by Diane Janes
‘He never wants to go anywhere. In fact, I don’t believe he has made any new friends – so it wouldn’t matter much if he did change school.’
‘Give him a chance; he’s only just settling in. Friendships don’t always happen overnight. It definitely wouldn’t do his education any good to have another move.’
‘Well, maybe he wouldn’t need to change school. There must be other places to live in the school catchment area.’
‘I don’t get it.’ Marcus changed tack. ‘What is it that you suddenly don’t like about living here? You used to love it. What’s changed?’
Jo hesitated. She didn’t want to tell him about the constant feeling of unseen eyes watching the house, and she certainly couldn’t tell him about the unfortunate episode with Gilda Iceton and her daughter. ‘It’s very isolated out here,’ she began tentatively. ‘You don’t notice when you’re away a lot, but it’s different now that I’m here all the time. In other places I’ve had friends living nearby.’
‘You liked the peace and quiet, you always said. You could always make a bit more effort – join something – get to know a few people. And what about Shelley? I thought the two of you got on well …’
The telephone saved her by trilling insistently at just the right moment. She stood up and lifted the phone from its cradle. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello – is that Joanne?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘It’s Monica here – Aunty Beryl’s daughter. I’ve got some bad news, I’m afraid.’
‘Oh dear,’ Jo braced herself. ‘What’s happened?’
‘Well – inevitable really – but Aunty Joan has died. I expect you knew that she’s been poorly for some time.’
As Jo hunted up some appropriate expression of sympathy for Monica, a mixture of emotions rose within her. Aunty Joan had been one of her mother’s aunts, the one who had never married, to whom Jo had been despatched a couple of times between periods with foster-parents and other relatives. Aunty Joan had lived in a small, terraced house in Accrington, which she had originally shared with and then inherited from her mother. The bedrooms had been full of strange old furniture, cavernous wardrobes, the interiors of which smelled like mothballs. When everyone else had long since gone over to duvets, Aunty Joan’s spare bed was still made up with starchy white sheets, ton-weight woollen blankets and a shiny, purplish-red quilted counterpane over the top.
Jo would have loved to live permanently with Aunty Joan, who bought cream cakes from the baker’s shop to eat after Saturday tea and a block of fruit and nut to share on Sunday evenings, but it had been impossible: Aunty Joan was a shop manageress, who did not get home until six o’clock in the evenings and had to work on Saturdays. That would have made Jo a latch-key kid, and the authorities didn’t like that; although Jo could have told them that lots of people managed perfectly well in similar situations, and besides which, there were far worse things for a kid to be.
Mum’s other aunt, Beryl, could not have Jo either, because she already had her own daughters, Monica and Verity, in bunk beds and her mother-in-law sleeping in the little back bedroom. So in the end Jo had gone to live with Grandma Molesly, who had taken her out of duty because no one else would or could: and because, as she said to her sisters, what would people think, if you let your granddaughter go into care? Jo had barely kept in touch with the rest of the family since Grandma Molesly died, but now she asked Monica for the funeral arrangements and jotted them down, promising to be there if she could.
‘My Aunt Joan has died,’ she told Marcus when she came off the phone. He had risen from the table, quietly tidying up in the background, while she talked to Monica. ‘Her funeral’s on Wednesday. I think I should go.’
‘Come and sit down.’ Marcus was already moving into the hall. ‘I’ve got your glass. Remind me again how Aunt Joan fits in.’
‘Aunt Joan and Aunt Beryl were my grandmother’s sisters, so really they’re my great-aunts, but because they were a lot younger than my grandmother – not much older than my mum – they seemed more like my aunts. Joan was the one who never got married – Monica is one of Beryl’s daughters. Beryl was the younger of the two and she’s still alive.’ She paused for breath.
‘OK, Joan and Beryl were actually your mother’s aunts – so was the grandmother you went to live with their sister?’
‘Yes – that was Grandma Molesly. She was their much older sister.’
