As She Left It (12 page)

“Exactly,” said Pep. “Well put, love. I wish you could convince her next door. She had a right go about the Joshi boys
again
to me yesterday. Terrorists, she reckons. Or on their way to it.”

“God, I know,” said Opal. Then she dropped her knife and fork. “Christ, I asked her over for tea.”

FIFTEEN

O
F COURSE,
M
RS.
P
ICKESS
was up on a chair at Opal’s window, scrubbing away at the glass hard enough to go through it to the other side.
And
she didn’t miss Opal coming out of Pep’s either.

“Oh, there you are,” she called over. “I thought I’d just crack on while the light was still good.”

Opal didn’t say that it was the first week in July and the light would be good until ten o’clock, she just mumbled apologies and stood with her head down until Mrs. Pickess had finished telling her how fine it was and how she was quite happy to get on with it on her own and how Opal shouldn’t feel bad and her hip was hardly bothering her in this warm weather anyway.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” Opal said.

“See and empty it out,” Mrs. Pickess called in the front door after her. “Refill fresh from the tap.”

It does look good, mind
, Opal thought staring out while the water boiled for the tea, even if the view through the sparkling glass was of Mrs. Pickess on her chair, polishing madly with a page of crumpled tabloid, her skirt hem lifting to show the frill of her underskirt and her shirt collar slipping aside to show its shoulder straps. Who wore full-length underskirts anymore, never mind in a heat wave? “Are you not roasting?” Opal shouted. “Would you rather have something cold?”

Then she had to sit through the explanation of how hot tea cools you down on a warm day, as well as a lecture about putting hot teabags in the bin and how it would attract vermin and how she would look out for a little teabag dish for Opal next time she was down at the city markets, but until then she should use a bowl, next to the kettle, with a folded square of kitchen paper in the bottom to stop it staining.

“I haven’t got any kitchen paper,” Opal said. “I’ll use toilet roll.” And Mrs. Pickess looked as if she might gag.

“Well,” she said, looking round, once she had recovered. “You’ve made a start.” Opal fixed her eyes on Mrs. Pickess’s face, refusing to look around her kitchen and see where she might have failed. A start! She had been up until after midnight last night making sure the kitchen and living room would pass muster. She would never have invited Mrs. Fussy Knickers in after just a
start
.

“And now with my windows so nice and clean, it looks lovely,” was all she said. “You came round and did the back first, didn’t you?” The evening sun was blaring in through the clean glass and bouncing around the kitchen like a pinball. Opal thought she better not say that she had quite liked the softness that came from the dust and smears.

“I did,” said Mrs. Pickess. “I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

“I’m very grateful.”

“Well, I’ve done what I can,” said Mrs. Pickess, “but my days of going up a ladder are behind me.”

“Of course they are,” said Opal, hoping it wouldn’t have been more polite to disagree. “I’ll ask the Joshis if I can borrow a ladder. They’re bound to have one. One of the lads might even offer to hold it steady for me.”

“If you can catch them in between
prayers
,” Mrs. Pickess said.

Opal smiled. Pep Kendal was right. “Prayers?” she said.

“Five times a day,” said Mrs. Pickess. “I saw something on the telly about it. A big curtain down the middle of the room.”

“They’re not Muslims, Mrs. Pickess,” Opal said. “They’re Hindus.”

“
Pffft
. It’s all the same,” said Mrs. Pickess. “They can’t fool me.”

“You’re right,” Opal said. “We’re all the same. Good for you.” Mrs. Pickess’s eyes narrowed to slits, but she said nothing. “Where do you come from, originally?” Opal went on. “I’ve never met anyone else called Pickess. Where’s that from?” Mrs. Pickess put her mug down on the table with a crack, making Opal think that if she’d used cups and saucers, like Mrs. Pickess said, she’d have six cups and five saucers now.

“My husband’s family—the Pickesses—were greengrocers in Osmondthorpe since Queen Victoria,” she said. “You can still see their name on a gable end. And my family were called Thirsthwistle.”

“Bloody hell,” said Opal.

“Which is a fine old Yorkshire name.”

“You should have gone hyphenated,” Opal said, which wrung a laugh out of Mrs. Pickess at last.

