by AJ Taft
“This is it, Primrose Glen.” Lily looks up from the map and her brow creases. The street is devoid of parked cars and the houses are all set far back from the road.
“What number is it?” Jo slows the car to a crawl.
Lily looks at the scrap of paper in front of her. “Twelve.”
“What number’s that one?”
Lily leans the top half of her body out of the window. “Oak Dene.” She pronounces it ‘denny’.
“Oak Dene, la-di-fucking-da. Can’t have something as ordinary as a number, dahling.”
Lily comes back into the car and turns to Jo. “This can’t be it.”
“Hang on, that’s number ten, it must be the next one.” They edge another few hundred yards down the road, and Jo pulls the Mini into the kerb. She points to the large sandstone building, peeping over the mature trees and privet hedge that defend it from the road. A black, wrought iron gate, with the word, ‘Newlands’ fashioned in the middle, rises high above the boundary. They can see the windows on the first floor; all made from stained glass and there are a lot of them. “That’s it.”
There is silence in the car. “Do you think it’s flats?” asks Lily, eventually.
Jo sucks in air through her teeth, “No.”
Lily scratches her head. She doesn’t know what kind of house she had thought her father would live in, only that this isn’t it.
“Of course,” says Jo. “He’s probably at work – what day is it?” Lily scratches her head again. “It’s Wednesday. We went to my mum’s on Sunday, back Monday.” Jo ticks the days off on her fingers. “Yesterday was Tuesday. It’s Wednesday and it’s half past twelve. He’ll be at work.”
Lily puts her feet up on the dashboard and lights a cigarette.
“Come on, Lil. Let’s take a closer look.”
“But what if someone comes? What if … You don’t think he’s married do you? I mean, remarried?”
Jo shrugs her shoulders. “Well, it’s big for a bachelor pad. Unless, maybe he’s a rock star or something.”
Lily doesn’t want to admit to the fantasy she used to entertain, built from the time her mother threw the radio out of the kitchen window when ‘Let It Be’ by The Beatles came on. “Maybe he’s gay? Maybe that’s why he didn’t want… Maybe he’s ashamed...”
“Mmmm,” says Jo, but her voice is thick with uncertainty.
“What if he is married? Christ, I could have a wicked stepmother.” Different possibilities start to seep into Lily’s brain, but before Lily can voice any of them, a smaller, wrought iron side gate that neither of them has noticed opens, and a teenage girl steps out. The girl closes the gate behind her, locks it and puts the key into a purse and the purse into her bag. She’s dressed in a school uniform, with royal blue knee socks, and her long brown hair is in pigtails. She adjusts the bag hanging over her shoulder, bends down and pulls at a knee sock before ambling down the street. Lily and Jo shrink into their seats. Jo buries her head in the street map, but Lily can’t take her eyes off the girl. She watches her fiddle with a Walkman and guesses she’s about fifteen.
“If that’s his girlfriend, he’s more than a complete arse.” Jo says.
“That’s not his girlfriend. That’s his kid. She even looks like him. But…” Lily struggles to get the words out. “You wouldn’t leave a baby and then have another would you? Not without... I mean... I’ve always thought that must have been what made him leave. He thought he wanted kids, but when it came down to it, he realised he couldn’t go through with it.”
“Oh, Lily.” Jo turns her head, so Lily doesn’t notice the tears that threaten her eyes. Lily reaches for another cigarette, her heart thudding against her chest. The cigarette packet is empty. She crunches it up in her hand and throws it against the windscreen. She throws opens the car door. “Come on.”
Jo grabs her arm. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to take a look. There’s no one inside. She locked the gate.”
“But what if someone comes back?”
“We’ll say we’re looking for our dog, or something. I don’t know. Come on.” Lily takes a hair band from round her wrist, pulls her dreads back off her face and ties them back in a loose ponytail at the base of her neck. She slams the car door, glances up and down the street and then strides up to the front gates. A number pad on the right hand side blinks at her, waiting for a code. She starts to climb the gates, pulling her small wiry frame up with ease as Jo, realising Lily is actually going to do it, struggles from the car. Lily marches up the drive as Jo reaches the gates.
