Tarnished (4 page)

The pelican-shaped ashtray was well within Jean’s reach, since she had only just put out her last cigarette, but Peg moved it closer without comment.

‘Nan mentioned something about a Keithy,’ Peg said, when Jean had everything she needed.

‘
Did
she now?’ Jean said, raising her eyebrows, which she kept immaculately plucked in high arches above those elaborately made-up eyes. She drew her face back into the flesh of her neck, giving herself a couple of extra chins. ‘Well, that’s a turn-up for the books.’

‘I thought she was getting Dad’s name wrong or something.’

‘No.’ Jean took another slug of her Guinness. ‘No, she wasn’t doing that.’

‘So who’s Keithy then?’

Jean looked at Peg and sighed. Eventually, she appeared to make a decision and went on. ‘I’ll tell you. Just for Mummy’s sake. So if she brings it up again you’ll know to steer her clear. Because we’ll NEVER EVER talk about it again after this, Meggy. Not in front of Mummy.’

‘Never talk about what?’

‘Keith – Keithy, as Mummy always called him – was our brother.’

Peg frowned. ‘Whose brother?’

‘Mine and
his
. You know, your dad’s. Not for long, though. It was a dreadful accident. He was only a baby. Not even two. He fell off the edge of the docks into the river, hit his head on a stone and was swept away.’

Peg gasped. ‘I never knew . . .’

‘A really and truly dreadful accident.’ Jean clocked Peg’s reaction and nodded to herself. ‘Pass us that tissue, will you, darling? Well, that’s the story we told everyone. I saw it happen, though . . .’

‘What does that mean?’

Jean dabbed at her eyes and took a deep breath, as if she were about to say something more. Then she checked herself and, at last, she spoke.

‘Your father saw it too. He was there.’

‘How horrible for you both,’ Peg said, compassion almost blanketing an initial flash of annoyance that no one had thought to tell her about this piece of family history before. Was it any wonder she couldn’t remember anything when chunks of the past had been withheld from her like that? ‘How horrible for everyone.’

‘There’s some things it’s impossible to forget,’ Jean said, leaning back on the pillows and rubbing her forehead. ‘I know I’ll always remember it. All my days. The little baby toddling on the edge of the dock. His face as he lost his footing. And the sound as his head hit the rock. Crack.’

Jean watched as Peg shuddered.

‘I’ve asked myself if I could have done or said anything to stop it happening,’ Jean went on. ‘But I was too far away. I never could have got there in time to stop him.’

‘You’re not to blame, Aunty Jean. You were only a little girl yourself.’

‘I was eight. I know what I saw. But it nearly killed poor Mummy. She wasn’t there. She was busy somewhere else. She’d left him in our charge. So she blamed herself. She said it to me, at his poor little funeral. “I’m never looking away from my children again,” she said.’

‘So it must be
really
horrible for her not to have seen Raymond for so long,’ Peg said.

‘I suppose,’ Jean said, brushing crumbs from her bedspread. ‘But do you know what and all?’ She narrowed her eyes at Peg. ‘That was when Mummy stopped eating. She used to be a fuller-figured woman, big, a bit like me. But after Keithy died, she started starving herself.’

‘I can’t imagine Nan big,’ Peg said. ‘I always thought she’s skinny because that’s how she is. I never knew.’

‘Well, dear,’ Jean said, wedging the balled-up tissue between her flesh and her sleeve. ‘You can’t know everything, can you?’

Indeed, Peg thought. So it seemed.

She served the salad supper and, despite Jean’s protests about being forced to eat rabbit food, the entire plateful disappeared in a few bites. With it went the best part of a large loaf of the doughy white bread that formed a major part of her diet, half a bottle of salad cream and almost an entire tub of Utterly Butterly.

‘I’m worried about Mummy,’ Jean said, wiping her mouth with a Wet One. She put another cigarette to her mouth and looked up at Peg, a depth of seriousness in her eyes.

‘You and me both, Aunty Jean.’

‘It’s just, if she’s talking about Keith, then, well . . .’ Jean drew on her Marlboro again and blew the smoke out up at the ceiling, adding another tiny tint of yellow to the nicotine stain blooming on the Artex.

‘She didn’t know who I was when I turned up,’ Peg said.

‘Oh dear.’

‘We need to start thinking what we’re going to do with her, Aunty Jean. She won’t have any help, but she can’t go on like this.’

‘No. I know. It’s a dreadful problem, I know.’

