as they dug into the arms of his chair – it still shocked me. You’d have thought I’d got used to it, but each time, with each attack, I was terrified it wasn’t going to stop until his oxygen-starved body collapsed dead on the floor.
I reached for his hand and rubbed it helplessly. His eyes widened and the whites turned bloodshot as the effort of pulling air into his ravaged lungs popped capillaries in tiny scarlet explosions. He struggled to get his handkerchief from his sleeve and to his mouth.
I jumped up and went to the bed. Dragged the oxygen tank close enough to get the mask over his head. As I moved his hand out of the way to position it over his nose and mouth, I tried not to look at the blood on the cotton of his handkerchief.
‘Breathe, Granfer.’ His body was rigid as if somebody was sending an electric charge through him. ‘Breathe.’ The plastic mask misted and cleared with the breaths he managed to draw in. I chewed my lip, wondering if I should leave him to shake Jago awake, but just as I was about to stand up, the tortured gasps seemed to abate and Granfer’s face lost its violent purple hue. I glanced down at the smear of dark blood on the handkerchief. He caught me looking and balled it up to hide it.
When I was younger I used to daydream he had a transplant, that his black and shrivelled lungs were cut out and fresh pink ones sewn into their place. I’d imagine him waking from the anaesthetic with silent breathing, air slipping in and out of him discreetly and without pain. I’d see him flying kites on Sennen Beach with me and Jago, or rowing us out to catch mackerel and ling which we’d later bake into a stargazy pie, little fish heads poking out from the pastry with their eyes cooked to a cloudy grey.
‘I’ve met a friend,’ I said, when his body lost the last of its rigidity. ‘She lives in the white house on the cliff. You know the one? The one Dad loved.’
He gestured for me to lift up his mask and I did, leaving it on his forehead like a jaunty Christmas party hat. ‘Is she as nice… as Penny?’
Granfer had only met Penny once. It was a few years ago when she knocked on our door with a school sweater of mine.
This is Tamsyn’s.
My heart had skipped when I recognised her voice. Someone from my school at our house? It felt dangerous and unsafe, as if two planets had veered off orbit and crashed into each other.
She’s here… Do you… want to see… her?
No, it’s fine—
Tamsyn!
Then he’d collapsed into one of his fits and I’d run out from my hiding place behind the door in the sitting room to make sure he was okay. Penny was eyeing my grandad with thinly veiled revulsion. I noticed he had a globule of mucus threaded with blood on his sweater. I wiped it off with my sleeve then slipped my hand into his and squeezed. I faced her, pushing back my shoulders and raising my chin. She thrust out my sweater.
I picked it up by mistake.
I gave her the evils as I took it but she didn’t notice because she’d gone back to staring at Granfer.
Thanks then.
Penny forced a tight smile and stepped backwards off the doorstep.
Mum said to say hi to yours.
Then she was gone like a dog from the traps. Penny was the only person from school who’d ever come to our house and because of this Granfer had decided she was my best friend.
‘She’s nicer than Penny,’ I said.
‘Must be… a cracker then.’ He smiled and lowered the mask and went back to the jigsaw pieces, with the sound of oxygen hissing softly in the background.
I left his room and stood outside Jago’s door. I paused to listen. I wanted to wake him so he could tell me not to worry about Granfer’s fit. He always managed to calm me. But I knew if I dragged him from sleep he’d be cross and would probably refuse to talk to me, so instead I went back into my box. I called it my box because that’s what it was. A room with only enough space for a bed and a small bedside table. The door didn’t open fully and hit the bed before it was even halfway. There was a shelf that ran around the top of the room which Dad had made before I was born when they decided to use the box room for my cot rather than make Jago share with a baby. It held my clothes and although I could only get to it if I stood on my bed it was fine as long as I kept them in neat folded piles. My underwear was under the bed in a wooden crate that had once held oranges from Spain, and beside it was another box which contained all my other bits and pieces including my scrapbook.
I slid the box out and retrieved the scrapbook then sat cross-legged on the bed and slowly leafed through it. There was the yellowed newspaper cutting that made the announcement of the date and time his memorial plaque was to be unveiled at the RNLI station in Sennen. Then the small red flower I’d picked from a bush at the churchyard on the day we buried him, which was now dry and crispy. There were photographs too. One of me on his shoulders, his hands clasping my ankles, the remains of an ice cream smudged over my face. My favourite was the one of me and Jago, arms around each other, heads tipped close with Dad behind us, all posing beside the sandcastle we’d built and smiling at Mum behind the camera. Three sets of happy eyes squinting into the sunshine.
I made the scrapbook when I was twelve. Nineteen months and twenty-three days after he died. Mum had taken me to the Cape surgery, desperate for anything which might help me sleep through the night.
She has nightmares.
Mum had paused and rubbed her face hard, tears welling in her exhausted, bloodshot eyes.
The doctor glanced at the clock on the wall and cleared his throat impatiently. He leant forward, elbows on knees, close enough to suffocate me with his nasty aftershave and told me to fill a scrapbook with things which reminded me of Dad. Happy things. Memories. Mum was unconvinced and grumbled about the quack doctor all the way to Ted’s as I jogged to keep up with her. But she did as she was told and bought a scrapbook made of coloured sugar-paper and a glue stick. It didn’t stop my nightmares but I loved making it and when I felt tense it definitely calmed me. I was glad the doctor suggested it.
My brother’s door creaked open and I heard his footsteps going towards the bathroom. I closed the book and slipped it beneath my pillow for later, then went into his room. I sat on his unmade bed – still warm from his body and smelling of cigarettes and unwashed sheets – to wait for him.
‘Morning, half-pint,’ he said as he came back in, hair ruffled, eyes gummed up with sleep.
‘You know it’s after lunchtime, don’t you?’
He ignored my comment. ‘First day of the holidays?’
I nodded.
‘Bored already?’
‘No.’ I reached for the copy of Playboy which lay on the chest of drawers beside his bed and idly flicked through it while he dressed. I paused to look at a dark-haired girl with wet lips the colour of bubblegum who splayed her legs to reveal her privates without any shame at all.
‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘Not leaving much to the imagination is she?’
‘Get off that,’ he snapped, as his head emerged from his faded AC/DC T-shirt. He snatched it from me then opened his top drawer and stuffed it under his pants and socks.
‘Why do you want to look at pictures like that anyway?’
‘I don’t look at the pictures. I buy it for the stories and