This short story, or section of a short story (the extract represents about 70% of the completed piece), is something that Rebecca has been working on alongside her work-in-progress novel, Flatland.
Written from different perspectives within the same family, the novel follows the story of Andrew Laister, who soon discovers that his parents are selling up the family farm and that he is to inherit a large sum of money from the sale of the land. The story is set in rural Lincolnshire, where Rebecca grew up.
Outside of her writing, Rebecca works in TV production. She has a First Class degree in English Literature from the University of Bristol and currently lives in South-East London.
Email: rpike910@googlemail.com
Phone: +44 7545787790
The Green Scarf
The weather was just glorious the last time Juno visited her father: bright and still and scorching. Even after the sun had set, the sky slipping to a thin, weightless blue, the temperature was still warm, and the teenagers who were sitting around in circles in Cleavely park lolled around in their shorts and T-Shirts quite comfortably. Summer had arrived reluctantly and everyone could agree that today was the first really good day they’d had all year. And it was perhaps because of this – the vague novelty cast by the lingering heat of the day against the fading light of the sky – that the few remaining adults along the pathway there found that a feeling of levity was trying to reach them, the kind that marks the start of the school holidays, when the days are long and all lies ahead of you.
Yet, there was one woman, a pale woman with dark freckles, who wasn’t admiring this pleasant summer scene like the rest of them. She was sitting waiting with a man on one of the benches by the entrance. Her head was bent, she was staring down at her toes, and her cheeks were moving slightly as she bit down on her bottom lip where the skin was all clotted and riddled through wear and continued picking away.
‘Juno?’
The woman started and turned to see George looking at her. He was almost smiling, a glint of incredulity in his light eyes; she’d been doing it again. Juno ran the tip of her tongue along the inside of her lower lip, listening in her mind to the twangy, Bostonian drawl of her Aunt Lizzie say, ‘Do you want a bit of bread with that lip, hunny?’ Juno rubbed her lips together and sat there, frowning at the largest circle of teenagers directly in front of them. Her whole face felt tense.
‘Are you OK?’ George asked.
‘Yeah. Fine,’ she replied, without looking at him.
They’d been in the park – the same park where Juno had spent her own teenage years, picking idly at the grass and hunched in the kind of loud, intimidating circles, that spread out before them now – for the past hour or so, waiting for her dad to get back from wherever it was he’d been that day. They’d come down for the weekend to help him pack up the house and take away some of Juno’s old things before he moved, but when they’d called to say they were close, about an hour ago now, her father had said he wasn’t home yet. There’d been something about Plymouth, he was talking on his hands-free on the motorway at the time, so it was difficult to catch all the details, but since she generally found phone conversations with her father uncomfortable, dishonest even, she’d only hurried him along, saying, with a kind of pained gaiety, ‘No, don’t worry, don’t apologise! We’ll just wait in the park!’
Juno stared unseeingly at that same circle, where two long, willowy boys were now sitting on their haunches, readying to leave. ‘I’m just not sure we’ll be able to fit all my old stuff in the boot,’ she snapped. ‘We should’ve just shared my bag between us,’ she added, with a sharpness she’d not fully intended.
‘Well, how much stuff do you need to take back?’ George asked. His voice was calm, reasonable. He’d missed the point.
‘Dunno,’ Juno said.
George wriggled a stick of rizlas and a pouch of tobacco out of his pocket and started rolling a cigarette. He placed a filter between his lips and asked, in a constricted voice, ‘How long did your dad say he would be?’
Juno pretended to check something on her phone. She angled her face away from the smoke, listening to the dry, crackle of tobacco, the sharp inhale of breath, issuing by her right ear. ‘Dunno,’ she said again, then slid her eyes sideways, ‘that stinks.’
‘Sorry,’ said George, wafting the cigarette smoke away with his free hand.
‘He just said he’d ring when he gets in,’ she said.
George sniffed and then said, a little too quickly, ‘I mean, what’s he doing?’
