“Hi,” said Opal. She raised her voice to make it heard above a babble of music and children on the other end of the line. “Is that Cleora Gordon?”
“That’s me. Who’s asking?”
“My name’s Opal Jones. But listen, are you the Cleora Gordon who’s related to Eugene and George? Little George and Little Samantha’s mother?”
“Little George?” said the woman, and her voice had risen to a shriek of hilarity. “Little George is a grandpa! Who is this?”
Opal took the receiver away from her ear and stared at it, unbelieving. She had found them. Found Fishbo’s family. Found Cleora anyway.
“Opal Jones,” she said again. “I live in Yorkshire. In Leeds. And I’m afraid I’m calling with some bad news.”
The kids and music carried on, but the woman was silent.
“It’s Eugene,” said Opal. “He’s ill. He might be dying.”
Still there was silence and then the sound of bumping and shifting as the woman took the phone somewhere away from the noise, shutting a door, dulling the happy sounds down to a mumble.
“Eugene?” she said. “Eugene is back in Leeds again? You jesting me? He hated it there. We both did. Leeds? And he’s dying? Who are you?”
“I’m just a friend,” Opal said. “A neighbor. He’s in hospital.”
“In Leeds?” It was like she was saying on Mars. “Is he visiting George?”
“No,” said Opal. “He lives here. He’s been here for … well, twenty-five years anyway.” Opal’s lifetime.
“Huh?” said Cleora.
“I know you must have lost touch,” Opal said. “I thought you’d want to know. I know he’s only your brother-in-law, but it was your name I found.”
“Huh?” said Cleora again. “My brother-in-law?”
“If you’ve got George’s number, I could get on to him. Fishbo’s never mentioned him, but if he’s still in Leeds—”
“Whoa,” said Cleora. “Back up, slow down. Who’s Fishbo?”
“They must have lost touch.”
And now the woman was laughing again.
“Someone got their boots on the wrong feet here, baby, and either it’s you or it’s me. My brother-in-law, George Gordon, stayed in Leeds when Gene and I came home. We couldn’t stand it there.”
“George? But his name’s Eugene.”
“Eugene, my husband, left me for the first time thirty-five years ago and the last time I saw his no-good backside was twenty years ago now. But he told me he had gone to America. Came back here flashing green dollars at the kids and the grandkids, Mr. Big Shot.”
“Fishbo’s your husband?”
“I don’t know who this Fishbo is you keep talking. Eugene is my husband. Now, he might be dead and he might be dying, but trust me he’s not doing it in Leeds.”
“Why would George pretend to be Eugene?”
“I don’t know that and I can’t tell you, baby,” said the woman. “Why would my husband pretend to live in California, USA, if he lived in England in the cold and the rain?” Opal considered telling her that England was sizzling in another day of steamy sunshine, but she decided Cleora wouldn’t believe her anyway.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Because those Gordon boys are all the same, that’s why,” said Cleora, and she was laughing again. “Stories and music and dancing and more stories.” She sighed and sang a little tune as she let it go.
“Right,” Opal said.
“I’ve got my kids and my grandkids and my great grandbaby,” said Cleora. “Those days are a long time ago. A lifetime ago. You tell George Cleora said hello, baby. And if Eugene shows his sorry face, you tell him Cleora said plenty but you didn’t understand those bad words.”
“I will,” said Opal. “I’ll do that. Sorry to have bothered you.”
“It was nice talking,” Cleora said. “You be a good girl and stay away from bad boys.”
“I really will,” said Opal. “What’s the baby’s name? Your great-grand-baby? I’ll tell Fishbo he’s got a … ”
“Great-grand-nephew,” said Cleora. “Jeez-um—another Gordon boy. Just what the world needs right now. He’s called Travon. You tell Uncle George.”
But as Opal hung up the phone, she was sure she wasn’t going to be telling George he had a nephew. She would have bet a month’s pay she’d be telling Eugene he was a grandpa again. And at last she understood why Fishbo didn’t want anyone trying to find his family. It wasn’t just that Louisiana was a big fat fib; it was that he had left his wife and children. He wasn’t a single man who lived for his music. He was just another useless deadbeat bastard who never thought about anyone but himself.
