by Tony Parsons
‘Your mother loves you. Come on, Plum. You know she does.’
‘But loving someone’s not the same as liking them, is it? It’s not the same as just accepting them for what they are. Love’s all right, I guess. I don’t know too much about all that. I’ll settle for just being liked.’
There’s a lot to do.
It’s good that there is a lot to do.
Because my grandmother died at home, the police had to come to the house. They were there after the ambulance men, who were not needed because it was too late, and the doctor, who officially confirmed that she was dead, but they came before the undertaker and his assistant, who gently invited us to wait in the living room while they wrapped my grandmother’s body and removed it from the house. It seems strange that my nan, after spending so many years living alone in her little white flat, should suddenly provoke this house full of people.
My father and I are spending more time together than we have for years. We register the death together, sitting silently in a waiting room full of happy couples there to register the birth of their babies. Then we go to the undertakers, or the funeral directors as they call themselves these days, and choose the coffin, decide on the number of cars, make arrangements for the funeral.
It’s still not done. We go to a florist and order our wreath, choosing a big one from my parents and me rather than three little ones—red roses, my nan’s favourite. Then we have to talk to the vicar who will conduct the funeral service and he is cold and sniffy because my nan only went to church for weddings, because she was an old girl who didn’t see much point in the church unless it was for a celebration, unless it offered a chance to look and marvel at some young bride in her white dress.
Finally we go to her little white flat. And although we have been gently led through the bureaucracy of death—everyone, apart from the vicar, kind and understanding, taking our credit cards with what looks like a genuinely sympathetic expression, telling us where we need to go next, pointing us to the next stop along the chain—there are no guidelines for what we should do in my grandmother’s home.
Within these white walls there is the evidence of a lifetime. Clothes, photographs, records, souvenirs brought back for her from Spain and Greece and Ireland and Hong Kong. My father and I stare at it all helplessly, unable to decide if these things are treasure to be cherished forever or rubbish to be left out for the dustmen.
Her things.
I want to keep them all, but I know that’s absurd, impossible. The clothes can go to Oxfam. Perhaps some of the furniture. We decide that I will keep the records, my father can have the photographs, but even that is not simple.
My dad opens an album of ancient black-and-white photographs from before he was born, and although he sees the faces of his mother and his father and his aunts and uncles, their grown-up faces shining through the smiles of when they were children, many of the people in the album are complete strangers to him, people he never met, with names he will never know. Not now.
My grandmother’s memories. Nobody else’s.
It’s too soon to think about Oxfam, too soon to think about throwing anything away. Some other day, perhaps.
For now, I choose one thing to remind me of my nan. It sums her up for me.
It is a bottle of lurid red nail polish called Temptation. On the bottle there is an admonition, a piece of advice, a philosophy. Nail him, it says. I think of my nan painting on her Temptation nail polish well into her eighties, and I smile for the first time all day.
Lovely. She was lovely.
Despite the unknown faces, my father seems haunted by the photographs. And there are many. Albums featuring cartoons of seventies dolly birds on the cover. Shoe boxes full of fading colour pictures. Photo books with sleepy English fishing villages on the cover and black-and-white pictures from the forties and fifties inside. Ancient black-and-white photographs, yellow with age, behind heavy slabs of glass, and what seems like chain mail on the back for hanging them up. Countless photos still in the envelopes they were in when they came back from the chemist.
All those weddings, Bank Holidays, Christmases, birthdays, Sunday afternoons. All those lives.
My father finds a scrapbook. It’s a scrapbook about him and his career, his success. It begins with his early stories as a young sportswriter and goes all the way up to Oranges For Christmas, when he became the story.
My father looks touched, humbled. No, he looks lost. It is clear he never knew this scrapbook existed, never knew that his mother was so proud of him. He seems—I don’t know what it is. Ashamed, perhaps. Or alone. Yes, that’s it. My father seems alone.
And I can see that you are never truly alone in this world until both of your parents are dead.
thirty-seven
When I get back from my grandmother’s cremation, there’s a message from Jackie on my mobile, telling me to call her urgently. It’s examination day. For my students at Churchill’s and for Jackie too. She sounds excited, and I guess it means that she feels a step closer to all of her dreams coming true.
But I am wrong.
‘Alfie?’
‘You okay? Ready for the exam?’
‘I’m not going to take the exam.’
‘What? Why not?’
‘It’s Plum.’
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘She’s run away from home.’
The examination hall for A Level English is in a college near King’s Cross.
The place is full of students—nervous students, confident students, students who have already abandoned all hope. And there’s Jackie, older than the rest, frightened for different reasons, for grown-up reasons that have nothing to do with getting qualifications or getting ahead, dressed far too formally for someone who is scheduled to take an A Level this afternoon, waiting for me outside the examination room.
Her paper starts at three. She has just under five minutes. But she is not even thinking about that.
‘The school called me. They wanted to know where she was. Then I found the message from her on my mobile. She said she had to get away. She’s gone, Alfie.’
‘What about her dad? Friends?’
