As She Left It (36 page)

“Was he your big brother or your little brother, Norah love?” she said.

“Big,” said Norah. “Little. They sent me away when he was born.”

Opal gripped the back of the armchair so tightly that her knuckles cracked.

“Well, we’ll get off then,” she said. “Do you want anything? Cocoa again?”

“Cocoa,” said Norah with her thumb in her mouth, and Opal beckoned to Frank to follow her as she crept away.

“So,” he said in the kitchen, as the milk boiled. “She got sent away when the new baby came and twelve years later she got her own back by … what? Hanging him?”

“Or tricking him into hanging himself,” Opal said. “She’s no angel, little Norah. But you got the first bit wrong. She didn’t get sent away when
Martin
was born in 1929. She’d have been tiny herself then. She got sent away after he had died, when he was twelve, in 1941. She got sent away when her ‘little brother’ was born, when she was in her teens. She got sent away for her ‘little brother’ to
be
born.
That’s
how Norah can be an only child with nephews and nieces. That’s what Sarah’s dad found out in the family tree that made him stop looking.”

Frank whistled long and slow between his teeth.

“Norah is really Sarah’s granny? Finn and Charlie’s great-granny? Grandpa unknown. Father unnamed on the birth certificate, to the Fossett family’s eternal shame.”

“Yup,” Opal said. “Looks like it. And now I’m going to take her this cup of cocoa and say goodbye. I don’t think I’ll be back again.”

“And did you remember the thing you thought Norah would help you remember?” Frank said, when they were back in the van.

“Yeah,” said Opal. “Part of it anyway. And my headache’s gone. I knew it wasn’t concussion.”

“What was it?”

“I did the same thing she did—no, scratch that! Sorry. But close enough. I said, at school in Whitby, that Michael, my half-brother, was my son. I told everyone. Told my guidance teacher, told the school chaplain that Steph and Dad had made me give him up and they’d adopted him and not told him who I really was. You would not believe the stink I caused. No wonder Steph hates me.” She shook her head in wonder at all she’d managed to forget.

“Now why on earth would you do something like that?” Frank said.

“Exactly. I’ve finally remembered. Norah helped me.” Frank swung the van round the corner of Mote Street. “But can we leave it for tonight?”

“Gladly,” said Frank, parking. “I don’t think I could take any more.”

Opal opened her door. “Any chance you could bunk off work tomorrow?” she said.

“Why?”

“Would you give me a lift to Whitby?”

“What for?”

“Tell you when we get there, if it goes the way I’m hoping.”

“Yeah, all right,” said Frank, stepping down from the van and slamming the door. “Like you said—we’ve both had enough for today.”

But there was just a little bit more. At the sound of the van door slamming, Sanjit had come out onto the pavement and was staring hard at Frank, with his fists clenched at his sides.

“Oh no, Sanj, yeah,” said Opal. “I had that completely wrong.” She turned and smiled at Frank, but he backed away with his hands up.

“Don’t tell me, “he said. “The hints are bad enough. I don’t want to know.”

“Okay,” Sanjit said. “If you’re sure.” He turned round and called back into the house. “Opal Jones is here.”

Sunil joined his son, squeezed his shoulder briefly, and then walked over towards Opal, putting out his hands and taking hers in them.

“Zuleika called from the hospital twenty minutes ago,” he said, and he didn’t have to say any more.

“Fishbo?” said Opal. “Oh, Mr. Fish! Oh, no.”

FORTY
-
FIVE

T
HE FRONT SEAT OF
a van was better than a bus on the country roads, and Opal was almost cheerful as they climbed up from Pickering to the high moor. As long as she only thought about little bits at a time, anyway, and that wasn’t easy.

“Margaret says the funeral will probably be Friday,” she said. “Three days—not counting today—to learn the trumpet part for ‘Moon River.’ I should have brought one with me, practised on the journey.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” said Frank. “This is not a big space. Are you going to tell me the rest now?”

Opal nodded. She owed him that much, but her hands were sweating and her mouth was full of water.

