Out on a Limb (7 page)

Chapter 7

P
OSTCARD : FRONTSIDE
–
OLIVE GROVE
, wizened person, flagon, donkey. Backside –
Hi all! Hic! xxx

Oh, oh,
oh
. What I wouldn’t give to be sitting in an olive grove right now. What I wouldn’t give to be sitting in
any
sort of grove right now. What I wouldn’t give to be sitting, period.

Memo to self: Friday : a.m.

If not raining, cut grass , bath dog. p.m. DO NOTHING.

If raining, a.m. brush dog, Go shopping. Lunch with Dee. p.m. DO NOTHING.

Things I do NOT wish to be doing on my day off: driving to my mother’s house, hoovering her carpets, scraping – indeed, even
touching
– any part of Hugo’s rancid tropical fish ensemble complete with nodding Victorian novelty diving person, collecting up post, putting rubbish out for dustmen, watering pot plants (with exception of the cactus in the downstairs loo, which is not to be watered at any point
ever
), locating and removing Hugo’s car keys (they’ll not be getting their hands on
that
), gathering up black jacket, beige skirt, peep-toed lemon sandals, eau de nil cardigan, dressing table mirror, bottle of Opium, all knickers in top right dressing table drawer, all slips in bottom left dressing table drawer, other reading glasses, thing in bathroom for sandpapering hard skin on feet (eeewww), library books (3 only – Corinne can take
his
back) and taking said spoils (bar the books – another errand) over to Pru’s house. In Bristol. Oh, and bringing my mother back to my house.

Things I am doing on my day off. See above.

The cul de sac my mother lives in is one of a kind rarely seen in suburban Britain for many a year. It is in a little pocket that time recently forgot. Every house, without exception, has net curtains at the windows. I wonder, as I drive along it, how this can be. Do potential purchasers, having made the cultural leap into a non-net curtain hanging lifestyle, simply throw their hands up in horror, do a three-point turn in the bit of road reserved (and
always
available) for the purpose, then drive off again shaking their heads? Similarly, do potential purchasers that are still very much net-aware fall upon The Myrtles (for that is the name of the cul de sac), in raptures of net-fuelled delight? Sad to say that were I to take a turn around The Myrtles with a house move in mind, I would definitely be one of the former. Not because I hold net curtain owners to be a lesser kind of life form, but simply because people with net curtains, in the main, are more mature, in the main, and more quiet, in the main, and are therefore likely, in the main, to be more than averagely horrified if Jake and his drum kit and his skateboard moved in. And outside almost every house sits a sensible car, all of them sparkling like extremely smug pins. Always a reliable clinical sign.

My mother’s house (which, strangely, is how I have come to refer to it now that it isn’t any more) has a big For Sale board outside. This is as of last Wednesday, and is the principal reason I am here today. On principle, I tabled the motion that it ought to be Corinne (and her smarmy long-lost brother, for that matter) who was earmarked for the scrub up before people came-a-viewing, but my mother was quick to point out that a) she has not the least intention of having that woman rummaging through her personals, and b) neither does she want some ‘trumped up’ estate agent, who’s no better than they should be, passing judgement on the state of her carpets and surfaces unless she’s one hundred percent sure they are all up to scratch. Which is fair comment, I suppose, because neither would I. Anyway, once the necessary complement of trips have been made to divest said house of all her belongings (which will be many, and many of them Doug-based – bet he’s pleased), Corinne can clean her bloody house herself. No decision has yet been arrived at re the fish.

Yet for all this fighting talk my mother is still so damn
jolly
. Preternaturally jolly, disgustingly jolly, and the only reason I haven’t yet passed comment about it is that I’m almost sure I know exactly why that is, and can’t face the conversation I know will ensue. I need time to adjust. To gird what needs girding. And to prepare a watertight case for the defence.

I pull up and park my (dirty and dented) car across the drive – Hugo’s Nissan Sunny is going nowhere, after all – gather rubber gloves and bin bags and squirty stuff and Spike, then I march grimly up the path and let us both in.

Already it smells different. For one thing it no longer smells of my mother, or, rather, of the pot pourri refresher oils for which she has long had a fetish. Or of Hugo’s ‘occasional’ (where the word ‘occasional’ equals daily) cigars. Now the house is infused with that distinct but unmistakeable fragrance of being somewhere where nobody’s living. Dust, perhaps. Even though there’s no one to make it. Still air, marking time. Growing stale.

