The Secrets We Left Behind (8 page)

For the last few years, they’d lived on one of the tattiest roads in Newquay, and today it looked even worse than usual. There was as much furniture outside on the street as in the houses,
by the look of it. She passed a double mattress propped up against the wall and a ripped armchair with an old reel-to-reel tape recorder on the seat, all getting sodden in the rain. Sometimes, she
struggled to remember what things had been like before, when they’d lived in a nice house in a nice road where people mowed their lawns on Saturdays and washed their cars on Sundays. She
couldn’t even picture her bedroom in that house now.

When she let herself back in, it felt like she’d been away for ten years rather than ten hours. Time was all wrong in hospitals. The flat felt cold and damp, more so than usual. She
stooped to pick up the post, walked through to the kitchen and switched on the light, waiting while the fluorescent tubes flickered into life, then she turned on the radio – a reflex action
– just in time to hear Abba joyfully singing the chorus of ‘Mamma Mia’. She turned the radio off, threw the post onto the table and went over to the sink where the pan from last
night’s spaghetti Bolognese was soaking in the bowl, a greasy orange scum floating on top of the cold washing-up water. Apart from the tea and biscuits they’d given her at the hospital
this morning, she hadn’t eaten a thing since last night, so still in her coat, she opened the fridge, ate some corned beef with her fingers, then poured a glass of milk and drank it straight
down. She felt in her pocket for the tiny lump of hash Rob Trelawney had given her yesterday, then took her coat off and sat at the table to roll a spliff. She wasn’t very good at it, not
like Rob, but then he smoked all the time. To Rob, spliffs were like cigarettes. She lit the thin, inexpertly rolled joint and took a deep drag, letting the calm wash over her. It definitely numbed
things a bit. That’s what her mum used to say about drinking. ‘It’s only a drop of sherry, Jo-Jo, just to take the edge off .’

Some of the post was for her, some for her mum. There was a reminder to take her books back to the library, and a pink envelope in Sheena Smith’s handwriting. Sheena was one of the few
girls she’d kept in touch with from school. She opened the envelope; Thank You card for the tights and bath salts Jo had given her for her birthday. There was a gas bill and a letter from the
hospital, both addressed to her mother. The gas bill was a red reminder; Jo slid it between the salt and pepper pots to remind herself to phone them tomorrow. And she should phone Mr Rundle, the
landlord, too, and the Social Security; and there would be loads of others. She’d better make a list. The hospital letter sounded like a telling-off because her mum had ‘failed to
attend’ for her fortnightly blood test. Another appointment had been made and would she please notify them if she was unable to keep it. The letter went on about wasting time and using up an
appointment that another patient might be able to take blah blah blah. Jo snatched up a green felt tip pen that was lying in the fruit bowl on top of some wrinkled apples, turned the letter over
and scrawled on the back,
I did not attend the appointment on the 26th because as you should bloody well know, I’ve been in your stupid hospital for six weeks and anyway I died this
morning. Hope that’s a good enough excuse for not attending the next one. Yours, Marie Casey (deceased).

She read what she’d written, then tore the letter into shreds and tossed it into the sink. How could it be that, just last night, she’d been sitting in the living room watching
Top of the Pops,
and now, twenty-four hours later, she no longer had a mum? She took another toke on the spliff and ignored the tears that were rolling down her cheeks. She’d been
almost relieved when her mum was admitted to hospital; at least the nurses would know what to do. Also, it meant that, for a while, she could pretend her mother wasn’t an alcoholic, that she
was in hospital for some normal reason, like gallstones or piles or a hysterectomy. Jo had gone in to see her most nights, but her mum was often so drugged up she was barely conscious. Last night,
she’d seemed a bit better, although her skin was a sickly yellow and there were brown shadows under both her eyes. She’d even talked about a holiday in Spain. ‘We’ll save
up,’ she’d said, her voice stronger than it had been for weeks. ‘I’ll get a little job when I’m back on my feet. I was a cashier before I met your dad, you know; I did
double-entry bookkeeping for two years, so I’ll be able to find something.’ Then her eyes had filled up and she reached for Jo’s hand. ‘You shouldn’t have to be the
one who goes to work, not at your age, not when you’re such a clever girl. You should have stayed on at school and done your A levels. Oh, Jo-Jo.’ She turned her head away on the
pillow. ‘What sort of mother have I been?’

