A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  ‘What you up to today?’ she asks, twirling a curl around a finger.

  ‘Paperwork. Mostly.’

  ‘Mostly ?’ she quizzes.

  ‘Pauline wondered if we should take the kids to the aquadrome in Welwyn later.’

  ‘But you said you hated it there.’ Joanna, busy envisaging the lovely Pauline in her swimsuit splashing around in the pool with Mike. ‘It’s what you tell me whenever I suggest going.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that, but—’

  ‘Because Pauline likes it, you want to go?’ Joanna interrupts him and prods the flesh around her middle, the baby weight she gained and struggled to shift.

  ‘Why are you being like this? It’s your fault if you think you’re missing out on things here – I said I’d come with you, didn’t I? I wanted to come with you.’ She hears his frustrated sigh. ‘Pauline said she’d have looked after the boys.’

  ‘Oh, because of course that would’ve been great fun, wouldn’t it?’ Joanna darts a look at her only travelling companion, thankful she is still absorbed in her own little world. ‘Don’t pretend you’d have been happy to give up a Sunday sorting out Carrie’s flat.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have minded.’

  ‘Wouldn’t have minded ? Oh, come on, Mike, we both know that’s a big lie. Why would you have wanted to do anything for her? You hated her.’ Joanna knows she’s being unreasonable and regrets the unfairness of her words, but they’re out now and she can’t unsay them.

  ‘I didn’t hate her.’ Mike sounds affronted. ‘I just knew how bad she was for you, that’s all.’

  ‘But you didn’t have to discourage me from keeping in touch with her, did you?’ Joanna, while acknowledging she’s still in a state of shock about her sister, isn’t sure why she’s attacking Mike.

  ‘Hang on a minute. I was protecting you.’ Mike holds his ground. ‘You don’t remember, do you? How long it used to take me to put you together again after she’d finished tearing you to shreds.’

  ‘I know, I’m sorry.’ Joanna softens – it isn’t fair to transfer the shame she has about her only sibling on to Mike. ‘I don’t want to argue with you about it any more.’

  ‘Neither do I,’ he agrees. ‘But honestly, Jo, I wish you’d let me come with you. It would’ve been nice for us to spend some time together. And I’m sorry if you think I’m fussing, but I’m really not happy with you going there on your own. You said yourself you’re not entirely convinced Carrie stabbed herself … Suppose she was in danger from someone, and that someone tries coming after you?’

  The train wheezes to a stop, then remains stationary for some time. Stiflingly warm, the heaters belt out artificial air, and wafts of whatever her travelling companion is eating drift over to her.

  ‘Pauline can’t hear us talking, can she?’ Joanna ducks her husband’s concern. She hates the idea their neighbour could be privy to any discord between her and Mike.

  ‘No, she’s with the kids.’

  ‘It is kind of her to help out while I’m away, taking the boys to school tomorrow – you will thank her for me, won’t you?’

  Mike’s answer is lost to the barking Buttons.

  ‘Someone at the door.’ He tells her what she already senses. ‘I’d better go and see who it is.’

  ‘Speak later?’ she asks.

  ‘Speak later,’ he says, then hangs up.

  Joanna checks her mobile for other messages, thinks about replying to an email from one of her music students, but scrolls through her contact list instead. Sees her sister’s number and activates the call. Pressing it to her ear she listens to her sister’s recorded voice, the slight hesitancy, the little puff of breath, before inviting the caller to leave a message.

  ‘I miss you so much.’ She says the things she couldn’t say to Caroline when she was alive. ‘Why didn’t you tell me if you were in trouble? I could have helped. I wanted to be a sister to you but you kept pushing me away.’ Joanna blinks through the sharp winter sunshine flooding the carriage and settling in warm bands across her body. ‘There’ve been times when I could’ve done with you too, y’know. Where did we go wrong? How did we let things get so bad between us?’

  With the sway and rock of the train speeding through cuttings again, she dozes off … until a frantic tugging of her sleeve, and she wakes to the face of her co-traveller alarmingly close to hers.

  ‘Wake up. Wake up.’ The grip, tightening, shakes her arm. ‘This is King’s Cross – they won’t let you sleep here.’