‘She’s not with her dad. And there are no friends. Not now your nan’s gone.’
‘I’ll find her, okay?’ I look up at the clock. It’s nearly three. ‘You have to go inside now. You really do. If you don’t, you lose your chance.’
‘How can I? How can I think about all of that stupid stuff when my daughter’s missing?’
‘She’ll be back. You can’t throw it all away.’
‘I don’t care about any of that. The degree, Carson McCullers, poems by sad old men who wouldn’t know love if it took a chunk out of their codpiece. This is all my fault. I don’t know what I’ve been thinking about. I don’t know what I’ve been doing with you. Studying emotions in a dramatic extract and all the rest of that old…what a pathetic waste of time. I should have been thinking about my girl.’
‘You do think about your girl. You think about her all the time.’
‘What’s wrong with the life we’ve got? What’s wrong with it? That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘Stop it, will you? Talking like that doesn’t help her and it doesn’t help you. Go on. Get in there and do your best. I’ll find her. She’ll be fine. I promise.’
‘I just want my girl back.’
‘You’ll get her back. Just get in there.’
She puts her hands on her hips. ‘Is there a dog in here? Who do you think you are? Who do you think you’re talking to? You’re not my husband.’
‘Go on, Jackie.’
She stares at me as if this is somehow all my fault. Me and my books and my cynical friends. Her eyes are shining and her bottom lip is clenched to stop it trembling. But she starts drifting towards the examination room with all the other students, still watching me with a kind of weepy hostility until the door closes behind her.
Then I walk out into the city, looking for Plum
, still dressed for a funeral.
I go to Leicester Square, the gaudy, rancid heart of the West End, and wander around looking at the faces of the children huddling in doorways, hanging out in the park, squatting on the street. Plum’s not there.
So I walk down Charing Cross Road to the Strand, for some reason a favourite area for homeless kids, and cover its length from the railway station to the Savoy. Lots of teenagers with their sleeping bags in doorways. But no Plum.
I head north, up into Covent Garden. Plenty of young kids on the street, but for some reason only a few obviously homeless, dragging their sleeping bags across the piazza, ignoring the jugglers and the buskers and the mime artists who wow the tourists and make everybody else feel like slitting their wrists. And I stare at some dopey git whose big selling point is that he doesn’t move, he never moves an inch, and I realise that Plum could be anywhere. She doesn’t even have to be in London.
My mobile rings. It’s Jackie. I tell her there’s no news, please don’t worry, go back to Bansted and wait for my call.
She wants to help me look for Plum but I persuade her that one of us should be at home, waiting by the phone, in case there’s a call. Reluctantly, she agrees.
Naturally—at least it seems natural to me—I want to know how the exam went. Jackie refuses to talk about it. She gets angry when I press her for information, acting as if all that side of her life—wanting to go back to college, caring about books, wanting a degree, thinking about poems and plays and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter as though they were the most important things in the world—is the root of all her problems.
As though you can be punished for your dreams.
When the sun goes down, the city changes.
The office workers go home and the party people pour into the streets of Soho, Covent Garden, Oxford Street. And I can’t imagine Plum here, among the designer coffee and the loud laughter and the empty chatter. It’s not her.
So I go to the stations, starting off in the east at Liverpool Street, where the trains from Bansted come in, and gradually move across town. London Bridge, King’s Cross, Euston. All the big mainline stations. Then out west. Paddington, Victoria. There are pitiful little groups of children with their rucksacks and their sleeping bags in every nook and cranny of these giant hangers, but I can’t tell who is homeless and who is waiting to go home. Later, nearing midnight, it becomes more obvious. The ones who are going home watch the notice board for departures, the ones who are not going home stare at nothing, or warily watch the men in the shadows who eye them up, waiting to make their move. But there is no sign of Plum at the stations.
I am about to call Jackie when I realise that I have missed St Pancras, that Victorian Christmas cake of a station next to Euston.
There’s no real reason why she should be at St Pancras, apart from the fact that its spires and turrets and lancet windows make it look like something out of a fairy tale, a place where everything works out all right in the end. There’s no real reason why she should be at St Pancras apart from the fact that it’s so different from all the rest. Just like Plum.
St Pancras is smaller than the other stations, less inhuman and modern, more the size of a railway station out in the far-flung suburbs in places like Bansted than those soulless, secular cathedrals you get in the city. But she’s not here, of course. It’s getting very late now and people are running for the last trains. I am about to call it a day, phone Jackie, tell her to call the police, when I see the photo booth.
Next to a filthy pair of trainers, there’s a book. It’s the book I gave Plum. Smell the Fear, He-Bitch by The Slab. I knock on the side of the photo booth and pull back the curtain. There she is, sound asleep, her hair falling in her face. I say her name and she wakes up.
‘Why are you dressed like that?’
‘Because of my nan.’
‘Oh.’
‘Your mum’s really worried about you.’
‘I couldn’t stand it any more. It was too much. It would be too much for anyone.’
‘Sadie and Mick. And their little gang.’
‘It got worse after you came to the school.’
