Tarnished (13 page)

‘I should’ve stayed and had it out with him. I’m such a coward.’

‘No you’re not. He deserved to have you walk out on him.’

‘And when Caroline came in and got me, she looked so, well, scared.’

‘Bastard,’ Loz said again, plating up the breakfast.

‘And, oh my God, I didn’t tell you: he’s been having me followed. He knows where I live and everything.’

Loz paused open-mouthed, a pancake flopping over the edge of her spatula. ‘What?’

‘I know. Really creepy.’

‘But why?’

‘See if he got his money’s worth from that awful school?’ Peg shuddered.

‘I wonder if he knows about me?’ Loz said.

‘I should imagine he does. I wish I’d never gone.’

‘You did the right thing.’

‘He seems to have just wiped the past out completely.’

‘Except why’s he following you about? It’s got to be because he’s feeling guilty. He told you he wanted to make it up to you?’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Bingo. Guilty.’

‘But I don’t want his stinking money.’

‘Here, come to the table and get this down you,’ Loz said. ‘Grilled field mushrooms, fried eggs – sunny side down, guaranteed snot-free – pancakes, maple syrup, baked beans and soda bread toast with unsalted Breton butter.’ She put the plate down in front of Peg, who had, like a good child, taken her place at the table.

‘Thanks. I so wanted you there, though,’ Peg said, almost fully meaning it.

‘See? What did I say?’ Loz said, picking up her mug and sitting opposite Peg. She reached over and gave her hand a squeeze. ‘I should’ve gone with you.’

‘Bloody lovely mushies,’ Peg said, tucking in.

‘Field-foraged by this old lady who brings them in from Surrey. Nicked them from work.’

‘Loz!’

‘Not that they’d notice. Not that I don’t deserve a perk or two.’

‘So what am I going to do now then, Loz?’

Peg’s phone buzzed at her side. Cautiously – she hadn’t told Raymond her number, but she wouldn’t have put it past him to have some people find it out – she looked at the screen.

‘Is it him?’ Loz said, seeming to read her mind.

‘No. It’s just Marianne.’ Peg put on her Marianne voice – all passive-aggressively soft – and read out the text: ‘“We’re five down because of the flu. I know you’re supposed to have the weekend off but can you come in tomorrow?” Bollocks. That’s the last thing I feel like doing.’

‘You can say no.’

‘I know. But . . .’

‘Yeah yeah, but you won’t. Do you want ketchup?’

‘Brown sauce, please.’

‘Ew.’ Loz pulled a face, but fetched the bottle anyway. ‘I think you need to find out what Daddy did,’ she said, sitting down again. ‘To get put away.’

‘What if it was something really terrible?’

‘You won’t rest until you know, though, will you? Then, once we’ve got the size of him that way, we’ll know how to approach him.’

‘I’m not sure I want anything more to do with him now, let alone once I find out he’s a – I don’t know, some sort of murderer or kiddy fiddler or something.’

‘Look: he’s got money. Doll and Jean need money. He wants to “make it up to you”,’ Loz said, putting on a gruff, East-End-gangster voice which, apart from being an octave too low, actually sounded a bit like Raymond. ‘If he won’t help out willingly, he can help out without knowing it, and you can divert some funds their way. Then everyone’s happy and you get on with your life. You play him to benefit them.’

‘Sounds like it could get complicated . . .’

‘Look: put your fork down a second, will you?’

Peg did as she was told. Loz reached for her hand and curled her small, almost translucent fingers with their cooking-scar badges of honour round Peg’s own, softer hands. ‘Look, Peggo. I love you. I want to live here with you. We have a great future ahead of us: I’m going to start my restaurant and make a load of money and we’ll have a lovely life. I don’t want you moving back to your box room in Tankerton to look after two ailing old ladies. I want you to be happy. Us to be happy. Listen to me. I’m dealing out wisdom here. He fucked you over. He deserves everything he gets. It’s a serious thought: get the money off him.’

Peg wished she could see everything so clearly. But Loz had never met any of the people involved so didn’t really appreciate the complexities. She knew it was more than time to take her down to Tankerton to meet Doll and Jean, to show her the part of her life that no one else knew about. It was something she had been avoiding, an issue that Loz had, with uncharacteristic tact, allowed her to determine for herself. She closed her eyes and imagined introducing everyone. It certainly wouldn’t be like going up to Camden to meet Naomi and Richard.