  The walk from the tube to her sister’s old flat is short but, needing to sidestep numerous cross-legged beggars and hawkers pushing leaflets into her hands for things she doesn’t want, it takes an age. Joanna has always thought of the London district of Bayswater as a village within a city and, out under a milky sun, the streets around Queensway bustling with colour and life, she is reminded how much she loved coming here. It makes her question if the sleepy little nook of Hertfordshire she and Mike ended up in had in fact been the right move. Often invited by Dora, the visits stopped when she died and Caroline inherited; for reasons Joanna never got to the bottom of, her sister didn’t want her anywhere near the place, or anywhere near her.

  When she reaches the flower stall that has always been on the corner before the turn into Edinburgh Terrace, she stops to smell the roses as she always did in the days when she used to stay with Dora. With no Dora or Caroline to buy for, she noses through the buckets of sprays with their leafless, thorny stalks, wanting the heady scent of the ones that grew at Pillowell, but they always elude her. Those types of roses don’t exist beyond her imagination. Like her memories of warm summer evenings barefoot on Dora’s lawn, the air thick with their perfume and the song of the linnet, they were little more than a rumour of the heart. Much like, as things turned out, the postcard-pretty setting of Witchwood, when she thinks of the horrors that were to occur there.

  A good-looking man in a pinstripe suit is suddenly at her elbow. He smiles appreciatively at her while he chooses a bunch of flowers. Joanna returns his smile, she can’t help it; contrary to Caroline’s green-tinged accusation whenever they were out together, she doesn’t go looking for this kind of attention, but can’t pretend it isn’t flattering when it comes. ‘If you didn’t go round with a scowl on your face,’ she used to tell her sister, ‘then people might smile at you.’

  ‘Nice, aren’t they?’ the man says. ‘I can’t resist them.’

  ‘I’m the same; they’re so pretty.’ She knows she shouldn’t talk to strangers, let alone strange men, but something in the way he searches her face makes her forget the risks others warn of. ‘Are they for someone special?’

  ‘Maybe.’ He winks, making her blush.

  She moves away from the flower stall and is about to step off the kerb when she spots a black guy with Bob Marley dreadlocks, strumming a guitar. She is wriggling coins from her purse when he shifts forward into another song, plucking the opening chords of a calypso melody … yellow bird, you sit all alone like me …

  The tune, with its strong associations, makes the horizon swim. Dipping her head to hide her tears, Joanna is back there … back among the tall bulrushes, the cold water up to her middle, teeth chattering wildly as she scrabbled with the noose of weeds … the dangling disbelief in those first few moments when she hoped someone would tap her on the shoulder and tell her it was all an awful joke.

  Rooted to the pavement, she realises, perhaps for the first time, how closely she’s lived with this memory. How it has loitered like a blot on the landscape of her mind, the darkness oozing from it, a wound that can never heal. Impossible to contemplate someone as fragile as Caroline coping with such a dreadful experience. Harrowing enough for Joanna to carry around, but at least she’s been able to let it all out with Mike. Who did Caroline have? Because it can’t have been healthy to bottle that up. Nowadays you’d be given counselling, especially when you consider how young they’d both been, but not once did the sisters speak of what happened in Witchwood, boxing the
misery away, much as they did when their father drowned.

  Joanna misses the way the busker’s smile folds in on itself, but he doesn’t stop playing as others have gathered around, singing and clapping, dropping coins into his guitar case. When her memories release her, she breaks into a run, her holdall banging against her calves.

  ‘Excuse me … excuse me,’ she cries, ripping through the dwindling crowd and into the quiet terrace to hunt for number seventy-three, aware how the man in the pinstripe suit appears to be following her, and is worryingly close on her heels.

  Summer 1990

  Mid-afternoon and despite the hot, high sun, Pillowell Cottage continued to perpetuate its twilit mood. With its preponderance of tassels and bobbles, the Strawberry Thief wallpaper thieved the light as well as the strawberries and a lamp glowed dully on the sideboard. Shaking out the last melting Wagon Wheel from a family-size packet, Dora jammed it into her mouth whole and threw open the French doors to the summer sounds of her garden, the breeze stirring the pendant quartzes of the chandelier: a gift to her long-dead parents on their wedding day. A flickering from the leaves made her dart her head. She expected the girls to emerge through the side gate and was relieved not to see them. Licking her fingers clean, she squinted at her reflection in the round-faced mirror in the hall. Satisfied there was no trace of chocolate, she reapplied a fresh coat of lipstick. Hot Candy Pink, the sticker informed; a jaunty shade and far too young, but Dora didn’t care, she liked it.

