The Summer of the Bear Read online

  Alba had been sent to her room in a tantrum. She’d felt the bed dip as her father leaned forwards to smooth her hair behind her ears. Anger, he had gone on to argue, was the default emotion for the lazy. Reason, logic and patience, conversely, all required harder work than most people were prepared to commit to.

  ‘But what happens when you can’t agree on things?’ Alba sniffed.

  ‘Well, humans fight and countries go to war. This is why diplomacy is important, because diplomacy is all about using words and not weapons.’

  ‘But words are weapons,’ Alba said, not because she particularly understood the meaning of the phrase but because she remembered her father saying it before and she knew he’d be impressed.

  ‘Clever girl. Yes, they can be. But so is silence. So is anything you do to manipulate people. Bad moods, charm, sulking. So you see, you have to be careful how you use these things.’

  ‘So your job is a weapon.’

  ‘Very much so. But diplomacy is a good weapon. Countries talking to each other is a good thing. People talking to each other is a good thing – which is why, my little tree frog, you must apologize to your mother when she comes up to kiss you goodnight.’

  ‘Alba . . .’ Letty pleaded. Her bright flash of temper had already expended its battery life. All she wanted was to take Alba in her arms and hold her tight, keep her safe.

  Alba’s nose had blocked with mucus from the effort of not crying. She turned her head away and parted her mouth to breathe. Apologies had come so cheap when she was little, the price of a kiss or a hug – not any more. She no longer knew how to talk to her mother and her mother didn’t know the person that she had become. She had no idea, for example, that Alba smoked cigarettes or that she had finished one of the half-empty bottles of gin in the sitting-room cupboard. Her mother had not noticed that she needed a bra and she had no idea that two weeks after the death of her father, as if further proof was needed to confirm the end of her childhood, Alba had pulled down her pants in the school lavatory to find spots of blood on the thin white cotton. Her mother had no idea that her daughter was currently in collision with her own puberty. She had no idea about anything. Alba’s nose began dripping. She would not apologize to her mother, she would not. Her nose dripped harder and the silence between mother and daughter stretched long and shrill.

  46

  ‘Just get it over and done with.’ Georgie rammed her hands deeper into her pockets and gazed up at the mottled sky. ‘You’re saying you want me to knock on the door.’ ‘That is the conventional method for entry’ ‘Just walk up the path and knock on the door?’ ‘Why are you making such a fuss about it?’ Alba shrugged and stamped her gumboots on the wet tarmac.

  ‘For God’s sake. Bang on the door, say you’re sorry, then run like hell.’

  ‘Easy for you.’

  ‘Well, he’s not going to hear you shouting it from here . . . unless, of course, you go and shoplift yourself a megaphone or something.’

  ‘You’re hilarious.’

  ‘Well, get on with it then. Besides, you got off lightly. He could have had you arrested.’

  ‘Oh right, as if there’s a single policeman on this island.’

  ‘There’s nice Sergeant Anderson.’

  ‘Who’s probably still searching for that bloody dead bear.’

  ‘He could call for back-up.’

  ‘From who – Dad’s Army? Your friends at MI whatsit?’ she said sarcastically. ‘God, why is everyone making such a fuss about this?’

  ‘Mum, you mean.’

  Alba scowled.

  ‘You don’t think she has enough to worry about without you being a thief?’

  ‘It’s none of her business.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

  ‘I could have paid the money back. She didn’t have to make me apologize.’ Alba spat out the word like a bullet.

  ‘Of course she did.’

  ‘If it’s so easy, then you do it.’

  ‘I would if it had been me stealing.’

  ‘No, seriously, you ought to do it. Its embarrassing for me.’

  ‘And it wouldn’t be embarrassing for me?’

  ‘No. You didn’t do the crime. It would be more like an acting job for you. Besides, aren’t you even slightly curious to know what it feels like to be in trouble?’

  Georgie sighed. This was Alba’s magic trick. Making her own guilt disappear like a rabbit back into a top hat.

