To Autumn by Katie M. Hall

Chapter 1

Chapter 1

I pack up the crusty remains of the plastic cheese slice and pickle sandwiches Dad made us for lunch on the train. My little sister Anne and I are being sent away to Devon to spend the whole summer holiday with our grandmother.

I shove the mangled mess of dry crusts and crinkled foil into the tiny metal bin squashed between the backs of two turquoise upholstered seats. The lid squeaks open and shut, as if it’s trying to rat us out – to whom, I’m not sure, as for now we are adult-free.

We have, of course, already finished the lunch box treats of Capri Suns and KitKat fingers (fours, not twos) that was meant to have survived beyond our never-ending train journey. I hand Anne a wet wipe to wash away the evidence that is smeared on her expressionless face and chocolatey fingers. I throw away the last of the wrappers and used wipes, and the bin squawks again, echoing in the hushed compartment. The ladies in the seats opposite us tut under their hats. The train’s temperature is way too stuffy for wearing big hats, but maybe, like Mum always says, for some people appearances matter more than anything.

I pull my best funny face at Anne, one that would have had her in hysterics before. She sees me but doesn’t respond, and I’m left looking like a bit of a plank. At least it doesn’t matter if anyone here notices. I promised Dad I’d try my hardest to be a good sister while we’re away, but I’m finding it hard not to show how irritating Anne’s constant silence can be. I don’t know if I’ll be able to stay cool with her for the whole six weeks. I mean, I appreciate it. I know how I’d be feeling if I was her, being sent away from home with just a geeky big sister for company while Mum’s still in hospital. I just wish she would talk, say something, let me know she’s doing okay.

On top of everything, we definitely don’t need strange ladies’ disapproving tuts. We didn’t need the fuss they made when we boarded the train because we have the reservation for the forward-facing seats. Too bad. Dad asked especially when he bought the tickets, because Anne becomes travel sick if she sits facing the wrong way, and I said no way would I be cleaning up any of that.

A big yawn wins its way out of my mouth. I’m still tired after being woken up far too early by Dad this morning. There was actual dawn birdsong when the alarm clock went off, something no teenager should have to deal with on the first day of their summer holidays, unless they’re heading off on a plane to Disney World maybe. I wore my most convincing positive face when we left the house…well, I neutralised the face that could reveal how I really felt about waking up early just to be sent away. My face is always a dead giveaway of my feelings. Mum says she can read me like a book.

I really struggled to keep up the conversation with Dad on the bus and tube we took to Paddington. My head was stuck in fantasies about being back in bed and having a lie in to celebrate no school for six weeks. The summer of 1997 is supposed to be one of the best of my life, at least that’s what I was told over and over at school in the last few weeks of term. After we finished our GCSEs, the message from teachers was, “There’s nothing you can do but wait for the results – and that’s out of your hands until the end of August. Enjoy the freedom, things can only get better!” I had totally intended to channel their spirit, even though things didn’t end up going quite to plan with my exams. I haven’t been very successful. Life hasn’t been easy or relaxing, with Mum in hospital and me worrying about how to tell Dad I’ve messed up my exams.

Then, out of nowhere, Dad announced on Monday that Anne and I’d be heading off for the whole flipping summer without him. I think he deliberately left telling us to the last minute so that we wouldn’t have time to talk him out of it. And now, instead of fun, the first day of the holidays began with climbing aboard a foreboding train at Paddington station, like something out of an Agatha Christie mystery.

From the platform, the train had an air of carrying important people to important places. Instead, it now carries Anne and me to our grandmother’s holiday home, a caravan near somewhere called Newton Abbot.

I felt like Paddington Bear rather than Miss Marple, standing at the train door this morning, holding a suitcase and a plastic bag full of foil-wrapped quarter-square sandwiches. When Mum makes them, she cuts them into triangles and removes the crusts which is a bit more exciting, but today, just like the last three months, we’re stuck with boring squares inside stale crusts.

Before the train set off, Dad stored our suitcases in the baggage rack. The cases are bulging with the new shorts, T-shirts, and swimsuits he shopped for us, and matching plain polo shirts very much in the fashion of “bought by a parent from BHS”. We hugged him in the cramped compartment until he was told by the guard to wait on the platform if he wasn’t intending to travel. He waved goodbye to us through the rain-stained window, trying to hide the fact he was crying – something we’ve all been pretending not to notice almost every day for the past month. He recreated his standard dad jokes, the old fake walking down steps, and holding his nose whilst making puffy cheeks and circles with his mouth to look like he was breathing underwater. I laughed along, even though, after the millionth time, the jokes are no longer funny. I don’t know why he thinks he needs to hide his tears.

Dad asked the train guard to keep an eye on us, and we were told very sternly by a nasally voice, “as long as you behave,” we’d be okay. Everyone else in our carriage is a grown up; no other pairs of not-quite-sixteen-year olds and nine-year olds.

Dad’s parting words after the suitcases were stowed were, “Robyn, look after your sister,” passing me a baton of responsibility I haven’t asked for and don’t feel ready to accept.

