Tarnished (30 page)

That would have been like pouring petrol on a fire.

Then

Here comes another one.

I don’t like these.

I wish I couldn’t remember them. I’ve tried to think of something lovely, but I just seem to be stuck in this groove now. This school-was-hell groove.

It’s later now and, after an evening lurking in a carrel at the far end of the library – my favourite hiding place – I use the bathroom last and put my nightie on in the toilet stall. Then, careful to avoid everyone’s eye, I walk the length of the dormitory to get to my bed, which is the last of all twelve.

I pull the duvet back and climb in, ready to bury myself for the day. But as I do so, I hear the snort again, like a room full of stupid dogs with bones stuck in their throats, and I realise that my bed is not as dry as it should be. In fact, as I lie down, it squelches with the dousing of a good jugful of cold water. I continue to settle myself down though, as if nothing is amiss. I refuse to allow them the satisfaction. The cold water seeps into my skin, stinging me.

From the shelter of my covers, I take a look behind me at the other beds and they are all shaking. Not with cold like me, but with laughter as Miss Elliott comes to turn the lights off and tells everyone to calm down.

Ugh.

Twenty-Eight

By the end of the following day, and after a lot of hard work, they had the bungalow pretty much clear, and, as Mrs Cairns informed Peg when she went out to get a pint of milk, the pile of rubbish in the garden almost entirely covered the overgrown lawn.

Peg visited Jean several times, but Loz, in her endless speculations about what was in the garage, had decided that they had to keep everything level with – and here she had dropped into an imitation of Parker – ‘your old man’s fat sister’. She declared that no mention of keys, garages or missing girls was to be made to Jean, and, to keep her sweet, she wasn’t going to join Peg on her trips to her bedside.

Peg felt relieved on all counts by this.

‘Best I don’t get within earshot,’ Loz said, as they scrubbed out the newly cleared kitchen cupboards. ‘You know what a blunderbuss I am. I can’t be relied on to keep my trap shut like a good little girl.’

‘Like me, you mean?’ Peg said.

‘I never said nothing.’ Loz smiled, sat back on her heels and held her hands up in the air.

But even Peg found it hard not to ask about the garage. And Jean didn’t make it any easier by subjecting her to a grilling about their trip to London.

‘Something came up at the restaurant,’ Peg said.

‘So why did you have to go too?’ Jean said, flicking off the TV with the remote and turning to face her.

‘Um, it was a good friend’s birthday, so I—’

‘But you’ve got to sort things out for Mummy! Isn’t that more important than gallivanting off to London? I suppose you saw that demonstration, then?’

‘Demonstration?’

‘Yes, that student thing. Running battles all the way down Oxford Street they said on the telly. Dreadful. I don’t know where all the respect’s gone. That girl’s restaurant is in Soho, you said? You must’ve passed it on the way.’

‘We must’ve just missed it.’

‘But you were there at lunchtime, you said? It was right over the middle of the day.’

‘Oh, we were inside most of the time.’

And so it went on, Peg proving what she already knew – that she was rubbish at lying – and Jean, with apparently innocent questioning, managing to drive her into a corner. It was clear she thought Peg was up to something. It was as if now she had cottoned on to the true nature of her relationship with Loz – and Peg was sure that this was the case, although of course there would never be the chance of a conversation about it – Jean had labelled the two of them as entirely suspect.

And who was to say they weren’t? Peg
was
lying to Jean – something she realised she had never done before. She might in the past have omitted a few facts just to keep her sweet, but to tell her things that were actually untrue . . . Well, this was something new.

Payback time, perhaps, for all the lies she now knew she had been told?

Or just a sign of how low she was sinking?

If Peg had felt without edges before all this family mess began to reveal itself, at least she could have said back then that she knew what goodness was, and that some part of the way she led her life contributed to the stock of it in the world.

Now she wasn’t so sure about anything.

And something indefinable continued to gnaw at her, making her feel sicker and sicker, as if she were really ill, as if she had some sort of cancer growing inside her.

When Peg went out later to get another pint of milk – they were fuelling themselves with endless cups of tea – she also stopped at a cashpoint. With a sinking feeling she saw that her balance, which rarely stretched beyond two figures, now showed that she had eight thousand pounds in her account.

Raymond had come through pretty efficiently.

Good old Raymond.

