by Sarah Till
I'm the bag lady. I've completed the code now, reached the pinnacle of my profession. Funny how things turn out. I could just have easily took myself off and made a life in Spain or trained as a teacher in Essex. One small turn of a cog in the engine of life, and here I am guarding a secret that nobody knows, and that until recently there's been little danger of anyone thinking about. But that's the thing with secrets. Top Secret. By the very nature of them, they are something that you know you need to keep to yourself, but you know other people would want to know. They bubble up and make you feel like they are going to spill out if even a tiny hole if your shell splits.
At the moment my thick, durable shell is held together by gossamer threads, threatening to break at any moment. Don't get me wrong, I won't tell the Top Secret, I'd rather not speak at all. If I can just get though the next week until the court case without upsetting anyone, and stay reasonably clean and tidy, I might have a change to stay here and to prove Julia Scholes wrong. Whoever is threatening me, chasing me for the treasure I don't have, is obviously watching me. They've been in Coombes Cottage and probably searched my shed. They must be starting to realise by now that I don't have what they are looking for. I walk back down the hill, the kestrels accompanying me until the village, then I'm on my own again. Away from my safety my resolve falters a little bit, but by the time I'm back at the house and see that there is no police car parked up the side, I feel almost jolly.
I grab Macy from behind the door and pull her into the garden. I grab the post while I'm there and find a letter from the court telling me the date has been set for next week. The usual letters from the gas and electric, statements. There's also a solicitor’s letter from Jenson and Co. I tear it open, immediately thinking it's from Manchester despite the Padstow postmark. But it's not from Manchester. None of my siblings have died, as far as I know, and it's not from either of my parents. It's from Andrew's solicitors.
Dear Mrs Nelson
My client Mr Andrew Nelson has informed me of an incident where you have intruded on his property. This, and other incidents where you have waited outside his workplace, constitute harassment.
I understand that you have been arrested for public disorder and will be charged after pleading guilty to this offence.
Mr Nelson has asked us to inform you that should any incidents of this nature happen again, then he will have no choice but to seek an injunction. Please do not approach Mr Nelson or his wife and children. If you do not comply with this request, further action will be taken.
Yours faithfully
Patrick Jenson
Senior Partner, Jenson and Co Solicitors
I wait for the rush of tears, the deep search for understanding that usually occurs when Andrew does something like this. It doesn't come. I put the letter down and throw some crumbs to the birds.
'Now then. Just you and me now, it looks like. He doesn't want anything to do with me.'
A sparrow comes a little bit closer and pulls at the crust in my hand. I smile, even though I feel like sobbing.
'After all these years of worrying and wondering and hoping, it's come to this. Well, he might be able to shut me out, and not see me. Not even acknowledge that I'm his mother. Tell people I'm dead. Problem is, it's a two-way thing. He can take away my grandchildren and all those birthdays and christenings and weddings, but he can't stop me from loving him. No. That love belongs to me, a mother to her son, and he can't take it.'
As darkness falls and the birds fly home, their bellies full, I'm left here alone in the garden. Only a tiny robin remains and he watches me, waiting for more titbits.
'It's all gone. Nothing left. I can't even protect you now. Come on, get these crumbs here.' It hops down and brushes my hand. 'It's all gone. Well, almost. I still think I've got a little bit left inside, me, somewhere.'
CHAPTER 19
So I'm letting go. There's no point holding on to something that I can never have back, and Andrew has made it clear that he wants nothing further from me. He's never going to sit with me and tell me why someone is searching for Mum's treasure, he's not interested. Not that letting go is easy. It involves ripping myself apart from something I am firmly attached to, so hard that my skin feels like it is bleeding. I spent the past week pottering around the shed and the garden, pulling up the roots of the plants that didn't make it through my absence and throwing them on the compost heap. It left the garden in good shape, with plenty of room for the plants that were left, the strength, to spread their leaves and soak up the spring sunshine. The sunflowers are creeping up the wall, their leaves soft and downy; at a different time I'd touch them and they would remind me of Andrew's new born skin. But now I have to forget about that. Put it out of my mind.
