As She Left It: A Novel

by Catriona McPherson

  “Damned crematorium,” said Fishbo. “Rules and regulations ten ways from Friday. No, I didn’t get to play, but I chose the numbers and it was a fine day. Except for you missin’ it.” He stopped and stared at the floor for a moment then he went on, skewering her with a look. “You keeping up your practising, Baby Girl?”

  “I haven’t played for years,” Opal said, feeling a bit guilty in spite of herself.

  “That’s a pity,” said Fishbo, shaking his head. His gaze had turned very speculative. “But you could sure pick it up again.”

  “Maybe,” said Opal. “But anyway, how have you been?”

  Fishbo sucked his teeth and hung his head, the picture of sudden sorrow. “Not good, Baby Girl,” he said. “Nothin’ but bad news here these days. I’ve been a-wandering in the wilderness for more years than I can tell you,” he said. “But I always thought I’d find my way home.” Opal waited, not sure what to say. Fishbo glanced at her. “Norlins,” he said.

  “Sorry?”

  “That damned hurricane! Ain’t nothin’ left to go home to now. Ain’t nowhere to lay down and rest my sorry head now. I’ll die here, and that’s the end of the story.”

  “I didn’t know you were from New Orleans,” said Opal.

  Fishbo twitched as if she had pinched him. “What the hell you talking?” he said. “Where did you think I come from? I’ve always come from Norlins. Everybody knows I do. Why, where would you throw me off to, huh?”

  “Sorry!” said Opal. “Blimey, Mr. Fish, I was only twelve the last time I saw you, remember. You don’t think about where people are from when you’re twelve. I thought you were from Mote Street, from Leeds.”

  “I sound like I’m from Leeds?” said Fishbo, scowling.

  “No, fair enough, but neither does Margaret and neither does Zula Joshi. I didn’t know everybody was supposed to sound the same and look the same till I went to Whitby. God knows I found out quick enough there.” At least he was laughing again.

  “Yes indeedy, it’s a melting pot and no mistake. Meltin’ in Mote Street—sounds like a number.” And he started snapping his fingers and shaking his shoulders up and down, one at a time, turning his head to watch the shoulder that was rising as if he was surprised.

  “So did you lose family?” Opal said.

  Fishbo stopped dancing and sat back in the chair, tired out by it already. “Not in the hurricane,” he said. “Long, long ago. Lost touch, lost heart, lost everyone.”

  “Maybe not,” Opal said. “I bet you’d have a better chance of getting in touch with them now than before, even. I bet they’ve got all sorts of agencies, or whatever, trying to sort people out who’ve got displaced. Hm? Mr. Fish?”

  “Long, long ago,” said Fishbo. His eyes were closed and his voice was gravelly.

  She waited until she was sure he was sleeping and then rose quietly and left the room. She stopped in the hall and wrote a note for Mr. Kendal on the pad of paper by the phone—Mr. Kendal still had a telephone table; who still had a telephone table?—asking if he would mind fetching something heavy in his van if she promised to help lift it.

  The head and foot of the bed only just went up the stairs, with a lot of creaking from the banisters and a lot of swearing from the three men, while Opal and Fishbo hopped about at the bottom, Opal telling them to mind their backs and Fishbo telling them to be cool and quit the cussing.

  When all the bits were upstairs in the front bedroom, the three of them stood panting and looking at it, Jimmy D giving it his gunslinger stare, Big Al squinting and kicking it as if it was a second-hand car, and Pep Kendal grinning.

  “Guess how much it was?” said Opal. It looked even better here in the bedroom, twice the size and three times as fancy. She would either have to get rid of the wardrobe or put it where it would stick out over the window, but she didn’t care.

  “Sorry about all the effin and jeffin, Opal love,” said Big Al.

  “Go on, guess,” she said.

  “Pretty penny,” said Jimmy D. “You’ve come up in the world if you’ve bought the likes of this.”

  “More to life than dough,” said Fishbo. “Lucky for me, cos dough I ain’t got, but an idea I surely do.”

  “Somebody guess,” Opal said.

  “A grand,” said Jimmy D.