“It’s all connected,” she said. “Everything’s joined to everything. You think you can keep things out of your head, if you concentrate hard. You think your brain’s in charge. And then
Blammo
! Like from nowhere, one little thread starts to fray, one little rock gets lifted, and the light shines in. That’s when you know it’s your blood that runs the show. Your bowels, you know? Your guts and your … . what do you call them? … your glands. When you’re shaking so hard you can’t talk and you’re breathing so fast you can’t think and all your … stories have …
Pffffffff
.” She lifted her hand from her mouth like blowing a dandelion away.

“Tell me,” he said, in his gentle voice as the van rocked along. There wasn’t another car or house or sign of life in sight. The moor fog was coming down. “Start talking.”

“Dunno where to start,” said Opal. She looked at her watch. “Dunno if there’s time.”

“Make time,” said Frank. “Talk fast. Tell me now.”

“Okay … Okay … Well, it’s all connected, see? That’s the main thing. I see that now. The mum and the dad and the boy and the girl.”

“Who’s this?”

“And the little old lady and the poor old man. The baby that’s lost and the baby that’s … ” She took a big breath, swallowed, tried again. “They’re all the same.”

“Start at the start and tell me it all,” he said. “Keep on talking right till the end.”

“The start?”

“When does it start?”

“I suppose … I dunno.”

“So … once a upon a time,” Frank said. The words made gooseflesh pop out on her arms.

“No!” She shivered. No more stories. Time for truth now. “It’s …
maybe a month ago.”

“So …” he said, “once upon a month ago then.”

She turned away from him and looked out at the fog drifting towards them. Beautiful, ghostly fog. Bloody cold too and murder on your throat. “Three months ago really,” she said. “I missed my mum’s funeral.”

“Margaret told me,” said Frank. “As part of the general introduction to Mote Street, when she came to offer to keep a hold of my key.”

“Good old Margaret,” Opal said. “Yeah, I missed it. I had a hospital appointment. I didn’t know if it could get it put back and I was scared to ask.”

“Is that why we’re going to Whitby now?” said Frank. “Have you got another one?”

“No,” Opal said. “But it’s sort of related in a roundabout way.” She took a deep breath and turned so that she couldn’t see him. “I was having an operation,” she said. “A procedure.”

“Uh-huh.”

“A termination, as they called it. Except who the hell calls it that? I was having an abortion. And I couldn’t put it off, because you’ve no idea what it was like trying to get the appointment for it in the first place. All the interviews and counselling and leaflets.”

“It’s just to make sure you’re sure.”

“Well, I
was
sure. Baz—he was my boyfriend—was off as soon as I told him. Which was a big surprise—never saw that coming at all. I’d imagined … had a name picked and everything. If it was a girl, leastways. Charlotte. But … stupid cow, as it turned out. Baz-shaped hole in the wall from him leaving so fast, you know? So I tried to get a loan of a caravan so I’d have some peace and quiet to think it through, but that didn’t happen either, so I ended up in this bedsit and there was no way you could have had a baby … and anyway, the day I was booked in was the day that Nicola got cremated. So I missed it. So there you go.”

Frank said nothing. They rolled on northwards along the moor, dry and brown from the weeks of no rain, the road kicking up dust behind them like something out of a cowboy film.

“What’s that got to do with today, though, love?”

“I’m still ‘love’,” said Opal. But she still kept her face turned away from him as she went on. “It started something off. I went back to Leeds because I hated the bedsit and I started remembering stuff I’d totally forgotten. Things started joining up, you know. Then I found out about Fishbo missing his family and I found Norah’s notes in her bed—Martin’s notes in his bed, as it turned out—and, of course, I heard about Little Craig and … I really needed a distraction from the thing I didn’t want to remember—so I started meddling, but it only made it worse, and then that song started … ”

“The outhouse song?”

“And the nightmares started … ”

“About the tattoos, is this?”

“And the thing I didn’t want to remember got mixed up with the thing I couldn’t stand thinking about until last night, when it all burst like a great big toxic boil.”

“Lovely,” said Frank.

“Sorry,” Opal said.

“And what was it then?”

“In the boil? Sorry. It was what happened in the outhouse. I
thought
it was intuition telling me Craig was buried there, but it was a memory, like I said. It was about being pregnant.”

“You mean, like the hormones made you remember … What do you mean?”

“The first time I was pregnant,” Opal said. “Before. I was twelve.”

