Page 46 of A Sky Full of Stars
‘I don’t really want to discuss it over the phone. Can you just come over? Please?’
It was rare for his sister to be so cagey, and Tristan’s alarm bells started to ring. He knew he didn’t really have any other choice but to agree.
‘Of course,’ he said gently. ‘I’ll be over as soon as I’ve finished up here. Do you want me to bring anything?’
Thea gave a short laugh. ‘No. Just yourself. And don’t worry about dinner – I’ll sort you something out.’
They said goodbye and ended the call. Tristan’s attention shifted back to the paperwork on his desk, and the inevitable arrival of new emails. After ten minutes, though, he found he was just staring at things, and not really taking anything in. His mind felt as though it was being unravelled in at least three different directions, and he couldn’t concentrate. Sighing, he shut down his computer and shoved the papers on his desk into the top drawer. There was no point trying to do anything else today. Locking the door behind him, he headed off to see Thea.
45
It took fifteen minutes to drive from the observatory site to Thea’s house, and Tristan spent most of it trying to calm his racing thoughts. He was someone who needed to focus on one thing at a time: he’d always found multi-tasking overwhelming, and his laser focus on individual projects was what made him so good at his job. The problem was, when things came at him simultaneously, it took him a while to be able to separate out the strands. In an attempt to calm himself, he ran through what the planned layout of the Observatory Field site was going to be once the demolition started. The land around the building had already been flattened, and was a wide, long, smooth stretch of compacted rust-orange Somerset earth, ready for the heavy loaders and JCBs to come in. Off to the far side, where the access road had already been laid to hardcore, was his Portakabin.
His thoughts progressed to his own professional path for the next couple of months. He would be on site, and then back in head office, checking in remotely and in person from time to time. His involvement with the site would gradually taper off as it began being populated with houses, and the sales team, already selling off plan even before a brick was laid, took on the bulk of the management. Then, it would be pastures and projects new. That strange state of limbo between the breaking of the first earth and the day the first owners and tenants moved in always felt surreal: as though he couldn’t fully move on until the places came back to life with their new occupants, having been razed to the ground and rebuilt. The rise from the ashes, and the sense that he was helping to create something new was what drove him and gave him passion for the job.
Once he was outside Thea’s house, he parked up behind her car on the driveway. He didn’t have to knock as Thea was at the door before he’d even locked the car.
‘Thanks for coming over, Tris,’ she said, giving him a nervous smile. ‘I’m sorry about sounding so dramatic on the phone.’
‘What’s up?’ Tristan asked as he followed Thea back through the small hallway and into the kitchen, where she’d put the kettle on to boil. ‘You did sound a bit cloak and dagger. Is there a problem with one of the kids?’ He listened for the familiar sound of footsteps on the stairs, but the house was surprisingly quiet. ‘Where are they both, anyway?’
Thea, despite her serious demeanour, relaxed a little. ‘I’ve had a bit of a parenting result tonight,’ she replied. ‘They’re both at sleepovers so I don’t have to go and get them until tomorrow morning.’
‘So, were you planning a wild night on the town, then?’ Tristan teased. ‘Don’t let me stop you if you’ve got a hot date!’
‘The only hot date I’ve got is with another cup of tea and the last series ofCobra Kai!’ Thea smiled. ‘I’ve always had a thing for brooding blond types, as you know.’
‘TMI, sis.’ Tristan’s expression grew serious again just as hers did. ‘So, what is it you need to talk to me about? Is Cora having trouble at school again?’
Thea shook her head. ‘No, it’s nothing like that.’ She poured hot water into two mugs and left the teabags to infuse. Leaning against the kitchen worktop, Tristan waited for Thea to enlighten him.
‘I’m worried about Gran,’ she said. ‘I popped in to see her earlier, and she seemed a bit, oh, I don’t know… discombobulated, I suppose. She had a whole load of paperwork out on her kitchen table, but it was old stuff, not current. She kept looking through it while I was there, but when I asked her what it was, she wouldn’t tell me. She just said that she thought she had some stuff that Charlotte might find useful for the observatory’s archive, and then changed the subject.’