‘I couldn’t do anything like that, though. I couldn’t take his money through lies.’

‘It wouldn’t be for you, though. Would it? And he’s clearly no angel. I shouldn’t imagine the way he got hold of the money bears much looking at. You’d be doing the world a favour taking it to benefit two old women, turning something filthy to good.’

Peg shook her head and, despite herself, smiled. Loz could construct an impressive argument. ‘I don’t know. I need to know what he did first.’

‘You could ask Jean perhaps, or Doll?’

‘No!’

‘Why not?’

‘It wouldn’t be right. They’ve obviously got their reasons for not telling me.’

‘Oh, Peg . . .’

‘It’s true. I’m supposed to be making their lives easier, not upsetting them. I’ve got to find out some other way.’

‘But how,’ Loz said, leaning back and stroking her chin. ‘If only there were some way one could look up things that happened in the past . . . perhaps using a computer . . . on a worldwide web sort of thing . . .’

‘As you know, I’ve searched for him on the Internet for years and nothing’s ever come up about prison.’

‘But you’re not exactly the world’s most expert geek, are you?’

Peg shrugged.

‘Think though,’ Loz went on, her eyes lighting up. ‘Your mum died when you were six, and you didn’t see your dad after that.’

‘Yep.’

‘So, we’re looking at something that happened mid to late nineties. Where did you and your mum and Raymond live back then? Guildford was it?’

‘Just outside. Farnham.’

‘And I suppose there’s a local newspaper for round there?’

‘I suppose . . .’

‘Boom.’ Loz pointed at Peg, her eyebrows raised, waiting for her to catch up.

Of course. When she had been looking for Raymond, she had been searching more recent records. She needed to look backwards, in more specialised archives, from before the time when everything automatically went online. As someone who supposedly knew a thing or two about libraries, she should have seen that without having it pointed out to her by a technophobic chef.

They both leaped over to the old iMac and Peg turned it on. But sadly, after waiting for it to perform its whirring and clicking start-up routine, PARTYBOYZ was nowhere to be found.

‘Come on, Sandy, switch it off and switch it on again,’ Loz said.

‘He’s probably too busy “entertaining”,’ Peg said.

‘Hey, just think: if you could bring yourself to take Raymond’s money, we could get ourselves an Internet connection . . .’

‘Stop it,’ Peg said, smiling. Loz had a way of fixing her mood, however low she was feeling.

‘Oh the luxury of just going online, just like that,’ Loz clicked her fingers.

‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

‘I maintain my Luddite position solely on economic grounds,’ Loz said. ‘Bung me a couple of grand and I’ll turn into the queen of geek.’

‘Hmmm . . .’ Peg said, scrolling fruitlessly for another unsecured wireless network. ‘Oh fuck it. I’ll go into work tomorrow and do it there.’

She picked up her phone and texted Marianne to say she was willing to provide sick cover. It would be better all round to use the work computers – they had access to all sorts of normally paid-for resources, including loads of local newspaper archives.

Then she turned to Loz. ‘OK. Let’s try to forget about it and have a day off today.’

‘I’m all for that,’ Loz said. ‘Come this way, then, madam.’ And she led her to the sofa where the gas fire was burning warm enough to get rid of Peg’s rose-patterned dressing gown, and Loz held her and kissed her and felt her and stroked her and licked and bit and opened her up, and Peg gave as good as she got, or better.

And for a few short hours, she forgot all about Raymond, Spain and the awful, awful Caroline.

Then

Breathe.

Oh.

Oh.

This is when I was six. It’s the summer half-term after Aunty Jean told me about my mother’s illness.

I’m lying in my bed, tucked in under the roof, reading
Alice in Wonderland
and cuddling my sniffy blanket, which is still a bit scented from the night before. I smell bacon and sausages frying and suddenly I hear Nan’s voice. She’s talking to Gramps in the kitchen.

I’m bursting with excitement, because I’m staying here for the whole week. I’ve never done that before, not for the whole of a holiday – I always go home first. But this is a special treat to have the whole time by the seaside, and the weather’s lovely. Lovely!

I’m hoping Nan’s got us a beach hut for the week.

Wayne the driver brought me back from school last night in The Car, but it was only Gramps here, because Nan and Aunty Jean hadn’t got back from a trip they were on.

