Tarnished (24 page)

As Nan brings her hand up to the mole and touches the hairs, I see Phil’s mouth working, her little round mouse eyes falling back into her bony face.

‘I might be able to help you with that,’ Nan says. ‘I’ll see what I’ve got in the house.’

‘Cheerio then, miladies,’ Wayne thunders as he crosses the lawn towards the car.

‘How many times do I have to tell you? Use the path,’ Nan says, her hands now on her little hips.

‘Lovely to see you too, Mrs T.’ Wayne salutes her like a soldier, and swings himself into the car.

Nan just lifts her shoulders a little and rests her head on one side, watching as he pulls out along the road.

‘Come on then, you two. Let’s see what we can find you to eat!’ Nan says, and we follow her into the bungalow. As usual, she has pulled out the dining table so it fills her lounge and it’s groaning with mounds of sandwiches, sausage rolls, rich and livery galantine and, my favourite, Nan’s chocolate cake, which is so gooey it’s almost a milkshake instead of a cake.

‘Sit! Sit!’ Nan says, pulling out a chair and nearly pushing Philippa into it.

‘Shouldn’t we say hello to Aunty Jean first?’ I say. That’s the way we normally do it.

‘Poor Jeanie’s having a snooze,’ Nan says. ‘She’s had a bit of a chest recently. Now then, Meggy, don’t forget to be the hostess.’

She disappears to the kitchen, leaving us alone with all the food.

I run round the table, grabbing things and piling them on two plates. I put one down in front of Philippa and take mine to my seat at the other side of the table. I’m pretty hungry after the long journey. It’s only when I reach across for more that I realise that Phil still has everything on her plate.

‘Tuck in,’ I say.

‘Not hungry,’ Phil says. It’s the first thing she’s said since we arrived, and her voice is tiny, her arms drawn round herself and her shoulders all hunched up.

I shrug and put some more stuff on my plate.

For a short while, the only sound in the room is my munching as I work my way through my second plateful. Then Nan bursts through.

‘How’s it doing, girls?’ she says. Then she sees Phil’s untouched plate. ‘What’s the matter, Philippa?’

‘She said she’s not hungry,’ I say, through a mouthful of sausage roll.

‘Oh, but you’ve got to eat,’ Nan says. She grabs a sausage roll and holds it in front of Phil’s mouth.

‘Go on,’ she says as Phil just sits there, looking at the food in Nan’s hand.

‘I can’t,’ Phil says.

‘Course you can,’ Nan says.

‘Go on, Phil,’ I say.

‘I don’t like sausage rolls.’

‘Well try an eggy sandwich then, girl,’ Nan says, popping the sausage roll onto my plate. ‘You’ve got to eat something.’

Phil reaches out and curls her bony fingers round a sandwich, lifting it as if it weighs ten tons. She puts it up to her mouth and slowly opens her lips to let the tip of the corner in. She bites it, frowns and chews slowly. Then she puts the rest of the sandwich down. Nan eyes her like a cat watching a sparrow.

Then, as if it were the biggest lump of stuff in the world, Phil swallows the bit of the sandwich. Almost immediately, she grasps her stomach and closes her eyes.

‘May I be excused, please, Mrs Thwaites?’

‘Oh, call me Nan,’ Nan says. ‘I don’t hold with all that Mrs bother stuff. You want to get down?’

‘She wants the toilet,’ I say, interpreting our school language for Nan.

‘Oh yes, dearie. Show her the way, will you Meggy? There’s a good girl.’

I go into the hallway and point towards the bathroom. Phil only just makes it in time before she is sick.

‘Nan! Nan!’ I call. ‘Philippa’s poorly!’

‘Oh no,’ Nan says, coming out to the hallway and barging past me to find Phil crouching over the toilet retching green stuff up. Nan grabs Phil’s hair and holds it back, then rubs her on the back, helping her up with the last bits. She’s great when you’re being sick, Nan is.

‘Get a glass of water, Meggy,’ Nan says. ‘And the Dettol, a bucket and a roll of kitchen towels.’

I do as I’m told and when I come back with the supplies, Nan is sitting on the toilet, with Phil on her knee, holding her close. I feel a sudden stab of jealousy and wish it was me that had been poorly, not Phil. Nan reaches out for the water and, after a bit of cleaning and dabbing and wiping Dettol round the toilet, we go back to the lounge, where the smell of the eggy sandwiches makes Phil retch.

Nan dips into the kitchen and comes out with a tube of lavender air freshener, which she sprays round the room. Then, out of the blue, the buzzer goes off and Phil jumps out of her skin.

