by Camilla Way
Would u like one?
Maybe. He can’t see her, but still she goes red.
Would u be my girlfriend?
She hesitates again. OK.
U ever kissed a boy?
She stares at the question without answering. It feels as though the fairground ride she’d been enjoying has suddenly accelerated. No, she eventually types.
I’d like to kiss u.
She feels the heat in her cheeks. U don’t know me …
No, but u seem really nice, from ur picture and the things u say. But that’s OK, I no I’m not good looking, we can just be friends if u like, it’s cool.
U are good looking. Ur really handsome.
As she leaves the toilets she finds she can’t stop grinning, and the tiny flicker of doubt she’d felt has all but disappeared by the time she reaches her next class.
Viv drives the short distance to her mother’s, still thinking about the flowers. Stella’s street is almost in sight, but the traffic lights are out of order and she’s caught in the resulting gridlock. Tapping her fingers on the steering wheel in frustration, she tries to lighten her mood by thinking about her encounter with Hayley earlier. Hearing about the other women – and poor Rafferty Wolf – had been so lovely, and idly she wonders if it might be possible to organize some kind of reunion for them all, at Stella’s place perhaps.
Reluctantly, her thoughts turn to Margo. In the twenty-two years since she left Unity House, Viv had seen her only once. It had been in a supermarket in Herne Hill that Viv happened to be passing and had dived into to escape the rain. She’d been browsing magazines when she’d looked up to see an elderly black woman walking with a stick. Viv had known instantly who she was; despite the intervening years her striking features were unmistakable. The older woman had turned her head and they had locked eyes. And it was the strangest thing. Viv wasn’t sure what she’d expected: shame, perhaps – guilt, almost certainly. But the look on Margo’s face had been something else entirely, an emotion she never thought she’d see in those beautiful brown eyes. Shocked and angry, Viv had turned and left without acknowledging her and never went back to that supermarket. Whenever she thought of it she’d bristled with disgust, her sense of betrayal visceral and raw once more. The traffic jam shifts at last and she turns into Stella’s road, the memory of that unsettling meeting lingering.
Getting out of her car, she sees Shaun smoking a cigarette outside her mother’s house and feels a sudden burst of fury.
‘All right?’ he leers, when he sees her.
‘So it’s not just my house you smoke your fags outside?’ she snaps.
‘Come again?’
His arrogant, handsome face is repulsive to her now. ‘I saw you. Hanging around outside my house last night. What do you think you’re playing at?’
‘Free country, ain’t it?’
‘Was it you who sent me flowers?’
He bursts out laughing. ‘Me, send you flowers? Off your head, you are!’
And all at once she knows with absolute certainty that the irises hadn’t come from him. ‘Leave me alone,’ she says, turning away to hide her mortification. ‘Next time I see you in my street, I’ll call the police.’
‘Yeah, you do that, love.’ He blows out a long stream of smoke and laughs. ‘Fucking nutjob.’
Her mother’s in the kitchen when she goes in. ‘Where’s Cleo?’ she asks, looking around for her daughter.
‘Hmm? Oh, not sure. Maybe she went to the loo.’
She thinks of Cleo wandering around upstairs, where Shaun could happen by at any moment, and says crossly, ‘For God’s sake Mum, don’t you know?’
Going out into the hall, she calls her daughter’s name. ‘I’m in the bathroom!’ is the response, and Vivienne waits in the hall, trying to regain her composure. She shouldn’t have spoken to her mother like that, today of all days.
When she goes back she touches Stella’s shoulder. ‘Sorry for snapping. How are you?’
‘Oh … you know …’ she replies with a sigh.
‘Yeah.’ Viv nods. ‘I know.’
When Cleo comes back in, Stella says tartly, ‘There you are. Thought you’d fallen in. Expect you took your phone up there, did you?’
‘Oh, give it a rest, Gran,’ Cleo says. ‘Stop hassling me.’
Her voice is sharper than Viv has ever heard it and she looks at her daughter in surprise. ‘Cleo!’ she says. ‘Don’t speak to your gran like that!’
Her daughter sighs and shrugs, before flouncing out of the room.
