Page 17 of One Last Thing
7
MEGAN
Was my dadhighwhen he made these decisions? Seriously, was heonsomething? Medication for his pain or perhaps a recreational drug or two just for the hell of it? AmIhigh right now? Because, for all of this to make sense, I’m sorry, butsomeonehas to be high.
There is no way in hell that a person of sound mind would organise an ENTIRE holiday itinerary for a box. Oh, I’m sorry, not one box. Two.
Two boxes of ashes.
That’s essentially what Dad has done here, right, let’s face it. He’s gone to a lot of trouble and expense to plan a holiday for himself when he’s DEAD. I honestly don’t know what to say or think. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to knowexactlywhat to think. She sipped away at her breakfast cocktail, looking bemused, as though this would make for an entertaining anecdote a next devastatingly honest and witty bestselling memoir.
Oh god, I think I’m going to be sick.
Maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t get round to breakfast yet, otherwise I might be throwing it up. Or maybe one of the reasons I feel so sick is because I haven’t eaten today. I should eat something. Ugh. The idea of eating anything. I can’t, not right now.
Having paced busily around my room for the last few minutes wondering which of us is or was high, I slump down on the edge of the bed and bury my head in my hands.
The house. The dream house. I can’t believe he finally bought it.
You know when you’re driving along somewhere and you see a house that you fall in love with on the spot? The sort you’re captivated by and you suddenly start picturing yourself living there in this dream alternate reality? It happened to me once when I was on a canal boat in Newbury for a hen do. We were all pissed on Prosecco, wearing ship captain hats from Amazon and dancing to Gina G when we drifted past the most beautiful house I think I’ve ever seen. It looked like the house a kid would draw: perfectly symmetrical, red brick, large windows, chimneys. Its garden was lined with colourful wild flowers. There was an elegant bird feeder at the top and it sloped down to the water, by which there was a swing chair. I stopped dancing and gawped at the house. A duck and its ducklings were gliding past it.
I saw myself living in that house, sitting in the chair by the water, writing a novel.
‘What are you doing?’ Marisa asked, shimmying over to me.
‘Look at that house.’
She took off her pink heart-shaped sunglasses to do so.
‘Isn’t it amazing,’ I said, feeling sad that we would soon lose sight of it.
‘Very pretty,’ she agreed. ‘But I think the nearest train station is miles away and I bet there’s nothing much else around here. You want to be closer to a village or something.’
I laughed. It was soMarisato think practically about a dream house.
Dad was practical, too, about most things. He liked order and routine and he was gentle but realistic. Mum was the dreamer of the pair of them. Whenever we’d have a day wandering around Collioure, he’d take us to see ‘the dream house’. A tall, pale-yellow house with blue shutters and the typical red roof of the town; it was on a quiet, narrow, cobbly street a little set back from the centre, but you could see the top of it from the sea as you came in on the boat. There was a small café at the end selling fresh pastries that you could smell the moment you turned round the corner to walk down the street.
‘It’s near the centre but not in the centre, so it’s quieter and not filled with tourists,’ Dad said once he’d decided on this house, being a tourist himself. ‘On weekends, you could stroll to the café to get your morning coffee and breakfast and sit with your book on one of the rickety tables outside and then take the boat out.’
‘We own a boat now, do we?’ Mum replied as she peered up at the house.
‘If you live in Collioure, you have to own a boat,’ he said as though that were the law.
‘Don’t you want a big house with a pool?’ I said, thinking wistfully about my classmate Louise who had a holiday home in Spain with a swimming pool. She used to invite special friends out there.
I would never make the cut – but at that point in my life I was still hopeful.
Dad shook his head. ‘No. I want this house. I can picture us here.’
And that was that. Whenever we visited the town, Dad would talk about his house. We would often hire a boat, and when we went out into the marina, he’d point it out, the roofand top blue shutters visible from out at sea, and if we were in Collioure for the day, we’d be forced to wander past it and listen to the future weekends he’d plotted here of coffee and croissants in the sunshine.
No one ends up buying their dream house. Everyone knows that. Dad didn’t, apparently.
And now he wants to leave his pale-yellow, blue-shuttered dream in my care and Mum’s; but for that to happen, he wants us to have a holiday together.
Couldn’t he let me mourn inpeace?
There’s only one thing to do in situations like these. Call Marisa.
