Merry Hill lot.
With her friends, she had come to know the place so well that it was like a second home. They had learned all the ways of avoiding the security guards and the CCTV cameras. But there had been others attracted to Merry Hill shopping centre, too men who had money, and had seemed attractive. And perhaps a little dangerous, too.
‘Black Forest gateau?’ said Murfin.
They turned south on Wolverhampton Road and headed towards Warley and Bearwood. And as soon as she saw the big white cross picked out in brickwork on the tower of Warley Baptist Church, she knew she was back home.
There were starlings roosting on the high ledges, their white droppings streaking brickwork that had always seemed a little ornate for a Baptist church. They stopped to fill up with petrol. On the forecourt of the petrol station, Fry saw the familiar blue and-cream buses passing, and heard the sound of a genuine West Indian accent.
Murfin was intrigued by the Caribbean restaurants and Punjabi food stores they passed along the road.
‘A Somali takeaway!’ he said. ‘We don’t get those in Edendale.’
‘You’re not getting one here, either,’ said Fry. Turn left up ahead.’
They turned into a housing estate and drove through the streets to Hilltop. Murfin didn’t question her directions, knowing that she was familiar with the area. They passed Warley High School on Pound Road. It was the middle of the morning, lesson time, so there were no kids hanging around outside. Fry heard a bell ring somewhere and was glad they were already past. She didn’t want to be in sight of the school when the kids appeared.
Warley Baths were now called a swimming centre. Further up Thimblemill Road was the library, where Fry had spent even more time, sitting among the books, looking for something she could relate to, something that told a story similar to her own. She had never found anything.
At the infant school someone had planted a yucca in a concrete flower bed, and there were security shutters over some of the windows. But it still looked much the same. Next door was the King’s Community Church. Had it been called that back in the 1980s? She
259
had a feeling that ‘community’ had been an invention of the eighties. Before that, people hadn’t felt the need to use the name. A community was something you just were.
They negotiated their way through a serves of little roundabouts, each with its cluster of shops and a pub. And on George Road she found the Plough still there at one end of the road, with the George Hotel at the other, near the infant school. Familiar places, all of them. Yet alien now, too, like backdrops for a recurrent bad dream.
From the roundabout near the Hilltop shops, she could see the view across the valley to more houses. There were some masts on the horizon, but she couldn’t remember what they were for.
‘Do you want to stop, Gavin?’ she said. ‘You can get a pie in the shop over there.’
‘Why, sure,’ said Murfin, surprised.
While he went into the shop, she walked a few yards back to the roundabout. Yes, the little brick semi was still there, too. It wasn’t a council house any more, by the look of it, but had probably been bought from the council by its occupants. The new owners had put in a Georgian-style front door and leaded windows, removed the crumbling rendering from the walls and covered them with artificial stone. They had painted all the woodwork white, and they had even erected a little wooden fence, which symbolically separated the house from the pavement.
For many years, Fry hadn’t been able to hear certain songs cropping up on the radio without being transported back to Warfey. Anything by Right Said Fred or Salt ‘n’ Pepa turned some kind of switch in her mind, and she instantly found herself again in that crumbling council house on the Hilltop estate. She would be lying on her bed in her own room, listening to a cheap stereo and 1 holding the diary she had hidden under her spare sweaters in a
t bottom drawer, just as Emma Renshaw had done.
In those days, there had been particular pieces of music that she t. had used to try to lift her mood, and others she had chosen because
p they matched her depression, or because their words allowed her
P to wallow in tearful self-pity. Now, they all meant the same thing,
tt They all recalled the bedroom and the diary, the painful recording
h> of the details of her life, the failure of a miracle to happen.
tri Fry stood for few moments longer, looking at the window of
the front bedroom. Then, beginning to get embarrassed, she turned away.
260
Murfin was waiting for her by the car, smiling contentedly. Food always made him happy. Fry could get envious of him, if she spent too much time in his company.
‘We can cut through this next street, Gavin,’ she said.
‘OK.’
They passed Warley Water Tower, so like a medieval fortress from a distance that it had fuelled her fantasies as a child. And beyond the golf club were Warley Woods. The woods seemed to mark the southern boundary of her territory, with Wolverhampton Road at the western edge, providing the escape route into town. The woods looked neater and more well trained now, less threatening in their orderliness, but also less like a place that might offer a refuge when you needed one.
In a short time, the place had changed a lot. Yet Fry knew she would have difficulty putting her finger on what exactly it was that had changed, what the subtle differences were that made this place so alien from the world she had known as a teenager.
She was glad she’d come, though. Warley was the physical link to her past, and seeing it had helped her to put it into perspective. Finding that the house on the Hilltop estate was nothing like it had been fifteen years ago gave her the power to sever the link in her memory. The bedroom and the diary couldn’t exist behind that stone cladding and the leaded windows. The music had faded with the sight of the little white fence.
And now, maybe, she could put the whole of her past to rest.
Murfin had stopped the car at a crossroads, where there were long rows of shops running to right and left.
