The Other Family (33 page)

‘OK,’ Chrissie said.

‘You’re smiling.’

‘I’m not—’

‘You’re smiling.’

‘It’s relief,’ Chrissie said.

‘I don’t care what it is. You’re smiling. And the flat?’

Chrissie took a sip of wine.

‘If I don’t sell the house—’

‘You
will
sell the house.’

‘I can’t afford the flat on what I’ll be earning.’

Sue cleared a heap of T-shirts and a pair of swimming goggles off another chair, and sat down.

She said, ‘What about those girls?’

‘Well, Amy—’

‘I don’t mean Amy. I mean Tamsin and Dilly.’

Chrissie said cautiously, ‘Dilly is looking for a job—’

‘Is she now.’

‘And Tamsin. Well, I don’t really know what’s going on with Tamsin.’

‘Do sit down,’ Sue said.

Chrissie said, sitting, ‘She keeps talking about moving in with Robbie, but she doesn’t do it. He’s built her an amazing cupboard, apparently, but she doesn’t seem in any hurry to fill it. He’s like a dog, sitting there hoping for chocolate. I
thought he was so strong and masculine, and would support her the way Richie did, but she doesn’t seem to want to let him any more.’

‘You can’t have both of them living with you—’

‘I could—’

‘No,’ Sue said.

‘There’s just enough room—’

‘
If
you get the flat—’

‘Yes. If—’

‘Still no,’ Sue said. She leaned back, twiddling her wine glass round by its stem, watching it, not looking at Chrissie. ‘Do you really
want
them to live with you?’

There was a pause, and then Chrissie said slowly, ‘I don’t know if I want to be alone.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like. You might love it. You might prefer it, actually, to living with two people who ought to be fending for themselves.’

Chrissie said nothing. Sue went on leaning back. Then she took a mouthful of wine and said, ‘Well, Amy’s having a go at it, isn’t she? Amy’s trying to swim without her family water wings on, isn’t she? Instead of banging on about how you don’t like what Amy’s doing, why don’t you try imitating her instead?’

Scott had given her some money. She’d felt very awkward about confessing that she’d spent the money her mother had given her on CDs at the folk club, and that her card would probably be rejected at an ATM, but he’d held some notes out to her that morning, saying, just take it, don’t say anything, take it.

‘But I feel awful—’

‘You’re family. Take it.’

‘I shouldn’t—’

‘Yes, you should. Anyway, I want to. I want to give it to you.’

‘OK,’ Amy said. She glanced down at the notes in her hand. It looked as if he’d given her an awful lot. ‘That’s – so great. Thank you.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Scott said. ‘The hard part is now.’

‘The hard part?’

‘You’re going to North Shields. You’re going to see where Dad and my mother grew up, went to school. You’re going on your own.’

Amy looked at him.

‘Why aren’t you coming?’

‘Because I’ll colour it for you. Because you’ve got to see it through your eyes, not mine.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll tell you where to go.’

Amy said doubtfully, ‘Is this a good idea?’

‘Was last night a good idea?’

Her face lit up.

‘Oh,
yes
!’

‘Then trust me,’ Scott said. ‘Walk your feet off and come back and tell me. I’ll be waiting for you.’

She had walked, on her own, up the steep streets to the metro station at Monument, and there, as instructed, she had bought herself a return ticket to North Shields, feeling as she did so that her very anonymity in the Saturday-morning crowds was as exciting as the adventure itself. She sat, as Scott had told her to, near the front of the train so that she could have a sense of the scene through the windows of the driver’s cab, as they sped out of the glowing underground station and out on to the raised rails through Manors and Byker, past the cranes of Walker and Wallsend and out along the river shore through Hadrian Road and Howden, through Percy Main and Meadow Well, to North Shields.

On the platform, busy with people who belonged there, who knew where they were going, she said to herself, ‘This is it.’

‘Start with the quays,’ Scott had said. ‘Head for the river. Head for the quays.’

You could smell your way to the shore, almost at once. The air smelled of water, river and sea, rank and salty, and overhead there were gulls, wheeling and screaming, huge black-headed gulls with heavy beaks and solid, shining bodies. Amy headed south, staring up at the sky and the clouds and the shouting seabirds, staring about her at the street and the houses and the children, scuffing along together in packs, just as Richie must have done when he grew out of being that toddler in hand-knitted socks and bar shoes.