Juno turned to face him. An expression of reproach and impatience had appeared in George’s face. The sharpness stabbed at Juno, and for a few seconds she could only see her father through George’s eyes: a father who had never, not once, tried to meet George in person, and who, even now, despite their three-hour drive, couldn’t manage to be in on time. Disappointment lapped in dark waves through her chest, and when a burst of laughter flared in a distant corner of the park, it sounded cruel and mocking to Juno, aimed at them. She opened her mouth to say something, but at that moment her phone started vibrating in her hand and she looked down to see the word ‘Dad’ on the centre of her screen. ‘Ah,’ she wiped her nose with the back of her hand, and said, with some relief, ‘Here he is now.’
The sky was almost dark by the time they pulled up to the house and everything, even her hair, seemed to stink of cigarettes. Juno switched off the engine and they sat for a moment in silence, listening to the gentle ticking sound of the engine pinging around the inner cavities of the car.
‘Happy?’ George asked brightly.
Juno said nothing to this and sat there frowning at the house in front of them. They were parked down a dark cul-de-sac, staring at a boxy, 1980s semi with a white garage. The only light in the drive came from the slither of yellow escaping through the gaps in the curtains, but even in the low light, her eyes took in the familiar contours of her childhood home. The same rebrick, almost orange façade, the same creeper of ivy down one side, the same camper van parked outside the garage door.
For as long as Juno could remember, her father had always owned a camper van. He was a wildlife photographer, of birds mostly, and spent up to half the year on the road. Each van was grey and named after a 1970s TV star. Juno hated them all, nearly as much as she hated those slow, soporific weekends she spent at her Nana’s bungalow whilst her father took off in ‘Bruce’ or ‘Paxman’ and returned, weeks later, with a face full of hair that turned her father into a stranger. Her sister, Ellie, had tried to maim one of them once. Cilla, this van was called, Cilla Black. Around the time of their mother’s funeral, Ellie had taken a pair of nail scissors to Cilla’s tyres and tried to pierce the tough rubber rim with the tip. The scissors were too blunt to be of any use, but Juno had still loved her sister for that. And when she thought of Ellie now, cheeks flushed, tongue peeping out as she explained – with an authority, a womanly efficiency, that Juno had just craved – the damage a broken tyre could do, her chest felt a little bright and tender. She sighed and, making no effort to move herself, she said, ‘Can you get our stuff from the back?’
Leaving George at the boot, Juno walked to the door and rapped on the handle three times. After a pause it swung open, and her father stood there in the frame. He looked strangely brown and older than she remembered. His hair had thinned and was cut so short that the silver hairs almost blended into the skin, like tiny, glinting fish scales. Standing across the threshold, their eyes met with one of those peculiar glances that had a meaning beyond words, before she saw his eyes falter, and whatever it was that had passed between them fractured and dissolved.
‘Hi darling,’ he said. His voice caught slightly in his throat, as if he hadn’t spoken it in a while.
‘Hi, Dad,’ she said, then waited for him to offer his arms in a hug, but no one moved and, after another few seconds of just standing there, Juno reached her arm upwards and embraced him with one arm, before her arm fell, quickly, unnaturally, to her side.
‘You must be George!’ he said, looking past Juno and holding out his hand.
Juno felt some inner layer tense. George didn’t do handshakes. Handshakes were the kind of easy, masculine gesture which George avoided. She thought she saw alarm cross his face before he made a show of negotiating the bags onto one arm and then offered his own hand forward.
‘How was the drive?’ her father asked. His tall, brown body looked huge next to George’s, wide and dense. Juno had never thought of her father as particularly masculine, yet, standing side by side next to George, Juno realised her father was masculine. It was a kind of general, unspecified masculinity that came as much from the hook in his nose, as the thick, symmetrical fingers, the leather belt (maybe it was just the belt?) secured high and tight on his waist. She turned around and stepped a little further into the hallway, but her father’s face – large-nosed and solid – stayed in her mind. Had George seen this too?
‘Yeah – fine thanks,’ George said, his voice sounding calm, ordinary. ‘We got lucky with the traffic.’