Even though there have been no more murders, the incident room is still there as well as the news reporters and Mia Connelly has been here twice. Both times I've smelled her tobacco aura before I see her and heard the tap of her stilettos on the road. Each time I've worried that she'd come to search the house, but she hadn't.
'Hello Lizzie. Heard you've been in some trouble. Julia's reported that you've stolen something and spent something on her credit card.'
I stood outside the garden gate the first time, leaning against the dry-stone wall. I’d been watching her for a while through a small gap in the fence, sitting in her car, staring at a pregnancy test stick.
'I didn't. But I think you know that. Just like I've nothing to do with them murders.'
'Mmm. So why did you go to see John Nelson?'
'Because he's my son. No crime there, is there?'
'No. But I just want to know you're safe, Lizzie. Like I said before, I've got an inkling you know more about this than you're letting on. And like the note said, tick, tock.'
She'd gone but come back again two days later and waited outside for an hour, smoke bellowing from the slightly open window of her Mondeo, until I opened the gate. As soon as she saw me she drove off. It was only then I realised that she was checking I was still alive and I nodded and smiled to myself. She’d taken the bunch of herbs I had hung in the gatepost, with a little note saying, ‘For Mia’.
I sleep for long periods in the shed, my whole being wracked by tiredness and pain. Not the kind of pain that a paracetamol or aspirin will fix; a visceral pain that I recognise from when my mother first left. You have to carry it round with you every day, humping it onto your shoulders and taking it into account in everything that you do. But I'm used to that. I've got a rucksack full of agony. I wake up and count across my worries, skipping over those that I've counted more than a thousand times, until I get to Andrew, then I skip over him. I have to. I usually rest on my main worry these days, the golden lump of metal that seems to be at the centre of everything. The birds come to visit me every day, perched on the thick, misshapen hedge, waiting for crumbs. I discover that they like rice pudding, and that if I beckon them, they'll come inside the opening of the shed and peck at the dust.
I wake up this morning and see that it's Wednesday. I can't face the journey into Padstow to sign on, not with the change in my routine. I haven't been down the main road all week; I've crept along the coastal path and along to the headland, taking care to avoid anyone. There are lots of news vans in the village now, and gruesome sight seers everywhere, not even disguising themselves as holiday makers. Tintagel is booming, all the guest houses full, everyone involved in a real-life game of Cluedo. I can't envisage a journey into Padstow without waiting outside Andrew's office for a glimpse. I can't even trust myself not to do it once I get there, and it's important that I don't do anything to make tomorrow any worse.
I know that it's Wednesday because last week I drew lines to represent days on the shed wall. I crossed them off every night and checked the letter to tell myself that Thursday was definitely the day of the court hearing. There's only one left now, then the line inside a big circle. I tidy out the shed and wonder if I'll see it again. No one has mentioned jail, and Joanne seemed to think I'd get a fi
ne. Celia also didn't think I would go to prison. But who knows? A lot of it depends on the jury, and what they think. Julia Scholes is a tidy woman, very controlled in her appearance. I am the opposite. But, after today, the gap will have closed a little. Because I have a plan. I've fidgeted around all week, waiting for Wednesday, because it's today that I'm going to go back into the house.
Just as the sun peeps over the roof of the roof, I push open the kitchen door. It's sticky and it creaks a little, but it opens cleanly and I walk in. There's a smell of damp, and a channel of blackness down one wall, with mould and fungi growing on it, but otherwise, it's not too bad. A thick film of light brown dust covers everything, and as I move across the room, the sunlight catches it and it glistens. I watch it for a moment, then realise that it must be sand. Jer told me that sand looks completely different under a microscope. He told me that sand is the fingerprint of the beach it comes from, and a sample of sand under a microscope can easily identify the part of the world from where it originates. In some parts of the world the entire beach is made up of shells and snail shells, so small that you can't see them. In other parts it's made up of tiny stones. He often talks about hidden worlds, outside what we can see, outside the range of our eyesight. He told me that there's world out there, right in front of us, that we can only imagine. That birds and bees see things completely different to us because they have a different colour spectrum. Lots of invisible things that affect us, even down to the creatures that live on our eyelashes and the bugs in our beds. He'd given me a cheeky look.