For a fleeting moment, she wanted to say,
A lousy one, if you want to know the truth. A really bloody shitty one.
But she knew that wasn’t entirely fair. When she was little,
she’d thought her mum was wonderful, the best mum in the world, and that had given her a dilemma, because although she knew she wanted to have her own babies as soon as she grew up, she
couldn’t imagine living in a different house to her mum. So when she was old enough, she’d decided, she would buy a big pink house and she and her children and her mum would all live
there together. She hadn’t given much thought to a husband; she didn’t think she’d need one.

She realised her mum was crying.

‘It’s all right, Mum.’ Gently, she pulled her hand away and stood up. ‘Listen, I’ll come and see you again tomorrow, okay?’ She kissed her mum’s clammy
forehead and walked out of the ward, keen to be home in time for
Top of the Pops.

Then in the middle of the night, the ward sister had telephoned and told her that her mum had taken a turn for the worse. The minicab cost almost two pounds, but it got her there quickly.
She’d sat next to the bed for nearly three hours, listening to her mother’s laboured breathing and leaning in closer every time her eyelids flickered. And then at just after five in the
morning, her mother had smiled for the first time in weeks, a warm, beatific smile that came more from the eyes than the mouth, and then she’d closed those once-pretty green eyes for the last
time, and died.

Jo gathered up all the envelopes, opened the pedal bin with her foot and threw them in, thank-you card and all, then she put her hand in the cold, greasy washing-up water, fished out the torn-up
pieces of the hospital letter and threw them in on top. She finished the spliff then walked across the hall and into her mother’s room. The last time she’d been in here was the day the
ambulance came. She pushed the door open slowly. The room felt chilly and smelt stale, like unwashed clothes. The laundry basket in the corner was full, and she felt a pang of guilt. She could have
taken this lot to the launderette, couldn’t she? Six weeks. She could have come in here and changed the bed, at least. There was a sticky glass and a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes mug on the
bedside cabinet, along with a jumble of pills, a box of tissues and a pot of Nivea face cream. She slid open the top drawer; more pills, more creams and ointments. She picked up one of the tubes
and smiled when she read the label. She remembered her mum’s voice, incredulous:
‘Anusol,
I ask you! Why not call it
arsehole
and have done with it?’

When she was a little girl and they’d lived in Padstow, she’d loved going into her mum’s room because it smelt nice and there were pretty bottles on the dressing table and
necklaces hung over the mirror, and sometimes, her mother would let her try on her shoes and clip-clop about in them like a grown-up lady. But this room bore no traces of that mother. There was
still a perfume bottle on the dressing table, but it was covered with dust; her mother hadn’t worn perfume or jewellery for years. Under the bed there were two carrier bags full of bottles,
mostly sherry or Martini, which was what her mum drank in the evenings; during the day, she’d sometimes slip some vodka into her tea when she thought Jo wasn’t looking. Those damn
bottles. She remembered wondering why her mum always took a clinking carrier bag with her when she went to the corner shop, and one day, she watched out of the window as her mum stopped at a litter
bin, glanced around and then lifted the carrier bag and tipped the bottles into the bin. It was only when Friday came around and Jo saw the dustmen taking the lids off the bins all along the road
that she understood. That was back in the days when her mum still cared what people thought.

Jo tried to think of the old mum, the mum who used to know so many songs that you could say any word you thought of and she’d know a song with that word in it; the mum who used to fold a
sheet of paper, make little cuts or tears in it and get Jo to tap it with her finger and shout
Abracadabra
and then, magically, open the paper out to reveal a string of paper dollies holding
hands, or a beautiful peacock with a fanned tail, or a swan with its wings outstretched. For a second, the memory was so strong that her mum, the funny, happy, laughing mum, felt intensely real and
present, but then it was gone, leaving an imprint on the air like when you’ve just blown out a candle. For the first time since she was a little girl, she climbed into her mother’s bed
and cried herself to sleep.

