B is for Bella (Sixpenny Cross Book 2) Read online

  “Please make her better,” begged Bella.

  “The vet will do her best, la mia bella Bella,” said her father, “but that’s a very sick kitten.”

  “I think you should go home,” said the vet. “Leave her with me. I’ll take a good look at her, and then I’ll phone you.”

  The Tait family left their details at the desk and drove home.

  “What will be, will be,” said June.

  Chapter Four

  Later that evening, June tucked her daughter into bed.

  “You know the kitty is very poorly, don’t you?” she said, stroking her daughter’s head.

  Bella nodded, a giant tear squeezing from the corner of her dark eye.

  “The hostibal will make her better.”

  “The hospital will do the very best they can. Now snuggle down, and we’ll know more in the morning.”

  A little later, the phone rang.

  “Hello, it’s Sandra, the vet at the Animal Hospital. I have good and bad news for you,” she said. “Your kitten is seriously injured. She has two broken legs and was concussed. The good news is that she has no internal injuries. I think we can fix her, but it’ll be very expensive.”

  She named a figure and June gasped. They agreed that June should first talk with Donald and then get back to the hospital quickly with a decision.

  “We can’t afford this,” said June sadly.

  “I know,” replied Donald, “but how can we allow the poor little thing to be put down? Bella will be devastated.”

  “Do we have the money?”

  Donald took his wife’s hand and gazed into her face.

  “You know our Italy money? We could use that.”

  June looked back at her husband and finally nodded her head.

  “Yes, let’s use the Italy money.”

  The Taits had been putting aside a little money whenever they could. June’s dream was to visit Italy and see the village where her grandmother had been born and raised. She wanted to feel the same sunshine that had warmed her grandmother’s face, and smell the same Italian scents. She wanted to see the sapphire-blue Ionian sea, and taste the grapes and olives, just as her grandmother had.

  It was hard saving up the money for the holiday. Donald didn’t earn very much as a mechanic and it wasn’t the first time they’d needed to raid the Italy fund. A couple of years ago, the stairs in their cottage had needed re-carpeting. Another time they had to replace the engine in the car.

  This time they dipped into it for the sake of their beloved little daughter and a kitten they’d never seen before that afternoon.

  “We’ll get to Italy one day,” promised Donald, and June nodded.

  “Who knows?” she said. “Perhaps some day we’ll win the football pools.”

  It was a nice dream.

  “La mia bella Bella, we have good news for you,” said Donald the next morning. “The hospital is going to make your kitten better.”

  The smile on Bella’s face was worth every penny of the Italy fund.

  “Can we go and see my kitty?”

  “Not today, but soon.”

  “I’m going to call her Hattie, because she was in Mummy’s hat.”

  “That’s a perfect name, Bella. When we visit her, we’ll tell her.”

  Bella beamed, and her parents basked in her happiness.

  At Yewbridge Animal Hospital, Donald and June were worried that the metalwork on the kitten’s tiny legs might alarm Bella.

  Nothing could be further from the truth. Bella was fascinated by the hospital and the treatment. Years later, Donald and June agreed that visit to Yewbridge Animal Hospital marked the day that little Bella Tait decided her future.

  The vet was patient, taking time to explain in simple terms why Hattie had metal pins in her back leg, and how the splint and plaster cast on her front leg would keep the bone straight while it healed.

  “When you take Hattie home, you’ll need to keep her in a little crate. She mustn’t move around much. It’s very important that she keeps as still as possible while her legs mend.”

  Bella absorbed the vet’s words and nodded.

  At last they were allowed to take Hattie home, and Bella took on most of the nursing duties. She fed the kitten by hand, and stroked her head until she purred. She sat with her, making sure she wasn’t lonely and didn’t move too much.

  When Hattie’s treatment was over, she was as lively and agile as any kitten could be. Apart from a slight limp, she was as good as new.

  bbbbb

  “Mum, can I ’ave some money?”

  “What for?”

