Quiet Neighbors

by Catriona McPherson

  Maybe she really was pregnant. Slim girls of nineteen don’t have heavy breasts with blue veins showing. Jude glanced at the belly pushing open the skirt flaps. Eddy was wearing ribbed tights, the waistband pulled high, clear to the bottom of her bra, but her little lolly-stick legs still had wrinkles at the ankles. No swelling.

  “I know,” she said. “I look like a pile of shite.”

  “I think you look lovely.” In truth, Eddy’s hair could have done with a wash. It was dull and separating into hanks at the parting so that her scalp showed. And she didn’t take all of her make-up off at night either; she had black dots from yesterday in the corners of her eyes and a rash of spots in each nostril crease. “Blooming.”

  It came from nowhere. She was thinking about Eddy and Eddy alone, and yet it hit her so hard she doubled over from the pain of it.

  “Jude?” said Eddy, sounding very young.

  She had doubled in pain the first time it hit her too. It was long after Max left that she worked it out. She calculated, from the news her soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law insisted on sharing, that the day of the charity picnic when Raminder floated around serene and magnificent, brimming with health and hope, she was already two months along.

  Max had stopped drinking. Jude had been telling herself they’d turned a corner, good times were on the way.

  “Jude?” said Eddy again. “Are you okay?”

  Jude straightened up and tried to smile. “Sorry,” she said. “Maybe I need to talk to you too.”

  “You first,” Eddy said. “I’m still trying to screw up the courage.”

  “I was married,” Jude began. “We couldn’t have children. Well, I couldn’t. He could. He did. Now we’re not married. Well, I’m not. He is.” The way the words jerked out of her sounded comic even to her own ears.

  “Scumbag,” Eddy shouted. She had so much mascara on that her eyes, wide with outrage, were like cartoon daisies drawn with a marker pen.

  “You look like Twiggy,” said Jude.

  “Who?”

  “Google her. And thanks for not laughing. If you’d laughed I might have broken up in little bits.”

  “Thanks a million!” Eddy said. “What did I do to get that? Why would I laugh?”

  “It’s not you,” Jude said. “Look, what did you want to say?”

  “I wanted to ask you … ” Eddy chewed her lip. “But here’s something else first. How come you’re here when your parents have just died? How come you’re not home sorting out all their stuff?” It was the same question Mrs. Hewston had fired at her.

  “Council house, only child. Plus I’m a cataloguer. It was done and dusted before the funeral.” She sat back on her heels. “But I cheated a bit. There was a post-mortem, so the funeral took three weeks.” That was a distraction. What did it say about her life that a post-mortem on her parents was a polite way to distract attention from the really bad stuff?

  “Why was that then?” said Eddy.

  “They died in their car,” said Jude. It was about as dishonest as the truth could ever be. She couldn’t face telling Eddy what had really happened. Eddy had had what everyone deserves: a mother dying in a crisp hospital bed with cheerful nurses and a drinks machine in the corridor. No one would smirk at her. “Why aren’t you sorting your mum’s stuff?” she said. Another distraction.

  “She didn’t have any,” Eddy said. “No possessions, like Lennon said. ” Then she grinned. “I haven’t told him yet I was a commune kid. I decided before I got here to keep that bit quiet in case, you know … ” Jude shook her head. “In case he got pissed off with Mum.”

  “About what?” said Jude. “It sounds like Jamaica House wasn’t far off being a commune back in the day. Too close to one for Mrs. Hewston anyway.”

  “Well, cos it’s one thing to cut him out if she was married all nicey-nicey, but it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth to have nothing to do with him when anything else goes.”

  “I suppose,” said Jude. She shelved a couple of books. “A commune in Derry?” Another book. “You’d think they’d all be in the west. Somehow. Sorry if that’s a cliché.”

  “Sometimes it’s handier to be in the UK and not real Ireland,” Eddy said. “Some of the guys couldn’t—you know—get over the border. Passports and that.” She gave Jude a knowing look.

