Tarnished (40 page)

Gramps opens and closes his mouth. He looks like a poor fat goldfish out of its water.

‘I’m going to take these in,’ Nan goes. ‘And I’m going to come back out here with your pills and a glass of water, and I’m going to stand here and watch you while you take them. I’m going to watch you every day now, to make sure you take them. You’re not to be trusted, Frank Thwaites. I don’t know what I’m to do with you and Jeanie and the girl to look after. Truly I don’t.’

Does she mean me? Am I a trouble to her like Gramps? I shrink back a bit against the brick wall.

Nan goes into the bungalow, her head held high.

Gramps slumps against the wall and puts his head in his hands. His shoulders are shaking and, for a minute, I wonder why he’s laughing. But then he looks over at the back door where Nan has disappeared and I gasp, because I see his eyes are wet and red and he’s crying.

I stay where I am for a couple more seconds. Then I sneak into the bungalow through the front door and sit quietly in the lounge with my book, trying hard not to be a bother to anyone.

Forty

Peg was tied to a hospital bed and the man – who although she could only see his silhouette had to be Raymond – positioned a whining power drill over the centre of her forehead. As it bored through her skull, it stuttered on the bone, but he kept revving it, insistently starting up again and again, as if—

She forced herself awake and sat bolt upright in her little bedroom, narrowly avoiding banging her head on the low eaves ceiling.

‘Meggy! Meggy!’ Through the fathoms of her hung-over daze, she could hear Jean wailing. Downstairs, the intercom buzzer was repeatedly being fired off.

That
had been the drill noise.

In the darkness, Peg stumbled down the ladder, flicked the light on in the lounge and found the white box. Her head pounded and her mouth tasted of stale Brussels sprouts.

‘Meggy! Meggy!’ the buzzing and calling continued.

‘Yes, Aunty Jean?’ Peg said, hitting the respond button.

‘Oh, thank goodness you’re there. I’m all alone in here. I thought you’d gone away without saying goodbye.’

‘Isn’t he in with you?’

‘Raymond? He had to go off. It’s dear little Paulie’s birthday tomorrow,’ Jean said. ‘He’s gone back to Spain.’

‘But he said he was staying the night.’

‘He did, darling.’

‘He did? But—’

‘He stayed and he waited and waited for you to wake up this morning, but you didn’t, so he had to go. He went to Hamley’s to get a present before his flight. I said to him, “Go to Hamley’s,” I said. “There’s toys there you can’t buy anywhere else in the world.”’

‘Are you saying I’ve slept right through the whole day?’

‘That’s what it looks like, Meggy, doesn’t it? You youngsters. I wish I could still sleep like that. I can’t sleep at all unless I take me pills. Anyway, I need you to come over and help sort me out.’

‘OK, Aunty Jean. I’ll be with you in a tick. I’ll just get myself properly dressed.’

Back up in her room, Peg peeled off her funeral clothes. She was glad her father had gone without saying goodbye. It’s how she wanted it to be. No more contact.

It was a liberating thought.

She looked at the dress as it lay in a heap at the floor and winced at how much she had spent on it. A sum she would never have paid had she been sure she was going to tell Raymond to stuff his money. She picked it up and sniffed at it, then held it out to examine it. There was mud on the hem, and it smelled as it should after thirty-odd hours of continuous wear. Even Loz would think twice about taking it back for a refund.

Loz.

She flipped the dress over the back of a mouldering Lloyd Loom chair that she had used to sit at her desk when she was a child, and grabbed her phone from the bedside table. There were no messages. Loz had not tried to return her call. She tried phoning her again, but, as before, it just rang and rang. Peg felt a flash of her new, all-too-accessible anger.

Loz was holding out for too bloody long. She had apologised, hadn’t she?

Perhaps Loz had gone to the police and been detained for wasting their time. But that was a ridiculous thought. More likely she had lost her mobile phone, left it on the train or something, like she had twice before in the year they had been together.

Would they be together for another year? Could they survive all this? The thought of not being with Loz made Peg feel so empty she ached.

She took a quick shower, washing away the mud that had crusted through her tights onto her legs. Standing under the feeble jet of water, she let it slide over her face. It was hardly invigorating, but it was what she knew, and it went some way towards waking her up.

She dressed, towel-dried her hair then, just as Jean started buzzing again, she let herself out of the back door and through into the extension.

