Forget Me Not (The Ceruleans: Book 2) (13 page)

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes the next day was
a crocodile. I shrieked.

‘What – what?’

‘Sorry – sorry!’

I grabbed Luke, who had shot up in bed and was urgently
scanning the room for the threat. ‘It’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I’m an idiot. I
just woke up and saw
that
, and it freaked me out.’ I pointed to the
chair beside the bed, where yellow eyes were watching us.

‘Hey!’
shouted a voice from downstairs. Cara.
‘You
guys okay?’

‘No!’ hollered Luke. ‘We’re being attacked by a bloody
sequined crocodile!’

Cara’s laugh was long and loud. Luke cringed and took out
his frustration on the beast, beating it soundly with a pillow.

‘Okay,’ I said, stilling his hand. ‘I think you killed it.’

He stopped pounding. ‘Sorry. It’s just – the humiliation!
She drives me mad!’

I picked up the offending article and it hung limp in my
hand. Why I’d mistaken it for anything dangerous was a mystery. It was a
novelty sock, garish green with yellow sequined eyes and toes designed to look
like jagged teeth.

‘I take it this is Cara’s work?’

‘Yes. She swapped out all the normal socks in my bag. Her
idea of a fun prank.’

His expression was thunderous but I couldn’t help grinning.

‘You went out in these last night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well,
that
explains why you didn’t want to give me
your shoes outside the club.’

‘I would have, if it came to it.’

I pressed a hand to my heart. ‘You’d have braved the streets
of Newquay in these for me?’

The storm clouds dissipated. ‘For you,’ he said, ‘anything.’

He pressed me to him and kissed me and we fell back onto the
bed. But along the way I reflexively tightened my hand on the sock and a merry
jingle rang out. We froze.

‘What the heck is that?’

‘Er, Disney, I think?’

A disembodied voice took up the tune of
Peter Pan
’s
‘Never Smile at a Crocodile’. A
very close
disembodied voice.

‘CARA!’ roared Luke.

‘Luke!’ she called back cheerily from the other side of the
door. ‘Come on – up and at ’em. Aunt Maud’s expecting us at midday, and I
really need Scarlett’s help with… er… choosing an outfit to wear.’

‘To see Maud?’

‘Yep.’

‘The cream,’
I mouthed at him, and pointed to my
legs. Understanding dawned on his face, washing away most, if not all, the
irritation.

‘Fine,’ he said loudly. ‘The sooner you go away, the sooner
Scarlett’ll be down.’

We heard her moving away – but only just.

‘Since when is Cara stealthy?’ mused Luke. ‘Usually, you can
hear her coming a mile off, stomping along.’

‘I’d better get up,’ I said.

‘Mmm,’ he agreed, then wrapped me in his arms so tightly
that movement was impossible.

‘If I don’t, next time she’s bound to just walk right in.’

‘Probably.’

‘And find us like
this
.’

‘She’d probably cheer.’

‘She probably would, but
I
wouldn’t.’

‘I know. It’s just hard to let you go.’

A pause. Then his pout dissolved and, smiling, he took the
lead:

‘But we still have another night here, after the surf.’

‘We do.’

‘And many more nights, back in Twycombe.’

‘We do.’

He squeezed me so hard I couldn’t breathe, and then released
me.

‘Love you.’

‘Love you too.’

I sat up in bed and looked about for a t-shirt to pull on
while I sorted myself for a shower. The lamp on the bedside table caught my eye
– it was shining uselessly in the sun-soaked bedroom. I reached for the switch
on the electrical cord and turned it off.

‘Did it work?’ said Luke, serious now. ‘Leaving the lamp on
all night – did it chase away the monsters?’

Monsters. The Fallen. Darkness. So vivid last night, so
terrible. And then obliterated by light.

I closed my eyes and drank in the sensation of his fingers
tracing patterns on my back.

‘No,’ I said, ‘the lamp didn’t do that. You did that, Luke
Cavendish.’

Intimacy: the antidote to death.

