‘Thing is,’ I went on, ‘I’ve made my decision and I’m happy to stick with it; well, not happy but I’ve come round to it, to staying at home and looking after her. I could do correspondence courses in my free time. I wouldn’t let my education slide, I’d keep it up. And I’d be doing my duty at the same time so it wouldn’t be so bad. Except for Dickie, this friend of hers, he has his own key and he wanders in whenever he feels like it. It’s as though he’s the one who has a right to live there, not me. The thought of spending more time with him. Why he can’t be her full-time carer . . . He reckons he’s got a demanding job, but I’ve never seen any evidence of it. He’s always down at the bookies’ when he’s not with us. He’s basically a bum.’
I paused and waited for her to sympathize, but all she did was blow on her coffee.
‘Do you know him? Dickie Knowles? Nasty yellow hair, he always wears a filthy beige coat? He’s no reader, so you wouldn’t get him in here, and I know you don’t live in Bank Top, but you might have seen him slouch past.’
Miss Mouse shook her head.
‘Oh. Well he’s horrible. He
touches me up
. I’ve had enough of it.’
You were supposed to feel better after you’d got something off your chest. I wished it was Miss Dragon sitting opposite, she’d know what to say to make me feel better. I thought of a film once where a woman was crying and crying during a therapy session, and all the counsellor did was wait till she’d finished, hand her a tissue and say, ‘Same time next week.’ Perhaps that was the way to handle problems.
I said, ‘Perhaps, if I’m being totally truthful . . . ’
Her eyes burned into me.
‘. . . it’s not all my grandma’s fault. Some of it’s me.’
Miss Mouse raised her eyebrows.
‘What I mean is, secretly I’m sort of glad I can’t go – oh, for God’s sake, promise you won’t tell Miss Stockley this. Don’t tell anyone. You won’t, will you?’
‘I won’t say a word.’
‘You know, when I was little I sometimes used to get invited to parties, and they were always horrible. I used to sit in the corner and watch the other kids race round doing stupid tricks with balloons and teaspoons, and wish I was anywhere else. Once I took a book upstairs and hid in a mum’s bedroom while they did games. You had to do something with an orange, roll it through your legs I think, and I knew I’d be crap at it. When this mum found out, she was really cross because she said it was rude to go in people’s bedrooms unless you were invited. She told me off in front of the other kids and they were in stitches. So the next time I got an invite – and it was only ’cause the whole class were going – I told them my grandma wouldn’t let me out. I pretended I was furious with her, and they believed me.’
Now I’d started talking it was as if I couldn’t stop.
‘Then, every time something came up, something social, I got into the habit of saying I wasn’t allowed to go. I used the excuse all the time at secondary school. And I made out that my grandma was a bit iller than she really was, that she couldn’t be left, because there was no arguing with that, I just got sympathy from the other girls. I mean, they thought I was boring, but they never made fun.
‘So really, the Oxford business is just an extension of that. And I think I could have convinced myself it would all work out for the best if it wasn’t for Dickie and his wandering hands.’ I took a breath, let it out slowly. ‘God, sorry for going on, I didn’t mean—’
‘But you do want to take up your Oxford place,’ she said. ‘And I think you could, Miss Stockley was telling me, from a practical point of view. With a reassessment from social services, and your grandmother’s friends helping out. And of course, the terms at Oxford being so short, only eight weeks. You’d be back before she realized you’d gone.’
She was making it sound so straightforward. ‘But there’s nothing you can do about my fear, is there? There was one night, when Poll was in hospital, I nearly went mad because I was in the house all on my own. I couldn’t cope at all.’
‘That’s precisely why you
must
go away. Otherwise you’ll end up on your own permanently. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ Her pale cheeks were growing pink.
A vision of myself in my forties rose up in my mind’s eye; stuck in Poll’s house, the furniture and decorations all still the same but scruffier, Poll’s ashes on the sideboard. I’d sit in front of the telly all day and eat till I was too fat to get through the door.
‘Do you understand?’ Miss Mouse said again, more urgently.
‘I think so.’
‘If you don’t go, you risk becoming very bitter. You can’t go through life saying, “I could have gone to Oxford,” every time you meet someone.’
‘I know.’
