Anyway, overnight, my life changed. I was dizzily, ecstatically in love for the first time and Jason felt the same way. At fifteen, I was happy and confident at school for the very first time and my grades improved in leaps and bounds – enough to make university a possibility.
I thought Jason and I would be together forever …
I’ve tried hard over the years to play down the bullying and put the taunts and the painful attacks behind me. But coming back to Hart’s End always makes the dark days of my past loom a hundred times more vividly.
Sometimes I wonder if that will ever really change.
*****
The house feels shivery and bleak without Mum and Dad, so I go around turning on table lamps and radiators to make it cosy – even though it’s the middle of May and it won’t be dark for a few hours yet.
Then I make a cup of tea and sit in Dad’s old armchair, smoothing the arm and trying to look on the bright side. It’s going to be fine. The café will be a success and I’ll be able to pay off the mortgage arrears so we won’t have to sell the house. They don’t have a big mortgage, but the illness forced Dad to stop working and close down the business. They lived off savings for a while but for the past few months, they’ve been sliding slowly into debt.
The treatment he’s about to undergo sounds horribly invasive but my dad has always been strong – in body and in spirit. He’ll take the discomfort in his stride – I know he will. I try to ignore the nagging little whisper in my head that says, What if the treatment doesn’t work?
We have to be positive. The doctors wouldn’t have recommended Dad for the trial if they didn’t think he stood a big chance of benefiting from it, would they?
The bond I have with my dad is special.
When I was little, he’d take me fly fishing, usually right after tea, and we’d sit there, side by side, watching the surface of the river for any slight movement, Dad making me laugh with his daft jokes. (He didn’t seem to mind that my giggles probably scared the fish away.)
Fishing as it grew dark was the way to go, Dad said, because fish loved evenings, especially after a hot summer’s day spent lazing around. As a child, I loved this image of lazy fish getting their groove on as dusk fell. And of course, whatever we caught, we always returned to the water to swim another day.
Mum used to go fishing with Dad when they first met. I tend to picture it as quite romantic, the two of them sitting together on the river bank, talking about their lives and waiting for a bite – but Mum always laughs and says she was only there for Dad and that, actually, she hated the cold and the wet and all the fishy smells! (Prawns make the best ever bait, according to Dad.) I think Mum was quite glad when he started taking me fishing instead.
When they were thinking of a name for me, Mum joked they should call me Dusk or Twilight because that was the time of day they did a lot of their courting, right there by the river. Even before I arrived in the world, they were apparently patting her swelling tummy and talking to ‘Baby Twilight’, and the name just stuck.
They’re well matched as a couple. Mum is the practical one, while Dad has a more reflective, dreamy nature, like me. I love that he believes in following your dreams, whatever the cost. When I was little and we sat on that riverbank, he’d tell me that life was precious and should be lived to the full. He’d encourage me to smell the rain and feel the wind, and throw my dreams into space to see what came back to me.
It was Dad who first gave me the idea about switching careers and studying to become a pastry chef. When he said it, I laughed, wondering why I hadn’t thought of it first. I sometimes think Dad knows me better than I know myself.
He’d always been in great health. Never went to the doctor. His other hobby, apart from the fishing and wood carving, was walking. He and Mum both loved the holidays they spent in the Lake District, getting hot and breathless scaling the peaks and enjoying the panoramic views from the top. At home, when he wasn’t busy with the shop, he’d often walk for miles in the country lanes around the village. He was a fit man. Everyone said that. So I didn’t have to worry about him.
Then, a month after I started at catering college, Mum phoned to say she’d have to cancel our forthcoming weekend in Amsterdam because Dad was feeling a bit under the weather. I remember thinking it must be a really bad dose of cold or flu to make Dad give up a trip to one of his favourite cities. We’d been looking forward to it, all three of us, for ages.
Then came the news that Dad had diabetes.
I was quite shocked because Dad lived such a healthy life. Okay, he usually had the sticky toffee pudding when he and Mum went out for dinner about once a month, but that was hardly sugar overload.
But after the initial bombshell, I got used to the idea. Dad had diabetes, which wasn’t good. But it wasn’t the end of the world, either.
Then Mum phoned and mentioned he was going into hospital for more tests, and that was when I started to really worry. If diabetes had been diagnosed, why the need for further tests?
It turned out the diabetes was an underlying symptom of something much more serious.
Mum very rarely cried. But that night, when I took the train back to Sussex and Dad
