‘Is there an iron? A washing machine?’ It would do no harm for him to believe it was clothes storage I cared about.
‘Oh aye,’ he said. ‘The washer and dryer are in with the massage chair and the mini-gym.’ His smile was broader than ever as, giving his thumb a lick that was just one notch too extravagant, he turned the top page of my application and bent his head to read it.
Ten minutes later, I had myself a contract with the subcontractor to the Grampian Health Trust, doing the kind of specialized work we’d never got into at BG. And, since I wasn’t employed, and I’d coughed up a hefty deposit for the tracker logger, not to mention I was using my own van, there was nothing else needed. I patted myself on the back for my choice of company, big enough to go looking for serious sub-work, small enough to be panicking that they’d got it, green enough not to question me too much.
‘Just one thing, doll,’ he said as we were heading out of the office to take a tour of the warehouse and meet the foreman. ‘I’m Mr Morton. Not “pal”. OK?’
I flushed but luckily he took it to be embarrassment instead of fury and he swatted me on the behind with my own application in its folder as I passed through the door. I kept walking, teeth clenched and head high. I’d have put up with a lot worse than that to get my feet under the table and that locker filled.
Of course, none of the shirts in any of the BG offices, much less the polos on the warehouse floor and behind the wheel had ever messed with me. They looked. Sometimes they took their sweet creepy time looking and even sucked their teeth too, but they knew if a cardboard file ever hit Tash Dodd on the bum, there’d be a sacking and a punch in the gob to go with it. Nate Dewar wasn’t going to be so lucky. ‘Eyes on the prize, Tash,’ I told myself. ‘Eyes on the prize.’
The foreman, an Indian man in his fifties, blinked once or twice when Morton introduced me, but he said nothing.
‘Own van?’ he said.
‘And she’s going to be working on the meds,’ Morton said. ‘Got her DBS check and a refrigeration unit.’
‘Good. Saves me a lot of juggling. Is it white, your van? Even better. We’ve got cling-ons. You’ll not mind cling-ons, eh? Decals. Turn your wee van into our wee van. You don’t need to keep it on when you’re not logged in. We can’t insist on it. But we prefer it, don’t we Jamie-boy? Good advertising.’
‘I’ve got a decal on my Beemer,’ Morton said. ‘Unless Herself’s on board. She forgets where the money comes from.’
‘Mine won’t peg out my work clothes,’ said the foreman. ‘Puts them in the dryer with a perfume sheet in case the neighbours see. Women. No offence, Natasha.’
‘Natalie!’ I said, far too loud and far too bothered. Both of them stared at me for a moment, but then both of them concluded I was pissed off at them making their wee jokes about wives. ‘Nate, for short. Nate, if you want me to answer.’
‘You’ll need to get used to a bit of joshing,’ said Morton. ‘And you’ll need to answer to whatever.’ The two of them shared another look and I made myself nod and try to look sorry.
‘Speaking of which,’ said the foreman. ‘Come and say hiya to the dregs of the night shift. It’s always the same few at the coo’s erse.’ He was talking louder and louder as he led the way into the bowels of the warehouse, past high cages of discarded packing plastic and towers of pallets ready for return. ‘No matter the routes, no matter the loads, these are the boys you’ll find having one last wank in the bog before they put the rubber to the road. Aye, I mean you!’ This last was in answer to a shout of denial from somewhere deep in the avenues of loaded pallets.
I snorted and fell into step behind him. The crudeness didn’t bother me. I’d grown up on porny calendars and page-three girls littering the vans and the loading docks. I’d heard more graphic accounts than that of what the drivers got up to on the lonely road and in the Portakabin toilets before they set out. And anyway, despite everything, the smoky whiff of shredded cardboard from the recycling compactor, the oily perfume of the thick pallet wrap and the nutty smell of biodegradable packing noodles felt like home.
