Jamie and Nia:
Jamie and I and our horde of savages eventually arrived home from the park, poor Jamie dog-tired from running around after the twins Jamie and Laura and trying to keep tabs on Julie-Anh while I lounged in lady-like disdain and let Jamie take the strain, but it was still a good afternoon. The kids got to play football with their daddy, and Julie-Anh almost managed to throw a ball for her daddy to catch, laughing uproariously at him all the time.
The kids all got their special ‘park-treat’ of an ice-cream cone and a hotdog, and yes, I got to eat the half they couldn’t manage, and some of the older hobbyists at the boating lake even let the twins have a go at controlling their radio-controlled boats, so a successful family day out on many levels.
Mummy and daddy were away on a long-weekend seaside break to Minehead in Somerset, so I got the duty of collecting mail, junk mail etc, so that’s what I did next. In just two days an impressive amount of junk mail had accumulated: free-papers, flyers, advertising for gardeners, window-cleaners, mobile mechanics, electioneering, the usual. Mummy never had a ‘No Circulars’ sign on the door, she liked to look through junk mail, it was one of her guilty pleasures, and she liked reading through the local free papers, it was how she kept current with the neighborhood.
I did what I always did, I just quickly picked up armfuls of the stuff and shoved it in the recycling bins, I didn’t sort through it, I dared not, God knows what those three mini-terrorists were up to at home. When I popped back home, Jamie had the phone and a big grin on his face.
“It’s Allie for you, I think you need to hear this.”
I love talking to Allie; she’s as gorgeous as Lena, a perfect image of what Lena must have looked like at that age, and as dear to us as one of our own, but I knew she was supposed to be knee-deep in Year Four Finals prep; the entire family had just sent her a ‘good-luck’ card and some pretty pricey book tokens for her final year studies, so I was intrigued as to what she needed to talk about. I soon found out.
“Nia, I think I have a hit for you,” she began, “I went cruising the internet and found something. It’s only a snippet, in a local paper’s website about an inquest for a Barbara Jane Davies, not Davis, but the dates match, the middle names match, only thing is, she passed away up in Carlisle, not Coventry. I also have a cemetery headstone reference. I think it’s our Barbara, Nia, the name might be a typo, but everything else matches. I think someone needs to go and take a look; there are too many matches to be a coincidence. I think we might have found her.”
Her enthusiasm was infectious, and I found myself grinning at the smile I could hear in her voice. I also didn’t miss the way she’d claimed Barbara as ‘ours’, and her use of ‘we’ as part of the search, not ‘I’, telling me she considered herself part of this family and cementing her even deeper into our unique family-clan.
“OK Allie, send me the link, I’ll run it past Jamie, and if he likes it too we’ll run up there and take a look. Thank you baby, Darryl and Lena must be so proud of you, I know I am!”
I could hear her preening all the way down the phone, so note to self, something extra-special for her stocking come Christmas.
I opened the link she sent me and took a look, OK, so not much more than what she’d already told me, but Jamie had that raised-eyebrow, ‘I need to check this out’ look he gets when he thinks he’s on to something, so he was on-board. It looked like we were heading up to this ‘Stanwix Cemetery’ in Carlisle as soon as we could arrange it, because if he thought he was going exploring in the howling wastelands of the North by himself he had another think coming!
Keeping a lid on it all weekend was a chore in itself; daddy and mummy were supposed to be having a break, I really didn’t want to blurt this out and affect their holiday. It was their first weekend away in ages, I didn’t want them thinking about this stuff instead of enjoying the beach and the nightlife, but I know mummy picked up that I was bursting to tell her something, but I bit my tongue and kept my trap shut. Nothing was going to happen until they got home so there was no point discussing it just then.
*****
After Mummy and Daddy came home from their long-weekend seaside break, and the usual homecoming rampaging chaos of kids running wild because Nana and Grampa were back, mummy took me aside to do a little digging.
