As She Left It (11 page)

At least finding someone’s long-lost family wasn’t the kind of thing you’d ever kick yourself for.

“Baby Girl!” said Fishbo. “I thought you’d forgotten me. Now step right in. I’m all ready.” He shuffled aside and pointed Opal towards the right-hand room, the music room, which was away from the shared wall so that Fishbo’s pupils could squeak and honk their way towards a tune all day, and the Mote Street Boys could squeak and honk their way back again all night and blame it on jazz. It was just the way Opal remembered it: last decorated by the last resident who cared about wallpaper, only more rusted now with another ten years of nicotine clinging to the cornice and the lampshades. She looked at herself in the mirror hanging by a chain above the tiled fireplace, remembering when she had been too small to see anything in it except the reflection of the opposite wall. The sideboard was still loaded with sheet music, skeletons of dismantled trumpets, scrabbled tangles of guitar strings, and a bent cymbal with a rash of apple and bananas stickers spreading over it. There was the same old couch and the same three chairs, ashtrays on the arms, shoes kicked off half under the frills, folded newspapers sliding down the sides. There was the same coffee table covered in opened mail, tea mugs, smeared plates with drying bacon rinds.

The little table beside Fishbo’s armchair was the same too—a brimming ashtray, a bottle of something Opal had called “Mr. Fish’s medicine for his throat” but that she now saw was Southern Comfort, three cans of coke left in a plastic noose made for six, and a sticky glass almost empty. His chair itself had flattened and sagged and been bolstered up again with new cushions, too bright against all the fawn and beige of spilled coffee and tobacco. In the centre of the room, as always, there was a music stand, a hard chair, and an open trumpet case on it, the horn itself glittering with polish.

“Can I tidy up a bit for you?” Opal said, before she could help it. It never used to bother her, the cans and the bacon rind, but now a little thrill of something unwelcome went through her, like running past railings with a stick and letting it rap against them. It was too much to be in this room again, as if she would go back across the road and find Nicola there, glass sticky with brandy, different ashtray just as full.

“Women!” Fishbo said. “All the same! Cain’t let a man
be
.”

“I’m just saying,” said Opal.

“Well, save your damn breath to blow your damn horn,” said Fishbo. He let himself fall into his armchair, put one claw on each armrest, looking like some kind of Bond villain or something, and nodded at the trumpet, waiting there, pulsing with the late sunlight filtering in the window.

Opal picked it up and tried the keys. They were smooth and free and she bit her tongue to keep from asking how come they could all keep their instruments like new pins and live in such a pigsty. That was one of Vonnie Pickess’s expressions—“like a new pin”—familiar from when she used to regale Margaret or Nicola or anyone who would listen about what a palace No. 1 had been before Mrs. Kendal gave Pep up as a bad job and moved back to Derby.

It had been ten years since she had put a trumpet to her lips, but everything about it was as familiar as if she played for an hour every day: the nudge of the rim against her bottom teeth, the crackle in her ears as she built up the pressure of her breath ready to blow, the forgotten—until remembered with a jolt—reflection of her own face in the back of the flare. She wiggled her eyebrows at Fishbo, cocked her elbows, and started softly to play.

Not good. What leapt to mind was Pinocchio trying to speak and finding out he was a donkey. She took the mouthpiece away with a jerk, apologised to Fishbo (who was sitting bolt upright with the shock), and tried again. Another sliding, farting groan belched out of the flare and ended with a screech like nails on a blackboard.

“Man, oh man,” said Fishbo.

“Bloody hell,” said Opal. “Scales?”

“Scales, baby.”

“And I’ll put a baffle in.”

After twenty minutes, it wasn’t so bad. Her fingering and her breath control were coming back to her, the notes were holding steady, and the rasping had stopped, but her cheek muscles were aching. She took the mouthpiece off, polished it, emptied the condensation from the spit valve, and placed the trumpet flare down on the seat of the hard chair.

“I wish I’d practised,” she said, remembering Steph and Sandy nagging her and the trumpet case sitting in the shoe cupboard day after day, month after month, until Steph got sick of dusting it and moved it to the loft.

“You’ll be jes’ fine,” said Fishbo. “End of next week, you’ll be good as new.”