“I was so glad to get rid of it,” she said, “I’d have married Mr. Pickess if he’d had a glass eye and wooden teeth.” She heaved up a sigh like a load of wet washing from a twin tub and huffed it out again, slumping. “We had thirty happy years and he left me well set. There’s not much more you can ask for.”

“Did you never have children?” Opal said, only realising that minute that she had never seen youngsters visiting No. 5 when she was a kid.

“We never did,” Mrs. Pickess said, taking another biscuit and snapping it in two. “But Mr. Pickess never cast it up to me. Not a word.” Opal nodded, but she couldn’t help thinking he must have semaphored his feelings somehow, or else why did Mrs. Pickess assume the guilt and feel humbled and lucky instead of never casting it up to
him
. “And they’re not all joy, not by a long chalk.” She put one of the pieces of biscuit in her mouth and chewed it steadily, with a circular grinding motion, her gaze fixed on the tabletop.

“Margaret would agree with you there,” Opal said, and Mrs. Pickess shifted gladly to someone’s else’s troubles—as Opal had known she would.

“Poor Margaret,” Mrs. Pickess said. “And as for Denny—have you seen Denny?” Opal nodded. “Poor Margaret.”

“Karen really never comes near her? Never at all?”

“Not for over five years now. She was always a funny one. Not family-minded. But after Craig went, it was more and more strained and longer and longer in between and then she just stopped coming.”

“You’d think it would be a shared thing, wouldn’t you?”

“And that’s not all. She’s moved house now, and Margaret doesn’t even know where she’s gone.”

“And she was an only child, Karen, wasn’t she?”

“The only one.” Mrs. Pickess ate the other half of her biscuit. “Margaret wanted a big family, of course …
you know
… and one time her and I very nearly fell out over it. She was going on about it—Karen would be five, then—about how she was cursed and her arms ached for another baby and there was no justice in the world when all her sisters had such crowds of them. Well, Opal, I snapped. Just the once, mind. I told her she was blessed, not cursed. That she had a beautiful little girl—and she kept her lovely when she was a child, just like a little doll, always in a dress and white socks and gloves for church, like a little doll in a box. I’d have given …” Mrs. Pickess grappled with another sigh and got it out of herself. “But look at us now. I wouldn’t swap with Margaret
now
. Karen gone and Denny just sitting there in the living room.”

Opal knew that for years
Mr.
Pickess had just sat there in the living room too, in an onyx jar in the alcove beyond the fireplace, with his British Legion medal in an open box in front of it. It had fascinated her when she was small and she had hatched numerous plans to get Mrs. Pickess to leave her alone in there, planning to open the top of the jar and peer inside to see if there were any big bits. Teeth, maybe. Or a toe, that you could grow a new Mr. Pickess from.

“Opal?”

She shook herself back from the memory. “And Craig,” she said.

“Hm?” said Mrs. Pickess.

“Denny just sitting there, Karen gone, and Craig disappeared who knows where.”

The sun was having its last gasp before it set behind the trees in the back gardens of the big houses over on Grove Lane, and as Mrs. Pickess looked up, the light shining through the scoured glass showed a face not even just naked, but
peeled
, suddenly stripped of a mask no one knew was there until it had gone. Opal blinked and in the time it took to shut her eyes and open them, the look was gone; the sun had slipped below the highest little twigs and leaves on those far-off trees, and Mrs. Pickess was herself again.

“It must have been terrible for you all,” Opal said, steeling herself, hating herself for dredging it up. Mrs. Pickess said nothing. “I didn’t know about it until I came back, you know. Margaret told me. Just the bare bones. And I didn’t want to keep on at her.” Still nothing. “But it’s just so hard to imagine. It’s such a quiet street, for one thing. And everyone’s always looked out for everyone else. How could a little boy just suddenly be gone that way?”

Mrs. Pickess spoke at last. “The bare bones?”

Opal thought about Mr. Pickess’s toe on its bed of ash again. “I mean, just that he was playing outside and then he was gone and no one could find him.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Pickess said. “Only minutes it was, and the whole street out on the hunt for him. And give them their due, those … ” she waved over her shoulder towards Zula’s corner of the street, “they all pitched in just like the rest of us.”

“And you never heard anything?”

“Me?” said Mrs. Pickess. The light was fading fast now, so Opal stood and turned the light on. “You’ll need to shut your door else you’ll have flies all through,” Mrs. Pickess said, but Opal sat down again and left the door to the yard open.