“Lily, wait for me.”
The house has three bay windows and a stone built porch. Lily peers through one of the windows, cupping her face with her hands to stop the light reflecting. Inside is the largest front room Lily has ever seen. The polished wooden floor reminds her of a ballroom, the settees are square and leather, like the ones in Agatha Christie murders, set in country mansions. Lily tries the gate at the side of the house. It clicks open and leads her into the back garden, where a tree swing hangs centre stage from the branches of an oak tree. A greenhouse with white wooden sides stretches along one wall, with what looks suspiciously like grapes growing inside. Lily marches up to the house and stares through the glass doors that lead from the patio. In the dining room, school books lay open on a long wooden table, next to a half empty glass of blackcurrant juice. Lily counts eight chairs set around the dining table. She moves to the kitchen window. The schoolgirl smiles from a picture on the wall, despite the braces on her teeth.
Lily puts her forehead against the pane of glass to cool her thoughts, but the rage leaps in her like a fire. She turns from the window. The garden spreads itself before her. She notices a fish pond, has the sudden urge to urinate in it. Her father takes better care of fish than he ever has of her. He thinks more about them, thinks more often of them, than he does of her. She’s about to undo the button on her trousers when Jo comes round the corner, out of breath. Lily slams her hand so hard against the side of the shed, the walls shake and the pain in her palm focuses her.
Lily kicks a flowerpot, standing on a low wall next to the patio. The pot topples over and smashes, its contents sprawling over the lawn. “It’s like Neverland. All we need is Bubbles the chimp.” Lily looks wildly around, as if actually expecting to see a monkey come bounding over the lawn.
“He probably thinks you’re after his cash. He’s an arse, Lily. Let’s get out of here.” Jo takes Lily by the arm. “We need to think what to do.”
Chapter 10
The next morning, the sound of Lily roaring wakes Jo. It’s a primitive, physical expression of pain. By the time Lily comes out of the bathroom, Jo is dressed. “I thought I’d go and get us some food, supermarket, you know.” Jo drops her keys and bends to pick them up. “Do you want to come? Will you be ok, Lily?”
Lily stands in the doorway staring at the floor. “I need to be alone,” she says quietly.
As soon as Jo steps out of the door, Lily goes back into the bathroom and opens the small cabinet on the wall. Hidden behind an old toothbrush mug is a packet of razor blades. Why they are hidden is anybody’s guess, as Lily can’t remember how old she was the last time her mother made it upstairs. Must have been at least six years ago, but old habits die hardest. Lily takes them out and closes the cabinet door, catching sight of her reflection in the mirror as she does so. She stares at herself for several minutes. Her father’s eyes stare back at her. Her reflection shakes its head slowly at her.
Lily drops the packet of razors in the overflowing bin and runs down the stairs two at a time, to the kitchen. She throws open a cupboard door and grabs a pile of plates. Taking them into the front room, she then hurls each one like a Frisbee across the room, watching it smash against the back wall. When every plate is destroyed, she goes back into the kitchen and grabs another pile. Once the kitchen cupboards are bare, she turns her attention to the cheap ornaments, picture frames, anything she can find. Only when everything is brok
en (except for two mugs – she’s not that crazy, yet) she stops.
Jo returns to find Lily asleep on the settee mattress, surrounded by a mound of broken glass and china. She closes the front room door quietly and starts emptying the shopping bags into the kitchen cupboard. A few minutes later Lily appears in the doorway, rubbing her eyes. Jo glances sideways at her. “Well, at least there’s plenty of space for the food.”
Lily’s smile is brief, just the faintest glimpse of an upturned mouth, but it was a smile. “There’s another box in the loft,” she says. “I couldn’t, I didn’t open it before. It’s full of letters. I looked but I couldn’t. I’m going to get it.”
“Do you want me to come up?”
