Free Welcome to My World by Miranda Dickinson Page B

you, our Eth,” she used to say to me.’
    ‘Don’t you mean “psychic” . . . ?’
    ‘Now, I’ve never held much with all that mumbo-jumbo rubbish, to tell the truth. But every now and again I get my feeling and I have to say, stuff happens , like.’
    Although Mrs Bincham was smiling, Harri didn’t exactly feel reassured. ‘So what do I do now?’
    Mrs Bincham’s grin broadened. ‘Nothing you can do, our kid. Just got to sit it out, I s’pose. So you have another bit of Chocolate Crispy Bakewell while you’re waiting and I’m sure that’ll take your mind off it, eh?’
    Harri surrendered to the inevitable and reached into the Tupperware box.
    She should have been used to the Big F by now – although she had never really thought about it in that way before. She had become accustomed to the strange mix of joys and sorrows that twisted and twirled her from one event to the next, often unannounced. It was just life.
    She remembered her grandma once saying: ‘Life is like a wild pony – you can never tame it. But if you grab its mane and hold on with all your might, it will be the most thrilling ride you’ll ever have.’ Grandma Langton had lived in a tiny cottage on the edge of Dartmoor, where Harri and her parents would visit during the summer holidays. As a little girl, Harri had liked nothing better than to hold tightly on to Grandma’s hand as they battled against the elements to climb the hill behind the cottage and gaze out across the windswept moor to where the wild ponies grazed. Even as a small child, she’d appreciated and envied the beautiful creatures’ freedom, walking and cantering wherever they pleased. The thought of jumping on one of their backs and taking off across the wildly undulating moor towards distant hills was at once impossibly exciting and ridiculously scary, but Harri longed to be as carefree as they appeared to be. As for Grandma, her own ‘thrilling ride’ had come to an abrupt halt when Harri was eleven – life throwing her from its back for the last time.
    Life, or fate – or whatever you chose to call it – had certainly taken Harri for more than one breathless ride over her twenty-eight years – although it had to be said that most had been brutally scary rather than exhilarating. Losing one parent to cancer was bad enough; losing both was cruel in the extreme, not least because her mother’s malignant tumour was diagnosed while her father was enduring his last weeks of life. As Dad lay on the sofa in the family home, too weak to move, but still somehow able to smile and joke (which he accomplished with aplomb right up until he finally succumbed to unconsciousness), Mum made two sets of funeral arrangements – one for him, one for her – sitting at the kitchen table making copious lists for Harri ‘for when the time arrives’.
    Dad’s cancer had taken him slowly, a long-drawn-out process over nearly six years, which crumpled the once strong and vital six-foot-three former rugby player into a pitiful heap of skin and bone arranged painfully across the old Dralon settee in the living room. In contrast, Mum’s illness took hold at lightning speed: five and a half months from the diagnosis to her funeral at St Mary’s, Stone Yardley’s parish church. Five months after burying her husband, Mum went to join him and Harri was alone in the world. Of course, she had friends. Viv and Stella rallied round, cooking meals (Viv) and getting her out of the house to go shopping or for walks (Stella), whilst Auntie Rosemary came to stay for three months, helping Harri to put the family home on the market and, eventually, find the tiny, ivy-covered cottage that was to become her own, bought with the money left to her by her parents.
    Her father’s illness meant that holidays were spent near to home or at least a major hospital: the Lake District was about the furthest they dared travel and this was only because they had family living in Kendal, should an emergency arise.