Читать книгу Who Killed Ruby? - Camilla Way, Camilla Way - Страница 10

It was a few weeks after that when Vivienne’s life in Essex came to an abrupt end. Viv had returned home from school one day to find Stella packing their one and only suitcase. ‘We’re moving to London,’ she’d said as Viv watched her, wide-eyed. ‘Take that uniform off and throw it in the bin.’ Then she’d tossed her Ruby’s little green rucksack. ‘Put whatever you can fit in there, the rest we’ll leave. Let that pig of a landlord deal with it.’

They left there and then, taking a bus to the nearest station to catch a train to a new life. She had sat across from her mother, her bag of belongings on her lap, and tried to make sense of it all. Were they leaving because of Jack’s family? Or because they had no money left to pay the rent? She had sneaked a glance at her mum, and thought she understood: Ruby’s death was too sad, too terrible, to do anything else but run from.

For the first few months of their new London life they’d moved from place to place, to the spare beds or sofas belonging to ‘friends of friends’, or the sister of someone Stella used to work with. Sometimes Viv thought about the toys and bedroom she’d left behind, she thought of her friends and the people she knew in their village, but then she remembered the cold dragging misery of Ruby’s funeral, the cross bearing her and Noah’s names, the mound of earth covered in irises, her sister’s favourite flower, and she knew she never wanted to go back there again.

Stella never said how she found the commune in Nunhead and Vivienne didn’t ask, it was just another surprising turn in this constantly twisting new life of theirs. It was 1985, Nunhead a grubby pocket of south-east London tucked between New Cross and Peckham. The occasional small and dusty pub filled with small and dusty old men; clusters of council estates, Afro-Caribbean barber shops that stayed open half the night, lights and music and laughter spilling out across the pavement, narrow streets of dirty-bricked terraces, punctuated here and there by a greasy spoon, a bookies, a launderette. It was as far away from their rural Essex lives as Mexico or the moon.

Unity House had been on the border of New Cross, along a wide street lined with tall Victorian houses with steep steps to the door, from where you could look down at the barred windows of the cool dark basement area far below. Viv and her mother had arrived there one rainy Tuesday afternoon. They’d stood staring up at its yellow front door, they and their bags growing steadily damper in the drizzle.

Suddenly the door had opened and a young, pretty woman with a mass of black curls tied back with a red bandana and huge silver hoops in her ears had said, ‘Hello! You must be the new recruits. I’m Jo. Looks like you could do with a cuppa.’ And Viv had looked into Jo’s smiling face and something tightly bound inside her had unloosened a fraction for the first time since they’d left Essex and she’d thought, Thank you, oh thank you, thank you.

Unity House had been the start of it all, the start of their new life, of Stella’s transformation, though they hadn’t known that then. Jo had led them to an enormous kitchen with lime green walls and a long table covered in books and mugs and gardening gloves, a tomato plant someone was in the middle of repotting. Off the kitchen was a brick outhouse, and spying a wooden hutch, Vivienne had let go of her mother’s hand and dropped to her knees to find the biggest rabbit she’d ever seen.

When she returned she’d stared up wide-eyed at the posters pinned to the kitchen walls. One, bizarrely, was of a fish riding a bicycle, another was about something called Greenham Peace Camp. After a while she’d tuned into her mum and Jo’s conversation and was shocked to hear Stella haltingly tell her about Ruby. Viv had held her breath; her mother never talked about these things, not ever, not even to her. But Jo had leaned forward and put her hand on Stella’s arm, her eyes shining with compassion. ‘You’ve come to the right place,’ she said. ‘We’re all survivors here, one way or another.’

When they’d finished their tea, Jo had shown them around their new home, which they soon saw was much bigger than it had appeared from the street: four floors of large, light and airy rooms, linked by narrow passageways and three steep flights of stairs. In the living room one wall was entirely covered by a mural of a naked woman, a white dove in each hand. Everywhere she looked were piles of books, an abundance of pot plants, large, dramatic abstract oil paintings in vivid primary colours, a broken guitar here, somebody’s bike there. Indian throws were pinned across the large bay windows, turning the room’s light a pale mauve, orange, green. Viv can still recall the house’s singular woody, musty smell, feel the fresh air blowing through the always-open garden door.

One by one they were introduced to the others. There was Sandra and Christine, who, strangely, had a son together, a round-faced two-year-old named Rafferty Wolf who called one of them Mummy and the other Mama; they lived on the first floor. Soren, a slender, bright-eyed woman in her sixties, wore her grey hair in a long plait to her waist and was clearly responsible for the artwork displayed throughout the house; her attic space was lined with dozens of canvases, a smell of turps in the air.

On the second floor lived Hayley. A student in her twenties, she had purple spiky hair, a nose ring and a wide smile that showed large and gappy teeth. Her room was thick with cigarette smoke and through its fug Viv saw that her walls were covered in posters and flyers with slogans like ‘Maggie Out!’ and ‘Ban the Bomb!’ and ‘Fuck Capitalism!’ Across the hall was Jo’s room. In the basement lived Kay, who had a man’s haircut, shy brown eyes, wore a man’s suit, and barely spoke. ‘You’ll meet Margo later,’ Jo had promised as she showed them to the room that would be theirs.

That evening a dinner was thrown in their honour. The long table now cleared of gardening things, the nine of them crowded around it, everyone – apart from Viv, her mother and Kay – talking at once while Jo ladled something called goulash onto their plates. Vivienne sat close to her mother, overwhelmed by the hubbub of voices, the good-natured jostling for space, and she’d watched wide-eyed as Sandra, mid conversation, lifted her top to reveal her bare breast for Rafferty Wolf to feed hungrily from.

And then Margo had entered the room. Though in her fifties, her black skin was still luminous, her long dreadlocks only lightly peppered with grey. She was, Viv thought, absolutely beautiful. Her movements slow and languorous, she wore a long billowy blue dress with mustard embroidery at the bodice. She took her seat at the head of the table and while Jo poured her a drink, she had turned her large dark eyes to Viv and her mother. ‘Welcome, Vivienne and Stella, I’m so pleased to have you here,’ she’d said.

Candles flickered and spilled red wax down the necks of wine bottles, their flames casting shadows of the women against the lime green walls. Margo told them how she’d started the commune ‘as a place of shelter, somewhere we can live without violence or fear or censure. Everyone is equal here. We all contribute, we pool our resources, our time and our skills …’ She had a slow, sonorous way of talking that was almost hypnotic. Somebody put some music on, a female voice rising and falling along with a flute and a guitar. Vivienne, sleepy now, leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder as she listened to Margo talk.

One by one, the women had told their stories that night, describing how they’d come to find each other, how Margo and Unity House had changed their lives. Viv must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew she was being carried up to bed, a blanket pulled over her, her ears full of the music and the rise and fall of the women’s voices.

They would stay at Unity House for almost a decade, and during that time the strong, clever, loving women who lived there would each, in their own way, help to shape the person Vivienne would become. But, just as that first night it was Margo who’d made the greatest impression upon eight-year-old Viv, it would also prove to be Margo who taught her the most valuable lesson of all – that people aren’t necessarily always who they seem.