Читать книгу Saving Missy - Beth Morrey - Страница 13

The following Tuesday, there was a fight at my new café.

After my encounter with Sylvie in the chemist, I took to loitering around that row of shops, the café in particular, until the smiling waitress began to recognise me and serve my coffee with plain cold milk, none of that frothy nonsense. They gave me a little card that got stamped every time I bought a cup, eventually resulting in a free drink. The bread in the Turkish shop next door was cheap and fresh, and I browsed the children’s fiction in the charity bookshop, picking up a Thomas the Tank Engine book for Arthur for fifty pence.

I’d never bothered with any of these local explorations before – I’d been busy with the children and running the household, and later, when he got ill, looking after Leo. I didn’t have to worry about money then either, whereas now I spent my time rooting out meagre bargains as if it would make the slightest difference. My meanderings whiled away the hours and the pennies, but there was still no sign of Sylvie.

That Tuesday, enjoying my regular ‘Americano’, who should come in but Angela, this time without Otis. She was unkempt as usual, tendrils of too-red hair escaping from a topknot, smudged eyeliner, leather jacket and scruffy boots with buckles that clinked as she walked. At first I didn’t notice the woman she was with, but as they sat down together in the corner I saw she was crying, and that Angela appeared to be comforting her. She was speaking quickly, persuasively, but the woman kept shaking her head, wiping at her cheekbones. She was terribly thin, with a sucked-in look that led me to conclude she was probably on drugs.

Then Angela suddenly sat back, smacked the table like she was finished, and the other woman got up and cannoned her way out of the café. Angela half-stood up and called out something that sounded like ‘Flicks!’ but maybe she was just cursing. The woman stopped in the doorway and turned around, mascara in streaks down the hollowed panes of her face, her mouth twisted into a snarl.

‘You don’t get it,’ she snapped. ‘You’ll never get it.’

They both seemed oblivious to the other customers, who had fallen silent at the spectacle, watching over the rims of their cups as they appreciated this little soap opera scene.

‘I want to help you,’ said Angela. ‘Please.’ She held out a hand.

Like a tennis match, all eyes darted across to the other woman in the doorway.

‘Then stop interfering. Leave me alone,’ she spat, reaching for the door handle. What happened next was extraordinary. Angela leapt forward and pushed the door shut, barring her way; the woman tried to shove her aside, and they grappled in the entrance, pulling each other this way and that. Occasionally one of them would say, ‘no!’ or ‘don’t’, as they continued their ungainly shuffling, oblivious to the dropped mouths of the onlookers. Then the other woman suddenly lifted her hand and slapped Angela across the face. She fell back with a short cry and there was a collective gasp from the customers; one of the row of laptop-workers stood up, as if to protest, then thought better of it as Hanna the waitress hurried forwards and pulled Angela back a step. The other woman watched them for a second, chest heaving, hair askew, then wrenched the door handle and stumbled out into the street.

There was a barely perceptible sigh of disappointment as she exited – the fun spoilt when it was just getting going – but I’ve always found such public displays sordid. Leo and I once had an argument at a party, sotto voce out the sides of our mouths, lifting our glasses and nodding to passing guests. People have no standards nowadays; they just let it all hang out.

Angela, a livid mark on one cheek, sank into her seat, took a cigarette packet out of one pocket and lit up right then and there. Hanna went back over to remonstrate with her. Grimacing, Angela stubbed out the cigarette in a saucer. She sat with her head in her hands for a while, then picked up her bag and made her way to the door. As she passed my table she caught sight of me and raised her eyebrows wearily.

‘Oh, hi, er …’ Unlike Sylvie, she’d forgotten.

‘Millicent.’

‘Hi, Millicent. You OK?’

‘Fine, thank you. Um … you?’ To my dismay she suddenly hefted her bag on to the floor next to me and took the seat opposite, beckoning Hanna over to take her order.

‘I’m fucking awful, as you can see. I’m just gonna sit here for five minutes if that’s OK, stop me doing something stupid.’ Pulling the bowl of sugar cubes towards her, she crunched one between yellow teeth. She was very pale, with dark circles under her eyes. Probably all that hard drinking with Sylvie.

‘Of course.’ I hoped this didn’t mean I would have to pay for her coffee.

We sat in silence for a few seconds as she picked at the skin around her fingernails, which were bitten to the quick and flecked with chipped nail polish. Hanna delivered her coffee and she slurped it, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

Eventually she looked sideways at me. ‘You married?’

I caught my breath. ‘Yes. But he’s not … he’s not …’

She waved away the question. ‘I’m not,’ she said grimly. ‘And sometimes I’m so fucking relieved, you know? More trouble than it’s worth.’

