Tarnished (2 page)

He took a photograph. Then, taking his rucksack off and laying it next to his detector, he drew out one of the carrier bags he kept for what he called wet specimens. Ever so carefully, using the bag as a sort of glove so that he didn’t have to touch her, he eased her inside it. She just about fitted. She was surprisingly heavy, though, for just a head. He put her into the rucksack and eased it on to his back. Finally he picked up his detector and had a look about to see if there was any more of her to be found.

But he couldn’t see a thing. The currents went all over the place this far out. The rest of her could end up anywhere, Sheppey, Walton or perhaps even Dutch Holland, which is how he thought of it to differentiate it from Holland-on-Sea, Essex. He took one last wistful look out to where he had been heading. He supposed he wasn’t going to go out there now, not with the weight he was carrying on his back.

The poor girl.

He had better take her back and give her to the police so that perhaps they could work out who she was.

Her mother, if she had one, would be worried about her.

Then

Breathe.

OK then.

I’m trying to see her face.

But all I can remember is the weight of her arm round me, and the scent of her: almondy orange, thick. And the feel of her nightie, which is pale blue, cotton, with frills on the front.

I’ve got my eyes shut and we’re in her bed and she has a cup of tea, which, with her free hand, the one that isn’t on me, she reaches and drinks from. And, although I can’t hear the words, I can feel the rumble of her voice as my ears are pressed up against her ribcage.

If I had a clear photograph, I could see her face.

But I don’t have a clear photograph. There were hardly any photos of anyone, which, not knowing any different, I never really questioned. Not until recently. The only one I’ve got is of me, where I’m sitting on her lap, all chubby knees and cornrowed hair, leaning against her slim elegance.

And in it, her face is a blur.

I try to look forwards, but always I’m pulled back to the blank space before I was ten, and the void that has filled me since then.

I wonder if it’s because I can’t see my mother’s face that I feel like this.

One

When Peg turned up for her weekly visit and was greeted with a scream, she knew things had reached the point of no return.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ Doll said over the blare of the TV.

It was the first time Peg had ever heard her grandmother swear.

‘It’s me, Nan, Meggy.’

The sticky fly tape behind Doll twisted in the fruited thermals of the lounge. Despite the fact that it was now winter, it was full and no longer doing its job. Peg noted that it needed to be changed.

‘Never seen you before in me life.’

Doll frowned and patted her immaculately set grey curls – the mobile hairdresser always came the day before Peg.

Then, tilting up her head with a birdlike movement, she squinted at the large, crinkle-haired girl in her lounge. ‘Stand in the light so’s I can see you.’

Peg moved further into the greasy sunlight filtering through the net curtains and allowed her face to be taken by her grandmother’s cold, lumpy fingers. As the old lady leaned forward she brought with her a tang of urine that flared Peg’s nostrils.

‘Oh yes. Now you mention it, there
is
something familiar about you. You’re Raymond’s girl Margaret, ain’t you?’

‘That’s me, Nan,’ Peg said, pressing her lips together, trying to appear neutral. ‘Shall I make us a nice cup of tea, then?’

‘Nice cup of tea.’ Doll nodded and folded her hands back into her lap, on top of the blanket Peg had crocheted with her one wet Easter holiday many years ago.

Peg went out to the tiny kitchen and hunted for the teapot, teabags and milk. Doll had taken to putting things away in peculiar places. Only last week, the milk had been in the washing machine and the teapot – full of treacly tea and with the chicken-shaped cosy on it – in the fridge. Today wasn’t such a challenge; by rooting in the saucepan cupboard, she found everything she needed.

While the kettle boiled, Peg began her regular clean of the kitchen, the work coloured this week by a realisation that the situation was becoming untenable. But it was so difficult. It was all down to her to sort out, but what could she do to help Doll while at the same time respecting the old lady’s fierce independence? She had tried to get help in, had gone through all the means-testing that showed Doll was entitled to home care. But every time a home help, carer or shopper came to the bungalow, Doll sent them packing.

‘They’re all idiots. That or savages,’ she explained to Peg, who knew exactly what sort of shorthand her grandmother was using. The mobile hairdresser – the only help allowed past Doll’s threshold – was an unswervingly cheerful woman in her mid-fifties. She was also English and, underneath her spray tan, lily-white.