*

Sunday in the apartment was shaping up to be a quiet one. By
half past eleven, when Luke and Cara and I were ready to leave for our lunch
out, only Si and Duvali and Tamara had surfaced. Duvali made them all some kind
of vile hangover cure – a Prairie Oyster, he called it. I watched, cringing, as
the three of them knocked back the concoction, abundantly glad that while my
energy drink tasted like cough medicine, it at least didn’t contain a raw egg
and Tabasco sauce. Afterwards, Si muttered half-heartedly that he’d better wake
the others to get ready for coasteering, but then followed Duvali and Tamara
out onto the balcony and collapsed on a sunbed.

Cara, conversely, seemed to be suffering no ill effects for
her late night and not-quite-so-virgin cocktails. She was so excited that she’d
been able to dance, really dance, at the club, and was completely wired over
the YouTube video of yesterday’s flash mob that Liam had uploaded – the hit
counter was at five thousand and rising steeply. Her compulsion to check the
view count every few minutes had made our healing session that morning somewhat
stressful for me: she kept opening her eyes suddenly as I worked on her legs.
At one point I thought she’d caught me out – seen my light. But in moments she
was buried in the YouTube app again. The only time she really took a break from
it was when I told her there was only one application of cream left in the tub.
She looked so downcast – her legs were better, undeniably so, but nowhere near
healed. But I couldn’t do that for her now, so quickly. I told her that the
cream was my mother’s, and I would ask her to get more, but that it would take
time: it was experimental, not readily available. She seemed to accept that.

We took a taxi into town. On the way Luke and Cara gave me a
little background on their aunt. She was a little blunt, they warned me, but
had the biggest heart of anyone they knew. She had come to Newquay as a young
woman, married a doctor, talked him into buying a dilapidated house, renovated
the house and opened it as a guesthouse. The business was any bank manager’s
worst nightmare: Maud’s guesthouse never turned a profit, and frequently ran at
a loss, because she had a habit of taking in people down on their luck – the
homeless, the lost, the waifs and strays. In her last year of business the
local council had awarded ‘Aunt Maud’, as all of her guests called her, a gold
trophy for her contribution to the community. She promptly pawned it to help one
of her residents pay off a debt.

For forty-five years Maud somehow managed to keep the
guesthouse operating. And then she lost her husband to cancer, and she had to
concede that the house was too big to keep up by herself. So when someone made
her a good offer on the guesthouse, she took it, and moved to a small flat in a
retirement development overlooking the sea. She was happy there, Luke told me,
entertaining a steady stream of former guests.

Certainly, the lady who greeted us at the door to her flat seemed
delighted to have company, and was so practised a hostess that I felt like I’d
barely blinked before I was sitting on a comfortable armchair with a glass of
orange juice in one hand and a ‘nibble’ (a.k.a cheese and pineapple on a stick)
in the other. Maud was the spitting image of her sister, Grannie, but her
direct manner reminded me of Cara. She was without doubt the most commanding
presence in the room, and she had an unnerving stare. At least, the way she
looked at me unnerved me.

‘Have we met before, Scarlett?’ she said.

‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘Strange.’ She tapped her cocktail stick on her lower lip
and studied me. ‘Because I’ve certainly seen you before.’

‘Maybe Scarlett reminds you of her grandparents,’ suggested
Luke. ‘You may have met them in Twycombe when you visited Grannie.’

‘Perhaps. Who are your grandparents?’

‘Were,’ I said gently. ‘Peter and Alice Blake.’

Her cocktail stick stilled. ‘You are Peter Blake’s
granddaughter?’

‘Yes.’

‘I see.’ Finally, she broke the stare and looked away from
me, out of the window, which I could see from my seat offered a fantastic view
of the beach. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That is why you are familiar to me.’

‘You knew my grandfather then?’

‘I did not,’ she replied, and there was something sharp in
her tone. Before I could say anything else, she clapped her hands. ‘Now then.
Go wash your hands, dears, and we’ll sit up and have lunch. I made tuna pasta
bake. Everyone loves tuna pasta bake.’

I did not, in fact, love tuna pasta bake, but I ate it,
every mouthful. So did Luke and Cara, though it took them a good deal longer to
clean their plates because they kept having to pause to answer Maud’s
questions. She asked a
lot
of questions, and many of them were
searching. Most of all, her interest was in their plans for the future.
Clearly, she wanted to see her niece and nephew make something of themselves. I
sat quietly throughout, relieved to be a spectator not a participant, until
Maud turned to me and asked, ‘And what about you, Scarlett? What are your
plans?’