  ‘I’m not doing your penance for you.’

  ‘Why not? The Paki doesn’t know the difference between us.’

  ‘Forget it, Alba.’

  Alba yanked up her hood angrily. Rain was breaking like cold metal needles against her face. ‘What you don’t seem to appreciate, Georgie, is that shoplifting is factored into the retail price of goods. Every Mars Bar the Paki sells has got a shoplifting percentage added onto it and since I’m apparently the only one that has ever stolen anything from him, he’s defrauding the rest of the islanders. I mean, think about it, do you think he lowers his prices just because there’s so little shoplifting here?’

  ‘It’s not going to work, Alba.’

  ‘You think it’s good for me to be forced to apologize. You think I need punishing. But I’m not sorry, so what’s the point? A forced apology is just a lie dressed up in pretty clothes and lying definitely won’t stop me stealing. So, as I already said – pointless. If you do it, though, I’ll give you something in return and then we’ll both benefit.’

  ‘What could you possibly give me?’

  ‘Why, will you do it?’

  ‘Depends.’ An idea was occurring to Georgie. There was something she wanted from her sister.

  ‘What about if I do your cooking rota for the next few weeks?’ Alba offered.

  ‘For a start.’

  ‘Shake on it.’ Alba prised a hand from her pocket.

  But Georgie had no intention of selling herself cheap. ‘Yes, that,’ she said coolly, ‘plus you have to be nice to Jamie.’

  Alba withdrew her hand. ‘Define “nice”.’

  ‘It’s not a word that normally needs defining.’

  ‘Define “nice”, and for how long exactly?’

  ‘Alba . . .’

  ‘How long?’ Alba repeated harshly.

  Georgie held her ground. ‘You have to be really properly nice to Jamie and do my cooking until the end of the month.’

  Alba scowled. She glanced at the Paki’s house and tried to imagine forming the word ‘sorry’. Most emotions were hateful, but humiliation had to be the most hateful of all. She was furious that Georgie had got the better of her, but then she remembered the neat pyramid of ash of her recently arrived A level results and felt better.

  ‘The end of the month. But not one day, one hour, not one single minute longer.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Alba,’ Georgie said resentfully. ‘God forbid anyone should expect more of you than the bare minimum.’ She began trudging up the stony path. Was empathy supposed to be optional? It was hard to say how anybody might turn out in the end, but not for the first time, she wondered whether her sister might be a sociopath. Once, she remembered asking Alba whether she would sacrifice her family for a cure for the common cold and without hesitation Alba had replied yes.

  Georgie knocked on the door then pressed her nose to the window. She wanted to leave, but unless one of them wore Alba’s hair shirt the whole unpleasant episode would have to be repeated. She sighed heavily and picked her way through wet thistles and nettles towards the mobile van parked to the side of the property. The back was rolled up and she peered inside.

  It was the third time Georgie had seen him but he was now no longer a distant scarecrow figure, but a flesh-and-blood boy, slumped against a packing crate, reading a book, his long thin legs stretched across the worn floor like broom handles.

  ‘Oh,’ Georgie said. She took in the dark skin and the wild afro. Of course, it made sense. Son of Paki. Had to be.

  Equally startled, he scrambled
to his feet, tipping his book onto the floor.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Georgie said. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to see anyone.’ He brushed down his trousers. ‘We’re not open.’ He was staring almost rudely at her.

  Georgie pushed a strand of wet hair off her face. Standing, the boy was a gangly, thinner version of his father. The trousers of his boiler suit stopped well short of his ankles and his feet were bare. His hair was so bushy it could have been used to sweep cobwebs from the van’s ceiling.

  ‘Why are you in here if you’re not open?’

  ‘Reading.’ He shrugged.