‘I’m sorry, Plum.’
‘They kept going on at me. About my old boyfriend. My old, old boyfriend. They said: where did you meet him, Plumpster? Meals on wheels? I told them you’re a teacher and they had a right old laugh about that. Mick said you looked like a teacher who had lost all his faculties.’
‘That bastard Mick. I’m not so old.’
‘I know. You’re only middle-aged.’
‘Thanks, Plum. Thanks a million.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘I’m sorry if I made it harder for you. I never meant to.’
‘I know that. You just wanted to tell me about your nan. I’m glad you did. It’s not your fault. If it hadn’t been you, it would have been something else. Any excuse. There’s always some excuse for that lot.’
‘So where are you going?’
She shrugs, pushes the hair from her face, and peers out at the departures board as though she actually has a ticket in her pocket.
‘I don’t know. Anywhere’s better than Bansted.’
‘I’m not so sure about that, you know. You’re loved out there. It’s your home. And it’s not so easy to find another one. Take it from me. Shall we go home? Back to your mum?’
She shrugs, pouts, pushes her fringe in front of her face.
‘I like it here.’
‘You like this photo booth?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s a comfortable photo booth, is it?’
‘It’s all right.’
‘Really?’
‘As photo booths go. Nothing special. Stop going on at me.’
I pick up her book. ‘Still a fan of The Slab, are you?’
‘’Course.’
‘I’m starting to warm to him myself. He’s not such a bad role model for a growing girl.’ I flick through Smell the Fear, He-Bitch, nodding sagely. ‘Do you like what The Slab has to say about doing the human thing?’
‘It’s okay, I guess. But I’m more of a fan of the way he elbow-smashes bad people in the cake hole.’
‘Right, right. Well, what would The Slab do at a time like this?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If he was getting picked on. What would The old Slab do? Would he run away and sleep in a photo booth? Or would he stand and face the creeps who are bullying him?’
‘Come on. I’m not The Slab, am I? I’m just a fat loser. He’s more like a superman. That’s what makes him special.’
‘I think you’re tougher than he is, myself. I think you are stronger, better, braver.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘You’ve put up with a lot of crap in your life. Your parents breaking up. All the trouble between them after the split. Your mum working so hard to support the pair of you. Mick and Sadie and the little creeps who follow them around. You couldn’t have got through all that if you were a coward. And I think you’ve got more guts than Mick and Sadie put together. All bullies are cowards. I reckon you’re a lot nicer too.’
‘Nice doesn’t get you very far. Nice gets walked all over. Nice gets you a smack in the chops.’
‘I don’t know. Look at my grandmother. We didn’t love her because she could beat up all the other pensioners, did we? Because she could elbow-smash her way to the front at the bus stop? That wasn’t why we loved her, was it?’
‘I guess not. So how was the—what do you call it?—burial?’
‘Cremation. It was okay. As good as it could be. Lots of people. Faces I hadn’t seen for years. Like a dream, really, all those faces I remembered gathered in one place. And people I didn’t know. Neighbours, friends. So many friends, she had, Plum. There was so much real affection for her. Love, even. She inspired a lot of love. And there were flowers everywhere. And “Abide With Me”. Her favourite hymn. And “One For My Baby”. By Sinatra.’
‘It’s so depressing, a
ll that old music.’
‘What do you expect at a funeral? I’m horny, horny, horny tonight? It worked. You should have been there. You would have seen.’
‘I don’t like funerals.’
‘It’s a way of saying goodbye.’
‘I don’t like goodbyes.’
‘Nobody does. But that’s life. A series of hellos and goodbyes.’ I think of pushing hands in the park with George Chang, of learning to move with the changes that are heading your way, like them or not, of finding the courage to become what you need to become. ‘Look, Plum, you think you’re the only person who ever felt the way you’re feeling now. But plenty of people do. It’s much more normal to be afraid and lonely and sad than it is to be like Mick or Sadie. Or The Slab. You’re not the freak. They are. I know it seems like these days are never going to end. But they will.’ I brush her hair back from her face and see the tears. ‘What’s wrong, Plum? What is it?’
‘I miss her. I miss your nan.’
‘I miss her too. And you were great with her. You really made her life better. The way you took care of her—not many people of your age could have done that. Not many people of my age. You can be proud of that.’
‘I only did it because I liked her. She was funny.’ Plum smiles for the first time. ‘This little old lady who liked sports-entertainment wrestling. She was cool.’
‘She liked you too. She saw you in a way that Mick and Sadie and these other creeps never will. She saw you the way you really are.’
‘Is that really what you think? Or are you just trying to get me out of this photo booth?’
‘That’s really what I think. Listen, shall we go home to your mum?’
‘Can we sit here for just a little bit? Just sit here quietly?’
‘As long as you like, Plum.’
thirty-eight
This New Zealand gardener seems to have taken a shine to my mother. Between you and me, I wonder what Julian—what kind of name is that for a Kiwi who is certainly no fruit?—really has on his mind when he talks to her about bird control and forking borders.