by Beth Moran
“Yes. But I don’t know where to start. I know she’ll be around fifty-one and was probably friends with Henry Hatherstone. She may well have done what Da did, and moved away after what happened. She could be anywhere.”
“And you can’t ask Ginger or Archie? If you explained I’m sure they’d understand.”
“I promised Reuben. I don’t even feel I can ask around the village about Henry, in case it gets back to them.”
Ada wanted to try Morris again, but I couldn’t stomach it. The whole subject now seemed too sensitive, and I guessed Morris Middleton didn’t do sensitive very well. We settled for Ada promising to keep her eyes and ears open, and I moved across to May’s station for my manicure. As always, May kept her mouth closed, her lips tightly pursed. Probably to prevent any acid from dripping off her tongue and dissolving the nail polish.
Ada had another client, Amanda of the boob tubes and bitchy remarks. I hoped the magic scissors would slip. Then told myself off for stooping to her level.
“So, Amanda.” Ada hacked off a chunk of grown-out pink, leaving a three-inch grey root behind. She tossed me a wink. Oh dear. “How long have you lived around here?”
“Forever,” Amanda sneered. “Never guessed I’d end up spending my life in this dump. That’s what landing yerself with a baby’ll do. No man wants to be saddled with a woman who’s got a kid like that. What if the next one turns out just as bad?”
Ada smiled sweetly. She sneakily brushed the protective gown to one side and snipped a long thin chunk out of Amanda’s fake leather waistcoat. “So that must be, what, how long now? Nearly sixty years?”
Amanda pulled down her drawn-on eyebrows so they were now at least halfway down her forehead. “Mind yerself! I’m only thirty-nine. Looking good for it too. You old women get so far past it, you can’t remember what normal people look like.”
Ada accidentally nicked Amanda’s ear, causing a ruby droplet of blood to well up on the rim of her lobe. “Oh, my dear! I am so sorry. My doddery old hands aren’t what they used to be. Here, fetch Amanda a glass of whisky, would you, May, to ward off any shock?”
Amanda calmed down once she had swigged back her second tumbler of whisky. Ada, very carefully holding her curling iron away from her client’s skin, resumed the covert interrogation. “And was the village very different when you were young?”
“No. It was just as dead.”
“And what did you get up to, you and your friends? You must have found some way of amusing yourselves. Did you have many pals? Any of them still living here?”
Amanda froze. Her eyes swivelled across the room toward me. When she spoke it sounded as if her jaw was wired together. “And why would you give a flying fig about that?”
I focused very hard on choosing what colour nail polish I wanted.
Ada whipped off the gown with a flourish. “There we go; all done. That’ll be ten pounds. There’s a mirror in the hall. You can see yourself out? Lovely. Do come again, won’t you, and we’ll sort out all that grey. Goodbye.” She hustled Amanda out of the chair and through the door, simultaneously taking her money and handing back her jacket in one graceful sweep.
“Well, that was interesting! Hmm. Was she simply behaving in her usual disagreeable fashion, or is she on to us?”
May’s lips twitched. “You’ve just poked a rattlesnake. Let’s see who gets bitten.”
Three days later, after an exhausting weekend pandering to the needs of some very frisky lovers (No, we don’t stock those particular items in the campsite shop; no, we aren’t going to trek through the snow at ten o’clock in the evening to find the type of sleazy shop that might sell them, and no, we definitely don’t have any of our own that you can borrow), the rattlesnake bit.
I woke up to find another message, this time spray painted across the outside of my home. It said “Shut up fat bitch”. Original. I didn’t want to call Brenda. I knew who had done it. We’d got Amanda angry and scared. She knew something.
Reuben came over to my caravan the following week. He brought a wooden box with him, about the same dimensions as a shoebox. Opening it up, he lifted out the papers on top and unfolded them.
“There’s a lot here that isn’t relevant: school certificates, Mother’s Day cards and stuff like that. But I found these.”