“Tell me, my Nguye’t, what is happening, what has happen? Daddy feel something, so do I, what happen while we gone?”
I told her about my chat with Allie, and showed her the link she sent. Mummy studied the information, sparse as it was, then called Daddy.
“James, please to look, Nguye’t and Jamie have something, not know what it mean, please to say what do next.”
Daddy looked long and silently at the information Allie had sent me, and then looked up at me.
“What do you think, Nugget, is it worth trudging up there just for this?”
I hugged him.
“Jamie thinks so, daddy, we need to know, and the best way is to suck it and see. If you and mummy babysit we can be up and back over the weekend, what do you think? If it’s not her, no harm done, and we can forget it, but if it is… ”
*****
Five days later Jamie and I were at Stanwix Cemetery, standing at the graveside of Barbara Davies. The stone itself was simple, modest, no dates, no real information, just a simple inscription that gave nothing away: ‘Barbara Davies, beloved mother, taken too soon. I love you, Mum’
The grave was well-tended and very neat, the grass clipped and even, and a fresh posy of summer flowers in the flower-holder set into the spotless white stone kerb surrounding the grave; obviously someone came here regularly and maintained the gravesite, but there was no clue who they were, or if we had any connection with them. We were pondering what to do next when the groundskeeper drove by, so Jamie flagged him down to ask if he had any records about the family who owned the gravesite.
He was reluctant to give out personal information like that, but he looked very strangely at Jamie, almost like he knew him, and what he did share stuck in my mind.
“There’s a couple of young families come by here every Sunday, looks like two brothers, I can’t hardly tell ’em apart, sometimes there’s three of ’em, pretty wives, and five, six kids, they all set to and clean that grave, clip it, brush it, wash down the stone and the kerbs, fresh flowers, all that stuff; you can see they do a good job. They come here every Sunday without fail, usually get here ‘fore lunch, you pop in here tomorrow about 11 o’clock you’ll see ’em, ask ’em yourselves. That’s all I can tell you, sorry.”
Well, we went back on Sunday, we waited, and waited, and waited, and no-one showed. By three in the afternoon Jamie had decided they weren’t going to show up, so, feeling deflated and curiously depressed, we headed back to the Lake District Airport. Another dead end to tick off the growing list of dead-ends we’d put together.
And so it might have ended there, if Mummy hadn’t decided to sort through the recycling…
*****
The first thing I knew about it was when Mummy showed up clutching a plain envelope hand-addressed to ‘James Morrison’. Mummy showed me the note inside. I read it through, and then read it again.
“Does Daddy know about this? And where’s it from, Ma, who gave you this?” I asked her, not sure I liked where this was going.
Mummy sat down and took her time answering. I could see she was thinking about the implications of the note, what it meant to daddy. When she finally spoke, it was slowly, like she was still working it out; I know Mummy’s ‘puzzled’ voice, and she wasn’t puzzled, more like she was still unravelling it.
“When we leave Thursday this not arrive, must be Friday or Saturday, it Wednesday now, so this been there four day now. Nothing more, no other note, nothing. When you put recycling away?”
I’d cleared up Friday, this note must have been mixed up in all the usual Friday avalanche of junk mail, free papers, and miscellaneous pizza flyers, I hadn’t checked if there was anything mixed in there because I’d already picked up the real mail early that morning. I had no reason to suspect it was there; I’d just swept it all together and dumped it in the recycling bin.
Mummy was watching me closely, waiting to see what I wanted to do; that’s what I love about Mummy; she actually listens to me and takes my feelings and suspicions seriously, she doesn’t just override me because she’s my mother so she knows everything better than I do.
“What you want to do, my Nguye’t?”
“Tell Daddy,” I decided. “This concerns him; if it’s some kind of scam he’ll know what to do, it’s his job…”
Mummy nodded in agreement.
“Tell Jamie too, we all talk, may be nothing, but maybe not, see what Daddy say, what Little Boy think.”