Here we are in the tenth chapter of “Memory Lives On,” taking us to the approximate halfway point.  We just need to get over the hump, and then it’s all downhill.

“What if this Cherry person refuses to give us any information?” Mr Daly asked Joe for the millionth time.

“Despite the fact that she’s invited us to Southend specifically to do so?  Look, we already know that logic doesn’t run in her family.”

We were walking along the seafront, which, like beaches the world over, usually looks better in August than on Halloween.  Considering Southend is in Essex not the Caribbean, it never looks exactly tropical even during a heatwave, but today was even worse.  The sea was pencil-lead grey, the sand looked like huge pile of frozen biscuits that an elephant had sat on, and the sky was that white colour you only get when the weather is aiming a whole load of iciness at you.  If you ask me, beaches should try and hide during winter, and not just hang around depressing people.

But then where would the crabs go?  THINK OF THE CRABS, ANJA.

Joe smirked back at Mr Daly, but it looked like he was getting annoyed.  “I told you, she’ll tell us everything she knows.   Cherry can’t stand my dad.  Besides, she works for my aunt, so we’ll be able to talk to her as well.” 

“I haven’t tried to get in touch with her until now, but it’s perfectly safe to do so now that we’ve found out that one of her employees is Anja’s cousin!”

(Seriously, I wrote this, and even I don’t get the characters’ logic.  I’m not sure I got it at the time, either.)

“Hmm,” Mr Daly growled, obviously trying to give the impression that he was actually thinking about something other than his image, “Mr Foster, I feel I should warn you not to be too trusting of this Cherry.  She may have a pretty face, but many dangerous women have the same.

And now I’m reminded how much better a story this would be if it turned out that Cherry was plotting against them.  But nope, Anja trusts her, and therefore she’s on the level.

She won’t be the first woman who’s used the way men feel about her for her own gains.”  He gave me a pointed look that scared me.

…Wasn’t he trying to protect her innocence from the wicked boys just a chapter ago?

Does Mr Daly know about Gary and me? I wondered.  I’d have thought he was too dumb to work that out. 

Well, he knows that you shared a room, in defiance of common sense, and he knows that Estelle told the hotel you and Gary were a couple, in defiance of all that is pure and good.  So I don’t blame him for having suspicions.

And what business is it of his, anyway?  I didn’t stop to think that Mr Daly had never really felt like minding his own business, and if things had turned out differently that might have been the one mistake that ruined my life.

SPOILERS- “If things had turned out differently” translates as “if Anja was less inclined to break people’s wrists with her bare hands.”

Svetlana’s place wasn’t far from the beach.  We just had to avoid the occasional speeding car that zoomed along the road, walk up a street opposite the seafront, get lost about five times, argue, and finally walk into her driveway.  Nothing to it, really.

I could see Mr Daly’s disappointment as Svetlana answered the door.  He was clearly expecting a femme fatale type…

Anja knows this because…  Oh, you get the idea.  If fifteen-year-old me had wanted to include all these glimpses into other people’s thoughts and motivations, she should either have written this in third person or picked a more intelligent narrator.

…and that was something Svetlana was not.  She was quite pretty, I guess, but she looked worn out.  Her chestnut hair was all over the place, her T-shirt hadn’t been ironed and the laces on her trainers had snapped. 

…What, both trainers?  Wouldn’t she have replaced the laces for the first one that broke before the second one did?

But even so, I saw Joe’s face light up when he saw her.  I also saw something, which, like Mr Daly’s suspicion of me, I would later regret ignoring.

Just before running up to give Joe and me a hug, Svetlana gave Gary a look I didn’t like one bit.

DUN DUN DUN.

(This bit of foreshadowing actually is relevant to the plot!  It’s a miracle!)

“Halloween today!” Ben told us with delight.  Whoever had given him that tiger costume really hadn’t thought about the consequences.

“The consequences” being that he’d wear it.  Oh, what damage they wrought with their hubris!

“Sh, Ben,” Svetlana told him, “I’ve got to talk to your Auntie Annie about something important.  Put a lid on it, OK?”

Ben looked up at me.  “Hello Auntie Annie!  Halloween today!”

Ben had never really got the hang of my name.  To be honest, I don’t think I knew how to pronounce “Anja” when I was two, so I didn’t really mind. 

