by AJ Taft
“Me mum’s dead,” says Lily.
Jo pulls a packet of cigarettes from her pocket. She lights two and holds one out to Lily. “Shit.” They start walking, neither knows where. “Pub, or home and a spliff?” Jo eventually asks.
Lily sighs, “Spliff I guess, I’ve got to pack some stuff. My, er uncle’s coming to get me.”
They’ve been inseparable for over a year, and yet Jo knows so very little of Lily’s life, beyond the fact that she doesn’t like to talk about it. She knows Lily hardly ever goes home to Accrington. “I’m really sorry, Lil.”
“Yeah, it doesn't matter. She died a long time ago, before I was born. Her soul I mean. It’s just taken nineteen years for her body to get the message.”
Jo links arms with Lily as they make their way up the hill, past the polytechnic and its university neighbour, until they come to the park. The September sunshine is still warm enough for there to be groups of students lounging around, some reading; the more energetic playing Frisbee. Lily breathes in deeply as they pass one brightly coloured group, savouring the sweet smell of hashish.
“I hope Tim and what’s-his-face aren’t in,” says Lily, as they walk up the path to their front door. Two bedroom houses were hard to find, so when they’d first start looking for a flat, Jo had suggested them getting two rooms in a shared house. When the landlord had shown them round, they’d met the two final year chemistry students; Tim with his jam jar glasses, and been immediately satisfied they wouldn’t impinge on their lifestyle.
“If they are, they can fuck off,” says Jo.
At a quarter to three, Bert pulls up in a pale blue Vauxhall Chevette, circa 1976, his pot belly nestling the steering wheel. As Lily climbs into the car she turns to Jo, “Do me a favour, post this for me?” She takes a battered envelope from the side pocket of her holdall. It’s addressed to the Salvation Army, written in a childish scrawl; the I’s have circles over them.
Jo looks at her questioningly. “You’re not going to get God on me now are you?”
Lily smiles, “The next best thing.” She ducks into Bert’s car, “Please? You won't forget? It needs a stamp.”
Jo puts it inside her coat. “Course.”
Chapter 2
Standing above the open dirt pit, Lily watches as ten black suited men bear her mother’s coffin aloft through the headstones. She can see beads of sweat running down the red faces of the front two; Bert and Mr Peterson. What they are carrying looks more like a boxed sofa than a coffin, appropriate really as her mother had hardly left the settee in the last few years. The funeral parlour had offered the use of a steel-framed trolley, but Lily had insisted. The coffin was to be carried.
Finding ten men ready, willing and able to carry the coffin had been no mean feat. A real ‘Challenge Anneka’; Lily could almost hear the voice-over, “You have six days, no living male relatives (leastways none you’ve ever met), and a dead, agoraphobic mother who weighs more than a carthorse.” Volunteers were going to be thin on the ground. Luckily Mr Peterson across the road had two sons, and the bloke from the chippy was duty bound. And Bert of course. The funeral home had made up the rest. It’s hardly nearest and dearest, but at least she’s in the ground. As the vicar brings proceedings to a close with a solemn rendition of the Lord’s Prayer, Lily takes a seat on a conveniently sited gravestone and lights a cigarette. Relief floods her body, making her feel like she can breathe again, really for the first time since Mr Strange had told her of her mother’s death. Her mother is safely in the ground; in a way her whole life has been in anticipation of this moment. Lily has fulfilled her birthright.
Bert sidles up to her, still sweating from his earlier exertions, his hair slicked back and wearing a shiny dark grey suit that fits badly, where it fits at all. “How you doing, Lil? Crash us a fag, will you?”
She pulls a Lambert and Butler from her packet and hands it to him, trying her best to avoid any physical contact as she does so. Technically she’s giving away her inheritance (she found 100 packets of them in the dresser, the warning printed in Arabic or something, probably the most valuable asset in the house), but what the hell. She’s guessing there won’t be any fighting over the will.
“Do you know, no one here’s said sorry?”