  “Dave Preston?” said Jude. If Eddy’s stepfather had been one of the guys who couldn’t legally get over the Irish border, Jude was losing respect for Miranda’s taste in men. Leaving kind sweet Lowell for that sort was madness.

  “Nah,” said Eddy. “He’ll never leave Fermanagh. He lives three streets from his granny. Mum stuck it out seven years, but she never liked it. As soon as she left him, we were straight back to the Community till she had to go to hospital. I think she made the right choice. I mean, a lot of it sucked, but they looked after her really well as long as they could. Dave would never have done that.”

  Lowell would, was what Jude was thinking. “She really kept quiet about Lowell?” was what she said.

  “She never mentioned Scotland at all,” Eddy said. “She talked about travelling in Wales, all over Ireland, Glastonbury and that. All before I was born. I was dead chuffed when I looked up LG Books and found out it was this close to the ferry over.”

  “And she finally told you right at the end? I’ve been feeling pretty sick about not speaking to mine for weeks before they died,” Jude said. “But getting hit with a bombshell like you were … ”

  “I’m just glad I listened,” Eddy said. “She was off her head on the morphine. And I was knackered too—completely zoned out. But she gripped my hand so tight my fingers went purple, so I knew it was important. She said my father’s name was Lowell and he was good man. She said she’d done a terrible thing and she was sorry. And then I thought she said Lowland Glen was a bookshop in Jamaica. I was glad to get that straight.”

  “The terrible thing being that she kept you apart from your father?”

  “I suppose so,” Eddy said. “Or making me live in the Community.”

  “That bad?”

  Eddy thought about it for a moment or two. She was pleating the skirt of her dress, pinching it up in two fingers to make a fan. “Nah. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was freezing cold in the winter and the food was terrible. We grew most of it ourselves. “

  “In Ireland?”

  “Exactly. And we never got anything new. Jumble sales and hand-me-downs all the way. And a lecture about how we were everything that was wrong with the world if we ever moaned.”

  Jude felt something then that she couldn’t put a name to. She looked at the baggy pinafore and the wrinkled tights, at the clumped mascara and patches of oily skin, and suddenly she wanted to bundle Eddy into the Volvo, drive her to Glasgow, and buy her anything she pointed at.

  “So … that’s what you wanted to ask me,” she said, winding back through the conversation. “What am I doing here. But what is it you want to tell me?”

  Eddy let the pinched pleats of dress fall, put her hands up to her face, and hid it.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” Jude said. “I’m sorry.”

  The girl’s shoulders were shaking. Jude looked around helplessly. She had no pressed cotton handkerchief in her pocket. She glanced at the duster, but it was filthy. Eddy’s sobs grew louder with every breath.

  “I’ve done a really stupid thing,” she said. “It’s about being pregnant.” She pulled her hands to the sides of her face, stretching her skin, so that pink crescents showed inside her lower eyelids and her bottom lip turned out, shining and smooth, like the curve of a conch shell. “I don’t know how to tell him,” she said. “I don’t even know how to tell you.”

  “You don’t have to,” Jude said. “I guessed.”

  Eddy let her hands drop. Her marker-pen mascara was smeared into swipes of war paint over her cheeks. “How?” she said.
/>   “I worked it out.”

  “How?”

  “That’s not the question, Eddy. The question is why? Why’d you do it?”

  “I don’t know,” Eddy said. “I wasn’t thinking straight, what with my mum and everything. And then it just sort of took on a life of its own—he was so thrilled!—and I don’t know how to stop it without destroying him and making him hate me.” She gave a big shuddering sigh. “How the hell did you guess? Are you some kind of psychic. Or—Hey! Have you been reading my texts? And why didn’t you bust me?”

  “Tell Lowell, you mean?” Jude said. “I haven’t lived your life and I haven’t had your troubles.” It wasn’t particularly true. “Mostly I didn’t want to rock the boat,” she admitted.

  “No,” said Eddy, with a new note in her voice. “You wouldn’t, would you?”

