Chosen

© Andrew Greig

Lesley Glaister was born in Northamptonshire and grew up in Suffolk, moving to Sheffield where she took a degree with the Open University. She was ‘discovered' by the novelist Hilary Mantel when she attended a course given by the Arvon Foundation in 1989. Her first novel,
Honour Thy Father
, won the Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award.

Thirteen novels later, Lesley Glaister lives with her husband between Sheffield, Edinburgh and Orkney. She has three sons and teaches Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

Chosen

Also by Lesley Glaister

Honour Thy Father
Trick or Treat
Digging to Australia
Limestone and Clay
Partial Eclipse
The Private Parts of Women
Easy Peasy
Sheer Blue Bliss
Now You See Me
As Far as You Can Go
Nina Todd Has Gone

Edited by Lesley Glaister

Are You She?

Lesley Glaister

This edition published in June 2011
First published in May 2010
by Tindal Street Press Ltd
217 The Custard Factory, Gibb Street,
Birmingham,
B9 4AA
www.tindalstreet.co.uk

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

Copyright © Lesley Glaister 2010

The moral right of Lesley Glaister to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without either prior permission in writing from the publisher or a licence, permitting restricted copying. In the United Kingdom such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London
WIP OLP

All the characters in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN
: 978 1 906994 20 4
Ebook
ISBN
: 978 1 906994 53 2

Typeset by Alma Books Ltd
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Cox & Wyman, Reading

Cover

About the Author

Also by Lesley Glaister

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Dodie

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Stella and Me

Dodie

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Acknowledgements

To Lawrence, Andy and Ginny with love

Chosen

S
he stands on the dark front doorstep, shivering, listening to the sound of nothing happening inside. You can sense if there's someone in a house and there must be someone here – Stella never leaves the place. But that doesn't stop the awful feeling that there's no one here: no one who's breathing.

A weird red dress
, Seth said. She should have taken more notice. He'd been round at her house after school one day last week – Wednesday? Thursday? He'd come through the door and dropped his schoolbag on the floor, as he often did, to scrounge something from the fridge – and to put off going home to Stella.

Crowing with delight, Jake had toddled over to Seth, to be swung, shrieking joyfully, into the air. Four-thirtyish, it must have been. That time when the day starts to collapse into a blur of mess and fretfulness, towards food and bath and stories and bed and at long, long last, quiet and a glass of wine.

So she hadn't paid much attention.

‘But, will you babysit on Friday?' She definitely had asked that.

‘I'll text you.' He'd grinned – and they both knew that meant yes. He loved to babysit, to get to eat pizza in front of the TV with a can of beer and his feet up on the coffee table – something Stella would never allow, not in a million years.

He'd put Jake down, gone to the fridge for milk. She'd watched his long knobbly fingers, clever fingers that could mend anything. He liked nothing better than to take a machine apart and put it back together.

And then he said: ‘Mum's gone weird.'

‘
Gone
weird!' Dodie said. ‘And don't swig from the carton.'

With his sleeve, he wiped the milky moustache from his handsome face – well, potentially handsome, with his dark blue eyes, and humorous quirky mouth. ‘Weirder than usual.' He burped sonorously. ‘She's got this dress hanging in the hall. A red dress, like a
weird
red dress.'

‘What's weird about it?' she asked, but at that moment Jake fell over and cracked his head on the table leg and then the phone rang for Rod and she had to go and get him out of his shed, and then . . . well it was all busy and hot and Seth had gone to lie on the floor and play trains with Jake, keeping him out from under her feet while she peeled the spuds.

And she'd forgotten about the dress, though in miniature it has been swaying somewhere at the back of her mind ever since: a red dress hanging in that cold bleak hall.

No one's going to open the door. The streetlamp shines a dappled light through the dripping branches of the laburnum on the wet pebbledash. She braces herself to go down the darker, dank side passage. The garden gate squeals, grating on its hinges. She stops and runs her finger inside one of the wrought-iron twiddles, picking up a scratch of rust.
You'll get lockjaw
, Stella used to warn her – that lockjaw smell of swing chains, seesaws, seasick. She stands looking up at the back of the house, but there's no sign of life: just blank, black windows with the rain sluicing down.