Bert lights his fag, and wiping the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, he looks at her, like he doesn’t understand. She spells it out for him, “I’m nineteen years old, me mum’s died, I have no other living relatives, no money and no one’s said to me, “I’m sorry your mum’s dead.” Everyone murmurs inane crap like, “at least she’s at peace.” Even the vicar said he hoped she’d be happier where she is now. No one’s sorry for me. I’m completely alone.”
Bert coughs, a cough that comes from deep within his lungs. Lily can hear the mucus rattle in his windpipe. He bends over and puts his hands on his knees for a moment until he recovers. He takes another drag on his cigarette and then says, “You can move in with me.”
Lily laughs, momentarily taken out of her self-pity. “I’m not that alone, thanks anyway, Bert. I meant I don’t have any family left, look at this lot.” She gestures at the sparse funeral congregation. Mr Khan from Passage to India mistakes her gesture for a wave and returns it. The woman he’s talking to turns round to see who he’s waving at and smiles across at Lily. Lily hasn’t noticed her before and she frowns as the elderly woman bustles her way across the grass, over to them. She’s small, with an ample bosom cradled tightly in a floral print.
“Lily,” she says, taking Lily by both arms and pulling her up to her feet. “I’m so sorry.” Concern brims over in the woman’s eyes as Lily stares at her, trying to place her. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Lily opens her mouth to protest, but then closes it again.
“You used to call me Aunt Edie, you poor lamb.”
“Aunt Edie?” Lily puts out a hand onto the headstone next to her, as standing up so quickly seems to have made her light-headed. “I thought... I mean... I haven’t seen you for years.”
“I saw the notice in the paper and thought I’d come.” Aunt Edie speaks slowly, each word laced with sympathy. “I hope you don’t mind. I know we didn’t see eye to eye in the end, but, well, you know. Hopefully she’s found some peace at last.”
Lily senses a response is required, but the words aren’t coming to her. Aunt Edie watches her for a moment and then continues, “You were eight years old last time I saw you. Do you remember? You used to come round for tea every Thursday? You don’t look like you’ve had a decent meal since, look at the size of you.” She turns Lily from side to side. “There’s nothing of you, and what’s going on with your hair? You used to have lovely hair.”
Lily’s mind fills with memories of beef paste sandwiches and wagon wheels. “But what happened? I mean Mum told me you’d ... well.” Lily’s cheeks start to flush as she tries to run a hand through her dreadlocks.
“What did she tell you?” Aunt Edie cottons on. “She told you I died? She never. Bloody hell. You wouldn’t put anything past that one. She always was a-” The vicar walks up to them and smiles. Aunt Edie almost curtsies. She doesn’t complete her sentence.
“I’m going to have to dash, I’m afraid,” says the vicar. “I have another, engagement.”
“I actually went to your funeral,” says Lily, once the vicar has moved on. She stubs her cigarette out on the nearest headstone. “I knew something was odd at the time, but I was only eight. Mum told me not to speak to anyone; she said it was rude to talk at funerals. And then we left straight after you, well, after someone was cremated.”
Bert pulls heavily on the stub of his borrowed Lambert and Butler. Lily chews the inside of her mouth. “Well, there was me saying to Bert I didn’t have any family, and now I’ve got an aunt I thought was dead.” She lines the extinguished cigarette up between her thumb and middle finger nail.
“You’ve still got a dad as far as I know,” says Aunt Edie.
Lily flicks the stub and watches it sail t
hrough the air and land in the grass between the headstones. She wipes the sweat from her palms onto her black canvas trousers. “I was just coming to that.”
Chapter 3
Lily props Bert up against the privet hedge while she fumbles with the latch on his garden gate. The nearest street lamp is broken, the light burning a dull orange, too low to make any impact on the surrounding dark. It fizzes as it burns. Lily pulls Bert’s arm around her shoulder again and drags him up the path to the front door, “Key?”
“It’s in me pocket,” says Bert, trying to stand up straight to allow Lily to reach into the front of his suit trousers.
“I’m not that pissed,” says Lily, holding out her hand for the key.
Once inside, Lily leads him into the front room and drops him into the fake leather armchair. The covering on the arm has peeled off, leaving a scorched bald patch where the ashtray would normally sit. Lily glances around and sees it on the floor, its contents spilled. She picks it up and returns it to its rightful position. “See you then, Bert.”
