The Hiding Place (24 page)

The Retail Park’s over there on the right, look . . . in a minute you’ll see the Bute Dock? It’s brilliant what they’ve done. Exchange Building there – really smart
now!

I wound my window down as far as it would go, let in a smell of ash, and then a drift of something else – salt. A scent I’d forgotten I knew: the smell of the foreshore, of a
lover’s licked skin. A mechanical digger in the distance juddered like a wind-up toy, bright yellow against the glint of the mudflats. Minute gulls rose and fell like shreds of blown paper:
something was being unearthed.

We left the roadworks to enter a dense block of streets, then another and another until the tang of salt had vanished and there was only the pressure of brick bearing down. The sky between the
rooftops fell heavy here. The cab slowed to a crawl.

All this yer’s condemned, he said.

I scanned the houses for people. Two young girls stood side by side on the corner with their hands tucked up their sleeves; a pale child, naked apart from a red pullover, ran
out of the black hole of his front door, chased by the cry of another inside. The driver pulled into the kerb.

Can’t get you no closer – unless we go all round the ’ouses.

This’ll be fine, I said. But it wasn’t fine; I was thinking of who might still be here after all this time: Eva, the Next-Door Rileys, the Jacksons. Perhaps the taxi driver was right
and everything would be rubble and dust. He took one strap of my bag and swung it up off the floor of the car. He held out a card – Carl’s Cabs – and smiled.

Give us a bell when you’re wanting out, he said.

It started to drizzle, a dirty, familiar mist, greasing the pavement.

On the corner I tried to get my bearings. What was once the Evanses’ shop had become a squat block of maisonettes in mustard-yellow brick. Behind them, the crisp outline of a new hotel
complex, a half-built car park, a girder swinging from a crane. Most of the streets looked dead, windows smashed, doors boarded up. The sign for Loudoun Place had been spray-painted with stripes of
red and gold and green. At the far end used to be The Square, but I could only see a line of dented garage doors, a lamp-post with its wires hanging out like a disembowelling, and a horse, grazing
on a patch of stubbled grass. Holding my hand out in friendship, I walked towards it. We got eye to eye before it veered suddenly away, lumbering off as far as its rope would stretch. From an
upstairs window at the end of the terrace, a voice shouted down at me.

Oy! You! Leave it!

It was a child’s voice. The boy leaned out of the window; he looked about eight years old.

It’s alright, I said.

Ho-er! he shouted, breaking the word into two, Fuck off, Trollop!

I didn’t want to run. Round the corner, down the alley into Hodge’s Row. The door of Number 2 – my mother’s home, and mine – was coated with a film
of dirt. Rain darkened it. The living room curtains didn’t meet in the middle. There was no one there.

At the dead end, the high wall was still standing. A car was parked on the pavement, the bonnet forced up against the door of the last house. Eva lived halfway down. I knocked, waited, then
crouched and pushed open the letterbox. It was murky inside, bare apart from a faint glow from a room at the far end of the hall. A sheet of green tarpaulin hung from the doorway like a dying flag.
I could see a pair of knees jutting out below it. I put my mouth to the letterbox and called out,

Eva? Mr Amil?

The legs shifted suddenly out of view. I shouted,

It’s Mrs Gauci’s daughter! I need a key!

There were no slow footsteps, no grate of a chain. When I bent to look again, the knees were back in the doorway, just as before.

In the front window of the Jacksons’ house was a sign, tilted to one side, showing a picture of a German Shepherd dog with its tongue lolling out. I Live Here! it said. The bell made no
sound when I pressed it and the touch left a circle of grime on my finger. One of the upstairs windows had been boarded up; the other was broken; a piece of grey net fluttered through the hole.

You won’t get no joy there, said a voice behind me, They’ve up an’ left.

The woman leaned in the doorway of Number 4. Her eyes grew wide when she saw my face,

My God, Mary!

She put her hand to her chest as if in pain: this old woman was Mrs Riley, more than thirty years on. She looked at me properly, took in my face, the sight of my hand. I needed
no other introduction.

~

Mrs Riley came back with a torch and kneeled down at the front door of my mother’s house. For a second I thought she was about to say a prayer, but she put her shoulder
against the wood and jammed her hand inside the letterbox. She brought out a long piece of dirty string with a key attached. The shiny edge jutted towards me like a blade.

