by Julia Crouch
‘I’ll pay you back. I’m still waiting for the Greek lawyers. They’re taking an age – although next week is looking likely,’ Polly said.
It dawned on Rose that Polly might have come away with no means of paying for anything herself. It was probably something she had never really had to think about before, so the fact she didn’t have any money now wasn’t going to stop her.
‘How are you feeling this morning, then?’ Rose asked her.
‘Oh, you know, OK,’ Polly said.
‘At least you didn’t end up in hospital for a week.’
Polly looked sharply up at her, but Rose turned to look out of the window.
‘Look at that,’ she said to the children. A wide waterway carved its way through a fat, springy meadow. ‘That water comes from our river,’ she said. The river from the bottom of the field by The Lodge. The river that once upon a time Gareth had said he was going to chart with woodcuts.
Mist hung over the top of the water and spilled from its edges into the grass.
‘It’s almost as if we’re in a plane and we’re looking down through the clouds,’ she said.
Polly leaned her head against the window, preparing to drop off. Rose reached over and tapped her on the knee.
‘Shall I take the tickets? In case you’re asleep when the guard comes.’
Polly reached in her little handbag and passed a wallet with the tickets in it over to Rose.
They crawled across the West Country, stopping at every station on the way. Polly was soon fast asleep, but Rose was kept busy keeping the children in line. The boys kept attacking each other as usual, but the new development was that Anna was now joining in, holding her own and giving as good as she got. Rose tried to keep them quiet, but it was a long journey, and they were excited. A few of the passengers sitting around them quietly got up and moved further down the train. One or two made their displeasure more evident. An hour into the journey there was an exclusion zone around them.
As they moved into Hampshire, Polly woke up and, borrowing ten pounds from Rose, staggered down the train to find the Polish girl and her trolley. She returned with packets of crisps for the children and a coffee for herself.
‘You didn’t want anything, did you, Rose?’ she asked.
‘I’m fine,’ Rose said.
‘Can we go over there?’ Anna asked, pointing to an empty table a few seats away.
‘If you’re good,’ Rose said, and louder, so that everyone on the carriage could be reassured, she went on: ‘I’ll make you come back here the minute I hear anything I don’t like.’
She sat and looked at Polly, this woman who had once been her friend. She wondered if things had always been so difficult between them, underneath the veneer of their shared history and the repeated mantra of referring to each other as best friends. Or was it like a long marriage, dissolved into mute seething where there must surely once have been love? For all her tininess, her little-girl aura, Polly had some nasty hard edges. Rose realised that she had probably always hated her, one way or another. If it wasn’t for the downright evil man-snatching that was going on now, it was as an object for jealousy and inadequate self-comparison.
‘What are your plans, Poll?’ she blurted out when Polly had finished her coffee. The train rattled past a low-tide harbour somewhere near Southampton, with desolate little boats stranded in a space entirely filled with ooze.
‘This again,’ Polly said, looking out of the window, her reddened lower lip protruding.
‘I’d like to know. Gareth and I—’
‘Gareth and you what?’ Polly shot her a glance.
‘Perhaps it might be time to start thinking about finding yourself somewhere proper to live? The house money isn’t far off, as you say. You’ll probably want to look for somewhere closer to London and if you want to go away and have a look around, see what you can find, I’m happy to have the boys till you’re ready for them.’
‘Well, that’s funny. It was only yesterday that Gareth said, and, now, let me get this right.’ She pulled off her red leather gloves. ‘Oh yes, he said, “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, Polly. Having you and the boys around, it brings a bit of life to this old place . . .”.’ She said this in an exaggerated version of Gareth’s accent, so it sounded as if it had been spoken back in the dangerous Wild West. She had drawn herself up so she was high in her seat, almost looking down at Rose. Then, without warning, she laughed and laid a hand on Rose’s knee.
‘Oh, don’t look so worried. I’m sure he didn’t mean it like that. He might not even have said it like that in so many words.’ She wrinkled her nose and tried to catch Rose’s eye. ‘Poor you,’ she said. ‘You really do need this little break, don’t you?’
‘Tickets please, ladies, on this fine and misty morning!’ A portly guard bustled down the aisle towards them. What was it with South-West Trains this morning? Rose wondered. It was as if they had only permitted cheerful, wholesome and sunny people to work this route, to act as a foil to her mood. She thought about Gareth and, for the first time since she had done the desecration, she thought about the studio, and she felt sick. Suddenly, her plans – to get to Polly during this trip, to investigate the studio yesterday – revealed themselves to her as the muddled mess they were, and as she bantered with the ticket collector, inside she felt uprooted, lost. After the studio, she probably wouldn’t ever be able to talk to Gareth again. What on earth had she done?
‘Feet off the seats, sonny boy,’ the guard said to Nico as Rose rummaged in her big bag for the tickets. Eventually she found them and held them up, feeling like a child herself.
