Best of Friends. Cathy Kelly
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Erin teased, as she tested the water with a toe, ‘but why not?’
They lay back, luxuriating in the hot, scented water, feeling stiff muscles unknot.
‘Is that your foot?’ demanded Erin as she felt something prodding her ribs. ‘No tickling.’
‘Spoilsport.’ Greg sank deeper into the water and Erin could feel his toes wriggling under her armpit, insistent and ticklish.
‘We’ve got the bridal suite – we’ve got to do things like this,’ he pointed out, still burrowing.
‘Like this, you mean,’ Erin retorted, sliding under the water, making him jerk upright when her big toe made contact with his groin. Laughing, her hair clinging to her like a water nymph, she sat up and shook the water from her head.
‘You wanna play, missy?’ Greg said, grabbing her ankles and hauling her through the water onto his lap.
‘Is the periscope up?’ Erin murmured into his neck.
‘Nearly. Why don’t we try dry land?’ Greg said, his fingers finding the slippery nubs of her nipples.
Erin clambered out of the bath and wrapped a bath sheet around her, drying herself carefully. No point in drowning the bed too. Out of the bath, the steaming hot water began to have its narcoleptic effect. The bed, when they pulled off the coverlet, looking so inviting and so soft. Erin had suddenly never felt so tired and warm and soothed in her life.
‘What a bed. Can we buy one like this?’ Erin moaned as she lay down.
‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful?’ yawned Greg, bashing his pillow a bit to get it right. ‘It’s so comfortable. I slept like a log last night.’
They curled up beside each other, bodies entwined, Greg’s right hand gently stroking the curve of Erin’s back.
‘We could have a little snooze,’ Greg muttered, his stroking slowing down, ‘to get our strength back.’
‘A little snooze,’ agreed Erin sleepily. ‘Ten minutes.’ She somehow raised her head to look at her watch on the bedside table. ‘Ten to four. We’ll snooze until four.’
‘Or ten past…’ Greg said.
The room was dark when Erin woke up and for a few scary seconds she couldn’t remember where she was. Then she heard Greg’s steady breathing beside her and she remembered. She still felt tired after their climb but mentally alert. Lying in the dark, she let the forbidden memories fill her mind.
It had all happened because Erin wanted money for her eighteenth birthday. She wanted money because she yearned to travel, to see the world, and if she got enough cash together to buy a round-the-world ticket, she could work her way across the globe.
Mum was anxious about giving Erin cold cash as a gift. ‘I wish you wanted a proper present and not money,’ she said sadly. ‘With Kerry and Shan—’ She stopped herself just in time. She’d been about to say Shannon, who was Erin’s older sister – not that Erin really knew her, and Mum found it difficult to talk about her.
Shannon had left home to live abroad when Erin had been a baby and there was nothing but the odd postcard home to remind people she was still alive. Erin hated Shannon for what she’d done to Mum. Kerry said Shannon was a selfish bitch who’d never cared who she’d hurt and that she’d turned Mum’s hair grey overnight.
‘What did you get Kerry when she was eighteen?’ Erin asked brightly, determined to get her mother over the pain of thinking of Shannon.
‘Earrings, those gold and opal ones she wears for good. Your father and I would have liked to get you something you could have for ever,’ Mum said. ‘Money is soon forgotten, Erin.’
‘I know, Mum,’ Erin hugged her mother, ‘but I want to build up memories I can have for ever, and if everyone gives me cash, I can. There are so many places I want to see – the Far East, Australia, America…’ There was a far-off look in her amber eyes and her mother sighed because she knew that wanderlust was in Erin’s blood, just as it had been in Shannon’s.
The family had held a small party in an upstairs room of a local pub and it had been a huge success. Toasts had been made, many pints had been consumed and Erin had drunk her first legal vodka and tonic.
She did get cash for her birthday – not enough for a round-the-world ticket, but enough to book a trip abroad. She didn’t know where she wanted to go, just somewhere. She’d never been abroad and the family visit to a caravan park every other year had been fun but not what you’d call exotic. No, abroad, with all its exciting connotations, was what she wanted. Australia was too far and would cost a fortune, but India…Erin was fascinated by India and could just see herself there, backpacking and sleeping in shabby hostels, being one of the people. And she wouldn’t get sick, no way. She had the constitution of an ox, as Mum used to say.
There was lots to plan for her trip, but the first thing was to get a passport. She’d collected a form, but the paperwork was interminable. She had to get photos signed by the police and an official copy of her birth certificate – not a photocopy, but a real one. She’d asked Mum for that and there she ran into a problem. Mum, who kept all the family documents in a shabby accordion file in her and Dad’s room, said she’d look and then came back and said she couldn’t find it.
Undaunted, Erin sent off for it.
A couple of weeks after her party, the certificate arrived. Erin shuffled downstairs in her Snoopy T-shirt and knickers and picked the post off the hall carpet. She had the house to herself, as Dad and Kerry were at work and Mum had gone shopping, popping in to Erin’s room on the way to remind her that she couldn’t lie in bed like a big slug all day.
In the kitchen, Erin slopped cornflakes into a bowl and looked at the post. None of it was ever for her but today was an exception. ‘Ms Erin Flynn’ was typed at the top of an official-looking envelope. She ripped it open and for a minute thought they’d sent the wrong certificate. The name was hers all right but the rest of it made no sense. Under ‘Mother’ was written ‘Shannon Flynn’, and that couldn’t be right, and under ‘Father’ was the word ‘Unknown’. The date was fine and everything, but the civil service people had clearly mixed it up. Absently, Erin ate some more cornflakes, still staring at this confusing bit of paper. And then the truth clicked in her head, like those magic eye puzzles she’d always found mystifying until one day she learned how to ‘see’ them. The form wasn’t wrong. Shannon, whom she’d always thought was her mysteriously absent sister, was actually her mother. Kerry wasn’t her sister but her aunt, and Mum and Dad weren’t her parents. They were her mother’s parents. Her grandparents. Granny and Granddad not Mum and Dad. It was all such a shock.
But as she sat there, dumbfounded, she realised that by far the most disturbing part was the fact that Mum had lied to her. Mum was the most trustworthy person in Erin’s world. The first time Erin’s heart had been broken by a boy from her class, Mum had held her close and promised that it would feel better soon. And Erin had believed her, even though her heart was breaking, because her mother had never lied to her. Until now. Her spoon clattered onto the linoleum but Erin didn’t bother to pick it up. No, she’d been lying before now. Mum had been lying to her for all Erin’s life.
She ran upstairs and found the suitcase on the top of her parents’ big 1930s wardrobe. It was heavy, and dust bunnies danced off the top as she hauled it down. Inside were old clothes, including a huge brown coat she remembered her father wearing for years, and a couple of old shirt boxes, their former bright blue faded with age. The first contained cards and mementoes belonging to Mum. Erin couldn’t bring herself to look through them in case she found her own childish home-made cards, painstakingly painted and glittered in school.
The second box held a few documents of the sort that were usually kept in the big accordion file. There was the original of the birth certificate Erin had just been sent, much-folded, and a few letters with photos lying in between the pages. Shannon, who’d been so absent