  Dean was there. Pushing her father’s old petrol-powered mower and giving the tunnel of lawn with its awning of trees a smart set of stripes. Leaning back in her Dr Scholl’s, she watched him through the quartered kitchen window with her brass opera glasses; saw how he glistened with sweat in the turgid air, his lean, young frame in ripped Levi’s, his suntanned arms batting away flies. The boy sure was a dead ringer for that Jim Morrison … She hummed her favourite Doors track and considered his dangerous edge, because Dean Fry – he had it written all over him – was definitely the archetypal Bad Boy. Small wonder Caroline was besotted; Dora might have been too, had her heart not been lost to Gordon Hooper. She glared at herself in the mirror. Get a grip, you fool, you’re old enough to be his mother. But – her thoughts as she heaved a sigh into the pain of unrequited love – maybe she wasn’t so foolish, maybe Gordon was growing fond of her. Why else did he keep dropping round?

  Dora gave her hair a squirt of the Silvikrin kept on the hall table in case of visitors. In case of Gordon. The anticipation of seeing him bubbled in her chest. She held it there, luxuriating in its promise. Could love be possible? Fifty-four wasn’t all that old. She squashed her lips between a tissue in the way her mother did in this same mirror. Not that Dora’s thoughts were with her mother – her mind, shifting from Gordon, unexpectedly landed on Caroline: a troubled child who doggedly scrutinised her reflection. Dora caught her staring into the chrome curve of the electric kettle earlier, not because she was especially narcissistic, certainly not in the way Dora herself had been aged thirteen, but – she suspected – to hunt her features for clues she might be a harbinger of death.

  ‘Is it because I look like Dad? Is that why Mum wanted to die?’ Caroline’s question had left Dora floundering. ‘I’m not stupid; I know she can’t stand to look at me.’

  And what was Dora expected to say? Suggest she wear a Mickey Mouse mask so her mother wouldn’t have to see her face? Poor kid.

  Bereft of her chattering nieces, Dora slumped down on her chaise longue. Strange to feel the lack of them when she could be so awkward around them, but at least when they were off playing with Ellie Fry or at Pludd Cottage, she was free to indulge in whatever took her fancy. Crammed with relics displaying her Dutch ancestry, Dora had hoped to use Pillowell to convey something of their shared cultural heritage, but to her bemusement, only the family photo album was of interest to Joanna and Caroline. Heavy as an anvil, its vellum skin worn by generations of fingers to a murky brown, it was packed with photographs of their shared Dutch–Jewish relations. It at least got the conversation going, although not always in the direction Dora would have liked.

  ‘Flip wanted to marry a Catholic girl.’ She relayed the story of her favourite uncle to the sisters who sat side-by-side, eager for tragic tales of the smiling-faced cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, captured at weddings and bar mitzvahs. ‘But my mother forbade him. His own sister .’ She dabbed her lips with a handkerchief, as though she might find blood there. ‘Threatened to cut him off without a guilder unless he married the nice Jewish girl they found him. So, they all perished. Ruth, Flip, their three little children – carted off to the gas chamber … ’

  ‘How come your lot got out?’ Caroline, nonchalantly turning the parchment pages – the dead faces of Dora’s loved ones meaning nothing. ‘You’re Jewish too, aren’t you?’

  Dora felt the sting of that question afresh. In a cottage clotted in secrets, the story about what her father cooked up with a select group of Nazi officers to ensure him and his family safe passage to England was something she would never divulge.

  A thump against the French doors. Jolted out of her reverie, Dora, now sprawled over her velvet-tongued chair, saw a sparrow hawk throw its weight into the opalescent afternoon. Especially fond of the families of finches and tits that fed from her bird tables, Dora hoped the bugger didn’t catch anything. Absentmindedly stroking the upholstery as if it were a pet, she kicked off her shoes and looked beyond her toes at her garden. Quiet enough to hear a thrush whacking out snails against a stone. The tapping, reminiscent of her old Remington typewriter, spun her back to the brown-walled rooms of the Foreign Office: a setting where her flair for European languages had been applauded and she was held in high esteem. Nowadays, fearing she’d become a figure of fun and that people ridiculed her behind her back, she regretted giving up her important work after inheriting her parents’ money. Her role within the Diplomatic Service meant responsibility and overseas travel; it gave her unquantifiable purpose as a younger woman. Now, lonely and hurtling into middle age, there was little to sustain her, and she seemed to have lost her way in life.