Lily shakes her head. “No, I’ll bring it down.”
Jo puts a frozen pizza in the oven and sweeps up the broken crockery, while Lily fetches the box. Once they’ve eaten, using torn up pieces of the cardboard packaging as plates, Lily opens the small wooden box, which despite the layers of dust is highly polished and inlaid with an intricate design. She shudders at the mound of letters inside. Jo picks up the top envelope and glances at Lily. Lily nods. Jo pulls out a small sheet of paper and clears her throat.
“‘My dear darling wife...’” She reads. “By the way, this is dated April ’66:
‘Being away from you does not get any easier, even though we can now count ourselves an old married couple. I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere and it’s beautiful and utterly pointless without you.’”
“Such romance.” Jo holds her hand to her heart for a brief moment. “Shame he’s a complete knob.”
She turns the piece of paper over and reads from the other side:
“‘I am counting the moments until we are reunited (forty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes). I have plans to take you straight to bed and keep you there the entire weekend.
All my love for ever, David.’”
Lily puts her hands over her ears. “Too much information.”
Jo pulls a face. “I wonder what he does, your dad? I mean he clearly earns a fortune.”
Lily reaches for a letter. “I don’t know. But if he was that rich when he was married to my mum, it’s no wonder she was pissed off.”
“And why hasn’t he paid any to you? I mean when your mum got divorced she should have got half, shouldn’t she?”
“I don’t even know if they got divorced.”
Jo opens another envelope. “What about this?
‘You are the woman of my dreams.
Thank you so much for last night.
I will remember it forever.’”
Lily isn’t listening. Her eyes scan the letter in her hand. “God, this one’s from my mum:
‘I love you so much I can hardly breathe.
I yearn to be with you.’”
Lily drops the letter like it’s contagious. “Yeah well, that’s what killed her. I don’t know if I can read any more of these.” She spots an envelope addressed to her mother in a different, loopy handwriting. Lily squats on her haunches, elbows over her knees, rocking slightly as she opens it. “This one’s from my Gran:
‘Dear Pamela. I’m sorry about today. I thought I’d try writing instead, in the hope that maybe you’ll try to understand, what I’m saying isn’t a criticism of you. I’m trying to help. I can’t bear to think of you in this state when I’m gone. I’m not blaming you. I will never forgive that man for what he’s done. After all I did for him; he’s broken my heart too. And I haven’t the time to recover. But you do. You have to carry on, Pamela, if only for Lily’s sake. You’re still young. Please don’t let life pass you by. It doesn’t last forever. I don’t want to fight. Please don’t let it end like this. Mum.’”
Lily sits back with a thump on the floor. The silence broken only by the faint hiss of the gas fire. “God, he really screwed my family didn’t he?” She looks at the postmark on the envelope. “1972, that’s the year she died.”
Jo lets the letter she’s holding fall onto the mattress. “It’s so sad. No one recovered.”
Lily’s eyes are bright. “It’s like he stole everyone from me. He didn’t just leave me, he took everyone with him. He left me nothing. Where are all his relatives? Not one of them kept in touch with me. Where are my grandparents? Why didn’t they send me the odd birthday card? Cousins, aunts, uncles; I had no one.” Lily draws breath and allows her anger to rise like fire. “I have no one. Who am I going to spend Christmas with? I’ll end up with bloody Bert next door.”
“You can come to ours,” says Jo.
Lily remembers Jo’s spluttering indignation when she had come back to Leeds after spending three days with her family last Christmas. It had taken her almost a week to stop regaling tales of how her brother had nicked her Billy Bragg album, and how her father had insisted on them going to church on Christmas Eve, despite the fact he wasn’t religious, because his young wife wanted them to sing carols. Jo had had some great argument with… was it an aunt or a cousin, about politics or racism or something. She had come back to Leeds a ball of anger and frustration.
Jo stands up. “At least we’re friends. I know it’s not exactly family.”
Lily pours them another drink. She stands up to hand Jo the mug. They dwarf the dingy room, with its nicotine striped wallpaper.