Even with her weekly mini-cleans, Peg could see that the battle against the chaos of stuff in the small bungalow had been all but lost. A teenager in the war, a young mother in the rationing years, Doll had never knowingly thrown out anything potentially useful in her life, and after eighty-nine years that added up to a hell of a lot of stuff, none of it as clean as it could be, most of it covered in a thick layer of greasy dust.

So the kitchen drawers were crammed with objects that were unlikely ever to come in handy, but which had been saved just in case. There were packets of sugar from every café Doll had visited in her life; beer mats swiped, she had told Peg, from the days when she and Frank used to go for a weekly drink in the local pub; a handful of British Rail spoon, sugar and milk-powder sets she made him take from the train on his daily commute to Wapping after they first moved down; various lengths of string rolled into balls like wool, and boxes and boxes of plasters, out-of-date antiseptic wipes, scalpel blades and yellowed latex medical appliances. There was a drawer almost entirely full of rubber bands, some so ancient as to be returning to the original sap. Another sharply compost-scented drawer was stuffed solid with the thin, filmy plastic bags you put supermarket fruit and veg into.

The grimy cupboards above the drawers held the leavings of generations of cheap, cracked and partial dinner sets, unidentifiable electrical appliances with dangerous-looking twisted and frayed cloth-covered cables and enough vases to furnish a small florist’s shop. Off-puttingly jammed in among the dinner plates were stainless steel kidney dishes, a grimy bedpan and lengths of stained rubber tubing.

Four years earlier, shortly after coming home from boarding school after her A levels, Peg had – amid much consternation from Doll and Aunty Jean – moved out of the bungalow, away from Tankerton and up to London to start the job she still held at the library. On her weekly visits she had watched with alarm as the tide of clutter and neglect almost immediately began to roll in. It was as if Doll, who had been impeccably – even obsessively – clean and tidy when she was growing up, had been holding it all back until she was gone. It hadn’t helped that, with the almost inhuman strength of a determined old woman, she had pulled what looked like hundreds of boxes and bags of ancient stuff into the lounge from the garden shed. It had been as if she were somehow taking stock, finding a way of rooting her increasingly free-floating sense of self.

Two years after she had moved out, after months of guiltily wondering if she should intervene, Peg had spent a whole weekend trying to organise things. She thought if she managed to clear just one cupboard or shelf in each room for the small number of items Doll actually used, then it would be possible to keep the other stuff under control. But it had been a far more difficult job than she had anticipated. Doll had perched on the kitchen stool, watching her every move with as steady an eye as she could muster, making sure that nothing Peg moved was thrown away. Then she had followed her around the house, saying ‘I might be able to use that’ each time Peg, questionable object in hand, glanced at the recycling box she was optimistically pulling behind her.

She wondered if, when the time came, she could get the phrase put on Doll’s gravestone.

‘And why are you nosing through my stuff anyway?’ she once asked, to which Peg had no answer that didn’t sound insulting.

In the end, Peg threw her hands up and decided she would just stage tiny, imperceptible and secret interventions whenever she visited. So, while the situation had steadily worsened, at least it had done so more slowly than had she not lifted a finger.

She tipped a beetle thing out of the teapot, gave it a rinse and popped in five teabags – Doll liked it ‘so strong you can stand a spoon in it’. Then she put it on the tray she had already set with cups, saucers and sugar, the blue Princess Diana milk jug and a plate of Bourbons only just past their sell-by date.

But, as seemed increasingly to be the way, when she got back to the lounge Doll was fast asleep in front of the roaring gas fire, snoring slightly, jaws open, a string of spittle threading between the top and bottom sets of her loose dentures.

Peg batted away the couple of flies that threatened to invade her mouth.

On the TV, Lorraine Kelly and friends were chatting at such a volume that the hundreds of dusty glasses in the cocktail cabinet tinkled along with them. Peg put the tray on the sideboard, prised the remote from Doll’s grip and turned off the TV. She poured herself a cup of tea, picked up a Bourbon biscuit, pulled her red notebook and pen out of her bag and settled down on the settee in front of the whistling gas fire. Her brain whirring, she leaned back and gazed at the creeping damp patch on the ceiling. But she had other things to worry about than the state of the roof, which she knew nobody had the funds to repair anyway.

