Monday 17 June 2024
Sally
The distance is helping. In Sally’s mind, the Lambert family is officially nowhere near Swaffham Tilney anymore. It’s 10:00 p.m. and protectively dark. The second most horrible day ever (the first was when Furbert died) has given way to a more hope-filled evening, and Sally is grateful beyond words to be spending it in Corinne’s Range Rover, on the M6, having just passed Stafford—all six of us, safe together, Sally thinks, for she never fails to include the spirit of Furbert in her tally of Lamberts, though his whereabouts at any given moment are a more complex question, she concedes. On one level, he is obviously being driven by Corinne to her “favorite holiday home” in Troutbeck in the Lake District along with the rest of the family. Even so, before setting off from the Hayloft, Sally made sure to leave the door of his crate in the lounge open, and plump up the blankets and cushions inside it, in case he wants to nip in and out for a few long naps every day. That’s what he did while he was alive.
Sally feels certain that it’s possible for spirit dogs to be in two places at once. Why shouldn’t it be? What’s the point of being a free-roaming soul if you still have to be stuck in one place?
It was only once Furbert had died that Sally realized how much that crate had been his special den, just his and no one else’s. She saw what happened when Champ joined the family: He approached Furbert’s crate over and over but never went in. Instead, he’d curl up contentedly just beyond it, with maybe one paw across its metal threshold. One day Sally realized what this meant: Champ, being a dog and therefore more attuned as well as more spiritually pure, sensed that the crate was already occupied by the spirit of Furbs.
Sally immediately told all the human Lamberts that the door to the crate had to be kept wide open at all times. Mark stupidly asked why a dog’s soul couldn’t travel through stainless-steel mesh. That wasn’t the point, said Sally; it was all about the important symbolic gesture of making Furbert feel welcome and showing him that they all understood he was as present as he’d ever been. Mark shook his head and raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t close the crate door again after that.
Champ’s equivalent of Furbert’s crate—his special den—is his beige Sound Sleep Donut bed, in which Sally hopes he is now fast asleep in the boot of Corinne’s Range Rover. It fills her with glee to think that they are leaving the Gaveys and Detective Connor Chantree further behind with every minute that passes.
Corinne turns off the music she’s been listening to for the last hour and says, “Anyone want me to stop at the next services?”
Nobody does. “Let’s just get there,” says Mark abruptly, as if there’s anything any of them can do to shorten the distance between(Sally reads the sign they’re about to pass) Yarnfield, whatever that is, and Lake Windermere. It’s making Mark nervous, she suspects, to be in a car that isn’t his, driven by someone else. He’d made more of a fuss about leaving his car at home than either Ree or Tobes had about coming without their iPhone.
Corinne turns the music back on again: a deep-voiced man singing that he wishes he had a dime for every bad time, but bad times always seem to keep the change. All the way from Swaffham Tilney it’s been songs about crops that won’t grow, or can’t be saved, or turn into dust bowls, and tractors that need to be sold to ward off hardship. That one, Corinne told Sally, is her favorite song in the world. It strikes Sally as the wrong way round that Corinne, who always wears shapely black dresses and at least three thin, delicate strings of gold around her neck, even when she’s also got wellies and a raincoat on, listens to this cowboy-and-tractor stuff when the only thing Sally’s ever heard blaring out of the Farmer’s open windows is Lionel Richie or Michael Jackson.
Sally imagines what Ree and Tobes must be thinking about Corinne’s choice of music and silently beams praise in their direction for keeping their scathing opinions to themselves. She still can’t believe the whole family has come with her. She didn’t want them to at first—was sure they would make everything harder and worse, hated the thought of inconveniencing anyone—but now she feels comforted to have them all with her.
She’d been impressed when Mark had said to Corinne, “Of course I’m coming too. I’m not letting you take my wife and my dog and just vanish into the night.”
“Great.” Corinne had seemed pleased in a distant sort of way, as if everything about Mark was beside the point. “Pack a bag, then.”
“For how long? I can’t be away from work for more than one day—maybe two,” he said.
“No one’s forcing you to miss work, Mark,” Sally told him. “You can stay here. I’m not asking anyone to do anything.”
“I’m definitely coming,” said Ree. “I’m not letting Champy out of my sight for as long as the Gaveys are out to get him.”
Sally couldn’t have put it better herself. “What about your job?” she asked Ree, who clicked her fingers in an exaggerated, sarcastic “Oh, damn and blast!” kind of way.
“What a shame. My poor job. I’ll have to miss loads of days, without giving any notice. A mobile café with a slowly flattening tire that no one ever fixes might fire me. Never mind!”