‘It’s only Aunty Jean’s buzzer,’ I say, laughing.

‘Hello?’ Aunty Jean’s phlegmy voice sounds down the buzzer. ‘Is that my favourite girl back, then?’

I jump off my chair and excitedly put my mouth up to the buzzer. ‘Hello, Aunty Jean!’ I yell.

‘Ooh, volume down a bit, girl,’ she says. But I can hear the laugh in her voice.

‘You don’t need to stand so close, dearie,’ Nan says, putting her arm round me. ‘Shall we go in and say hello?’

I look at Philippa who still hasn’t lost the shocked face she had when the buzzer first went off. ‘Come on, Phil,’ I say. ‘Aunty Jean’s a barrel of laughs.’

Like a little lost ghost, Philippa slips off her chair. I take her cold, dry hand and we follow Nan, who has piled up a big plate of food for Aunty Jean, out of the back door, down Nan’s slope and up Aunty Jean’s. We open the back door and, almost instantly, Philippa starts coughing. It’s probably because of the smell of Aunty Jean’s cigs, but that’s what it’s like in her extension, so that’s that.

‘Now then,’ Nan says in a low, serious voice to Philippa. ‘My daughter is handicapped, so you’ll have to take her as you find her, I’m afraid.’

‘Where’s my favourite girl?’ Aunty Jean calls and, forgetting that I am supposed to be the hostess and taking care of my guest, I drop Philippa’s hand and rush through to the bedroom and throw myself on top of her, which makes Lexy hiss and fluff up and jump off the bed. He hates sharing Aunty Jean.

‘Oof, have a care, dearie,’ she says, opening her bare fleshy arms to give me a big, big hug. I am lost in her giant soft bosom and her smell of cigarettes and chocolate, mixed with the Sudocreme that Nan and I rub in her skin to stop it from breaking.

‘And who is this little girl, then?’ I hear Aunty Jean rumble from underneath the nylon frill of her nightie.

I look up and see Philippa cowering in the doorway. Nan is trying to coax her into the room, but she’s having none of it.

‘Come and sit here, dear,’ Aunty Jean says, moving a kidney dish with some used bits of cotton wool in it from the other side of her bed to clear a space. Philippa doesn’t move. It’s like she’s just turned herself off.

‘Come on, Philippa,’ Nan says in a whisper that’s loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘Don’t be rude, now.’ She takes Phil by the arm, leads her round the bed and pushes her down on to the eiderdown. Phil is stiff and stick-like. She just perches there, as far away from Aunty Jean as possible.

‘I brought through a snack for you, dear,’ Nan says to Jean as she hands her the plate.

‘Lovely. Thank you, Mummy.’ Aunty Jean takes a slice of galantine and pops it into her mouth.

‘Now then, I want to hear all about school,’ Aunty Jean says. She lights a cigarette, then I snuggle in to her side and begin to tell her the good bits. Every now and then, I try to involve Philippa. I say, ‘Didn’t we, Phil?’ and, ‘Don’t we, Phil?’ and she nods. But I’m not really enjoying having her there on the edge of Aunty Jean’s bed.

Also, she’ll know that I’m not telling everything about what goes on at school, and I’m scared that if she says anything it’s going to be something like, ‘Remember when we were pushed into the pool with all our clothes on and your watch got ruined.’ Or ‘But that girl you’re talking about as if she’s our friend puts chewing gum in your hair.’

I don’t want Aunty Jean and Nan to worry about me at school. Goodness knows they have enough on their plate as it is. That’s what Nan says whenever any sort of trouble happens. I don’t want to make them worried. I want to be able to come home and just be happy.

Later, when we’re back in the bungalow watching
Blue Peter
, Nan comes in with a tube of something and a plastic spatula.

‘I said I could do something about your poor face,’ she says to Philippa, squeezing the tube so a big dollop of cream lands on the spatula.

Philippa’s hand darts up to her mole. ‘But Mummy says I mustn’t touch the hairs,’ she says. ‘If I don’t touch them until I’m twelve, I can have them taken right off forever with lasers.’

‘Is that a kind thing to do to a girl?’ Nan asks me. ‘Making her go around all those years with an ugly thing like that on her face?’ I shake my head, although, to be honest, I’m more interested in the
Blue Peter
Canada expedition.

Then there’s this struggle and I see that Nan is somehow using one hand to hold Philippa’s hand away from her face and keep her head still, while using the other to smear the cream thickly over the hairy mole.

‘Now you mustn’t touch the cream,’ Nan says, ‘or you might burn your fingers.’