GAAAH.  IT’S NOT THAT HARD.  IT REALLY ISN’T.

Gary looked surprised, but Joe and Mr Daly had other things to worry about.  Joe was gazing moonily at Svetlana, while Mr Daly looked around disapprovingly.

“I didn’t realise you had a son, Miss Hughes,” Mr Daly sneered, as if having kids out of wedlock still came with a massive social stigma attached.  Svetlana looked at him like he was some kind of horrible insect she needed to squash, and replied, “Well, I do.  He isn’t bothering you or owt, is he?”  Her tone of voice could have frozen a decent-sized volcano, and it definitely put Mr Daly in his place.

That might have been really effective if fifteen-year-old me had bothered to paragraph it properly.  Or in any way foreshadowed Mr Daly’s disapproval of unwed mothers.  Or if Mr Daly had actually continued the conversation instead of wilting away at Svetlana’s brilliant comeback.

“So anyroad… 

I didn’t actually know anyone from Manchester at the time, so I lifted Svetlana’s entire idiolect from Coronation Street.

I need to go round Jean’s place to see if I need to open Blaze again today.  You come with me, Anja.  We can ask her about James when we’re there.  Gary and Joe, you stay here and keep an eye on things.” 

It’s not nice to call Mr Daly a “thing”!

She knelt down to talk to Ben.  “Now Ben, do you want to come to Auntie Jean’s house, or do you want to stay here with Joe and Gary?”  She left Mr Daly out, I noticed.  He noticed too, judging by the constipated pig look on his face.

Ben looked confused as he glanced from Svetlana to Joe.  “See Sammy?” he asked.

Svetlana smiled.  “Yes, you’ll see Sammy.  You coming with me?”

“Yeah,” Ben smiled.  He zoomed towards the door and tried to open it.  Nobody had told him that doors were more likely to open if an eighteen-year-old turned the handle than if a two-year-old rammed right into them.

Ben is not actually important to the plot at any point.  His entire function is to provide “cute” moments like this one.  But at least he knows how to pronounce his own name, Anja.

“Who’s Sammy?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” Svetlana grinned as she picked up Ben. 

For some reason, Ben seemed extremely enthusiastic about “Sammy,” whoever he or she was.  In the time I spent staring vacantly out of the window at the park that would probably have looked really beautiful if it hadn’t rained last night, Ben kept chanting “Sammy’s house!  Sammy’s house!  Sammy’s house!”

“Now, Ben,” Svetlana chastised, “It’s not Sammy’s house, is it?  He only lives in the garden.  It’s Auntie Jean’s house.”

Now I was really confused. 

Svetlana could have cleared up this confusion three paragraphs ago by actually explaining who/what Sammy was, but she didn’t.  Maybe she just enjoys seeing Anja squirm.

I started staring at the leaves that had fallen off the trees, looking vaguely like cloths that had just been used to mop up something truly disgusting.  I think Halloween is autumn’s only saving grace.  I mean, during the winter, you get Christmas, New Year and snow if you’re lucky (Svetlana’s parents usually spent half the winter phoning us up and telling us about the blizzards going on where they lived, which was a bit unfair considering we barely saw a snowflake).  In spring, you get Easter and nice weather.  And in summer you get a holiday unless you’ve got a really demanding job, plus weather hot enough to allow you to go swimming.

Oh, goody.  Another one of Anja’s inner monologues that have nothing to do with what’s going on, but are desperately needed to show you how DEEP and PHILOSOPHICAL she is.

But in autumn, you get no time off school/work at all, the weather’s lousy and barely anything interesting happens.  Oh, don’t try to tell me Firework Night is interesting.  I like watching fireworks as much as the next person, but any fun you get from that is tainted by legions of Mr Daly clones whinging about how dangerous and expensive fireworks are. 

Hm?  I thought Mr Daly was a moron and you didn’t care what he thought?

Halloween has a similar problem, with narrow-minded people going on about how evil and disconcerting it is, but nothing can ruin it for me. 

…But they can ruin Firework Night?  Why?

And in real life, the Mr Daly clones usually praise Firework Night to the skies as the moral, patriotic answer to Halloween.  So this makes even less sense.

And, judging by the fact that he was still wearing his tiger costume, Ben was the same. 

“It’s my fault, really,” Svetlana told me, “Ben saw all the Halloween stuff in Woollies and he got scared. 