“Why? What’s on at the end of next week?” Opal said, but he must have heard the nerves in her voice, and he waved the question away. “What age did you start at?” she asked, leaping on the first way she could think of to get him talking about the past.

“I was nine,” said Fishbo. “Little nappy-headed critter. Nine years old with a little toy trumpet my daddy gave me.”

“Was he a trumpet player too?” Opal asked, and Fishbo slapped his knee, making his foot lift up off the floor in a reflex.

“Daddy? Not hardly, Baby Girl. He worked on the railroad. He had no music in
his
soul. Somebody left that toy trumpet in the railway car, see, and so he wrapped it up as a gift and gave it to me for my birthday.”

“He told you that?” said Opal.

“Not right then,” Fishbo said. “Later, when I wanted to git me a full-size horn, I tried to hawk it. Daddy hit me upsides and down saying I didn’t get a good price, y’know? Drive a hard bargain. He said it was a fine little horn, worth more than I sold it for. See, I’d been thinkin’ if
I
got it for
my
birthday, it must be bottom of the damn range, cuz I knew how dirt poor we were.” Fishbo was laughing and shaking his head as if this was the funniest story he’d ever heard, but it made Opal feel as if she might cry. Then Fishbo himself seemed to hear a different strain in the air of it too, and he grew sober. “Aw, Daddy,” he said. “Long gone now. Little nappy-headed critter won’t be too long following him home.”

“Did he die while you were still there?” Opal said. “Or after you moved over?”

“Long, long gone,” Fishbo said, too cryptically to be much help really.

“What about your mum?” Opal said. “Sorry!” He had looked up at her with a sudden sharp look. “I suppose mums are in my mind.”

“My mama was jest a chile when she had me,” Fishbo said, “and she lived to a fine age. Clean-livin’ woman, Baby Girl. She died five years ago.”

“Wow,” said Opal, hoping that he would take it to be one of those meaningless expressions her generation went in for (awesome! fabulous!) and not what it was: amazement that someone so decrepit could have had a mother alive as recently as that. She gathered herself. “So you were still in touch with them
then
?” Fishbo nodded in that slow measured way of his that looked more like yoga than communication. “But you didn’t go back?” He began shaking his head. “And you really think there’s no way you could get in touch now?” Fishbo stopped shaking his head and looked at her, through her, through the wall behind her and the one beyond that.

“You cain’t never go back,” he said. “Life is a one-way ticket. Ain’t no road home.”

Opal was doing the slow yoga-nodding too now, thinking how much she used to love listening to Fishbo when she was a little girl; the slow rolling sound of his voice and the sudden flights up-tempo where his words were as sharp as his snapping fingers and his smile flashed like a light show, but now … Now everything he said sounded like something off a movie trailer or like it might be printed under the title of a trashy paperback, and his voice didn’t thrill her the way it used to. She thought of Margaret and Zula and how they sounded so mixed up and chopped about. Leeds and Meath, Leeds and India, all jumbled together. Why did Fishbo still sound exactly the same?

Then she took a long, hard look at him, sitting there on his chair with its extra cushions, looking like a bundle of clothes with a head on top, like a scarecrow, and her heart melted again.

“Did you have brothers and sisters?” she said. Let him talk about the past in any voice he wanted to.

“Our house had more bunk beds than a dog has fleas.”

“You’ve probably got nephews and nieces then,” said Opal. “And great-nephews and -nieces. Gordon can’t be that common a name in New Orleans.”

And Fishbo’s eyes seemed to swim back into focus again and fasten on her face again.

“What you …” he said. “Why you—who
are
you? You some kind of ghost come to haunt my last days? What’s going
on
?”

“What?” said Opal. “Mr. Fish? It’s Opal Jones. It’s me.”

“I’m tired,” the old man said, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. “You leave me now, chile. Let me be.”

Opal crept to the door and let herself out, closing it softly behind her. She was the master of getting silently through a door. Started learning how at ten, had it down pat by the time she was twelve. Steph used to lock up and take the key out after Opal moved there. But by then she was thirteen, her sneaking about days already over. “I was a prodigy,” she had said to one of the torn-faced social workers she used to sit with every week, the pair of them bored to tears. “Doing things way earlier than the rest. Like that Mozart bloke, yeah?” And she got written up for an uncooperative attitude, just because the miserable cow had had no sense of humor.