In defiance, while I have my last few hours of freedom, I’m reading my magazines and listening to a compilation tape that was hastily but lovingly made by my best friends when they found out my summer sentence.

The tape is full of the Oasis tracks I love best. I turn the volume up loud on my new Walkman (a guilt gift from Dad), instead of looking out of the window and enjoying the stillness of field after field, which becomes more and more like a green carpet the farther away we travel from London.

I’m doing my best to ignore just how pissed off I am at the thought of being forced to spend my precious holidays in the middle of nowhere. Not only that, we’ll be staying with Grandma, a woman we know only from stilted monthly telephone calls and birthday cards sent with five-pound Woolworths vouchers.

I could’ve been hanging out with my mates in London, trying to find some normality again after all the months of chaos and upheaval. From the moment we finished our last exams, my best friends Michelle and Tanith and I have been making intricate plans. They’re supposed to be helping me find a boyfriend. Fantasies that made my heart beat faster, of hanging out at the Trocadero, sunbathing in Hyde Park, and watching fit swimmers at the lido are now just that – daydreams I’ll be having, or worse, stories I’ll be reading on the postcards they’ve promised they’ll write. All I’m gonna have to tell them about is a summer of playing Uno and Pass the Pigs.

At least the sun’s shining outside now. As the train pulled out of Paddington station, in the early morning drizzle, it felt like being sent away as a punishment but for a crime we haven’t committed. The unfairness sits in my stomach like concrete, leaving no room for stale sandwiches.

Anne’s barely looked up from her Barbie magazine all morning, while I can’t concentrate on anything in my Smash Hits Summer Special, even the article on my favourite actress Winona Ryder, who I’ve not stopped thinking about since I saw her in Beetlejuice last Christmas. If only I could be Lydia Deetz and have cool surrogate ghost parents, then maybe things wouldn’t be this hard and we wouldn’t have to be sent away.

It’s three months to the day since Mum drove her car into the red brick wall that surrounds Springfield Hospital. No one really knows what to do for you when your Mum tries to kill herself and ends up on a psychiatric ward in a special hospital for months and months. Dad’s done his best. He’s managed to look after us and visit her every day and still make it to work every now and then. He was taking us to visit her every Sunday as well. We won’t be able to do that from Devon.

I’m kind of relieved. I know it’s my fault Mum did what she did. I know that’s why she doesn’t speak to me when we go and see her. Even though Dad says that she hasn’t spoken to him either, I can tell he’s lying about that. She must have told him what I did and that’s why we’re being sent away. To keep me out of trouble. That’s why I need to find a boyfriend. It’ll solve everything.

I’ve not told anyone, but the day before Mum drove into that wall, she walked in on me kissing someone on my bed. Not just anyone. Mum caught me snogging my friend Beth. It wasn’t the first time we’d kissed, but it was the first time anyone had seen us. It was excruciating. Mum screamed at Beth to leave. After Beth left, Mum just sat at the dining room table rocking back and forth. Beth wouldn’t talk to me after that.

The train starts to slow, and the view changes to yellow concrete and angry clouds. The guard announces our arrival at Exeter station. I’ve been told more times than needed that this means we are nearly there. The pit of my stomach starts to churn, like it is filling with expanding concrete. I try to settle it by whispering to myself as quietly as possible, “You can do this. You’re grown up and strong. Anne needs you.”

The two ladies with the hats shuffle and fuss as they stand up. The bigger lady catches her leg on the heavy black armrest.

“Blast!” she swears, then collects herself, and they both stomp out of the carriage.

The second lady makes a point of saying, “What an inconvenience. Thank goodness we can finally get off this blasted train,” in a voice everyone can hear. She turns and gives Anne and me a long hard stare, almost crashing into the automatic-closing internal carriage door. “These modern doors,” she cries, as they finish bumbling out.

A pleasant silence fills the air in their place. I wish that my only worry was trying not to stay stuck in the train doors.

After a few minutes, the train stutters and chuffs its way out of the station and no one sits down opposite us to replace those grumpy old women. There’s no sign of the guard, so I stretch my legs and put my Doc Martens up on the seat opposite, fully aware of the lopsided poster above us advising passengers that seats are no place for feet. One perk of being adult-less. I shift back and forth in the seat, place my feet down on the floor, then up again, lean forwards and then back, picking up and putting down the magazine. The next stop will be ours, and it will be here very soon.

“Ants in your pants,” I can hear Mum say in my head. She likes to use her weird phrases to describe people’s behaviour. I used to find it annoying, but right now I really miss hearing those random observations. There hasn’t been much laughter at home since she tried to end her life. That’s how all the grownups describe it; they use euphemisms to make it sound less scary than she “attempted suicide” or “wanted to kill herself”.

The coastline outside the window whizzes past. Why does time pass by at the opposite speed we’d like in a situation: too fast when we want it to go slowly and too slow when we want it to pass quicker. By this calculation, the impending summer will take a snail’s pace.

