The Other Family (10 page)

Amy said softly, ‘Me too. About other things.’

‘I’ve never said it out loud,’ Scott said. ‘Not for twenty-odd years. I’ve just let it stew around in my head.’

‘Yes,’ Amy said in a whisper.

‘And then you ask me—’

Amy said, more clearly, ‘I don’t know why I rang. I just thought I would. It was in my mind and it was bugging me, so I did.’

‘Will it bug you again?’

‘You could ring me,’ Amy said. ‘It doesn’t have to be me. You could phone.’

‘I don’t think so—’

‘I’m going,’ Amy said. ‘I’m going to ring off.’

‘Cheers,’ Scott said. He waited. Amy said nothing. Then he heard her phone go dead. ‘Bye,’ Scott said, with exaggerated emphasis, into the ether. ‘Bye. Thanks for calling.’

He threw his phone across the space of the floor on to the sofa, and put his hands into his still-damp hair, ruffling it up into spikes. What had all that been about?

Amy got down on to the floor and crouched there, holding her knees, pushing her eye sockets against them. She stayed there for some time, just breathing and waiting for the bones of her skull to press against the bones of her kneecaps until they were more painful than merely uncomfortable, and then she unrolled herself slowly and stood up and stretched until her fingertips touched the sloping ceiling above her bed. She had taped a big picture of Duffy up there, wearing a red-and-black jumper and a lot of eye make-up, posed against a brick wall and looking pretty panicky. It was a look that Amy could often identify with.

She bent to pick up her phone from the carpet, and put it in her jeans pocket, leaving the charm she had attached to
it – a blue glitter dolphin – hanging outside so that she could tweak the phone out in an instant when it began to vibrate. She always had her phone on vibrate. Her sisters, of course, had loud ring tones but Amy preferred the near secrecy of vibrate, just as she preferred to let most family things drift her way, being ever observant but seldom demanding. It was only things that really mattered that got Amy into demand mode, that turned her into someone she wasn’t all that pleased to be, someone who snooped, someone who went through drawers and checked e-mail inboxes and eavesdropped. Someone who opened her dead father’s piano stool – something that had never even remotely occurred to her to do, all the eighteen years of her life – and found inside all sorts of old stuff; stuff relating to a place and a time which had nothing to do with the dad who was part of Amy’s life, nothing to do with anything familiar to her either.

There was quite a lot of sheet music in there, battered copies of songs from musicals,
Show Boat
, and
Guys and Dolls
, and
Carousel
. There were football programmes from St James’ Park, dated in the 1970s. There was a postcard of something called St Andrew’s Churchyard and on the back someone had written in a handwriting that wasn’t Richie’s, ‘Fifteen witches buried here!’ and a date, 27 July 1963. There was a brochure for the Grand Hotel, Tynemouth, and a small wooden coat of arms, gold keys crossed on a red background, below a gilded helmet and a little ship, above a motto, ‘
Moribus Civilis
’, and on the back of the shield was a grubby white label on which – her father’s hand this time – was written ‘Scott – 1983’. And there was a photograph. It was in an envelope but both the envelope and the photograph looked as if they’d been much handled. It showed a young mother, and a baby, quite a big baby, almost a toddler. The young mother had her hair in a curled pageboy, and a plainly home-made frock, and a hat like a halo. The baby was in
hand-knitted shorts and an Eton-collared jersey and little socks and bar shoes.

Amy had been alone in the house when she opened the piano stool. Chrissie had gone to see the bank manager, Tamsin was at work, on reception at an estate agent’s in the High Street, Dilly was at college. Amy was supposed to be upstairs, working. The period of grace she had been given on account of Richie dying had, quite suddenly, seemed to end. Chrissie had begun, with something approaching shrillness, to insist on Amy’s catching up with the revision she’d missed in the last few weeks, the revision it was absolutely imperative she complete, before the school term began. She found revision so hard to approach that some days it was almost impossible. The music was OK. Even music theory was OK. But when it came to English and Spanish, her concentration seemed to fragment and scatter like little bobbles of mercury skittering away across a sheet of glass. She’d made herself sit there, in front of her
Hamlet
quotations, for almost an hour, and then she’d gone downstairs, to make, oh, coffee or toast or powdered soup in a mug, and drifted into Richie’s piano room on a melancholy whim, to touch the keys, pressing them down very slowly, without a sound, and found herself on the floor, opening the worn padded seat of the piano stool.