The rest of the journey was spent in near-silence. The only words uttered by Rose or Polly were directed at the children. It was gone midday when they finally got to Brighton. They walked the length of the iron-arched platform in the cold, bright, sea-tanged air. Each step brought Rose’s childhood back to her. She remembered clearly coming back to this station from London shopping trips, hand in hand with her mother, before she became a teenager, before she turned round and disappointed them all. Back when she was a good girl.
They rounded the corner by the Golden Crust Baguette stall to get to the taxi rank. There was no one in the queue, so they made to get into the one cab that was waiting there.
‘Oy, oy, stop now,’ the taxi driver said, getting out and slamming the door. ‘I ain’t taking all of you at once, you know. Not with all them bags and that buggy and all.’
‘But that’s ridiculous,’ Polly said. ‘You can carry six, surely?’
‘That’s not what it says on my licence, mate,’ the taxi driver said. ‘Unless you know better, that is.’
‘Look, I’m fine. Me and Floss can walk,’ Rose said. She thought she could do with the fresh air. ‘I’d rather. Really.’
‘I want to come with you, Mum!’ Anna said, hanging on to Rose.
‘That’s fine, love. You come with me. I’ll show you all my old places.’ Anna curled into her side and looked up at her with adoring eyes.
‘Sort it out, love, then. I haven’t got all day,’ the taxi driver said, blowing out his cheeks.
‘Well then, OK then,’ Polly said. ‘It’s twenty-five St Luke’s Rise. Can you remember that?’
‘Of course,’ Rose said. ‘You’ll need some money, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Polly said, holding her hand out. Rose gave her a ten-pound note. She had resigned herself to the fact that this trip was going to be expensive in so many ways. Finally, Polly, Nico, Yannis and all the luggage got in the taxi, and Rose, Flossie and Anna stood on the pavement, waving as they set off. Rose should have turned left out of the station to get to Lucy’s house, which was only about a mile away down and up the hill. But she decided she needed to buy time for herself, so instead she pointed the buggy down Queen’s Road, towards the sea, which hung like a great grey blanket between the buildings in front of them.
‘Come on, Anna. I’m going to show you some of the best clubs in the universe.�
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‘What sort of clubs?’ Anna asked, hanging tightly onto the buggy handles as they rolled down the hill.
‘Clubs for when you are a big girl. Clubs for dancing, and drinking, and having fun.’
‘They sound good,’ Anna said. ‘Except for the drinking thing.’
Rose felt reckless. She felt no responsibility towards Polly, nor towards this Lucy-from-the-past. For once, she thought, she would do what she wanted and not worry about anyone else. They picked their way down to the seafront, past the throngs of people: snowwhite girls with pierced noses and soft bellies on display to the seachilled air; Big Issue sellers with pathetic dogs, the art of avoiding whom had long since escaped Rose; dazed-looking women with buggies like Rose’s, held rapt in front of Waterstones as if they could while the whole child-riddled day away just gazing at stacks of the books they used to have time to read.
This Brighton was a different town from the one Rose had grown up in. Instead of a slightly down-at-heel, seedy, kiss-me-quick-hat dive, it now had the air of a slightly down-at-heel cosmopolitan city. Rose wondered if this homogenisation had only recently happened, and how widespread it was. She felt out of touch and impossibly old as she neared the seafront, the anodyne brick and pastels of a redeveloped Churchill Square shopping centre on her right. In her day it had been piss-sodden, bleak and brutalist.
‘Look at all the birds!’ Anna said.
‘Seagulls. They’re sort of rats with wings.’
Anna thought about this. ‘But they haven’t got those horrid tails,’ she said.
‘True. But they eat absolutely anything. And they attack people. I once read about a man who was killed by a seagull in Rottingdean.’
Anna looked up at her, wide-eyed, and Rose slapped herself on the head. What was she thinking, worrying her sensitive girl like that? She had got too used to the thickened pelts of the boys. ‘But he was an old man, and very ill at the time. They’ve never killed a girl or her mum before.’
‘Never?’
‘Never.’
They went down the slope to the seafront and Rose was completely taken aback. Where she remembered scrappy clubs amongst decaying fishermen’s arches, deep, pocketed pubs and pissy little alcoves, there were now coffee bars on neat terraces that edged onto the shingle. Beautiful glass floortiles pointed the way along the new, curving, Granite Sett seafront walkway. There were a couple of showers, a kayak rental shop, the odd sculpture. It all looked so unEnglish to Rose’s eye. With its brightness, its bustle and its shards of colour picked out against the chalky sky, it was almost an affront to her newly-hewn rural sensibilities.
Anna loved it, though. Even Flossie managed to look a little interested in a rack of plastic windmills by a giant, big-girl-sized fibreglass ice-cream cornet.
‘Let’s have a drink,’ Rose said, and they took their seats at a bar terrace on a paved peninsula that reached far out onto the beach, up against a big stone groyne. Rose wondered how the bar fared in the winter, during the storms that flung the stones from the beach up against the promenade. Perhaps they had to rebuild the bar each spring. Or perhaps the winters weren’t what they used to be down here in the south.
