Trudie was unusual, I said, what with her doing men over instead of the other way round. She’d fleeced them on that internet dating site. Promised fun-filled nights in return for them paying her fare from Greece to the UK. I wasn’t being spiteful. I was interested. We’d bonded a bit since I’d rescued Audrey – which was ironic. Except maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was because I’d been nicer.
Why she’d done the internet stuff came out now like popping a cork. She’d always kept in touch with her sister in the UK. Emails, regular. Then the sister got poorly. When she got worse, Trudie raised the money from lovestruck men to go over and see her. They were sort of giving money to charity only they didn’t know it.
She liked my hair. Hers had henna on. Too orange. Nearly the same colour as her skin. She said I could borrow her tablet if I wanted, she’d show me how to use it. I said thanks and I asked her the cat’s name. The one she’d had in Greece with the sunburnt ears. Linda, she said. That had been her sister’s name. Fair-skinned, couldn’t take the sun. This cat had taken on her spirit. It, she, Linda, used to lie in the sun, front paws stretched out, just like her sister had done by the pool. Told you Trudie was a hippie, didn’t I?
TJ pretended not to recognize me with my new hair. ‘We have new kitchen lady, Primrose. Classy lady.’ He made me turn right round so he could see the back.
My ponytail had gone. My hair curled under. My eyebrows had an even better arch to them. I’d drawn in the shape first with biro, then plucked around it. Took me ages to scrub off the blue afterwards and Juicy Lucy had thought it was a bruise. I looked OK. Respectable. Until I opened my mouth and my teeth and the way I spoke let me down.
Primrose heaved a tray of sausages and tomatoes out of the oven. Looked over. She’d have been red in the face if she wasn’t so dark. ‘You look smart, child.’ Flash of pearly whites. The bright-coloured African material that showed under her overall was robes from her own country. They just wrapped around so it didn’t matter about her size. With her hair braided and her overall off, she looked really dignified. Important. Course, being big helped.
I hadn’t heard from Louise yet, but no news was good news. I wrote to Enid but I didn’t ask if she was starting the new treatment yet. I didn’t want her to know I’d raised the money for it. Or how I’d done it.
Good for my English I was writing letters. And reading the stories in Woman’s World made me feel I was getting somewhere. Didn’t read them all in one go, obviously. Some of them were three pages long, with tricky names. Bit far-fetched, as well – too many happy endings. Audrey didn’t like me rustling the pages in bed or leaning over to get the dictionary. She’d stalk off to the end of the bed and curl up in her beanbag.
I was improving myself for Alastair and trying to keep up with TJ. Well, not get so far behind. He’d started his harder English class. Took that great big paper out with us Sundays now. The Observer. Gave me a chill seeing its pages flapping. Plus, he was struggling through a proper book, hundreds of pages long, he said, and hundreds of years old. I think he said hundreds. Luckily, he kept it in his flat. The man in his book had lived in some old buildings near St Paul’s so we had to go and look at them. He hadn’t really lived there, though, TJ said; it was all made up.
Now I’d got the painting and Enid sorted, I’d been thinking about TJ’s flat. Moving in after the New Year. Be a good place for Alastair to contact me. Maybe even visit. Mind you, TJ would have to watch those long arms and legs of his. Watch he didn’t knock over my stuff and that. It would be weird seeing him in the mornings. Going out for our Sunday trips from the same place. Us studying together. Didn’t know what old Sofa would think. The flat didn’t sound big enough for someone her size anyway.
I’d been putting a few things in my holdall already, along with the stuff I’d been saving to show Alastair one day. The Present from Margate box. My appraisal, Jack’s letter, leaflets from the places me and TJ had looked round, postcards. A bit I’d asked the vet to write down. (Ruby and me had taken Audrey there again to get her injections. I’d been on my best behaviour. Had to be else Ruby wouldn’t have let me come. And Audrey needed me to talk to her soothing. I’d shut my eyes and stuck my fingers in my ears when some tosser hooted at Ruby for taking her time turning right. Had to drum my heels in the footwell. The vet said Audrey was well cared for and well nourished. Ruby had spelt nourished for me.)