And then, quite abruptly, she was on a ridge high above the water, standing by a house which had plainly once been a lighthouse, looking out across the great breadth of the Tyne River, to South Shields and Jarrow, a name Amy knew because of Bede, the seventh-century monk who lived in the monastery there, whom she remembered because a history teacher had once told her class that he kept a precious store of peppercorns to make monastic food less boring. The road she was standing on was quiet, much quieter than the streets near the metro station, and the gulls seemed to be whirling higher, their cries echoing in the wind up there, the wind that was blowing in off the sea, blowing Amy’s hair across her face, obscuring her vision. She caught it up in both hands, and twisted it into a rough knot behind her head, and set off down a steep and turning path to the shore.

And there was Fish Quay, as Scott had said it would be, the quayside where his grandmother and great-aunts had gutted herrings for a living. He’d said that in their day, in his mother’s girlhood, the herring drifters had been packed in against the quayside several deep, but now the water lay
almost empty, just a straggling line of trawlers moored alongside battered iron-roofed sheds, with the water slapping at them and long rust marks streaking their sides. Everything was shuttered, all the doors were closed, there was nobody on the street, no movement except the odd plastic bag and scrap of paper litter lifting in the wind and skittering along the surface.

She walked slowly along the quay, past the bacon grocer’s with its jolly challenges painted in the window glass – ‘If you aren’t wearing knickers, smile!’; ‘Never go to bed mad: stay up and fight!’; ‘Do not enter the shop if you have no sense of humour!’ – past the fish and chip shops, past the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, and the warehouses for Larry’s Fishcakes and Blue Dolphin Seafoods, and came out at the end into the Low Lights car park, where there was a bench looking out across the wide, crinkled grey river melting into the further grey sea and, on the horizon, the silhouetted statue of Admiral Collingwood, where Scott said he and his mates used to gather after school, standing like Earl Grey high above the world below and gazing forever eastwards from his grassy mound.

She subsided on to the bench. It was wonderful there, so big and so bleak, all that sea and sky, but it was sobering too, laden with all those lives, those past lives, battling and struggling and hating the sea as much as they needed it, relied on it. Amy put her hands into her hoodie pockets and breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. This was the sort of place that last night’s music had come from, it was people who’d lived and laboured here who had instinctively recorded how they were feeling, how they were thinking, in a way that could be easily remembered, could be simply passed on. She sniffed once or twice in the wind. If she shut her eyes, she could conjure up that girl last night, the girl with the flute and the lovely, light, straightforward singing voice.
If she kept them shut, she could imagine Scott as a boy down here, as a teenager in his school uniform with his tie bunched up in his blazer pocket, and not just Scott, but her father who might even –
even
– have sat on this bench, or whatever was here before this bench, and looked at the sky and the sea and the gulls, and thought and thought about music too.

She opened her eyes and tipped her head back, wriggling herself down until her body was in a straight line, shoulder to heel, the back of her head balanced on the back of the bench, and stared up at the sky. She felt taken over, bowled over, blown away by a sudden and extraordinary wave of happiness.

‘Don’t read anything into this,’ Margaret said.

Bernie Harrison was in an armchair in her sitting room, legs crossed, very comfortable. He had a cup of coffee balanced on the arm of the chair and Dawson, stretched in his usual place along the back of the sofa, was keeping a discreet but definite eye on him.

‘What would I read?’ Bernie said.

He was wearing well-pressed summer trousers and brown-suede loafers, which were entirely appropriate to the dining room of the Grand Hotel at Sunday lunchtime.

‘Well,’ Margaret said, trying to sound unconcerned, ‘this might look like a family occasion, but it isn’t. I’m not, as it were, introducing you to the family.’

‘Ah,’ Bernie said. He smiled at her. ‘You manage to put things so graciously.’

‘It’s better if we are all quite clear where we stand.’

‘So,’ Bernie said easily, ‘I have been asked along to leaven an awkward social lump, have I?’

‘You’ve been asked,’ Margaret said, ‘to make a foursome.’

‘Not like you to be nervous, Margaret.’

‘No.’

‘But I’m flattered. Yes, I’m flattered. When did you last ask anyone for help?’

