The Bookshop of New Beginnings: Heart-warming, uplifting – a perfect feel good read!. Jen Mouat
push the tiredness aside for a little longer. She rummaged through her suitcase again, seeing the lovely dresses and designer labels with a critical eye. Nothing suitable for Bluebell Bank. In the end she pulled on a pair of jeans and Emily’s hoodie, avoided the bed after one long, yearning glance then set off downstairs in search of Emily.
With ghosts popping up at every turn, Kate descended the stairs, feeling like an imposter. For the first time the unwelcome thought rose to torment her: what if the email had been a drunken whim and Emily neither expected nor truly wanted her to come? Then she recalled how Emily had flung her arms around her in the bookshop and was somewhat reassured.
Kate was unused to doubting herself these days – such prevarication was relegated to a time long gone – and the sense of uncertainty unsettled her.
Life with Lily in the dismal tenement flat in Edinburgh had been terribly grim, a battle for survival sometimes. It was thanks to the Cottons that she had prevailed, made a success of herself; thanks to one night in fact, when she had been driven to seek their help. The nights were always the worst; it was then that her mother’s demeanour was at its most precarious. It wasn’t so bad when Lily went out – the parties back at the tenement were far more frightening. Kate would lie rigid and sleepless beneath her thin sheet, listening to raucous voices in the sitting room. A man had invaded her bedroom once, lurched towards her bed slurring sibilantly, shushing her, grinning drunkenly. Kate had lain frozen, heart thundering and body useless, until Lily had come in and laughingly dragged him out by the shirt. After that Kate always made sure the chair was firmly beneath the door handle.
The nights when Lily went off who-knew-where with people she called friends were usually something of a relief. But not this particular night. After years of trying to keep the stark truth of her mother’s drinking locked tightly within, Kate was forced to throw herself upon the Cottons’ mercy. She hadn’t been able to sleep. She had been up for hours waiting for Lily to come home, tormented by some ambiguous terror. They’d had a fight earlier – a raging argument about Lily spending all her money on booze, too little left over to feed them – and Kate was nursing lingering resentment and the dull thud of pain from a developing bruise where Lily had swiped at her on the way past.
Lily didn’t come. The electricity was off again and there was no money to feed the meter. Kate was cold, wrapped in a blanket, watching raindrops slide down the dark, curtain-less windows and street lights bleed in the wet that patterned the glass. Waiting, waiting, for her mum to come home and be safe. She had her shoebox on her knee – the contents might have seemed like junk to anyone else but to Kate they were treasures and she had them still, carrying them through adulthood with her, carefully preserved: shells from Rigg Bay, the plastic bangles from Emily, a birthday card Dan had given her scribbled in his messy boyish handwriting, a piece of turquoise sea glass and other such oddments.
Kate listened to the sounds of car tyres sluicing through puddles until there were fewer and fewer of them and the street below was almost deserted. When she checked the clock by her mother’s bed it was 4 a.m. She did the only thing she could think of.
She hadn’t any money for the bus, but anyway, she felt safer walking than she would on the night bus with the drunks and weirdos. When she arrived on the Cottons’ peaceful, sleeping, suburban street only a mile from her own dark, uncared-for tenement, she was a mess: hair in rattails, stark white face, eyes like holes burned in cloth. No wonder Dan had looked so shocked when he opened the door, his father appearing behind him, rumpled and helpless, with glasses askew. Kate remembered, despite the overriding cold and fear and loneliness of that night, the warmth of Dan’s hand as he pulled her inside, as he put his arm so gently around her and guided her into the kitchen; the concern and anger on his face as he sat across the table from her listening to her story, while Ally made lumpy hot chocolate and Fergus buttered toast, and Emily sat as close to Kate as it was possible to be. Later, Jonathon had driven her to the tenement to check on her mother – passed out and snoring on the sofa – and collect her things. She had stayed with the Cottons for a week, begged them not to call social services upon her return; she didn’t want to be taken away from Emily and the brothers. From then on, she spent most of her time at the Cottons’ house anyway, and it was worth putting up with the occasional night with her mother to preserve her sanctum.
It was the first time Kate had asked for anything. She had shown the Cottons the worst of herself and they hadn’t shunned her. Kate – hitherto so closed and wary, so protectively curled around the shame of her home life – had opened up like an unfolding flower.
It was the first the Cotton siblings had glimpsed of the reality of Kate’s life; the first they knew of any lives lived like hers: without refrigerators filled with an endless availability of food, or nagging parents complaining about picking up laundry, but always remembering to pack lunches or sign forms for school trips; homes like Kate’s that were not warm and safe, where adult responsibilities and fear came much too soon. This enlightenment was sobering and all four Cottons became fiercely protective from there on in.
Kate hadn’t been afraid after that because she had never again felt alone; their acceptance sparked new confidence in her, and helped to determine a different course. Afterwards, she joked that the brothers were as much hers as Emily’s, to which Emily was wont to reply that she was welcome to them. At thirteen, Emily was at the age to despise her family: Dan was supercilious by dint of being eldest; Fergus was a pain in the neck, always playing practical jokes and taking the piss; Ally trailed after Kate and Emily like a lost puppy most of the time; and Noah was too young to be of any use.
Kate wouldn’t have traded them for anything.
Kate hovered in the hall, memories of that miserable night, and others, too close for comfort. This was the home of her heart, these were the Cottons; and she couldn’t remember their beneficence without feeling fragments of that old pain.
It was frightening, this change, turning her back on everything she had cultivated and embarking on a path so uncertain, but it was also exhilarating, necessary. Kate squared her shoulders as she descended the last two steps. She had been the chameleon all her life, forced to adapt, to make her own way. She’d managed to secure a place at university to study art, bolstering her mediocre grades with a heap of hard work and a little help from Emily; left Lily and the tenement and all they represented behind to forge a new life in America – playing the part of someone confident and carefree from the outset and being surprised when everyone seemed taken in by this new incarnation.
Emily was in the kitchen, making noisy dinner preparations. Kate stood in the doorway for a moment and observed the scene of domestic … well, bliss wasn’t precisely the right word … with a smile. ‘Need a hand?’ She wasn’t sure what Emily was making, but it seemed to involve using most of the utensils and pans in the kitchen.
‘Oh, hi. No, I’m good thanks. Sit and talk to me by all means. Do you still like Bolognese?’
‘Yes.’ Kate studied the unique array of ingredients on the bench. ‘But are you quite certain that’s what you’re making?’
‘Well, a version of it. I just chuck everything in.’
‘So I see.’ Kate slid into a seat at the table and looked around the room. Besides the unfolding dinner carnage, the room was clean, but cluttered; she hadn’t taken the time to look around properly earlier, too preoccupied. She studied a pinboard neatly arranged with little slips of paper, thick black pen in Emily’s hand marking out instructions and appointments: a manual for getting through the day. Alongside that was another board of photographs, each carefully labelled. Kate rose and went to study the board. If not for those labels it might have been any ordinary display of family pictures, in an ordinary kitchen, rather than a glaring reminder of Lena’s illness.
These photographs were recent and she eyed them with interest, updating her mental picture of them all. ‘Tell me about the boys,’ she said, tapping a photo showing all five Cotton siblings – at an airport by the looks of things, if backdrop and baggage were anything to go by. Fergus was in the middle, his red hair vibrant