He handed me an envelope containing a thin wad of faded photographs taken at a child’s birthday party – Henry’s. His cake had been made in the shape of a thirteen. The group of kids lounged along a riverbank, the boys bare-chested and wearing those tiny shorts fashionable in the mid-seventies, the girls in brightly coloured summer dresses.
“Do you see him?”
I did. In four of the photographs my dad was there, grinning beside his best friend Henry. I drank him up until Reuben handed me one of the other pictures.
“What about here? Recognize anyone?”
I could see Ginger, her hair as vibrant as her name, curling over her shoulders in long tumbling waves. She had her head back, laughing, and I wondered if she ever laughed that freely again after Henry died.
“Look closer.”
I found her – even then wearing a skirt several inches shorter than everybody else’s, her T-shirt straining against the curve of her developing body. She gazed at the camera, eyebrows arched questioningly, one side of her mouth curled up. Not beautiful, or pretty, but a girl who knew how to hook a boy’s attention.
We worked backwards with the dates.
“These must have been taken in 1976.”
I shook my head. “How does that fit? If this is Amanda, she’s thirty-nine now. She would have been three in ’76. It can’t be her. Does she have an older sister?”
Reuben looked at me, waiting for me to work it out for myself.
“Okay. So the chances of her telling the truth about her age are about as likely as this girl being three.” And if she was going to lie, knocking ten years off to squeeze herself into a previous decade seemed about right. “Do you recognize anybody else?”
“No. Henry went to boarding school; most of these kids have that look about them. See how Amanda is always a little bit apart?”
There was nothing else of any use in the box. The keepsakes ended with a champagne cork, the date “15.4.81” written along the side, above the words “Henry’s eighteenth”.
I told Reuben what I had learned about the witnesses from the newspaper, and the repercussions from the conversation at Ada’s cottage.
His face turned to granite. “Marion! How many of these messages have you had?”
I showed him the first note, the second one from the festival and told him about the tyres.
“Please tell me the police have seen all these!”
“The first one came the day Grace took off, wrapped around a brick through my window. Brenda assumed it was her.”
“Why would Grace chuck a brick through your window?”
I shrugged, embarrassed. “She was going through a weird time back then. Scarlett thought she might be taking drugs.”
“And the link to you is?”
“Jake.”
“Right. That would fit. So did Grace get the blame for the rest of them?”
“I only reported the tyres. The second note was nothing, just left in my purse. And when the spray paint was done, I had already figured it was Amanda.”
“You’re sure it isn’t Grace?”
“We’ve been friends for ages now. She has a boyfriend. And she’s hardly still jealous about me and Jake.” I heard my voice rising as I tried to push the image of Jake out of my head. “And it fits. The first note came the day after I had my bag stolen at the village. Amanda was the one who picked up my photo and gave it back to me. I passed it round the traders at the festival. She doesn’t want me asking about my dad. She didn’t want Ada asking about her past and her friends, because they’re linked. She was the other witness at Henry’s accident. What is she trying to hide?”
Reuben packed away the photographs. “We need to speak to her.” He grimac
ed. “I need to speak to her.”
“You know she’ll only lie. What then?”
“I think it might be time to tell my parents.”
Three days later, on the last day of February, I came back from a run to find Grace sitting on my caravan steps, huddled against the early morning chill in an army green parka.
“Haven’t you got an exam today?” I walked past her and unlocked the door. We went in and sat down.
Grace hunkered further into her coat. “Mum left the van wearing odd shoes this morning. She woke me up at quarter-past five with a cup of tea.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. When I yelled at her she totally lost it. She chucked the mug in the sink so hard it smashed, and then left.”
“In odd shoes?”
Grace nodded. She bit hard on her bottom lip.
“Grace, I’m not sure this is just stress.” If a giant asteroid was hurtling toward the Peace and Pigs with only milliseconds to spare, Scarlett would still find a matching pair of heels. “Go and get ready for school. I’ll get changed and then we’ll find her.”
