33 East

by Susannah Rickards

  ‘Go on what happened, what did she say?’

  ‘Well,’ Janet continued. ‘Three months later I was meeting Damien Walsh round by Grandad’s garage, when I got a call from Gertie on my mobile. Gertie was asking if I could come to see her that day. Damien gave me a lift in Grandad’s car that was in the garage that Gran had left him in the will. He had spruced it up and was showing it off – Gertie said it looked better than new. Anyway Gertie said that Gran had the idea for the will, including what she wanted me to do with my life. because of that film that I used to watch all the time. You remember the one mum, Sliding Doors. Gertie said that Gran wanted me to have the chance at life that she never had. The chance that she couldn’t provide for her daughters due to times being so hard when she and Grandad was raising them. Turns out Gran was quite bright in her day was offered a place at university but never went due to her getting pregnant with Auntie Pauline. I never knew about that until Gertie told me, but Gran and Grandad got married after they found out.’

  ‘Well I never heard that one before. Mum never mentioned anything like that. Are you sure Gertie knew what she was talking about?’

  ‘Mr Mathews was Grandad’s best man and Gertie was Gran’s bridesmaid, so Gran tell Gertie that if she goes first she is to tell me everything and help me move on with my life. Listen mum, Mr Hertzberg, Gran’s solicitor, he’s a diamond. He’s helped me a lot over the past few years and now with Gertie gone it made me think about our family. I need your help mum. Gran had a plan. There is a lot to tell you about. Damien was right, I am doing alright and it’s about time I fulfilled my promise to Gran.’

  Both women knew that they needed to be in a space where they could continue what had just taken place. So together they left the cafe and made their way back home to Jennifer’s house.

  Paulette and Janet had a tearful reunion and the three women talked through the night. Paulette talked about how tough things had been over the past few years due to her husband gambling away all their money. Tony had cleaned out mum’s bank account before he disappeared. Auntie Julie had put Frank and Claire into a private school and had now run out of money as well. Early the next day, Janet borrowed some of Paulette’s clothes and went for a run.

  As she ran through Beacontree Heath she marvelled at how much Dagenham had changed in the time she had been away. She noticed the Asian and black families doing the school run. The sunlight was dancing across the rooftops and the trees. As she looked down towards the town centre she noticed the new buildings. As she ran she felt the embrace of the community calling her home. She realised that she didn’t need to run away from anything anymore. She remembered why Dagenham was such a great place to live.

  By the time she got back to her mum’s she had decided what she was going to do for her family. Her dear Grandma had given her an opportunity in life, now it was time for her to help her family and fulfil the promise she had made to her Gran. Something Bob Clack used to say rang in her ears, ‘Every woman has just so much time to live and she can use it or waste it as she wills.’

  REDBRIDGE

  The Homecoming

  Deborah O’Connor

  My thirteen year old sister was pregnant and it was all my fault. That’s what I expected mum to say anyway.

  I wasn’t sure if the tongue-lashing would begin as soon as I opened the front door or if she would let me unpack my things first. Either way, I knew that when her anger did come, it would be thick, fast and probably leave a mark.

  Whatever. Under my breath, I began rehearsing the accent and turns of phrase she would be expecting of me, tongue-lashing or not. But the Essex twang was harder than I remembered and I kept stumbling over the vowels and dropped consonants that would blend me back in.

  The taxi came to a stop at some traffic lights and I found myself sitting parallel to the queue for the town’s biggest club, Funkymojoes. At Heathrow the sky had been full of drizzle but, as we had travelled from west to east, the rain had turned to snow. Here, in South Woodford, I saw that a thick layer of white had crusted itself onto the pavements and that the Friday night contingent had been undeterred by the new and forbidding clime. With a pride I didn’t understand, I smiled at the skilled way their polished black loafers and spiky heels navigated the icy walkways, and the way the girls braved the arctic terrain with only their sun-bed tans and polyester mini dresses for warmth.