I pull my key out of the open door and step into the hallway. Such post that has been delivered is not on the doormat, but in a neat pile on the little semi-circular table by the stairs. I flip through it, wondering as I do so which bits of it I should take away. Just Mum’s? Hugo’s too? What’s the protocol for these things? I realise there probably isn’t one. I take Mum’s, plus the couple of letters addressed to them both, and make a mental note to ask her about the others.

The kitchen is grim. Not grim as in teenage under-bed-world grim. Just grim as in the way kitchens get to be grim when occupied by people who don’t feel any pressing need to make-over, de-clutter or otherwise tart up their lives. There is just stuff
every
where. Biscuit barrels, Tupperware containers, empty sherry bottles, egg-timers, expired airplants on amusingly shaped pebbles, ramekins full of used tea bags, spoon rests with stains on, tea towels stuffed randomly through the handles of cupboard doors. And all of it dominated by a pre-historic spider plant that’s wedged on a high shelf in the corner by the cooker, and from which a waterfall of dozens of little spider plants hang. And on almost every available square inch of the window sill, further baby spider plants burgeon from plastic flower pots on tide-marked saucers, trailing on the draining board, crawling into the sink, sidling along the by-ways of the worktop.

Spike , having sidled and found nothing to amuse him, is now clamouring for action by the back door. I find the correct key, then let him out into the garden, with instructions to go poo at will. And then I make a start on the fridge.

As I have had painful cause to acquaint myself with recently, t here’s nothing as revealing about a person (or persons), as a careful examination of the contents of their fridge. I bend down and gingerly acquaint myself with Mum and Hugo’s. No one has much been here since the day of the funeral, and though both Pru and I have made sorties with Mum to pick stuff up, we’ve none of us lingered here long enough to make forays into its sepulchrally lit interior.

It’s chock full, as expected. Though not remotely in the sense that you’d go ‘yeehah! Let’s eat!’. On the top shelf there are two dusty eggs, a small plastic bowl with seven wizened baked beans in, three almost empty jars of jam with rust accruing on the lids, a jar of pickled onions (one onion left), a folded butter wrapper and half an apple wrapped in cling film. I attempt to pick it up. Correction: apple puree.

On the lower shelf there is a similarly cling-filmed casserole dish (remaining contents taupe and unidentifiable), an empty Branston Pickle jar, a tea plate with half a dried-up lemon and a teaspoon on it, a third of a packet of supermarket own brand block margarine, about a sixth of a cucumber (now essentially slurry), another plastic bowl with two grey boiled potatoes in it, another folded butter wrapper (?), an open packet of streaky bacon (one streak remaining), a mug full of what I presume must be dripping and a fruits of the forest yoghurt with a violently stressed lid.

The door (in a nod towards health and fitness, I presume) contains four little bottles of bacterially beneficial yoghurt drink (way out of date), a small tub of eye gel, some interesting looking plastic eyewear called a Gunk Wonder Mask, the remains of a small bar of diabetic chocolate, a half full bottle of red wine with a kitchen roll stopper, and a carton of the dairy product formerly known as milk.

In the salad drawer there is nothing bar one cherry tomato, for which I am really most grateful.

I’m just pouring the curds and whey into the sink when I’m suddenly startled by a loud bang from upstairs. I turn the tap off and listen harder, but the silence is once again total and I wonder if I’m imagining things. I peer into the garden. Perhaps it was coming from outside. But then I hear it again. Accompanied this time by a sort of scraping noise. Definite. Actual. Real. And upstairs. And not a million miles removed from that bit at the beginning of
The Exorcist
when the mother thinks they have rats in the attic… Except she’s wrong and it turns out to be something much worse. I put down the milk carton and tiptoe to the kitchen door. If they’re rats, I decide, then they’re big ones. No.
Human
ones. There’s definitely somebody up there. Oh, God, I think. Burglars! But it surely can’t be burglars, can it? Who would be so brazen? It’s a sunny Friday lunchtime. We’re in net curtain land. There are Neighbourhood Watch plates on every other lamppost. Nothing bad can happen in The Myrtles, can it? But there’s something – no, some
one
– upstairs, that’s for certain. I feel a shiver of alarm. Hugo’s ghost? I hover some more in the kitchen doorway, anxious, a bit frightened, and not at all sure what to do.