I jumped in the shower, then threw on a pair of jeans and a jumper. Stuffing my wet hair under a woollen hat, I hurried over to find Grace pacing up and down outside her caravan.
“She’s not inside?”
Grace shook her head.
“Where’s Valerie? Did she see your mum this morning?”
“She’s sorting out the pigs.”
“Come on, then.”
We found Scarlett in the office, staring at the same piles of paper that had sat there for weeks now. She was a wreck.
I gently turned Grace away. “You need to go and take your art exam. Try to put this out of your head and we’ll deal with it together when you get back.”
She stayed in the doorway. Her eyes, brimming with anguish, never left her mother.
“There’s nothing you can do here that I can’t do without you. You need to sit this exam, Grace.”
It took a while, but eventually I persuaded her to leave. Scarlett had been watching us, moving her head from side to side like a small child trying to follow a conversation full of words too difficult to understand.
“Hi, Scarlett.”
“Hi.”
“How are you feeling?”
She stared at me, a pen dangling from her fingers.
“Scarlett? Are you okay? Grace is worried about you.”
“What? I’m fine.” She spoke slowly, her words slurred. One side of her face looked wrong.
I sat down in a chair opposite her. “You have odd shoes on, Scarlett.”
“What?” She looked down at her shoes, frowning, confused. “How did that happen?”
“I think you need to see a doctor.”
“No.” She shook her head, but it was sluggish and lopsided.
I leaned forward to see if I could detect alcohol on her breath. It smelled sour, and her teeth were dark yellow. I knew she wasn’t drunk.
“I need to sort out this mess. I’m tired. Please let me work.”
I put my hand on top of hers. “You need to see a doctor.”
In the end it wasn’t hard to bundle her out of the office and into my car. She shuffled her left foot along the ground as I led her like a little girl. Or a frail old woman. Or a person who was hopelessly, desperately ill.
I called Valerie, asking her to cover for us. She would phone Samuel or the Hatherstones if anything came up. Stomach in my mouth, heart breaking, I drove Scarlett to the doctor’s surgery. From there we went to the outpatients unit at Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham. From there it was the acute admissions ward, where we heard the news that would tear the hearts of the Peace and Pigs into tiny shreds.
Two days later, a grave-faced, smooth-skinned doctor with a gentle Scottish burr confirmed Scarlett’s diagnosis. He spoke with us for over an hour, but only the words that mattered stuck. Inoperable. Incurable. Unstoppable. Invincible. Terminal. It would be possible to try a course of radiotherapy or chemotherapy, but this would only delay the spread of the tumour for a short time, and when it returned it would be swift. We were talking months, not years. Probably weeks, not months.
I left Grace alone by Scarlett’s bedside while Valerie and I went to the top floor of the hospital to find the restaurant. We were not the only customers with trembling hands and tear-streaked faces, Valerie’s the colour of the raw dough I had kneaded that morning into bread rolls, punching and rolling my emotions into food. Valerie’s eyes were still wide with shock, bloodshot and bleary. I wanted to wrap her up in a blanket and rock her. To tell her it would be all right; that I would take care of her, of them; that we would look after each other. But I knew before then would come pain and death smells, exhaustion and fear and the physical ache in your chest that hurts so much you want to prise out your heart with a spoon rather than bear the reality of what is happening. And this would be only the beginning of a long, jagged, desert road.
So I told her what I knew to be true. “I will be here. I won’t leave you. And we will do our very best for Scarlett. We will love her with all the love she gave us.”
My mother told me many times that I had inherited my selective strop-ism, as she labelled my crippling psychological disorder, from my English genes. O’Gradys learned how to talk when they were babies, and kept going until their last breath. Never, she informed me with a caustic glare, had they dallied with the silent treatment. This was true; in a family that size it would have been pointless. Nobody would even have noticed.
