by Frances Vick
Andreena made one of those noises peculiar to her, a kind of quizzical, amused squeal. ‘How were you a bad daughter? And who is this everyone? Tell me?’ She waved one bangled arm around the room.
Jenny took a deep breath, dabbed at her eyes with more kitchen roll. ‘There are things I should have done. I should have stayed the night with her, Dree, I should’ve. If I’d done that, she’d still be here.’ She watched fearfully as Andreena sat back, her face a curious mixture of conflicting expressions. ‘You see? You do think I’m—’
Andreena’s voice was as sharp as her face was kind. ‘Don’t tell me what I think. Tell me what happened.’
‘No. No, you’ll think badly of me,’ Jenny answered. Through her tears she could see Andreena’s face soften. She took a deep, shuddering breath.
‘Tell me,’ Andreena said softly. ‘Tell me and maybe you’ll feel better. Nothing can be that bad, can it?’
‘I don’t know about that. It feels that bad,’ Jenny sobbed.
‘Jenny,’ Andreena’s face was world-weary now, ‘if you think I can’t guess what happened, you’re silly. Believe me. Nothing gets past me.’
‘What d’you think happened?’ Jenny whispered. She stared at her own shaking fingers, knotted together on her quivering knees. The nerve by her mouth twitched like a fishing line snagged in weeds.
Andreena sat back on the chair, then opened the small bottle of brandy and poured a generous dollop into their mugs. It merged, turbid and nasty looking, with the dregs of the tea. She pushed it towards Jenny.
‘I think that your mum was a difficult woman. I think that she drank too much. I think that maybe she said something nasty, and that’s why you came here. For a break. I can understand why, it’s a nice house.’ She looked around the clean kitchen. ‘Is that what happened?’
‘Yes,’ Jenny whispered.
‘Is that all that happened?’
‘What d’you mean?’
Her voice was so soft now. Andreena put one firm hand on her knee. ‘Did she hurt you? That’s what I mean.’
‘No! God, no! Mum wouldn’t do anything like that—’
Andreena reached one swift hand to Jenny’s jaw. ‘You’re bruised here.’
Jenny hastily pulled her hair out of its ponytail. She let the tears come.
‘Listen to me.’ Andreena’s voice was low, husky, hypnotic. ‘You’re a loyal person. You’re a good daughter.’ She put up one hand to ward off any disagreements. ‘It isn’t easy to admit that bad things are happening, is it? And so you push it down and push it down, and you break. Eventually you break. And you do something that normally you’d never do.’
‘What do you mean? “Something you’d never do”?’ Jenny looked at her friend like a python’s hypnotised prey. ‘Did you do something… bad. To your mother I mean?’
Andreena blinked slowly, and when she opened her eyes, they were dim with memory. ‘I ran from her. I ran away from Jamaica because of her. I loved her, but she’d do things… ach.’ She pushed a rough hand through the air. Bangles clinked and clashed. ‘But you? You moved back to be with yours! And one night, one night only, you run away.’
‘And look what happened.’
‘You run away. To be safe,’ Andreena told her seriously, and touched the bruise on her chin. ‘That’s good. That’s a good thing to do.’
‘But if I’d been with her, she wouldn’t have died.’ Jenny looked at her. ‘That’s what people are going to think! I posted something on my blog about it. Maybe I shouldn’t have done. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m just so used to writing what I’m feeling, you know? But then some people started being awful, and there was a big row, and it just… That’s what everyone is going to think. That I… did something bad.’
Andreena smiled solemnly. ‘Well maybe they will. Crazy people make a lot of noise. And on the Internet?’ She puffed out some air, her hands made the shape of an explosion.
‘They’re right though, aren’t they?’ Jenny muttered.
‘They are? And how many of them have your worries? Hmm? Listen to me now. People will always chat nonsense. They’ve been doing that since the beginning of time but, unless they’re paying your rent? Pay. No. Mind.’ This was Andreena’s favourite maxim. ‘Listen. If you can look after other people, you can look after yourself. Am I right? Now it’s time for you to do that. No guilt. No excuses. Live for yourself now.’
‘That doesn’t seem right,’ Jenny whispered.