Ree’s current job is her third casual position so far. Her attitude about interviews and employment reminds Sally very much of her own at a similar age. There’s nothing Ree loves more than being told she was the best candidate by far and aced the interview. Conversely, nothing makes her more furious than being expected to do whatever job it is once she’s gotten it. Sally is practiced at nodding empathetically in the face of a barrage from her daughter of “How the hell should I know how to make a Vanilla Velvet VIP? What even is that? No, pleasedon’tshow me how—do I look like I care? Just everyone do the right thing and agree to have PG Tips with semi-skimmed milk, for fuck’s sake. And I mean…can we all please stop pretending the Cupwardly Mobile van in Swaffham Tilney is, like, a Starbucks in Chicago? Like, Bianca messaged the whole Cupwardly group with some bullshit about bringing ourbest selves to work and our A game, whatever that is, and I was like, ‘How about you bring me some more interesting work that isn’t just making drinks for bored people who are as desperate to turn tea into a social life as they are thirsty? Maybe then you’ll get to meet my best self.’ No, Mum, of course I didn’t actuallysaythat. I’m not an idiot.”
“I’m definitely coming with you and Champ,” Toby had said nervously to Sally, as if worried she might try to stop him. “We should all be with him in his hour of need.”
True, Sally thought. And Tobes had done his last GCSE exam, so if he wanted to join the escape party, why would she stop him? Mark didn’t object, which meant it must be fine—though it alarms Sally, remembering her thought process, that she made her husband the yardstick for good parenting when she’s the one with the important overview, the one making sure Champ gets to safety. If it had been left up to Mark, they’d be at home now, watching TV, just as findable by their enemies as they had been before they knew they were in danger.
“So are the hot tub and cinema room in the actual house?” Toby asks Corinne. She described her favorite spare home to them when they first set off, in an attempt to convince Mark she wasn’t about to lock them up in a primitive shack. She’d sensed, correctly, that he didn’t entirely trust anything north of Nottingham.
“No, it’s in a converted old piggery at the bottom of the field,” she tells Tobes. “You’ll love it, I promise.”
“I love it already,” he says.
“Same,” says Ree.
And so here they are, the Lamberts, off to the Lake Districttogether. The kids have already argued, compromised, and decided on the movie they’ll watch when they get there: a horror film calledSpeak No Evil. Sally knows Mark, Ree, and Tobes are all thinking this will be nothing more than a fun, impromptu family trip—maybe three or four nights away at most—until Sally sorts out the Tess Gavey problem and gets Champ acquitted of all charges, in the way she always sorts out everything. Tobes and his friends have even given her a nickname based on this tendency: Lester, after a character from the video gameGrand Theft Auto. When you get into trouble in that game and need help, you call Lester.
Tobes belongs to a gang of eight best friends, five boys and three girls, and Sally is known by all of them to be the most helpful parent—the only one who will solve the group’s problems without ever saying anything inconvenient like, “But why did you think it was okay to use a fake ID in the first place?” or “But why didn’t you avoid any possibility of projectile vomiting all over important paperwork by not drinking quite so much?”
I can do this, she thinks.I am Lester.With Corinne’s help and with hundreds of miles between me and Lesley Gavey, I can save the day, the week, the year, the life.Mark, Ree, and Tobes might get bored and want to go home if the mission to save Champ becomes too grueling or takes too long, but that’s okay. It’s nice to have the comfort of their company for now, and if they decide they need to leave suddenly, that can be arranged. And both Sally and Corinne made it clear before they set off from the Hayloft: If Mark, Ree, and Toby were along for the ride and whatever came after it, they had to be either helpful or neutral—definitely not a hindrance. They had to let Corinne and Sally be in charge. (Ree rolled her eyes andsaid, “That’s totally aimed at you, Dad. Mum knows me and Tobes won’t spoon the whole operation. She only included us because she doesn’t want you to feel picked on.”)
Mark’s resistance to anyone but him being in charge is hilarious. That’s what Sally calls it, anyway; it’s more tactful than saying “infuriating.” Not infrequently, at home, she calls out, “Mark!” and gets the self-satisfied reply, “No. Not Mark.” The first time this happened, she was confused. She ran downstairs to confront him face-to-face—for it was undoubtedly he who had replied—and said, “But you are Mark.”
“I know.” He grinned. “But I also don’t want to do whatever boring chore you’re about to assign me. That’s what ‘Not Mark’ means: ‘Assign the task that’s in your mind right now to someone who is…not Mark!’” This was soon officially enshrined in family folklore as “one of Dad’s greatest hits,” which made him do it more often.