Under the table, Luke’s hand squeezed my knee. ‘Scarlett’s
taking a year out,’ he said.

I braced myself for Maud’s reply. So far, she’d been
impressed with Cara’s plan to grow her business, but pretty scathing of Luke’s
lack of direction – man-and-van and pub cook were entirely beneath him, she
thought, and he should be pursuing the dream he’d once had of running his own
restaurant. At least Luke was doing
something
now and for the
foreseeable future, though. I was achieving exactly zilch.

But Maud didn’t point that out. She just fixed those
penetrating eyes on me for a while, long enough that Luke cleared his throat
awkwardly. Then, seemingly satisfied with what she saw, she gave me a smile and
a nod and granted us all a reprieve from interrogation by turning the conversation
to some of the more eccentric guests she’d had at the guesthouse.

After dessert, Luke and Cara helped Maud clear away. I tried
to help, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Instead, she was quite insistent that I
take in the view from the small balcony leading off the living area.

‘I’ve seen your eyes sliding over there, dear. Drawn to the
view, no doubt. Bound to be. Go and take it in.’

Outside, I held tight to the balustrade and looked from the
cloudless sky, where gulls darted and dived, to the gently rolling sea, where
novice surfers wobbled and toppled, to the wide, sandy beach, where families
picnicked and dug in the sand and rock-pooled around the base of a jutting
island. It was the kind of view you could look at for hours and not get bored.

My text alert beeped. I dug my phone out and checked the
screen. A message from Jude.

How are you after last night?

I texted back:
Okay.

Nothing I need to know about?

No.

Are you going back to that club tonight?

No. It’s the night surf at Fistral.

My phone rang at once. I rejected Jude’s call. Seconds
later:

You can’t surf waves like that at night!

I sighed. I wasn’t remotely planning to surf tonight – this
was an organised competition for experienced surfers. I’d got pretty competent
on a board, but I wasn’t remotely in
that
league. But that little word,
can’t
,
in Jude’s text irritated me.

Don’t tell me what I can and can’t do
,
I
typed. Then I felt a little guilty; I knew he was just trying to look out for
me. So I added:
PS: Thanks for last night
.

He replied in moments:
Welcome.

‘Who are you texting?’

Luke had appeared beside me. I jumped guilty and locked the
screen on my phone.

‘Um, just my mum.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I didn’t realise you two were
on talking terms.’

‘Yeah, she rang the other day. She’s doing better.’

‘Good. That’s good.’ He looked out at the beach. ‘Fancy a
walk? There’s something I want to show you.’

‘What about Cara?’

‘She’s happy to stay on with Maud – peas in a pod, those
two. She can get a cab back later.’

‘But isn’t it rude to leave now?’

‘The great thing about having a brutally honest aunt? She
never finds brutal honesty rude. I’ll just go in and tell her I want some time
alone with you to kiss you senseless on the beach.’

*

I don’t know whether Luke told his aunt that (I told him not
to!), but when we got down to the beach he seemed very determined to make those
words a reality. He found it amusing that I was self-conscious in front of all
the people on the beach and kept twisting away when his lips got close.

‘Luke!’ I scolded when my attempt to escape him ended in me
backing into a little girl’s sandcastle.

‘Sorry,’ he said to the girl, who was gazing up at him in
horror. He crouched down and used his hands to quickly reconstruct the south
wall of her castle. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Good as new.’

‘Come on,’ I said, when I saw a man frowning and heading our
way – the father, no doubt. I tugged Luke away. ‘What is it you want to show
me?’

He pointed. ‘That.’

He was gesturing to the tall rocky island, cut off from the
mainland by a hundred feet or so but connected to it by a tiny suspension
bridge. Now, at low tide, it was jutting out of the beach, but when the tide
came in it would be a true island in the ocean. From down at beach level there
was little to see but the rock and some greenery high up, but I’d seen from
Maud’s balcony that there was a house on top.

‘Quirky,’ I said. ‘But it’s so high, and the drops are so
steep, and the bridge… I think you’d have to be mad to live up there.’