Kiss Me First (22 page)

Once started, I found that I rather enjoyed the chopping. I concentrated on cutting the discs identically, each one approximately a centimetre thick. These I arranged like those chips they have in casinos, ten to a column. The repetitive, methodical nature of the work made my thoughts drift, and I started remembering lunches at Granny Margaret’s. Mum and I visited her three times a year, on Boxing Day, Easter Sunday and her birthday, and she always served tinned carrots. It was the only time I ever ate vegetables. Mum said it was a pretty good deal; after all, most parents made their children eat vegetables every day.

I don’t know why we called her Granny Margaret; it wasn’t as if I had another grandmother to distinguish her from. She lived in sheltered housing in Kent and always had the heating right up, even at Easter. When mum started to be intolerant of the high temperatures, she refused to turn it down. ‘We all have our ailments,’ she said, as if her rheumatism was equivalent to mum’s MS. She had lived in Elm Tree Court for as long as I could remember, since my Granddad Geoffrey died in 1994, but she still seemed annoyed to be there. She was always complaining about the staff not doing things right, and the other residents being too old. She also thought everyone was trying to take advantage of her and rip her off; even her own daughter. Mum would bring tins of biscuits and a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream and Granny Margaret would examine them suspiciously, sniffing the bottle and putting on her glasses to read the ingredients, as if hoping to find poison listed on there. Then she’d serve up a horrible meal, like a dry chicken breast, and always with these disgusting, mushy little rounds of carrot.

I could never think of anything to say to her, and she didn’t have much interest in me either, even on her birthday when, on mum’s suggestion, I gave her a DVD compilation I’d made of the best moments of
Bargain Hunt
. The only time she had perked up was in 2007 when we thought I might go to college; when mum mentioned it, she asked when I would be leaving and questioned mum about the dimensions of my bedroom and whether this big, ugly wardrobe she had would fit in. On the train back, mum explained that Granny Margaret thought that after Granddad’s heart attack, mum should have asked her to come and live in Leverton Street, even though she had visited once and knew that we only had two bedrooms. She thought that mum had made a mistake by not getting married, because then mum would have a bigger house. She was a bit ‘old-fashioned’ about the fact my father wasn’t around.

The next visit, when she found out we had decided against college, she was even grumpier than usual. When I went for a third biscuit she pulled the tin out of reach, and announced I was too fat. ‘You over-indulge her,’ she said to mum, as if I wasn’t there. ‘A big, weird child. You’re never going to find someone to take her off your hands.’ Mum’s usual way of dealing with her was to be polite, but that time she got angry and said that she never wanted me to be ‘taken off her hands’ and that if by ‘over-indulgence’ she meant letting me be my own person and showing me love, then she would continue to do so, thank you very much.

When it got to the point when mum was unable to get down to Kent to visit, there was no question of Granny Margaret coming up to London. She didn’t even come to the funeral. Instead, she sent me a note to read out at the service.
My daughter Susan was a good child who had a range of hobbies and interests. Although her adult life did not entirely fulfil the promise of her youth, she endured setbacks with resilience and made the most of the circumstances in which she
found herself.
Needless to say, I didn’t read it out.

I was so immersed in my thoughts that my chopping had slowed right down, to the point where my knife just rested on the carrot. My reverie was broken by Deirdre putting her hand on my shoulder.

‘Maybe hurry things up a bit, yeah?’

I looked around and saw that everyone else had finished and big metal urns were already steaming away over the fire. I quickened my pace and finished the supply of carrots. Whilst the stew was cooking everyone hung around, sitting on the floor and smoking their tiny cigarettes, which needed to be re-lit every few minutes. Annie had gone back to the van to change the baby, so I sat down next to the old man with white chest hair and floppy hat who I had talked to on my second day. On his other side were a couple who I couldn’t immediately identify in the flickering firelight.

‘Hey, how you doing,’ the man said, and then turned to the couple. ‘You know, she took a taxi all the way from the airport.’

This is apparently how I am known here. The male half of the couple asked, ‘How much did that cost you?’

When I told him, and he had done the usual sucked-in breath, hand-waving reaction to the amount, the man said to his female friend, ‘There was that woman last year who got a taxi to Granada, do you remember?’