  Only a year ago, Georgie’s whole life had been about boys. How to meet them, when to meet them, in which cafe she and her girlfriends would congregate to get the best glimpse of them. Her mother had not approved of her wearing make-up, so she took to bringing a tiny palette of watercolours to school with her and as soon as she turned the corner from the house she would wet her finger and swipe her eyelids bright green. After her father’s death, she had avoided boys – she had avoided everyone, but boys especially – and now it was as if she no longer remembered how to choreograph her body in their presence. She picked his book off the floor. ‘Under Milk Wood,’ she muttered, feeling hopelessly self-conscious. ‘I had to read that for A levels. I even got to be Captain Cat in the school play.’

  He continued to scrutinize her as though she was some exotic object the tide had washed up on his doorstep. ‘Were you any good?’ he offered finally.

  ‘Awful, I’ve never been able to act. I think they only asked me because they felt sorry for me.’

  ‘For being a bad actress?’

  ‘No, no,’ she bit her tongue. ‘Mostly because I was new and . . . well, other stuff.’

  The boy yawned and stretched one arm up to the roof of the van. There was something sleepy and fluid about him, Georgie thought, like a sloth that had woken up from a month-long nap only to discover it was bedtime again. ‘The school here never puts on plays,’ he said. ‘They just made us read, day in, day out. I used to hate it.’ He felt around in his pockets and produced a packet of cigarettes. ‘Now, it’s something to do when the weather’s bad.’ He glanced out at the clouded sky and grinned. ‘I read a lot.’

  ‘I like reading. You get to try out other people’s worlds and see if they’re any better than yours.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Well . . .’ she said carefully, ‘not if you stick to the tragedies.’

  The boy jammed a cigarette in his mouth and absently felt around with his foot for a boot. ‘There’s not much to learn about different worlds from Under Milk Wood. It might as well be set on the island.’

  ‘I suppose so. I never really thought about it.’ As it happened, she wasn’t thinking about books at all, she was thinking about his subversive hair. She had seen hair like his before in newspapers. It was student-sit-in hair. Antiwar-protester hair, socialist-counter-demonstrator hair. If one day soon he drove the van through the township shouting communist slogans or preaching the evils of American-dominated global capitalism, no one on the island could claim that they hadn’t been warned. She wished she had hair that stood for something interesting.

  The boy found his boot and jumped off the van. ‘So if you need anything, my father’s doing the rounds tomorrow.’ He rolled down the door and it occurred to Georgie that she’d missed her moment. The thing ought to have been done right at the beginning, a mumbled sorry and a lightning-fast exit. What a stupid idea apologizing for Alba had been. She suddenly felt tired by her adolescence. Why was navigating it so relentlessly hard and why was he making it harder?

  ‘Are you saying that if I did want to buy something you wouldn’t sell it to me because you’re closed?’

  ‘I’ve got no till.’

  ‘What if I paid you the exact amount?’

  ‘There’s nowhere to put the money’

  ‘Couldn’t you put it in your pocket?’ Evidently she was only making matters worse but she couldn’t stop herself.

  ‘I suppose if you really need something that badly . . .’

  ‘I don’t, actually’ She couldn’t work out why she was so cross. ‘I was just making a point.’

  ‘Look.’ He glanced towards the house. ‘It’s not me. My father is fanatical about accounting. He would rather not make money than have it lying about in the wrong place or not know exactly what it was for. My father knows precisely how much money he’s made every single day down to the last two-pence piece.’

  ‘Oh.’ Georgie’s fingertips touched the edges of the coins in her pocket. ‘I see.’ No wonder Alba had been caught.

  ‘It sounds crazy, but it’s an obsession with him. When I was a boy, he would wait until he thought I was asleep, then he would whisper passages out of his accountancy manuals to me.’

  ‘That is crazy,’ she said unhappily.

  ‘I don’t care though.’ He threw up the roller and jumped back in. ‘You can get what you want. I won’t tell him. Come on.’