“I miss her, Lil.”
Lily doesn’t reply. She lets herself out of his house and back down the path.
In some ways the estate feels like toy town. As a teenager Lily used to walk home, pissed, at all hours of night, past the rows of identical 1940s council houses, each window trimmed with net curtains. Front lawns the size of handkerchiefs edged with matching privet hedges. She never once felt threatened.
Everyone knows everyone. If it weren’t for the occasional burnt out wreck of a car, you could almost imagine the original vision, ‘Homes fit for heroes’. Lily lets herself into the house next door. The smell makes her retch as soon as she steps over the threshold. She’s spent the last six days here, but the smell won’t go, no matter how many tins of Floral Harmony she sprays.
She turns into the front room and flicks on the light. A bare bulb illuminates the room, which looks even smaller without furniture. When her mother was alive, a reinforced settee had taken up almost all the floor space, but it wasn’t here when Lily arrived and no one has mentioned it since.
Lily sits on the floor and pours herself a vodka from the half empty bottle. She uses the same glass she’s used for the last six days. She rests the back of her head against the wall behind her and wonders for a moment what her mother would have made of her wake. Stupid question, seeing as how her mother hadn’t left the house in ten years. There would have been more chance of getting her mother to the moon than to the back room at the Dog and Duck.
Lily opens her eyes and focuses on the pair of bolt cutters leaning against the side of the gas fire. She bought them three days ago from Mr Bhopal’s Tardis-like hardware store, and they’ve stood, unused, in their current position ever since. Lily takes a mouthful of vodka and crawls across the room to them. She kneels and picks them up, the weight of them pulling on her biceps. She makes a cutting gesture with them, as if practising for the task that lies ahead. She’s told herself, as a mark of respect, she’ll wait until morning; the dawning of a new, motherless, era.
Lily stands and closes the curtains. The minutes tick past on the small carriage clock on the mantelpiece. It’s almost 2 a.m. Occasionally she hears the sound of a car engine on the estate, or the distant echo of a police siren, but mainly there is silence. The only furniture in the front room now is the dresser, its centre drawers on the verge of collapse, and the television. It’s difficult to stand and watch television. Lily drains her glass and reaches again for the bolt cutters.
The metal padlock on the loft hatch has rusted over the years. To Lily’s knowledge it has never been opened. She spent the first two days she was here, ransacking the house for a key, but at the back of her mind she had known she wouldn’t find one. For as long as she can remember she’s fantasized about getting past that padlock, knowing the secrets of her past must lie up there.
Her old desk chair wobbles beneath her as Lily holds up the bolt cutters and snips at the thick metal. The cutters slice through it, just as Mr Bhopal had told her they would, and the padlock falls to the floor, narrowly missing Lily’s head on its descent. Lily pushes against the wooden trap door and sees a set of metal stepladders. They make such a racket as she pulls them down, she’s afraid they will wake the dead.
It’s pitch dark in the loft. Lily flicks the light switch but nothing happens. She climbs back down the ladder and takes the bulb from her mother’s bedroom, standing on piles of yellowing News of the Worlds to do so. Back in the loft, Lily has to replace the bulb by the light of her cigarette, her hand shaking. She switches on the light and is momentarily blinded. It takes a while for her eyes to adjust and allow her to focus on the contents of the room. Cobwebs hang from the ceiling, which is so low Lily cannot stand up straight. Two suitcases and a couple of boxes, the proper, old-fashioned, tea chest kind, are grouped together in the centre of the gloom. Lily guesses they were put up there when they first moved in, when Lily was just a baby. Lily reaches for the nearest suitcase and flicks open the catches.
Inside are clothes, men’s clothes. She pulls out the first item, a brown shirt with thin white stripes, ironed and neatly folded on the top of the pile. The buttons are done up. She holds it to her face and smells mustiness, mixed with a hint of pine aftershave. Lily holds up the shirt in front of her and as the folds drop out so do the arms, falling onto her lap, each neatly cut off at the shoulder. She pulls out a pair of trousers, with creases like tramlines, and a hole where the crotch should be. Lily doesn’t know what makes her feel saddest; the thought of her mother neatly ironing and folding her husband’s clothes after she’s hacked them to pieces, or the fact that her father obviously never returned to notice.