  “Sweets.”

  “What d’you think I am? Made of bloomin’ money?”

  “It’s not fair!” Christine kicked the wall in temper.

  “I’ll tell you what I will give you, though. A smack round the chops, that’s what I’ll give you.”

  Her hand shot out. The slap was sharp and spiteful.

  Christine gasped. But she didn’t cry.

  bbbbb

  Bella’s first day at the village school in Sixpenny Cross was harrowing for both mother and daughter.

  When the school bell rang, they followed the other mothers and children inside. Bella’s new school uniform swamped her, and her leather satchel and lace-up shoes squeaked with newness.

  Another mother dragged her daughter into the cloakroom. The child was thin and pasty, with a ratty face and small, hard eyes like marbles that stared at the world defiantly. Her school uniform was crumpled, stained and clearly secondhand.

  “Christine, get a move on,” snapped the mother. “I ’aven’t got all day.”

  June and Bella found the peg labelled ‘Bella Tait’ in the cloakroom. Christine Dayton’s peg was next to it.

  “Right, so ’ere’s your peg,” said Christine’s mother, hanging her daughter’s coat on it. “Now, I’m off. Get yourself into the classroom, and behave. I don’t want to ’ear no stories from your teacher that you been playin’ ’er up.”

  Christine said nothing and showed no emotion on her pale, pinched face. Flat eyes stared at Bella and her mother. She didn’t even say goodbye to the departing figure of her own mother.

  June was finding it hard to leave.

  “I have to go, darling,” she said at last, gently detaching Bella’s arms from around her legs. “I’ll pick you up later, and we’ll have spaghetti for dinner, shall we?”

  Bella wasn’t used to other children or the noise. She wanted to be home with her mother and Hattie and all the animals. She opened her mouth and howled. Christine Dayton stared on in fascination.

  “Hello Bella,” said the teacher, crouching down to her level. “Mummy will be back to pick you up this afternoon. Now, I wonder if you could do something for me? Our goldfish needs feeding. Can you help? And then after that, do you think you could draw me a picture of all your family?”

  Bella stopped crying.

  Christine needed no consoling. She flitted from one activity to the next, quickly tiring of each before moving on. If another child had what she wanted, she snatched it away or pushed them off. Christine’s name was the one that the teacher used the most.

  “Christine, dear, we don’t push each other like that.”

  “Christine, please don’t do that, you could hurt somebody.”

  “Christine, wait for your turn.”

  But Christine pleased herself. She stopped to watch Bella hard at work on her picture. She picked up a paintbrush, dipped it into a paint pot and deliberately swiped it across Bella’s picture. The blue paint ran down Bella’s picture, saturating the paper.

  Christine waited, expecting a reaction, but although Bella stared at the blue paint, she didn’t complain.

  Christine clenched her fists. Bella was supposed to cry. Christine wandered off to cause trouble elsewhere, but she kept looking over her shoulder at Bella.

  A little later, the teacher went to see how Bella was getting on with her picture. Bella was still working hard, oblivious to
the children milling around her, her tongue clenched between her teeth in concentration.

  “You’ve been busy,” her teacher said. “What a lovely picture and what a lovely blue sky. Tell me who you’ve drawn.”

  So Bella explained about her mother and father, Willy the worm, Hattie the cat with the limp, the rabbits, guinea pigs, mice, rats and budgerigars.

  “Gosh,” said her teacher. “What a lot of animals you have! When you’ve finished that beautiful picture, do you think you could sort out the box of farm animals for me?”

  Bella nodded.

  “Then tomorrow, we’re going to make animals out of plasticine.”

  Bella rarely cried at school again.

  When the mayor of Yewbridge visited Sixpenny Cross village school, he toured the classrooms. He was ushered into Bella and Christine’s class, and smiled at the children. Christine Dayton narrowed her eyes, already aware that this was an authority figure, the type of person her parents had taught her to hate. Bella was standing close by, fascinated by the important visitor with the shiny gold mayoral chain around his neck.