  “A hundred!” said Opal. “I got it for a hundred quid. Because there’s some kind of secret thing wrong with it that only an antiques expert would know, but I’ve been all over it with a whajcallit, and I can’t find any problems.”

  “Hundred quid?” said Big Al.

  “The guys in the shop couldn’t get rid of it quick enough,” Opal said. “It’s like they were embarrassed or something.”

  Pep Kendal turned right round to stare at her, giving her a screwball look, one eyebrow up and one down. “Are you kidding?” he said. “You really can’t see what’s wrong with this?” Opal half-smiled, thinking he was joking. The bed looked perfect to her, enormous and extravagant and the kind of bed that lives go right in, where mysteries are solved and lost children found, where tangled threads are spun out into straight strong lines of gold.

  “Nope,” she said.

  “Don’t you wanna hear my idea, Baby Girl?” said Fishbo.

  “It’s not a bed,” Pep said.

  “What do you mean?” Opal asked, staring at it.

  “I’m not gettin’ any younger,” Fishbo said. “And man-oh-man I do not have the lungs I useta!”

  “Oh, yeah!” said Big Al, suddenly striking one of the bedposts with the flat of his hand. “I see it now.”

  “And jest when I was gettin’ to frettin’,” said Fishbo.

  “Mr. Fish, hang on,” Opal said. She turned to Pep. “What do you mean it’s not a bed? What is it?”

  “It’s half of one bed,” said Pep, poking the pennants and feathers on the headboard, “and half of another.” He pressed the chrysanthemums and roses on the footboard as if they were lift buttons. Opal blinked, then laughed.

  “God, yeah!” she said. “That’s why it looks so completely mad. It’s got twice as many different things as it should have. Fantastic!”

  “The more the merrier,” Fishbo said. “That’s what I’m saying. Two for the price of one.”

  “Is that what Billy in the shop was so embarrassed about?” Opal said. “I think it’s even better.”

  “Oh, but for a dealer,” said Jimmy D. “What a red face it would be.”

  “Well, lucky me,” said Opal. “Except—do you think it’ll fit to-

  gether?”

  While Jimmy D, Al, and Pep started manhandling the side bars, grunting and softly swearing, Fishbo perched on Nicola’s Ali-Baba basket and put a cigarette between his lips, starting to pat his pockets, looking for his lighter.

  “No,” said Opal. “No smoking.”

  “Oh, sweet baby,” said Fishbo. “You said a whole lot there. If I had never got the taste for these damn things … but I practically growed up in a tabacca fiel’, you know.” Opal thought the swearing got louder then. “Which brings me back to my idea. I’m a song and dance man, much as a trumpet man, always was. All my life I did all three—singin’, dancin’, blowin’ my horn. That’s my life. That’s Fishbo. Now, I gotta choose. I don’t got the puff no more.”

  Pep Kendal was sitting back on his heels inside the bed frame—it had gone up without a hitch, iron balls dropping into sockets like putting nuts back into their shells; nothing from Ikea would have slotted together that way—and he stared at Fishbo as if his eyes were taking X-rays of the old man’s thoughts before he could turn them into words and speak them.

  “And suddenly, here you are!” Fishbo said. He put his unlit cigarette behind his ear and gestured broadly, beaming at Opal. “A girl who can blow a horn just the same style as I blow mine and who ain’t gonna go takin’ over my band on me. I’ll be the band leader, the song and dance man, and you be the trumpet. You got the puff for it, Baby Girl. Whaddaya say?”

  “Are you getting this?” sai
d Pep to Big Al, who was moving the spring, walking it, bouncing and jangling, over the floor towards the frame.

  “Me be in the band?” said Opal. “I haven’t even practised for—”

  “It’s a job,” Fishbo said. “I’m offering you a gig.”

  “Eh, hang on now,” said Pep. “You can’t just add another member into the band. We’re splitting our take five ways already. No offense, love.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Kendal,” Opal said. “I couldn’t anyway. I’ve got a job. They phoned me yesterday. Thirty contracted hours and as much overtime as I want.” Of course, as well as her job she had her mission; she couldn’t take on trumpet practise and travelling to gigs.