It was November now, getting near the end of the year. I was whizzing so far onwards and upwards I even had a go at a practice letter to the adoption agency. I already had the proper spellings. Only, once I had the pen in my hand, I couldn’t put what I wanted to say into words. Thinking about contacting Alastair made me nervous. I got into a tangle. Would he want to hear from me, even now I was doing so much better? I still had bad teeth and no exams or nothing, didn’t I?
Was I being selfish like Big Shirl and Juice had said? Was it for my good, not his? Would I be pushing out his birth mum? I wanted to push her out, only everyone said it was wrong.
So I only got as far as Dear Sir or Madam. It was in my best handwriting, though. I put the beginning of the letter back in my holdall. Still a couple of months before the year was up.
37
Woman’s World, 31 October 2018
Create Your Own Masterpiece on a Budget!
It was a shock, after I’d pinched the painting, seeing the copy up there on the boardroom wall. Like I’d never stole it. Like I’d dreamt the whole thing. Showed I’d done a really, really good job. I leant so close to the glass – TJ had gone ahead – my breath steamed it up. People think I’m stupid, but it’s the snooty types who’ll pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a painting, when a photocopy looks just as good, who’re the thick ones, if you ask me.
I’d expected TJ and Primrose to look at me suspicious, but they didn’t. As for the rest of them at Scanda, well, people don’t take much notice of you when you work in a kitchen. Even less when you’re smaller and you don’t smile a lot because of your teeth. They’d forgotten about me rescuing Jack. Ten months ago now.
Mind you, I was smiling more. Quite full of myself since I’d saved Enid’s life. Talked about her to TJ now I knew she wasn’t going to die. He’d bored my ears off droning on about old Sofa.
I didn’t tell him exactly how I’d met her. Didn’t say the actual word prison. I just said it was a place where you go to make up for doing bad things. I said it quickly. TJ gave me a long look and didn’t ask anything else. He had a little interested smile on, though. I told him Enid was going to beat her cancer. I could feel it in my water, like she would say. Didn’t say why. Didn’t say I’d raised the money to get her better. Or how, obviously. He said he’d say a prayer for her. A Catholic one. I was pleased, not because I believed in all that myself, but because he thought she was worth praying for.
I nearly told him about Alastair then. Be tempting fate, though. Only two months to go before the New Year.
I huddled into my overall. There was a bitter wind up in the roof garden. Reckon it was to try and put people off smoking. A clear day, though, and all London’s new millionaires’ towers were sparkling. I stubbed out my fag and had a good stretch. Enid would be on the mend soon with her new drugs. I’d worked here for ten months. I was going onwards and upwards. Nearer to my son. TJ was right, there were opportunities. You just had to look for them.
Trouble is, other people are out there looking for them too, aren’t they? Opportunities to use people.
Juicy Lucy was in the kitchen, making soup. Swedes and parsnips, she said the veg were. They’d been going cheap down the market. I wasn’t surprised. She’d boiled them up and now she was using a little stick blender to mash them to smithereens. It was small and powerful. Very efficient. A lot of small things are like that.
Her glasses were steamed up. There was a reek of boiled veg like a blocked drain. She didn’t stop the whirring. I had to put the kettle on myself.
I took my work sandwiches out of my pocket. Smoked salmon on rye
bread. Real posh, only it tasted just like kippers. Audrey must have smelt it, even from outside, because she scratched at the kitchen door to come in. Stared at me eating it, purring, shifting her weight – quite a lot more of it now – from paw to paw, miaowing every five seconds. I ended up giving her half.
Juice jumped when I nudged her with a cup of tea. Didn’t even notice I’d made her one instead of the other way round.
She flung down the blender. She’d done her soup wrong. Put in too much water. Didn’t taste of nothing, she said. Just as well, I thought – better than drains. ‘Can’t do anything right. Can’t bloody think straight.’ Burst into tears.
Audrey scarpered. Cats can’t handle crying. Like men that way.
Juice felt better after a fag and the tea. We kept the soup boiling. I might only be able to cook egg and chips, but even I knew steam was water. After half an hour it was lower in the pan. Juice chucked in half a jar of Marmite so in the end it did taste of something. Didn’t cheer her up, though.