I was in. They didn’t suspect a thing, and all I had to do now was keep my head down and shovel the days past me like a tunnelling mole. I was going to get a month’s dedicated experience in a new field – the perfect cover story for what I was up to if anyone from home found me – and I was going to write a statement to leave in a locker:
‘Garry Dodd, of BG Solutions, BG Connections and formerly BG Europe is the UK collaborator in the people smuggling operation uncovered at Calais on the fourteenth of June 2017. Attached find—’
Only I didn’t know how to describe the papers I was going to stash here: dockets, statements, memos, emails, invoices, delivery notes, drivers’ logs, clients’ names. It was everything I had managed to copy in the long months of planning between the day of the late stomach bug and the burner phone, and the day, in the pits of a filthy winter, when I walked away. It was every piece of documentation I could lay my hands on, and that meant plenty, what with his commitment to, belief in, paper and ink. I had no idea what mattered and what didn’t, because I’m not an accountant – never mind a forensic accountant – but somewhere, I told myself, some time, in some mammoth session of printing or copying he must have produced at least one page that should never have seen the light of day.
Could I have lied? Could I have pretended that I’d stashed evidence and then bet on my own bluff? Maybe, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Also, I didn’t trust myself not to chicken out. Real stuff really stashed was me throwing my cap up and over the wall.
I still thought I was doing the right thing. Atonement, reparation, justice – I had so many names for it. At the same time, I told myself it was a project, a puzzle to be solved, a game to be played and, if I was lucky, won. I didn’t think about losing the game or what the forfeit might be.
FIVE
Ivy stepped off the train with bubbles of … well, she would have said trepidation if she was being honest, but excitement was a better word. Either way she swallowed hard and drew a deep breath as she made her careful way along the platform to the footbridge. West Lothian, she said to herself, trying to make it sound romantic. Hadn’t Walter Scott written about the Lothians? And wasn’t there an ancient stone palace in one of the towns? Didn’t earls and marquesses live in castles dotted all over the county? Didn’t people live in houseboats on the old Union Canal? But nothing she’d seen from the train windows was romantic in the least. She had seen cars, mostly, when the railway track ran alongside the M8, and she’d seen enough industrial storage to last a lifetime, certainly no palatial grandeur and nothing so quaint as a painted houseboat moored by a towpath.
‘Alight here for Livingston East,’ a voice had said as the train was slowing. Livingston! Mother had had a friend there and her scorn was always bottomless. ‘A glorified shopping centre,’ she said. ‘An overgrown carpark. All roundabouts and carveries. Not a High Street in the place.’ Ivy had thought it sounded lovely, mistaking ‘carveries’ for ‘carnivals’, because of ‘roundabouts’ probably. She was sick of Fraserburgh High Street where nothing ever changed. A glorified shopping centre sounded like fun, especially if it had a pictures upstairs, with ten screens and plenty popcorn.
Maybe we could go tonight, she thought, the three of us. Watch a film. Or maybe they would stay in, at the fairytale cottage. She hadn’t seen any cottages from the train window either. She’d seen bare fields and waste ground, the backs of factories and a guddle of sheds and shacks that could have been anything. Allotments maybe. Lock-up garages for the people who lived in the high flats? Well, it’s never the best of a place that backs on to the railway line, she told herself sternly.
She was determined to have a lovely weekend, now she was finally here; it had taken so much more time than she’d expected to get it organized. Phone calls and texts and an email with an attachment. That was because she didn’t understand Kate’s instructions.
‘Bring your photos,’ Kat
e had said. ‘I’m dying to see pictures of the rest of the family and Gail wants to see what you looked like growing up. You know, to compare.’
‘I’ll have to sort through the box,’ Ivy said. ‘Most of them aren’t in albums, apart from my parents’ wedding.’
‘I didn’t mean hump a load of old snaps!’ Kate sounded as if she was laughing, so Ivy said nothing. ‘Aren’t they on the cloud by now? Scan them in and we can see them when you get here.’
‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ Ivy said. ‘I got myself in a mess trying to install something just last year there and had to pay a fortune in computer repair.’
‘OK, well not scanning then. Take a picture with your phone, email them to yourself and then download them into a gallery.’