  “Hello, little girl,” he said, patting Bella on the head and ignoring Christine. “Would you like to be a mayor when you grow up?”

  “No thank you,” said Bella. “I’m going to be a vet.”

  Nobody was surprised.

  bbbbb

  Sometimes it seemed as though the Tait family was dogged by bad luck. It was always a struggle to pay the mortgage on the cottage, but other events occurred over the years, each one making it necessary to raid the Italy fund again and again.

  “We’ll get there one day,” Donald said to his wife when their ancient boiler broke down and no amount of tinkering would fix it.

  “I know,” smiled June sadly, “but we need to buy a new boiler first, there’s no question about that. Italy will have to wait.”

  “Well, I’ve just filled out this week’s football coupon. Perhaps we’ll get lucky this time and win the pools!”

  But bad luck was always waiting around the corner.

  With Bella at school, June took on a part-time job which certainly helped bolster the family finances. For a few hours a week, she helped Jayne Fairweather in the village shop and Post Office, and the Italy fund slowly began to swell again.

  “Oh, I can almost smell the lemon groves,” said June as she helped Jayne stack cereal packets on the shelf. “And I can imagine the sea, with little boats bobbing about. My grandmother came from a fishing village, you know.”

  “It sounds just wonderful,” said Jayne, leaving to answer the phone.

  She came back white-faced. June straightened up and stared at her.

  “Jayne? Whatever’s the matter?”

  Chapter Five

  Jayne Fairweather reached out and grabbed June’s hand.

  “It’s Yewbridge Hospital. They want to speak to you about Donald.”

  The colour drained from June’s face. She flew to the telephone. She heard a woman’s voice answer when she spoke into the receiver.

  “Am I speaking to Mrs Tait?”

  “Yes,” June replied, her heart pounding.

  “This is Sister MacArdle at Yewbridge Hospital. Your husband, Donald, had an accident at work but it’s nothing to be alarmed about. A car he was working under fell on him and broke his leg. We’re putting his leg in plaster before sending him home.”

  June breathed a huge sigh of relief. It could so easily have been a lot worse than just a broken leg.

  An ambulance brought Donald home when his leg had been set in plaster. The hospital lent him a wheelchair and a pair of crutches. Bella was the first to scrawl her name on her father’s cast, and then set to work drawing all the animals in the house.

  “Does your leg hurt, Daddy?”

  “No, la mia bella Bella, it doesn’t hurt now, but it feels a bit itchy. They showed me the x-ray, and it was quite a clean break. They made sure that the bones were in the correct position, then they set it in plaster to stop it moving about.”

  “Just like Hattie’s cast?” Bella was fascinated by anything medical.

  “Exactly like Hattie’s cast.”

  “Will you have a limp like Hattie?”

  “I don’t think so. But I’m going to have to stay at home for a long time. I can’t go to work until the cast comes off.”

  Bella was delighted and didn’t catch the worry in her father’s eyes. Seeing more of her father was very good news. But Donald knew no work meant no pay, and life was going to be tough for a while, even if they claimed unemployment benefits.

  As father and daughter chatted, they didn’t see the small, pale face hovering at the window, spying on them.

  Donald’s leg didn’t heal well, and weeks, then months, passed and the bills piled up. Once again, June and Donald were forced to dip into the Italy fund.

  bbbbb

  Christine couldn’t remember her father ever having a job. She knew he got something called ‘Benefits’ and she knew that their money came from ‘the Social’.

  “Mary, and you, Christine, if anybody ever asks about your dad’s back, you tell ’em it’s really bad,” their mother frequently told them.

  “Why?” asked Christine. “Dad ain’t even got a bad back, ’as he?”

  “’Course he has! That’s why he can’t work. If the Social don’t believe us, we’ll lose our benefits. So you make sure you tell ’em about how bad his back is.”

  So their father continued to loaf around the house, usually with a beer in his hand. He rarely went out, unless it was to the pub.