'Not our beds. That's why we're lucky. At least we don't have to put up with bed bugs.'
Lucky. He said that a lot, and I agree with him. He's taught me to try to see everything as only part of what there really is. It's his reason for not worrying what people think, because they are only judging from what they think is reality, not from a real view of the world. So the sand glistens in the kitchen and I walk up the hallway and towards the stairs.
I can already hear a scuttling, and I see the tail of something disappear down a hole in the corner of the hallway carpet. I step on the stairs, which I expect to be weak, but they are quite firm. My main fear is that the upstairs floors will have been so soaked that they have rotted, but everything seems bone dry. And after all, someone else has been up here. I can still see feint footsteps in the murky dust, and before I step forward I check that there is a similar track leading out of the house. I reach the top of the stairs and startle a flight of pigeons that have been nestling in the high rafters. A shaft of sunlight penetrates the house through the skylight here, and I see an intricate network of spider's webs, hung with white dust now. I haven't been up here since Andrew left.
It looks only slightly different, tinged with a green hue that, on closer inspection, has grown into colourful cultures in places where it was very damp, and then formed into a crust. It's quite pretty really. I brush some of it off the top of a wicker chair and it just falls to the floor. In a powdery puff. The particles waft upwards and into the faux crepuscular light, and dance about lightly. If Jer were here now, he'd tell me they were alive. That almost everything is alive in one way or another. I pad through to the bedroom, my bedroom, passing Andrew's empty space. I only glance is, resisting the spectre of him standing there. I'm preferring, right now, to pretend he'd never been here, that it had all been an accident.
My bedroom, like the kitchen, glistens in the light. I touch my old dressing table, the one from mine and Stan's room. Its darkness reminds me of the time sent in Manchester, the boredom and the stillness. That dressing table's seen all kinds of things. It was there at Andrew's conception and at Stan's death. I couldn't get rid of it when I moved here, I needed an affinity with at least one object, something that testified to my former life; that made it real. I open a drawer now and the perfume of makeup surprises me. Compared with the dimmed appearance of the room, everything in the drawer is bright. Another drawer is the same.
I open the wardrobe and silently thank Stan for his prudence. He'd insisted that all clothes were covered in plastic zipper bags, like body bags but without the body. Thankfully, my clothes had been preserved and were still wearable. I cleared the dressing table mirror off, a thick film of dust coating my hands, and held up a coat against me. Shoes still in boxes, socks and tights in packets. Underwear all in compartments.
I sit on the bed for a moment, plumping down on the duvet, an explosion of brown clouds around me. Where was all the water? How had it stopped on its own? I walked carefully into the bathroom, where the worst of the damage had been and switched on the tap. No water. Not even a gurgling noise. Completely dry. Same in the ensuite. The horrible realisation crept up on me, the thought I could have lived here all along, even without electricity, rather than in the shed. As if to immediately dispel this, I hear a scurry behind me and see a mouse, then another, run under the bed and out the other side. I don't have time to think about this now. I go to a pile of unopened boxes, still unpacked after years, and select the third one down. I tear off the tape and open the flaps and find what I need straight away. Stan had always cut his own hair, and Andrew's. I would ask him to trim mine every now and then so I didn't have to visit the hairdresser, and he would sit me on a chair and tell me to take my blouse off, leaving only my bra on.