“Twelve?” Frank was staring straight ahead, but his jaw had dropped open.

“And it wasn’t my mum’s fault or my dad’s, before you start. It just happened.”

“My Charlie’s twelve! How can you say it wasn’t your mum and dad’s fault?”

“It wasn’t!” said Opal. “My dad wasn’t even there. He’d been gone years by then. So
he
was hardly to blame.”

“Oh, Baby Girl,” said Frank.

Opal gaped. “That’s what Fishbo always called me!” she said. “Anyway, okay. This is the bit.” She breathed in very deep and held on to the breath until her chest started aching. “Okay, this is the tough bit. It’s about Robbie Southgate. Craig’s dad.”

Frank hit the brake hard and pulled over to the side of the road. Another white van went past them with the driver leaning on his horn. Typical! Only other car for miles around and it nearly hit them.

“I’m turning round, love,” said Frank, his voice sounding high in his throat. “We’re getting the cops on it. Not that I wouldn’t love to go and find him, but I’d end up in jail for murder.”

“Eh?”

“It was Robbie Southgate who raped you?”

“God, no!” Opal said. “I wasn’t raped. And it wasn’t a man. It was my boyfriend. He was fifteen.”

“Jesus! Finn’s fifteen!”

“Yeah, you could be a granddad twice over by now,” Opal said. Slowly, Frank pulled back out onto the road again. Opal waited until he had got up to top gear before speaking. “I wanted a boyfriend. Mum had one—always at least one—and I wanted one too. But I didn’t want a baby. Not when I was twelve. So I tried to make it go away. On my own.”

“In the outhouse,” said Frank.

“On a Friday night. Mum’s party. Thinking she’d be too busy to mind where I’d got to. So … I never even got my first-aid badge at Brownies and I would probably have killed myself if someone hadn’t found me. It was one of mum’s friends. Well, it was Robbie Southgate, is who it was. He was brilliant. He took me to hospital and stayed with me and he never looked down his nose at me or anything like that. He just looked after me. And all I remember was his arm when he was cuddling me in to him in the car—two bluebird tattoos on his arm. It was the only thing I could remember. Probably just as well.” She scrubbed her hands over her face. “The rest of it—when it started coming back again—wasn’t that fantastic, really.”

“You poor little love,” said Frank. “Do you want to stop? It feels dead wrong you saying all this and me watching the road.”

“I’m not trying to get sympathy!” said Opal. “I’m just telling you. Keep going. We need to get there by chucking out time.”

“Am I supposed to understand how all this fits together yet?” said Frank. “Because I don’t.”

“Listen,” Opal said. “Karen Reid wouldn’t hear a word against Robbie, right? And she stopped seeing her mum and dad. And when I grabbed her and said I wanted to talk about Craig, she was frightened.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you see? She was
frightened
. She shouldn’t have been frightened. If her little boy had been missing for ten years and someone suddenly came up and talked to her about him she should have gone through the roof with … I dunno, hope or something. And I thought it was weird that she didn’t look out of the bus window when all the school kids were going by. And I’ll tell you something else, the thing that made her go completely nuts at me and start threatening me was when I told her where I grew up.”

“Mote Street?”

“No, I mean, where I went to live when I
left
Mote Street: Whitby. She freaked when she heard that. And it was the next day that the photo came through the door. Taken from across the street—where Karen’s parents live. From when I was a little girl, when Karen was always round with the baby. And if anyone could have a copy of a key to a house in Mote Street—say if they wanted to stick a cat with a bread knife in its back on someone’s bed—it would be someone connected to Margaret. Like you said yourself, she’s already come sniffing after one of your spares, hasn’t she?”

“Karen Reid wanted you to stop looking for Craig?”

“And how weird is that?”

Opal directed him to the school gates, and they arrived in good time, ten minutes before the end of the day. But then five minutes after that, she looked in the passenger wing mirror and swore softly.

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “Steph’s here. Don’t tell me she still picks Michael up and takes him home.” She got down from the van and went over to the parked car.

Stephanie got out before Opal reached her and stood with her arms folded, leaning against the car door.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“I want to speak to Michael,” Opal.

“Just as well I’m here to stop you then, isn’t it?” She flicked a glance towards Frank as he came up beside them. “Who are you?”