“Dad, can I keep the parrot? Can she live in my room?”
He put down the knife and looked at me with a very serious expression. “You’ll need to look after her—she’s very old,” he said. “Here.” He handed me a toffee apple, and I licked it, patting the parrot’s glass dome with the flat of my hand as if I were patting a dog.
Dad put his hand on top of mine on the dome, his fingers flexing slightly in the way they did when he laid his hand on my head to say good-night. I licked my toffee apple. It didn’t taste like the ones at the circus. It had a slightly burned flavor, mixed with a smoky smell that felt wrong with all of that sugar.
“What was she called?” I asked between licks.
“Who?”
“The girl who died?”
Dad’s hand stopped flexing. “I don’t know,” he said at last.
“And the parrot? Does she have a name?”
“I think it’s engraved right here.” He bent and looked at the little curved plaque at the jar’s base.
“What does it say?”
“She’s called Jasmine.”
I studied Jasmine in her curved glass aviary. She was looking back at me in the same way that the eyes of people in portraits follow you around the room.
I took a bite of the toffee apple, and a sharp pain sent shivers up into the roof of my mouth. “Ow!”
“What is it?”
Something foreign and sharp was rolling around my mouth, knocking against my teeth. I put my finger in and scooped it out.
A large tooth lay in my palm. On one side was a big brown hole. The place where it had been in the back of my mouth sang with pain.
Chapter Five
After the first day at my new school, I ran down to the meadow to find Dad. The huge beech tree in the garden was beginning to shed its leaves, and they were scattered across the grass like a discarded silk petticoat. I laughed at the tree’s nakedness, shaking off the cardigan from my new uniform. The fallen leaves flew up all around me in a cloud of gold, and I pretended I was commanding them, waving my hands about my head like a witch casting a spell.
Dad was sitting on an upended wheelbarrow in the meadow, his sketchbook in hand, his great bushy eyebrows furrowed in concentration. His face was still nut-brown from the summer, and I could see little stripes of white all over his forehead where the skin between his wrinkles remained untanned. He looked like a tiger.
I came to a stop near Dad, and he snapped his sketchbook shut as soon as he saw me.
“Young Romilly!” he roared, and I jumped, wondering if he was losing his hearing.
I offered him a bit of the tangerine I had saved from my school dinner, and which tasted of wet toilet paper, and he took it gratefully, munching it, pips and all, the bristles around his mouth frothing juice.
“Rumor has it that this little meadow was an overflow for the churchyard.” He nodded toward the church’s high tower, peeping over the hedge.
I looked around the meadow. It was a triangular field bordered on all sides by high yew hedges. “But there’s no gravestones,” I said, feeling a little disappointed. It would be nice to find some human bones.
“Well, that’s what rumors are. No one knows if they’re the truth.”
I scanned the field again. There was nothing exciting here, unless you counted a huge heap of metal rods and discs piled up by the hedge that hadn’t been there the day before.
“Do I have to go to school?” I asked, changing the subject and biting hard on a piece of tangerine. Stacey had not been in my new class. At break time I had searched the playground, but it was only a small school and none of the children milling around on the tarmac were her.
Dad placed the sketchbook on the ground. “School is important, Romilly,” he said with a sigh, “and besides, people would berate me for taking you out.” He got up from the wheelbarrow and stretched, his joints cracking noisily. “Even if I was able to just whisk you out, I really can’t have you at home right now. My mind is bursting with ideas on how to make money out of this old place, and you’d be too much of a distraction.”
I looked down, digging my toe into the mound of grass beneath my feet. When I looked up, he had crouched down in front of me so that his eyes were level with mine.
“Just because I can’t give you what you want, doesn’t mean I don’t love you.” His eyes were shiny, as if he had been caught unexpectedly in a ferocious gale.
I nodded.
“And I’m sorry if I’m not always here for you at the moment. It’s just, I have so many things to think about right now. Tell you what, when everything in here has calmed down somewhat—” he indicated his head, and I imagined cogs whirring and little hammers tapping “—I’ll be able to focus much more on you, and then we can formulate a plan. Deal?”
“Okay,” I said, swallowing my tangerine wedge painfully. “What are you doing down here, anyway?”
“Attempting to pay the mortgage,” he replied with a chuckle, glancing over at the rods and pipes in the corner.
I looked around, but I couldn’t see any money anywhere.
“Is it a project?” I said, running my eyes over the metal rods. We had started a project at school today, making buildings out of spaghetti and balls of Plasticine. Maybe Dad was going to do the same on a bigger scale.
“I suppose it is. But it’s stuck right here.” He grabbed forcefully at the top of his forehead, as if he could pull the project right out. He smiled and turned back to his sketchbook, becoming still as a statue as if a light had gone out in him. I stepped forward and waved a hand in front of his face, but his batteries were well and truly dead, and I left him to it, walking back up to the house in search of something living.
* * *
Stacey was sitting on the gate, letting it swing back and forth beneath her. My stomach flipped with joy at seeing her.
“You’ve had a haircut,” she said. She had a packet of crisps in her hand, and she offered me one from the crackling bag. It tasted far more satisfying than the pithy leftover taste of tangerine in my mouth.
“Stacey, why don’t you—” I started.
But, “Shh, I want to show you something,” she said, wiping salty potato crumbs from her lips. Jumping down from the last bar of the gate, she took off, not looking back to see if I was following.
She led me through the village to a paddock behind a farmhouse. I hurried after her, intent on asking her about school, but when she stopped, the question fell from my lips. A donkey stood at the fence staring at nothing, its ribs clearly visible under its shaggy coat.