‘Good,’ her father said, a wide smile fixed to his face.
‘I think we were right to leave work a bit early, beat the rush,’ George continued, but her father had already turned away.
‘In the sitting room, Junie,’ he called, and then shut the front door behind them.
The room was half-packed when they entered and smelt of cardboard boxes and cello-tape. The shelves by the fireplace had been cleared and the walls were bare, save for a series of mean little nails jutting out at odd angles. The room looked smaller somehow without its usual ephemera. Small and worn out.
Juno took a seat on the far end of the sofa, ‘You look tanned, Dad.’
‘Do I?’ he said, lowering himself onto the other sofa.
‘Have you been away?’
‘Oh, I was in Brecon last week,’ he said dismissively.
‘Brecon? What’s in Brecon?’ she asked, encouragingly.
‘Red Kite.’
George raised his eyebrows and bobbed his head once.
‘Red Kite,’ Juno repeated, flinging out her words like a harpoon, trying to bring everyone inside the same orbit once more, ‘Any good?’
He smiled thinly, ‘No, not really.’
What her father meant by this Juno wasn’t exactly sure. Perhaps the conditions had been poor, or he thought the pictures he’d taken were no good; either way she knew how her father could get when a trip didn’t go to plan and she knew he wouldn’t want to talk about it.
‘Can I get you a drink?’ he asked, ‘Beer, wine?’
‘Um, maybe in a bit,’ Juno said, ‘Still feel a bit car – a bit journeyed-out. Are you OK?’ she asked, turning to face George.
‘Mm, maybe a beer in a bit,’ he said.
Juno stared at him. He was leaning back on the sofa with a familiarity that felt almost rude. Why hadn’t he said thank you? She turned from George with a sharpness and the three of them sat in silence for a moment. Searching for something to say, Juno peered pointedly at the cleared shelves in front of them, but she felt stifled by a strange mixture of impotence and alienation and for a few seconds nothing felt real.
After a pause, her dad hitched up his jeans. He looked instructively at the two bags by George’s feet, ‘Let me take this upstairs,’ he said.
‘Oh, we can do that, Dad,’ Juno said quickly.
‘No, don’t worry,’ he said, already bending down, ‘It will just take a sec.’
He left the room with the bags and after a few seconds they heard his heavy tread climb the stairs. They listened to the sound of the floorboards creaking and then a door closing shut.
Silence swelled for a moment.
‘Red Kite,’ George said eventually. His voice was so knowing, so fluent, it seemed to both hold and ease all the strangeness and disappointment she felt. She smiled. Relief seeped through her like warm liquid; she was glad George was here. She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed into the still room.
‘Yep,’ she said, in a low, tired voice, ‘Yep, yep, yep.’
Just then, her phone vibrated in her back pocket. She sat up, tapped it open with her thumb and read the message on the screen. ‘Ellie’s replied,’ she snapped, and offered the screen to George.
He raised his eyebrows and read out the contents, ‘Don’t forget to ask about the green scarf,’ he said mechanically. He looked at Juno. ‘I think she’s joking.’
‘I know,’ said Juno. ‘Why would she joke about that?’
George said nothing to this and after a pause he asked, ‘What about Lizzie? Did you tell your aunt you were coming?’
‘Yeah,’ Juno said, still staring down at her screen.
‘And what did she say?’ he asked. ‘Juno?’ he repeated.
‘Just to call when we’re back in London,’ she said, after a pause.
She clutched at her bottom lip and continued staring down at her sister’s message, at the three exclamation marks in the middle of her screen: ‘Don’t forget to ask about the green scarf!!! X’ And then – suddenly – she was crying. A crowd of hot tears gathered in her eyes; one fell out and rolled down her cheek. She brushed it away with the back of her hand and took the remote control from the arm of the sofa. ‘I’m not going to bring her photos,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Ellie can get them from Dad herself,’ she added and switched on the TV. She could feel George’s eyes watching her. She chose an old episode of a sitcom set in Cardiff and settled backwards into the sofa. After a pause, George turned to the screen and rested one hand on her knee.