“Right next door like that, I mean,” she said. “If Craig was playing in his yard and your back door was open with the fly curtain like it usually is, you might have heard something.”

“I was upstairs,” said Mrs. Pickess. “In the front bedroom. I was putting ironing away.”

“When?” Opal said.

“That day,” said Mrs. Pickess. “When do you think?” Her voice was growing rough now, and just a little unsteady.

“But
when
that day?” said Opal.

“When Karen came to the door,” Mrs. Pickess said. “I saw her standing on the step and in she went. I heard her shouting, screaming really, and then banging in and out the back and front, all three of them. Up and down the lane in back, up and down the street in front. I went straight down to see what was wrong. Anyone would have. Even her at the top was out. And that lot down the bottom. And your mother. And the Taylors at number four. You’d not know them. They hadn’t been here long and they didn’t stay long after, I can tell you.”

Opal returned, on tiptoe, to the point Mrs. Pickess had raced away from. “But Mrs. Pickess, even if you were putting your ironing away when Karen came, you might not have been upstairs in the front bedroom when Craig actually … you know, if he left the yard or if someone came in. Do you put it away as soon as you’re done?”

She did not want to answer, not one little bit. But Opal had played a masterstroke: she’d asked about housework. More than that even, she’d hinted that Mrs. Pickess might not set about it with order and precision.

“Of course I do!” she said. “I don’t know what’s worse between pressing stuff that’s too damp and having to hang it back up on the pulley again after, or leaving it dried out in a basket for days, waiting. I iron when it’s dry enough to iron, always have, never fail. And then I put it away. Catch me leaving a batch of shirts hooked over the door to get food smells in them!”

“Food smells,” said Opal. “You iron in the kitchen then.”

Mrs. Pickess stared back at her, her eyes wide and her lip quivering. “I never heard a thing,” she said. “I told the police. I heard not a voice nor a step. Didn’t hear the gate. Didn’t hear a car. Nothing.”

“A car?” Opal said. “Do they think a car came up the lane? Did someone else see one?”

“No!” Mrs. Pickess said, shouted almost. “I’m just saying, I heard nothing. And I saw nothing. All morning. It was as quiet as a grave. I had my door open all morning, and there wasn’t a peep from him.”

Of course not
Opal thought to herself. And it was hardly surprising since he’d disappeared the night before. Why then would Mrs. Pickess be so swimmy and quavering that way?

“It must have been dreadful,” she said, taking pity at last.

“It was,” Mrs. Pickess said. “They searched everywhere, you know. The police. Searched the houses and all over. Searched right through my house, took the bath panel off and went up to the attic, into the eaves, everywhere. They turned
this
place upside down.” Opal looked around, picturing coppers moving about her mum’s kitchen, too big for the little rooms, all starched serge and squeaking shoe leather, opening cupboards, their faces set like cement, not reacting to anything they had to sort through. But they still knew how to tell you what they were thinking.

“Mrs. Taylor,” Mrs. Pickess was saying, “she told me they took up the floors.”

“Well, no wonder they left!” Opal said. “They didn’t take up your floors too, did they? What for?”

“No, not the Taylors’ floor,” Mrs. Pickess said. “In here. Your mother’s.” She sat back and folded her arms, watching the news settle into Opal, waiting to see how it would land. Then she gave it another little nudge. “Because Karen’s ex used to knock about with her.”

Opal nodded. Made sense. She read the papers, sometimes. A kiddie goes missing and its mum and dad aren’t together anymore, the first thing you check is the dad. And if he’s got a girlfriend, of course you’re going to have good long look at her, and if she looks like Nicola, then it would be criminal not to go over the place carefully. She was still nodding, but there was something going on her chest, like when you put a clean trainer in the dryer to stop your pillow going lumpy.

“And who told them?” she said. “About Mum and Robbie Southgate. Margaret?”

“No!” Mrs. Pickess said. “Don’t you go saying that to Margaret, she never said a word about it.”

“Karen then? She’d a bloody cheek. Margaret thinks Robbie walked out on Karen. I know she does, and I wouldn’t poke my nose in to put her right, but that’s not what my mum told me.”

“Well, who’s to say?” said Mrs. Pickess, desperately. “It was all such a long time ago.”