‘Your mother’s mother.’
‘If she was my mother’s mother.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I must have told you. She used to say that she didn’t think my mother was her daughter at all, and that maybe she had been given the wrong baby in the nursing home. I’m not sure if she said it because she wanted to distance herself from Mum and the way she turned out, or whether she really believed it. But whenever she was really annoyed over something I’d done, she would say, “But then you’re not really my granddaughter,” because of course if there had been a mix-up and my mother was swapped at birth, then I wouldn’t be her blood relative either.’
‘That’s an awful thing to say to a child.’
‘But think what it must have felt like for her, too. All the horror of the murder, those years of embarrassment, having a daughter who wasn’t quite right, then having me there like a great cuckoo in the nest, a constant reminder. She was too old to cope with a teenager in the best of circumstances, and those circumstances certainly weren’t the best.’
‘It’s still inexcusable. She shouldn’t have taken it out on you – her grandchild.’
‘But she wasn’t sure if I was her grandchild. That’s the point. These days she would probably have asked for a DNA test. Anyway, let’s not talk about it any more.’
Marcus put on some music and began to tell her how the latest tour had gone. There was no more talk of Grandma Molesly, but when they retired to bed and Marcus had switched out the light, Jo was free to remember her again. Except that she found she could not – her grandmother had become no more than a series of faded snapshots in her mind. Grandma in her chair behind the evening paper, Grandma calling sharply from the kitchen, ‘Tea’s ready’, or ‘Wipe your feet’. Grandma with her back to the kitchen, stirring something on the stove. Aunty Joan’s face was clearer, her eye shadow an overly bright blue, her lips shiny pink with lipstick and her nails always done in a matching shade; even then the makings of a double chin. If only they had let her stay with Aunty Joan. She wouldn’t have ended up at St Catherine’s if she had lived with Aunty Joan, whose house in Accrington was served by an entirely different set of schools. She would have been thrown into completely different company and never become involved in baiting Gilda Stafford. In fact, she would never have heard of Gilda until she moved in across the road. With no history between them, the situation in the lane the other day could have been easily resolved.
Not only might her school life have been different, but it followed that the rest of her life would have been different too. Lots of things might or might not have happened. Just one decision on the part of some case worker or committee – her entire future had hung on that moment and they had gone the wrong way. Or maybe not. Perhaps the path had been set in stone much earlier than that.
She thought about her own mother’s childhood. Could you take it back that far? What was it that had made her turn out the way she did? There had never been anything odd about the other members of the family. Beryl’s and Joan’s lives were steeped in ordinariness. Had Grandma Molesly been right about the nursing home? Perhaps she had been given the wrong baby – a child who brought a taint of bad blood into the family. Perhaps the mother of this other child had deliberately exchanged her baby for Grandma Molesly’s. Maybe this woman had stood over the cots in the hospital nursery, looking down on the sleeping mite who would one day become Jo’s mother, guessed at what was to come and taken her chance on a better outcome, a child forged from a safer set of genes. Bad blood – that was what they used to call it, when
Grandma Molesly was still a girl. These days people pretended to know better, to embrace more modern ideas about the nature of mental illness, but deep down the old ideas were still strong. ‘Like mother, like daughter’, that’s what people said – not when Grandma Molesly had been a girl, but when she herself had been, barely thirty years ago. Once something really bad happened, no one ever looked at a family in quite the same way. We might pay public lip service to the theories of psychiatrists and their ilk, but our old instinctive senses kick in, once suspicions are aroused.
And even when things did not go so catastrophically wrong as they had in her own mother’s case, it did you no good to have eccentric-looking parents. That had been halfway to explaining Gilda’s problems. Her parents had been old enough to be her grandparents, and their ideas were rooted in the 1950s and early 1960s. They had dressed her in hand-knitted berets and cardigans, cut her hair clumsily at home, kitted her out in pleated skirts and knee socks when everyone else wore trousers. They encouraged her to keep apart, to despise modern music, to be ignorant of any kind of popular culture to the point where, like an elderly judge or university don, she thought dubbing was something with which to treat football boots, if she thought of it at all.