She didn’t look at him, but she smiled.

‘A while back.’

‘What do we know about this child?’

Margaret sighed.

‘She’s eighteen, she’s bright, she’s musical, she’s the youngest of three. She’s talked a bit to Scott on the telephone but she’s never been north and she’s not going to like my guest bedroom.’

‘Why is she in it?’

‘Because,’ Margaret said firmly, ‘she can’t possibly stay with Scott. I promised her mother.’

‘Did you? You spoke to her mother?’

‘I did.’

‘Successfully?’

‘No,’ Margaret said.

Bernie turned his head.

‘There’s a taxi pulling up outside.’

Margaret gave a little gasp.

‘Oh my God—’

‘Stay there,’ Bernie said.

He stood up and walked to the window, carrying his coffee cup.

‘Deep breaths, Margaret. Yes, it’s them. Scott, I’m sorry to tell you, looks like an off-duty footballer but the girl looks lovely. Tall and slim. Long, dark hair. A skirt, you’ll be pleased to hear. What there is of it. But I can’t see any luggage.’ He turned and glanced at Margaret. ‘I think your guest has come to stay in what she stands up in.’

Amy had never been anywhere like the dining room of the Grand Hotel. It had upholstered chairs, and ornately
draped curtains at the huge high windows, and the walls were decorated with long, narrow panels of stylized fruit and flowers. The carpet was very thick, patterned with medallions in russet and green, and so were the tablecloths and the napkins, which sat like small icebergs in a forest of glassware. The tablecloths even had undercloths, which went right down to the floor, which was just as well since they enabled Scott to stick his feet right out of sight so that they didn’t offend his mother.

Amy wasn’t quite sure what other things might offend his mother. They had, the previous afternoon when she got back from North Shields, gone shopping to buy her a skirt, and it hadn’t struck either of them, till they saw Margaret’s eyes on Amy’s legs, that the length of the skirt might signify as much as its existence in the first place. Margaret looked OK to Amy, because she was as Amy was expecting her to be, but she also looked a bit unpredictable, as if she might suddenly object to something that had never previously occurred to anyone as a potential flashpoint. Amy thought of catching Scott’s eye, and winking, but then she remembered that Margaret was Scott’s mother, and therefore not an appropriate subject for complicity, and refrained.

The other man, the sort of grandfather man, was fine. He’d told Amy he was an agent, that he’d known her father as a boy and as a young man, and he mentioned several names, people he represented, whom Amy had heard of. He seemed very easy and friendly, and Amy wondered if he was a kind of boyfriend, if that was the right word when you got as old as that, and he teased Scott about his appearance and Scott, who looked perfectly normal to Amy, didn’t seem to mind and just said cheerfully, ‘Places like this need a bit of shaking up, Mr Harrison,’ and Mr Harrison said, ‘Oh for God’s sake, lad. Bernie.’ And Scott had laughed and shaken his head and said, ‘Can’t do it, sir. Sorry.’

The menu was enormous. Margaret watched Amy reading it and then she said, in a voice with far more warmth in it than it had had before, ‘Choose whatever you like, pet. You must be hungry. They never give you anything but rubbish on the train.’

Scott shot Amy a warning look.

‘Thank you,’ Amy said politely.

‘Was it a good journey?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘And was Scott on the platform to meet you?’

‘Yes,’ Amy said. ‘Yes, he was.’

‘And what,’ Bernie Harrison said in a jocular voice, ‘do you think of the Frozen North so far?’

Amy put her huge menu down. She turned to look straight at him.

‘I think it’s wonderful.’

He said, laughing, ‘Well, the station’s wonderful—’

‘ It’s nice of you, dear,’ Margaret said, ‘ but you’ve only seen that and Scott’s flat.’

‘I
love
Scott’s flat,’ Amy said.

‘Thank you,’ Scott said.

‘And,’ Amy said, deliberately ignoring him, and now looking straight at Margaret, ‘I love North Shields and the river and the metro and the bridges.’

She stopped. There was a brief silence.

‘Excuse me?’ Margaret said.

‘We went to a folk club on Friday,’ Amy said. ‘It was amazing. I – I just loved it. I loved the music. I can’t stop thinking about the music. I think it’s – it’s so, so great. Up here.’

‘You came up on
Friday
?’ Margaret said.