Queen Mum (28 page)

*

*

Juno looked awful when she walked back in, like she was sick. I made her sit down while I hunted for hard liquor. Eventually I found some in the sideboard; two bottles of
Harvey’s Bristol Cream, one unopened, a half-bottle of Scotch and some Bailey’s. Dust flew out when I moved them around.

‘Mum and Dad weren’t big drinkers,’ she said, watching me pour Scotch into a mug.

‘I can see that. You want this topping up with coffee?’

She nodded, and the shadows under her eyes deepened as her head dipped forward.

After a minute she leant down to her bag and drew out the death certificate. She smoothed it out, then tossed it onto the table.

‘There it is,’ she said. ‘All done now.’

I said, ‘Did you get to say goodbye? I think that’s important.’

It sounds mad but we hadn’t talked about it last night. On the way out of the hospital Juno had been completely silent, and then in the car she’d started going on about food and how
hungry she was. When we got into the house she went all giddy and we ate our bangers ’n’ beans reminiscing about stupid Seventies TV adverts. Part of me was thinking, I should ask her
about how her mum went in the end. But there was something so sharp and glittering about Juno in that hour that I didn’t dare. I thought she might fracture, like a mirror.

‘I don’t know how you do say goodbye.’ Now she hunched round her mug and focused on the steam wisping above it. ‘I talked to her, don’t know if she was listening.
It was too late in the day to say a great deal.’

‘I think I understand,’ I said cautiously, though I wasn’t sure. ‘If my dad died tomorrow, I don’t know what I’d feel.’

‘Mmm,’ she said. I got the feeling she was a long way away.

‘It’s the weight of expectation, isn’t it? Knowing how you’re supposed to feel and then, if there’s a gap, it’s as if you’re inadequate. Someone should
tell you there aren’t any rules.’ The wail of a siren came through from the road at the front; police, ambulance? Someone in trouble, somewhere.

‘It’s like, people expect me to be getting over Joe, I’m sure they do – ’

‘Ally, they don’t. No one thinks that.’

‘ – making veiled references, it’s time to move on. But it wouldn’t matter if I believed them. Some mornings I wake up and it’s the same as the first day after,
just as raw.’ I knew I shouldn’t be talking about Joe, here; it was Juno’s time. But he’d become my reference point for almost everything. I tried: ‘You know how some
scientists believe everyone sees colours differently? Your blue might be my red, neither of us would ever know, and grief’s like that, I’m sure it is. There’s no point trying to
measure yours against someone else’s because we all see our own – colour.’

‘What do you mean, Ally?’ Juno put her mug down on the chair arm as if she hardly had the strength to hold it. All last night I’d felt her moving beside me, sleepless or in the
grip of unhappy dreams. Twice I’d reached across the bed and stroked her arm, and she’d gone still for a while. ‘It’s perfectly normal,’ and I was remembering an
American woman I’d seen on a counselling video saying this, very earnest, very deliberate, ‘not to feel a certain way after someone dies. There are no “shoulds”. It’s
a very confusing time. There may be a lot of hate about; you might even think you hate the person for leaving you and not trying hard enough to stay alive, even though you know that’s not
logical, but it doesn’t mean you—’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘What?’ My mind was still with the American’s row of pearls and blue round-neck blouse. She’d been sitting in a wing chair with a vase of flowers on a table next to her.
When I’d read the credits it said her son had died in a sailing accident. I was trying to imagine her rolling about on the carpet, screaming her throat raw, digging her fingernails into her
own cheeks.

‘You’ve got it the wrong way round,’ said Juno flatly. ‘My parents hated me.’

I heard what she said but I couldn’t make sense of it for a second. I must have looked simple, sitting there frowning at her. ‘No.’

‘Yes, Ally. They really did hate me.’

‘But, Juno,’ I burst out. ‘You’re the most lovely person – why would anyone, least of all—’

She cut me off, almost shouting: ‘Because they blamed me for my sister dying.’

She was on her feet.

‘Oh, God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t even know you had a sister.’

Juno with a sister!

‘I hardly did. She was only around till she was six. Wait.’ She walked quickly across the room and into the hall.

‘Does Manny know?’

She came back carrying two photo frames. ‘Here. I presumed you’d seen her pictures. I half thought you might say – although we did look similar, so . . . This is me, the thin
one, and this is Diane, two years younger. Like me but plumper.’

‘Christ, Juno, I thought that
was
you.’

‘Her name’s at the bottom; oh, no, only on the back. But this is her. June and Diane.’

She propped the pictures up on the table.

‘You look so alike.’

‘Yes. I think that made it worse.’

The clock struck four notes, quarter past one. I’d been going to heat up some soup.

‘How did she die?’

Juno sat down on the edge of the chair, looking at the photographs, her arms folded across her chest. I thought she was never going to answer. I had in my mind a road accident, Juno taking her
sister to the shops, telling her to cross without checking, I saw the street and the lorry, I saw Joe.

‘Meningitis,’ she said.

‘Meningitis? How was that your fault?’

‘It wasn’t. I was eight. But they wanted somebody to blame.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘What’s fair, Ally? Whoever said life is fair? All right, not blame. I don’t know how it worked. They closed up the day my little sister died. They took no interest in me any
more, I might as well have ceased to exist. If I’d run away from home, I don’t believe they’d have noticed. You don’t question these behaviours when you’re a child,
you just learn to adapt. I can see now they were desperate, but I still can’t forgive them; we lived alongside each other, and I left as soon as I possibly could, to make my own
family.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘I used to wish I was at boarding school. I think I’d have thrived away from home. I had all the Malory Towers series.’ She did a sad, fake laugh.