Why Juice wasn’t herself came out that evening, watching telly. Course there was a man behind it.
She’d had a letter from her ex. From prison. Loads of pages. Kisses all over them, and a heart with an arrow. You could see she was tempted. Turned your stomach seeing her goggling over them. None of us were swayed. ‘Oldest trick in the book.’ Big Shirl shook her fingers to dry her nails. Picked up the bottle of varnish and leant over her other hand, frowning. ‘Don’t you fall for it, my girl.’
EastEnders was on. I could watch it these days. Seeing them all boozing in the Queen Vic used to make me want a drink, but not so much now I got other things to think about.
Juice was still glued to her letter.
I turned round. ‘Mention Shania, does he?’
Juice hunted through the pages. ‘Um. No. But . . .’
Every single one of us whipped round. Said something along the lines of he’s bad news at the same time. Like something out of a musical. Kasia said her bit in Russian. Sounded like she was spitting, which would have been about right. Even Trudie put in her fourpenny-worth.
Juice clutched her letter, eyes red behind her glasses. She stuffed it down her bra – leggings don’t have pockets – and stomped upstairs. It reminded me of being a teenager again, only I’d have gone down the park, not upstairs.
A couple of days later Juice was in the kitchen beating up some eggs for an omelette. She had the makings of a salad on the side to go with it. Whipped up quite a froth. Seemed her mum – her adoptive mum I should say, only I didn’t like the word – had put her right. Stick with the BF and she wouldn’t ever get Shania back.
‘I’ve torn up his letter,’ Juice burst out. ‘Every page. It’s the only way, Mum said.’
She picked up the knife and started on the tomatoes and I got out of the kitchen sharpish.
Sunday, me and TJ went to the other art gallery in Trafalgar Square. Huge place with rooms opening off each other. Like a palace. Posher than the Queen’s, probably. Everything so grand you couldn’t hardly breathe. Pink marble pillars like the foreign sausage TJ liked, gold bits, glass ceilings, fancy squiggles everywhere. That sort of thing. And huge pictures that took up the whole wall. Dark colours. Men mostly. Battle scenes with people stabbing each other and not wearing many clothes.
TJ had a list of six paintings he wanted to see. He didn’t mean just see, he meant stand in front of each one for ages and get excited over it. You’d swear he’d had a drink, only I knew he hadn’t. He didn’t even know about my drinking days. Of course his special paintings weren’t all in the same place, or on the same floor even, so there was a lot of traipsing up and down trying to find them. Waiting, seething, to get through the swing doors between the rooms, sorry, galleries. Crowds of foreign people, chattering fit to burst, swarming through first.
We tracked TJ’s first painting down. The people in it were stiff and wound around in cloaks and robes, like mummies. Even I could see it was hundreds of years old. I stuck my hands in my pockets. Looked at it for well over a minute. Asked TJ outright why it mattered it was the original painting. ‘You can get really good photocopies these days.’ I didn’t look at TJ, I looked at a woman in the painting with her hands clasped together. ‘Nice bright colours, quality paper.’ The photocopy had felt heavy and smooth when I’d unrolled it at home, with the door locked. ‘Stick one of them in a frame and Bob’s your uncle.’
‘Bob . . .?’
‘Yeah. Means, there you go. Sorted.’
‘Sorted . . .’ TJ got out his notebook. I liked him writing down what I said now. It made me feel important. He put the notebook back in his trouser pocket. Proper trousers he had on, not jeans or trackie bottoms. Foreign-looking trousers. A bit old-fashioned, but smart.
‘No, there is big difference.’ Out came an arm, palm open. ‘Artist paint this with own hand. So painting has part of artist inside. Like painted with artist’s blood, almost.’
I looked closer. How did he make that out?
‘Artist spend many, many hours getting painting right. Photocopy look good at first stare, but is empty.’
‘At first glance.’ Was the Woman Reading photocopy empty? It looked OK to me. I folded my arms. Felt a bit deflated.
I trudged after TJ as he hunted down his other paintings. He pointed out details in them you wouldn’t notice. The little spot of white in people’s eyes that made them look real. The different types of brushstrokes. Some of it, on the modern ones, was really lumpy.