  I stared at them, trying to remember, trying to will myself back to something, a feeling I couldn’t quite place. I looked up to the criss-crossed Christmas light strings decorating the air; a cat’s cradle of wire and bulb stars, snowmen and angels that seemed to be all that was stopping the High Road from collapsing in on itself. But it was no good. No matter how hard I concentrated on the queue and the lights, that feeling, I couldn’t quite reach it.

  My last phone conversation with mum had been a few nights ago. I’d had her on speaker so that I could talk and listen at the same time as I tried to cram all the Christmas presents I’d bought (and a few of my clothes) into one suitcase. She’d been warbling on about nothing much – the X-Factor finals, her freezer going on the blink, the dog’s favourite new chew-toy – when something she said had snagged on my ear like a nail on a new pair of tights. I put down the Empire State snow-globes I was trying to wedge in amongst my cashmere jumpers and picked up the phone.

  As she’d gone on to feel her way around words like new addition and little accident, and bumbled into allusions about finding out too late, I’d began to understand what she was trying to tell me. To be honest, I wasn’t that surprised. I knew that in the last year lots of girls in Leanne’s school had fallen pregnant and that some had kept the babies and some hadn’t. No, what had made me bristle was the way that mum had qualified everything she said with lines that were full of blame, lines like you haven’t been here have you love?…with your family where you belong… we’ve missed you… you’re Leanne’s big sister… my firstborn. That and the way she kept harping on about how wonderful Vince had been through the whole ordeal, I can always rely on Vince (Vince was the landlord of the local pub and a family friend).

  Leanne getting pregnant. It felt inevitable somehow. I knew that if I hadn’t got out when I did, it could have been me staring one of those blue pee stick lines in the face. But luck or fate or chance or whatever you want to call it had intervened. One minute I was wandering around Topshop in my lunch hour, the next I was being scouted for a modelling job. I knew that and I was thankful for it. I comforted myself with the fact that mum was still young – barely forty – and so would be able to help Leanne with the baby so that she could at least finish school.

  The taxi was out of the town centre and nearly there. The driver turned left at the bruised and battered remains of the old BT telephone exchange that marked the start of mum’s estate, my old estate (when had I started thinking of it as belonging to mum?) and I saw how its smashed windows had finally been boarded over. Each square of the cheap hamburger wood was swollen with old rain. Despite the weather and the darkness, lads in silky blue tracksuit bottoms were playing football in the exchange’s locked car park, none of them yet old enough to while away their benefit in the pub over the road.

  The taxi turned right at the clumpy pebble-dash bungalow that marked the avenue and I saw how some of the houses wore snug metal grilles on their windows. Mum had spent another one of her (very expensive) long distance phone calls telling me in great detail about how the men from the council had come to fix them up all on the same day. These were the houses nobody lived in any more. As we cruised down the road, me directing the driver to the right door number, the houses got better. These had their Christmas trees up and their curtains kept open so that the fairy lights and red and gold tinsel sellotaped to picture frames and fireplaces, could be admired from the street.

  I paid the driver and was lugging my suitcase out of the boot when Leanne’s face appeared in the thin gap allowed by the door while the chain was still in the bolt. She gave me a smile before shutting t
he door again to free it, and then tip-toed barefoot onto the concrete step to give me a hug. I tried to feel for the beginnings of a baby bump but she had her fleecy trackies on and so I couldn’t really tell. Maybe she was only a few months gone.

  I went inside and into the small pocket of heat that was the front room. The gas fire was on full and next to it, in her favourite armchair, was mum, doing her lipsticks. Instinctively, I looked for that other familiar shape, a tiny figure tucked into the corner of the sofa. And there she was, Nanna Black, her hands folded blankly on her knees.

  As Leanne shut the door and rearranged the sausage-dog draft excluder, I went over to give mum a kiss hello, but she didn’t get up; wouldn’t meet my eyes even. This was going to be worse than I thought.