Jo understood how important it was not to be different: she had battled against it all through childhood, endeavouring to look and behave like everyone else, even in the face of Mum’s persistent oddities; trying to keep her mother as invisible as possible at school events, never inviting the other children back home. But some things you can’t conceal. The familiar wooden doors loomed ahead of her. The paint was peeling in places, and one of the doors caught at the bottom. It needed to be taken off, sanded down and rehung, but somehow it never got done so it always scraped across the ground when it was opened.
Her mother used to annoy her father by calling it the lean-to. ‘You can’t call it a garage,’ she said, ‘because you don’t keep a car in it.’
He almost never argued with her, certainly not about household terminology: he just kept on calling it the garage, while she continued to call it the lean-to. Jo trod a narrow line, depending on who she was talking to, trying not to antagonize either of them. It was not that her father would have become annoyed if she had said ‘lean-to’, in the way that her mother might have done if she had said ‘garage’; he might not even have corrected her, but his eyes would have implied betrayal.
In a way, of course, her mother had been right. The car was always parked on the drive, or more often on the remnants of the worn grass verge between the road and the pavement, because it was a nuisance having to squeeze between the car and the line of rose bushes which separated their narrow drive from the small front lawn. The garage itself was too full of other things to fit a car inside. The lawnmower lived in there, standing next to her father’s seldom-used workbench, which had forks, spades, a big old crowbar and an axe propped up against it; the washing machine stood against one wall, where it was convenient for the side door which opened directly into their small square kitchen.
Dad’s car had been parked on the verge that day, when she came home from school. She would have seen it as she walked up the road. She must have known then that there was something wrong because it should not have been there. It was a Thursday, so Dad should have been at work.
She always entered the house through the garage. She didn’t have a front-door key, but the garage doors were left unlocked in the daytime. She had never really liked going through the garage. It was always dark in there, and the light switch was right inside, next to the kitchen door, so on a winter afternoon you had to run the gauntlet blindfold. Once, she tripped over a broom handle which had fallen across the part where you walked, coming down hard, scraping her hands and knees on the concrete floor. Even in summer the light which came through the lone pane of glass in the door to the back garden was barely enough to penetrate the shadows. Apart from a narrow space on one side which was left clear to walk through, the interior was a jumble of cardboard boxes, with here a pile of discarded light fittings draped with an old curtain, and there a clumsily reeled stack of garden hose, which tilted crazily atop a broken kitchen chair waiting to startle the unwary by overbalancing and slithering to the floor like an outsize green python. If the kitchen door happened to be open that would let in a bit more light, but otherwise the garage was a place to traverse as quickly as possible, lest some bogey man grabbed at you from out of the gloom.
But not that day – not when she had stood outside the garage door for what must have been the last time. That day it had all happened in slow motion, starting with the age it took her to pluck up enough courage to put her hand on the door. In her mind’s eye the garage door stood just ajar. That must have been a warning signal, too. The doors were always kept shut, in case the wind blew them back on their hinges and they slammed. Mum screamed if that happened. Sudden loud noises alarmed her, and she must not be alarmed.
Reach up for the door handle – she had just turned twelve, but she could not have been very tall, not if the handle seemed high up. It was cool to her touch; the sun had gone from the front of the house by late afternoon, leaving the garage doors in shadow.
Pull the door towards you … nothing to see at first. It was September, a bright day outside, your eyes have to get accustomed. But then you see. You see his feet first. His feet are nearest to you, and for a split second you think he’s lying down to do something, maybe trying to fix the washing machine, which must have broken down again. But it isn’t the washing machine. It isn’t the washing machine which has leaked all over the floor; it’s your father’s blood, and there is the axe which spilled it lying on the concrete floor beside his head, showing you how it was done – and although you’ve never seen a dead body before, you know without a shadow of a doubt that you’re looking at one now.