Peg braced herself and finally gave voice to the thought that had been gnawing at her since she witnessed Doll’s earlier confusion. ‘It’s just I don’t know how much longer she’s going to be able to stay in the bungalow.’

Jean shot Peg a horrified look. ‘You’re not talking about putting Mummy in a
home
, are you, Meggy? You can’t do that, though. It would kill her to move away, away from all her things. Away from me. Do you want to
kill
her?’

‘Of course I don’t,’ Peg said, twisting her fingers into knots so tightly that they hurt.

‘I won’t have it, you hear me? I won’t have it.’ Jean stubbed her cigarette out in the mouth of the pelican-shaped ashtray. She screwed the Wet One up into a ball and jabbed it at her eyes, which started to bulge as a coughing fit took her over. The spasms racketed through her, making her fleshy body quiver. Tears blobbed in her eyes and spilled onto her blotchy cheeks.

Peg rushed to the kitchen to fill one of Jean’s special sipping cups with water. She held it in front of her aunt, who gulped it down between desperate wheezes for breath. Then she took the oxygen mask from where it was still perched on the top of Jean’s head and pressed it to her face.

‘Thank you, dear,’ Jean gasped. With quivering fingers she pressed the mask tight against herself, fell back against the pillows, closed her eyes and breathed in as deeply as she could to activate the oxygen.

Peg hovered anxiously over her while the moments passed. Then, without warning, Jean shot out a hand and squeezed Peg’s arm so tightly in her hot fat palm that she nearly yelped.

‘And if you throw Mummy in a home, Meggy,’ she said, lifting the mask away to speak. ‘Then what about me? What’s to become of me?’

Peg knew this was the big issue. Thinking about it made her head ache; she had no answer for it. But she couldn’t let Jean know that. She took a deep breath and looked her aunt straight in the eye. ‘Don’t worry, Aunty Jean,’ she said. ‘I’m never going to do that to either of you.’

She made sure both Jean and Doll were comfortable for the night. Then, her brain like scrambled egg, her eyes tight like two little raisins stuck on the front of her face, she steeled herself for the chilly walk to Whitstable Station, which she decided tonight would be the longer, beachfront route. She wanted to be whipped clean by the salt-sharp wind.

She had just fastened the front gate when she turned and nearly bumped into Mrs Cairns.

‘Heel, Scotty,’ Mrs Cairns said to her greying Jack Russell which, as usual, greeted Peg with bared fangs. ‘How are they doing, Margaret?’ she asked, her blob of a face a picture of solemn concern.

‘Oh, they’re fine, Mrs Cairns,’ Peg said, hitching her rucksack on her back and fixing a smile onto her face. ‘All jogging along nicely.’

Allowances had to be made for Mrs Cairns. Her only child – a ‘hulking great slow boy’, as Jean put it – had hanged himself in a police cell about twenty years ago, and, according to both Doll and Jean, she had not been right since then.

‘Your grandmother didn’t look all that smart yesterday. She was out the front here in her dressing gown at eleven o’clock in the morning calling for her late husband.’

‘Really?’ Peg said, her heart sinking down somewhere near her Doc Martens.

‘It’s a crying shame that she’s on her own here, without any help.’

‘I know, Mrs Cairns, but Nan won’t have anyone else in the house. And at least there’s Julie now, for Aunty Jean.’

‘And about time too.’ Mrs Cairns folded her arms across her battleship bosom and settled her chin into her neck.

‘I’m working on it, though, Mrs Cairns. I’ll get in touch with the council tomorrow. I promise.’

Mrs Cairns made a little harrumphing sound.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ Peg said, trying to stay brave, trying to hold back the tears of helplessness fizzing in the corners of her eyes, ‘I’ve got a train to catch . . .’

‘Yes. I suppose you’ve got a life to get back to up in London
,
’ Mrs Cairns said, unfolding her arms and swinging a bag full of scooped poop from her hooked forefinger.

‘I’ve got work tomorrow, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Well, don’t let me keep you.’

Peg set off, but before she had got more than a couple of steps, Mrs Cairns spoke again.

‘Oh, just before you go, what are your plans for that garden, Margaret? It was a jungle out there in the summer, and it really needs a good tidy.’

This was one of Mrs Cairns’s favourite themes.

‘Poor Mr Thwaites made it ever so lovely,’ she told Peg for the millionth time. ‘And even after he passed away so suddenly, Mrs Thwaites looked after it, kept it neat and presentable. But after you left, she let it drop, you know. And it’s in a right old state now. And all those weeds have seeds, you know. And they blow over my way.’

