Letters to the Lost (2 page)

It had been an old person’s house, that much was obvious. The television was huge and comically outdated, and an electric bar fire stood in front of the boarded-up grate. Against the front door a pile of mail had gathered like a drift of autumn leaves.

She limped back into the kitchen and turned on the tap above the sink, letting the water run through the clanking pipes for a few moments before cupping her hands beneath it and drinking. She wondered who owned it and what had happened to them; whether they’d gone into a home, or died. When someone died their house got cleared out, surely? That’s what had happened to Gran’s, anyway. Within a week of the funeral all the clothes and pictures and plates and pans, as well as Gran’s vast collection of china pigs and the fragments of Jess’s shattered childhood had been packed up and dispersed so the council could get the house ready for the new tenant.

The darkness felt mossy and damp against her skin. Goosebumps stood on her arms beneath her fake-leather jacket. Maybe the owner had died and not actually been discovered? Some masochistic instinct brought out by the dark and the quiet made her picture a body decaying in the bed upstairs. She dismissed it briskly, reasserting common sense. What harm could the dead do to you anyway? A corpse couldn’t split your lip or steal your money, or close its fingers round your neck until stars danced behind your eyes.

Suddenly she felt bone tired, the pulse of pain in her ankle radiating outwards so that her whole body throbbed with exhaustion. She made her way haltingly back to the front room and sank onto the sofa, dropping her head into her hands as the enormity of the events of the last hour overwhelmed her.

Shit. She’d broken into a house. An empty and neglected one maybe, but even so. Breaking and entering wasn’t like nicking a packet of crisps from the corner shop because you didn’t want to be called a skank for having a free school dinner. It was a whole different level of wrong.

On the upside, she had escaped. She wasn’t on her way back to the flat in Elephant and Castle with Dodge. She wouldn’t have to endure the lust that afflicted him after a beery evening watching her sing in the slapper’s gear he made her wear. Not tonight, not ever again. The first thing she’d do when her ankle was better was find a charity shop or something and spend a bit of the precious money on decent clothes. Warm clothes. Clothes that actually covered up her body, rather than displaying it like goods in the window of a cut-price shop.

Wincing, she lay back, resting her leg on the arm of the sofa and settling herself on the cigarette-scented cushions. She wondered where he was now; whether he’d given up looking and gone back to the flat to wait, confident that she’d come back eventually. She needed him, as he liked to tell her; needed his contacts and his bookings and his money, because without him what was she? Nothing. A Northern nobody with a voice like a thousand other wannabe stars. A voice that no one would ever hear if it wasn’t for him.

She tugged the crocheted blanket down from the back of the sofa and pulled it over herself. In the wake of the adrenaline rush her body felt heavy and weak, and she found she didn’t actually give a toss where he was, because for the first time in six months what he thought or felt or wanted was of no relevance to her whatsoever.

The unfamiliar house settled itself around her, absorbing her into its stillness. The noise of the city seemed far away here and the sound of cars on the wet street had receded to a muted sigh, like waves on a distant beach. She stared into the shadows and began to hum softly, to keep the silence at bay. The tune that came into her head was not one of the songs she had belted out on the stage in the pub earlier, but one from the past; a lullaby Gran used to sing to her when she was small. The words were half-forgotten, but the melody stroked her with soothing, familiar fingers, and she didn’t feel quite so alone.

Light was filtering through the thin curtains when she woke, and the slice of sky visible in the gap between them was the bleached bone white of morning. She went to adjust her position and instantly pain flared in her ankle, as if someone had been waiting until she moved to hit it with a sledgehammer. She froze, waiting for the ripples of agony to subside.

Through the wall she could hear noises; the rise and fall of indistinct voices on the radio, then music and the hurried thud of feet on the stairs. She sat up, gritting her teeth as she put her foot to the floor. In the icy bathroom she sat on the loo and peeled off her shredded tights to look at her ankle. It was unrecognizable; puffy and purpling above a foot that was smeared with dirt.

The bathroom didn’t boast anything as modern as a shower, only a deep cast-iron bath with rust stains beneath the taps and a basin in the corner. Above this there was a little mirrored cabinet, which she opened in the hope of finding something that might help. Inside the shelves were cluttered with boxes and bottles that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a museum, their faded labels advertising the mysterious medicines of another time; Milk of Magnesia, Kaolin, Linctus. In amongst them, on the bottom shelf, there was a lipstick in a gold case.

She took it out, turning it around between her fingers for a moment before taking off the lid and twisting the base. It was red. Bright, vibrant scarlet: the colour of poppies and pillar-boxes and old-fashioned movie star glamour. An indentation had been worn into the top, where it had moulded to fit the shape of the lips of the user. She tried to imagine her, whoever she was, standing here in this bathroom with the black-and-white tiles and the mould-patterned walls; an old woman, painting on this brave daub of colour for a trip to the shops or an evening at the bingo, and she felt a burst of admiration and curiosity.

There was a roll of yellowing crepe bandage on the top shelf of the cupboard, and she took this and a packet of soluble aspirin into the kitchen. She unhooked a teacup and filled it with water, then dropped in two of the tablets. Waiting for them to dissolve she looked around. In the grimy morning light the place looked bleak, but there was something poignantly homely about the row of canisters on the shelf, labelled ‘TEA’, ‘RICE’, ‘SUGAR’, the scarred chopping board propped against the wall and the scorched oven gloves hanging from a hook beside the cooker. The cup in her hand was green, but sort of shiny; iridescent like the delicate rainbows in oily puddles. She rubbed her finger over it. She’d never seen anything like it before, and she liked it. It couldn’t have been more different from the assortment of cheap stained mugs in the flat in Elephant and Castle.