The afternoon had worn on. The sun was working hard to burn off the grey veil of cloud that touched everything. But, sitting at the bar waiting for their drinks, Anna and Rose felt the sea-chill in the air. Eventually, their order arrived. Rose had a large glass of Shiraz, and Anna a hot chocolate with cream and chocolate flakes, which she declared wasn’t as good as the one she had had back at Heathrow when they waited for the boys to arrive with their mum.
They drank up, paid their bill and carried on towards the pier, which looked unchanged, more like the old Brighton. Everything was a little bright, a little gaudy. The people clogging the entrance were tattooed, gold-chained and out for the kind of good time you could only find in Brighton. She took the girls for a walk along to the very far end, past the clash and clatter of the amusements, the hypnotic bass pulse of tinny chart music and the unspeakably delicious smells of fresh, frying doughnuts. Out they went, beyond the phallic helter-skelter, the screaming dodgems and an alarming lever that promised to drop its shrieking occupants several hundred feet into the boiling sea beneath.
‘Look, you can see the sea whirling under you,’ she said to Anna. They stood on the boardwalk and looked down between the gaps. ‘You think you’re on solid ground, but you’re not. Any minute and the whole lot could collapse and we’d be in the water.’
Rose thought she could see the ghost of herself down there, covered up by some boy or other, his spotty bare backside going up and down, hammering into her. She shuddered.
‘I want to go back,’ Anna said.
‘Don’t be silly. It’s been standing like this for a hundred years.’
‘But what about that one?’ Anna pointed across the choppy expanse of sea to the West Pier that had fallen victim first to storms, then to arson. It was a sorry sight, Rose thought. A skeleton, a onceglorious queen, now a stripped thing, slowly reverting back to nothingness.
‘Oh, that’s a very old pier. Almost as old as the dinosaurs. We’ve got eras to go before this one falls like that,’ she said. In fact, she remembered the West Pier when it was closed, but still more or less whole, its beautiful domed ballrooms rising above the shingle, egging her on as she rolled out of a club at closing time with yet another boy, stumbling down the shingle to have fumbled, transient sex at the very edge, where the sea licked the land. It felt wrong to be standing here with her untainted daughters.
‘Come on, Anna banana. Let’s go. Do you want to see the house I grew up in?’
They escaped to dry land, then skirted up the hill past the Sea Life Centre. It was Rose’s old trip to school in reverse. With every step they took, Rose began to dread seeing her old house.
Looking back, it had been a horrible childhood. Like Flossie, she must have been an accident. But unlike her own lucky little baby, she didn’t even have one parent rooting for her. Her overriding memory was of always being in the way, of being an inconvenience in the otherwise smooth running of her parents’ guesthouse. If she kept her head down and her mouth shut, they were happy. Anything else, and her father, particularly, would be provoked to acts of violent exasperation.
Having learned this habit of invisibility, when Rose eventually made it to school, she lacked the skills to make friends. Her parents were also parsimonious to the point of disease. Her clothes were all from charity shops, and she was only permitted one bath, of five inches, once a week. There were no toys, no holidays, no new clothes and no birthday parties for Rose.
None of this helped her social life.
Her only comfort was food, which she took to like a lover. So the odd, drab, smelly girl added fat to her list of distinguishing features. It was only when she took to taking lovers like a lover that she began to lose weight and clean up her act.
Small wonder then, that when Polly showed her that bit of kindness on that school morning when she was so sodden from the waves, Rose grasped it with both hands and held it to her chest. It seemed she had been doing just that for all the years since. Perhaps, she thought, as she steered the buggy round a seagull-pecked black rubbish bag that spilled its glutinous contents onto the pavement, perhaps she should give it a rest now, all that gratitude.
‘This is it,’ she said to Anna, as they stopped in front of the tall, narrow house that she grew up in. It looked a lot smaller than she remembered. Or perhaps she was used now to larger houses, like The Lodge.
‘Posh,’ Anna said.
‘Someone’s done it up,’ Rose said, peering over the railings at the front that gave down to a courtyard full of shade-loving plants. Like Brighton itself, the house had acquired a sheen that it had never had in Rose’s day. It was a startling white, with glossy black paintwork. The windows, which used to clank in their rotten, peeling frames, had all been replaced with new wooden double-glazed sashes. There would be no draughts now, Rose thought. And instea
d of slightly mouldy nets, the windows were shielded from the street by smart oak Venetian blinds. All very nice, but also very closed off, like someone with their eyes shut.
‘It wasn’t like that in my day.’
In her day it was all brown. Rose remembered the guest room in the attic where the Moustache Man stayed on his regular Brighton visits. She remembered lying back on the candlewick comforter and spreading her legs as he fumbled with the zipper on his Terylene trousers. She remembered his ‘friend’ who sometimes accompanied him, and the way they took it in turns, laughing at her, and slapping her fresh little breasts.
‘Don’t tell your father, eh, Rose?’
‘We’ll make it our little secret, eh, girly?’
And Polly, in between times, had egged her on, daring her to push it further, to flirt more outrageously, to flash a bit more flesh underneath her school uniform, for the delight of the paying guests.