  I made a token lean in towards Nanna, not wanting to frighten her and certainly not expecting my greeting to be reciprocated. But, to my surprise, she smiled as though she recognised me and reached up to hold my face like I was a lover, her smooth hands veiny and dry. With shaky lips she said my name, ‘Julie,’ and I stood back in shock.

  ‘She’s having a good day today,’ explained mum without looking up from her lipsticks. ‘Must be in honour of your coming all this way home. Enjoy it while it lasts. Normally she thinks I’m some stranger come to rape and burgle her. All at the same time. Don’t you mum?’

  Nanna Black patted the space next to her on the sofa.

  ‘Home is where the heart is,’ she said looking me right in the eye, as though it was the most revelatory, most new, most important message in the world. I sagged. This, among other things was something I knew that Nanna said over and over, at random and meaningless points, and her saying it meant that the lucidity I’d just witnessed (or thought I’d witnessed) was gone.

  I sat down next to Nanna and braced myself for mum to start ranting. I guessed it would go something along the lines of, This would never have happened if you hadn’t gone away and would be followed by something about how her precious Leanne had rebelled because you weren’t there when she needed you. And indeed, how I might as well have been the one that led her up the stairs at a dodgy party, got her to lay on a bed and invited the first acne-ridden moron I could find to do the down and dirty with her.

  But, contrary to my predictions, mum was mute and so I turned my attentions to Nanna who (excited at having company) was motioning for me to pass her the enormous photograph album that rested at her feet. The album contained all the pictures of our cousin Nicola’s wedding. I knew from mum that the album had been Nan’s new favourite thing for a good few months, even though Nicola had been married almost ten years. It was enormous. Covered in red stitched leather, it came in a specially designed briefcase that took such an effort to heave down from the cabinet that mum had taken to leaving it lying around permanently in what was her otherwise immaculate house.

  Tapping me on the arm to get my attention, Nan opened the album with a happy sigh. It was full of all the usual wedding shots: the bride (Nicola) with her dimpled upper arms and tonged curls of hair in poses on a bench, kissing her groom, turning around coyly in a picture designed to show off her excessive ivory train. It was all pretty standard stuff, but somehow, no matter how many times I saw it, I always got fixated on the fact that, in some of the important set piece shots, cousin Nicola had her eyes closed. But as Mum said, they’d agreed a price that allowed them only a limited amount of frames and they couldn’t afford to pay for any more, so ‘Even if the snaps weren’t as perfect as perfect can be,’ they’d gone ahead and put them in the album anyway, ‘Otherwise we’d have been left without a full set, wouldn’t we now?’

  I thought of the set of photos I now had. All perfectly lit, some had me sporting a washed-out, meow-meow chic look, while others had me as an all-American girl, smiling whitely in Ralph Lauren linens. A couple of them had me as a Helmut Newton-esque nude (all glamazonian legs, oiled up skin and super contrasting blacks and whites). I had, of course, made sure not to tell mum about these. To think of her ever seeing me like that. My legs apart. Defiant in high heels. The expression on my face. What was it my friends always said? ‘As far as your parents are concerned, neither you nor they have ever, ever had sex’. They would concede the obvious reproductive flaw in their delusion and then shudder over-dramatically and say, ‘Because what’s the alternative?’

  Back in New York, I would carry this set of photos around with me all day on the subway. Contained in my book (a big black plastic folder with the agency’s name on the side) the pictures charted the staging posts of my new life in perfect matte detail. Starting with my first, ultra-gauche wedding dress shots (all new models were sent to Japan to do the obligatory bridal work), flick forward a few pages and you were into the slightly sassier stuff, a campaign I’d done for H&M (a campaign I’d won after cutting and bleaching my long brown hair short), a D-Squared jeans advert. Towards the end of the book, before the blank cellophane pockets waiting to be filled, was my more recent, high-end glossy work. In these photos my beauty had been routinely bludgeoned by bizarre hairstyles, over-size eyebrows and eccentric make-up. Bludgeonings that would make Leanne declare (when she eventually saw the pics in magazines) that I looked ‘totally minging’.

