Weirdo (2 page)

Edna reached over and stubbed out the Silk Cut. The lowtar brand were Eric’s most recent concession to doctor’s orders to take better care of himself; they were supposed to be better for you than the Rothmans full-strength he’d been on since his teens. Trouble was, he seemed to smoke twice as many of these, smoked them with an ill-concealed rage that he was denying himself his pleasure.
God knows
, Edna thought,
how many he’ll be on this time next week, when everything will change
…

She stopped that thought the only way she knew how, by applying herself to the chores at hand. She filled up the sink with hot water and Fairy Liquid, cleaned the glasses, the plates and the pans so that everything sparkled.

They were doing it for Samantha
, she had to keep
reminding him.
Their granddaughter. It wasn’t her fault that her mother behaved the way she did …

Edna winced, pulled the plug and dried her hands briskly. Ran a cloth over the surfaces, put the tea towel over the radiator, made sure everything in her domain was orderly.

From his basket in the corner, Edna’s toy spitz, Noodles, lifted his head and yawned, revealing a pink mouth fringed with sharp white teeth. He got to his feet, shook himself and hopped out, tail curled over his hindquarters, tiny ears pricked.

“Tha’s a good boy,” Edna leant down to pet him, feeling a twinge of arthritis in her knee as she did. Noodles yelped, as if he was talking back to her, brushing his face against the side of her hand. With his shaggy gold coat and bustling walk, Noodles was an amusing canine mirror of Edna. But he was a sensitive one, too.

The pair of them climbed the thickly carpeted stairs up to the room Edna had spent the past few weeks renovating into a bedroom for Sammy.

Her eyes trailed over the wallpaper and matching bedspread she’d picked from Laura Ashley in Norwich. Edna had asked her best friend, Shirley Reece, who had granddaughters of a similar age to Sammy, for advice.

Shirl had been sure that the bright, simple, poppy pattern would go down well. Edna was no longer certain. The room was so small that the wickerwork dressing table and stool were blocking the view of the sea from the window. And the wardrobe that stood against the opposite wall really didn’t look big enough to contain all of Sammy’s clothes.

“Oh, Noodles,” she whispered, “what if she don’t like it?”

Noodles stared up at his mistress, his brown eyes offering sympathy.

Edna reached up to the shelves she’d had Eric put up. Here she had arranged the collection of knick-knacks won by her granddaughter at The Leisure Beach, along with the books Sammy left behind each time. A china Mickey Mouse and a series of Nancy Drew mysteries, the things she usually picked up first when she arrived for a summer stay. Edna was keenly aware that this time her granddaughter might not be so eager to go back to her childhood things, not now that she was coming here to live. She might take one look around her and throw all of Edna’s carefully chosen home improvements in the bin.

But it wasn’t Sammy’s fault that her mother behaved the way she did.

As her fingers closed around the little figurine, the memories she had been trying to suppress all day, all month, all summer long, since her daughter Amanda had made the phone call that had turned their lives upside down, welled up in Edna’s brain.

Amanda, the cause of Eric’s first heart attack. Amanda with her too ripe figure and her platform boots, running off with an artist from London the moment she was eighteen – eighteen and eight weeks’ pregnant. Edna’s eyes closed as she tried to shut out the recollection of all that screaming, all that shouting, china hurled and furniture broken, fists raised and blood vessels bursting … Eric lying in hospital attached to a ventilator, unable to speak but his eyes still raging while Edna wept by his side. Amanda not daring to contact them again until the baby had been born, using her from the very start as a weapon against their affections, against their better judgement.

No, it wasn’t Sammy’s fault, Edna repeated to herself, fingers tightening their grip …

* * *

All along the seafront, the streetlights fizzled on. From the North Denes, where Edna stood in her architect-designed villa, Marine Parade stretched for another mile between the rolling humps of the sand dunes, until it reached the first of Ernemouth’s piers.

The mid-Victorian Britannic was a testament to the town’s dedication to commerce. Five fires and two schooners sailing off-course and into its 700ft-long rear end had done nothing to deter a succession of entrepreneurs rebuilding the pier and embellishing its theatre to accommodate still more patrons for the summer shows. Its current frontage looked out upon an amusement park, where giant snails trundled laughing children around. Above, this season’s stars emblazoned in lights:
Cannon and Ball, The Grumbleweeds
and
Jim Davidson’s Late Nite Nick-Nick
.

