Summer At Willow Tree Farm. Heidi Rice
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not Ellie, it’s Eloise to you.’
His brows wrinkled. Fine, maybe it sounded a bit pompous. She didn’t care.
‘OK, Eloise.’ He rolled the name off his tongue as if it were the punchline to a particularly unfunny joke. ‘There’s no need to flip out.’ He swung a hand towards Josh, who had wriggled out of her arms and was standing beside Art’s evil minion. The two children edged closer to Art, as if he were the sane dependable adult in this scenario.
‘The boy’s safely on terra firma.’ Art’s patient tone made her want to kick him exceptionally hard, somewhere extremely soft. ‘He made the decision to go up there and he got himself down without too much help from me. Toto came to get you as soon as she knew there was a problem. So whatever you’re accusing her of, you’re wrong.’
‘She came to get me and then took me on a guided tour of Wiltshire to bring me to a tree that I know is only five minutes from the farmyard.’
She was getting light-headed again, her lungs aching from the effort to hold back the tortured breaths of her outrage.
They’d done to Josh exactly what Art had done to her all those years ago, Art and the other commune kids. A couple of days after she’d arrived they’d told her she needed to be initiated in their stupid club. And somehow, because she was fascinated by the rough boy, and a bit afraid of him too, she’d agreed to try. And had ended up with the brand new Kookai blouse her dad had bought her for her birthday covered in fresh manure and them all laughing at her.
‘I don’t want my son near your daughter,’ she said. ‘I don’t want her suggesting he climb up trees, or swim in the millpond or tramp through fields of young bullocks to get a mythical stone that doesn’t exist. Do you understand?’
‘But, Mom, I want to join Toto’s club,’ Josh wailed, as if she’d just ruined his life. She ignored him, her gaze focused on Art Dalton’s face, and the rigid line of his jaw. Good, at least he didn’t look patiently amused any more.
‘Toto, why don’t you take Josh back to the farmhouse?’ Art addressed his daughter. ‘Dee can clean him up. It’ll be suppertime soon.’
‘OK, Dad’; ‘Yes, sir,’ said Art’s daughter and her son in unison.
‘Excuse me,’ Ellie began, her breath coming in jagged gasps now. ‘Who gave you permission to tell my son what to…’
Before she could finish the sentence, the children had dashed off together through the woods, back in the direction of the farmhouse. The direction she should have come from if Art’s child hadn’t taken her on a five-mile hike while her heart was exploding at the thought of Josh tumbling to his death.
Her temper hit boiling point, the white noise in her ears loud enough to sound like the woods were being dive-bombed by the Red Arrows.
‘How dare you tell my son what to do. He’s my responsibility not yours. I decide who he–’
‘If Dee has her way, he’s going to be here the whole summer.’ Art’s gaze locked on hers, all signs of amusement gone. ‘Toto’s a good kid and she likes him and they’re about the same age. It won’t do them any harm to hang out together. He’ll be sure to get lots of exercise.’
‘I’m not asking you. And don’t worry, we’re not staying the whole summer. I doubt I’ll stay more than one night after this. And if you’re talking about his weight with that comment about exercise, you can piss off. It’s perfectly healthy.’
‘Did I say it wasn’t?’
‘You implied it.’ Other parents always assumed they knew best. That if your child was carrying a little extra weight and theirs wasn’t that they knew how to fix it. They knew nothing of Josh’s body image issues. His anxieties. The way he could comfort eat his way through a whole quart of rocky road ice cream in two minutes after coming home from school. ‘And, believe me, being forced to climb a tree when he’s afraid of heights is not going to magically make him lose two stone.’
‘No one forced him to climb the tree. And he survived.’
‘How do you know that? You don’t know anything about him, you only just met him.’
‘I know he’s a little boy. And little boys need the chance to cut loose now and again. Not get wrapped in cotton wool by their mothers.’
She sputtered. She actually sputtered. The Red Arrows circling her head now. How dare he tell her how to raise her child, when he’d clearly spent no time at all raising his own. ‘Oh really, well maybe that explains why your daughter thinks she’s a little boy too.’
‘At least my daughter doesn’t think she’s fat.’
‘He’s not fat.’ She wanted to hit him. She squeezed her fingers into a fist, to resist the urge to lash out. ‘He has a traumatic relationship with food.’
‘Uh-huh? All I’ve seen so far is his traumatic relationship with you.’
‘You son of a bitch.’ The Red Arrows hit the sound barrier, the sonic boom going off inside her head as she swung her bunched fist towards his face.
He dodged back, and she hit thin air, flinging herself off balance and tumbling to earth. She body-slammed the ground, her reflexes too dulled by fatigue and incandescent rage to react fast enough to break her fall. Air gushed out, and pain ricocheted through her ribs, tears stinging her eyes.
She heard a curse, as strong hands gripped her waist and hauled her back onto her feet.
‘You all right?’ His gruff voice reverberated in her head, the low-grade headache now hammering her skull in time with the throbbing pain in what she suspected might be a dislocated shoulder.
‘Piss off,’ she said, but the expletive lacked heat. She hurt everywhere, her pride most of all.
The nausea galloped up her throat as blunt fingers pushed the hair off her brow. ‘You look knackered.’
Of course she did, she’d just hit the deck with enough force to puncture a lung.
‘I think I’m going to be sick,’ she said, her humiliation complete.
‘Put your head down.’
His palm cupped the back of her head and suddenly she was staring at the ground between her feet, studying the decaying leaves and a small beetle burrowing into a mound of twigs and wild grass.
‘Breath through your nose, it’ll go away in a minute.’
She wanted to tell him where he could stick his first aid advice. But she couldn’t speak round the lump of anguish, so she watched the beetle.
‘When did you last eat?’ he asked.
She tried to focus on his voice, which seemed a million miles away. ‘Yesterday morning, before we left home.’
‘Then you’re not likely to be sick,’ he said.
The dizziness and nausea began to subside. He released her head, and drew her upright with the hand he had clamped on her upper arm. The feel of his fingers, rough and cool pressing into her biceps, sent sensation zipping through her system.
Which should have been mortifying, but somehow wasn’t, because the pain had drifted away, to be replaced by a floating feeling. The warm numbness spread through her body.
‘Can you walk?’ he asked.
‘Of course,’ she said, but as she took a step, it was as if she were walking on the moon, about to bounce off into the cosmos.
‘Shit, here we go.’ She heard the husky words still a million miles away, but now from underwater.
Then she wasn’t vertical any more, she was horizontal and focusing on the scar that nicked his chin and made a white sickle shape in the dark stubble.
Her focus faded as she blinked. Once. Twice. The pleasant numbness enveloped her,