‘I don’t use my phone for that sort of thing. I couldn’t even follow what the fix-it lady was telling me. I had to give her my passwords and let her take over my account and do it herself!’
‘You shouldn’t do that, Ivy,’ Kate said. ‘Are you sure she was trustworthy?’
‘Of course! She told me straight out to change all my passwords once she’d finished. She made sure.’
‘Yes, but … never mind,’ Kate said. ‘I tell you what: have you got a buggy? A shopping trolley?’
‘I’ve got Mother’s old one somewhere.’
‘Bring your photos and your laptop and I’ll scan them in for you while we’re going through them. I’ll make a montage for you. It can play on a loop.’
‘Won’t that drain the battery?’ Ivy asked but she did what Kate was suggesting, lifting down the familiar boxes, seeing again the familiar moments captured there in black and white, in faded Polaroid, and finally in colour.
She had meant to go through and weed them out a bit. Gail and Kate wouldn’t care about her dad’s golf pals or her school trips to Balmoral. But, as ever, looking at all those smiling faces, the men in shirts and ties, the women in hats and gloves, made her feel a strange mixture of wistfulness for something she once had and melancholy for something she never would have. She started trying to decide how old Mother was in all of these snaps, gauge where Mother had been in life at fifty-four, the age Ivy was now. She had been married, with a teenaged child, and a car. A whole house, rather than a flat. A crowd of friends who came round in the afternoons to drink tea. A different crowd of friends who came round at night, in couples, to smoke and laugh and drink Gaelic coffee. Ivy could still remember rummaging in the After Eights box, the empty sachets like the gills of a black mushroom, and then her fingers hitting that one remaining chocolate. She would stand amongst the greasy plates and clouded glasses in the kitchen, nibbling it in quick tiny bites like a hamster stuffing its cheeks.
And so, in the end, she ran out of time to sort the pictures and put names on the back. Instead, she just dusted all three boxes and slotted them into the wheeled tartan buggy she used to use for shopping until one day she had seen herself reflected in the scored plastic of a bus shelter and been shaken by the sight of an old woman. She had snatched the hood of her coat down and smoothed her hair and she had tried to stand straighter and look like the girl she still thought she was. Only, that stupid trolley rumbling along behind her made it a futile effort and before she was halfway up her own street she pulled the hood up again, clammy and unpleasant now on top of her wet hair in the drizzle.
So she worried about arriving at Kate and Gail’s house with it. It and the boxes of snaps. She wondered if they had theirs in stiff albums with little holders at the corners, like her father’s boyhood stamp collection. She had even looked in the back aisle of the ironmonger’s to see if there was a wicker trolley with a hooked handle like an old umbrella. She had a feeling, never examined, that wicker trolleys were smarter; that they went with cotton aprons and long wellingtons with straps, instead of the PVC and short red rainboots Ivy wore, like Mother before her.
But then she worried about arriving at the house at all. The fairytale cottage, supposedly, although the address seemed wrong.
‘Did you say 1a Loch Road?’ she had asked, her biro poised over the pad ready to write down whatever Kate told her.
‘That’s right,’ Kate had said. ‘It’s out of the station, down to the main street, turn right and then first left. You shouldn’t need to ask anyone. But there’s plenty shops to bob into if you do get lost. A bookie and a nail bar that should both be open. And Adim’s.’
Ivy had said nothing. She didn’t understand why Kate and Gail weren’t meeting her off the train. As for the suggestion that she’d go into a bookie’s to ask for directions? She’d never been in one in her life. Somehow the thought of the bookie’s bled into the idea of the nail bar and made that seem, in Ivy’s imagination, just as disreputable, just as much a place she’d stay away from. And Adim’s sounded like one of those nasty fly-by-night places one step up from a market stall. She was determined to have nothing to do with any of it.
It was a newsagent’s, mind you, she saw as she walked past it minutes later. Small ads in the windows and hoardings propped up against the outside wall. But the pavement near the door was freckled with chewing gum and cigarette ends and Ivy felt her mouth pursing as she moved to the edge of the pavement and trundled her shopping trolley past at a clip.