He would take a long time making sure that my hair was straight, snipping away at stray bits, looking at it from every angle. It was never quite right; never perfect. Of course, I knew all along that he wasn't concerned with my hair, and this was the closest we got to lovemaking after Andrew was born. It made me happy, that he still liked to look at me. So happy that I had hidden his haircutting set away from Andrew, away from anyone who had a claim on Stan. It was a part of just the two of us, our bond, that was so precious to me. And now it would help me again.
My hair has been my triumph and my bane, and right now I know that it's a huge contribution to why I wouldn't be taken seriously. Obviously the tape-bound shoes and the baggy stocking won't help, neither will the dirty skin, but my hair gives me a unique crone look, perpetually greasy at the roots, cascading to near dreadlocks at the bottom. The shower at the police station had helped, but now, a week later, it was back in its dire mess. Just as Celia had said, I had regressed back into bag-ladydom in a very short time. I wonder if that time decreases as the years pass, and eventually a shower will make no difference whatsoever?
It's make or break time now for me, and I select the sharpest scissors in the kit. I clear the mirror again and unravel the thick plait that I did this morning. The plait reaches past my bottom, and when I untie it, my hair is bottom length. Andrew and I had look at the Guinness Book of records in the library, and I had seen people who had never cut their hair. I hadn't cut mine, other than a light trim by Stan, since I was in my teens. I gather it all up into my free hand and cut roughly through it, just below my shoulders. I'm shocked as I stand in front of the mirror with a bunch of sandy hair in one hand. It makes me panic a little, and I fumble around in the bottom drawer for fluid. I need to get this right. I have to look presentable.
Finally I find a big bottle of witch hazel and pour some of it over my head. It had the desired effect, soaking my hair, and I take the stainless-steel comb and pull it as straight as I can. I can almost feel Stan's heavy hands on it, pulling out the curls over and over again, until they are straight, then snipping off the tiniest amount from the ends. I mimic this, but my snips are inches long, until it rests just in my shoulders, stretched. I comb the very front over my face and snip in a long fringe, and it takes three attempts to get it straight. Eventually I pull the two sides together level and I can almost feel his breath on my face as he leans into me and catches my eye. It was enough for him.
My scalp smarts with the witch hazel and my hair springs back into big curls around my face now, making me look very different. The grey is hardly noticeable, turning now to streaks of white blonde. I take the tweezers and pluck the think black hair out of my chin one by one, then
pull harder at my moustache. The, I pluck my bushy eyebrows into a thick, straight line. There's a bottle of moisturiser in the drawer, and when my skin is smooth I slather it over, rubbing it in. The scent of it masks the mould and for a moment I feel good. I rub it into my neck and my skin immediately feels less tight, as if I have suddenly more room to live. I coat my hands and spend some time treating my feet. I snip at my hard, yellow toenails, making them short and tidy instead of ragged. Then I cut my fingernails. I smile a little as I choose a light pink nail polish, and it hides the brownness, but makes my hand look tanned instead of dirty.
That's enough for today. I take a dress from the wardrobe. I don't need to unzip the bag to know it's the black dress that I wore for Stan's funeral. I take a diamante brooch from the dresser, and a pair of black shoes from their box. Tights, pants, a good bra and a black mac. My old makeup bag with fake Dior and and Real Max factor makeup. I unzip it and it smells like chemicals, yet fresh. The aura seeps inside me a fills me with a desire to apply mascara. Finally, I choose a handbag. It feels strange to hold it, like it's a mini version of my carriers and of Macy, something that I can carry just a small compartment of my life in. Which will be ideal for tomorrow. I creep back downstairs as if someone is in bed and I don't want to wake them. As I tiptoe back through the glistening kitchen, I see a piece of paper on the floor. For a moment I think it's from Andrew, something I had missed from when he left, but I don't recognise the handwriting. Then, for a dreaded second I think it's one of the blood-soaked notes. I pick it up and read it. It's from the plumber, Mr Barnes, who came here all that time ago. It was to tell me he had switched the water off at the stopcock and that I should call him and he could do some temporary repairs.