Instead, my Irish relatives chose continual conversation in the form of bickering, griping, yelling, bullying and sniping. They also threw in some storytelling, joke-telling, memory reliving and banter. But they sorely lacked any form of meaningful communication whatsoever. The most I heard said about Declan’s murder was: “It’s a terrible thing, so it is. Our poor, wee Paula. And she mustn’t be blamed. That one was born queer.”
True to form, no one discussed my father’s illness with me, or that he was dying of some type of cancer, and that my behaviour could have no influence on that for good or bad. They told me, a seven-year-old girl, that my father was not well, and when he died I should be happy for him because he would go to be with Jesus and not suffer any more. Nobody told me how it felt to have a chunk of your heart die with him, or how grief could cause a widow on the edge of sanity to tip right over. That and a million other things I learned the hard way, through years of reading books in the corner of the library, and hoarding titbits from the few health professionals my mother allowed near me. I grew adept at filtering the cruel taunts from my cousins and schoolmates into their three categories: truth, nasty twists on the truth, and totally made-up stuff kids will spread around to produce a reaction (like the rumour that my da was an alien who had laid a mini-alien in my mother’s head, so she had to have her mind probed by Martian experts from NASA).
So now, I asked the doctors to tell us everything. I read the leaflets from the cancer charities describing what could happen to the mind and body of someone with a brain tumour. I asked what “some personality changes” might mean, and almost wished I hadn’t. I went back to the library and didn’t care that I sobbed as I read the blogs and questions and brain tumour websites. I would not face this blind, or with my head in the sand, or in denial. I would stir up hope, cultivate optimism and summon positivity. But this time we would not fight an unknown enemy. Grace and Valerie asked me questions, and I did not lie or fudge my answers to them. So much remained impossible to predict, all could be softened to some extent with kindness, but I did not lie.
Scarlett only spoke to me once about her prognosis. Steroids had cleared her mind and eased her headaches, and the bewilderment had temporarily departed.
“I have a tumour. There ain’t nothin’ you, me or that Scottish hunk of a doctor can do about that. I could spend however long I got left worryin’ about it, dwellin’ on the monster chompin’ its way through my brain, feelin’ miserable and countin’ d
own the days, but I don’t see how that is gonna help anyone. I am goin’ to die. That is old news. The only difference is that now I know how it’s probably gonna happen. I choose to accept that as a gift, a chance to tidy things up and tuck in some corners. I am not goin’ to spend the rest of my time here dyin’. I will, by the grace of God, grab hold of every second I got left and live it.” Her voice wavered. I reached over and took her hand. “Although I could do with a little help.”
Yes. Despite medication, weakness, nausea and brain monsters, Scarlett would surely live until she died.
For Grace and Valerie’s sake, Scarlett didn’t keep the news a secret. From that moment on they never had to cook a meal. I borrowed a freezer and set it up in the spare employee’s caravan to store all the pasta and pies and other meals deposited at reception by sympathetic Hatherstone residents. Valerie strung a hundred cards up along the edge of every wall in the blue van, and someone gave Scarlett a gift token to a spa hotel in the Peak District. The accompanying card wasn’t signed, but the handwriting was almost certainly May’s.
Erica brought round a card from her parents. We had been limiting visitors, as Scarlett was tired and still sometimes confused, and there are those people you want to give your time to when you don’t have much left, and those it is enough to know are thinking about you. It was a good thing Erica didn’t stay to see the card opened.
Inside, Fisher had written something about being sorry to hear Scarlett had received unfortunate news, and he hoped she was bearing up. He added a line expressing his concern that, for Scarlett’s peace of mind, she should sew up all business regarding the campsite sooner rather than later. He had very thoughtfully offered to pay a visit to pick up all the paperwork and put it in order on her behalf. In an extraordinary step of kindness toward a terminally ill tenant, he informed her he had a suitable replacement waiting as soon as she felt ready to say goodbye to the Peace and Pigs. As if all this generosity wasn’t enough, he offered to put in a good word for her with a local removals firm where he had an account.