by Emlyn Rees
Behind these buildings is the Memorial Hall, built to honour the young men of Rushton and the outlying farms who sacrificed their lives for King and Country in the Great War. Further back are the village green, the Gordon Arms and Rushton Primary, the educational institution where I learnt to name the colours of the rainbow, as well as how to read, write, add and subtract.
On the hill to the west of the Elo runs the Avenue, a long, steep road, lined by towering oaks, which are terrifying in their solidity. I once freewheeled down the hill on a go-cart, with the aim of weaving in and out of every single one of the twenty-two trees on the left-hand side of the road. I made it as far as the twenty-first, before losing my balance and skidding wildly into the tree. I was flung with a crack against the gnarled bark and split the skin on my elbow in a three-inch gash. The cart was left scattered like so much tinder across the side of the road and my scar remains to this day.
I lived in a house called Orchard View, which was sited at the very top of the Avenue on a side road called Hill Drive. It had been built in 1947, the same year Miles had been born (a fact that fascinated me as a child), and had been named after an apple orchard that had once stood there.
Like Miles, the property was in a continuous state of flux. In my mind’s eye, roof tiles switched with the seasons, and walls shifted from whitewash to yellow and blue, before reverting back to white again. Extensions, garages and carports rose and fell to accommodate new cars and architectural fashions. Inside was no different. Wallpaper and appliances were altered and updated on what sometimes seemed like a monthly basis. Only the antique furniture which Mum loved remains as a constant in my memory.
Early on in our time there, Miles had the attic converted and that’s where my bedroom was. On my first night there I slept on the bottom half of my bunk bed, protected by sheets with soldiers printed on them and a purple candlewick bedspread, which doubled up as a tepee in the summer. My toys were kept in a deep, purpose-built wardrobe, and my ceiling was patterned with luminous stars and planets stickers.
Two windows let in the real night sky. From one, I could look down on to our back garden and across at Mickey’s tree house next door. Mickey was the same age as me and was my best friend when I was growing up. Some mornings, bright and early, I’d stare into the highest branches and try to see Jesus, whom Mickey had painted there in a picture she’d won a prize for at nursery school. The other window in my bedroom looked across the five or so feet that separated our houses, directly down into Mickey’s own bedroom.
In the summers when we were young, Mickey and I used to open our windows at night and whisper to each other, or launch paper planes across the divide. Other times we’d try to frighten one another, pinching pieces of bamboo from Mickey’s dad’s allotment at the bottom of the Avenue, strapping them together and tapping at each other’s windows in the dead of night.
One evening during a Christmas school holiday, when Mickey and I were both fifteen, I watched unseen through a gap in my curtains while she undressed. As she unfastened her bra and stood in front of her mirror and brushed her hair, I knew that nothing between us would ever be the same again.
Our gardens backed on to a wide and shallow stream, which ran down the hillside to the Elo below. The fields and woods beyond belonged to Jimmy Dughead, a mean-spirited farmer who smoked roll-ups and tied dead crows and rats to his barbed-wire fences.
All the children in the village were terrified of him, mainly as a result of a story told by Tommy Wilmot, a boy a few years older than Mickey and I. Village legend had it that Dughead had once caught Tommy setting rabbit snares in his wood. Instead of handing him over to the police, Dughead had cocked his twelve-bore shotgun and levelled it at Tommy’s chest. He’d told Tommy that he’d give him a twenty-second head start, and then teach him a lesson in vermin hunting that he’d never forget. Following a panicked, thorn-torn flight, Tommy had escaped without his backside peppered with shot and had lived to tell the tale. He’d never set foot on Jimmy Dughead’s land again and said that only a lunatic would dare do otherwise.
I was with Tommy Wilmot on this one, but Mickey thought differently. Mickey feared no one, including Jimmy Dughead. She concluded that Dughead’s land, for precisely the reason that everyone was afraid to go on it – including her big brother, Scott – was the safest place in the world to hide something. And Mickey and I had something to hide: treasure. And it was because of this that, when I was still nine and Mickey was just ten, we crept across to the middle of the field behind our houses and buried an old used tin of Quality Street chocolates in the earth, using four distant trees to mark the location on our minds. The plan was to leave the tin there until Hallowe’en. Like many of our plans in those days, though, this one contained a hidden flaw.
Two weeks after we’d buried our treasure Jimmy Dughead relocated his prize-winning black bull to the field. Weighing in at over a hundred stone, the bull was a monster, sharp-eyed and capable of crossing the field at a body-crushing gallop in a matter of seconds. It haunted the part of the field where our buried treasure lay and hated children even more than its owner did. Mickey and I attempted on no less than eight separate occasions to get back what was rightly ours, but as if sensing our frustration, the bull wouldn’t be budged, and no amount of distractions and diversions proved successful in driving it away long enough for us to achieve our goal.
It was on the afternoon of Hallowe’en itself that Mickey formulated a further recovery plan. This one, she assured me, would work. This day would be the day, she told me, when we’d put one over on Jimmy Dughead and his rotten bull.
It would also turn out to be the day that Mickey Maloney saved my life.
Sitting up on the edge of my bed, I feel sluggish and disorientated, like I’ve just woken up after falling asleep on a beach. I run my hand down the nape of my neck, only to find it soaked with sweat. Getting up, I cross the room and lean out of the open bedroom window, praying for a breeze, but getting only diesel and petrol fumes instead.
I sigh, angry with myself. I don’t like thinking about Miles and about how things used to be. I don’t want to miss him. I can’t go through all that again. Keeping my mind clear of all that stuff is a habit I forced myself into after his death. It was Mum’s idea, the not thinking about him, the same as it was her idea to relocate us to Scotland and for us to change our names and start afresh. Self-protection, that’s what it was all about, I suppose. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t up for discussion. It just happened. It was the way it was, the way it had to be. One day I went to bed as Fred Roper, the son of Miles Roper, and the next morning I woke up as Fred Wilson (Mum’s maiden name), the son of Louisa Wilson.
The truth about Miles, too, vanished that same night. A new and sanitised version of him came into existence. He became an ordinary man who’d died of an ordinary heart attack, a story which I’ve stuck to ever since, and one which Eddie, like Rebecca and her family and everyone else I know, accepts without question. Neither my mother nor I ever talk to anyone about how Miles really died, in just the same way that we no longer discuss who he really was.
And as for the fifteen-year-old boy called Fred Roper who grew up in Rushton all those years ago … well, he simply no longer exists.
Hearing a distant, dull rumble of thunder, I look up and watch for a moment as a jumbo jet tears a thin white strip across the smoky blue sky. Then I gaze down at the traffic jam four storeys below and listen to the blaring horns and angry shouts. Phew, what a scorcher! as they used to say. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, being stuck in a car on a day like today.
Chapter II
Mickey
Joe hates me being late. He also hates my driving. ‘We should get a four-wheel drive,’ he mutters, glowering as we mount the kerb.
‘We’ve got four wheels already,’ I reply reasonably, clunking off the pavement and squeezing into a small space in the stationary traffic. ‘This ain’t the countryside, sweetheart.’
Joe slouches down in the ripped p
assenger seat of my dirty white van and doesn’t say anything, but then Joe thinks mountain bikes are absolutely essential for modern London living. Call me the odd one out, but I haven’t seen any mountains in NW10 recently.
I look out of my window and up at the sky. Phew, what a scorcher! as we used to say. It’s the kind of one-off Mediterranean-style London day where everyone else starts slapping their foreheads as if they can’t believe they haven’t installed air-conditioning, while I spend all day fantasising about being at the seaside. In the van, dusty warm air blasts out from the air vents and sticks to the thin slick of sweat on my forehead. I reach for the warm can of Diet Coke from the holder on the dashboard and take a swig. ‘Want some?’ I try, waggling the can at Joe, but he gives me a haughty look. He’s got pale, smooth skin, dark hair and a mole high on his left cheek, which makes him look pretty, beautiful almost.
‘Cheer up, it shouldn’t be too long.’ I sigh, but Joe just folds his arms and looks ahead at the long queue. I reach out to touch his hair, but since he’s had it cut he’s become all precious and he ducks out of the way.
