Page 91 of Summer At Willow Tree Farm

Art lifted his arms and put his hands behind his head, buying time, trying to look nonchalant, the quietly spoken words making his chest hurt.

He struggled to remember the lies he’d told for years whenever anyone asked about the scar. But, as Ellie refused to relinquish eye contact, those expressive green eyes so full of empathy, he couldn’t find the energy to lie about it to her.

If she was expecting some romantic tale of woe, though, she wasn’t going to get it. Because there was no way of romanticising the squalor of his childhood.

‘I can’t tell you exactly, because I blanked most of the details.’ And the ones he couldn’t blank still gave him nightmares, and turned him into a bowl of jelly whenever he got within a mile of a hospital.

‘Was it your arsehole of a father?’ she asked.

He stared at her. How did she know about his old man? Oh yeah, the sloe gin chronicles.

‘Sort of.’ He sat up, and gazed out at the pond, not wanting her eyes on him. Sunlight sparkled on the water. His skin had been clean and fresh from the swim, his muscles loose and languid after their lovemaking. And his belly pleasantly full from the tasty treats she’d piled into the picnic basket, and the bottle of Badger beer they’d shared. But now he felt unclean, the pastry he’d wolfed down with the ale threatening to reappear.

‘I caught him slapping Laura and I had some stupid kid’s notion that I could stop him. I couldn’t. He was strung out on something and he went berserk, kicked me so hard they had to slice me open to stop the bleeding.’

He heard the sharp intake of breath. Then felt her hand on his back. ‘How old were you?’

‘Six, maybe seven.’ He found it hard to remember, because he’d never had much in the way of birthday celebrations in the succession of squats and communes they’d lived in before ending up at the Rainbow. The revolving door of faces and broken furniture, the smell of stale weed and dirty feet, the sound of boozy arguments and the pounding base beat of music played at top volume all blurred into one now, with no specific time or location attached to the memories.

But he could still remember Laura’s frantic whispers as they wheeled him into surgery that day, making the gut-wrenching agony that much worse.

You mustn’t tell, Arty. They’ll take you away from me if you tell.

‘Please tell me they had him arrested?’

He glanced over his shoulder, to find Ellie’s face so full of fury on his behalf, it made his chest hurt more.

‘They didn’t know. Laura told me not to say anything. So I didn’t.’

Funny to think there had once been a time when he had been terrified of being taken him away from his mother. But then, young children always trusted their parents, until they grew up enough to know not to. Just like Toto had always trusted him.

He picked up a broken branch, flicked it into the water, watched it splash and sink.

‘That heartless bitch.’ Ellie’s voice was tight with anger. ‘How could she make you keep it a secret? She should have been protecting you, not him.’

‘He’d run off by the time I got let out of the hospital and we never saw him again, so it didn’t matter anyway.’

‘Of course it did and it still does. You have a phobia of hospitals now. And I bet that’s where it comes from.’

‘I don’t have a phobia. I just don’t like them much. But who does?’ Maybe they freaked him out more than they should, but who in their right mind enjoyed going to a hospital? ‘And Laura wasn’t that bad. We kind of deserved each other.’

‘How can you say that, Art? No one deserves to be treated the way she treated you.’

He twisted round, enjoying her outrage maybe a bit too much. ‘Have you forgotten what a shit I was back then, to you and everyone else?’

‘You weren’t that bad,’ she said. ‘I was pretty high maintenance and chronically self-absorbed.’

‘Maybe.’ He smiled, not sure how to process the fact that they seemed to have become friends as well as bonk buddies in the last few weeks. ‘But I’m still sorry for the way I treated you that summer.’

Warm fingers touched his arm. ‘Apology accepted. And I’m sorry, too.’

‘What for?’

‘For making you talk about your father… And your mother.’ She looked sincere, her face grave. ‘It’s obviously a difficult subject.’

‘It’s not difficult,’ he corrected her, because it didn’t feel difficult talking about them to her. ‘Just

boring.’