  It must have been her imagination, but Jude would have sworn the light on the Biography landing dimmed a little. It couldn’t have. LG Books was decrepit but not so bad that the lightbulbs flickered if someone switched the kettle on. And besides, Lowell—wherever he was—wasn’t moving. The whole house was completely silent, no wind rattling the windows, no creaks as the boards and beams shifted, and outside not a car passed nor a child called out nor a single reversing delivery van made a sound.

  “I snooped,” Eddy said.

  “Well, I deserve to be snooped on, I suppose,” Jude said. “I slipped up, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah. Saying Raminder.” Eddy gazed at her. “You know they’re looking for you, don’t you?”

  “I really don’t want to be found,” said Jude.

  “I’m not going to tell.”

  “Why not?”

  Eddy stuffed her empty Twix wrapper in her coffee cup and banged it down on the octagonal table. “Because here’s why. You know what they called her, don’t you? You know what Raminder called the baby?”

  “Jade.”

  “Jade! Like you basically don’t exist. Like it never even occurred to them. Jade and Jude! Bastards!”

  “Thanks,” said Jude.

  “I scratch your back,” Eddy said. She stared at Jude for a moment and then added, “I slipped too.”

  “Saying Aries,” said Jude.

  Eddy tipped her head, mock-saluting. “So it’s not just this,” she said, laying a hand on her stomach. “It’s that too.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “I’m not his. He’s not a dad and he’s not going to be a grandpa.”

  “I’m not going to tell,” said Jude, trying a little impersonation of Eddy’s accent, to make her smile. “I scratch yours too.”

  “I just wish I knew why she did it,” said Eddy, the tiny smile fading. “Why tell me lies on her deathbed? Who does that?” Jude shook her head. “No psychic lightbulbs about that one?”

  “Sorry,” Jude said. “It doesn’t make any sense to me any way I look at it. And I don’t know what to do.”

  “Never say die,” Eddy said. “We’ll work something out, won’t we?” She must have seen Jude’s face fall, because she turned clamourous, insistent. “Come on! My mum managed to disappear, why can’t you? And I’m not the only kid in the world with a dodgy ‘dad.’ Christ, I bet I’m not even the only one in Wigtown. And as for this?” She slapped her belly again. “We’ll think of something.”

  Jude said nothing. When Miranda disappeared no one was looking for her, because she hadn’t done anything. “I don’t want to live in a commune,” she answered at last.

  “Ha!” said Eddy. “It’d kill you. They don’t get many neat freaks in the Community.” Then she laughed at Jude’s face. “What? Was that supposed to be a secret too?” She pointed and cackled. Jude looked down at the Twix wrapper folded into a tiny square and wedged into the narrow end of the coffee-cup handle. “You know the one thing that bothers me?” Eddy said, sobering. “That Hewston bint. This place is perfect apart from her. She’s the sort that’ll ferret out anything she can get a sniff of and make up what she can’t.”

  “She troubled me too, at first,” Jude said, “but I don’t think we need to worry. Two reasons. One, she’s gaga. She was talking absolute crap to me when she came round and she’s starting to know it. She got upset when she got confused.”

  “Good,” said Eddy. “What’s the other one?”

  “She knows what side her bread’s buttered. She lives rent-free in Lowell’s house and she’d be a fool to wreck that, wouldn’t she?”

  “That makes three of us. He’s a bit of a chick magnet, is old—”

  “Dad,” said Jude. “Just call him Dad, Eddy. He’ll never order a DNA test. He loves you.”

  And, even though she was young and in a fix, Eddy paid enough attention to hear something in Jude’s voice. “I’m sorry,” she said. “If I hadn’t come along, you’d be well in by now.”

  “I don’t think of him that way,” Jude said. “He’s just a genuinely good, kind, sweet man.”

  “Up a tree,” sang Eddy. “K-I S-S-I-N—Yeah, I know he is.” She sighed. “He used to work in a care home, for fuck’s sake. And he keeps his creepy porn locked up where no one can accidentally see it.”