Except, if that was true, where was George? Where was the brother-in-law who liked it in Yorkshire if Fishbo was the husband who hated it but came back anyway? Who visited Kingston twenty years ago and told Cleora he lived in California. Well, at least that bit sounded just like Fishbo.
She didn’t go back to Pep’s. Why should she? They were only neighbors—the band weren’t even that—and she had too much on her mind to go to some knees-up or sit-in or whatever it was.
There was tomorrow’s task, for one thing: getting a hold of a key to that room where the other half of the bed was.
Then there was the new big worry. Franz Ferdinand was following her, and he had written a threat on a picture and put it through her door. He had been on Mote Street all those years ago. Or he was just following her and someone else was threatening her—she didn’t know if that was worse or better.
And there was the even newer, even bigger worry of having maybe killed Fishbo with Shake-n-Vac. Finished him off with it, at any rate. If she really still cared as much about Fishbo anymore. He wasn’t who he said he was, and he had left his family. Opal didn’t think much of men who upped and left their families, especially when they went on and on to little neighbor girls about being like a grandpa.
And of course there was the biggest worry of all: Nicola’s outhouse was full of Zula’s cement. Nic herself was full of Mrs. Pickess’s brandy. And little Craig Southgate was gone.
So she went home, on her own, shut the doors, shut the windows, tried to think it out, tried not to think at all, very nearly poured herself a brandy until she imagined how it would feel to wake up in the morning in this sealed and sweltering house with her mouth glued up and her dry breath whistling inside her nose. She was just telling herself that she could keep the upstairs windows open when she heard him coming home. He was thumping and clattering out in the yard, and she went up to the back bedroom to look out and see what he was smashing up this time, but he was only moving stuff around in the outhouse, clearing space, bringing a ladder and a workhorse out into the yard. What was he moving in then? He lifted the workhorse into the back porch but the ladder—a bulky thing, folded in fours, looked heavy—he left in the yard, chained and padlocked around one of the washing poles. Who’s going to run off with a great article like that? Opal thought, then she realized that wasn’t the point. The point was that unless a ladder was chained up anyone could come along and open it, put it against a house wall, climb in, and rob the place blind or strangle someone in her sleep. And of course if Franz Ferdi had a ladder …
With a sigh that was almost a groan, Opal shut the back bedroom window. She even went up to the attic and shut the skylight there—that ladder looked long enough for sure. The front bedroom window could stay open, though. No one was going to set up a ladder in the street, where all the neighbors could see. Not on Mote Street. There was Vonnie Pickess coming home right now in a blue print dress and a short-sleeved white cardigan that showed her old-lady elbows, grey-pink spirals of skin. She stood outside her door, looking around, sniffing for news, hearing only silence. Margaret and Denny’s telly was off, no sign of life at the Joshis, all quiet at No. 1. Her glance flicked over to Opal’s house, and the look on her face was nothing that Opal could put a name to. Then she went inside and closed her door.
The open front windo
w did no good at all. By two o’clock in the morning, Opal was twisted in her sheets, throwing her head from side to side, panting.
Someone was crying, locked in a room where the floor came halfway up the door and the bed was only a headboard and nowhere to sleep unless you balanced along it, and there were children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren too, but Opal didn’t know their names and she was supposed to tell the newspaper who they were for a photograph they were printing, but she was locked in a van where the floor came halfway up the walls and she was supposed to play the trumpet at the hospital but the mouthpiece was stuck in the concrete and only the horn was free and no matter how hard she pulled it wouldn’t come out, and she was coughing and bleeding and trying to hide the sheets inside a wardrobe full of frames wrapped in tissue with no pictures because she was hiding from someone—someone’s mother or someone’s daughter or sister. And a little girl could see her and she kept driving past, and Opal told her she was too young to drive the car and she should go home, and the girl said her daddy was driving and Opal looked and so he was, one arm on the steering wheel and one arm holding Opal in the seat beside him, two bluebirds, and they moved when he stiffened his arm to hold her down when she tried to open the door and run away, but she couldn’t open the door because she was locked in an outhouse where the floor came all the way up to the ceiling and tasted like iron and she was drowning.