I was intrigued enough to venture a question of my own. ‘What about your son? Is his father … around?’

She snorted. ‘Didn’t want to know. Better that way, trust me. Anyway, I’m not talking about me. You got children? Grandchildren?’

‘Yes, two children. And one grandchild.’

‘Boy or girl?’

‘A boy. Arthur.’

She grinned. ‘Bet he’s a terror.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A terror.’ But she’d drifted off again, staring into space, drumming her fingers on the table in time to the jazz playing in the background.

‘She’s got to get the kids out. And Bob. That’s the trouble,’ she mumbled, more to herself than to me.

I sat in silence, waiting for her to work it out. Women like her always have some drama or other. Just as I was wondering if it would be rude to signal Hanna to bring the bill, Angela leaned back in her chair, rubbed her face and heaved a great sigh.

‘You’re right, I can’t get involved,’ she said.

I inclined my head, and caught Hanna’s eye.

Angela pinched the bridge of her nose and huffed again. ‘Fuck.’

The expletives that pepper today’s conversations are particularly unsavoury, so ugly and unimaginative, although it was more the repetition that bothered me than the word itself. Angela’s curses were so frequent that they were like punctuation points, each one provoking a twinge of distaste, a sourness in my mouth and hers. Her speech was as sloppy as her scuffed shoes. I picked up my bag and put it onto my knee, ready.

Hanna brought over the bill. As she put the saucer down in front of us, she briefly squeezed Angela’s shoulder, but before I could decide what the gesture meant, Angela tweaked the paper between her fingers. ‘I’ll get this.’

I shook my head, ‘Oh no, please don’t,’ fumbling coins out of my purse. Angela waved them away, ‘No, go on. I barged in on you, it’s the least I can do.’ She slapped a five-pound note on the table and gave a hovering Hanna the thumbs up.

‘Well, there was no need. No need at all. But thank you.’ I stood up, feeling awkward as always, on the cusp of conversations. Beginnings and endings, I’m never sure how they should go. ‘Er, goodbye then. Hope you manage to … sort it out.’ But as I backed away, she grabbed her bag and slid out of her chair. ‘I’ll walk with you, I could do with the fresh air.’ I muttered an oath of my own.

Angela lit up again as soon as we were outside, inhaling her ‘fresh air’, head back and eyes closed, the bruise on her cheek already darkening. She turned to me, smoke curling out of her flared nostrils.

‘Where is Arthur?’

I nearly stumbled, so discomfited – and offended – by the question that for a while I didn’t reply. There was something disturbingly direct and intense about her.

‘He lives with his father, my son. In Australia. They moved out there three years ago.’ The words had to be choked out, everything in me rebelled against them. Angela stared at me for a second, then turned and kicked a fallen leaf.

‘That’s some tough shit,’ she said. ‘What’s he like?’

The marble was back in my throat. ‘He’s four. He likes Lego, and football, and Batman, and all the usual things a boy of his age likes, I suppose.’ I stopped, then found I couldn’t. ‘I don’t see them often, but when I do … He’s busy. Always playing, running, fighting. He hardly ever sits still, he’s just fizzing with energy all the time, so when he does stop, you want to … pin him down, moor him somehow. It’s so hard to keep up with him. But I want to. I want to keep a version of him at every age. He just keeps getting better and better. But I miss all the babies and boys he was, and want them all back.’ I tailed off, embarrassed.

Angela nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it’s like that, isn’t it?’

‘What’s Otis like?’

‘Such a sweet boy,’ she said. ‘Nothing like me. Nothing like his father either, thank Christ. There’s no side to him, no edge at all. I get scared sometimes, by the love. I used to be hard as nails – had to be, doing what I do – but he’s taken it out of me, made me soft. Like when you bash a steak.’

‘Tenderized,’ I said.

‘That’s it. He’s tenderized me, the little sod. I’m no bloody good at my job any more.’

I still didn’t like her much, but she had Otis and I had Arthur. ‘Sylvie said you’re a journalist?’

‘Yeah, but freelance, so you’re always hustling for the next thing.’ She switched into interrogation mode again. ‘You’re retired, right? What did you do?’

‘I was a librarian. Before I had children.’

‘They’re closing all the libraries now,’ she said glumly.

‘Well, this is me,’ I said, my hand on the gate.

Angela looked up. ‘Fuck me, the whole house? I’m just down the road, but in the top-floor flat. Postage stamp. You’ve got the whole house?’

‘We bought in the sixties. The area wasn’t quite so gentrified then.’ I thought of the riots, the strikes, the burglaries. The rubbish piling up in the street. We’d been pioneers.