She returns to the front doorstep, pressing her finger continuously on the bell and rat-tat-tatting with the fox-head doorknocker that used to scare her with its snarl. She opens the letterbox, catching her finger in the sharp bristles behind it, angles her head down and calls, ‘Mum,
Mum
!'

Seth had definitely said he'd text about the babysitting, but he didn't, and so she'd come round on Friday afternoon to find him. Rain gurgles and drips from the gutter – as it did on Friday – and a greenish mould spreads map-like from a leak in the drainpipe. Ask Rod to fix that, she thinks, though he wouldn't and she won't. Her stupid teeth are chattering. She will have to go back into that darkness, down the garden to the shed and get the key – but she puts off the moment, remembering how it went on Friday afternoon.

She'd stood here then, knocking and ringing and eventually giving up and trying round the back. But that time there had been a light in the downstairs window, and she'd seen the curtain twitch. ‘Mum!' she'd called. ‘I know you're in there.' Eventually the door had opened and Stella had stood hunched above her on the step.

‘Going to let me in then?' Dodie said, and when Stella hesitated, ‘What? You got a fancy man in there?'

Stella stepped back to allow her in. Dodie pushed down her hood and scrabbled her fingers through her hair. ‘You look nice.' She took a closer look at her mother. For years Stella had crept about in a filthy dressing gown, but today she was tattily splendid in the weird red dress – which wasn't so weird, just ancient and ethnic of some sort – but weird, certainly, to see her so attired. Her hair, usually a mass of greasy rats' tails, was washed and fluffy and there was kohl smudged round her startling grey eyes.

Stella squeezed out a smile. She might have been dressed up but the kitchen was the same as ever: chilly, bleach-scented, a trace of dope hanging in the air. As if checking for continuity, Dodie's eyes had ticked off the normal things: the tea cosy – a knitted cottage – derelict now; the potato masher with its split wooden handle; the giant scissors that
could snip through bones. But there was also a carrot, half-chopped on a wooden board.

‘Cooking?' Dodie said, surprised. Stella hadn't, to her knowledge, cooked for years.

‘Soup,' Stella said. ‘Thought I might.'

They stood in the tiny kitchen like actors in need of a prompt.

‘You could offer me a cup of tea,' Dodie suggested and Stella turned – so thin that, from behind, the dress looked empty – to fill the kettle, before she led Dodie through into the dining room. On the table, as always, there was a puzzle, this time a view of Venice. It was almost completed, just a few jagged islands left to fill – a bit of sky, part of a façade, the curved prow of a gondola.

Dodie shivered and huddled into her jacket. ‘Why don't you put the fire on?' The overhead light was a bleak forty watts, flattening and ageing, seeming to drain everything it illuminated of light.

‘Did you want anything in particular?' Stella asked.

‘Actually I'm looking for Seth. He in?'

Stella went back into the kitchen, a fusty, patchouli smell coming off the old velvet as she passed. The one-handed clock showed it was gone five and Seth's schoolbag was on the floor, but if he was in he'd have come bounding downstairs by now.

‘Seth told me about the dress. Why
are
you all dolled up, anyway?' Dodie said, studying the puzzle.

Stella returned with a mug of tea, centred it on a coaster on the table. She'd kept that table immaculate for years, an island of shine among the rest of the mean, dull furniture.

‘He's out,' Stella said, avoiding her eyes.

‘Out where?' Dodie said. ‘Aren't you having one?'

Stella gnawed the corner of her thumbnail.

‘Are you OK?' Dodie asked. She watched Stella frowning at the puzzle. Dodie spotted a piece, the gondolier's stockinged shin, and her fingers twitched. Half her childhood was spent here, like this, hunched over a puzzle, her reflection floating deep beneath her in the shine of the rosy wood.