Vivienne stands there, watching her mother stir something on the stove. And then, unable to keep it to herself any longer, says to her back, ‘Someone sent a bunch of irises to the café today.’ She waits anxiously for Stella’s reaction.
Stella stops what she’s doing, but doesn’t look at her daughter.
‘I don’t know who sent them,’ Viv goes on. ‘It’s freaked me out a bit, to be honest, especially today …’
Finally her mum turns to face her. ‘It must be a coincidence. Who might have sent them to you?’
‘That’s just it – I have no idea. They were sent in a box, a courier dropped them off. They weren’t from a florist or anything, in fact they were half dead. I threw them away.’
‘How horrible.’
‘Do you think I should tell the police? Do you think it’s someone connected to Ruby?’ She sees her mother’s wince of pain and feels instantly guilty.
‘What do you mean?’ Stella asks quietly.
‘Well, like …’ Viv makes herself speak her fear out loud. ‘Like Jack Delaney.’
‘He emigrated,’ Stella says, turning away. ‘Years ago. Why would he be sending you flowers now?’
‘I don’t know.’ After a silence, she says, ‘Where do you even get irises in November, anyway? They’re not in season, are they?’
‘Florists can get hold of anything these days, I should imagine.’
Viv hesitates. ‘Where did you get them for … for Ruby’s funeral?’
Her mother carries on stirring, then glances over her shoulder at Viv. ‘I didn’t. Morris sorted them out. He knew how much she loved them.’
She stares at her. ‘Morris?’
Stella stops stirring and turns to face her. ‘Yes, Morris Dryden. The butcher’s son. He offered, he knew they were Ruby’s favourites. He got hold of a florist in one of the big towns, I can’t remember which. I expect his father helped him, you know Morris wasn’t entirely all there.’ She’s silent for a beat or two, then adds, ‘He loved your sister, would have done anything for her.’
‘He did?’
‘Yes. That’s why he was always inventing reasons to come over, running pretend errands for his dad.’
A sudden memory of Morris comes to Vivienne. How on the village green her kite had landed in a tree and he’d shinned up to get it for her. How once he’d swung her round and onto his shoulders when she was very little. She recalls Ruby, the sun glinting on her curls, aged about fourteen and wearing a white cotton top and jeans, her face tanned from summer, saying, ‘Thank you, Morris, you’re sweet,’ and Morris’s grin of delight.
She’d never remembered that before. ‘He was nice,’ she says to her mother. ‘I liked him.’ Then, ‘What do you mean, “pretend errands”?’
‘Look, Vivienne, I’m sorry, I don’t want to talk about all this.’ Stella turns back to her stirring. ‘I just can’t.’
‘Of course, Mum, I’m so sorry.’
7
Living at the commune changed Stella. It happened so slowly that at first nobody noticed until one day it was plain to see that she was a very different person from the woman who had arrived lost and grief-stricken at Unity House all those months before. It was Sandra who started it, who said one day that Stella should go with her to the women’s refuge she worked at, that she might find it interesting to hear the stories of the people there. And she was right. ‘I think it helped her,’ Viv heard Sandra murmur to Christine afterwards, ‘to make her feel less alone in wha
t she’s been through.’
Another time, Hayley said to Stella, ‘Why don’t you come along to one of my Women’s Lib meetings?’ And gradually, Stella had found what to do with all the grief and shock and sadness of Ruby’s death.
Vivienne went to one of the meetings once. On the door of the community centre had been pinned a handwritten sign that said, ‘Women Unite Against Domestic Violence’. Hayley was supposed to be looking after Viv in another room, because there was nobody at home that night to leave her with, and she’d sat in the draughty ante-room with a bag of Jelly Babies Sandra had given her. But when Hayley told her to stay where she was, slipping through the door into the main hall, Viv, curious, had followed her.