‘It is though,’ Andreena said.
‘How did you get out of work today?’ Jenny asked her after a pause.
‘I told them there was a problem with my daughter,’ Andreena answered. ‘And I was right, wasn’t I?’ Jenny was beginning to cry again, and Dree pulled her close. Her coat smelled of cinnamon. Her hug was, as always, fierce with love. ‘Start to live for yourself. Never blame yourself for things that happened in the past. Anything. Promise me?’
‘I promise.’
That night Jenny suffered through a heavy medicated sleep with nightmares that were not really nightmares but heightened memories. The sudden shocking thud of a head against the wall. The broken picture and the blood on the carpet. Sal’s stretched neck and the snow. I’m sorry to tell you that your mother has died.
Her shouts woke Freddie in the room next door, and he stumbled in, all bed hair and panic. ‘Oh God, what happened?’
‘Nothing, just a bad dream, I’m sorry. I kept trying to wake up and I couldn’t. Those sleeping pills I took…’ She was sweating, face clenched, the demon panic sitting on her chest.
‘You were screaming something.’
‘Oh God, I’m sorry! What did I say?’ She sat up in bed, still shaking.
‘You kept saying “Get up! Get up!”’
She settled back into the rumpled pillows. ‘You and I were being chased. We were being followed. You fell, and I was trying to help you up. The snow… the snow kept burying you and I couldn’t dig you out fast enough.’ She laughed shakily. ‘That’s all I remember. Shit. That was horrible!’ She passed a sweaty hand through her hair. ‘No more of those pills for me. I’d rather not sleep.’
‘I’ll stay with you, OK? Until you get back to sleep.’
And he did, though he dropped off first, his pink round face losing years as he slept. Cherubic and innocent. Jenny closed her eyes, went into her place of power – the blue room, that safe space, but it seemed to have lost its magic. Sal’s long neck snaked through the sturdy bars; her weak cries could be heard through the walls, and Jenny, unsafe, exposed, felt fear. It was dawn before she finally fell into an exhausted slumber. And she didn’t dream, thank God.
7
The next day, Freddie and Jenny headed to Sal’s house to start on the cleaning.
‘So, what, we get the furniture sorted first? We won’t have time to do the carpets.’ Freddie puffed beneath his bin bags. ‘We’ll need a proper cleaning service to do them I think.’
‘No, Kathleen said that Maraid will lend us her Vax.’
Freddie thought of the state of the carpets. He wasn’t sure a Vax would do it either.
Jenny had been skittish all morning. The sleepless shadows beneath her eyes gave her a haunted look. She drank a few sips of coffee, put the mug down, forgot it, and made another, forgot that too. They stopped in the village shop on the way to the house, and Jenny spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the relative effectiveness of various cleaning products, insisting that they get new scrubbers, bleach, stain remover, while Freddie hovered behind her, his face creased with concern. When it came to pay, she realised that she’d come out without her purse, so Freddie had to buy it all, packing the bags while Jenny kept up her rambling monologue on what to clean and how to do it, and the woman on the till looked on with an uneasy sympathy, eventually offering shy condolences.
‘I was very sorry to hear about Sal,’ she said, stopping Jenny in mid flow. ‘She was a lovely woman. We used to see a lot of her. Before the stroke, you know.’
> There was an awkward pause. ‘Thank you,’ Jenny mumbled.
‘If there’s anything I can do?’
Jenny smiled crookedly. ‘Well, if she ran up a gin bill, you could write it off. That’d help.’
The woman’s face froze in confusion. Freddie winced. Jenny seemed to come to a little. She shook her head in a dazed way, as if she was shaking off a cloud of flies.
‘I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. If there is a bill, then of course I’ll—’
‘There’s no bill,’ the woman told her. Confused disapproval flowed from her every pore.
Freddie took Jenny by the elbow, and together they walked slowly, and in silence now, towards the estate. At the bend in the road, she stopped like a stalled horse.
‘We’ll do as much as you can stand, OK? It’ll be all right. Just let me know when you’ve had enough, and we’ll go home, OK?’ Freddie told her.