Other people were listening to him, muscling in. Old biddies nodding and smiling. How did TJ know all this art stuff? How did he know about science as well? History? How did his brain have room? Why did he bother with someone like me? Someone who’d just stolen a painting like the ones he was getting excited about. I leant against the wall while he droned on. Began to feel I’d short-changed Scanda. I’d stolen something off them, I know, but it had felt more like swapping before.
When he’d finished crowing over the last one, he took my elbow, smiled down at me. ‘You have been very patient, Maggsie.’
I heaved myself off the wall, sighing. Had I? That was a new one. Too busy thinking, more like. It’s a good thing, though, isn’t it, being patient?
It was a bit chilly sitting on the steps outside the National Gallery, even though we’d put down the Observer to sit on. We stared up at Nelson’s back and had the flask of tea and my sandwiches and our fags. Well, my fag and TJ’s e-cig. He’d been on them a few weeks now. I’d thought his vaping thing was a quarter-bottle of vodka at first. Same shape. Gave me a start. TJ breathed out more smoke than with a proper fag. All around himself like he was some sort of dragon. Steam, he said it was, not smoke. Been better off with a kettle.
We looked down at the people milling about like before. Felt small, with everything on such a massive scale, but sort of at the centre of things at the same time. Had to sit close to TJ, our jackets practically touching, to keep warm.
My eyes were still drawn to the painting, the photocopy, when I passed it on fag breaks, only not for the same reason. If TJ was with me I gabbled about any old thing to get us past the boardroom door quick. Luckily when he was up there working he was too busy to stare at the paintings.
Before, it had given me a lift; now seeing it made me feel a bit low. It looked second-rate, what TJ said all photocopies were. Empty. To be honest it looked like a photocopy. I’d thought shiny, bright colours was better. More cheerful. But maybe the artist, old Hammershøi, hadn’t wanted flashy.
Enid, I had to keep reminding myself. The original’s gone to save Enid’s life. And TJ was unusual knowing so much about art. No one else would spot the difference.
38
Woman’s World, 5 December 2018
New Ways with Cheese!
I still hadn’t heard from Louise. I kept checking my phone. Hardly bothered normally. No text or call. Maybe she was too busy trying to sell the painting. Maybe no one would buy it. Maybe Enid was running out of options.
Hadn’t heard from her either, come to that. When I let myself weaken I thought she might be wasting away in one of those special places people go to die, waiting for a wonder drug that wouldn’t never come.
I was still writing to her every week. It was easier now because most of the words were ones I’d used before. Soon as my sentence was up, January, I’d go and visit Enid. Ask Ruby to help me find out which hospital she was in. I had enough put by for the fare and that. I’d do it soon as I’d sent off that letter to the adoption agency.
For a few weeks the boardroom wasn’t used. Then, beginning of December, there was a posh dinner for some bigwigs. Primrose banged about the kitchen with saucepans. Big backside bumping into me. No hymn singing. I took more notice of that than about the stuff that might be going on upstairs. Sounds strange but I’d almost forgot I’d taken the painting.
No TJ to help Primrose out in the kitchen, seeing as he was upstairs. So no chance she could spare me to clear tables in the canteen. I hadn’t done that since those stuck-up tossers nearly lost me my job. They got a young girl in from an agency instead. Polish, she was, like TJ. Red hair. Dyed. She was quick, I give her that, and after she said she lived with her boyfriend, I warmed to her a bit. Plus she didn’t have time to get matey with anyone.
About three o’clock TJ came down, undoing his bow tie. The Polish girl went off then. They only had time to say hello and goodbye. Funny how hearing them few words, in a foreign language, could make you feel lonely.
TJ was bursting to tell us something. Don’t say he’s met another dentist, I thought. His arms were going. Even more dramatic than usual. I saw the two of us in his mate’s flat. Squeezed together in a tiny kitchen. Only the size of a cupboard, TJ had said. That was because it had used to be a cupboard. Saw my Audrey mug going flying. Then I heard what he was saying: ‘There has been theft! Theft from boardroom.’
Maggsie McNaughton's Second Chance Page 20