This is from when Aunty Jean could still get about and Nan could still drive – I remember now that they had a special car to fit the trolley in. Not that they went away much. This is the only time I remember them ever doing so.

For now, at least.

Anyway, it was nice to see Gramps, and I remember we had fish and chips from the Chinky, as he called it.

But it was always Nan I loved the most. So when I heard her voice downstairs, I was really pleased she was back.

As I get out of bed, I hear Radio Two on in the kitchen, and the Carpenters are playing. I know it’s the Carpenters because they’re Aunty Jean’s favourites. They’re singing the one called ‘Goodbye to Love’.

I like that one. I can almost sing it all the way through, and I imagine I’m all thin and wafty like Karen is on the video Aunty Jean’s got,
The Life of the Carpenters
. ‘It’s sad she died,’ Aunty Jean says when we watch it, all cuddled up on her big old bed that smells of cigs and Guinness. ‘But she was too good for this world. That voice. She was an angel.’ Sometimes I have to get the tissues, because she cries a little bit.

Nan and Gramps’s voices are too quiet to hear properly down there in the kitchen. It’s serious, because the sounds are all low and rumbly with none of Nan’s usual higher, laughy bits.

As I slip my feet into my fluffy slippers, I look at my clock that looks like a sunflower. It’s still quite early, only seven thirty, but Gramps will have been up for ages.

Nan says he’ll always be up with the larks, because every day from when he was fourteen to when he was sixty-five, he had to get up early for his work printing the newspaper. He’ll never learn to lie in and take it easy like everyone else, she says. If it’s nice, he goes to the garden, but if it’s not nice, he goes into his shed, where he makes things – like my Wendy house, which is in the back garden – and mends stuff. Mr Fixit we call him. If there’s something broken around the house, it will disappear for a couple of days and then it’ll be back in place, all perfect again.

I can see him now!

A big, gentle man.

Clever, but he didn’t say much.

And I don’t know why, but when I think of him, I feel sorry for him.

I pull on my enormous rosy dressing gown. My room is so small up here I can just about reach out and touch both the walls now, so I always do that before I go downstairs, just for good luck. Touch the stars on the wallpaper.

I pull back my sheets and eiderdown – that’s what they make us do at school, and I suppose it’s become a bit of a habit – and, clasping
Alice in Wonderland
to my chest, I quietly climb one-handed down the ladder to the ground floor. Then I pad across the carpet to the kitchen door, where I stand still and listen, holding back the moment I’m aching for: the moment when I burst in and throw my arms round Nan.

‘It’s a blessing, really,’ I hear her say.

‘Don’t say that, Dolly,’ Gramps goes.

‘My poor boy,’ she says, and I hear her sigh hard, like she’s pushing all the air out of her whole body. ‘She was breaking his heart.’

I peer through the door, which is open just a little bit. Gramps is perched on the stool by the breakfast bar – we call it that, even though it’s just a bit of kitchen top he cut to fit on top of the big chest freezer. He’s got one knee bent and his bad leg is stretched out so that Nan has to walk round it to get to the sink. She’s mostly at the cooker though, working away at the frying pan. I can only see the back of her, but her elbows jiggle as she slides the sausages about, flipping the hanky she keeps tucked into her bangle from side to side.

‘He never should have married her,’ she says. ‘Look at this mess she’s got him into.’

‘Don’t,’ Gramps says, looking at his big hands with their moon-shaped nails. ‘It’s not as if it’s her fault.’

‘What’s he going to do now, though, eh? How’s he going to look after the poor girl?’ Nan says, turning to look at Gramps. As she does so, she catches sight of me in the doorway, rushes to me and buries me into her front with a big hug.

‘Who’s my favourite girl?’ she says, holding me so tight I feel like I’m going to squeeze out of my mouth.

‘Where were you, Nan?’ I say, my voice muffled by the folds of her pale-blue pinny.

‘I was just off visiting, lovely,’ Nan says, letting me go and putting her hands on my shoulders. She’s only a bit taller than me and it’s so funny, because I’m only six!

‘What were you talking about?’

‘When?’

‘Just now?’

‘Oh, just a silly story,’ Nan says, brushing her hands together and moving away back to the stove. ‘I’m making the best breakfast for you today dear,’ she says. ‘Bacon and sausages and all the trimmings. You’re just in time to have it fresh.’