Peg nodded, itching to get away. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried to tidy things up. But her time was limited and, never having had a garden of her own, she had no idea where to start. Two years ago she had succeeded, during one enthusiastic bout of weeding, in pulling up a whole load of ground-cover geraniums.

‘What Frank put in for our fiftieth anniversary,’ Doll had informed her. ‘Just before he passed away.’ Oblivious to the effect she was having on Peg – who had ended up going home and crying until she was sick – she went on to say how the purple flowers coming up every spring had lifted her heart and reminded her of him.

‘Well what do you say, Margaret?’ Mrs Cairns said.

‘I’ll see what I can do, Mrs Cairns.’

After the geranium debacle she bought some new plants to put in, carrying them on the train in a soggy cardboard box that leached muddy water through to her jeans. But she planted them just before a late and devastating frost, and they all died.

‘I’d be very grateful,’ Mrs Cairns said. ‘I don’t like to nag, but it’s a bit depressing to look at. It can’t do poor Mrs Thwaites much good either.’

‘No,’ Peg said.

Mrs Cairns turned towards her gate, and Peg was finally dismissed. With time now at a premium if she was going to catch the one train she could use with her cheap advance ticket, she set off on the quicker, more dreary walk to the station, past the crumbling chalets of Tankerton, whose streets stood as yet unchanged by the tide of gentrification washing in from Whitstable.

As she reached the corner of the street, she heard a vehicle pull out in the road behind her. She needed to cross, so she glanced back. It was a white van. There were so many white vans on the roads and they all looked the same. But she had an eerie feeling that she had seen this one not only here in Tankerton, but also several times in the past couple of weeks as she made her way to or from the library. As the van passed, she caught a glimpse of the profile of the driver in the inadequate yellow streetlight.

And, although she couldn’t place him, she thought he looked oddly familiar.

Three

Peg endured a tense journey back to London in an overheated train carriage with the bouquet of the bungalow lingering in her nostrils and – she knew it – on her clothes.

Her only fellow traveller was a trashed boy who slouched in his seat, earphones blaring, and eyed her with menace.

If she had been Loz, she would have asked him what he thought he was looking at and told him to turn his fucking shit music down. But she was Peg, so she suffered in silence and tried once more to count her breaths, to take herself away and zone him out, using the same technique she had tried before failing and falling asleep in the bungalow.

She had found the method in a book on age regression and self-hypnosis borrowed from the self-help section of her library. The aim was to use the breathing and counting to put yourself in a state of what the book called ‘inner flow’. Then, by visualising yourself floating along a personal timeline, and seizing on glimpsed sensory details – your bedroom wallpaper, for example, or the smell of a favourite meal – you could access long-repressed memories.

Yeah, right
, she had thought when she first flicked through the book.

The fact of her missing memory hadn’t particularly troubled Peg until recently, when it had begun to dawn on her that, apart from her year-long relationship with Loz, she had very little going for herself. With no ambition and few friends she wasn’t too clear who or what she was. Something seemed to be blocking her up. It felt to her as if there were a wall between her and most other people, Doll, Jean and Loz apart.

It had been Loz, in fact – whose mother Naomi was a psychotherapist and who was therefore very conversant both with herself and the power of the mind to heal itself – who had made her realise this.

‘You need to do something about it Peggo,’ she had said one evening when, coming home from the restaurant after an early shift, she found her slumped in front of really crap daytime TV. ‘Before it gets too late and you’re completely fucked.’

It was also Loz who suggested that the reason Peg felt so blurred round the edges – for that was as close as she could get to describing how she felt – had something to do with what Loz had decided to call her ‘weird childhood’, and how she couldn’t remember anything about it.

She had offered Naomi’s services, but Peg had felt it was too close to home. It would feel . . . incestuous. Instead, ever her grandmother’s self-improving girl, she checked out the self-help book from the library.

Following its suggestion, she had gone out and bought a digital voice recorder with five hundred and thirty hours of recording time. A bit of a Luddite, she had taken a full day to become conversant with the workings of the thing, but now she carried it with her everywhere, ready for the moment when she might engage with her ‘inner flow’. She had also bought a new red notebook and a slightly expensive pen, for more conventional recording of what her thoughts revealed and, if she were honest with herself, she much preferred this quieter, more contemplative method. After all, she had been brought up by her grandmother to record everything in notebooks – or, as Doll called them, ‘Commonplace Books’.