By the time the next ad-break appeared her father still hadn’t returned. Juno was leaning against George’s side now, both legs strung out along the sofa.
After a pause, she spoke. ‘Aunt Lizzie says “hi’’’ she said, then continued tapping away on her phone.
‘How is she?’
‘Oh,’ Juno said, sighing. She finished texting her reply and then let the phone fall, face down, in the middle of her chest. ‘Fine,’ she said.
‘Yeah?’ George asked. He sounded unconvinced.
‘She’s a bit worried about this I think.’
‘What? Coming here?’
‘Yeah,’ she said, in a long, drawn-out voice. ‘Just being here. For the move.’ She paused then, thinking, before adding, in a loud, Bostonian voice, ‘You call me if you need anything, buttercup.’
George laughed, ‘I miss her.’
‘She’s just invited us for lunch next weekend.’
‘Yeah? That’s nice.’
‘Yeah,’ said Juno in a low, quiet voice. ‘Yeah, it is.’
They sat in silence for several moments. In the time it took for the sitcom episode to run, they heard the sound of an interior door being closed, followed by the rush of running water through the pipes. George yawned hugely without covering his mouth. ‘Is your dad alright up there?’ he asked.
‘He’s fine,’ she said dully. She had opened her phone again and didn’t look up when George spoke. ‘He’ll just be editing his photos upstairs.’
George said nothing to this. In the silence that followed, Juno thought again, of their stuffy, three-hour drive, the long hour they’d spent growing cold in the park. Of George’s mother’s 70th she had missed, a few months before, so she could put her dad’s old terrier down whilst he was away. Juno sat up suddenly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘My dad – this.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ he replied, a little too quickly.
‘No,’ she said, rubbing her face with her hand, ‘he should be better.’
George turned from the screen to face her finally. ‘I don’t mind,’ he said, flicking her long dark hair past her shoulder, ‘it doesn’t bother me.’
Juno considered this for a moment, then clawed at her lip and looked down at her phone. ‘What should I reply to Ellie?’ she asked.
‘Do you need to reply?’ George asked, yawning again. His lips were dry from the drive, and stuck to his teeth.
‘No, but I want to. I want to say something.’
George turned back to the screen. ‘Maybe you should try and talk to your dad about it,’ he offered, after a pause.
‘What, the scarf?’
‘Uh, yeah? The scarf – if you want? Or just about him generally. Like, how he’s been after your mum died. I think you should talk to him about that.’
Juno stared at George. Fear settled briefly before anger arrived, a sharp tug of anger that made her cheeks grow hot. What was George trying to say? She was good at talking about things! She could see George searching her expression carefully and, after a pause, he said, ‘I’m just saying you should know you can talk about it. You can talk about it as much as you want,’ he added matter-of-factly.
As quickly as it had arrived, the anger disappeared and a blot of tenderness parted in her chest. How was it that some people always knew exactly what to say? She should talk to her father! She turned and gazed at the TV, thinking. The conversation – trite, unfamiliar – flickered briefly then dissolved. She wiped her nose and instinctively opened the messaging app on her phone. She stared down at the image of George, windswept and happy, drinking cider at Whitby, but in her mind she saw only her father as he’d appeared many years ago.
‘Nice!’ she heard him say, as he picked up the little silver bracelet she’d just unwrapped for her eighteenth birthday. Who’s this one from?’ he’d asked. Her sister had flicked her light eyes worryingly at Juno then, before turning them, with a sharpness, on their father.
‘You,’ she’d said.
Juno dug her teeth down into her bottom lip. She weighed her words silently in her head for a moment (she was aware of how dramatic she would sound), before she turned her eyes to the screen and said, in a slightly dazed voice, ‘There’s just too much to say.’