I’ll show you what’s what, she said – and turning suddenly to face me – You won’t
find
nothing! Nothing worth having! As if I had accused her of this empty
street.

You used to have to pull it, I said, making a waving motion. But the lock clicked in immediately.

She had that fixed
years
ago, she said, pushing open the door to my home.

It’s cold in here, the gas has been turned off. The cupboard under the stairs is full of plastic sacks, all bulging and squashed in a heap, leaking bits of fabric and
sharp points through the holes. Mrs Riley shines the torch like a searchlight, angling the ray against the underside of the stairs, and the way the light splashes on the back wall makes my stomach
lurch. There’s a cardboard box filled with odd shoes, broken china, lumps of coal. I take a corner flap and drag it out of the way, holding my breath, pushing back the cupboard door where I
see the pattern of my mother’s fingerprints blackening the wood. A red eye in the corner blinks lazily at me; it’s the electricity meter, a new digital version. A scurf of orange
plaster-dust runs along the cable beneath. I remember when the meter used to take shillings. I would sit in here and watch the dial go round, counting the seconds until the red edge returned.

Mind out, look, let me do it, Mrs Riley says, pushing me aside.

She hands me the torch and crouches in my place. I stand behind her, casting the beam over the pile of bags deep in the recess.

Will you keep that light still!, she cries, It’s like the black hole of Calcutta!

She bends low, presses her face into the bags, finds the gas tap.

That’s it, she says, Should be on now.

~

The gas fire when it’s lit fills the living room with the stink of dust. There’s a bed under the window where there used to be the table piled with washing, and
True Crime
, and my crayoning books. Mrs Riley sinks gingerly onto the bed, inspecting the grime on her hands. Next to her is a tea-towel, its red words running along the edge: Irish
Linen.

Use this, I say, passing it to her.

Can’t use that. Can’t use that for anything now, girl. That was for laying her out.

She looks at me steadily. She wants to tell me something but I’m not going to ask. I see women like her at the library, their faces lit up as they read out the obituaries,
sitting at the long table with their scarves tied under their chins and the newspapers spread out in front of them. They bring flasks of tea and foil parcels of sandwiches. It’s like an
outing. Mrs Riley is one of these old women. Perhaps my mother was too.

She’s turning the tea-towel in her lap, stroking out the creases as if she’s stroking a cat; long slow sweeps of her hand.

Is it yours? I ask, guessing.

Oh aye.

She folds it over, rolling, unrolling.

You can get three for a pound at the market. Not this sort, mind!

Turns her head and looks at the pillow.

Pretty woman, your mother. Even at the end.

She catches up the torch and heaves herself off the bed, places the tea-towel carefully on the coverlet. It rests in the corner of my vision; it means something else now.

You rolls it up, see, she says, her voice confidential, You rolls it up nice and firm, and you puts it under the chin? Stops jaw-drop.

The back of her hand reaches up and flitters at the folds of skin hanging from her neck. She bares her dentures in a sparkling grimace.

There’s nothing worth having, she says again, No money. Nothing.

I’m here to bury my mother, I say, seeing her out.

When she’s gone I slam the door, pull and slam it again so hard the wall vibrates and the light bulb rocks in the centre of the room, throwing its shadows all over.

~

There’s nothing worth having, Mrs Riley, but I’m listing what there is. An inventory in my head; cataloguing, cross-referencing. It’s what I’m good at.
Here’s the living room with the bed, the tea-towel, an armchair, a television set perched on the table in the corner. Next to the gas fire is a brass coal scuttle wedged with magazines:
Word Search
,
The Puzzler
,
Take A Break
. A biro gathers dust in the corner of the hearth. On the mantelpiece is a scuffed blue spectacle case. I cannot touch any of it. No
pictures on the walls, no ornaments over the fireplace, no lampshade to soften the light. A month ago – two weeks ago – my mother breathed in this space. She moved through it, watched
television at night with the sound down low, a magazine in her lap and a pen in her hand. What did she do, at the end? At the end she made a start; putting things in order, tidying. Perhaps she was
waiting for us to come back.

In the kitchen now. I sit on the last step of the stairs, nodding at the table with its two upright chairs pushed in tight to the edge, the bath with its lift-up lid, the cooker with the Toby
Jug resting crookedly on the ring. It used to sit in the centre of the table. There were places for things. The Jug went there, with the pens in for my father to run a ring around the horse he
would bet on, for my mother to write her IOUs. It brings back Luca, drawing out a biro to scratch my name before she carves into my skin; and Fran, her blue tattoos. It brings me right up to my
mother again, standing in the yard with her hands over her face. That time, the Jug had money under it.

~  ~  ~

You’re not goin’ an’ that’s final!

Rose waits until she hears Terence’s footsteps receding down the path. She sits quite still, listening to the shink, shink of the wall-clock. It’s in the shape of a
teapot. She saved the coupons for it. It says ten to ten. She crosses the kitchen, opens the door of the freezer and takes out a packet of peas. She holds them to the swelling on her face.

I am, she says to the teapot-clock, Try an’ bloody stop me.

~

Rose lives in a crescent on Pontcanna estate. All the houses look the same: box-square semis with a rectangular patch of mud at the front. The wide picture windows show the
whole world what’s inside, which is nothing out of the ordinary.

Rose makes her way into the hall, bends down, slides her hand behind a loose edge of stair-carpet. She fumbles, hooks her fingers under the stair-rail, pulls out her money. No need to count it
– she’s taking the lot. She carries it back into the kitchen. She hasn’t got an envelope and she can’t find an elastic band. She holds the notes in her fist, looking for her
purse, and then she blinks slowly and laughs out loud: Terence will have taken it. The teapot-clock says ten past ten. Rose picks up the packet of frozen peas, now slippery wet and melting, and
rips the bag with her teeth. She empties them into the sink, running hot water on the clusters of icy peas and poking them down the plughole until she can’t be bothered any more. She stuffs
the notes into the Bird’s Eye packet and puts it in her shoulder-bag.

C’mon, Parsnip, she says, We’re goin’ on our hols.

The dog that has been lying silently under the table, watching Rose’s movements with a hopeful shift of the eyes, leaps up and points his nose at the back door.

Rose walks across the estate. In the distance is the Shopping Village with its Chinese take-away, the chemist glowing golden from behind its portcullis, and the new-brick outline of The
Cricketer’s Arms. The carriage lamps on either side of the entrance spark with orange rain. It’s falling heavily now. The dog stops to shake himself, pulling up Rose on the other end of
the leash. She hears the sound of pub-laughter drifting on the night, warm and male and slightly threatening. There are two youths crouching on the floor of the bus shelter.

When’s the next one due? asks Rose.

They shrug at her. The younger boy has a cigarette curled like a glow-worm in his fist. He sucks importantly on the end. The other puts his head round the edge of the shelter
and nods into the distance

S’yer now, he says.

Rose sees the lights of the Hopper Bus appear at the top of the road. She clutches her bag tight to her side. She’ll get a taxi at the terminus to take her the rest of the
way.

~  ~  ~

The bulb on the landing doesn’t work, but I can tell by the slant of light falling down the stairwell that the door to my old bedroom is open. I’m not afraid of
that. A prickle of air behind me, like my father’s breath, chases me flying up the stairs. I wait in the darkness until the banging of my heart subsides. I can see the bed and the wooden
chest beneath the window. Safe now.

I drag the lamp as far as it will stretch, running the flex under the bed and across the floorboards. The shade is nowhere to be found; no lampshades anywhere. I imagine my mother under all this
bald light. I try to pull the chest nearer to the lamp, but it’s too heavy, and when I lift the lid, it’s full to the brim – with old clothes, slices of flint, a dirty nest of
straw. I run my hand over the fabric and the shiny cuts of stone, pulling at the nest until it opens up its secret: a glazed chalk fawn in two crumbling halves. There’s a memory here but I
can’t fathom it. A twist of pale straw breaks between my fingers.

On the top shelf of the corner cupboard I find two folded blankets. When I shake them out they’re craggy with damp, but anything is better than the idea of using the bed downstairs. I put
my cup of water on the floorboards, unwrap the gift of chocolates and eat a few. I wasn’t prepared at all: I expected the phone to be connected, a Late Shop open, central heating, a fridge
that worked. Not this dereliction, this hollowness. Not Mrs Riley and her sly remarks. Somewhere, bouncing off a house further down the street, is the metallic hiss and bang of music. The window
sticks as I push at the sash, then slides up with a terrifying clap. I can only see the car parked on the pavement; it takes me a minute to realize that the music comes from there. The two bodies
in it are still enough to be dead. A curl of smoke rises from the driver’s window.