Reading by Lightning (22 page)

All the better, all the better, said George. She'll spot new ones. Lily, it's just like hide-and-seek, but you'll be the first hider and not the seeker. When we find you, we all squeeze into your hiding place until only one is left looking. We pack in like little fishies. So choose a place with a bit of room.

They groaned and laughed, but eventually they buried their heads in their arms or leaned against the wall and started counting in chorus. I stood frozen until George raised his head and caught my eye. Get off, he said.

I ran around the corner. There the garden wall passed very close to the house. I climbed it and then, using the drainpipe for footing, I scrambled up onto the roof and lay flat on the cool hard roof tiles. The music faded and the counting stopped. I could hear the lorries out on the motorway climbing the hill
into town. Above me the clouds glowed greenly with the reflected light of Manchester. In a moment I heard the crowd spread out. Some of them passed just below me. A boy said something like,
You're a right cow,
and a girl said something back
(I'll give you a thick ear-O,
it could be). I knew I would never be able to talk like that, in that quick, wry, sidelong way. But I lay on the roof and made a mental list, my New Year's resolutions: I would wear lipstick. I would learn to pin my hair up in front. I would buy shoes — I had the pound note Aunt Lucy'd given me for Christmas.
I will, I'll do it,
I vowed,
before I ever see any of them again. And then they'll forget what I was like when they first met me.

It was George who found me. I heard him walking along the top of the garden wall and then the scuffing of his shoes on the drainpipe. For a moment he was silhouetted against the sky and then he stepped over me and eased himself down beside me. Inch up a little higher, he whispered. Your feet are peeping over the edge.

We lay side by side. Lady Mab and Sir William on their tombs, George said. You won't have seen that yet. It's at Wigan Pier. In the parish church. Like Ferdinand and Isabella.

He was so close I could smell the ale he'd been drinking, so close I couldn't bring myself to turn my face towards him. Sir William's got his legs crossed and his eyes open, he said. Whereas Lady Mab's
praying.

He put his cold hand over mine and brought my arm up to my chest. Like this, fold your hands in prayer, he said. Lady Mab took a new husband when Sir William was away fighting in the Crusades. Then he came back. She had reason to pray.

Someone walked below us and there were shouts out on the Edge. They'll never find us, George whispered. No one's ever hidden here before.

I folded my hands in prayer. Above us a slanted moon floated free of the clouds. I wish I could mount my telescope
up here, George said. Funny what a difference a few feet makes. What's the moon like in Canada?

Different, I said. In Canada it's blue. I dared to tip my face towards him and he laughed a silent, open-mouthed parody of a laugh. His breath hung above his face in the damp air.

Is this roof
stone?
I asked, after a minute. My legs were freezing.

It's slate. It cost a bleedin' fortune. If that lot climbs up here Stanley'll kill us. Let's get down. They won't check round this side of the house again.

We climbed down. There was a corner between the garden wall and the shed. We sat side by side against the house with our shoulders lightly touching. David and Monty found us and squeezed in, and David passed a flask to George. Others found us and we had to stand up to make room. Jenny pressed her way in, grumbling. A ragged song started up in the house. Aunt Lucy's company was singing.
It's a long way to Tipperary, it's a long way to go.
By now the moon had sunk over the roof of the shed and it was dark. We stood with breath in-held, a little pod of sweat and smoke and damp wool in the cold air. Oy! a girl hissed. You've burned me. Laughter telegraphed through the crowd. Tobacco smoke drifted over us. Quit that, the same girl said. You're going to knock us over!

Is anyone actually looking for us? asked Monty, not bothering to whisper.

Maddy's out in front, said Lois.

After a while we heard Madeleine opening the garden gate. Okay you lot, she called. I know where you are. There was a long silence. Then we heard her voice again, a little farther away, a strange, plaintive cry. Barley! she cried. Barley! Someone leaned back against me and the whole mass of bodies teetered, and then I was off-balance, held upright by the group, my arms pinned between other bodies, one of my dreadful shoes lost. We were a pile of laughing bodies on the ground
then and no one tried to get up. Something was caught against my leg — it was a hand, the fingers cold and intentional. It slid along my leg, disembodied cold fingers stealing upward under my skirt with a private message to deliver. They were rooting for the soft skin at the top of my stocking, for the inside of my thigh. Then the whole body of us heaved and the hand was pried loose and with shrieks and laughter we disentangled ourselves and scrambled to our feet.

When I was back in Salford the next day I asked Nana about George, who he really was, how Aunt Lucy had come to adopt him, and she told me that some poor girl had borne him in secret and left him on the steps of the vicarage in Oldham. Aunt Lucy and Uncle Stanley had been married for three years with no sign of a baby, so the vicar brought George to them, and then before long Aunt Lucy had started a baby herself, the way women will.

Was he left in a box? I asked.

I believe so, she said.

What sort of box? I asked.

She thought deeply for a minute. I believe it was borax, she said at last.