  Christine, young as she was, was left to her own devices. Bored, she discovered she could sneak out of the house and go wherever she pleased. Nobody noticed her absence and nobody ever missed her.

  Small for her age, and light on her feet, she developed the knack of blending into the shadows, unseen and unheard. She peeped into homes, spied on her father drinking in the Dew Drop Inn, and watched the vicar through the vicarage windows.

  But most of all, Christine watched Bella Tait and her family.

  And the more she stared through the windows of Bella’s cottage, the more her eyes narrowed and her heart hardened.

  bbbbb

  Eventually, Bella’s father was pronounced fit and he returned to work. Both he and June sighed with relief, as it meant he was earning again.

  Around that time, Bella found a tiny fledgling in the garden. She knew that one should never interfere with fledglings because their parents were usually close by, feeding them and teaching them how to fend for themselves.

  Bella shut Hattie into the house, and watched from a distance. No parent bird turned up and the tiny fledgling didn’t move. Occasionally it cheeped, and its beak gaped, but no mother came to feed it.

  Bella approached it, but the baby bird didn’t hop away. She stooped down and carefully picked it up.

  “Oh, you poor little thing! You’ve got a broken leg!”

  It was so light in her hand she felt nothing at all except the tiny beating heart.

  “Don’t be frightened,” she said, “I know exactly what to do. Hattie had a broken leg, and so did Daddy. We have to make sure your leg is very straight, then put on a splint to keep it like that until it mends.”

  She took the little bird inside and showed it to her mother. Together they made a miniature splint from a matchstick, but it was Bella’s deft, confident fingers that straightened the leg, applied the splint and fixed it in place with sticky tape.

  She had successfully treated her first patient.

  “Good job, la mia bella Bella!” said her father, admiring her handiwork. “Good job!”

  Christine, at the window, watched and her hands balled into fists.

  bbbbb

  Christine hardly heard the shouting matches between her mother and father any more. They happened so frequently, they were almost a nightly affair. It often ended with her mother being slapped about. But that’s what husbands did, didn’t they? Then her father would collaps
e into his favourite chair in front of the TV, a bottle of beer at his elbow, and shout abuse at her mother who was preparing his dinner in the kitchen.

  But one particular night it ended differently.

  Her father swayed up their path, then hammered on the front door with his fist.

  “Where are you, woman?” he bawled, “let me in!”

  “Eh, ’old your horses! You’re ’ome early, ain’t you? Did you drink the Dew Drop dry?” asked her mother, opening the door.

  “Woman, you won’t believe what’s ’appened,” he said, standing unsteadily over her in the hallway.

  “What?”

  “They barred me! I ain’t allowed to drink in there no more!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. They’ve barred me from the Dew Drop!”

  “Well, perhaps that ain’t such a bad thing…”

  Upstairs, the listening child held her breath. It wasn’t wise to cross her father when he came back from the pub. Everybody knew that. Booze always made him angry. Christine crept out of her bedroom, knelt down and peered through the bannister at her parents below.

  “What did you say?” he asked, menace in his voice.

  “I just meant we’d ’ave more money perhaps if…”

  “What?”

  “I just meant that you don’t need to go to the pub every night…”

  But her mother had gone too far.

  Her husband’s hands were already balled. He swung back and slammed a hard fist into her stomach. Christine heard a little “ouf” as her mother exhaled and crumpled into a pile on the floor, her head hitting the hall stand as she went down.

  “You stupid woman,” he slurred, kicking her unconscious body. “I ain’t staying around ’ere. I should ’ave stayed in Yewbridge. This place is like a bleedin’ morgue.”

  He slammed the front door behind him and staggered back down their path.

  It was the last time Christine saw her father in Sixpenny Cross.

  Chapter Six

  Christine’s stomach was growling. She was hungry, and there was nothing in the pantry. Her sister, Mary, was out somewhere, and her mother was snoring on the couch, her mouth hanging open.