The Drowning by Valerie Mendes Read Free Book Online Page B

cafés. Our regulars will have heard what’s happened. They’ll understand – and they’ll be back. Nobody could expect us to open tomorrow as if nothing—”
    “But the money!”
    “This isn’t about money, Dad. We’ll manage.”
    “So when—”
    “When you’re ready. ”Jenna perched on a corner stool. “We’ve got stuff to do.”
    “You mean—” Dad’s face sagged – “Benjie’s funeral.”
    “Yes. There’ll have to be an inquest . . . and a funeral. And last night, I was thinking. Benjie’s school—”
    “What about it?”
    “The Head. She’ll need to know what’s happened. She’ll want to make an announcement about him. She has to be told.”
    Dad peeled off his glasses. He wiped his face with his sleeve. “Does she?”
    “I thought I’d go to see her, at her house, this afternoon. Leah will be able to tell me where she lives. Benjie went off with guys he knew. I want her to ask his class whether anyone was with him yesterday, whether any of them knows what happened.” Jenna’s head started to throb with the persistence of her thoughts. “I expect the police will go to the school, talk to Benjie’s class, maybe to the whole school. I don’t know.”
    “I can’t handle this.” Dad shook on his feet.
    “Yes, you can.” Gently, Jenna took his glasses out of his hand. She polished the lenses with a clean paper serviette. “Here. Go and sit down. I’ll make a pot of coffee. Then we’ll write a list.”
    “What kind of—”
    “Everything we need to do, the people we need to ring, the order in which everything’s got to be done and who’s going to do it.” She dug a piece of paper out of her pocket. “Here . . . All our suppliers. You’ll need to tell them as soon as possible we don’t want deliveries this week. Otherwise we’ll have crates of vegetables and cheese and ham sitting in the courtyard at dawn.”
    Dad slumped at one of the tearoom tables. “We’ve got to get through this, haven’t we?” He put his head in his hands.
    “Yes,” said Jenna firmly. “We have.”
    Dad raised his head. “Jenn.”
    “What?”
    “This list . . . Could we leave Mum off it?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She and Benjie . . . you know . . . he was the light of her life.”
    “You don’t need to tell me that!”
    “I don’t know how she’s going to cope without him. Last night in the car, she said some terrible things. If we could take the chores off her back for a bit, do them ourselves, just the two of us, I think she’ll—”
    “Fine,” Jenna said bitterly. “We’ll leave Mum off the list.”
    “We can tell her about all the arrangements, can’t we? You know, for the funeral and everything. Pretend we’re consulting her. Just so she knows what’s happening.”
    “Sure. Whatever.”
    “Jenn?”
    She paused with her hand on the coffee grinder.
    Dad said, “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”
    Jenna pressed the button. The grinder screamed into life.
    Without me, you’d still have a son.
    That’s what Mum is lying upstairs thinking . . .
    Blaming it all on me.
    There isn’t a chance in hell now that we’ll ever make it up.

    Afterwards, Jenna had no clear memory of how she survived the next two weeks.
    She only knew she had to be strong: for herself, for Dad, for those she loved and who had loved Benjie. Aunt Tamsyn, trapped at an agents’ casting conference in New York, in tears on the phone, could not be at the funeral. Everybody else was there: the Head from Benjie’s school, Leah, some of her older students who knew Jenna, some of Jenna’s schoolfriends, Imogen and Morvah, standing either side of her, Dad and what looked like half of St Ives, regulars at the tea room, friends he had known since childhood.
    They stood in the churchyard in Carbis Bay, under a relentless beating midday sun, watching helplessly as Benjie’s coffin dropped into the baked earth.
    Mum gave a shout of pain.
    The morning they reopened the tea room, Mum came