Despite standing empty for only two days, the house smelled neglected and damp. The glasses were still on the floor; the sticky kitchen table was now covered with a thin patina of dust. Freddie walked ahead of Jenny, an advance guard, while she hung back by the door. She only came into the room fully when Freddie crunched one boot on the glass that still littered the stairs.
‘Here, pick up the bigger bits and we’ll wrap them in newspaper,’ she told him. ‘Watch it, though, because it’s all over the stairs.’
‘What happened?’ Freddie picked up the photo, shook it free of glass, and pulled one shard out of infant Jenny’s face.
‘Accident, that’s all.’ Jenny was picking up splinters, her fingers drifting over the blood on the carpet. ‘She knocked it off going up the stairs.’
‘What about the blood?’
‘That’s mine. I tried to clean it up, but I got sidetracked getting her to bed and—’ She showed him a half-healed cut on one thumb.
‘OK then, I’ll clean this up,’ Freddie said eventually.
‘No. No, I’ll do it.’
And, still without looking at him, she plunged her hand into the shopping bag.
‘No, Jen, not that!’ Freddie grabbed at it. ‘It’s spray bleach. You need the stain remover.’ She didn’t let go, though, and her face, behind her loose hair, seemed set in a snarl. He almost recoiled. ‘Jen – let me do this, come on.’
‘No. I’m fine. I can do it.’
‘For sure, but not with bleach.’ He leaned down to look into her eyes. ‘You’re not OK.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re not though.’ He led her stiffly to the kitchen. ‘Look, you make a start in here and I’ll – deal with the stairs. OK?’
She nodded, took a shuddery breath. From her coat pocket, her phone rang. ‘Missed it.’ She looked at the screen, pale and tired. ‘Kathleen. I’ll go outside to call her. She can be funny about people overhearing her on the phone.’
She wasn’t outside for long, and from what Freddie could see, Kathleen did most of the talking, while Jenny answered only: ‘Yes, yes, of course, yes.’
She came back into the kitchen and shrugged her coat off.
‘Everything OK?’
‘Yup.’ She kept her head down, and grabbed a handful of scrubbers with one shaking hand.
‘You’re sure?’ Freddie asked. ‘You don’t look like everything’s OK. Did she upset you?’
‘She said that Maraid will only lend me the Vax if I give her the telly and the nest of tables.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ Freddie was all indignance. ‘She’s family, for God’s sake! I mean—’ The sight of Jenny’s strained, pale face stopped him. ‘That’s bullshit, though. Really.’
Jenny made a shaky, vague gesture. ‘Families. That’s just what she’s like. I’m not going to argue with her about it, I don’t have the energy. Plus she scares the shit out of me, Maraid.’
‘But, it’s your mum’s stuff, I mean, by rights it’s yours, surely—’
‘I don’t want any of her stuff!’ Jenny cried, almost savagely. ‘It’s all… shit. It’s all cheap shit!’
‘Babe – sit down.’
‘No. I just want to get on with the cleaning now.’ That rage had left her voice, left her weakened, grim. ‘Let’s just do that, shall we? Make a start anyway.’
‘Do you want me to call Kathleen back? I mean—’
‘God no!’ Jenny said. ‘She’d kill me if you did that. No, I’ll just let her have the TV. It’d only remind me of Mum anyway. I don’t want to argue about it. Right. You do the stairs, and I’ll start in here.’ She moved briskly to the sink.
‘Take it easy though, will you?’ Freddie hovered behind her. ‘Any time you need to stop, just stop, OK?’
And so Freddie spent the half hour carefully spraying and dabbing at the blood on the wall, which he soon had down to a pastel smear. The carpet cleaner, driven into the cheap shallow weave, fizzed pinkly with dissolving blood. From the kitchen he heard the scrape of crockery being dragged out of cupboards, the splash and gurgle of water in the sink.
All morning they scrubbed and dusted and aired the place out, until their eyes and fingers stung with bleach, and the scent of lemons drove out the cigarettes.
By early afternoon they stood on the cusp of Sal’s bedroom, spooked as children.
‘I can do this for you,’ Freddie told her.