“Leave me alone,” said Opal, waking and sitting in one snap. She waited in the quiet for a moment or two, gulped in three breaths that hurt her chest and didn’t draw any air down into her, then she curled up and put her hands over her head and began to rock, the old bed creaking and popping like a sailing ship all around her. Someone will come along and they will find this, she thought to herself, but the prayer of the little bed girl wasn’t working tonight. It sounded like a curse in her ears and yet she couldn’t stop it playing and replaying now that it had begun. Our Father, she whispered to herself, and then stopped. In a cottage, in a wood. But she had never heard that before Jill in the salon sang it to her.
“Help me, help me,” the rabbit said.
“No!” said Opal, out loud.
The outhouse, the outhouse, the hold your nose and shout—
“No!” She screamed it, and in the silence that followed she heard a loud click then nothing more. “Go away,” she said in a loud voice. “Leave me alone. Two times one is two, two times two is four, two times three is six.”
Halfway through the eleven times table she fell asleep, and “sixty-six” was the last thing he heard her say. He listened for a while, then walked away from his open window—separated from hers by only five feet—got into bed, and clicked his light off again.
THIRTY-NINE
SARAH FOSSETT HAD CLEANED the kitchen, and Norah hadn’t had time to muck it up again. Or rather she had had plenty of time but couldn’t drag herself away from her new DVD, so all her dinners were still in their tubs in the fridge and the cooker top and sink were still buffed and gleaming.
“She’s lovely, your Sarah,” Opal said.
“Mm-hm,” said Norah, without moving her eyes away from the screen. She was barricaded into her armchair again.
“Norah?”
“Mm-hm.”
“Where do you keep the spare keys? The keys to the rooms up-
stairs?”
“I’m not supposed to touch the keys,” Norah said. “I’m not allowed to.”
“But I’m allowed to,” said Opal. “Where are they?”
“Mother keeps the keys,” Norah said.
Opal couldn’t help her face twisting up to hear Norah talking about her mother that way. If Opal hadn’t seen the empty rooms with her own eyes just yesterday, she’d be afraid to go up there.
“But where does she keep them, Norah love?”
“In a drawer, in her desk, in her room, in her house,” Norah said.
In a cottage, in a wood. Opal shook it out of her head. She didn’t know that song. She must have let out a sound, because Norah tore her eyes away from the screen and took her thumb out of her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry, sorry.”
“Sh-sh-sh,” said Opal. “You haven’t done anything wrong. You watch your clowns and don’t mind me.”
She started right there in the morning room, since that was where the photograph albums and jewelry boxes were. In a desk in the corner with a roll-top, there were dozens of compartments Opal thought were ideal for storing keys, but there was nothing but letters and papers there. And pipe cleaners.
“I’m not allowed to touch Father’s desk,” Norah chipped in from across the room.
“Right,” said Opal. “Okay. It was your dad that smoked a pipe. Obviously. So where’s your mum’s desk then, eh?”
“Mum,” said Norah as if she had never heard the word.
“Mummy?” said Opal. Surely no one said Mother even back when they were a little tiny girl.
“You’re not supposed to say that,” Norah said. Opal thought that she was in a very obedient mood today and it was getting pretty annoying. She wondered if Norah had ever done anything naughty in her entire life. “Norah,” she said. “Do you want to help me do something secret?” Norah said nothing. “I want to hide a surprise in Mother’s desk. Do you want to help me?”
Norah stared, glanced at the door, looked back at Opal, and nodded. “A nice surprise?” she said.
“A lovely surprise,” said Opal. “Come on. You help me. I’ll pause the disc for you.”
