Читать книгу One Letter Different: A Story from the collection, I Am Heathcliff - Joanna Cannon, Joanna Cannon - Страница 7

‘YORKSHIRE ISN’T WHAT IT used to be.’

Ellis’s mother addressed the kitchen window of the holiday cottage, as if the entire county had spread itself out before her, waiting for an evaluation. They’d only been there half an hour, but her mother had already found herself a dishcloth to run over the draining board.

‘It’s the same as it always was, Carole. Still sandwiched between Lancashire and the North Sea.’ Ellis’s father didn’t address the kitchen window, but carried on opening and closing the drawers and the cupboards, because when you walk into a holiday room, the first thing you do is look at all the empty space and wonder how you might go about filling it.

‘There’s no view. The brochure promised a view.’ Her mother rinsed the cloth under the tap, and gave herself something else to wipe. ‘Brochures aren’t what they used to be either.’

There was a view, it just wasn’t the one her mother had expected to see. It was a view of another, identical holiday cottage, a recycling bin in the back yard of a pub called The Cow and the Canary (a ridiculous name, said her father), and a single, wooden bench decorated in graffiti, because there are certain things in life that are so important, they need to be written down somewhere to make sure they are always remembered.

‘There’s a view from my window. You can see the edge of the moors if you stand on tiptoe.’

Ellis looked at each of them in turn, but her parents didn’t answer.

She turned and headed back to her room, listened to the sound of her feet on an unfamiliar staircase and the echo of herself in another house. Unlike the carpeted world they usually inhabited, the cottage had floorboards and flagstones. It made every noise more important than you intended it to be.

‘Ellis, you sound like a herd of elephants,’ shouted her mother. ‘Do try to be more graceful.’

It took seven trips for her father to unload the car. Ellis watched from the bedroom, using her rucksack as a step and breathing silence into the glass. People go on holiday to escape their lives, yet her mother seemed to have packed as much of their life as she could into the back of the Ford Focus and brought it along with them.

‘I’m fairly sure they have frying pans in Yorkshire,’ her father had said that morning.

On the seventh trip, her father just carried one thing. The photograph. Ellis wasn’t surprised to see it, because it accompanied her mother everywhere in its tired gilt frame, but she was surprised to see it carried in all by itself. Perhaps her father was worried about dropping it, or losing it somewhere between their car and the front door of the cottage, or perhaps it was just that the photograph weighed far, far more than you might think.