Tarnished (3 page)

‘Are you all right, Nan?’ Peg grabbed for the old lady’s wrists and found the pulse point. It was fast, but steady.

She looked into her face again and, with relief, saw a fat, wet tear work its way out of the drooping corner of her grandmother’s eye.

The old lady wasn’t dying.

She was crying.

Then

I’m what, seven?

More or less.

Every night I stayed at the bungalow, until I was twelve or thirteen, Nan cuddled me up in my bed and told me a story. She never read from a book. She preferred the stories in her head, she’d say. Each night the story would be different.

She never repeated herself. Not once.

Not that I remember, anyway.

But that’s not saying very much.

‘Story!’ I go.

‘Tuck in then, Mrs Fubs,’ Nan says, pulling my eiderdown over me. ‘And hodge up.’

I shuffle myself right up against the wall and Nan stretches her little legs out beside me. Even though I’m still very young, my feet are already further down towards the bed-end than hers.

‘They stopped watering me when I could reach the postbox,’ was what she always said.

When I was younger than I was here I really believed her, thinking what cruelty that was.

‘Well then,’ she says, putting her arm round me. I catch her smell of lavender handcream and roast beef. ‘What’s it to be?’

‘A story about a broken-hearted king!’ I say, snuggling right down into the wiry firmness of her brown, freckly arm.

‘Another one?’ she says, and I nod my head up and down, up and down.

‘All right then,’ she says.

I settle down and let my eyes go hazy. There’s a seagull stamping around on the flat roof above my head. He’s been up there for a couple of weeks now; every night before I go to sleep, I hear him. He’s up to no good, Aunty Jean says, and if she weren’t handicapped, she’d be up a ladder with a broom to shoo him away. But I like him. I pretend he’s my pet.

‘The story of the Very Sad King,’ Nan announces.

‘The Very Sad King!’ I go.

‘Here we go then,’ she says. ‘Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, there was a king and he was a very happy king.’

‘Why was he happy?’ I ask, fiddling now with the bangle that’s wedged up on her arm above the knobble of her elbow. Put there, she says, by her owner, when she was a slave-girl. And then she ran away and got free and it was stuck.

‘He was rich beyond compare. And he had a lovely, lovely, lovely wife. A dark beauty she was. He’d found her in a foreign land even further away than his own country, and had fallen in love with her and brought her back to be his queen.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘She had brown skin—’

‘Like mine?’ I interrupt, holding up my arm. Which, to be honest, isn’t all that brown these days. Not with the sunblock Nan puts on me all the time.

‘Even browner. And her hair was long and curly, like yours, but darker: dark, dark brown, almost black. And she was tall and slim with a tiny waist. And the king loved her with all his kind and goodly soul. The only sad part was that they couldn’t have a baby, which was the one thing they wanted that they didn’t have.

‘Now, it so happened that there lived in the kingdom a wise old woman. Hearing about the heartbreak of the king and queen, the wise woman went to them and cast a spell, and one fine day the king couldn’t believe his luck when his queen gave birth to the most perfect tiny baby girl.’

‘What was she called?’

‘She was called Meg.’

‘Like me!’

‘Just like you! And little Meg grew and made the king and queen the happiest people in the world. She looked so like her mummy that sometimes, except for the difference in size, it would have been hard to tell them apart. But then, sadly, the queen got very, very poorly and died.’

‘Sad.’

‘Sad indeed. And the king was so broken-hearted that he got on his horse and rode away, far away, and was never seen again.’

‘But what about the little girl?’

‘He left a note for the wise woman. And this is what the note said.’ Nan puts the king’s voice on, which is very posh, not like how she talks at all. ‘“Dear wise old woman. Although I love my little daughter to bits, I cannot bear to look upon her because she reminds me so much of my beloved late queen. You are a good, wise woman. Please take her and bring her up as well as you can, as if she was your own.”’

‘So the wise woman got the little girl.’

‘She did. And that’s the end.’ Nan leans in and kisses me on the nose.

‘But what happened? Was the little girl happy?’

Nan thinks for a bit. ‘She was mostly happy,’ she says. ‘Perhaps even happier than she would have been with her mummy and daddy.’