  Nan had had enough of Nicola’s wedding album and so I put it back by her feet. It was about the same weight as my book. Fresh off the plane as I was, the thought of going back to it and the endless go-sees that now made up my day made me feel tired. But I also knew that, given a few days here, the thought of my tiny studio apartment, the hub and bub that was the catwalk and the sight of models backstage, lifting up their faces to the make-up artists like babies wanting to be fed, would make me regret agreeing to mum’s demand that I stay for the entire Christmas holidays.

  I relaxed into the cushions and began acquainting myself with mum’s latest colour scheme. Fiercely proud of her front room, she considered it the show-piece of the house and redecorated it every year. This year I knew she’d saved hard for some wallpaper from Next and that Vince had helped her to put it up (‘There’s no way you’d ever get me up those stepladders. Oh no’). On the bottom half of the wall was the first kind of paper, embossed pink and cream stripes edged with gold, interrupted halfway up by a fat border of vertical paper that acted as a kind of two-dimensional dado rail. Then, on the top half of the wall (in the same colour scheme) was the second kind of paper, a simple diamond design. Even though I knew my new meatpacking district sensibility should mean that it made me cringe, in reality, being back here, with the garish décor, tiny warm spaces and old school photos on the mantelpiece, I felt safe. I knew I would sleep well tonight. If I wanted to, I thought, I could come back to all of this. I imagined what it would feel like, to stop fighting it and just give in. Would it be like shutting your eyes and letting go?

  ‘How was your flight? Do you fancy a sandwich? I’ve got some of that nice Tesco’s Finest loaf’ asked mum, fishing another fistful of lipsticks out of the bag and onto her lap.

  So this was how it was going to be. Maybe she had decided to play nice until Nanna went to bed and then she would start the flogging.

  ‘No thanks. I’m alright, I had something on the plane,’ I lied, taking off my heels. Even though she’d offered, I knew the tell-tale signs of her being behind on a big order when I saw them (Leanne sat helping her, the TV turned up loud to cover the sound of the clicking) and so I didn’t want to distract her from the job in hand.

  Mum had started doing the lipsticks when Leanne and I were little. It didn’t pay as well as working at a check-out or something like that, but it did mean that she could be home when we got in from school and could look after us if we were ever poorly. Each Monday, a man in a van would drop off ten huge clear bags full of unmade plastic pieces and she would hoist them all into the back kitchen; the noise of the plastic shifting around like the clackiest of hail-stone storms. Her job was to put each piece into its final designated shape: a tube mechanism that operated lipsticks up and down from inside. She’d organised
her mini-production line in the same way for years: keeping the fresh bag to the left of her arm-chair – with its hundreds upon hundreds of tubes with their thin slits down the middle – and the bag full of finished products on the other side, ready for Cherry Sunset or Magenta Dawn to be poured into them at the factory at the end of the week.

  They looked like those over-complicated toys you sometimes find inside Kinder eggs, the kind you break within seconds, but mum had been doing them for so long that she didn’t even need to look down when she worked; her hands expertly popping and clicking each bit of plastic together while she watched Emmerdale or Eastenders.

  ‘Them kids have been at it again,’ she said launching into the kind of conversation that presumed I was around all the time and so would know what she was talking about. ‘They’ve only been piddling through people’s letter-boxes. On a morning as well, when there’s a pile of post sat right there.’ Nanna Black nodded enthusiastically as though she knew all about it and said, ‘There’s no place like home.’

  Mum stopped and looked at her open-mouthed, but then her patience, fine-tuned from years of having to deal with random interjections like this, kicked in and she carried on. ‘Then the other day they only went and set fire to Rita next door’s shopping bags while she was waiting for the bus in town.’

  When mum wasn’t looking, Leanne gestured with her eyes toward the bedroom upstairs, her bare feet grinding into the thick carpet and disturbing the perfect, lawn-like lines that Mum created daily by pushing the vacuum cleaner from one side of the room to the other. It seemed she wanted to tell me her side of the story before mum could poison me with her version of events.