It’s set in 2002, remember.  A simpler time, when Woolworths were still in business, e-mail didn’t exist, and exploding light fixtures could not only kill you but completely disintegrate your remains.  Ah, the good old days.

So I told him about Halloween, and how you can dress up as whatever you like.  And he got all excited and yelled, ‘Tiger!'”  She groaned.  “I don’t know what the obsession with tigers is.  Most kids his age are into dinosaurs.”

She parked her car outside somewhere that was probably a house.  Well, it had a garden and curtains at the window, so it couldn’t have been a multi-storey carpark.

I think the “multi-storey car park” simile is supposed to indicate that the house is really big, not that it’s a hideous concrete rectangle.  But you never know.

But nothing else made it look like a place where someone might actually live. 

“Svetlana!” I hissed, “Are you sure this is where Jean lives?”

“Yeah.  Why?”

“Well, it’s huge, for a start.  And look at this.”  I pointed to the sign.

Wild Cherry House

Owner/Occupier: Ms E.B. Foster

“I mean, it clearly has her name on it!  It can’t possibly be hers!”

“Impressive or what?” Svetlana grinned, “This is why everyone keeps calling me Cherry.  One of Jean’s family- might have been James, actually- called me ‘our very own wild cherry’ at a party for some reason- his idea of a joke- and everyone started teasing me afterwards.”  She shrugged, and carried Ben out of the car; nearly dropping him on the limo that was parked beside us.  “So if Joe tells you it’s because I have a reputation for seducing virginal boys, he’s lying.”

“Why did James call you that, exactly?” I laughed.  Some people have a very strange sense of humour.

“He’d just made this speech about how I spent so much time round Wild Cherry House, coming up with ideas for Blaze, I was basically like part of the furniture.”  She pointed at the haggard trees around the path, making the pine trees further on look freakishly healthy.  “Like these cherry trees, get it?  Not really all that funny, but everyone laughed anyway.  They were taking the piss for months afterwards.” 

See?  I told you the explanation was stupid.

She paused, looking a little nervous.  “Anja, could you take Ben into the garden while I go and talk to Jean?  Only she might still be depressed about Joe, see, and if Ben mentions him it’ll only make it worse.”

“She might still be depressed about the gruesome death of her beloved nephew last week.  Don’t ask me why.”

Ben was already racing across the grass, his tail trailing behind him, so I ran behind the house after him.  Even after the rain, the grass was the same colour as lime jelly with streaks of mud. 

In October.  I hope the local council knows that Auntie Jean’s lawn is genetically modified.

Ben stopped in front of a circular white figure on a ledge, partially hidden by the pine trees, and turned to me.

It was a stone statue of what appeared to be a snail.  The snail was about three metres tall, if you counted the antennae.

“Is Sammy,” Ben explained.

Well, I’m glad that particular mystery was solved!  I’m not sure I could have taken any more suspense.

“Oh, right!  Sammy the snail,” I replied, my confusion over who Sammy was replaced by confusion over why anyone would want a snail in their garden.

Why wouldn’t they?  That’s probably the single best idea in this whole story.

Ben saw I was interested, so he decided to elaborate.  “Is my friend,” he said proudly, “Sammy!  Say hello Auntie Annie!”

I paused for what seemed like a good amount of time.  “Yep, definitely heard that.  He said it very quietly, though.  Is he a shy snail?”

“Yeah.  Snails are shy.  ‘Swhy they don’t talk much.”  He grinned at me.  “Sammy likes you.”

And that was another Cute Ben Moment, ladies and gentlemen!  Don’t complain- he’s pretty much the only character who consistently acts like a real person.

I didn’t notice that Svetlana was behind me until she started talking.  “Jean said I had to open Blaze again.  Let’s go.”

She kept looking nervously at the snail.  For some reason, Ben’s beloved Sammy was really spooking her.  Ben gave her that angry look that two-year-olds are especially good at.  “Mummy doesn’t like Sammy,” he said grumpily.

“Don’t be silly, Ben,” Svetlana murmured unconvincingly, “Of course I like Sammy.”  She looked me in the eye, and mouthed something.  I couldn’t really tell what she was trying to say, but by now I know for a fact it was “I’ll tell you later.”

And we’ve reached the halfway point!  Next time, we meet Auntie Jean, who points out the plot holes for us.  I can’t wait!