Tristan felt the encroachment of unease, just as he had a couple of weeks back when he’d asked Charlotte to keep an eye on Lorelai. At the time, Lorelai had brushed off their concern, but that, added to Thea’s description now, suggested that they might have cause to worry about their grandmother. ‘Could you get a look at the paperwork in more detail while you were there?’ he asked, accepting his cuppa and a chocolate bar from Thea’s novelty dog biscuit barrel. It had been a long time since lunch.
‘Nope,’ Thea replied. ‘It all looked old, though – handwritten letters, and the kind of stuff that was churned out of one of those dot-matrix printers in the eighties and nineties. Had the punched edges around the borders and everything. Before I could ask her about it, she’d shoved it back in an old blue document wallet and into her bureau. But whatever it was, it seemed to be unsettling her.’ Thea sipped her tea. ‘I might be over-reacting, but this can be the way dementia starts, can’t it? Odd, repetitive behaviour? Fixations with things that seem irrelevant? What if Gran’s getting Alzheimer’s or something similar?’ She paused, as if saying it out loud was akin to swearing in church.
Tristan knew he needed to reassure his sister, and fast. She had a lot on at the moment, with Cora’s behaviour, and the stresses and strains of buying a new house that hadn’t even been built yet. He didn’t want Thea to worry about their grandmother until they both knew there was a real reason to.
‘I’ll check in on her more often from now on,’ Tristan replied. ‘I’ve moved to the site now so for the next few months it’ll be easy to pop down after work, or even walk down at lunchtime and see how she is. If she is starting to go downhill, it’ll be easy to spot.’
‘But perhaps not so easy to get her to acknowledge it.’ Thea picked at a flake of glaze on the side of her mug. ‘They say that people in the early stages of dementia can be very reticent about admitting it and seeking help. And we both know how stubborn Gran is, even without taking that into account.’ She shook her head. ‘I just don’t know how we should proceed.’
‘For the moment, I think we just need to keep an eye on her,’ Tristan said as calmly as he could. ‘It might just be that she was frustrated because she couldn’t find what she was looking for. She’s always joking about how we’re going to have our work cut out for us, clearing her house, when she’s gone. Maybe that’s not so far from the truth. Now that Observatory Field is well and truly out of the family, too, perhaps she just wanted to go through the paperwork and start getting rid of it. It could be as simple as that.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Thea replied. ‘Gran’s always been so strong, so together. I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like if she really is beginning to decline.’
‘Let’s cross that bridge when – and if – we come to it.’ Tristan sipped his tea. ‘We’ll both be a lot more hands-on over the next few months, and as soon as your house is ready, you’ll literally be across the woods from her. If there is something to worry about, we’ll see it, and we can deal with it. Together.’
‘Thanks, Tris.’ Thea gave him a shaky smile. ‘You can always talk me down off the ceiling. I suppose, if I’m being honest, Gran might not be the only one getting the collywobbles about the observatory. I know it sounds mad, given what we’ve all lived with for the past few decades, but now it’s really, truly, all going to change, I wish I felt more excited. Instead, I just feel… numb. I mean, Observatory Field has loomed over us all for our entire lives, like a mausoleum. It’s been a constant reminder of what happened to Mum and Dad, and in the next few weeks it’s going to be gone. I just don’t know how I’m supposed to feel. Does that make any sense?’
Tristan nodded, but only because he wanted to reassure his sister. She was always so much better at putting things into words than he was. In truth, he still couldn’t articulate his emotions in a way that made a tenth as much sense. All he really knew was that it felt as though there was something unfinished inside him, something that would, he hoped, wrap itself into a neat little parcel and disappear to the back of his mind once he witnessed the observatory being demolished.
‘Not knowing how to feel seems perfectly reasonable right now,’ he said eventually. ‘I think we all just have to take things one day at a time, just like we did when Mum and Dad died. But I’m here for you, Thea, and we’ll both be there for Gran, whatever happens.’
‘Thanks, Tris.’ Thea blinked a couple of times before she grabbed their now empty mugs of tea. ‘Do you want to stay for dinner?’
‘Thanks, but I’m hoping I’ll have plans.’ Tristan couldn’t suppress a quick smile at the thought that he might see Charlotte later.