Resigned to the fact that Angela wanted to come in, I made a last stand all the same. ‘Where’s Otis?’ I asked, hoping she’d remember she had to go and pick him up.

‘He’s at the childminder’s,’ she murmured, still gazing up. ‘The whole house. Jesus.’

Unlocking the front door, I could sense her behind me, hopping from foot to foot in anticipation. Pushing it open, we stepped inside.

The first time I went into that hallway was back in 1964. Heavily pregnant, and daunted by the wide sweep of stairs, I’d waddled left and discovered the most charming drawing room. A huge bay window sent sunlight flooding through, casting rays along the varnished floorboards; dark and light, dust particles rolling in the shafts as I wandered between them. Unfurnished – the previous owner had died and evidently the relatives had swooped in and snaffled the lot – it was a blank slate. While Leo argued with the agent about damp, the house whispered to me that it was mine.

Nowadays, of course, people would move in and immediately gut the place, stripping out and paring back so they can fill it all up again. New owners are so keen to ‘put their stamp on things’ – such an aggressive term, as if a house can be branded with one’s personality. We preferred to let the building’s own character shine through and didn’t change a thing, apart from re-painting one of the bedrooms for the baby. In fact, beyond general maintenance, it was still the same as it was just after Miss Edith Crawshay passed away in it.

‘Shit a brick,’ said Angela, seeing the kitchen. ‘This is a fecking time warp.’ It was rather outmoded, I suppose – the cabinets dated from the fifties. There was an Aga, which seemed incongruous in a city house, but it worked perfectly well, and to demonstrate, I put the kettle on the boiling plate. Angela had already prowled off. I scurried after her, keen to stop her before she reached …

Leo’s study. The door was already ajar. How dare she barge into my house and take stock like this? But as I opened my mouth to berate her she turned and her face was so transfixed with wonder it brought me up short.

‘Oh, Millicent,’ she breathed. ‘This is fabulous.’ She was stroking Leo’s John Milton reverently. ‘It’s a treasure trove. Look!’

‘It’s my husband’s,’ I said, taking it off her and putting it back on the shelf.

‘Some collector,’ she observed, unabashed, wandering over to his still-dusty Dickens collection. ‘Is this him?’ she stopped by his desk to pick up a photo of us, taken shortly after we were married.

‘Yes.’

‘Very attractive,’ she noted, then looked at me appraisingly. ‘Both of you.’ She picked up another photo. ‘Your children? The son, who’s in Australia. What about the girl?’

‘Melanie. She lives in Cambridge.’ I resisted the urge to snatch the frame back.

‘Do you see her often?’ She’d already moved along to the historical section.

‘Not really. She’s very busy. She teaches at the University.’ Once again, Melanie, backing away in my kitchen. ‘What you did … it wasn’t wrong … You shouldn’t blame yourself …’

‘Who’s Leonard Carmichael?’ She pointed at the shelf, stacked with his books, his name again and again on the spines.

‘My husband,’ I said, my voice shaking only slightly. ‘He wrote historical biographies. Mostly political ones.’

She stood on her thin ice and looked at me without saying anything, then the kettle started to whistle and I rushed off to deal with it. When I brought the tea into the living room she was already there, rocking on her heels and gazing around with her mouth open.

‘Have you had a car boot sale or something?’ She gestured around the room.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well … It’s a bit bare, isn’t it?’

Apart from the throw and lamp I’d reclaimed the other night, there was very little in the living room other than a sofa, a stool serving as a coffee table, and the television on a stand. No rugs, no pictures on the walls, no knick-knacks of any kind. I loathed clutter. When the children were little I felt as though I were drowning in it, and gradually banished the lot, finding that the less stuff I had surrounding me, the calmer things felt. Leo didn’t care one way or the other – as long as he had his books he was happy.

‘There’s rather a lot up in the attic.’ Angela’s eyes gleamed at the thought of untold treasure, but we certainly weren’t opening that can of worms. So she drank her tea and moaned about a deadline. Then she said she’d do a feature on ‘the houses that time forgot’ and use mine as an example, as if I would consider such a vulgar thing. But as she left, running a finger along the banister and casting one last look up at the grubby chandelier above the landing, she suddenly squeezed my arm like a conspirator.

‘Listen, give me your number. It’s my day off on Friday and I’m taking Otis to the park. You should come. He’d like to see you. He hasn’t got a grandma, or at least, not one in this country.’

It was nonsense of course. Otis had barely noticed me. But my face flamed with gratification as I tapped my number into her phone.

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘If the weather’s nice.’ I shut the door behind her, allowing myself a rare moment of triumph. At last, I would have something to email Alistair about.