She saw a circle of women sitting on orange plastic chairs and then, to her amazement, her mother stood up and began to speak. The Jelly Babies never got eaten. As Stella talked about discovering her daughter’s body, about how she lost her grandchild too that day, the hall was so silent you could have heard a pin drop, and the lump in Vivienne’s throat was far too large to swallow anything. Afterwards, one by one, the women came to Stella and hugged her, each of them thanking her, telling her she was an inspiration, and asking her how she’d found the strength to carry on. Viv, who’d crept out of the shadows by this time, was near enough to hear her mother say, ‘I carried on because I had no choice: I had my other daughter to think of. I couldn’t allow that monster to ruin her life too.’
Slowly Stella began to drop the plain dark trousers and shirts she once wore, replacing them with the long, colourful garments of the type that Margo favoured. She grew her chin-length brown hair long and coloured it a rich red with henna. She began to go to more and more meetings, was even asked to lead them sometimes. At Sandra’s suggestion, she went on a course to learn how to become a life coach – ‘I think you have a real talent for helping others,’ Sandra said. It seemed to Viv that her mother even began to carry herself differently, adopting a dignified, straight-backed posture, her head held high. Every week at Unity House’s Sunday meetings, which had always been led by Margo, the other women began to ask, ‘What do you think, Stella?’, ‘What’s your view on this?’ and more and more frequently Stella would give her opinion while the others listened with silent respect.
When Stella got a job at an old people’s home in Catford, if Viv wasn’t at school she stayed at home with whomever happened to be about. She would hang out in the attic with Soren, watching her paint, organizing her brushes for her and listening to her stories about her childhood in South Africa. Or else she would go to Sandra and Christine’s floor and play with Rafferty Wolf. She liked, too, to go down to the basement where Kay lived. She did this when she was feeling lonely but didn’t really want to talk. Together they’d listen to music on Kay’s portable cassette player; sad, mournful stuff so beautiful it made her want to cry, but in a good way. ‘What is this music?’ she asked Kay once. And when Kay told her she’d looked back at her perplexed. ‘Bark? What, like what a dog does?’ but Kay just smiled and taught her how to play four different kinds of Patience. They would sit, side by side, quiet but for the music and the slap of playing cards on the table.
Hayley’s room was the most fun. They’d dance together to her David Bowie LPs and Hayley would tell her about Greenham Common and the rallies and marches she’d been on, and about Maggie Thatcher and the rest of the Tory scum. She taught her how to roll cigarettes for her and Viv would sit carefully with a pack of Rizla papers and a pouch of tobacco and diligently make one roll-up after another, which Hayley would either smoke or tuck behind her ears and say, ‘Cheers, kiddo.’
But it was Margo who really captured Vivienne’s heart, who she would seek out to spend time with when her mother was out. Margo never asked her questions, but there was something in the way she listened that made Vivienne tell her things she never told anyone else. Together they would tend the vegetables in the garden, or Margo would show her how to help her make an enormous chilli con carne for that evening’s meal, and Viv would talk – about her old life in the village she’d grown up in, and about Ruby. She found she could talk to Margo about her sister in a way she didn’t like to with her mother. Each time she tried to with Stella it was like a heavy weight pushing down on her, her words clogging her throat. But with Margo it was different. She didn’t talk about the murder, just about things she and her sister used to do together, about how kind Ruby was, how she made her feel safe and loved. It made her feel better to talk about her; she didn’t want to forget.
To Vivienne, Margo was the best thing about Unity House. Which is why it was such a shock to discover how wrong she’d been about her, how terribly, terribly wrong. Her mother knew, though. She’d known it almost from the first day. She always had been so clever like that.
Cleo’s waiting for a bus to take her home from school when a text arrives from Daniel asking for her email address. She sends it to him immediately and, feeling suddenly restless, decides to walk on to the next bus stop. As she avoids puddles and crowds of school kids, she thinks about the letters she’d found in her grandmother’s room. An uneasy, anxious sort of feeling has been swilling around inside her ever since. It weighs heavily on her, the predicament of keeping such a huge secret from her mother. She should, she reasons, ask her grandmother about the letters … but always something stops her. For as long as she can remember, Stella has never talked about the past. Never ever. Cleo remembers the time, aged about ten and not long after she’d learned the truth about Ruby’s death, she’d mentioned her aunt’s name in front of Stella. She recalls her mum’s urgent shake of the head, her silencing glance of warning.