I wonder how it can be on her face if it would burn her fingers, but I don’t say anything. Nan knows what she’s doing.

‘I’ll just do the kitchen floor, then it’ll be time to get that cream off. And tomorrow I’ll show you a thing or two to do with make-up to hide the mole. You’re about the same complexion as Jeanie, so we’ll use her foundation.’

While Nan is in the kitchen, Phil and I don’t say a word to each other. We’re sitting with the whole settee between us.

Then Nan marches in with a little bowl of water, the spatula and a flannel, and she scrapes the cream off and I get a little closer to watch, because it’s really interesting. The cream comes off really disgustingly mixed up with lots of little black hairs.

Philippa doesn’t struggle, or even move, particularly, but she is crying.

‘There, girl,’ Nan says, dabbing at the now-hairless mole with the flannel. ‘Miles better. Now I think someone deserves a little treat for being such a good, brave girl.’

‘I’m a good, brave girl, too,’ I say, and Nan ruffles my hair and says that of course, she never forgets that. She bundles everything into the bowl and goes back out again.

‘My mum will kill me,’ Phil says. And then she goes, ever so quietly, ‘I hate your nan and I hate your aunt and I hate you.’

I don’t understand. Nan was only trying to help.

‘Now then,’ Nan says, coming back in with the sweetie tin. ‘Who’s for a little something?’

In the night Phil wets the bed. Then in the morning, she calls her mummy on this phone number she has for emergencies. She has a word with her mummy, then asks Nan to have a word with her. Nan comes away from the phone with her lips all tucked in and fusses around making sure Phil is all packed up. By ten o’clock, before Nan even has a chance to show her what to do with Aunty Jean’s foundation, a taxi arrives and Phil is taken back to school to stay there for the rest of the holidays.

‘Well, she was a bit of a drippy Dora,’ Nan says, as we watch the taxi turn the corner onto the main road.

When I go back to school, I realise that Philippa is now best friends with Uma. They don’t talk to me. Once, when they’re walking together in the playground with their arms round each other and I ask them if I can play and they say no I can’t, I really feel like smashing their heads together.

But, mostly, I’m OK with it.

I didn’t ever really like her, anyway.

Twenty-Three

Peg woke with a blinding hangover, feeling rotten. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but if anything she’d call herself a beer girl. Red wine didn’t suit her at all. Loz had allayed her initial qualms about getting up to anything in Doll’s lounge with a third glass of Bardolino, and it was not until pale dawn had started creeping through the curtains that they finally crawled up the ladder to the little bedroom. Once there, they curled up tightly together on the narrow single bed and fell into the kind of deep sleep that only the completely satiated – or the utterly deluded – can ever know.

But Peg found herself alone when she woke. She could hear Loz banging around in the kitchen, singing along badly to a Fleet Foxes track. Led by a greasy smell of burnt-on animal fat mixed with something more delicious – eggs in butter perhaps – Peg gingerly swung her feet on to the Spice Girls rug and climbed down to the kitchen where Loz was busy at the stove. Beside her were her portable iPod speakers, which she must have brought with her. It didn’t suit Loz to be without musical accompaniment while she worked.

‘Get back to where you belong, woman,’ Loz said. ‘I’m making you breakfast in bed and you’ll spoil it if you get up.’

Picking up her bag, Peg obeyed. She climbed back into bed, pulled out her notebook and read through the letter she had drafted to Raymond the night before. It would do, she thought. It was worth a punt. When she was allowed to get up, she’d go down to the internet café in the shopping street, type it up and email it from there.

Later, when they were enjoying freshly brewed coffee – wine, snacks and chocolate nut torte weren’t the only gifts that had been borne to Tankerton from the Seed larder – Loz said that she hadn’t been able to sleep in the single bed.

‘I mean,’ she said. ‘It’s all right for kids, but we’re big girls now. I like my space.’

Peg knew this. She also knew that Loz was used to a double bed – her large attic bedroom at her parents’ house, the scene of many proudly related schoolgirl conquests, had an American-sized king, all covered in fake fur throws and cushions made from old Persian carpets.

‘I’ve looked in Doll’s room and she’s got a lovely big double.’

‘But it’s total chaos. I haven’t even started sorting it out in there.’

‘If we put our minds to it, I bet we can get it clear by tonight. We’ll be much more comfortable in there.’ Loz leaned forwards over the breakfast tray and put her hand on Peg’s cheek.

‘I don’t know,’ Peg said, rubbing Loz’s hand between her cheek and her shoulder, like a cat.