She reaches for one of the wooden packing crates. Inside are books. Her mum was never much of a reader, unless you count Mills and Boon, which Lily didn’t. She picks up the top one; it has a picture of a fat frog and a pink flower on the cover, You only live twice, Ian Fleming is written on the front. Lily’s seen the film. She holds the book up to her face and smells the paper as she flicks through the pages. Then, with her hands trembling, she turns to the front page, hope making her hold her breath. But if a name was written there, and it probably was, it has been cut out; a small, neat rectangle of paper missing in the top right hand corner. Lily turns to the back page and realises it’s missing.
Lily swears under her breath and reaches for the second box. It contains a record collection: The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, a seven inch copy of Leader of the Pack by the Shangri-Las, and I Got You, Babe by Sonny and Cher. The box is full. Lily had always thought the theme tune to Coronation Street was the closest her mum had ever come to music. Simon and Garfunkel, The Kinks, Dusty Springfield. Lily bites her lip as she slides Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band out. It comes out of its sleeve in three separate pieces.
Lily notices through the cracks in the airbricks that it’s getting light. The bottle of vodka she brought with her is empty, and the heap of clothes feels slightly damp. She stands up too quickly, hitting her head against a low beam and falls to her knees, momentarily stunned. When her head stops hurting, she goes downstairs. She rummages through her pockets and finds, scribbled on a piece of paper, in old lady handwriting, Aunt Edie’s telephone number.
As she listens to the ringing phone, she has a flash of memory of Aunt Edie’s funeral. Her mother, already gigantic, in a black tent of a dress, hurrying her out of the churchyard as an elderly couple had approached them. The man had a gold ring on his finger with a red jewel that had sparkled in the sunlight. Lily had wondered whether he was the Pope. She had opened her mouth to ask, but her mother had pushed her out of the gate so hard she had almost fallen over.
“Hello?” A tremulous voice answers the phone.
“Aunt Edie? It’s me, Lily.”
“Heavens child, what time is it?”
Lily glances across at the carriage clock on the mantelpiece. It takes her a moment to work out that it’s half past five. “Shit, I mean sorry, I di
dn’t realise,” Lily takes a breath. “I need to see you.”
Chapter 4
Aunt Edie’s house smells of vinegar, perfectly preserved, it’s exactly how it was the last time Lily visited. Memories assault her from all angles. The china dogs that she’d pretended to feed and take for walks are still on the hearth; the ashtray with a black cat in the centre, that Lily’s mother had painted when she was a child, is still on the windowsill.
Aunt Edie is bustling around in her kitchen, wearing her floral pinny, delighted to have company. She hands Lily an American Cream Soda. The glass is the same glass Lily drank out of twelve years ago, with glass bubbles in the bottom. Aunt Edie sings along to Andy Williams on the radio, out of tune and about four words behind.
They sit down at the small wooden table in the corner of the sitting room, where Aunt Edie has laid out lunch. “Oh, it’s so nice to see you, Lily.”
“I need to find my dad,” Lily blurts
“Would you like salmon or beef paste? I got the beef special this morning."
“I want to find my dad.” Lily says, louder this time.
“Of course you do pet, no need to shout. I take it you’ve not seen him? Not ever?” Lily shakes her head and tries to stop herself ripping the skin from the sides of her thumbs. “What did your mother tell you?”
“Nothing, I don’t know anything about him. I looked in the loft last night. Found some old clothes and his record collection, but...” she hesitates at telling Aunt Edie what her mother had done, “but there was nothing that would help me find him.”
“She was a different woman altogether in those days, Lil. She loved him so much. Never looked at another man. She got with him when she was seventeen. Always said she was going to marry him. He didn’t stand a chance.” Aunt Edie chuckles to herself. “Ay, she was determined, stubborn as a mule. Always was. The happiest bride I’ve ever seen.”