limp body into her arms and, with a grunt, lifting her.
‘Come on,’ she says, but Ella doesn’t move, blocking her mother’s way. ‘Eleanor, move!’
‘Where are you going?’
‘To your room.’ Her mother pushes past, and Ella sees the scuffed underside of Rene’s shoes pass her face.
‘My room? Why?’
‘Because the fire’s not lit in there and the bed’s made.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s had a funny turn. Probably because it’s too hot, and she’s frozen through.’
Eleanor follows into the hallway, and her mother gives her a backward glance.
‘Where were you, before this?’
Ella looks down and says nothing. Guilt is curdling in her stomach. Her mother pushes the door of the bedroom open with Rene’s feet. The lamps aren’t lit in here; the fire is built for later. Not much heat comes through from the main room and Ella can see her breath steaming. When Rene is laid on the bed, her mother goes back to the main room to fetch a taper for the lamps and some water.
Ella walks to where her friend is laid out on her bed. They’ve played games before where one or the other of them was Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, waiting for the Prince’s kiss, but Rene was never much good at lying still – she’s too much of a fidget, too suspicious that she’s about to be tickled. Now she’s playing the part perfectly. Ella is stretching out her hand to touch Rene’s cheek when her eyelids flicker. Ella pulls her hand back in shock as though burned.
‘Rene?’
Her friend makes a noise which is not words before Ella’s mum bustles in, holding a lit taper.
‘You back with us, hen?’
She looks down at Rene on the bed, her face lit in flickering light like a painting of Florence Nightingale.
‘Mm,’ Rene hums, which is the closest she’s got to speech.
‘Good.’
Ella’s mum gets up on tiptoes to light the lamps, putting the taper to the soot-blackened filaments until the flame rears up and is tamed by a turn of the tap. Though they’ve had electricity in the flat for the last two years, the landlord has never replaced the gaslights, until now. Tomorrow a man is coming to take them out and put brand-new electric lights in. Ella can’t wait. She thinks it will feel like living in the future.
Her mother comes to the bed and again nudges Eleanor to one side.
‘Have a drink of water, hen. You’ll feel better for it.’
Rene nods once, tries to lift her head from the pillow and fails. Eleanor’s mum lifts her head for her and brings the glass to her lips.
‘I wish your dad was home …’ she mutters, seemingly to Ella but clearly not looking for a reply. Then, more certainly –
‘Eleanor, I need you to go and get Lorna. Go and get Mrs Mauchlen.’
‘Mam?’
‘Just do it, Eleanor.’
* * *
By the time Ella gets back to the house with Mrs Mauchlen in tow, Rene is sitting up in bed, sipping tea and eating a piece of toast with butter. She’s still pale, and coughs several times so hard that her eyes water, but she tells them all how she’s fine. Mrs Mauchlen, who has wrung her hands and fretted all the way to the house, is visibly annoyed with Ella, who wasn’t able to explain what was wrong. They both get a telling-off for staying out, but no punishment is mentioned and Rene climbs onto her mother’s back to go home, linking her arms around her neck.
As they’re leaving, Rene looks over her shoulder to Ella, and there is something in her eyes that she’s trying to communicate, but Ella doesn’t know whether it’s regret, accusation or apology. It will bother her later that, though she can recall the expression exactly, she still doesn’t know what it means. Then they are gone.
* * *
A new day breaks. Ella swings her legs out of bed, toes sinking into the colourful rug that her mum made with scraps of fabric, pulling them through hessian. When they read the Arabian Nights in school, she imagined the flying carpets looking like this one. The rug is colder than she expected. She pads to the window in her nightie and, rather than pulling the curtain back, steps around it, as though stepping on stage.
It has snowed. Isn’t it too early in the year for that? Ella isn’t sure. But it has snowed. Not good snow, sure enough. Not snowball snow, or snowman snow, or sledging snow. A dusting as thin as a sheet, pulled over the streets and rooftops as far as Ella can see. It frosts one side of every drainpipe, silvers the acres of roofing slate. Only the warm chimney pots are free of its shroud.
Though she knows it to be false, Ella cannot shake the feeling that today is Christmas. A day for presents, special food and no school. It annoys her that she can’t get this out of her head, because she will be disappointed when she has to get her uniform on. School is no fun without Rene, and she has been off all week, since they came home from the park.
Still, Ella doesn’t feel like sleeping any more. She may as well find out if her parents are awake in the next room. Often, she will peek around the crack in the door to see if their bed has been folded into its recess. If not, and she sees the forms of her parents, rising and falling out of sync, she will sit and hum tunes in the corridor until they wake up and notice her. Sometimes she will crawl into the bed between them, though her dad doesn’t like this. Ella likes those mornings.
Today, there is no doubt. The bed is up, and the door to the front room is open a little. There is a soft glow – the lamps are lit. And there is a smell, unfamiliar on a school day. Frying bacon. Ella breathes big lungfuls of it in disbelief. She has skipped forward in time to Christmas Day, that’s the only explanation that makes sense.
A smile breaking involuntarily over her face, Ella steps forward, puts a hand to the door and pushes into the warmth and light and good smell of the front room. She stands in the space vacated by her parents’ bed and looks expectantly at her mother and father, who are surely waiting for her with presents.
They haven’t seen her.
Both of them have their backs to her, her mother hunched slightly over the cast iron range, prodding the frying bacon with the wooden spoon that she cooks everything with – clootie dumplings, onion soup, rice puddings with jam. Usually her father will be sitting in his chair at this time, polishing his shoes or trimming his nails. Always quiet, self-contained, as though he has not really woken up yet, and is performing these actions in a trance.
But today he is not in his chair, he is standing next to her mother, one hand on her shoulder. Ella has become fully convinced that today is, if not Christmas Day, a special occasion, and this is the first inkling that something might be amiss. She watches for a moment, tempted (as she always is when she has entered a room undetected) to creep up and startle them.
‘Morning.’
Her voice is cheery, but she does not shout. Nevertheless, her parents startle and spin around.
‘Eleanor!’ her mother says, taking a step forward hesitantly, still holding the wooden spoon. Her father doesn’t move, doesn’t say good morning. Her mother seems to think better of walking across the small room to get her.
Ella walks around the low sofa where she and her mother sit in the evenings, while her dad sits in his wingback armchair facing them. Without the sofa in her way, she can see that something is lying on the hearth rug. It makes her stop. She was right after all – it’s Christmas, or her birthday, or some other special day which doesn’t come every year. Her parents have got her a present. A big one.
She looks at the present. How did they know she wanted one? How did they know she wanted a guitar exactly like Rene’s?
No.