‘Would it be too late to write and tell them you’ve changed your mind again, and you will be coming? Is that possible?’
I giggled with embarrassment. ‘I never let them know in the first place. Never got round to it.’
‘Well, then. That means you always intended to go, doesn’t it?’
‘It means I couldn’t bear to write the words down.’
‘Same thing.’
‘Is it?’ The room seemed to vibrate around me and I thought of Callum again, his surprise and admiration when I’d told him where I was headed. He was there again, at the sink, washing mugs and grinning. ‘I think this office must be built on top of ley-lines, or something. Everything seems to happen in here. It’s the place where my life turns upside down.’
I started a laugh that turned into tears. Miss Mouse reached out and touched my hair very gently, then let her arm fall to my sleeve. She stroked my cuff and I stared at her fingers, surprised.
‘I did a good job when I chose this for you, didn’t I?’ she said.
I swallowed. ‘That was you? That bag of clothes on the doorstep?’
‘Yes.’
‘God. It’s brilliant, everything was. You’ve seen me wearing the tunic, haven’t you? You don’t know, you don’t know what you started . . . ’
Then I saw: it was like washing the mud away from a piece of ancient pottery and the pattern coming clear before your eyes.
‘I think—’ I began.
‘I started it nineteen years ago. Nineteen years ago, my first mistake. I wanted to begin to put things right.’
She was leaning forward and her eyes were bright.
‘Are you—?’
‘Although I can never really make up for going. I understand that.’
‘I think I might know who you are.’
All the random moments that had been swirling around us for years suddenly coalesced to form a new future. I could make out her nodding through my tears, then her arms were round me and mine round hers, her bony body. And even then I was thinking, don’t touch her, she abandoned you! But the pull was too strong and I let myself be held while the room buzzed and my brain splintered apart.
After a long time I moved away and we sat back down, though she kept her hand on my wrist.
‘Could you come back home with me tonight?’ she said shakily. ‘There’s a lot to talk about.’
When I was a little girl, I’d rehearsed this moment. It had never been here, with her, though. It usually took place when I was a grown up successful something-or-other, sitting behind a huge oak desk, or in the hall of a posh house with stripy wallpaper and a bowl of roses on the table. She’d turn up unannounced, all apologetic, and I’d sweep her to one side. ‘Life-wrecker,’ I’d cry. ‘Coward.’ She’d slink away a broken woman with me shouting, ‘
Serve you right.
’ I’d slam the door and draw a line under the whole business.
I’d had it all worked out for so long. Where were the words that I needed; where had they gone?
*
Please God let me have said the right thing.
The first thing I did, to my surprise, was phone Poll from the front desk and tell her I was staying overnight with a girlfriend. I didn’t let her argue, although I could hear her chuntering on as I was talking. I
think
she heard me say I’d call back in the morning.
Miss Mouse – Mum – went round having a final lock-up, and set the library alarm, then we – Mum and I – had this surreal, spaced-out walk to the bus stop, neither of us talking, although my head was screaming with noise.
You’ve got no nightie, how could she run off like that, who’ll do Poll’s eye drops, dare I ask her if she killed my dad, does she know about Callum, where does she actually live, is Vince there, how
could
she run off like that, how
could
she run off like that?
Some drunks called to each other from across the street. I said, ‘I’ll have made you miss your bus, won’t I?’
‘No, there’s one every half-hour.’
I was thinking, whatever happens, I want a souvenir of this evening, something tangible I can put away in a box with Callum’s wasp, the Oxford newsletter, her photo. I’d hang on to the bus ticket and keep it forever; if it came to it, I’d pick that manky old lolly stick up off the pavement and have that as my treasure. Anything to prove this had been real.
She was talking now, about Miss Dragon.
‘My best friend,’ she was saying.
‘I thought so,’ I replied. I didn’t say I thought for a while they’d been lovers.
‘She’s done more than show me the ropes, she’s understood my ways.’
I didn’t really get that, but I smiled as if I did. ‘Does she know? About you and me?’
‘No. I’ve not told anyone. But she was very kind when my father died, last year.’
My other grandad. ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Miss Stockley’s dad died as well, she was telling me.’
‘That’s probably why she was so good with me. Our households were the same.’