There was a tie folded on top of all the papers. It was a terylene tie, navy blue with maroon-and-cream stripes. It was creased and had lost its label. It was definitely a tie that pre-dated Chrissie, Amy thought. Chrissie would never have countenanced Richie wearing a tie that wasn’t pure silk, and French or Italian. But there was something about this old, worn, cheap tie that made Amy put it down beside her with respect, an eloquent something. It was almost as eloquent, in fact, as the photograph, which was right at the bottom of the piano stool, under everything else, gritty with dust. When Amy put everything back into the piano stool, very
methodically, in the order in which she had taken everything out and with the tie neatly folded on top, she put the photograph in its envelope in the back pocket of her jeans. Then she took it out again, laid it on top of the tie, closed the piano stool, walked out of the room, paused, walked back in, opened the piano stool, extracted the envelope, put it back in her jeans pocket and went swiftly and stealthily up the stairs to her room like a burglar, even though she was the only person in the house. Once in her room, she slipped the envelope behind the Duffy poster. Then she went across to her laptop, and connected to Google Earth.

She had, she realized, no idea where Newcastle was, in any detail. Up north somewhere, like Manchester or Leeds, lost in that hilly other world that started after Birmingham and stretched vaguely up the map until it got to Scotland, but she had no precise idea of which side of up north it was, or whether it was in the middle or on the sea. It was surprisingly astonishing, then, to see the city swim up into view under the satellite’s scrutiny, swelling out from the curving ribbon of the River Tyne, with a great space of sea to one side and crumpled hills scattered on the other. She moved on, over Tynemouth and Gateshead and North Shields, past bridges and monuments, along streets and alleys tipping down to the river, to the sea, and then into information about the area’s history and music and decayed industries and revived nightlife. She was so absorbed in what she was doing that when she heard the front door slam, she’d given a little gasp, and hastily switched the screen back to
Hamlet
, back to those quotations that seemed to be, however passionately she chanted them, so dead on the page. ‘“It is not madness I have uttered”,’ she was saying, her eyes closed on an inward vision of Newcastle. ‘“Bring me to the test”,’ when Chrissie came into the room and asked her if she’d like a mug of tea.

That had been three days ago. Since Thursday, she had
gone back, half a dozen times, to look at Newcastle, and, almost as often, had slipped the photograph from behind Duffy’s poster, and gazed at it again, almost greedily. Richie and his mother. Richie in 1942, perhaps, in a photographer’s studio in North Shields, or maybe at home, although it seemed odd, even for 1942, to wear a hat at home. There was no background much to the picture, just the table Richie was sitting on, and a straight fall of thin curtain behind him and his mother, no other piece of furniture, no pictures or flowers. Just that proud young mother, in a frock she’d possibly made herself, and that baby, who would grow up to have his own babies. Four of them. Tamsin, Dilly, herself – and Scott. Scott, who still lived roughly where Richie had grown up and who was going to have the piano. Scott, who had come to the funeral, and looked like some weird echo of Dad. Scott, who had stood, almost defensively, at his mother’s elbow but who had, at the same time, regarded his three half-sisters, that split second they were facing each other, with more interest than hostility. It was three days of this, three days of Newcastle and her father and her father as a baby and Scott, that finally got to her. She was lying on her bed, one of her Spanish set texts – Lorca – propped up on her stomach, when the impulse came to her, cramping up her nerve ends until she seized her phone and dialled Scott’s number and waited, rigid with panic and thrill, for him to answer.

And then, of course, she didn’t know what to say. When he asked her why she’d rung, she couldn’t tell him. He sounded quite relaxed, though there’d been wary moments, and she discovered she wanted him to go on talking, wanted him to somehow take the conversation over and guide her, help her, suggest something she might do next. But of course he hadn’t. He had let her drift on, waiting to see what she was after, and, as she hardly knew that herself, she’d lost her nerve, as
suddenly as it had spurred her to act, and she’d ended the call, before she knew she was doing it, before she meant to.

She glanced at the radio clock beside her bed: seven forty-eight. Downstairs, someone might be making their traditional Sunday-night scrambled eggs, the eggs that were the only cooking Richie had ever done, and that not often. Food, Amy thought, would at least be distracting, would stop her thinking and wondering for a while, would clear Scott’s irritating, endearing Geordie voice out of her ears. She touched the dolphin charm hanging out of her pocket to reassure herself that the phone was still there, and went out of her bedroom, and downstairs.