The first anniversary of my granddad's death approached. The turning of the year to the pale green of spring had not carried Nan further from Granddad's death — it had brought her closer. Every morning she woke up mournful. Often she was awake before it was even light. She put her teeth in and went down to light the cooker and make herself a cup of tea, which she drank sitting in the kitchen, waiting until a decent hour (six o'clock) to climb the stair, calling hoarsely, Wakey,
wakey, rise and shine, where's our pet, where's our Lily? Come on, Lady Do-Nowt, rise and shine.

It was a small-enough space I had, just a narrow bed with a row of boxes crammed in beside it, and I surfaced from sleep to see her shapeless form hovering by the bed, a cup of weak tea in her hand (I didn't like milk in my tea at all, but she wouldn't be told). The tea and cheer were just a ticket to get into my room. Once in she sank heavily onto the bed and squeezed me up against the wall, and what was preying on her mind came out — she reverted to her grieving. She'd been paying into a burial club called the Funeral Friendly Society, but now that Granddad was gone she was worried that there wouldn't be enough for her. I'll go down to the office and inquire, Nan, I murmured, trying to hang on to my sleep.

And she didn't want her things sold, she didn't want the people from the terrace pawing through her things, Mrs. Crisp and that Irish woman from number seventeen. I'll tell Aunt Lucy, I said. Nan, don't worry. She sat and looked at me, her faded grey eyes hooded by her eyelids as if to save energy.

There's a wee sum in the building society, she said. But I don't want it touched. It's for you, for you children here, and for Roland's in Ireland and Phillip in Canada. Not a lot, mind. She poked me in the hip. Don't think you'll be rich, lady. We was never well off. But we was no poorer than the rest of them, and there was never an unkind word.

By then I'd pulled myself into a sitting position against the wall. Nan, I said, I wish you'd stop fretting. You're
fine.

And then she roused herself and squeezed my cheeks and said, Oh, well, pet, there's life in the old doll yet.

But really Nan asked so very little of me. She asked that I be charmed by her songs when she could manage to sing them
and pat her hand when she wept. That I not flinch away when she squeezed my cheeks and kissed me. That I respond on cue. She didn't ask to know who I really was. She'd taken in all she could take of other people through her long life, and by now if what they gave her was real or pretense, she couldn't care less.

And so I had a kind of privacy I'd never had in my life. I paid my tuppence at the library in the precinct and fell into reading, lying on my bed in the afternoons, pretending that I needed a nap and trying to lure the cat in to keep me company, feeling her pelt slip across the muscles of her back when I slid one hand into her soft fur, trying not to dig too deep because that would drive her away. Nan would climb the stairs calling, What's this, then, Lady Do-Nowt? Lying a-bed while the sun's shining? and then her snoring would start up like a pump that needed oiling, and I'd spend the afternoon on my bed, turning the soft, worn pages of books all rebound in black-painted cardboard, books named after girls and women.
Jane Eyre. Betty Trevor. Lorna Doone. Emma.
Even
Alice in Wonderland,
which Madeleine adored. Or I put my book down and got out the new black slip-on shoes I'd bought with my precious pound. I put them on and stood for a minute with one heel tucked into the arch of the other foot, the way Ruth and Imogene stood after the hiding game on New Year's (close to the boys, their bodies almost touching, Imogene laughing up into George's face). Then I crept down the stairs and pulled on my coat and slipped outside, carrying my book. Usually I walked to the bank of the Irwell where holly and blackberries and other vines were knit together into a picturesque fence and a fringe of chimneys poured smoke into the air. Sometimes I walked all the way out Moor Road to Kersal Moor, where (my nana told me) my father used to walk with his mates. Across the moor I saw the square white house that I'd decided
must have been Joe Pye's. One day I would walk out there and ask. One day, when I had more time. At the gate to the moor was a hexagonal stone building with its windows shuttered, and I sat down on a stone step outside it. Robins hopped along the grass (smaller than our robins), and sparrows with dapper black and brown markings (bigger than the sparrows at home, which we called English sparrows). If it was dry I read for an hour before I walked reluctantly back.

When I came in towards tea time Nan would be up from her nap. You're like a coiled spring, you, she'd say peevishly, You can't sit still. Always out and about, every minute of the day. Some days she was too mournful to complain. Tears oozed from her as though her skin were permeable. Ignoring the dirty floor in the loo (which she was too short-sighted to see), I plunged into the jobs that signified good housekeeping on Stott Street: colouring the flagstones with the donkey stone, polishing the stove all over with black leading. Appeased, she asked me to pin up her hair, and I stood behind her coiling tin curlers into neat rows while she sat sipping milky tea at the table. I sponged scabs of dried pea soup off her blouse, I pinned a shawl around her shoulders. I was Alice, tending to the White Queen. Nothing would ever happen.

Then something did, something arrived in the mail, a petition from my former life. The envelope was addressed in my father's small, pointed writing: