More Than Love Letters (20 page)

I bought some scarlet tights (15 denier was all I could get, so they’ll be straight in holes), and I thought I’d wear those red shoes that I bought at college for that dressy party that Sara Bhattacharjee had in the second year, and then I never wore again because I can’t walk in heels and they make me self-conscious about my height. I got some chicken wire – Cora had a roll of it because she puts it over her seedlings to keep off next-door-but-one’s cat – and I bought a big bag of multi-coloured feathers from a craft and sewing shop in town. Then tonight I have been busy with newspaper and flour-and-water, papier-mâchéing like crazy and sticking on feathers. The beak I cut and pasted from a cereal packet, covered with yellow crepe paper. My room now resembles a parrot enclosure after a suicide bomb attack by a militant macaw. If one of the parrots had been reading the
Guardian
.

Then I pedalled off to Witch House to see Helen because it was my turn on the rota. She was in a bad way. Even in this warm weather she always wears a long-sleeved top, normally, because of all the scars on her arms, but tonight she was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt. She had been to see her mum. She has never been able to talk to her about how she’s been feeling – I don’t think she has even mentioned the hospital – but she thought if she went in a short-sleeved shirt her mum would have to say something. She didn’t, of course: all she did was ask Helen why she doesn’t move back home. So now Helen is all messed up again. She had been jabbing a pencil into her thigh, leaving quite deep marks; she’d punctured the skin in places and I was worried it might get infected or give her blood-poisoning or something, but she’d disinfected it herself and said it would be OK. I stayed until she was asleep as usual, but I am afraid she’ll wake up later and hurt herself again. I really think soon she may have to go into hospital full-time for a while. She just isn’t safe with us.

How are you, anyway? How’s your dad?

Love,

Margaret xx

From:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]
Sent:
23/6/05 08:16
To:
Margaret Hayton [[email protected]]

 

Hi Margaret. Dad’s actually not great at the moment, since you ask. He started a new lot of chemo two weeks ago, and it’s leaving him pretty weak. His blood count was low at the weekend so they gave him a transfusion which perked him up a bit, but he’s also very nauseous all the time. Mum has a hell of a job trying to get him to eat. She says it’s like when she was pregnant. He doesn’t fancy anything except soup, but whenever he has an empty stomach he feels sick, so she has him on a cream cracker, every hour, on the hour. The GP mentioned ginger tea, but you can imagine what my dad would say about anything herbal. He thinks tea is only tea if it’s PG Tips, brewed to a deep orange, and has at least two sugars in it. Maybe your Cora has some suggestions for something Mum could slip in his Heinz cream of tomato. I’ve been trying to pop over about twice a week. It’s hard for Em with the kids, and it being such a haul from Middlesbrough, and Sam’s only just done his exams and is still finishing his dissertation, so there’s only me really at the moment.

Meanwhile – don’t mock! – my alphabetical compulsion has reduced me to the risible ignominy of placing an ad in the Singles section of the local rag. Velvet tones on the voicebox announced themselves as belonging to Gil, which didn’t seem a very promising name until I remembered Gilbert Blyth in the ‘Anne’ books. I met him as arranged last night, at a quiet pub outside the city centre, and encountered extremely promising velvet brown eyes to match the velvet voice. Sadly also a velvet scarf – but I have to assume, given the unambiguous nature of my ad, that I am none the less a member of his gender of preference. He displayed a broad range of conversational resources, covering film, music, world affairs, and the best methods of house-training a kitten. I hope that the kitten is real, and not an invented ploy for finding a way to an imagined kitten-loving soft spot in my girlish heart. I am informed that one should disbelieve 40 per cent of what blind dates tell you in their ads – I wonder if it is true of first meetings, too? I am now curious as to whether the comprehensiveness of his conversational aptitude reflects wide-ranging skills in other areas, too. I hope to find out soon – we have a second date scheduled for Friday night.

Big hugs,

Becs xxx

 

 

WITCH

Women of Ipswich Together Combating Homelessness

 

Extract from minutes of meeting
at Susan’s house, 23 June 2005, 8 p.m.

Helen was today admitted into psychiatric hospital on a full-time basis as a voluntary patient. She was reluctant to take this step, but felt that it was the only way she could be safe. Margaret reported that housing benefit will continue to meet Helen’s rent at Witch House for the first four weeks, after which the position will be reviewed.

Emily and Pat T. reported that they are a little concerned about Carole. She keeps staying very late at the medical lab, and the other residents say she even went in at the weekend, just to sterilise the test tubes one more time.

 

 

From:
Richard Slater
[[email protected]]
Sent:
24/6/05 17:48
To:
Michael Carragan [[email protected]]

 

Hi Michael,

Margaret phoned me this afternoon. I was over by the window when it rang. There’s this pigeon, you see, it spends all day sitting on a small ledge just above the window of my new office, ceaselessly making this rather smug pigeon noise. Always three little self-satisfied notes, rising slightly in pitch, the third one a shade longer than the first two. It was reminding me of something, and after three days of it (I’ve had the window open non-stop, it’s been so hot, so the audibility has been excellent) I finally realised what it was. It is Paul Daniels, saying ‘ho ho ho’ in that irritating way he has. So of course, it had to be stopped. I was leaning out a short way and trying to poke the pigeon’s feet with an inflatable tulip given to me by the Suffolk branch of the Anglo-Dutch Bulb Growers’ Association.

Anyway, the phone went, as I have mentioned, but I decided to let it go through to the answerphone, because the tulip was too short by just a tantalising inch or so, and the pigeon was still insulting my intelligence with infuriating bonhomie from the ledge. After the beep, of course, came Margaret’s voice, beginning to tell me that she was sorry I wasn’t there and really sounding as though she meant it. The i nflatable tulip drifted balletically down nine floors as I shot across the room, grabbing for the receiver, and in the process managing to knock flying the ceramic sugar-beet (you know, the one from the twinning of the Ipswich sugar works with the factory in Minsk, that I keep my paper clips in). So I was on the floor among the shards, for some reason trying to pick up all the paper clips, and Margaret was talking, and I couldn’t take in what she was saying at first. She seemed very agitated. One of the young women in the hostel, someone called Lauren, had called Margaret on her mobile at school, to say that one of the girls she knows who works at King’s Cross had told her that there has been a young Albanian working the area for the past two weeks, a new girl, long dark hair, about Nasreen’s age. Of course Margaret had to come to London at once, to see if it really is her. She had come straight to the station from school and just caught the 3.20, and was calling me from the train, expecting to arrive at Liverpool Street at 4.35. I said I’d meet her there, grabbed my jacket and ran.

I was at Liverpool Street before her, and saw her as soon as she got down from the train. What I noticed first was the look of strained excitement on her face. I could read it all: the hope that her friend might be found, that she was alive and safe, the fear of what degradations she might have been led into by her desperation. Only then did I take in what she was wearing. Three-inch heels, bright red tights, and above mid-thigh an extravaganza of brilliant plumage which made her look like a rare visitor from the tropical rainforest. In her hands was what appeared to be the severed head of a giant chicken. My dry mouth refused to form either the words of comfort and shared hope for Nasreen’s safety, or the obvious question about her apparel, which rose with equal speed in my mind, because (it shames me to admit) I was temporarily deprived of breath by the sight of the considerable and captivating length of Margaret’s legs, clad only in sheer scarlet nylon. She caught the direction of my dumbfounded gaze, and offered a hasty and less than coherent explanation involving a fictional fowl. But her mind, at least, was set firmly upon the task in hand, and we were soon on the Circle Line and heading for King’s Cross.

The presence of a bloke in a suit and tie, however, did nothing to further Margaret’s inquiries. Once it was speedily deduced that I was not a customer, the only possibility remaining seemed to be that I was a plain-clothed arm of law enforcement, and there was in consequence a perhaps understandable reluctance to talk while I was in attendance. Reluctantly I left Margaret to carry on speaking to the girls alone, coming back here with a view to getting the car and picking her up later on, around seven o’clock.

God, Mike, I can’t stand to think of that poor kid, escaping in fear of her life only to end up resorting to that existence down there. But even so, I really hope we’re going to find her there.

Richard.

 

 

From:
Margaret Hayton
[[email protected]]
Sent:
24/6/05 23:41
To:
Rebecca Prichard [[email protected]]

 

Dear Becs,

I’m sending this from Richard’s flat in London. He’s gone to bed – I insisted it was my turn to have the settee – and I asked if I could check my e-mail on his computer.

It’s been such an up and down day, Becs, I feel quite wrung out. We really thought we might have found Nasreen, but in the end it all came to nothing and we are back at square one. It was Lauren at the hostel who started it off – she called me at school to say that she had heard about a new Albanian girl working the streets at King’s Cross. Lauren was a runaway in London for a while, and she knows some of the women down there. I suppose she may have worked there herself at one time, but of course I’ve never asked. Anyway, naturally I dashed straight to the train as soon as I’d packed up at school. There was no time to go home and change out of my Roly-Poly Bird costume, so I just took the head off, flattened out the body a bit so it looked less obviously bird-shaped, and stripped away the lower portion which had made walking difficult. I suppose I looked a complete madwoman – why couldn’t I just have dressed up as Mrs Twit? – but to be honest all I could think about was getting to London and finding Nas. I called Richard from the train, and he came to help, but after a bit I decided the girls might talk more freely to a woman on her own, so he took off, promising to come back later to pick me up.

I talked to about a dozen women altogether before I tracked down the Albanian girl they had been talking about. It wasn’t her. This one was called Rrezja, nineteen years old, and actually a Kosovo Albanian, from Pristina. She was only thirteen during the conflict there. She lost both her parents: her father (she believes, although she can never be sure) to a mass grave, courtesy of the Serbian security forces, and then her mother in the NATO bombardment, which also destroyed the family home. She spent a year in a refugee camp, she told me, and then lived in derelict buildings, or stayed in boyfriends’ flats, until at sixteen she came to England with another girl in the back of a truck. ‘To try to make a better life,’ she said, and she still hopes to make enough money to get a flat and then look for a proper job. But she had bruises on her face and a split lip, and when I asked her where she is sleeping at the moment, she just shrugged. It’s so horrible, Becs – I can’t bear to think that Nas might be living that way. Some of the girls should clearly still be at school, but one of them, Rita, looked about Cora’s age under the thick mask of make-up, though she was as skinny as a teenager (I suppose that will be drugs). I really don’t know which is sadder.

At seven o’clock as arranged, Richard came slowly by in his car, looking out for me. When I saw him I stepped forward, and he wound down the window, but then I guess he saw I had been crying and in a moment he had pulled over and got out, and had me in his arms, hugging me tight. It was so good to see him, and to be taken back to his safe, clean flat, and my safe, clean life. He made us supper (pasta again, it seems to be his thing) and we talked for a long time. Well, mainly I talked and he listened, which he is very good at, and he even held my hand for a while, and after a lot of talking I calmed down a bit and things didn’t seem quite so bleak. Richard said some things then. He spun me this whole picture of where Nas might be – washing dishes in the basement kitchen of some cheap and cheerful restaurant, and then swigging beer afterwards and laughing with the waitresses until late into the night. Coke, you mean, I said, because she is Muslim and doesn’t drink, and he said, Diet Coke, you mean, because she’s eighteen and female so she probably thinks her bum is too big. We laughed at that, and then he made up the settee for me with his far-too-big kingsize duvet, gave me a kiss on the tip of my nose, and went off to bed.

And tonight was your second date with Gil, wasn’t it? I wonder how that went. And whether you are going over to your mum and dad’s at the weekend.

I know I ought to be thinking about Nasreen, but instead I keep finding myself thinking about Richard. About how secure and comfortable it felt to be in his arms, on the pavement at King’s Cross. About how he had one hand on the back of my neck, pulling my head in against his chest, just under his chin. And how I felt his fingers shift a little, until his thumb was running along just below the line of my jaw, as though he was going to lift my head up towards him. And how I wanted him to, I wanted him to lift my chin, and lower his mouth to mine, and kiss away all that fear and desolation. Oh God, Becs – I think I am falling in love with him.