Only Tamsin was in the kitchen. She was wearing a white velour tracksuit, and had a dark-blue towel wrapped round her head like a turban. She was sitting at the kitchen table, painting her nails with clear varnish in long, slow, careful strokes. She glanced up as Amy came in.

‘Where’s Mum?’

‘Out,’ Tamsin said. ‘I sent her out to have a drink with the Nelsons. Anything to get her away from the computer.’

‘And Dilly?’

‘Guess.’

Amy opened the fridge.

‘Want something?’

Tamsin shook her head carefully, so as not to dislodge the towel.

Amy took out a plastic box of pieces of cheese and a tomato and a caramel yoghurt, and put them on the table.

‘You been working?’ Tamsin said.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘All this time?’

Amy began to rummage in a cupboard.

‘It’s so boring—’

‘You’ll break Mum’s heart if you screw these exams up.’

Amy dumped a collection of cracker packets on the table, beside the cheese box.

‘Don’t say that!’

‘Well,’ Tamsin said, splaying the fingers of one hand and surveying them. ‘You’re the bright one. Dad always said that. I’m practical, Dilly’s decorative and daft, and you’re bright.’

Amy sat down at the table, holding a knife.

‘Get a plate,’ Tamsin said.

‘I’m just going,’ Amy said, ‘to put bits of cheese, Madam Fusspot, on crackers and eat them. I don’t need a plate.’

‘Get a plate,’ Tamsin said again.

Amy got up, sighing, and went to retrieve a plate from the cupboard, banging the door.

‘Tam—’

‘What?’

‘Tam, d’you ever think about when Dad was little? What his life was, when he was little?’

Tamsin looked at her other hand.

‘No.’

Amy took out a small block of cheese and put it on the plate. Then she hacked an irregular chunk from one end.

‘I do.’

Tamsin shot her a glance.

‘What d’you mean?’

‘Well,’ Amy said, ‘we don’t know anything about where he grew up, do we, we never went there, he never talked about it.’

‘He didn’t think about it,’ Tamsin said. ‘It was over.’

Amy balanced her cheese on a biscuit.

‘How do you know?’

‘We’d have known if he thought about it,’ Tamsin said. ‘But he didn’t. He didn’t want to know about it any more. He had a new life.’

Amy bit into her cheese. The biscuit broke and fragments scattered across the table.

Through her mouthful, she said indistinctly, ‘I do.’

Tamsin stopped painting. She glared at her sister.

‘
What
?’

Amy swallowed the cheese.

‘I want to know about where Dad was born. I want to know about his life there.’

‘You can’t,’ Tamsin said flatly.

‘Why can’t I?’

‘You’d upset Mum.’

‘Why would I, I’m only wanting to know where Dad—’

‘You know why.’

Amy said nothing. She gathered up several pieces of biscuit, and pressed them into the remaining cheese.

She said, looking at the food in her hand, ‘They didn’t
ask
for the piano.’

Tamsin leaned forward. The towel turban made her face look older, more severe.

She said, ‘Mum has enough to cope with. She’s not in a good place. She needs us to be right behind her, not siding with people who’ve taken things they’ve no right to.’

‘I’m not siding,’ Amy said stubbornly. ‘And they haven’t
taken
anything.’

Tamsin slammed her hands down on the table. She almost shouted, ‘Whose side are you on?’

Amy put another bite of cheese and cracker into her mouth.

‘Everybody’s,’ she said.

C
hrissie’s friend Sue was sitting on the edge of Chrissie’s big bed, gazing at the line of fitted cupboards across the room. Behind her, balanced unsteadily on the duvet, was a tray bearing the things she’d brought from the delicatessen – a bottle of Prosecco, some big green olives, a small whole salami in a netting tube – and two glasses, plates, and a knife. The door to the bathroom was closed. Behind it, Chrissie was doing God knows what. Sue crossed her legs and leaned back on her hands. Chrissie had said, a few days ago, that she couldn’t face sorting out Richie’s clothes alone, so Sue had said not to worry, I’ll come, I’ll bring a bottle, we’ll have a party, and here she was, as good as her word, all alone on Chrissie’s bed while Chrissie was locked in the bathroom.