  Realising the lawn mower had stopped, Dora sauntered barefoot to her kitchen door to look outside. All afternoon, the heat followed the journey of the sun, and it was with considerable relief she saw it finally slipping below the tops of the trees.

  ‘Dean . Are you there?’ She flung her head around and called into the ripe smell of cut grass. ‘D’you want a drink?’

  He appeared on the back step, out of nowhere, blocking the light.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ she gasped, unnerved by his suddenness. ‘Nice glass of Robinson’s barley water do you?’

  ‘Ta.’ He nodded, sweeping the back of an arm over his perspiring brow.

  ‘The girls like it,’ she said, waving him inside, but he didn’t budge. ‘Lemon flavour,’ she announced over the rush of the cold tap. ‘There.’ She passed him the beaker she had deliberately set aside for him, along with a fiver for the thirty-minute labour.

  ‘Ta,’ he said again, yanking his headphones free and tucking the crumpled note into the pocket of his jeans. He downed the barley water in one thirst-quenching gulp. Thirsty herself after her chocolate binge, Dora watched the bounce of his Adam’s apple until, returning the empty beaker to her and repositioning his Walkman, Dean sprinted away, seemingly reluctant to linger a moment longer. ‘I’ll be back in a week or so.’ He tossed the guarantee over his shoulder.

  ‘Okay, thank you,’ she said to his receding torso with its dark triangle of sweat. ‘See you then.’

  Dean was gone, bobbing in time to the music clamped to his head.

  ‘Not sure I like him.’

  A voice from her hallway severed her contemplations. She bent her large body to receive it. No one ever used her front door. Panic fizzed over her scalp. But identifying Gordon – his smart-suited self, obfuscated by shadow – it dropped away again.

  ‘Gordon!’ A squeal of joy and she swayed to
wards him. ‘How lovely of you to come and see me.’

  ‘Are the girls here?’ he asked immediately, bending to bestow the obligatory kiss Dora presented herself for. ‘I’ve something special for them.’ A rustling as he lifted a substantial carrier bag.

  ‘Oh, presents ?’ As excited as if the bulging bag had been for her. ‘You naughty boy, you shouldn’t have.’ She patted her sticky wall of hair, pleased she’d had the foresight to apply fresh lipstick. ‘They shouldn’t be long.’ She glanced at her watch, its delicate strap sunk deep into the fleshiness of her wrist. ‘Such good girls, always off amusing themselves – I barely see them.’

  ‘I could come back later?’ he offered.

  ‘No. No .’ Dora, determined to keep him. ‘Come in, I’ll fix us a drink – I could murder a gin and tonic.’

  Gordon Hooper’s car was there again. The black BMW he secured in a lock-up at Gloucester station when he was away in Tuscany. The Jameson sisters and Ellie Fry circled it in a way they would if a new child had turned up unexpectedly at school, saw themselves reflected in its wax-polished sides, the curved chrome of bumpers. They peered through its windows at the plush leather seats with their bright red piping, identified road maps of Europe, a folded newspaper, two violin cases, stray items of clothing suspended from coat hangers.

  ‘Wasn’t he supposed to be going back to Italy?’ Caroline adjusted her Alice band in the car’s wing-mirror. ‘He’s always hanging around here.’

  ‘Mrs Hooper says he changed his mind,’ Joanna informed them. ‘He’s staying the whole summer now.’

  ‘You’re joking.’ Caroline touched the car roof. Stove-hot under the unrelenting sun, she jerked back her hand.

  ‘He wants to look after her, ’cos he’s kind.’

  ‘That’s nice.’ Ellie squatted to tighten the laces on her roller skates.

  ‘Is it?’ Caroline, fists on hips.

  ‘I dunno why you’ve got such a downer on him.’ Joanna, linking arms with Ellie the moment she was upright again. ‘I like him,’ she said dreamily. ‘He reminds me of Daddy.’