Jenny let out air through pursed lips. ‘No. I’m not going to be a pussy about this.’ She took one determined step into the room. Then another. Then stopped. ‘I can still feel my mum. Isn’t that weird?’ She looked over her shoulder at Freddie. ‘I keep imagining she’s in the next room. Andreena told me the other day that when her mum died she saw her afterwards. Just walking around her house. Behind her in the mirror.’
‘God, that’s creepy!’ Freddie shuddered.
‘She said it was a nice thing, like her mum was telling her that everything was all right, that she needn’t feel bad. She said she saw her on and off for a whole year, until she stopped grieving and accepted what’d happened.’ She turned around fully to face him. ‘You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?’
‘Not really.’
‘Me neither,’ Jenny replied. There was a pause. On the bed, a gaudy flowered wrap lay spreadeagled, it’s sleeves puffed as if they still held phantom limbs. ‘Look at that. She loved that thing. She claimed it was silk. It’s not though. It’s only polyester.’
‘Jen, really, why don’t you let me do this?’
‘No. We’ll do it together.’
‘Or we can come back tomorrow maybe?’
‘No.’ She pulled a bin bag off the roll, a loud rip in the stillness. ‘If you do the wardrobe, I’ll do the chest of drawers, OK?’
‘OK.’ Freddie opened a window a crack to let in some fresh air. In its reflection he watched Jenny hesitantly approaching the bed, placing one spread palm on the gown, letting it hover, and then grasping it suddenly, bagging it up and throwing it into the bag with a grimace.
By 4 p.m. they had stopped for the day.
‘We can go for a drink on the way back if you want?’ Freddie opened the door, peered at the darkening sky. ‘They might still be serving food.’
She followed, hesitated, stopped. ‘No, you know what? I think I’m going to stay here. Just this one night.’
‘What? I don’t think that’s a good idea—’
‘No. I want to. I don’t know why, but I think it’ll help. Honestly.’ She smiled at him. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘OK, I’ll stay with you—’
‘No.’ Jenny was firm, serious. ‘I think I should be on my own for a while.’
8
Jenny didn’t stay in the house for long. Half an hour later she texted Freddie to make sure he was at his parents, and then took a taxi to the train station, keeping her head down; she didn’t want to risk anyone in the village seeing her, wondering where she was going, mentioning it to Freddie. That was the problem with villages... they were boring places filled with boring people who had nothing better to do than No
tice Things. At the station she bought a ticket to the city and, in the train, sank into a still meditation, here and not here, present and past, and when the train stopped she merged with the rush hour crowds in the dark streets, under the dark sky, just another grey bobbing face.
Then she turned east, and the streets were emptier here. Striding through the semi-derelict covered market, past dirty drifts of swept-up snow, past a pub with broken panes covered with plywood, named, incongruously, Pretty Windows, and up the hill, the winding, bleak hill to what, years ago, was Home. Her mind meandered around the narrow alley of the word. Was this still Home? Home is where the heart dies. Home is where the hatred lies. You can’t go home again. The years hadn’t dimmed her memory. If anything, going over the same memories again and again had scored them deeper into her brain like scars. Here was red brick on red brick under a lowering sky; halal butchers and Polski Skleps; dull-eyed teens and overtired toddlers. Here was The Fox, the pub where Mum had worked, where she’d met Marc. Here was the taxi rank they’d run to that night. Here was the drain down which her family photos had swirled. Here was the wall against which she’d been pinned, legs dangling, his fingers crushing her windpipe. Everything was the same, and everything smelled of rain, coppery and dense as blood.
She got to their old house, the front door still scabrous black. No handle, just the flimsy Yale lock that a child could open using any old bit of plastic. The only things different were the curtains. These were nets with grimy bunched bottoms, whereas theirs had been blue with little grey flowers. Maraid had run them up on her sewing machine when they’d first moved in with Marc. Quiet. It was so quiet on this street. You could hear everything on this street. You learned not to say anything on this street. You had to keep secrets on this street.
Like a sleepwalker, Jenny walked down the alleyway to the back of the row, stopping just at the edge of her old back garden behind the still-broken wall. The garden had been paved since they lived there, and all the sad little flowers that Sal had planted must have died years ago.