Norah was already pushing away her tray table. She leapt up and trotted over to the door. Opal threw down the remote and followed her. Followed her along the corridor into the kitchen. From there through a door of dark wood with glass panels into a sort of little office with nothing in it except a chair set in front of double cupboard doors. Norah took hold of one in each hand and swept them open. She gasped, a small nervous sound, and turned troubled eyes to Opal.
“Where is it?” she said, but Opal was looking at the desk that was fitted into the cupboard, built in there. A household desk or something. Exactly where the lady of the residence would sit and write out her shopping lists and make up brown envelopes of money for her servants’ wages.
“It’s right there,” she said. Norah turned back and then faced Opal again.
“Gone,” she said.
“What’s gone?”
“Silver,” said Norah. “Mother’s silver. The turret … the soup …
turret.”
“A tureen?” Opal said.
“And the candelabrum,” Norah said. “And all the boxes! Oh. Oh. Mother’s cake slice. I’m not allowed to touch it. And the spoons and knives and forks. I’m not allowed to touch them. I didn’t touch them.”
Opal shushed her, holding her little hand and swinging it, trying to calm her. She looked at the empty shelves reaching high up above the desk all the way to the ceiling. Then she reached out and ran a hand along one. It was smooth and dust-free and her fingers, when she brought them to her nose, smelled of polish. Burglars wouldn’t polish the shelves once they’d swiped the silver.
“Sarah,” she said softly.
“I didn’t touch it,” said Norah. “I didn’t. We never had any silver. Mother doesn’t like silver. We haven’t got any. Men came. They took it away. They came and took it.”
“Sh-sh-sh,” Opal said. If Sarah wanted to sell Norah’s stuff to get the money together for a good nursing home, it was none of her business, but surely she should at least have tried to let Norah know. Or maybe she did. After all, Norah had forgotten all about it now. She was sitting on the chair—an old-fashioned desk chair that swivelled round and round on its single leg—swaying from side-to-side.
“Do you want to watch the circus?” Opal asked, and Norah leapt up and scurried off—silver forgotten, surprise for Mother in her desk forgotten, everything blown away like seeds off a dandelion.
It gave Opal a wriggling feeling inside every time. She kept upsetting Norah, right from
the first day they had met out on the street. And then she threw her little treats like she was training a puppy and made her forget again. It wasn’t right and she would be glad when it was over.
But right now it was worth it. If Norah was going into a home, at least the people there would know about her, once Opal had found the evidence that would prove what had happened. The staff would know just how careful and tender they had to be and if it was a really good nursing home, Norah might be happier there than she had ever been anywhere. And anyway the last little trick—“Let’s hide a nice surprise in Mother’s desk for her!”—had definitely been worth it. Because there they were: a fat bristling bunch of keys, right there in the top drawer. Opal took them, restarted the circus, and went upstairs, telling herself she was helping. Not like Sarah was helping—helping get Norah into a nice, neat old folks home—and certainly not like Shelley was helping—helping her struggle on day after day. Opal was hacking through a forest of vines trying to get Norah out of the tower where she’d been asleep for a hundred years. Or that’s what it felt like anyway.
On the landing, she sat down on the carpet and started working methodically through the bunch of keys. Some were too big and some were too small, but more than she had expected were just right, fitting in and moving a bit, sometimes quite a bit. Then she thought, of course they do. Those were the keys for all the other doors, and so they were all the same size. Then she put one in that turned a bit more than the rest and with an extra twist turned all the way. She left the bunch hanging in the door, pushed it open and walked into the room.
“Oh bloody hell, I don’t believe it!” she said. She went as far as stamping her foot on the bare boards between the hall runner and the carpet on the bedroom floor.
It was all there, the chest of drawers, the dressing table with the marble top, the dressing table with the wooden top, the bedside pot stands, the wardrobe with three doors, all of them absolutely covered in roses and chrysanthemums in the pattern Opal knew so well. And where the bed should have been, just like before, just like in Mother’s room, a bit of rough wallpaper where it had scraped and a patch of dark carpet where it had shaded and no fucking bed. Again.
As She Left It: A Novel Page 24