The first thing she and Loz decided to spend the money on was getting rid of the rubbish in the back garden.

‘I’m looking for a
woman
and a van, really,’ Loz said, flipping through the fat
Yellow Pages
she had on her knee.

The day’s work done, they were sitting with a bottle of beer each in Doll’s newly pristine and slightly antiseptic lounge.

‘Does it really matter who’s driving, so long as we can get all that shit carted away?’ Peg said. The pile of bulging bin liners had turned the back garden into a small-scale municipal tip, and, as Mrs Cairns had informed Peg that morning, something needed to be done ‘before the rats move in’.

‘Here’s one,’ Loz said. ‘“James and Daughter. No job too small”.’

‘Perfect. Tell me the number,’ Peg said, pulling her phone from her pocket. But just as she was dialling, Doll’s house phone rang – the first time Peg had heard it doing so since she had moved away to London.

‘Hello?’ she said cautiously.

‘Can I speak to Ms Margaret Thwaites, please?’ the rather camp young male voice at the other end asked.

‘Speaking.’ She had no idea why someone like that would be calling her at the bungalow and asking for her by her horrible full name.

‘My name’s Jamie. I’m calling from the Kent Hospitals’ Trust. I’m afraid—’

‘Nan!’ Peg gasped, her heart lurching.

‘Ooh, no, sorry. It’s not bad news. Well, not really. Not that sort of bad news. In a way it’s the reverse. Well, I’m afraid we’ve had a bit of a Norovirus outbreak on the ward Mrs Thwaites is staying on at the moment.’ He made it sound like a hotel room, and that Doll was there on some sort of mini-break. ‘And we’ve no choice but to shut down for a deep clean.

‘Mrs Thwaites has been looked at by our discharge team and, in view of pressure on beds, she has been assessed as capable of returning to her home which is, due to the level of infection present in the ward, the best place for her to be.’

‘Oh,’ Peg said. ‘Well. That’s great news.’

‘What is it?’ Loz said, as Peg put the phone down after Jamie had finished running through the arrangements for Doll’s return.

‘She’s coming home,’ Peg said, buoyed by the absurd hope that things could return to normal. ‘Nan’ll be home tomorrow.’

Twenty-Nine

At midday the following day – a day so cold the fog and frost still hung in the air like a freezing blanket – the ambulance appeared.

It was an hour earlier than expected, turning into the driveway just as Peg returned from walking Loz to the station; her three days’ leave had expired and Cara had called that morning to beg her to come in early, as yet more staff were off sick.

‘Are you sure she should be coming home?’ Peg said, as the paramedics – a cheery, plump-cheeked woman who introduced herself as Sue, and her co-worker Don, a tall man with an Elastoplast under a half-closed bruised eye – slid Doll out of the back of the vehicle. As they put up the sides of the wheeled stretcher to move her in to the bungalow, the old lady remained fast asleep, her skin ashen, her breath coming in small rasps, sending feeble puffs of steam into the thick, icy air.

‘Believe me, darling, she’s a million times better off here,’ Sue said.

‘Don’t quote me,’ Don said in a voice that matched his gloomy demeanour, ‘but they’ve already lost five to the bug, and there’s twelve more in intensive care.’

‘Too much information, Don.’ Sue shot him a warning look, then turned to Peg. ‘Don’t worry, dear. Mrs Thwaites is just a bit dozy. They gave her a little something to keep her calm for the journey.’

‘Didn’t she want to come home?’ Peg said.

‘I should say not,’ Don said. ‘She put up quite a fight.’ He gestured to his eye.

‘She did that to you?’ Peg was astonished. Doll couldn’t harm a fly.

‘She was just a bit confused,’ Sue said. ‘They get like that.’

They wheeled her to the front porch, where they realised they had a problem. There was not enough room to turn the dogleg to get to the front door.

‘We’ll have to get her up, put her in a seat,’ Don said.

‘I’d rather not. Is there another way in?’ Sue asked

‘We can go in through her daughter’s extension,’ Peg said, thinking of the wide corridors and the one-way door into Doll’s lounge. ‘I’ll just go and check with Aunty Jean.’

‘Don’t keep us hanging around out here too long though, love,’ Don said. ‘It’s brass monkeys.’

‘I’ll get another blanket for her,’ Sue said, heading back to the ambulance.

