But there was neither sight nor sound of Alice. Frankie trickled a little wine onto the page, folded it in half and vigorously rubbed her hand over it. She opened it out and stared hard. It looked nothing like the butterflies or strange beings that the children had created with poster paints at nursery school all those years ago. Even Freud – or whoever it was who’d used the exercise in therapy – would have had a hard time reading anything into it. It was simply an amoebic splodge and a waste of wine.
Alice and the Ditch Monster Do Absolutely Nothing
‘It’s Daddy!’
Momentarily, Frankie’s heart ached for her daughter who was so used to fathers coming through the post that she brandished the envelope like it was a missive from royalty, running it in a lap of honour around the kitchen table before placing it carefully in front of Sam.
‘Can you tell where it’s from?’
Sam looked at the stamp and the franked mark. ‘Ecuador,’ he said as if it was some tiresome general-knowledge quiz set up by his father.
‘Ecuador,’ Annabel marvelled. ‘Is that the capital of the equator? Is Daddy at the centre of the universe?’
‘South America,’ said Frankie.
‘Open it then,’ said Sam.
Frankie’s heart creaked again as she watched Annabel slip her little finger into a gap and serrate the envelope as carefully as she could as if in anticipation of its contents bettering a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s. You never knew what Miles would send the children. Previously, they’d received a torn label from Israel which said Coca Cola in Hebrew, a wrapping from a ready meal in Japan called SuShitSu, a beer mat from Tasmania, a shrivelled-up floral lei from Hawaii, something from Venezuela they had thought was a dead beetle but turned out to be some type of bean that they’d planted without success. Occasionally, there were notes, mostly not. Usually there were months between letters but then again Miles might bombard the children for a while, like friendly fire. These days, Sam was inured to all of it, whereas Annabel’s life still depended on them.
Annabel eased out of the envelope a slim, rectangular piece of paper. It was torn carelessly from a Barclays Bank cheque book. Attached to it was the smallest yellow Post-it note imaginable.
Kids!
It’s amazing here!
I’ve struck gold!
Give this to your mother.
Dad xx
Annabel wasn’t bothered about the cheque addressed to her mother. All she cared about was that her father had travelled to the equator for her, had dug for gold and found it. She peeled off the sticky note, placed it on her fingertips as if it was a rare butterfly, and left for her room.
‘Four thousand quid!’ Sam was hard-pressed not to love his dad just a little bit more just then. He passed it to Frankie. ‘Look.’
Four thousand pounds, made out to her and signed, legibly, by Miles.
‘Sick!’ said Sam, leaving the table. ‘Four grand.’
‘Sam – please, no tweetering or facebookgramming about this.’
‘Seriously?’ His mother’s terminology wasn’t even amusing, just annoying.
‘Yes seriously.’
‘But you’re not on Twitter.’
‘That’s irrelevant. It might buy you a few more followers – but not friends. Anyway – it’s vulgar to talk about money. And anyway – it’s private.’
Sam huffed his way out leaving Frankie alone in the kitchen with all that money. If there’s four grand in your English bank Miles, God knows what you have squirrelled away under your Ecuadorian mattress. And not for the first time, Frankie thought, whoever you’re in bed with this time, I hope there’s a gun under your pillow. And then she thought, this autumn, we’ll have been divorced for seven years. These days it was strange to consider that once she’d had a husband and even odder to think that the husband had actually been Miles.
‘Frankie?’ Peta assumed her sister had phoned for a chat, yet she was doing all the talking.
‘Still here,’ Frankie said. Peta’s impassioned tirades against politics in the PTA, unfairness in the rugby club, Philip’s long hours, the boys’ adolescent mood swings and stinky bedrooms had wafted over Frankie quite soothingly, like a billowing sheet.
‘So – what’s been happening in the Back of Beyond?’
‘I don’t live in the back of beyond.’
Peta laughed. ‘Burnham Market it ain’t.’
It was just under twelve miles to Burnham Market but Frankie had to admit quietly to herself that her sister had a point. Renting a holiday cottage in the popular market town had inspired her move from London to Norfolk. But like most holiday romances, reality rendered the fantasy obsolete. Property prices in any of the Burnhams were beyond her means. The type of home she envisaged for her family, that which she could afford, took her further afield. Or, as Peta would have it, in the middle of a bloody field.
‘And the kids?’
‘They’re brilliant,’ said Frankie. ‘Loving school. Loving the outdoors, the sea. Dressed crab from a shack. Scampering.’
‘And you? New friends?’ Peta worried that Frankie’s choice to have a limited social group in a city was one thing, but to move miles away from anywhere was quite another.
‘There’s Ruth,’ said Frankie.
‘The reiki woman?’
‘Alexander Technique,’ Frankie said. ‘It’s about balance and posture, rest and realignment and it’s helped with my headaches already. She’s definitely becoming a good friend.’
‘She’s not a lentil-munching happyclappy hippy is she?’
‘Peta you’re terrible. She’s chic, sassy and my age. She’s much more Jäger-bombs and a secret ciggy than mung beans and wheatgrass shots.’
‘Thank God for that. But you can have more than one friend you know.’
‘You’re not going to tell me to join the PTA are you?’
‘No but too strong a belief in self-sufficiency can be isolating. Lecture over – how’s work?’
Frankie paused. ‘It’s back. The block. I can’t hear Alice. It’s really worrying me now.’ She misread Peta’s ensuing silence and leapt to the defensive. ‘Just because I write for kids doesn’t mean it’s child’s play.’
‘Whoa – whoa. But it’s happened before – when you’ve struggled with the story. Have you told your editor?’
‘No. He keeps leaving messages. And I daren’t tell the bank either.’
‘Are you strapped?’ Peta asked. ‘For cash?’
Frankie thought about it. She had only to ask her sister. She’d done so in the past and Peta had been generous, keen even; as if the money she’d married into had value only when she could give it to others.
‘It’s OK, Peta. Guess what turned up today? Not so much a bad penny – but four grand. From Miles.’
‘Oh dear God that man. Where is he?’
‘Ecuador.’
‘Doing what?’
‘God knows. Being Indiana Jones.’
‘Bank