From here on, the second mile of Marine Parade was called “Golden”, and not in reference to the sands that constituted this stretch of the beach, but to the entertainments across the promenade. Amusement arcades, every one named after a Las Vegas casino – The Mint, The Sands, The Flamingo, Caesar’s Palace, The Golden Nugget and Circus Circus – all recreated in glittering lights on the façades of one-storey breezeblock caverns. Between the beachfront bars, Kiss-Me-Kwik sun hat vendors, candy floss and donut stands, they squatted like a blowzy row of ageing drag queens, demanding attention and making the most infernal noise about it.

Inside The Mint, Debbie Carver stood leaning against a pinball machine, trying to work out what was irritating her most – the shrieking, whistling cacophony of the machines, or the sound of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” blaring through
the speakers above her head. Maybe it was the company she was keeping. The penultimate Friday night of the summer holidays and here she still was, stuck in the boring ’musies while her companion went on banging pennies into the slots, oblivious to her discomfort.

Not for the first time, Debbie wondered if she had been more foolish than kind to make friends with the girl who had moved into her road, in the terrace underneath the gasworks, nine months ago. Not that, when she looked back on it, she could even work out whether she’d had any choice about it.

Debbie had first encountered Corrine Woodrow in a needlework class, halfway through last autumn term. She’d sat down beside her and started chattering away, like they had known each other all their lives. Debbie, who had been trying so hard to cultivate an aura of impenetrability, was completely taken aback.

Corrine didn’t look friendly. She didn’t wear a shirt or tie, just a tight, V-neck sweater with an equally skinny pencil skirt and a worn-down pair of stilettos. Long, dark brown hair fell into heavily kohled eyes. The smell of patchouli oil clung to her like a cloud.

She hadn’t come from far away, Corrine told Debbie, just the other side of Norwich. But her mum had lived here before, her mum was Ernemouth born and bred, in fact. Corrine blushed when she said this, her fingers flying deftly across her sampler, working far faster and with more accuracy than Debbie could have managed while talking so much.

All the other girls in Debbie’s class were soon talking about Corrine’s mother too. Kelly Grimmer had it on good authority that Mrs Woodrow had a
reputation
. Debbie already knew where that had come from. There were
motorbikes parked outside Corrine’s house all day and all night.

But Debbie had never particularly liked Kelly Grimmer. She’d not been immune to the whispers herself when she had started to subtly alter her appearance, going a little bit further each time she got away without a bollocking from her dad. The black eyeliner, the pair of crimpers that had transformed her brown hair into a thatch of corrugated spikes. All the sanctimonious warning chunters only served to bring her closer to Corrine, and the more she had found out about her new friend’s life, the more Debbie had wanted to protect her. She’d even got Corrine a job in the guesthouse where she worked the summer season – and had six long weeks to regret it.

Corrine worked away at the Pac-Man, chewing gum furiously as her fingers pushed the buttons. Unconsciously, her left foot moved to the rhythm, skinny ankle rising and falling out of her turquoise shoes. Corrine had been so proud of them, bought with her first pay packet. She’d not had a chance to spend any more on herself since; her mother snatched her wages off her as fast as she could earn them. Now those shoes, so pretty back at Easter, were scuffed and marked, the sides boated out and the heels in need of repair.

Debbie chewed at her black-painted nails, thinking about where she could have been tonight, if only she were a year older. How she could have been with Alex.

Alex Pendleton was the boy next door. Tall, black-haired, hauntingly handsome, he had taught Debbie all about music and style, implanting within her the desire to do anything he could. In the long term, that meant following him to Ernemouth Art College, where he was already in his second year. But right now, Alex was travelling around the country
on Mars Bars National Express tokens and a hitcher’s thumb, following bands with his friends, Bully and Kris. They wouldn’t have minded Debbie coming. But her mum did. “Not until you’ve finished your O-levels,” was what she had to say about it.

If she hadn’t been lumbered with Corrine, Debbie could at least have tried to get through the doors of the pub they all drank in, Captain Swing’s on the South Quay. There were a couple of boys in her class who had managed it, Darren Moorcock and Julian Dean, who had turned into goths over the summer and looked much older with the hair and make-up. But if she so much as mentioned the place to Corrine she would stick her bottom lip out like she was about to burst into tears.

