My Pretty Pekins
Songster
The last tendrils of space-cadet blue stretched across the otherwise black western sky as Calder set his face homewards. A tiny sliver of a crescent moon hung in the night sky, surrounded by the pinpricks of light we call stars. His footsteps were the only ones on the street, and they made an eerily hollow sound as he pulled the lapel of his coat in for a little extra warmth.
"And it isn't even winter yet," he whispered to himself, smiling wryly as he passed under the yellow halo of a street lamp.
When he reached home, he let himself in and slipped into the warm hallway of the bungalow. He would have hurried off to bed alone, as usual, but the sound of his parents' voices arrested him. He'd told Tara he hadn't seen them in ages. Well, that had been true. What he hadn't said was that he'd avoided them. Avoided just about everyone - after Michaela. He made his decision and walked into the sitting room, where they were talking.
His mother looked up and surprise and then a sort of tender delight crossed her face. She stood up and reached out to him. He, looking down at her, realised with a start how much she cared about him. His father was looking on with the dispassionate air that he knew so well how to assume. Like father, like son. Calder wrinkled his nose and gave his Dad a sarcastic grin. "Long time no see."
"Longer time no want to see," his Dad returned, in their old joke.
Calder glanced around him as he sat down. It wasn't grand. Not like Michaela's home. But it was home, all the same.
***
Alina heard the lights in the house be switched off by her Dad as he came upstairs. She drew the curtains in her bedroom and workroom and sat alone on the bed for a long time. Then, in a sudden moment of decisiveness - or perhaps impulsiveness - she got up and went into one corner of her room, and tugged gently on the carpet, which came up after she applied more force. In the floorboards was a small hatch, the one she'd stuffed her own diary in, never wanting to see it again, after Michaela had died. Anything she wrote in it after that would be meaningless, she'd told herself. The last date in it was the 29th August. That had been the day that - Alina shuddered - Calder had told them, his face wet with tears, that his magic couldn't save Michaela. That it was a matter of time. That they ought to be ready to say goodbye.
Shakily, she took the old diary out and fingered the fountain pen by it, before taking it into her hands and breathing deeply.
October 1st. The day I have decided to keep my diary again.