  “It’s not porn!” said Jude. “It’s a valuable collection of … something. Oh, I give up,” she added as Eddy blew a raspberry. “And you’ve no need to apologise. I’ve got a house and a job and a friend. I’m better off than I could have imagined a couple of weeks ago. If I can just keep my head down till . . . It’s easy on the telly, isn’t it? Films and all that? People get new identities all the time. But it’s not the same in real life.”

  “You don’t need a new identity,” Eddy said. “Mum used bang on about this all the time. You can call yourself anything you want and—say what you like about this country—you never need to show your papers.”

  It was Anne Tyler again, but it looked like Eddy believed it. Jude smiled and tried to believe it too.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’ve got a home and a job and two good friends.”

  “Three,” said Eddy, “counting Mrs. Hewston.”

  Sixteen

  Except, in Jude’s mind, there was a fourth friend and she wanted more of him. After some hard graft and a bit of desk work over lunch, she told herself sternly. She was supposed to be saving an ailing business here.

  Spinning Yarns, the book and wool shop next door to the left, and Tilly’s, the tarot and crystals operation next door to the right, had steady streams of customers. Jude could hear the Yarns shop bell ding whenever she was up in Mighty Hunters and the Tilly’s wind chimes when she was up in Ladies Who, on account of the way the big front windows were always cracked open around Lowell’s sign strings. She had gone to visit the proprietors, hoping to get some tips, but both of them—a retired Yorkshire social worker in the tarot shop and a young Polish mum whose husband worked at the fishery—told her the Internet was all that mattered and they only kept the shops because the rates were cheap and the rent was cheaper.

  She took the last of her coffee into the dead room at two o’clock and surveyed the squatting toad, the book mountain. T. Jolly was thirty years deep. She could just dig in, throwing books over both shoulders like a burrowing mole, but she was too much of a librarian. She could deal with each bag from start to finish, sorting, cleaning, pricing, shelving … Except she could see into one of the front bags from here and it was three Asda cookbooks staring back at her: vegetables, chicken, and cheese. She would know that Asda cheese cookbook at fifty paces because there were two more upstairs in Home Crafts and Gardening; one pristine for a pound and one well-crusted—with cheese, presumably—for twenty-five pence.

  Nothing, Jude thought, was twenty-five pence anymore, so God only knew how long it had been there. She was going to have to tell Lowell to send some of these to the pulper. He wouldn’t agree; he would—he had!—start on about jumble sales and the free exchange of ideas and sending books to Africa. As though a vi
llage school in Africa would thank him for Asda’s Book of Cheese.

  In the end, she compromised by starting three towers just inside the dead room door, doing a bit of rough triage. Slowly, the book mountain grew a canyon as Jude removed bag after bag from its nearest slope. The three towers soared. But it was almost closing time before she saw something that said T. Jolly to her eager and practised eye. She tugged, felt the north wall of the canyon threaten to slip, and spent another patient twenty minutes excavating properly. She had just freed a tantalising Brentford Nylons carrier, packed three across and six deep with hardbacks, when Lowell sidled in.

  “Golly,” he said, looking at the towers and canyon. “Dear me, yes, it has rather run away from me, hasn’t it?”

  “Sell, pass on, RIP,” Jude said pointing. “Don’t look! Or if you insist on looking, don’t argue. You’ve lived without all of them up till now. If I’m about to give the upside-down penny black to Maureen at the Cancer, it’s no worse than it sitting here turning into coal.”

  “Fine, fine, no argument!” Lowell said, holding up both hands and backing away. “Do whistle if you come across anything called Love’s Labour’s Won, won’t you?”

  “Or Cardenio,” said Jude. “I’m a librarian, Lowell. I know about lost Shakespeare.”

  Lowell put a hand to his breast and bowed his head, a repentant knight.

  “You can make it up to me by giving me a lucky dip price for this,” she added, holding up the Brentford bag.

  Lowell took a step closer, pulling his spectacles down from amongst his hair.

  “Whoa! Whoa!” said Jude. “Lucky dip! I don’t know what’s in here and neither do you. That’s the whole point.”

  “A pound,” Lowell said.

  “We’ll call it a tenner,” said Jude. “And take it out of my wages. Anyway, what can I do for you?”