Peg got the key to Jean’s back door and quietly let herself in, in case her aunt was sleeping. The hot, dry air of the central heating almost sucked her in out of the cold. A chipper voiceover from some reality TV show jeered at high volume from the bedroom, but Jean tended to keep the telly on all day long, dozing through it at intervals, so this didn’t necessarily mean she was awake.

‘Aunty Jean?’ Peg called softly, but there was no reply. She tiptoed through to the hallway and peered through the half-open bedroom door.

‘Naughty Lexy,’ Aunty Jean scolded. She had thrown her bedcovers off and, to Peg’s astonishment, with her tent-dress riding up so that it displayed the wide, pinkly mottled expanse of her buttocks, she hauled herself up in the bed and rolled over so that her head was at the foot end.

Reaching out with her grabber, she righted a pelican figurine that had been knocked from its watchful position on her dressing table.

‘The poor pellies don’t like to be upset, naughty pussy cat,’ Jean said, dragging herself even further to look under the bed where Lexy must have taken cover. In doing so, she exposed yet more rippling regions of flesh.

Stunned, Peg backed silently away, retracing her steps to the kitchen.

Jean could barely prop herself up in bed, let alone swing her body round like that.

Peg’s cheeks flushed with anger at the thought of poor Doll knackering her back hoisting her daughter up and down, doing things for her that she could, from the evidence she had just seen, quite clearly manage on her own.

In Peg’s eyes, this removed every last shred of credibility from Jean. She was going to watch her like a hawk.

She was going to watch her with Loz’s eyes.

She opened and slammed the back door and called her aunt again, as loudly as she could.

‘Is that you, Meggy? I thought you said you were going to the station with that girl. Can you stay there just a mo, dear, please?’ Jean called breathlessly. ‘OK, I’m decent dear,’ she said after the amount of time Peg reckoned it would take to nimbly swing herself back and cover herself up.

Peg stuck her head round Jean’s bedroom door and forced a smile. Her aunt lay back on her mound of pillows, rather pinker than usual. Her arms flopped at her sides, and, without moving her head, which she was making out was too much effort for her, she looked sideways at Peg.

‘Has that “Loz” gone, then?’

‘Yes.’

‘I hope Mummy never finds out.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know darn tooting what I mean.’

Peg chose to ignore Jean. She needed to focus on getting Doll inside, out of the cold.

‘She’s back.’

‘Eh?’

‘Nan. She’s back. They came early. Is it OK if they bring her through here? They can’t get the stretcher thingy through her door.’

‘Of course dear,’ Jean said, her voice weaker than it had been, resuming its invalid character. She pulled the bedcovers up to her chin.

Peg went outside, where Sue and Don had wrapped Doll up in a couple of spare blankets. She led them to Jean’s door and they wheeled the stretcher through the hallway.

‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Jean called feebly from her bedroom. At the sound of her daughter’s voice, Doll’s eyes shot open.

‘Jeanie?’ she said. ‘Is Jeanie come to visit?’

‘We’re at home, Nan,’ Peg said, leaning forward to stroke her tiny, wrinkled forehead.

‘Home? Let me see her?’

‘Is it OK if she goes in to see her daughter?’ Peg asked the ambulance people.

Don, who was at Doll’s head end, looked at Sue, who was at her feet.

‘Bless her,’ Sue said and nodded, so they pushed her into Jean’s room.

‘Ooh!’ Don said, as he caught sight of Jean. Sue flashed him another of her looks.

‘Mummy,’ Jean said, reaching out a puffy hand for her. ‘Oh Mummy.’

Doll pulled her own hand out of her tightly tucked-in sheet and took her daughter’s fingers. ‘Ooh, Jeanie. How are you doing, darling? I missed you so much.’

‘Not so bad, Mummy,’ Jean said, her chins quivering. Doll struggled up on her stretcher so that they were close enough to kiss.

Sue smiled at Peg, her eyes moist.

‘Now, don’t you go and start frightening me and Meggy again, will you, Mummy?’

‘No dear,’ Doll said. ‘I try not to frighten anyone. I keep it nice and safe.’ Her tiny hand, contoured with loose wrinkled skin like an old map, rested on the fleshy plane of Jean’s cheek. ‘Don’t worry about me, dears. I’ll be up and about in no time and we can send the girl packing and I’ll be looking after you again like I always have.’

‘Of course you will, Mummy.’