  Georgie looked hard at his hand before taking it. Unlike her light-fingered sister, she had never been inside the mobile van. The units to the right were tightly stacked with an assortment of sweets, tins and jams, while the other side housed a lending library with shelves of battered paperback books leaning flimsily against each other for support. There wasn’t a lot of room for two people to manoeuvre in and Georgie could smell the peat and cigarette smoke on his clothes.

  ‘Take anything you want.’

  ‘I don’t need anything.’ She was flustered by his closeness.

  ‘You’ve hardly looked.’ Deftly he shuffled a few cans. ‘We have beans, lentils, coconut milk, peppers, pygnolia nuts, you can’t get any of these things in the shop, you know.’

  ‘It’s okay, thanks.’ Then, worried she sounded snobbish, added, ‘I mean you obviously have really good things.’

  ‘You can pay me tomorrow if you didn’t bring enough money.’

  Georgie’s head began to throb with resentment. Any minute now, he’d suggest turning his back while she swiped a can of sesame paste. ‘Honestly, it’s not why I came.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ He was towering over her, blocking her escape.

  ‘I came to apologize,’ she mumbled.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For stealing from you.’ Her pink cheeks mutated to crimson.

  ‘Oh.’ A spiral of hair bounced across his eye. ‘Well, that’s interesting.’

  Georgie felt as vulnerable as a tortoise who’d been tricked into parting with its shell. Damn her sister. Damn her own pathetic lack of character for agreeing to take her place.

  ‘I brought the money to pay you back.’ She clanked her coins loudly and edged forwards in the hope that he might follow suit.

  He didn’t. And now they were even closer. ‘It was only a comic,’ he said.

  ‘And a mint Aero.’ Georgie could feel the damp under her armpits. ‘Plus a book.’

  ‘Well, the book she’ll have to return. There are people waiting for it.’

  And still he didn’t move. Georgie prayed for deliverance. It was only because Alba had nicked the island’s most popular read that she’d been caught in the first place. Quite why she’d snatched Alex Haley’s Roots when there were already two copies at home it was hard to say. Her sister was probably a kleptomaniac as well as a sociopath. At school, there had been a girl in the year above her who could not stop stealing knives and forks from the school cafeteria. After she’d been rumbled, the teachers had stormed her bedroom and discovered a cache of cutlery under her bed large enough for every Bonn resident to slice up their hams and cheeses.

  ‘I’ll get you the book.’ Georgie raised her eyes to his with an effort.

  He moved aside. The cool air felt like a poultice on her burning cheeks. ‘Wait a minute.’ Georgie found herself rewinding the conversation. ‘You said “she”. You said she’ll have to return it.’

  ‘My father said it was the
younger sister. You’re the older one, aren’t you?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I saw you at the meeting in the school house.’

  ‘The bear meeting? I didn’t see you.’

  ‘The whole island was there.’ He shrugged as if a crowd of elderly islanders were the perfect camouflage for a six-foot-three smoky brown boy with bedspring hair. He was Mowgli, Georgie thought. No idea that he was being raised amongst wolf cubs.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I’m Georgie.’

  ‘Aliz.’

  ‘Aliz,’ she repeated unconsciously. ‘So, did you look for him? The bear?’

  ‘Nah, I reckon it drowned at sea, otherwise someone would have spotted it.’

  ‘That’s what Alba thinks, but my little brother still goes out searching every day.’ For the first time she remembered Alba was waiting. ‘Look, I have to get back.’ She scrabbled in her pocket. ‘Here. I’m really sorry by the way.’

  Aliz took the change from her. ‘How did your sister get you to do her dirty work for her?’

  ‘I don’t know, she’s cunning that way. She’s like Typhoid Mary, she infects everyone around her.’ Georgie then concentrated so hard on finding a way to end the conversation that accidentally she began a new one. ‘So why do you keep that old school bus in your garden?’

  ‘It’s not a bus, it’s a greenhouse. Want to see?’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Georgie noticed Alba grimly enlarging the circumference of a pothole in the road with the toe of her gumboot. ‘I really ought to get back.’