The kitchen door is open a crack, and Mum must be inside. You have to find Mum. You don’t know how this terrible thing has happened in the garage, or why your father came to be lying on the floor with his blood splattered from the pile of old newspapers stacked on the redundant television stand, to the front of the washing machine beside the kitchen door, where it has trickled down in pale, uneven stripes. What you do know is that it is around 4.30 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, and that means Mum will be somewhere in the house.
So you step around him, very carefully, not touching anything, not treading in anything, almost having to jump over him, in order to reach the kitchen step because he takes up most of the space – much more lying down than he used to standing up. This will be a feature of the coming days: the way until he died Dad took up so little space that people had almost stopped noticing him, whereas Mum, of course, had always managed to be noticeable.
It’s so quiet in the kitchen that you can only hear two things: the tick of the clock and a fly, buzzing against the window, frantically bashing against the glass until more by luck than judgement it finds the open top light and is abruptly gone. You don’t want to break the silence, so you don’t call out. Mum doesn’t like it when you shout; although, of course, she doesn’t like it if you take her by surprise either, which she calls creeping up on her, even though you didn’t mean to.
The door between the kitchen and the hall is half closed, but the door handle has dried blood on it. Hook your fingers around the side of the door and open it that way. Mum isn’t in the living room, although there’s evidence of her presence, a puzzle book open at an incomplete Word Search, a pencil with a very frayed piece of string tied around one end, a plate on the coffee table containing a half-eaten sandwich and surrounded by toast crumbs from some earlier snack. There’s also a mug with some tea left in the bottom. The remaining liquid looks pale against the tannin-stained interior. The door to the front room is open, but there’s too much junk in there for anyone to be inside, unless they are hiding – and Mum hasn’t done that for ages.
Then you turn the corner and see her sitting on the stairs. She’s got the pills and the sherry bottle
beside her, but she hasn’t managed to kill herself because the stupid, stupid, stupid woman never managed to get anything right.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Aunty Joan’s funeral took place at the local crematorium. It was a standard one-size-fits-all Church of England service taken by a priest who had never met the deceased, but managed to get all the names right by referring to his notes. The singing of ‘The Lord is my Shepherd’ was greatly enhanced by the presence of several ladies with whom Aunty Joan had once upon a time sung in a choir, and the coffin went out to the strains of ‘Que Sera Sera’, which had apparently been her favourite song. There was little obvious emotion: Aunty Beryl was seen to wipe her eyes a couple of times, but the general ambience was one of calm acceptance. Joan had been unwell for some time; it wasn’t a shock. There was no grieving partner or children, and everyone said it was a blessing that she hadn’t suffered.
Jo had approached the occasion with some trepidation, but the cluster of black-clad figures, standing on the pavement outside cousin Monica’s house (chosen for its convenient proximity to both Aunt Joan’s sheltered-housing complex and the crem), had greeted her warmly, Aunt Beryl enveloping her in a warm hug and Monica planting a kiss on her cheek before saying that they had saved her a place in one of the funeral limousines.
During her journey south down the motorway, Jo had built herself up to expect a much cooler reception. Was she not the daughter of the evil changeling who had brought so much shame and distress to the family all those years ago? Of course, if Grandma Molesly had been right, then she was not really their relative at all. She didn’t look much like them, although family resemblances between cousins were not always strong. And if she was not of their blood, then neither was Lauren. She wondered if her mother had been aware of the doubts cast upon her parentage when she was growing up. Lauren too must be growing up in alien soil. Jo had generally taken the repeated message I still have her as a taunt, but just occasionally she wondered whether the abductor’s motive in sending it was a misguided attempt at reassurance, letting her know that her daughter was still alive and well and safe. The seashells might simply be more of the same, a secret code meant only for her – except that she could not decipher it.