‘And that’s the end?’

‘That’s the end.’

‘But that’s not a proper ending.’

‘That’s because it’s a real story. And real stories sometimes don’t have those neat pat endings like they do in those books you read.’

I think about this for a while. I suppose she’s right. But I still feel a bit cheated.

‘Can I read now?’ I ask.

‘Well . . .’ Nan says.

I have to read, because I want to get the story out of my head. ‘Please,’ I go.

‘All right then, twenty minutes and no more.’

She creeps out and shuts my door and I hear her making her way down the steep steps from my attic to the rest of the bungalow.

I sit there with
What Katy Did
in front of me, but my eyes aren’t taking in the words. All I can think about is Nan’s story and how the little girl sounds like me. I’ve got the dead mummy and the broken-hearted daddy, who rode away, and I suppose Nan is a bit like the wise old woman.

Later, Nan comes up and checks on me and gives me my sniffy blanket so I can sleep well.

Was I happier than I would have been with my own parents?

Who’s to say.

I don’t remember them. I don’t even have an image for either of them.

All I have are these vague moments from my childhood.

Breathe, Peg.

Two

‘She was crying about Raymond,’ Peg said.

‘Oh,’ Jean said. She was trying to reach for something with her grabber stick, but couldn’t quite work up the momentum to raise herself to sitting. ‘Oh bugger it. Pass me my cigs, will you, Meggy? There’s a darling.’

Peg reached down for the Marlboros, which had worked their way across the candlewick bedspread and fallen onto the lino. ‘I’d really like to find him, so they can see each other again before it’s too late.’

‘Not much chance of that. Thank you, lovey.’ Jean propped her oxygen mask on the top of her head, pulled a cigarette from the pack and put it between the Rimmel-red lips she referred to as her ‘trademark look’. Peg picked up the lighter and held the flame to the tip for her. Jean’s fingers were so swollen, so distended by her own flesh that she had problems with motor tasks. And it didn’t stop with her hands – she had been stuck in bed now for over ten years.

She inhaled deeply, then let the smoke trickle slowly from her nostrils. From his position parked on her belly, her ageing cat Lexy batted lazily at the plume with his paw. That cat was a nuisance: he regularly sprayed Jean’s room. But, away from the focal points where he marked out his territory, his pungent cat musk had nothing on the fug of Jean’s cigarettes and the rankness that crept from the deep folds of her body. Having grown up with it, Peg was used to it. But the almost visible odour still always hit her like an olfactory boxing glove when she entered Jean’s extension – even after the warm-up of having spent some time in Doll’s side of the building.

‘What do you mean, not much chance of that?’ Peg said. She had always wondered if Jean knew more about Raymond than she let on.

‘There’s no way of finding him. That’s what I mean,’ Jean said, looking at Peg through the corners of eyes which, despite their customary slick of frosted blue shadow, could only be described as piggy. ‘Get me my Guinness, will you, Meggy?’

It had always been like this. Jean met any mention of her missing brother with a blank wall.

What she didn’t know, though, was how right she was about there not being much chance of finding him.

What she didn’t know was that Peg had been making quite an effort to find Raymond and had so far turned up a nothing as big and as fat as her aunt. For all she knew he was dead. But something inside her said he was still around and, if he was, she was determined that she would find him for Doll. It must be awful to be an abandoned mother.

What she felt as an abandoned daughter was also worth noting, but, she reminded herself, far less urgent at the moment.

She went through the wide doorway into the kitchen to fetch Jean’s afternoon pint of Guinness. Frank had built this extension for his daughter almost entirely on his own when they moved down from London. While the rooms were no bigger than those in the adjoining bungalow, he had built the doorways and passageways wider than standard, to accommodate Jean’s bulk back in the days when she was mobile. It mattered little, now she was bed-bound, that she had probably outgrown even the generous dimensions of his handiwork.

Popping in on Jean was the most challenging part of Peg’s visits. After she and Doll had shared their ritual fish and chip lunch – she only had chips herself, but Doll had never seemed to notice – she would settle her grandmother down in front of
Countdown
with a slice of her favourite Jamaica Ginger Cake while she went ‘next door’.