Michael Jackson gave way to Wham!’s “Club Tropicana”. Debbie shuddered inwardly.

* * *

Outside, the Golden Mile glittered and flashed, beckoning the punters with a neon wink. Horse-drawn carriages full of tourists clopped north from The Mint, past the new indoor leisure centre, the landscaped gardens and miniature village, all the way to the next pier.

Unlike The Britannic, The Trafalgar Pier had been commissioned with some civic pride in mind, to celebrate Nelson’s famous victory. That it took another fifty years to erect suggested that the enthusiasm of the townsfolk had not been equal to that of the Aldermen who conceived it. Still, it was the grandest building on the seafront, twin towers surrounding a glass and steel pavilion. During the winter this became a roller-skating rink, but in its present summer incarnation as a beer garden it represented the ultimate
triumph of the will of the people over any misplaced ideas for their betterment.

At the end of the Golden Mile, the horses would stop to deposit their excited cargo at the gates of the very pinnacle of Ernemouth’s pleasure palaces, where the snow-capped tops of painted wooden mountains, spinning Ferris wheels and redand-yellow-striped helter-skelter towers announced they had arrived at the Leisure Beach.

Its mile-long rollercoaster was the longest in all Europe. Its latest attraction, the Super Loop, spun revellers round in a gigantic circle at 100 mph. There was a queue beside it that had stretched the length of the park ever since the ride had been installed.

A queue that, from his office eyrie in the tower at the centre of the park, Eric Hoyle would, on any ordinary night, look down on with a smile, counting each head and the £5 entrance fee, £2.50 concessions, they represented. With the soft clack of an adding machine as a soothing soundtrack, he might pour out a finger of Scotch, light a cigarette and gaze out on his kingdom, eyes wandering across the cobweb of illuminations and out to sea, where the lights from the oil platforms would wink back at him.

But tonight was not an ordinary night. Tonight, Eric’s eyes were fixed on only one thing, a photograph that he normally kept locked in his safe, a photograph Edna believed he had long ago thrown away in one of his fits of pique.

His daughter Amanda, wearing a psychedelic kaftan, her blonde hair tumbling out of a matching headscarf, holding in her arms the tiny bundle of his first and only grandchild.

The cigarette in his right hand was burning down to the filter, but Eric hadn’t noticed. His shirt open at the collar, his tie thrown on top of a pile of paperwork next to the bottle
of whisky and the tumbler that held more than three fingers tonight, he continued to stare, his eyes narrowed and his mouth set into a thin, grim line.

Beyond the Leisure Beach, Marine Parade carried on past the caravan parks and the windswept dunes of the South Denes to the very tip of Ernemouth, where the spit from which the town had first risen gave way to the North Sea. Here, atop a column that was a twin to the one in the London square, Admiral Nelson stood guard over the county of his birth, his eyes forever cast towards the horizon, warding enemy outsiders away.

An hour later, Sean had found his way out of the forest and onto the A11 towards Norwich. The landscape began to alter, pine and scrub heath giving way to wide, brown, ploughed fields, fringed with coppices and long lines of poplars. He passed villages with duck ponds and flint-towered churches, gatekeeper’s cottages and farmsteads, the sky getting bigger and the land lying lower as he went. Traffic kept up a steady flow around him and, though the clouds still lay sullen, he could turn off the windscreen wipers. But he kept the radio on.

He wasn’t really listening to it now, just wanted the background hum of voices to distract him from what he had seen in the secure unit. What he had felt there. The appearance of Corrine Woodrow had come as a shock, nothing like what he expected. Stupid to think that she would be, but photographs had a way of doing that to you, of keeping a face suspended in time. Sean had been as much of a sucker for that as any other punter.

The doctor in charge of the institution had taken Sean into his study for some mild interrogation before allowing him to see her. Robert Radcliffe was an elegant man in his early sixties, his still-dark hair clipped neatly around his bald pate,
a Jermyn Street shirt and Savile Row trousers visible beneath his white coat. For such a man to be in charge of a place like this, rather than coining it in Harley Street, suggested to Sean a dedication that ran deep and did not expect to be trifled with.