  “It’s Saturdays and Sundays, mostly,” Fishbo said.

  “If we’re looking for a trumpeter, we should hold auditions,” said Jimmy D. “No offense, Opal.”

  Al finished squaring up the spring to the frame and let it go. It fell slowly at first, and then, with a rushing, tinkling sound, it crashed onto the base like a dropped piano and sent up a puff of rust and dust that filled the air and set them all off coughing.

  “Jesus, Al!” said Pep. “JD, get Fishbo out of here.”

  Right enough, Fishbo’s eyes were watering and his coughs grew deeper and richer, rattling and gurgling from far inside him. He stood up and put out a shaky hand to take Jimmy’s arm and together they shuffled out of the bedroom and closed the door.

  “Sounds like you might need those auditions,” Opal said. “Is he really still playing the trumpet with that chest?”

  “Barely,” said Big Al. “Sorry about the dust.”

  “You’re all right,” Opal said.

  When they were gone, she fetched a duster—she wished she had one of those proper yellow dusters that were edged with red stitches, but she made do with an old tee-shirt—and ran it lovingly all around the swooping lines of the head and footboards, smoothing it over the dips and swells of the four corner posts, and winkling it into all the dark places between the carving. Once, a corner of it snagged and got stuck on a foot post and, pulling on it, she felt something grate. She held her breath, suddenly certain that the bed was going to collapse and she would have to haul it outside and phone the council to take it away, but the duster came free and the bed stood just as before.

  That evening she lay in it, banked up on three pillows—they were Nicola’s pillows and it was Nicola’s covers she was under, but in this bed it was all right somehow. This was the kind of bed people were born and died in; this wouldn’t be the first time a young woman had lain under inherited blankets in this bed and put her head on the same pillow where her dead mother had rested hers. But something about the foot post troubled her. She shut one eye and then the other. She looked to the left-hand side and then the right and then she sat up straight and stared.

  That right-hand foot post, the one where the duster had snagged, was squint now. The main column was straight like the left one and the big square blob with the vines carved into was still square too, but the ball on top of that had four roses carved on its four sides. And she was looking down the length of the bed at the left edge of one rose and the right edge of the next one round, instead of at one whole flower, face-on. And the horse-parade plume thing on the top was facing the window, its narrow side to her instead of showing its three feathers like the other one. Opal knelt on the crackling mattress—one look inside the plastic had convinced her she wouldn’t unwrap it—and shuffled down to the end. She grabbed the squint plume and twisted it back. It turned without protest back to its proper place. Opal gave it a rub with the hem of her pajama top and started shuffling back up the bed again. Then she stopped, returned to the foot, and twisted the plume the other way.

  It turned, and turned, started to wobble and then, without warning, came off in her hand—impossibly heavy—and clunked a chrysanthemum as it fell onto the bed beside her. She stared at the brass threads revealed on the thick peg that had held it in place and peered at the matching brass threads inside the stump of the post, standing decapitated now. Then she rose up on her knees and peered down into the bedpost itself, into the brass-lined cavity there. In it, curled round into the shape of its hiding place, was a thick sheet of yellowed paper folded in two.

  Opal reached in to grasp it but then drew her hand back, snapping it against her chest and staring around the dark bedroom, her heart walloping. She could hear something. Somewhere—she couldn’t have said if it was above her or below—someone was very quietly weeping.

  NINE

  FIRST THINGS FIRST, OPAL made damned sure the weeping was real and not some mad ghost-crying she had released from the little brass hidey-hole where it had dwelt. She reached in, grabbed the paper, and pulled it out. The crying just carried on, not any louder or any softer than before.

  It was bad enough, though, and she hopped out of bed and put her head round the curtains, looking out into the dark street. Maybe one of the Joshi boys had dumped a girlfriend and she had come to moon under a streetlamp and stare up at his window. But there was no one out there and anyway, the sound was definitely coming from inside. She followed it out into the passage and along to the back of the house and the attic stairs, then climbed them as quietly as she could. She didn’t know whether her ears were getting attuned or if she was really getting closer. Warmer, as they used to shout playing hunt the thimble. (It was never really a thimble. Who had thimbles? But hunt the ring pull didn’t sound the same.) Yes, she was getting warmer, and her mouth had gone dry. She would much rather be getting cooler, cold, stone-cold, in the deep freeze, up at the North pole, Opal. If there really was someone crying in her attic, the farther away she was, the better. But her feet kept moving her forward all the same.