‘You always say that. We’re stuck.’
The news comes on and I fiddle with the radio, trying to find something a bit more lively. I generally work on the principle that if something really serious happens I’ll hear about it. In the meantime, I try to avoid the mild, local anaesthetic numbness that the news creates by not listening to it every half-hour. It’s harder than it sounds. On every station the latest headlines spew out like back issues of a gossip magazine being read out on a tape loop. If it’s not some pop star having another baby with a ridiculous name, or a corrupt politician with prostate cancer, it’s soundbites of doom and gloom from around the globe, all neatly edited with a funky backing track. Cod reserves hit all time low – one time, one time. Computer virus rocks Japanese banks – koo koo kerchoo. Museum fire destroys Egyptian mummies – shoutin’ out to the Southall posse. I keep the dial moving until I tune into my favourite country music station and tap my fingers on the steering wheel in time to Hank Williams’s slide guitar.
Ahead of us two windscreen cleaners appear through the mirage created by the rows of hot bonnets and idling exhausts. They walk slowly between the cars, bearing their sud-dripping wipers and dirty cloths like weapons as they intimidate their captive audience. Somehow I know they’re heading straight for us.
They get to my van, just as the traffic ahead starts to creep forward. I put up my hands in refusal and mouth ‘No thanks’ through the windscreen, but I’ve made the fatal mistake of making eye contact. The man, who can’t really be more than a teenager, has a dirty bandanna tied round his forehead. He leans over, smacking the soapy washer on my screen. I wind the stiff handle on my door and the driver’s window moves down an inch, and I try a different approach, leaning up towards the gap to make myself heard. ‘Sorry,’ I say, shrugging apologetically. ‘No money.’
Oblivious to my polite refusal, the man flicks up my wipers and pulls his own rubber blade across the glass, leaving a weeping brown streak. A moment later he’s holding out his hand, begging. Joe rummages through the sweet wrappers and hair clips in the moulded junk tray between the gear stick and the fan.
I put my hand on his arm. ‘Don’t,’ I warn, but the other man has already seen that Joe’s found the emergency pound coin I keep for meters.
‘This is all we’ve got.’
‘It’s too much,’ I whisper. It’s our turn to move and I’m running out of time. Both men leer menacingly in at us, almost salivating over the shiny gold coin on our side of the glass.
I take the money from Joe and hastily shove it at the man through the gap at the top of my window. It’s an old trick, but he must have had another coin in his hand, because he starts shouting, indignantly showing me a dirty penny piece, pretending that I’ve given it to him instead. Panicked by his menacing look, I quickly wind up my window, almost trapping his fingers. The man shouts and spits violently on to my windscreen.
‘Leave her alone!’ yells Joe angrily, twisting in his seat to glare at the man, who shakes his fist at us as we move away.
I pull repeatedly on the windscreen wiper and a jet of water squirts on the glass. The offending spittle is smeared into a thin smudge and eventually disappears, but its effect still lingers. Joe turns back round in his seat and I reach out and touch his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, darling. Leave it.’
‘But why did he do that?’ Joe looks upset and I stroke his cheek, proud of him for sticking up for me. ‘You gave him the money.’
‘I know,’ I say, looking at Joe’s sweet face and wondering how the hell I explain to my nine-year-old child that the world can be a very cruel and ugly place. ‘They’re just trying it on,’ I pacify, smoothing things over. I glance in the wing mirror and notice that the men have moved on to new victims. I can feel my pulse quicken and all I want to do is get away as fast as possible.
‘But why?’
‘Because they’re poor, I suppose,’ I explain, trying to sound calm. ‘People do strange things to get money.’
Joe’s silent as I swerve across the junction and buck over the bumps in the short-cut road to our street. ‘Come on. Let’s get the shopping in,’ I say, smiling to cheer things up.