“Do you know what I want? I want him to get some idea of consequence. That he can’t do what he did and it not to have any consequence.” Lily’s words are slurred. “When I was eight years old, I came home from school to find my mum lying on the kitchen floor with her head in the oven. Afterwards, this doctor pressed a bottle of tablets into my hand and said, ‘make sure your mummy takes two every morning when she gets up and two before she goes to bed.’ And I was too embarrassed to tell him my mum never went to bed. She lived on the sofa; so I didn’t know when to give her the pills.”
“You can’t let him get away with it, Lil. He can’t be allowed to say he has no wish for contact. No way. Let’s go back again,” says Jo. “Take another look. Hey, we might have got the wrong David Winterbottom for all we know.”
Lily shakes her head. Unusually for her, inside her is a sense of deep certainty. She knows they were at the right house.
“Well then, Lil,” says Jo, when it becomes clear Lily isn’t going to speak. “Let’s pay him another visit. It’s not like we’ve got anything better to do.”
Chapter 11
Jo parks the Mini a few hundred yards away from Newlands and looks at the clock on the dashboard, three twenty. “Hope we’re not too late.”
Twenty minutes pass before the schoolgirl appears around the corner, hands in pockets, sucking on a lollipop. “God, what a stiff,” mutters Lily, as the girl stops outside the side gate, gets her purse from her bag and her key from her purse and lets herself in.
Less than half an hour later a dark green Volvo estate pulls up outside the front gates. The driver taps in a code and the wrought iron sweeps aside. Jo watches through the rear view mirror, while Lily cranes her neck to watch through the passenger’s wing mirror, but they see no more than a flash of the side of a face. “I think it was a man,” says Jo.
Lily bangs her arm against the door. “This is no good.”
“What we need is equipment,” says Jo. They wait in silence as the light gradually fades from the day. “And a proper plan.”
Three days later they are back, sitting in the red and white Mini, in the small, cobbled side street across the road from Newlands. The side street is only a few hundred yards long. It ends in a pair of large wooden gates. The back entrance to the large detached house is on their right. Each house is shielded from the road by a combination of tall fence and high hedge. Not the privet kind; more the well established beech or laurel. They are both wearing black combat trousers and black sweatshirts. Lily’s dreads are tied back in a ponytail and pulled through a baseball cap, which she wears with the peak pulled down over her eyes. Jo is wearing sunglasses and a black beanie hat. She pulls out a pen and their specially
purchased notebook from her bag, and begins to write.
“Do you think anyone can see us here?” asks Lily.
Jo underlines her heading with two thick black lines, before twisting and turning in her seat. “Don’t think so. I can’t see any windows from here.”
Lily pours them a cup of black coffee from the new thermos flask, and unwraps the toast they didn’t have time to eat before they set off that morning.
Moments later, Jo nudges Lily’s elbow. The coffee that Lily has just poured spills over the top of the mug and onto Lily’s inner thighs. Lily leaps up in pain, trying to hold the material of her trousers away from her flesh. Jo, her mouth full of toast, nods towards the house. The gates are opening. With one hand, Lily raises the binoculars to her eyes. A sleek, black sports car pulls out, pausing momentarily to check for traffic. Lily watches it roar off down Primrose Glen. She doesn’t remove the binoculars until the car is out of sight.
“It was a woman, I’m pretty sure.”
“And?” asks Jo. “Hair colour? Age? Was she white? Black? Purple? Come on, Lil, you must have seen something.”
“White, I guess,” says Lily, rubbing at the warm wet patch on her trousers.
DAY ONE (Monday)
07:30 Newlands. All quiet.
07:40 Adult Female (AF) leaves. White.
Black nifty sports car (expensive).
07:55 Postman drops letters into box on outside of gate.
08:25 Green Volvo leaves. Adult Male (AM).
No description available at this time.
Lily puts the binoculars down. “I can’t tell. It’s a man. It could be your dad for all I know.”