It was such a weird conversation to be having, not least because what we were talking about bore no relation to my loud, racing thoughts. It was like having the radio and the TV on at the same time. The bus came and we got on. I pushed my ticket down to the bottom of my peggy purse, and we sat at the front behind the disabled seats. Aside from us, the downstairs deck was empty.
‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘that Dinah lived with just her father, and so did I. They were much closer, of course; they did a lot together, while he was still fit. Dad and I were sort of semi-detached. We liked our own space.’
‘So you live alone now?’
‘Yes.’
Not with Vince Millar, then.
The central strip light hummed above us, you heard it when the bus was idling. Flick-flick-flick went the street lights past the window. I thought, I’m sure I shouldn’t be sitting on the 575 having a polite conversation. It should be ranting and recriminations, and running off into the night and sobbing till dawn on the moors. Or hysterical joyous weeping and white-knuckle clasping of limbs, like the victims of
Surprise, Surprise
. Trust me to get it wrong. Bet Donna French would have handled herself with style.
‘If I’m being truthful, I don’t even really miss him.’ Mum (
Mum
) was rolling her ticket into a long spindle between her mottled fingers. ‘That probably makes me sound terrible, but we’d made our peace, and he went quite suddenly, without a lot of suffering. He had said a few times he was moving to Exmouth to be near his cousin, so I often pretend to myself that he’s just gone there for a while.’
That sounded a bit mad to me, but everyone’s got their own way of coping. ‘So what happened to your mother?’ Because if she ran off, that might go some way to explaining what you did, I was thinking.
‘I lost her in my teens.’ Mum had unrolled the spindle and was now pleating it into tiny folds.
‘What do you mean? You got separated?’ I said stupidly.
‘She died of stomach cancer,’ said Mum. I looked away, watched the driver’s hairy forearms for a while, counted his gold rings. I never know what to say when someone comes out with that sort of thing.
After a minute she said, ‘It wasn’t a good time. I was ill for a while after.’
I held my breath, waiting for baby Kat to come into the story. But she changed the subject.
‘I live on Windermere Crescent. Off Chorley New Road. I get the bus in every day, well every day the library’s open, because the stop’s only a minute away from my front door. It’s a nice house. When I was away and Dad lived there on his own, he really let it go. I had to do a lot of tidying up when I came back. You can have the spare room, it’s quite a good size. I can wash your sweater and things, and tumble them for you in an hour, so you can wear them tomorrow. You’ll have to wear Dad’s old dressing gown in the meantime.’
Yes, I thought, because none of your stuff will fit. Why wasn’t I that shape? And then a voice in my head immediately went, How can you be concerned with something as trivial as fat when this is your
mum
at last?
‘You are definitely all right to stay, aren’t you?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, trying to sound as if I was in control of my life. ‘It’ll be fine.’
*
The house turned out to be a biggish Thirties detached with one of those porches shaped like a huge brick keyhole. A security light clicked on as we went through the metal gate, showing a paved driveway edged with neat stone pots.
‘You should have seen it when it was just my dad on his own. This was all grass, knee-high.’
Inside the long hall was an Axminster carpet and a white-painted banister. I could smell potpourri or air freshener. Everything looked very clean. I followed her through to the kitchen and watched her fill the kettle.
‘Tea? I’ll just nip up and put sheets on the spare bed,’ she said, taking her coat off and hanging it in a cupboard under the stairs. ‘Go through to the lounge.’ She pointed the way.
I poked my head round the door to see a very ordinary sort of living room, a bit old-fashioned, tons of books lying around, then I went back to the kitchen to brew the drinks. While the kettle boiled I took stock. The surfaces were immaculate and, in the main, bare. Apart from the kettle, a radio and a toaster, nothing else was out on show. No mug-tree, no utensils, no jars, no cleaning fluids. No ornaments or plants on the windowsill, no fridge magnets. There was no evidence of pets. Only a calendar and a Constable reproduction hung on the walls.
I opened a few cupboards to see if I could locate the tea and only found lots of crockery and pans. At last, inside the cupboard above the fridge, I found some jars and packets, half a small loaf in a bag, and a pot of freeze-dried tea. In the gleaming fridge there were some diet yoghurts, skimmed milk, and a bunch of bananas; that was it. Not even any butter. She must be due a major shop.