‘I was wondering where you had got to,’ Jean said. ‘Thought perhaps you’d slipped in the shower like Mummy did one time.’

Sitting upright in her bed, propped up by purple floral pillows, Jean looked strangely well – at least, she appeared to have more vim than she had since Doll’s death.

‘Oh, Meggy, I’m so hungry. The girl left me blasted salad again, and it’s only touched a tiny corner of my stomach. Is there any way we could get hold of a bit of fish and chips? My purse is on the side over there. Treat yourself, too.’

Peg realised that part of the feeling in her belly that she had put down to frayed nerves, tension and a hangover was mostly deep hunger. She had not eaten since breakfast the day before.

‘All right, Aunty Jean. I’ll just be a tick.’

She went to the end of the road where the chippy stood rather too conveniently. She remembered that on certain days, when the wind came more from the north, it would carry the intoxicating scent of hot fat and frying potatoes right into the bungalow, making it impossible for her young self to concentrate on anything until she had satiated the urge by going to buy a portion of chips.

She remembered all this now. She remembered everything – almost.

‘Oh, hello, darlin’,’ Mei the chippy owner said, looking up from the fried fish portions she was arranging in the hot cabinet. ‘Long time no see. I’m so sorry to hear about your nan, my darling.’

‘It was a bit of a shock,’ Peg said.

‘We’ll miss her in here,’ Mei said, nodding her red, greasy face to her husband, a skinny, drooping man shifting the chips around in the fryer. ‘Won’t we, Jimmy?’

‘Eh?’ he said, looking up from his hot, greasy task.

‘I said we’ll miss old Dolly coming in here every night, won’t we?’ Mei shouted over the sizzle and pop of the fat and the racket of the extractor fan that piped the seductive smells out into the street.

‘Oh, yes, we will.’ Jimmy rested his hand on the edge of the stainless-steel fryer and wiped his flopping hair back from his eyes with the other, glad of the chance to pause his hot work. ‘We’ll miss the business too!’

‘Jimmy!’ Mei scolded. ‘So rude. I’m so sorry about that, Meggy darlin’. The chip fat gets into his brain.’

‘No, no, that’s all right,’ Peg said, keen to find out more. ‘Nan came in every night, you say?’

‘Oh yes,’ Mei said. ‘You could set your clock by her. Every night at eight, for your aunty’s supper. Big fish and chips, chow mein and the surprise.’

‘The surprise?’

‘She’d always take her something else. “Jean’s little treat”, she called it. Sometimes a big bar of chocolate or bottle of pop from there.’ Mei pointed to a refrigerator unit full of soft drinks and confectionery. ‘Sometimes another portion of something. She liked the sweet and sour pork balls, I know that. Dolly really looked after your aunty, didn’t she? Poor lady. If we were quiet, I’d send him –’ she nodded at her husband – ‘with her, to help her carry it all.’

‘When did she last come?’ Peg asked.

‘The night the ambulance came.’

‘When she went into hospital?’

Mei looked a little uncomfortable. ‘No, the very last time. I said to him –’ she pointed her spatula at her husband again – ‘I said that she didn’t look too clever, didn’t I, Jimmy? And, for the first time, it was early, about half four. But she’d been in hospital for a few days, hadn’t she? So we thought she just wanted to celebrate with your aunty or something. We thought nothing of it. I’m sorry, darling.’

Jimmy, who had returned to his chips and was now shaking the excess fat off them before putting them in the hopper to keep them warm, nodded. ‘She was some lady,’ he said.

Peg walked away from the chippy, balancing the heat-wilted thin plastic bag and its large portion of fish and two of chips and one chow mein against her chest to ward off the cold. Her parka pocket swung with the weight of the family-sized bar of Fruit and Nut that Mei had insisted was Jean’s favourite. She didn’t have to imagine what a nightly dose of this, on top of a full day’s eating, could do to a person. The evidence lay piled on a bed not more than a couple of hundred feet away.

‘That looks good,’ Jean said, as Peg carried a tray mounded with steaming fried food into her bedroom.

‘Mei at the chippy said Nan used to go and get you supper every night.’

‘She looked after me,’ Jean said, cramming a handful of chips into her mouth. ‘Got any ketchup? And what about a drop of Guinness, then?’