Juno woke in her old bedroom late the next morning. The room was used as her father’s study now, and on the floor lay stacks of framed magazine covers, editorial spreads and a box of awards and plaques. Juno yawned and fumbled for her phone. She’d struggled to fall asleep last night and, when she checked the time now, she could see it was already reaching ten o’clock. She rolled onto her side and saw George lying fast asleep on his shoulder, facing her. He was a good sleeper, still and silent, and as she looked at his face – the full lips sealed, the dark sweep of lashes – she thought again, for the first time in a very long time, how pretty he was. Her insides warmed as she looked at George’s face, at his small chest sighing in and out. Yes, she thought, they were going to be OK. She lay there watching George for several moments, then extracted herself, with an effort, from the low sofa-bed, and went downstairs. It was another beautiful day and the kitchen worktops were striped with bright, slanting light. She poked around in the cupboards, trying to find something with which to make a cup of coffee, but the cupboards had already been emptied and all that was left were some batteries, a box of Yorkshire tea and a cafetiere that looked as if it had never been used. She placed the tea-box on the counter and flicked on the kettle. She looked around, taking in the polished counters, the table crowded with cleaning products and electric tools, before her eyes fell on a mug, a pale blue mug, drying on the rack by the sink. She hadn’t seen that mug in years! It was her mother’s mug, her special baking mug. Her mother was from Boston, and she’d always preferred using cups to bake with – sometimes with a proper measuring cup, but often with this pale blue mug Juno was extracting from the rack now. How old could it be? She looked at the bottom, hoping to find a date or name painted on the base but the rough, white ceramic was blank. Juno tipped the mug the right way up and peered inside.
They had done a lot of baking with their mother. Scones, sponges, Boston cream pie, but in her memory it was only ever one thing that they made: bakewell fingers, a crustless version of the original tart which was so sweet and sticky that the mealy sponge would continue leaking grease for days. You couldn’t eat it without a bit of kitchen roll. It was their father’s favourite and, whenever he was away, their mother liked to have a tin full in the utility room ready for his return. Or, at least, that’s what she claimed. As she got older Juno began to wonder whether the baking was really just a ruse to stop her and Ellie fighting – they had such terrible fights, when their father was away – quite so much. And it did, it really did. For they both loved those afternoons baking with their mother. It always felt very serious and important baking things for their father’s return and, when they were finished, their mother would hand them her saucer full of rings for them to try on. It was always the opal they tried on first; the small opal on a gold band that their mother wore on her index finger. It was Ellie’s favourite, that opal ring, and therefore Juno’s favourite, too.
At that moment, the old French doors shook open, and she looked up to see her father walking into the kitchen.
‘It’s glorious out there,’ he said.
Looking at her father, at the calm, very ordinary way he had begun brushing the mucks off the tops of his jeans, Juno recalled the conversation she had shared with George the night before. An unexpected stab of guilt bypassed her quickly and she had to look out to the lawn. The French doors had been left open and, after a pause, she heard the low, summertime sound of a lawn mower droning nearby.
‘The removers are coming at three,’ her dad said, ‘I thought I’d need the morning to finish off, but I think we’re more or less there.’
‘Yeah, you’ve done well,’ Juno said, turning and peering through to the sitting room. The room was crowded with even more boxes and the two sofas were splayed at odd angles in the centre of the room.
‘It’s just the loft, really,’ he went on, peering down to brush the last of the mud off the tops of his jeans. ‘Everything’s packed,’ he said, ‘but it will need to be brought down at some point. I don’t fancy the Whitman chaps thundering around all the way up there.’
‘Well, we can do that,’ she offered.
Her father gave his jeans a final brush with his hand. He seemed to hold her gaze a little longer than was exactly necessary and then said, ‘Yeah, alright. I’ve got a few more bits to finish off in the gar –’ He trailed off, smiling. ‘Morning, morning,’ he said, looking past Juno’s shoulder to the door behind her, ‘Did you sleep well?’
George drifted through the frame, looking dazed. He was still dressed in his PJs, old tartan bottoms and a novelty Cher T-Shirt with yellow deodorant stains underneath the armpits and the words, Mom, I am a rich man, printed in cracked letters on the front. A slither of something sharp and contemptuous shot up Juno’s neck and made her look away.