She drank the aspirin mixture in two big grimacing gulps, her throat closing in protest at the salty-sweetness, then took the bandage into the front room where she applied herself to the task of binding up her ankle. Mid-way through she heard whistling outside, and stopped, her heart thudding. Footsteps came closer. Dropping the bandage she got to her feet, tensed for the knock on the door or, worse, a key turning—

With a rusty, reluctant creak the letterbox opened. A single, cream-coloured envelope landed on top of the heap of garish junk mail and takeaway menus.

Mrs S. Thorne

4 Greenfields Lane

Church End

London

UNITED KINGDOM.

It was written in black ink. Proper ink, not biro. The writing was bold and elegant but unmistakably shaky, as if the person who had written it was old or sick or in a rush. The paper was creamy, faintly ridged, like bone or ivory.

She turned it over. Spiked black capitals grabbed her attention.

PERSONAL and
URGENT
. If necessary and possible
PLEASE FORWARD
.

She put it on the mantelpiece, propped against a chipped jug bearing the slogan ‘A Present from Margate’. Against the faded furnishings the envelope looked clean and crisp and opulent.

Outside the world got on with its weekday business, but in the little house time faltered and the day dragged. The initial euphoria of having got away from Dodge was quickly eroded by hunger and the savage cold. In a cupboard in the kitchen she discovered a little stash of supplies, amongst which was a packet of fig rolls. They were almost two years past their sell by date but she devoured half of them, and made herself save the rest for later. She kept trying to think of where to go from here, what to do next, but her thoughts went round in futile circles, like a drowsy bluebottle bashing senselessly against a closed window.

She slept again, deeply, only surfacing when the short February day was fading and the shadows in the corners of the room had thickened on the nets of cobwebs. The envelope on the mantelpiece seemed to have absorbed all the remaining light. It gleamed palely, like the moon.

Mrs S. Thorne must have been the lady who had lived here, but what did she need to know that was ‘Personal and Urgent’? With some effort she levered herself up from the sofa and scooped up the landslide of mail from beneath the letterbox. Wrapping the blanket around her shoulders she began to go through it, looking for clues. Maybe there would be something there to hint at where she’d gone, this mysterious Mrs Thorne.

Most of it was anonymous junk offering free delivery on takeaway pizzas or bargain deals on replacement windows. She tried hard not to look at the takeaway menus, with their close-up photographs of glistening, luridly coloured pizzas, as big as bicycle wheels. In amongst them she found a newsletter from All Saints Church with ‘Miss Price’ scribbled at the top, and several flimsy mail order catalogues selling ‘classic knitwear’ and thermal nightwear addressed to Miss N. Price.

No mention of Mrs Thorne.

She tossed the church newsletter onto the junk pile and stretched her cramped spine. The idle curiosity that had prompted her to start the search had faded when it yielded no instant answer, and the pizza photographs made her feel irritable and on edge. Since she wasn’t even supposed to be here it was hardly her responsibility to make sure the letter reached its destination, and it wasn’t as if she didn’t have enough of her own problems to sort out. She didn’t need to take on anyone else’s.

But still . . .

She got up and went over to the fireplace, sliding the letter out from behind the clock. ‘Personal and Urgent’ – what did that mean anyway? It was probably nothing. She knew from Gran that old people got in a state about all kinds of random things.

The paper was so thick it was almost like velvet. In the gathering dusk it was difficult to make out the postmark, but she risked taking a step towards the window to squint at the blurred stamp. Bloody hell – USA. She turned it over and read the message on the back again, running her fingers over the underlining where the ink had smudged slightly. Tilting it up to the dying light she could see the indentation in the paper where the pen had scored across it, pressing hope into the page.

Personal and Urgent.

If possible . . .

And before she knew what she was doing, before she had a chance to think about all the reasons why it was wrong, she was tearing open the envelope and sliding out the single sheet of paper inside.

The Beach House

Back Creek Road

Kennebunk, ME

22 January 2011

Darling girl

It’s been over seventy years and I still think of you like that. My darling. My girl. So much has changed in that time and the world is a different place to the one where we met, but every time I think of you I’m twenty-two years old again.

I’ve been thinking a lot about those days. I haven’t been feeling so good and the meds the doctors have given me make me pretty tired. Not surprising at ninety years old, maybe. Some days it seems like I barely wake up and lying here, half sleeping, all those memories are so damned vivid I almost believe they’re real and that I’m back there, in England, with 382 Squadron and you.

I promised to love you forever, in a time when I didn’t know if I ’d live to see the start of another week. Now it looks like forever is finally running out. I never stopped loving you. I tried, for the sake of my own sanity, but I never even got close, and I never stopped hoping either. The docs say I don’t have much time left, but I still have that hope, and the feeling that I’m not done here. Not until I know what happened to you. Not until I’ve told you that what we started back then in those crazy days when the world was all upside-down has never really finished for me, and that those days – tough and terrifying though they were – were also the best of my life.

I don’t know where you are. I don’t know if the house on Greenfields Lane is still yours and if this letter will ever reach you. Hell, I don’t know if you’re still alive, except I have this crazy belief that I ’d know if you weren’t; I ’d feel it and be ready to go too. I’m not afraid of Death – my old adversary from those flying days. I beat him back then so I’m easy about letting him win this time around, but I ’d give in a hell of a lot more gracefully if I knew. And if I could say goodbye to you properly this time.

I guess that pretty soon none of this will matter, and our story will be history. But I’m not done hoping yet. Or wishing I could go back to the start and do it all again, and this time make sure I never let you go.

If you get this, please write.

My love

Dan

Oh.

Ohhhh
. . .

She folded the letter in half again and shoved it hastily back into the envelope. She shouldn’t have touched it; would never have done if she’d thought for a minute it would be so . . .
serious
. Life and death kind of serious. Personal and urgent.