  She was halfway up there now. Who the hell would have broken into her house, gone up to an attic full of bags of booze bottles, and sat down to weep there? The sniffs and sobbing were louder than ever. A tramp? An old friend of her mum’s? Then a thought came crashing in so hard and fast she could almost taste it and now her feet did stop moving, frozen to the carpet, legs like columns of stone.

  The thought was so loud inside her head she couldn’t believe it hadn’t clanged out all around: it was Craig Southgate. She raced up the rest of the steps and fumbled for the attic light switch. Little Craig—nearly fifteen now—had come to a house he thought was still empty, across the road from his granny’s, to look out and … but there was no one there. And there was no window up here to look out of anyway.

  Then a throat was cleared, and Opal heard footsteps cross an empty space. That was no teenager and there was no empty space to walk across in her attic. It was next door.

  She stared at the dividing wall, a single course of bricks. It seemed like she’d got a new neighbor then. Moved in to his dream house and gone straight up to the attic all alone to cry his eyes out. Welcome to Mote Street, she thought. I wonder what brought you here?

  Opal slumped for a moment, as the adrenaline left her and a foolish feeling washed into its place. Then she remembered the note in the bedpost and raced back downstairs again. The piece of paper, she told herself sternly as she clambered back up onto the bed. Who said it was a note?

  But it was—or part of one at least. She opened the paper very gently, easing the brittle fold apart, and held it up under the ceiling light (she hadn’t got as far as lamps on bedside tables yet). It was handwritten, in pale ink, old-fashioned writing from when children were taught how to write and all used the same loops and curls and the same little flicks joining each letter to the next, like toy elephants nose to tail. South, it said at the top of the page. Underneath were these words:

  Because bad things happen to little girls

  Opal let the note fall onto the bedcover and stared at it. She said it aloud: “South—because bad things happen to little girls.” The night was as hot as ever and the dash up the attic stairs to where it was even hotter under the rafters had left a film of sweat across her back, but she shivered now. It was horrible
, even though she didn’t know what it meant. In fact, it was the worse for that. What was South? Someone’s name? And what about the rest of it? She couldn’t tell if it was a threat or a motto or some kind of … what was the word … incantation. As soon as she had it, she pushed that thought away.

  And the note just stopped there. It started up in the middle of a thought and then it stopped again. She looked inside the bedpost, but she knew it was empty. So where was the rest of it?

  Opal smacked her head with her hand and rolled across to the other side. She twisted the left-hand foot post hard, but it wouldn’t budge. Maybe, she thought, it goes the other way, mirror-image to its partner, and she tried reversing. Now there was some movement, but she had tightened it with her first twist, and she had to get up and stand on the floor, bracing herself, wrestling the plume in a two-handed grip before she felt the thread start to give way and could spin it clear.

  There was another sheet just like the first. East, it said.

  when someone finds this after I am gone

  But what did it mean? Opal put the two sheets side-by-side, first east-south—when someone finds this after I am gone because bad things happen to little girls. And then south-east—because bad things happen to little girls when someone finds this after I am gone. Neither order was all that great. And there was no capital letter to say where it was supposed to start and no full stop to finish it off. Even with both bits, it started in the middle and stopped before the end, only just a bit longer.

  Then she smacked her head again. She didn’t have the start and the end. South east was the middle. North south east west, it went, round the compass, round the four posts of her bed.

  Except her bed wasn’t a bed, was it? She stood at the head and squinted hard at all the undulations of the carving, looking for a join. The grain of the wood bloomed and withered in a pattern like a flame and—she had missed this before—there was a tiny hairline crack running up the inside of this top right post. Right the way up, no joins, no secret compartment, no more of the note there. The rest of it, the start and the end, north and west, were with the other headboard, wherever it might be.