I’m very proud of my flower shop. I’ve had it painted in lilac and the signwriter has done a great job inscribing MICKEY’S FLOWERS in silver and white above the windows. It stands out in the parade of shops, looking glossy and inviting between the derelict second-hand furniture place on the corner and the dated red and grey frontage of James Peters Limited next door. I can see Kevin, their chief Brylcreem-slicked estate agent, on the phone through the glass window and wave, but he doesn’t respond. He looks like he’s melting in his pinstriped suit and he waggles the wide knot of his tie as he churns out his patter.
It was Kevin who did the deal on the flower shop and I don’t think he’s quite got over the fact that I negotiated a fair whack off the price. He’s taken it as a personal slight, especially since he was the one who showed us around the area when we first arrived. ‘If you think about it, right,’ he said, taking a deep drag on his cigarette, as Joe and I slid around on the leatherette seats of his car, ‘Lahndan is just, like, a series of villages, all joined together. And this, right,’ he shouted above the din of the lorries as he stabbed his cigarette tip towards a scrap of land (the park), ‘is no exception. You want village life, you got it. Those posh city types are moving here in droves …’ Kevin turned round and looked at me in the back seat at this point and blew an impressed whistle. ‘Between you and me, love, we’re talking boom time.’
Kevin, of course, was talking out of his (no doubt Brylcreemed) posterior and I couldn’t help telling him so, which is why he probably ignores me now. I wasn’t being unfriendly, it’s just that in my experience, ‘village life’ would not include thousands of strangers crammed into a jumble of converted Victorian houses and concrete high rises all living in fear of burglars, vandals or, for that matter, neighbours who might speak to one another. Nor would it include bus lanes, surveillance cameras or residents’ parking zones. If this place were even remotely ‘villagey’, Joe would be able to leave his bike unlocked outside the local shop without it being stolen and I could keep the car running while I popped to the cashpoint. I’d also be able to unload the shopping in comfort.
Instead, I put on the hazard lights and make Joe stand guard by the van.
Lisa opens the door of the shop and the old-fashioned bell I’ve rigged up chimes as she stands on the doormat. There’s a blast of a horn as a car speeds past, and Joe and I both immediately look at Lisa, but she takes no notice. She’s twenty-three and by all accounts a total babe, except that it wouldn’t occur to her that the long expanse of her sculpted legs, her mane of corkscrew curls or her smooth olive skin would be of interest to anyone else.
‘The traffic was terrible,’ I groan, as I pant up to her with all the shopping bags.
‘Let me give you a hand,�
� she says. ‘You must take a break, Mickey. You’ll exhaust yourself.’
Lisa is my life saver. Sometimes I think she’s been sent from the heavens, as she appeared like an angel when I opened the shop and has been working with me ever since. She also rents a room from me in our flat upstairs and without her I couldn’t make ends meet, or cope with Joe, whom she keeps an eye on when I have to go out. Yet for someone so good-natured she has an incredible capacity for worrying. It’s the intangibles of life that set her off. She’s fine when it comes to slinging together the funkiest hand-tied bouquet you’ve ever seen, and ask her to do all the week’s ordering and she’ll do it with her eyes shut. Yet she’ll bite her nails down to the quick worrying about good karma, or combining the right essential oils for her bath. I tease her when such an attack of ying-yang balancing happens, but it always backfires because, when she’s run out of things to worry about, she worries about me.
‘You must take a rest, honestly,’ she repeats, looking after me, as I two-at-a-time the stairs with all the shopping bags up to the flat.
‘It saves me going to the gym,’ I puff, on my way back down. ‘Anything happened?’ I ask, ignoring her concerned look.
‘We’ve had our first death,’ she replies, plumping up the bunches of Sweet-williams in the bucket by the door. ‘Marge took the order.’
I glance over Lisa’s shoulder and see Marge, my other assistant, sagged on the stool near the counter at the back of the shop. She licks her thumb and forefinger and turns over the page of the tabloid newspaper, engrossed as usual. A packet of chocolate biscuits is in mid demolition in front of her. ‘That’s fantastic. When?’
‘Tuesday week. They’ve ordered the full works for the funeral procession. Marge talked them into it.’ Lisa sounds disapproving, but then Lisa would do everything for free if she could.