So this was Loch Road, opening between a shuttered Chinese takeaway and the nail bar Kate had mentioned. Ivy peered up it, telling herself nowhere looked its best in February, then felt her shoulders drop. Detached Edwardian villas. That was perfect. If she had ever thought where she’d like to find a long-lost sister it would be in a quiet street of detached Edwardian stone villas. Here was solidity and respectability but nothing so posh that Ivy would feel unequal to knocking on the front door. She knew this world. She’d had her nose pressed against it since she was a child, going to tennis parties but never with her own racquet, accepting invitations but never repaying them. She set off up the street, telling herself to stop worrying.
She’d been telling herself that all week. Truth be told, all the fuss about the buggy and the boxes, the bookie’s and the house number were distractions. What really bothered her was that she had still, in the two weeks it had taken to organize this visit, not spoken to Gail.
‘She’s thrilled,’ Kate said. ‘I mean, obviously she was shocked at first. But she’s absolutely delighted. She’s just shy. She doesn’t get about much. She’s’ – Kate dropped her voice here – ‘what people might call a recluse. And then there’s still grief. It’s not so long since our dear father passed. But she’s absolutely dying to meet you. Don’t worry.’
Ivy was beyond the end of the brick wall that marked the back yards of the main street shops. Now she was walking past a stretch of fancy railings, fleur-de-lis at the top, a yew hedge bulging behind them. Yew, not even plain old privet. And here was the gate, with ‘1a’ in gold on a medallion.
Ivy stared. The house sat well back from the street at the far end of what was more an orchard than a garden. There was a path through the middle, made of very workaday concrete slabs and edged with bricks set diagonally so they stood up like shark teeth. But on either side there were apple trees she could tell were of great antiquity. They were gnarled and bowed, propped up with crutches here and there, looking like hunched-over crones. Like enormous dead spiders, Ivy thought, some of them so misshapen their trunks had split and showed thick orange fungus growing in the scars.
The house itself, beyond the orchard, was just as startling. It was tiny and joined on to the side wall of the house next door. It had one deep bay window with a turret on top, one small bay window, and in between them a double door with black iron hinges and a stone surround. A carriage lamp above was lit and blearing orange out into the dull day. A fairytale cottage, Ivy thought, nodding. It was even in a sort of a forest, nearly.
She looked for a doorbell or knocker. Finding neither, she rapped on the wood and waited, half turned away, half inclined to trot back down the path and catch the next train home.
But when Kate open
ed the door, she was beaming and she came right out on to the step and hugged Ivy tight.
‘You came!’
‘Of course, I came. Did you wonder?’
‘I’m just being silly,’ Kate said. ‘Come in. Gail’s having a nap but that means you can look around and get settled before you meet her.’
Ivy was already looking around. Inside the front door was a small vestibule and then, through an inner door, a broad, short passageway. The floor was polished stone and the walls were panelled wood to head height, plain plaster above. On the left-hand side a pair of glass doors were lying half open. Ivy left her trolley in the hallway and followed Kate through them. This room was the one with the big bay window. It also had a fireplace with a high marble mantelpiece and a picture painted right on to the wall above, framed with a plaster relief of fruit and ribbons. There was no furniture beyond a piano in the far corner.
‘This is the ballroom,’ Kate said. ‘Isn’t it lovely?’
Ivy was noticing the parquet floor under her feet, pungent with the sun beating in the window and drying it, and noticing too the pair of chandeliers over her head, clouded with dust. She nodded.
‘And through here is the supper room,’ said Kate, throwing back a pair of painted panel doors that disappeared into the wall. More parquet, better preserved on the shady side of the house, as well as another, smaller, marble fireplace and a little more furniture: a long table – or maybe it was a lot of little ones pushed together – but it stretched down the middle of the room with wheel-backed dining chairs neatly tucked under it. At one corner was a silver tray with a bottle of wine and three glasses on it. Ivy knew the bottle had only just been opened because she could hear it fizzing and she thought she could see a vapour rising from its neck. Kate must have popped the cork when she heard the knock at the door.
A Gingerbread House Page 5