I nudge Anne and ask her to start packing up her belongings into the Spice Girls rucksack she insists on taking everywhere. At least she has grown out of her Power Rangers phase. She looks at me fiercely, but after a pause she relents and sighs only half-gruffly as she stops her Walkman and puts everything away into her bag. I offer her a weak smile, trying to say, “hey, we’re in this together,” as the words won’t come out. As usual, she doesn’t say anything in response.

The nasal guard announces our imminent arrival at Newton Abbot station, signifying our fate of being signed, sealed and delivered to Devon; and perhaps also to the witch’s cauldron I see in my mind every time I hear the word “newt” following months of revising Macbeth for GSCE English Lit. My stomach tightens even more, and I stop myself heaving by counting to five.

Dad’s voice sounds out of nowhere in my mind. “You’ll be okay, you’re spending the summer with your gran and she loves you. Everything’ll be alright.”

We stand up and I’m sure Anne can see my hands shaking as I pull our heavy suitcases off the baggage shelves and drag them to the main carriage door. I fight with the window to jiggle it down to make sure I can reach the lock, as Dad showed me this morning. Was that only a few hours ago? Finally, it wriggles loose, and then all I can see is the platform in front of us.

†

We hear her before we see her, as we step down from the train.

“Annie! Robyn! Hellooo!” shouts a creased voice, emerging from post-box-red lips, and accompanied by a waft of warm floral perfume.

“She prefers Anne, Gran,” I say, jumping in as peacemaker before Anne has a chance to react.

“Grandma, please,” say the lips, while stencilled eyebrows peer around to make sure no one else has heard my faux-pas.

“Grandma. Yes. Of course.” The foundation layered face and heat-set perm in front of me has Dad’s nose and chin, which surprises me. I blink back some tears, but I can’t shift the lump in my throat.

“These are our cases,” I say, trying to sound perky and helpful, as I cough the words around the mountain lodged behind my tongue.

“Excellent, let’s see if we can make them fit in the car, shall we?” Grandma walks towards an old burgundy Ford Fiesta parked in the taxi rank.

The car looks about as sturdy as a used baked-bean can might if it had wheels. The rust-edged coat doesn’t do anything to disguise how old and worn out it is. The song we sang in middle school about rusty old cars “I’m just a little pile of tin, nobody cares what shape I’m in” worms into my head. I try to hide my disbelief that this car will be able to hold all three of us plus two heavy suitcases and our straining-at-the-seams rucksacks without collapsing.

“She’s a top little runner, this one,” says Grandma as if she can read my thoughts. “I’ve had her since new and she’s never done me wrong. Not quite been the same since we had to change her to unleaded, but she gets me about.”

I smile. I hear Mum’s voice saying, “Always be wary of people who refer to their cars as ‘she’.”

“You’ve really looked after her.”

“I think Annie should sit in the front,” Grandma continues, snapping me out of the memory, “that’s the only other seat with a belt.” This is good news, because Anne’s tendency for travel sickness applies to cars as well and she’s better up front. One battle I don’t need to fight.

Apart from when Anne was little, we haven’t really been all that close, until this year. Because of the age gap, our lives don’t usually overlap. But even though she hasn’t said a word out loud since April, my big sister protector instinct keeps kicking in, and I wish I could make it easier for her, going through this. I’ve had to do a lot of babysitting the past three months, but I don’t feel like I’ve been able to connect with her. Maybe being together here, away from the messiness of home, will give me a chance to show her I do love her. I’m sure there’ll be things to bond over.

“Okay, I’m happy to sit in the back!” I say. I call upon on my well-practised Tetris skills as we pack the car, lowering the double backseat down and pushing the two suitcases forward. The boot just about closes and although I end up wedged between the bags and the car door, it means that at least it doesn’t matter there isn’t a seatbelt for me. There’s no way any amount of force could throw me out of this position. Grandma fires the engine and then launches the car into rapid acceleration followed by a stop short behind another car at the exit, and I’m glad that I am wedged in between the luggage, fixed in place.

“Shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes, loves,” Grandma says just as we lurch out of the car park and onto a busy road. I shut my eyes. If I can’t see the hazards that jump out from the Cycle Proficiency test highway code book, then I can’t be frightened by them. Grandma doesn’t know that we haven’t been in a car since Mum’s accident.

†

Finally, the Fiesta pulls into the long Smugglers’ Cove Holiday Park driveway and slows down. There’re a couple of billboard posters alongside the curb, with brightly coloured photos of happy kids having fun by the pool, in beach dunes, jet skiing, climbing in an adventure playground, and playing table tennis. Maybe the summer won’t be a bust after all. The idea of some sun and swimming, my daily dose of Saved by The Bell and Neighbours, and hopefully a decent selection of magazines at the holiday park store, gives me a faint hope that we may survive our extended trip after all. I might just be able to do some of the things I’d been looking forward to in London. I hadn’t thought about the possibility that there might be other families with kids my age here at the park on their holidays. Perhaps I’ll find a boyfriend after all.