The heat in the kitchen went streaming out of the opened window, into the dark with the cigarette smoke. Outside there was a thin patter of snow starting up.
“Oh.” Andy shrugged. “I had a crisis about what to wear.”
Last year the organisation of the Hogmanay party had been the same: Penny running about until the last minute. She’d be a drunken mess by the time the guests arrived. She’d forget to get changed again, too. Well, the guests could take her or leave her. Andy would always be immaculate, of course. She looked him up and down and decided that he made quite a sweet cowboy.
Our second party! she marvelled, and poured herself a second toast. Celebrating over a year of cohabitation.
Andy poured his own glassful, leaned across and kissed her cheek. “Happy New Year,” he said, and she could smell his freshly washed hair under the bandanna. He lived in a borrowed room, signed on for income support and housing benefit, but he bought expensive shampoo, even with his hair shaved on number seven. She was glad he was dressed as a cowboy tonight. For an hour or more this morning he’d been digging through Liz’s wardrobes in Penny’s room. He tried on a couple of her dressy outfits. Tacky dresses, he called them, and he looked stunning in them, she had to admit. Penny wouldn’t have refused him if he’d asked to borrow one for the party. At the same time she wouldn’t have been altogether happy seeing him come downstairs done up as her absent mother. And the party guests might prove a problem. She wasn’t sure how they’d deal with her housemate in drag.
“Do you reckon we’ll get everyone turning up?” she asked worriedly.
“Course we will. They love a good do round here, don’t they?” He was distracted by the blinds rattling against the open window. “The wind must be picking up. Should I close that?”
“We’ll be getting a blizzard.” Oddly, the thought only made her feel cosy. She liked the idea of the house with a partyful of people trapped inside, a snowstorm raging out there in the estate. Imagine being snowed in and the party just going on!
Andy went to shut the window. As he did so, a sudden gust sent a black slip of paper spinning into the room.
“What’s that?” He jumped back, slamming the window. Penny picked it off the carpet. “An empty After Eights packet.” She turned the black envelope over in her fingers.
“Oh.” Andy went to change the tape.
When Penny was little and couldn’t sleep, she and her dad would eat After Eight mints in the kitchen at night. They would leave messages for each other pushed inside the packets, hidden in odd places. She looked inside this one, but there was nothing there.
We used the black envelopes from After Eights to tell each other the important things. It worked. The messages got across.
And it wasn’t like dad was a bad communicator. He brought me up wonderfully. He knew the things to say. Some of the women I know, they were brought up knowing nothing. When they had their first period, they thought their insides were coming out. Dad told me everything. Sometimes sitting as we watched the washing machine thumping round all night. Sometimes roving miles in the car through the dark, sometimes via black envelopes. I suppose the ones in the envelopes were the ones we wanted to keep.
Keepsakes. It’s a good word. I have a green After Eights box, I’ve kept for years. Like a tiny filing cabinet, crammed with messages on different coloured bits of paper. They’re almost worn through with rereading. Funny what you keep. All the things dad told me. Then, when he became Liz, what she went on telling me. Things about me, things about her. I had this feeling that, when the After Eights mint box, when the tiny filing cabinet was full, then I’d know everything. My growing up would be complete.
It’s full, all right. You can choose at random, pluck out an envelope, the box will still seem full. Inside, some precious sliver of wisdom or nonsense, still smelling of minty fondant.
That box caused a row between Andy and me. Not too long ago I found him in Liz’s room, now my room, with the envelopes spread on the bed. I walked in and found him absorbed in them, opening out folded sheets and poring over the whole set. Greedy for the full story.
“I never worried about people going through my stuff,” I said. “I let everyone live here and I never thought it would happen. I’m too trusting.”
Andy was trying to push the letters back in their pockets, to sort out the damage he’d done. I worried that he’d spoiled them, or ruined their order. He stammered apologies.
“I’m just nosy,” he offered at last. “I see something like this and I can’t help myself.”
“But it’s my stuff! My private letters!”
“I didn’t know that! Not until I found them!”
“You shouldn’t have been here!”
“I was bored!”
“Bored? So you go rooting around in my stuff?”
He looked exasperated with himself. “Yes!”
I laughed at him. “Have you read all these?”
He sat back down on the bed. “I’ve been reading them all afternoon. Sorry, Pen. But...” He shook his head. “You’re so lucky. To have all this. It’s like all you need to know about life. Important things and daft things. But things you’d forget if they weren’t written down. All about you and…your parent.”
So he knew the thing about Liz. Now he knew that she didn’t start out as my mam. He’d read her letters beginning to end, and they started out signed at the bottom, ‘love, dad.’
“Just call her Liz,” I said. “That’s what she wants to be called. If she ever comes back, that is.”
“I think she’s an amazing person,” he said, which made me laugh again.
“Maybe she is.” I started packing away the notes. He’d laid them out very carefully, I saw, in precise order. Trust Andy to look