Cleo scowls as she dodges a large puddle and sees her bus sail past. She hadn’t been very nice to her grandmother since her discovery and feels bad about it. Stella senses something, she knows. Now there is this odd chill between them and she doesn’t know what to do about it.
She thinks sometimes of telling Layla about the letters, just to feel the relief of speaking it out loud, but something stops her – as though it would be betraying her mum somehow, discussing something so private and painful. But as she walks the cold wet streets towards home, Cleo comes to a decision. She will tell her mother. She won’t be able to stand it if she doesn’t. But not yet. It’s too soon after Ruby’s anniversary, and her mum is so busy with the café … and before long it will be Christmas and she doesn’t want to spoil that. She will tell her after Christmas, she decides. Definitely.
She feels better, having come to a decision. When her phone vibrates in her pocket and she sees that she has a new email from Daniel, she opens it eagerly, her worries instantly forgotten.
Hey Cleo, u OK? It’s nice being able to email you, feels like we can talk properly now, she reads.
Me too. How are u?
Not good.
Why? What’s happened?’
My dad. I was late coming home from school yesterday, he got angry. Sometimes he hits me and stuff.
Cleo stops at a bus shelter and sits down, staring at the words in dismay. That’s terrible, I’m so sorry. Are u OK?
Yeah. I’ve got a black eye and a fat lip, could be worse.
Her fingers hover over the keypad, unsure how to respond, and a new message appears. I hate him. I always tell people I walked into a door or whatever, guess I’m ashamed that he does it.
It’s not ur fault. Don’t ever think that. Cleo hesitates, then writes, What does ur mum do when he does that?
My mum died when I was little.
Cleo catches her breath. I’m so sorry.
U ever had anyone close to u die?
No. I mean, my aunt died really young, but that was before I was born.
How did she die?
She was killed by her boyfriend. She was only sixteen.
That’s awful.
I know Her name was Ruby. My mum says I look like her.
She must have been beautiful then.
Cleo smiles. I have a picture of her, she was way prettier than me
.
U know how u could cheer me up? Take a selfie right now and send it to me.
After a second’s hesitation, she does as he asks.
Ur so pretty.
Can I have one of u?
I have a fat lip, remember?! Hold on, I’ll find one from the other day.
She waits, counting the seconds, and then there he is. He doesn’t have the hat on in this one, and he’s smiling shyly at the camera. He’s so good-looking with such beautiful blue eyes that her heart flips. She can’t bear the thought of anyone hurting him. Are u OK? she writes. After what ur dad did, I mean?
I am now I’ve talked to u.
She looks up and sees her bus approaching. I better go.
OK. I wish I could see u in real life.
Me too.
Maybe one day. X
The following Saturday, Viv waits at the foot of the stairs for her daughter to come down. When she appears she looks so pretty, her cheeks flushed and glowing, that Vivienne feels a surge of love and pride. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘we’re going next door to visit Neil.’
Cleo rolls her eyes. ‘Oh God, can’t I stay here?’
‘No. He’s our neighbour and he invited us both. Come on, stop being so grumpy. It’ll be half an hour, tops.’
Viv smiles enthusiastically when Neil opens the door, hoping to make up for Cleo’s (and her own, if she’s honest) reluctance. ‘Come in, come in,’ he cries excitedly as they follow him through to the kitchen.
Immediately he makes a big fuss about what Cleo might like to drink, ‘Coke? Lemonade? Juice? Or I’ve got Dr Pepper, if you like? Water? Are you sure? Go on, treat yourself. No? Have a biscuit, then, here you are, take two. Not on a diet, are you? Lovely slim girl like you.’
At this point, Viv hurriedly butts in. ‘Gosh, isn’t it great in here, Neil? You must tell me which builders you use!’ And thankfully Neil’s attention is diverted once more.
In fact, the kitchen is pretty cold and sterile, but it’s expensively done and she finds enough to compliment to keep him on the subject for several minutes. The room opens up on to a living room and, spotting a collection of games consoles, Cleo asks if she can take a look.