‘It is pretty desperate for the parents, you know. They might not have thought—’

‘But the way you are with Ben, you’re so good, it’s made me realize. You understood Joe dying was his loss too, and he saw professionals. Whereas my parents took all the grief
for themselves. They left me – stranded.’

A vision of a tiny Juno standing crying on an empty beach. ‘I can’t understand why your mum and dad would react like that.’

‘That’s because you’re a good person, Ally. I wouldn’t have expected you to get any of it. Your mind doesn’t work that way. Look how you’ve been with Ben,
amazing.’

‘Not really. Not such a good person, when you get down to it.’

‘Oh, you are.’

Down the hallway, the letterbox snapped and we both jumped.

‘Free paper,’ said Juno. ‘I’ll have to get that cancelled, one more thing on the list.’

‘I thought it was someone coming in,’ I said stupidly. ‘Tell me about Diane.’

‘No, I don’t want to go over it; don’t look like that. It’s not you that’s upset me, just forget it. Only, do you understand now? About my reaction, my mum
dying?’

I nodded.

‘
You
mustn’t be upset, Ally, it’s not your fault.’ She picked the photographs up casually, the way you’d pick up empty glasses after a party.
‘I’ll hang these back up. They’ll all be going with the house clearance soon, anyway.’

‘Oh.’

‘What?’

‘You shouldn’t throw those photos away.’

Juno turned, the pictures clasped against her sweater. ‘Do you want them?’

‘If they’re going in the skip. Are you really not keeping them?’

‘I have copies at home, in an album,’ she said.

I was so relieved to hear she was being practical, not callous.

‘OK, I’ll have them.’

Everyone has their own way, I reminded myself, as I leant the frames against the front door.

Juno did some telephoning while I packed, and then we got in the car.

Key in the ignition, I paused, looked across at her strained face. ‘Do you think I’m a good person?’

‘Absolutely. Better than me,’ she said.

We didn’t talk much on the way back. I was seeing Diane lying on a sofa, her mother giving her junior aspirin in a glass of water, telling Juno to stop making so much noise and go draw the
curtains. I wondered whether Juno had been asked to do something and failed, phone a doctor – but you wouldn’t make an eight-year-old do that. Perhaps Juno knew her sister was ill for
hours before she told anyone; maybe she saw the rash and didn’t say. But the rash only comes later. She could have had nothing to do with any of it, except in her mother’s head. I
imagined Diane being carried through hospital doors in a man’s arms and doctors rushing about, Diane laid out on a trolley with her legs all mottled. But it probably wasn’t like that at
all. I saw Joe, and gripped the steering wheel. His feet were pressing again into the back of my seat.

Did you know, Juno, I wanted to say, that I stopped Ben from talking about Joe as if his brother was something to be ashamed about, and I did it in the most humiliating way I possibly could? And
he’s never forgotten it, even though he doesn’t say. He’ll take that scene with him to his old age.

Did you know that when Joe’s teacher, Mrs Daly, left me alone with the class memory board, I unpinned one of the pieces of paper and wrote a nasty message on it? There was a drawing by a
boy who’d tripped Joe up deliberately in the playground, and another time had stolen his afternoon snack so that he had nothing to eat at break. This boy had drawn a sun and two figures, I
don’t know who they were meant to be, they were very poor. Joe could draw a lot better than that. Mrs Daly had felt-tipped ‘Heaven’ along the top. And I was so angry that I
scribbled over the paper with a wax crayon and wrote
hypocritical bully
in letters so hard they ripped the surface of the paper in one place. Then I pinned the picture back up. I suppose Mrs
Daly took it down. It was never mentioned, so I presume none of the kids saw it. I hope they didn’t, I hope she just threw it in the bin. Did she show it round the staff room?

It began to rain and all the cars and lorries were putting their lights and wipers on.

‘It gets dark early now,’ I said.

Juno didn’t reply but she had her eyes closed and she might have been asleep.

The worst thing I’ve done was to watch Mr Peterson dying. No one knows I did this.

After Joe was killed I couldn’t get Peterson out of my head. At the inquest it was suggested that he might be too old and infirm to continue driving, but a doctor’s report gave him
the all-clear. Nevertheless, he claimed he would never get behind a wheel again.

He lived locally. I used to go round to his house to check whether the car was there; it always was. His wife couldn’t drive. At one point I was going across town every day to look, hoping
I’d catch him out then I could attack him. I used to imagine watching him lower himself into the front seat, then I was going to launch myself at his thin body, screaming, pummelling his
chest, dragging him out onto the ground. It would have been easy to attack him, he was very frail.

One day Tom had the small ads open because he was looking at motorbikes. In those days he was interested in buying a project bike, one that needed loads of work. He wouldn’t be riding it,
just fixing and reselling. I was going through what he’d circled when I spotted Peterson’s phone number. He was getting rid of the car. I called and pretended to be someone else and his
wife told me that her husband was too ill to drive. At first I thought she was making it up, but he turned out to have terminal cancer. She was very upset.

This is how premeditated it was; I actually hired a wig and plain glasses from a costume shop. I drove to the ward she’d said he was on and I told the nurse at the desk I was there to see
him. But instead I went and sat by the bed of a man who was asleep and listened to Peterson’s wife talking to a visitor, another old man. She said they were waiting for a private room or,
ideally, a place in a hospice. She said this in front of her husband, so he must have known the score.