Part of Frank’s design was that, for her independence, Jean would have her own back door. So visiting her involved going out of the back of the bungalow, down a slope, turning back on yourself to go up another, then into Jean’s door, which was right next to Doll’s. There was also an internal door in the partition wall between the bungalow and the extension, but it only opened from Jean’s side – another feature Doll said Frank had designed to ‘give the girl some dignity’.

He sounded like he had been a kind man. Peg wished she could remember him, but all she had to go on were family stories and a photograph Doll kept on the mantelpiece of their wartime wedding. Other than that, her grandfather was as lost to her as her mother: a hazy figure.

On top of the worry of what to do with Doll, Peg’s other problem was that when she tried to think of anything that happened before she was ten or so, she found nothing. She could almost feel it in her skull: a big, empty hole. Time that she must have lived through, but where either nothing had taken root, or from which everything had been erased.

But the leavings of this forgotten past were all around her. Evidence of her grandfather’s kindness, for example, coming up against the harsher realities of the present.

Because, despite Frank’s best-laid plans, there was very little dignity left for Jean now. And that was where Peg found the challenge in visiting her. Doll’s decline was brutal, but far easier for Peg to deal with – it was the kind of thing you might expect from an eighty-nine-year-old. Up until about a year ago, not only had she been able to cope with her own needs, but she had also single-handedly looked after her disabled daughter. This had been a matter of great pride and importance for her.

So, with certain qualifications, Doll had seen a good innings.

But Jean. It had been a tough life for her all round. There she was, twenty years younger than her mother, yet thanks to her forty stones of rebellious flesh horribly, horribly stuck.

She had been handed the very shortest of life’s straws; even the thought of her beached there at the back of the bungalow brought Peg out in a rash of guilt and despair. Although she barely admitted it to herself, it was partly because of this that she had moved away from the bungalow so soon after she had finished school.

As she slowly poured the Guinness down the side of the glass so that it didn’t froth up too much, Peg noticed that Julie – for whom Wednesday was a well-earned night off – had left out a cold supper for Jean under a shell of cling film. Julie was Jean’s care worker, contracted by the council to come in three times a day. This arrangement had been put in place after Doll slipped on the outside slope while delivering her daughter’s daily full English breakfast. Luckily, Mrs Cairns the next-door neighbour was in curtain-twitching mode at the time, so Doll was carted off to A&E for a check-up and Peg was called in and given the usual Mrs Cairns head-waggling tirade about how on earth could she leave her poor aunt and grandmother with no help after all they’d done for her.

It wasn’t like she’d asked them to look after her, Peg thought, as the memory of the shame she had felt at that moment flushed her cheeks.

But that was when Peg had finally won the battle to get Doll some help with Jean, and the first of a succession of carers was brought in.

They didn’t last long. It was hard work, shifting all that unwilling flesh around a bed, and Jean, quite understandably, didn’t take to being cared for by strangers.

But Julie, the fifth carer to come along, had been with Jean for eight months now. She had been new to the job, so hadn’t known any different, hadn’t known that other clients could be grateful and meek. She was also the most patient person Peg had ever met.

She poured herself a small Guinness – Jean liked company when she had a drink – and carried the two glasses through to the bedroom, where she adjusted the electric bed-head to make it easier for her aunt to drink.

‘Thank you, darling,’ Jean said, as the whirring contraption shifted her immobile bulk up to a sitting position. ‘What’s the girl left out for my tea?’

She always referred to Julie – who was at least forty – as ‘the girl’. Not once in Peg’s experience had she called her by her real name.

‘It looks like ham salad,’ Peg said, helping Jean to light another cigarette.

‘Oh no,’ Jean said, poking out her lower lip. She didn’t really consider salad to be proper food. ‘Did you have fish and chips again with Mummy?’

‘As soon as it’s less icy, we’ll come over and eat with you again,’ Peg said. ‘But Nan can’t go out in this.’

‘Is it still icy, is it?’ Jean said. Her drink had given her a tan moustache. Peg pulled a tissue out of the box on the bedside table and wiped it off, taking care not to disturb her lipstick. ‘Pass us the ashtray, there’s a dear.’