But then I mentally shake myself. What sort of wimp
am
I? I decide upon action as opposed to evacuation and take four determined steps to the newel post.

‘Er…hello?’ I call up. No one responds. But then the scrapes become thunks. ‘Er…hello-oo?’ I say again.

But it/they can obviously not hear me calling, so now I take a tentative four or five steps up the stairs. Looking up now, I can just see the corner of the loft hatch, and the edge of a step ladder spread underneath. So I wasn’t imagining it. There
is
someone up there (rats – even giant rats – don’t set up ladders), but the question is, who can it be?

It’s not terribly long before I find out.

‘Hel-LOOO!!!’ I say again, albeit ready and braced. I can still be at the front door in seconds, if needs be, though something tells me a daylight-hours burglar at large would have altogether more finely honed hearing. Even so, my heart isn’t exactly on message. It’s chuntering away like a train now. After all, why wouldn’t a burglar burgle here? It’s unoccupied, inviting, full of silverware…cripes – they might well have even staked the place out. Oh, God! And what about Spike in the garden? I’m just dithering about whether to fetch him and then make a getaway via the side gate, when there’s a bump, then another, then some shuffling and banging. Then a new voice – a male one – shouts down ‘er…hello?’

And then says it again. I grip the stair rail tighter and try to keep calm. Would a house-breaker ever say ‘er…hello?’ when confronted? But then I realise I’m sure I’ve heard the voice before. And I’m just at the point of remembering where it was that I heard it when Gabriel Ash – well, his startled face, anyway – suddenly appears in what I can see of the hatch.

I start as well, and for a moment we’re both speechless. Then he grins at me.
Grins
! The cheek of the man! ‘What the
hell
do you think you’re doing here?’ I bark up at him.

‘Er…’ His face disappears back into the blackness for a moment, then his lower legs swing down through the hole. They hover, somewhat precariously, about a foot above the ladder, but though good sense would dictate that I go up and hold it, I decide that as he got himself up there unaided, he can bloody well get down by himself too. Which he does. And he’s got cobwebs in his hair. Possibly a family of migrant spiders as well, though he doesn’t seem to notice, in that way that men don’t. He pauses on the second to top step of the ladder and reaches back into the hatch to take hold of a box. Now I stomp up to the top of the stairs.

‘Well?’ I say again, ‘just what do you think you’re doing?’

He looks sheepish, but not that sheepish. And even a bit jovial. ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ he says nicely. ‘Did I scare you? I’m sorting some stuff out. In the attic. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here.’

‘More to the point,’ I point out crossly, ‘is that I didn’t know
you
were here. You frightened the life out of me!’ Which is somewhat overdoing it, as I’m patently alive still, but he deserves it anyway. He
could
have.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again, and I concede that he looks as if he is. Well, quite right too, frankly. ‘I didn’t hear you,’ he explains. ‘I’ve been down at the far end.’ He indicates the general direction. ‘Phew, but it’s dusty up there.’ He makes a few sweeps across his jeans, as if to illustrate, showering the carpet with bits of loft insulation. Then he follows my gaze. ‘Er, sorry,’ he says again.

‘Sorting
what
stuff exactly?’ I ask him pointedly, because the more I think about it, the crosser I find I am becoming. It’s one thing to find out that Mum’s home actually
isn’t
that, quite another to find Hugo’s prodigal son fetching up and breezing, bold as you like, through the contents of her loft. A bloody cheek, in fact.

‘Things of my father’s. My sister said –’

‘Oh, so that’s all right, then, is it?’ I snap. ‘God, I really can’t believe you people!’ I park my knuckles on my hips and glower up at him. ‘Not only have you turfed my mother out of her home before the crematorium cooker’s even gone cold, now you’re invading it as well! Look, it may well be that you own the house – though NOT the conservatory, so you can expect to hear a bit more about
that
, believe me – but tenants do have certain rights, you know. To privacy, at the very least. So neither of you has any right whatsoever to enter this property without prior permission from my mother.’

‘But –’

‘Yes, I
know
the estate agent has a key. Of course he does. He has to. And he at least does us the courtesy of telephoning first to see when it’s convenient to show people round. But it’s absolutely
not
okay for you to think you can just –’