I hadn’t been paying much attention, but at this I snapped alert, remembering the email Tess received not long after check-out, from her friend Jennifer claiming – mistakenly, I had thought – to have spotted her at the Alhambra in Granada.

‘When was this?’ I asked.

August, they said.

I showed them Tess’s picture, and they conferred and said that yes, it could have been her.

It was the most definite response I had got so far to my enquiries. On further questioning the couple said that they had been at the commune for two months the previous summer, and were sure she had been here when they arrived. A few days after they had arrived she had gone to Granada, then returned to the commune, where she stayed for another week or so before leaving. To where, they didn’t know. She had camped alone, as I had guessed. I would have thought that she would have kept herself to herself, but apparently not: she was quite sociable, they said, and had often joined others in the communal area.

I asked what the woman had talked about.

‘She didn’t speak much,’ the man said. ‘She was quiet.’

‘She said she liked my necklace,’ the woman said.

‘How did she seem?’ I asked.

The woman shrugged. ‘She was shanti,’ which, it transpired, meant ‘calm and happy’ in hippy speak. Then, she said, ‘I remember. Her name was Joan.’

Because of her accent, I misheard the name as ‘John’.

‘But that’s a boy’s name.’

‘No, no,’ she said. ‘J-O-A-N.’

Joan, as you might remember, was the name of Tess’s cat, the one who disappeared. It could have been a coincidence, and I tried not to get too excited. Besides, even if this ‘Joan’ was Tess, I was still no closer to finding out what happened to her. Nonetheless, this was by far the most positive identification, and I felt content that my suspicion she had come to the commune could be proved right.

The couple turned back to talk to each other, and I gazed into the fire. I’ve always liked fires; I used to make them in the back garden of Leverton Street when I got home from school. Here, potatoes were baking in the outskirts, and I watched their skins wrinkle and blacken. There were now a lot of people gathered around, waiting for the food, and loud chatter in various languages rose above the ever-present sound of bongos and guitars. One man had brought out a long stick that made a rude noise when he blew into it.

When the stew was finally ready, people massed greedily around the pots, clutching tin plates that they seemed to have provided themselves. No one had mentioned that we had to bring our own plates, and of course I didn’t have one, but Annie had brought me one of her spares from the van. I waited until the queue had thinned out and then went up and asked the man serving for a tiny portion of stew and took three pieces of heavy white bread. I sat down beside Annie and Milo and was just about to start eating when Deirdre made this noise, a kind of ‘Ommmm’. Everyone else replied, ‘Ommmmm,’ and then there was a cry: ‘Thanks for the food!’

I had intended to eat quickly and go back to my tent but I found myself remaining seated after I had finished. To my surprise, I found I was quite enjoying myself. As night fell lots of people had put on hoodies, like me, and I felt more similar to them compared to the daytime when they had their brown flesh on display. I remember looking around at all the people there, hoods up and faces illuminated by firelight as they chatted away to each other, and thinking that they all looked nice. More than that: at that moment I had this sense that they were not just random strange foreign people but that we were all part of a group, like a tribe resting the night before a long trek or battle. The children were running around, feeding bits of stew to the dogs – who, I noticed, quietly spat them out again. The moon was bright and low in the sky, and stars were twinkling like they were sending me messages in Morse code. Someone kept throwing orange peel onto the fire, which made a lovely smell, and there was another sweet, acrid odour, too. Once I started noticing, it seemed like everyone was smoking except me – even Annie accepted a drag of a cigarette, and I saw Bandit showing his admiring neighbour a stick of something strongly scented that looked like green candyfloss.

Sitting beside me was an oldish woman called Esme, who had tiny plaits in her grey hair and a completely flat chest. She was engaged in an animated discussion with the man crouched in front of her about the pros and cons of running vehicles on vegetable oil. On my other side, Annie was talking to Synth, a dreadlocked woman around the same age who had also bought her children with her to the commune. I tuned in to their conversation. Annie was telling her about her furniture, and how she wanted to start making it with bamboo. Synth asked her where she was planning to source it.

‘China,’ replied Annie,

‘Are you happy with that?’ said Synth.

