The House We Called Home: The magical, laugh out loud summer holiday read from the bestselling Jenny Oliver. Jenny Oliver
he said. She now noticed the bag slung over his shoulder. He narrowed his eyes. ‘You can’t just turn up, tell me you’re pregnant and then leave.’
‘I can.’
‘And what if you decide not to come back. I know nothing about where you live. How would I find you?’
Amy shook out her hair, stood with her hands on her hips. ‘I will come back,’ she said, haughty expression on her face, internally glossing over the fact that permanently avoiding Gus had been her very intention.
‘I don’t trust you.’
‘That’s not very nice.’
Gus laughed, incredulous. ‘You gave me a fake number the night we went out.’
Amy paused. ‘You rang me?’ she asked, unable to help feeling a little smug.
‘No,’ Gus scoffed. ‘I just know how many digits are in a phone number. You don’t, clearly.’
Amy swung round, incensed, and started to stomp away. To her annoyance he followed her a few paces behind all the way. No matter how many times she stopped and tried to plead with him to go home. He sat opposite her on the tube. Made himself at home at her kitchen table as she packed. Walked beside her in the smoggy heat to get the Hammersmith and City line to Paddington. ‘Please go away,’ she said as the train pulled in. ‘Please?’
‘No chance.’
‘You don’t even want the baby.’
‘No, I don’t want the baby. But I don’t want you to have said baby and me not know.’
Amy screwed her eyes tight. ‘You’re muddling me.’
‘Well, let’s stop talking then.’
Now, as she sat round the dining room table, Amy took a covert glance at Gus and immediately had to look away with displeasure. He ruined being back here. The sight of him brought her previous life into stark relief: the parallel path when she would have run into the house shouting that she was pregnant at the top of her voice, grinning gorgeous husband by her side holding their clasped hands aloft in triumph. A path long gone.
She had to swallow down a rise of sadness. Close her eyes for a second and think of a really complicated times table – her grief counsellor’s tip that had done wonders for her maths. When she opened them she was looking down at her T-shirt, at the three little monkey emojis – eyes, ears and lips covered – and knew how they felt.
Moira had got the laptop out and was waiting for it to crank to life. Gus next to her was wide-eyed at how old and slow it was. When finally the NatWest page loaded, Moira clearly didn’t have a clue what to do.
‘Here, do you want me to do it?’ Gus asked, unable to stop himself. Pained by the slowness, he angled the laptop towards himself.
‘Oh Gus, darling, yes please,’ Moira said, relieved.
Amy winced. She didn’t want Gus to speak. If he was going to be here she wanted him to sit mute. She watched as he keyed in the passwords. Under the table Stella bashed Amy’s leg again, clearly trying to get her attention as Gus and Moira were distracted with the website. But Amy stayed resolutely looking away.
Out of the window the sun had spread pink and orange across the horizon, a bonfire of light that made the room glow amber.
Oh, why wasn’t her dad here? Amy wanted him sitting on that seat on the sofa so she could curl up next to him, her feet tucked under the furthest cushion, his arm around her as they drank tea and he watched the snooker while she put her headphones on and caught up with all her favourite YouTubers. She had prayed he might be back home by the time she and Gus arrived. And that perhaps he would stand at his full six foot two height – her vision of him more from when they were kids, strapping, scary, and heroic rather than in his old Edinburgh Woollen Mill cardigan and slippers – beckon Gus to one side, pull out his chequebook and say, ‘Come on then, how much will it take for you to disappear?’
Her fantasy was interrupted by a loud gasp from Moira.
Amy glanced across.
Her mother was peering close to the screen where Gus was pointing at a withdrawal.
‘A thousand pounds?’ Moira said, outraged. ‘What the bloody hell does he need a thousand pounds for?’
Gus cleared his throat, clearly a little unsure about whether it was a rhetorical question or whether she was in fact looking to him for an answer. ‘It’s … er … most likely so he doesn’t have to take any more out, the bank would be able to tell you where he was if he did.’
‘Oh.’ Moira sat back in her chair, only slightly mollified. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ She crossed her arms and legs, and added sourly, ‘I didn’t know Graham was so forward-thinking.’
‘Mum!’ Amy’s voice was a little harsher than she’d intended, but she felt like her mother was being far too cold about the whole thing. ‘Why are you not more worried about all this? He’s missing. Dad’s missing!’ she said, looking accusingly round the table. She had envisaged a lot more drama, more police popping round, more notices taped to lampposts and front page head shots in the local paper.
‘Yes, with a thousand pounds of our money!’ Moira said. ‘I am worried, Amy,’ she added, more because it was what was expected of her than with real emotion, ‘but he’s a grown man with enough money to get by and a phone if he needs any help.’ Then Moira paused, as if she’d had a brainwave. ‘His phone. He was on his phone a lot more, wasn’t he Sonny? You taught him all that fancy stuff with that Instabook.’
‘Instagram,’ mumbled Sonny.
They all turned to where Sonny was slumped at the end of the table on his phone.
‘He speaks!’ said Amy.
Sonny glanced up and when he caught Amy’s eye she winked at him. He blushed and half-smiled beneath his mop of hair.
Amy thought Sonny was great. He styled himself like a little grungy One Direction, which made him even more sulkily adorable. He wound Stella round the bend. She remembered last Christmas Eve, the house pre-open-plan all garlanded and twinkling. The huge tree by the fireplace tied with red bows and gold baubles, the fire crackling. The heavy curtains blocking out the drizzle that should have been snow. The waves thundering on the beach. Amy had sat helping Stella wrap all the kids’ Christmas presents, both of them a bit pissed on the Aldi Prosecco their mother had rushed out to buy in bulk after it got voted Top Tipple in the Daily Mail: ‘I’ve never been in an Aldi before. It’s quite something.’
Earlier Sonny had got a bollocking for pressing Rosie to explain why she thought some of her friends at school got more Christmas presents than her – especially the ones she didn’t like. Was it because Santa preferred them to her?
‘He’s just such a pain,’ Stella had said as she curled ribbon with scissors. ‘I’m like, “She’s six years younger than you! Stop being so mean to her!”’
‘I think you said stuff like that to me when we were younger,’ said Amy.
‘I did not,’ Stella gasped with affront.
‘You did. You told me that Jackie down the road had seen her dad scoffing the mince pie and sherry for Santa, and signing the card she’d left out.’
Stella snorted into her Prosecco glass.
Amy raised her brows. ‘Yeah? Remember? You’re basically just the same as him.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Stella. ‘God, I would never have got away with half the stuff he does. Dad would have throttled me.’
Amy had been unable to disagree. If the analogy was right then Amy was the equivalent of little Rosie. Dancing through life unencumbered. Her only discontent coming from the fact she had been almost invisible to their father for the first fourteen years of her life. But that had been more than made up for by being