‘Yes, thanks. Very peaceful,’ George said, slipping into that voice he used that was ever so slightly ironic, which made it difficult to tell whether you were the butt of the joke or not.
‘Good,’ her father said, laughing briefly, a little confused.
They stood and watched Juno making a lot of noise stirring her tea and clanging her teaspoon into the sink.
‘Right.’ Her Dad picked up an enormous electric screw-driver lying on the kitchen table, ‘I better run this next door before I forget.’ He hovered awkwardly for a moment. ‘If you need me for anything, I’ll be clearing out the shed,’ he added and then headed out of the room.
With one hip leant on the counter, Juno blew on her tea and looked at George. She listened to the latch on the front door go and then said, still eying George carefully, ‘I don’t think that T-Shirt fits you anymore.’
About an hour later, after they’d showered and dressed for the day and George had annoyed Juno by insisting that he needed to go out and buy some coffee before he could do anything else, Juno released the stepladder from the latch in the ceiling and climbed into the loft. The place was dark and smelled of pine and old dust. She fumbled around for a switch, finding one eventually on a beam behind the latch, and flicked it on. A single, exposed bulb twitched a few times, then settled into a stark white light.
Juno hadn’t known what she was expecting exactly, but at the sight of the fresh cardboard boxes, taped and ready to leave, she felt something catch and turn in her chest. She bunched up her lip with her front teeth and then, with some vague intention of trying to gauge the size of her task, she started picking her way through to the back of the loft where she found a small group of boxes still yet to be sealed. She fumbled through the box closest to her. Inside was a stack of dusty CDs and a pile of old children’s books. She picked up a copy of Dogger and started leafing through the water-coloured pages. She had never liked Dogger. She’d thought the stuffed toy old and ugly and staring at his work fur, the single ear pointing upwards, she recalled how impatient she’d always been to leave the dog behind, to hurry on through to the raffle pages at the back; Aunt Lizzie had always told those parts so well. Juno continued flicking each page in turn, thinking cheerfully how she must take the book to lunch with them next weekend, her aunt was sentimental like that, when something snagged in her periphery. She flicked her eyes upwards to the slightly larger box lying open to her left, inside of which lay a pool of fabric, startlingly green in colour.
The green was paler than she’d always imagined, with a yellow undertone to its hue that felt quite shocking somehow to Juno; until now her mind had created a scarf of rich ivy green. Heart hammering absurdly, she placed the book on the side and picked up the scarf. The fabric was light and slippery and you didn’t have to look closely to see the warp and weft of the thread, how it puckered and snagged every so often in tiny bobbles. She felt an urge to smell it, before a small slither of revulsion shot through her and she quickly dropped it into the open box once more.
Staring down at the crumpled up bit of fabric, Juno clutched at her bottom lip, thinking. She was being ridiculous! Who was to say this wasn’t one of her sister’s things? Or her mother’s? It was more of a chartreuse colour, yellowish green would have been her response if asked, and at any rate, she knew her father had kept a selection of her mother’s old clothes and most of her jewellery, too. This scarf could easily be one of hers, she thought, still staring into the box, yet she dismissed these thoughts even as they formed, sensing, somehow, that they weren’t true. She stood there motionless for a few more moments, before she released her bottom lip, then started picking her way, a little jerkily, back towards the hatch in the floor.
Only after a few paces did she stop. She had forgotten, for a moment, the sharp edge of the beam, leaning diagonally by her right ear. She had forgotten the smell of dust and cardboard boxes and the scraps of cello-tape that had her watching where she put her feet. She had forgotten she was here, in her childhood home. Her mind had slipped, falling into a flood of scenes and faces – scenes and faces which had been trying to reach her for a few days now – of her old life, when the kitchen was not five years old and the carpets smelt all sour and new and her hair was cut in that innocent, stubby fringe and her mother (her mother!)… her mother was still alive.