The doorway at the end of passage darkened and she turned to see Pep Kendal standing there.

“Is Fishbo all right?” she said, and even in her own ears she soun-
ded like a tearful child. Pep beckoned her, and she went to join him. “Is he, though?” she said when the kitchen door was shut behind them. “He got confused there. Like an old person.”

“He
is
an old person,” said Pep. “They’re called senior moments, love. Yours’ll be along someday too.”

“I don’t mean like that,” Opal said. “He didn’t know who I was for a minute.”

“He doesn’t eat enough,” Pep said. He was cooking, and he waved his spatula over the frying pan as if a brown, frilly egg and a few links of sausage were just what the doctor ordered. “And he’s got a chest infection, keeps him up coughing at night. He’s just tired.”

“That’s what
he
said,” Opal agreed, glad to let the worry go.

“I heard you practising,” said Pep, watching the sausages. He pushed his lips out, making his moustache bristle. Opal laughed.

“Yeah,” she said. “What’s this thing at the end of next week?”

“Silver wedding,” said Pep. “The Mote Street Boys played at their reception, and they want us back again.”

“Great!” said Opal, feeling a trickle of cold down between her shoulders at the thought of a function room full of people, all dressed up, all staring slack-jawed at the stage where she was trying to play a scale.

“They moved away from Leeds, obviously,” said Pep. “Mote Street means nothing to them. They’ve been down in Coventry.”

“Is it really that bad?” Opal said. “The ‘Mote Street’ thing? Why didn’t you just change the band’s name?”

“Ah, the youth of today,” said Pep. “Got an answer for everything, eh?”

And because it was far too close to the truth—the way Opal had waltzed back in here and decided she could fix all the problems, solve all the mysteries, make life perfect for everyone—she didn’t give him any backchat. He went over to a cupboard and got a plate out, then looked over his shoulder. “One or two?” he said.

“Plates?” said Opal. “Well, he’s out for the count, I think.”

“I was inviting you to dinner,” said Pep. “You want it engraved?”

“I want my egg broken,” Opal said. Pep brought two plates over to the counter, picked up the spatula, and drove its edge into the middle of one of the eggs.

“Hey,” Opal said. “That was the good one. What a waste! You shouldn’t break the good egg.” Pep put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a quick squeeze; Opal couldn’t tell why.

“He’s really upset about his family too,” she said when they were sitting opposite one another at the little kitchen table. Opal rolled a sausage up in a slice of buttered bead and squirted in ketchup, like a hotdog. There was a lot to be said for single men who didn’t care about manners. “You know, since the hurricane.”

Pep chewed and swallowed, then ran his tongue around the outside of his bottom teeth.

“Ah yes,” he said. “The hurricane. New Orleans and the French Quarter and the Gordon family scattered to the four winds and poor old Eugene who cain’t never go home.”

“What?” said Opal.

“We’ve been hearing a lot more about Norlins again since Katrina blew through.”

“So who’s Eugene?”

“Eugene Gordon, my lodger,” Pep said. “Fishbo!”

“Look who’s talking,” said Opal. “Pep!”

“Here,” said Pep. “I was called Peppermint since primary school—after Kendal Mintcake.”

“Who?” Opal asked.

Pep stared at her. “Mean to say you’ve never had a bar of Kendal Mintcake? On a day at the lakes?”

“When was
I
at the lakes?” said Opal. “Nicola wasn’t exactly the type for picnics, you know.”

“But I’d bet you all the money in my pockets,” Pep said, going back to the subject, “that Gene Gordon made up ‘Fishbo’
for himself.”

“Why are you being so mean?” asked Opal. Pep screwed his tongue into a back molar and worked it round there, saying nothing. “He’s supposed to be your friend.”

“He is my friend, the old fart. I wouldn’t change him, which is just as well because he’ll never change now. Just nod and smile, love. Like we all do, while he’s looking. Nod and smile.”

“I don’t know what you’re on about,” Opal said.

“Well, do me a favour and don’t try to work it out,” Pep said. “He’ll be enjoying having you back and telling you all about it. Don’t spoil it for him, eh?” He shook his head then and laughed. “Louisiana!”

“What about Louisiana?” said Opal, sounding scrappy even to her own ears. Once again, Mr. Kendal was hitting far too close to home. “We’ve all got to come from somewhere.”