‘Hoo, your dad was in a right old state when he came through last night after your little set-to,’ Jean said, as Peg returned from the kitchen with cans and ketchup. She tipped the chow mein so that it landed like a heap of worms on top of her fish and chips. ‘I told him not to worry, that it’s just a bit of a phase, that you’ll come through it. All girls have crushes on other girls, and fights with their dads. It’s quite normal, and it’s just happening to you a bit later than usual, because you didn’t see him for so long. But you need to have this little bit of arguing now.’

Peg popped a couple of chips into her mouth, enjoying the way the warmth instantly soothed the weak, low-blood-sugar hunger that had dogged her since she had woken up. As she worked to prevent Jean’s words annoying her, the realisation hit her that she didn’t have to put up with her aunt’s rubbish any more. Now Doll was gone, she could just do what Loz had always told her to do. She could turn her back on the whole lot of them, step out of the mould they had made for her.

It had nothing to do with her!

She popped the top of her can of Guinness and took a deep swig, as if toasting that thought.

‘So me and your daddy had a bit of a talk last night after your ding-dong,’ Jean said between mouthfuls. ‘And we realised that there’s one way to help you and that’s to bring you back into the family.’

Peg spluttered on her drink.

‘What?’

‘I think Mummy, God rest her poor soul, rather neglected you in the past couple of years. Letting you move away and all that.’

‘I wanted to go, though. It’s what I wanted.’

‘That’s what you think, but you’re only a girl. What do you know, really?’ Jean said, licking salt and grease and congealed chow mein sauce from her fingers. ‘This is really and truly delicious, you know, Meggy. I don’t know why you didn’t get it too. You don’t know how much I’ve missed me chow mein since Mummy passed away. That Mei said they were too busy to do home deliveries, so I just had to make do with curry from the Taj Mahal. Which, as you know, doesn’t always agree.

‘So anyway. Me and your daddy had this talk and it turns out he’s going to be very generous. He’s going to build us a lovely bungalow, right by his villa. In Spain, no less. Well, you’ll know how lovely that is, because you went there behind our backs. And it’ll be all mod cons and specially built for a person of my size. He’s going to pay you to look after me. Very handsomely, he says. More than you earn in that library, anyway. And there’ll be no rent or anything for you to pay. All bills taken care of. Just think!’

Jean looked at Peg, a wide smile almost cleaving her face in two.

‘But I don’t want that,’ Peg said.

What was this new plan Raymond had cooked up, in complete contradiction to all the putting-Jean-in-a-home business? Was it some sort of revenge on her for telling him to stuff it? Or was it just another of Jean’s fantasies?

‘Oh, but you can’t turn it down,’ Jean said, still smiling. ‘You’d be an idiot.’

‘But I want to live with Loz and get on with my own life.’

‘Meggy, see sense, dear,’ Jean said. ‘This isn’t like you, looking a gift-horse in the mouth. And it won’t last, believe me, this little thing you’ve got with that Loz. She looks like a flighty sort of person to me. Not your sort, not at all. And anyway, it’s not a proper sort of thing, is it? Not really? Not proper family. No, girly, you belong with me. I wouldn’t be surprised if that Loz just drops right out of the picture.’

‘What do you mean?’

Jean avoided Peg’s eyes. ‘Like I said, she looks proper flighty. Pass us a serviette, dear, will you?’

Somehow, even though she had been talking all through the meal, Jean had managed to ingest every last scrap of the mound on her plate. She took the napkin Peg handed her from the dispenser on the bedside table and dabbed her mouth. ‘Anyway, like I said, your daddy’s going back to Spain and he’ll get it all sorted for us. He says it’ll only take a couple of months, he says six at the most, and I can get you trained up in what you need to do for me while we wait. Though of course, Mummy taught you most of what she knew, didn’t she?’

Peg clasped her hands in front of her face and screwed up her eyes. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could her father have performed such a complete about-face in less than twelve hours? To say she had been stitched-up was something of an understatement. She had been double-hemmed, overlocked and smocked.

But she had the power to walk away from this grotesque future they had decided for her. A power that was beyond that of her aunt. Putting her half-finished meal to one side, she stood. She had to talk to Loz.

‘Sorry, Aunty Jean. I need to take all this in.’

‘You do what you like, dear. You’ll see it’s for the best.’ Jean folded her hands comfortably on her belly, burying them underneath the flesh of her breasts.