Page 16 of The Edge of Always

Chapter Five

‘So, are we off then?’ Mae asked from her bed. She was playing snake on their dad’s phone while Luna set up her sketchbooks in the small circle of space at the end of their beds. Luna and Mae shared a room at home, where they didn’t need to, and in the cottage where they did, since there were only two bedrooms.

The cottage, decorated by their mum, was cream. And white. Everything was cream and white. Some of the things had little pink flowers on them, like Luna’s bedding for instance. Or else little blue flowers, like the curtains. There was one wall of bare stone behind their beds (this was Luna’s favourite thing in the cottage) and an antique chest of drawers by the door (her second favourite).

Luna felt like it was the bedroom of a dainty person. The sort who brushed their hair until it was shiny every night before bed and knelt down to say their prayers. No matter how hard she tried, Luna didn’t feel like that person. And Mae… well, Mae didn’t even try.

It was almost 5pm – time to go and meet Emmett. Luna’s earlier inexplicable excitement at being so palpably close to Emmett that she could reach out and touch him, if that was a thing that they did, had worn off and was replaced instead by worry. Worry that her mum would try to stop her from seeing Emmett as much as Luna hoped to this summer. Worry that she’d be locked in her bedroom with the white walls for the whole summer. Possibly Luna was being a bit dramatic.

‘What about Mum?’ she asked.

Mae rolled her eyes where she was laid on her bed, a leg draped over her bent knee.

‘She’s not going to ground us for the summer – we only make the place look a mess, same as Dad. Plus, Eyebrow Clive is here. I saw her heading out into the garden with a cocktail twenty minutes ago. Let’s just go ask Dad if we can go out.’

Eyebrow Clive was their neighbour; their cottages shared a hedge. Luna’s mum was a Clive fan, a Clive superfan if you like. In Luna’s mind, Clive was ancient already, with this sweep of grey hair but the biggest, darkest eyebrows she’d ever seen. They were like slugs. That’s how he got his nickname, which wasn’t very original, but it was what they’d come up with four years ago when Clive bought the place next door. Eyebrow Clive was rich. He talked about his favourite wine a lot and did this chortly-posh laugh while saying things like, ‘Very good, Jennie, very good,’ when he and Luna’s mum had deep and meaningful conversations over the hedge.

Luna could never remember a time when her parents had seemed as if they liked each other, so she had no real basis for comparison, but it seemed like her mum laughed an awful lot more with Eyebrow Clive than she did with any of them.

‘Poor Dad,’ she said.

‘Yep, totally tragic. Maybe he can get a serum to grow his eyebrow hair, and then Mum will fancy him again.’ Mae launched herself out of bed. ‘But you know what’s even more tragic?’ she asked.

Luna noticed that Mae still hadn’t changed her T-shirt.

‘No, what?’

‘The fact that you’re thirteen and you’ve never been kissed. That’s way worse than your own wife being repulsed by you. They’re going to write articles about you in Seventeen magazine.’

‘They are not.’ Luna stood up too, a little bit worried that that might actually be a thing. She didn’t want to be weird, or tragic. She just wanted to be normal, to fit right in. ‘There’s just no one that I want to kiss. I’m not kissing just anyone.’

There was a chortly laugh from the garden. ‘Very good, Jennie, very good.’

‘Come on, before her drink runs out and she has to come back in the house.’ Mae grabbed her sunglasses from the top drawer. Luna was pretty sure that they were joke ones; they were so thick, but Mae thought that they made her look cool, and who was Luna to argue?

Luna fluffed her already wild hair in the little mirror they had hanging on the wall next to the door.

‘You look amazeballs,’ Mae said, already out of the room. ‘Someone better snog your face off this summer. Now let’s go.’

The girls found their dad at the small dining table, glueing together a model of some old aeroplane. Neither of her parents had ever demonstrated to Luna what a happy relationship might look like, but her dad had instilled in her an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of old planes, which hopefully counted for something.

‘Look at this, girls.’ He ushered them closer in hushed tones, as if talking loudly might cause the model to fall to pieces somehow. ‘It’s a Supermarine Walrus mark one.’ He held it up so that Luna and Mae could inspect it.

Luna and Mae made a sound to show that they were impressed. Luna mostly felt sorry for her dad, which made her kind of sad.

‘Where do the bombs come out?’ Mae asked, talking in a normal voice. This wasn’t their first rodeo when it came to their dad and his models.

Luna might feel sorry for her dad, but there was no denying that he was the reason she was so big and hairy since he was a big bear of a man. This was what Luna thought when her dad took his T-shirt off at the beach. He even had hair on his back. He was tall and wide and probably quite strong. It was just that his personality didn’t match his stature. He was softly spoken and gentle. Most of the time he just seemed confused by his wife.

He was an aeroplane engineer. Her mum once asked why he spent so much time making aeroplane models, since he spent his working life around the real thing, and he’d answered that he admired the fragility of models. Even now, it did look kind of funny, his big hands delicately touching a small, fragile aeroplane.

‘This plane was purely for reconnaissance, Mae. No bombers on this one.’ He held up his model carefully.

Their dad only stayed with them for two weeks of summer, then he went home to work before driving back to get them four weeks later. It meant that Luna, Mae and their mum were here for six weeks. Six weeks. It felt like a whole lifetime.

‘It’s a great model, Dad,’ Luna said. ‘Maybe we could go to the puffins while you’re here.’

Mae was making eyes at her since she wasn’t the biggest fan of the puffins or their dad’s bird talk. But Luna wanted their dad to have a nice time.