‘Well,’ said Annie. ‘It’s a very sustainable material.’

Synth shook her head, and then launched into some speech, most of which was drowned out because the man had started blowing his rude stick again. When he paused for breath, I heard Synth say, ‘. . . and the pandas?’

Annie laughed.

‘Oh, I think there’s enough bamboo to go round. Aren’t there only about eight pandas left, anyway?’

At this, Synth got even more animated, her long bony hands slicing the air as she spoke. ‘They’re not helped by China exporting all the bamboo. They need to eat tonnes of it each day.’

Annie’s expression was the closest to cross as I had seen it, her cheeks flushed red. I leant forward, raising my voice so Synth could hear.

‘What’s wrong with letting pandas die out?’

Synth and Annie both turned to look at me.

‘What do you mean?’ said Synth.

‘Extinction is a part of life on earth. And if pandas are inefficient and ill-equipped to deal with life, then we should let them die out. Especially if they’re an obstacle to more important species. We shouldn’t be sentimental. We should only save things that are worth saving.’

Now it was Synth’s turn to be annoyed. ‘That’s a ridiculous thing to say, and—’

She was cut off by the arrival of Bianca, the tiny, shaven-headed woman who had accosted me on my second day. She crouched down in front of me and started to speak quietly. I couldn’t hear over the crackle of the fire so had to lean closer and closer until my cheek was almost next to hers before I could hear that she was still talking about the toilet and why I should use the proper place.

‘I can’t believe you’re still going on about that!’ I replied. ‘I’ve dealt with enough shit in my life, OK, and I don’t want to see yours.’ And then, to clarify, I added, even more loudly, ‘I had to wipe my mum’s bottom.’

I think I was as surprised as Bianca at my outburst. As I say, I think I had become intoxicated by the drug smoke around me. At the time, though, it felt good to speak like that. Bianca gave me a funny look and moved to speak to Esme, and I turned my attention back to Annie and Synth. Synth was still rabbiting on, and I caught the word ‘karma’. What this was in connection with I didn’t know, but the word triggered something in me and again I felt compelled to intervene.

‘Karma doesn’t exist,’ I said.

Again, Annie and Synth looked over. Synth said, this time in a measured voice, ‘I don’t mean to be rude and you’re entitled to your opinion, but really, how old are you? What do you know?’

‘It’s’ – I tried to think of the word Tess would use – ‘bollocks. Bollocks. Life isn’t fair. There isn’t this kindly force rewarding you for good deeds. My mum was a good person who had never done anything wrong, and she got MS.’

Annie put her arm around my shoulders. I didn’t shrug her off.

‘Oh you poor thing. That’s very tough.’

Then Synth started talking again, tapping on Annie’s back to get her attention. Annie turned back to her, still keeping her arm around me, and I listened to them resume their conversation without really hearing the words. I looked at the other people around the fire, everyone yapping away, and now it didn’t feel like we were all in it together; instead, it seemed to me that no one really cared what anyone else was saying. They pretended to, but really they just wanted to transmit and not receive. What would it take, I thought, for them to be genuinely interested in what I had to say?

I squeezed Annie’s knee hard, so that she turned to me. Synth’s face contorted with annoyance at the interruption.

‘I killed my mum,’ I said, in a low voice.

Annie’s arm suddenly felt very heavy across my shoulders.

‘What do you mean?’ she said, quietly.

‘I killed her. With morphine.’

She was silent. The hiss of the fire was deafening, the other voices miles away. Then I lifted her arm from my shoulder, stood up and went back to the tent.

Ten minutes later, Annie came back. I heard the sounds of her putting Milo and the baby to bed in the van, and then her footsteps approaching the tent. She knelt down and unzipped the door.

‘Do you want to talk?’ she said.

‘OK,’ I replied, and proceeded to tell her everything. From the first time mum fell over, that Saturday night in 2002, as she was carrying the foot spa full of warm water over from the kitchen. The expressions on people’s faces on Kentish Town High Street when we went past, moving out of the way because they thought she was drunk, and how I would run after them and inform them that that wasn’t the case. The nappies. The hoist. Her useless, dead-bird hands in her lap.