Scarlett - Cathy Cassidy [46]
‘You could have a bit of this,’ I say, pulling at my red skirt. ‘Or maybe my burgundy combats? What d’you think?’
‘Ah, no,’ Clare says. ‘You can’t cut them up, it’d be such a waste!’
I shrug. ‘I don’t have any old clothes with me, though.’
‘Unless… Well, there’s the stuff in the attic,’ Clare says.
The thunder crashes again, and the kitchen light flickers slightly and then steadies. ‘What stuff in the attic?’ I ask. ‘There’s nothing of mine up there.’
Clare hesitates, biting her lip. She can’t quite meet my eye.
‘Clare?’
‘Actually, there is,’ she says at last. ‘Sacks and sacks of stuff that your Dad’s kept hold of for years, since you moved out of the house in Islington. I think he was supposed to be taking it to the charity shop, but he made the mistake of looking in the bin bags, and he just couldn’t bear to part with it.’
My head is spinning. What was in those bin bags, all that time ago? Toys, clothes, books – bits and pieces of my childhood. When Dad left, I threw out everything I could from the old days. Getting rid of the memories wasn’t so easy…
‘He kept it all?’ I ask. ‘Everything?’
‘I think so,’ Clare tells me. ‘I’m sorry, Scarlett. He should have told you.’
The lights flicker off and on again, and I rub my forehead, trying to clear the fog from my mind. My childhood, neatly bagged up, is sitting in the attic above our heads. It’s not lost, after all.
‘Can I see it?’ I ask. ‘The stuff in the attic?’
Clare grins. ‘Of course, Scarlett. Fetch that stepladder from the back porch, would you? I’ll show you exactly where it is…’
We go up the stairs, carrying the wooden stepladder between us. On the landing, Clare opens up the rickety stepladder below the square wooden hatch in the ceiling and climbs up, pushing the hatch door open to reveal a dark, cavernous space.
‘Lucky there’s a light up here,’ she calls, flicking the switch on.
‘Come down,’ I call. ‘It doesn’t look safe. You hold the ladder and I’ll go up.’
‘Nonsense!’ Clare laughs, tanned feet in flowery flip-flops disappearing up the rungs of the ladder. ‘I’m pregnant, not ill. Come on!’
I follow her up into the floored loft space, piled high with boxes, tea chests, rolls of carpet and black bin bags. My heart starts to thump.
Clare is already kneeling beside the black bin bags, opening the knots at the top and checking inside them. ‘That’s them,’ she says. ‘One, two, three… four. Do you want to see? It’s your stuff really, so if there’s anything you want we can throw it down.’
I look inside the first bin bag, fishing out school books, plimsolls, a stack of dog-eared pony books. There’s a bundle of home-made cards tied up with string, carefully coloured with stubby wax crayons or scratchy pencils or garish felt pens, endless sketches of ponies, a green potato-shaped car that has to be the Morris Traveller.
Inside the second I find a bag of Barbie dolls, a black Barbie horse with red wool plaited into the mane, my very first pair of satin ballet shoes and an impossibly tiny pink leotard. The third bin bag is stuffed with soft toys – a fleecy brown bear, a ragged panda with only one ear, a knitted donkey that Gran made me back in the days when I was still her favourite granddaughter and not the problem child from hell.
How did it all go so wrong?
I’m taking big breaths in, yet the air seems thick and soupy and I can’t quite fill my lungs. I’m trying hard to stop my hands from shaking, and my eyes sting, either with dust or tears, I can’t tell.
‘Scarlett?’ Clare puts an arm round me, and I wipe a hand against my eyes. The fourth bag holds clothes. On top there’s the red velvet dress I wore on my eighth birthday, then the cerise silk crinkle-skirt I wore on holiday in Corfu. There’s a red fluffy jumper, the one I wore when we went to see The Nutcracker, the Christmas I was six, and the crimson corduroy pinafore dress I loved so much when I was five. We pull out dress after dress, a dozen different kinds of red, shades of scarlet, ruby, burgundy, crimson, each one soft velvet or thick wool, embroidered cotton or crumpled