*

Mr Rundle was very sorry to hear of her mother’s death. She was welcome to stay in the flat until the end of March, he told her, and she wasn’t to worry
about the two months’ rent they owed. ‘You’ll have enough to think about, young miss.’ His craggy forehead wrinkled as he lit his pipe. ‘I’m not short of a few
bob these days, and your mum was a good tenant, mostly.’ He asked about the funeral and Jo admitted she had no idea what to do, so he and Mrs Rundle took over the arrangements, much to
Jo’s relief. A week later the three of them, together with Rob Trelawney and his parents, her friends Sheena and Jackie, a nurse from the hospital and Miss Bradwell, her mum’s social
worker, sat round on chairs and packing cases drinking weak tea out of disposable cups; Jo hadn’t realised you were supposed to provide tea and cakes after a funeral and she’d given
away most of the crockery. There hadn’t been a lot to get rid of. The WRVS and the Salvation Army had taken most of the household things, and Mrs Rundle had helped her bag up her mum’s
stuff for the church jumble. It fitted into four dustbin bags; not much to show for a whole life. Apart from clothes, her mum owned very little. She’d sold most of her jewellery ages ago,
except for a Victorian cameo brooch that had belonged to her own mother. It was the only thing Jo wanted to keep; it would remind her of her mum and of Granny Pawley at the same time. Her own
things, the stuff she wasn’t taking with her, filled another two bags and a couple of packing cases – her old record player, the cassette recorder, her books, records and tapes, a few
old toys she’d hung on to. Once she’d made the decision, getting rid of her things was easier than she’d expected. She’d hung on to too much; those things were all part of
her childhood, and that was behind her now.

The tiny funeral party picked at the ham and tomato sandwiches, mushroom vol-au-vents and fairy cakes that Rob’s mum and Mrs Rundle had made that morning. No one said much, and no one
stayed for long.

She gave a week’s notice at the Co-op and told Carol and Geoff, who owned the pub where she worked three evenings a week, that she wouldn’t be back, then she wrote notes to Sheena
and Jackie promising to stay in touch. When she’d seen Rob and his mum out after the funeral, she’d said she’d pop round to say goodbye, but she knew she wouldn’t. She hated
goodbyes, especially as she still quite liked Rob. She was going to stay with her mum’s cousin in London, she told them all. No one questioned her, not even Miss Bradwell. Only Mr Rundle had
any doubts. Being a dyed-in-the-wool Cornishman, he was suspicious of Londoners who, he said, had no consideration. ‘Noisy beggars, they London folk,’ he grumbled when he came to
collect the keys. ‘Come down here in summer with their cars and motorbikes, playing their transistor radios on the beach and leaving all their mess behind. Never see sight nor sign of
‘em come wintertime.’ He shook his head. And London itself, he told her, was a filthy place, full of people you couldn’t trust. ‘Streets paved with thieves and
blaggards.’ He puffed furiously on his pipe. ‘Steal a wooden leg from a cripple, they Londoners.’ When he dropped her off at Newquay station with her duffle bag and her
mum’s only good suitcase, he pushed a five pound note into her hand. ‘You look after yourself, my lover; ‘t ain’t right, a young maid all alone up there in that
place.’

Jo stashed her suitcase in the luggage rack, then settled with her duffle bag on her lap. It was a long journey, over six hours, and she’d barely slept the previous
night. The last time she’d been on a train to London was when she was nine; she hadn’t slept the night before that journey, either. Her dad was working in London and renting a bedsit in
Green Park because it was handy for the City. He came home on Fridays and left again on Sunday nights to get the train back. Just before Christmas, her mum decided to take the train up and surprise
him. ‘We’ll travel up on the Thursday,’ she said, ‘then we can go out to dinner with Daddy in the evening, get up early on Friday for Oxford Street, do some shopping, have
lunch, then come back with Daddy on the four o’clock train. So when he phones tonight’– she put her finger to her lips – ‘not a word, okay?’

Jo nodded eagerly, pleased to be trusted with keeping the secret.

The night before, she’d been so excited she’d lain awake for hours, and in the morning she was up and dressed long before her mother. She wore her new navy corduroy pinafore dress
with a white jumper underneath, white socks and black patent shoes. She knew you needed to dress smartly for London. Into the beige suede handbag Granny Pawley had given her, she put
The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe
to read on the train, a mini pack of tissues, a notebook and pencil, a packet of Spangles and her purse with eighteen shillings for her Christmas shopping. She could
barely keep still as she sat on her parents’ high iron-framed bed while her mum applied lipstick in the same cherry-red colour as her trouser suit. ‘You wait until you see the lights in
Regent Street, Jo-Jo; the best Christmas lights you’ll ever see.’ She twisted the lipstick down again and put the lid back on, pressed her lips together and then blotted them with a
tissue. She leaned into the mirror and turned her face first to one side, then the other. Apparently satisfied, she took her new fun-fur coat out of the wardrobe. ‘Come on then, Jo-Jo,’
she said with a mock-impatient smile. ‘Are you going to laze around here all day or are we going to London?’ Jo jumped down off the bed and ran to get her own best coat, which was
plum-coloured with gold burtons and a black velvet collar.