She turned to her red book.

List: what to do about Nan?
she wrote, and underlined it twice.

She stared at the blank page, but nothing came, no great insights or solutions.

So she closed her eyes, slowed her breathing and practised the mind-clearing technique she had been learning. She tensed and relaxed each of her muscles and started to count down from a hundred, imagining she was climbing down steps, down to a room with stars on the walls . . .

‘Meggy!’ Peg felt a hand on her knee. ‘So nice of you to come, Meggy!’ Far from coming up with any great revelations, she had simply fallen asleep in the humming, airless heat of the double-glazed bungalow.

‘Hello, Nan.’ Peg smiled and looked at the lined face twinkling down at her. She took her grandmother’s cold hand, feeling the wedding ring that had been on that finger for sixty-six years. It had always been loose, but now it was only saved from slipping off by a lumpy, arthritic knuckle. The engagement ring, a decent-sized diamond that Frank had bought second-hand with his saved wartime earnings, was long lost. Washed away with the potato peelings, Doll always said.

‘You’d better sit back down, Nan,’ Peg said, getting up and helping her to her chair. Then she went over to the teapot and lifted the cosy. ‘It’s still warm. Want a cup?’

‘Probably strong enough for me now,’ Doll said, and they both laughed.

The intercom buzzed sharply, cutting across the thick air and making them jump even though they had heard it countless times before.

‘Mummy?’ Jean’s voice crackled from the little white box on top of the low bookcase. ‘Mummy? Is Meggy there?’

Putting the teapot down, Peg picked her way across the room to the box and pressed the red button on the top.

‘Hello, Aunty Jean.’

‘Oh, thank goodness you’re there. I was getting ever so worried.’

‘I’ve been here for a bit, Aunty Jean. It’s only eleven.’

‘Is it only eleven, then?’

Peg glanced over at the wrought-iron clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Yes. I’ll be over at about four-ish, as usual.’

‘Oh.’

The tone of her voice stirred in Peg the familiar feeling that she was doing something wrong. ‘I’ll see if I can’t come over a little bit earlier, then,’ she said.

‘All right, darling. Thank you, darling.’

The intercom crackled as Jean cut the connection.

‘You know,’ Doll said as Peg finally poured the tea, ‘I don’t know where Keithy’s got to. Do you?’

Peg turned, cup in hand, and looked at her. ‘Keithy? Who’s Keithy, Nan?’

‘My Keithy. I miss him, you know.’

Peg put the tea on the occasional table by Doll’s chair, cleared six copies of the
Daily Mail
from the grimy pouffe and sat down next to her. She took her hand and laced their fingers together.

‘Your Keithy, Nan?’

‘You know.’

‘No?’

‘You know, Keithy, my boy. My poor baby.’

‘Your boy’s Raymond, Gran. My dad, remember. Raymond.’

‘Oh yes. Raymond’s a lovely boy. Ever so clever.’

Peg felt a lump in her throat.

‘My Raymond’s done ever so well. In spite of
her
.’

Peg closed her eyes. She could hardly bear it when Doll started on her mother.

‘She broke his heart, you know,’ Doll said.

‘She died, Nan,’ Peg said. She needed to soften her tone. ‘And Raymond’s not here any more, remember?’

‘I miss him so much.’ Doll looked up at Peg and closed her heavy eyelids, which were so papery Peg thought she could see the irises through them.

There was very little Peg could say to this. What do you say to a confused old lady who hasn’t seen her only son for sixteen years?

They sat for a few minutes, holding hands, the hiss of the gas fire underlining the silence in the room. Outside, a car rolled past, bumping over the tarmac seams in the patched-up concrete road.

Then Peg noticed that Doll had started to snatch at her breath in staccato rasps. Her tiny, concave chest shuddered under the food stains on her brown acrylic jumper.

‘Nan?’ Peg bent towards her grandmother, a flush of panic sheening her face. ‘Nan? Are you all right?’

Doll didn’t respond. Peg put her hands on her shoulders and gently tried to rouse her, but she seemed to be lost somewhere inside herself.