Dear Timon,
Are you really coming up?
FORTY-THREE
I couldn’t settle. I came back to London and Aunty Anne said that’s always been my problem, that I couldn’t sit still. She said she’s lucky, but she’s been able to pick up her pieces wherever she is and make it her home. She’s had to, she’s had to up sticks and settle elsewhere again and again.
I sat at dinner with them and I wondered: how did I end up with you lot? They were like somebody else’s friends and family. In the underwater dining room, welcoming David into the fold again in his different guise as Katy’s new fella. Joshua had cooked dish after dish, all of them brightly coloured and quite bizarre. He made us laugh at them all, the things he’s been trying out and inventing in our honour. He would never tire of trying things out. The only disaster was a side dish of shredded courgette deep fried in olive oil. It was me who had to tell him how horrible it was, acrid and cindery. Josh shrugged and handed me a dish of cherry tomatoes and yellow star fruit slivers.
His sister Melissa, that black old crow, picked a fight with Serena, annoyed that Joshua’s flash friend, as she saw her, seemed prepared to fly herself to Paris to visit an optician’s. Make two trips for tests and fittings, just to get the glasses she wanted: tiny octagonal frames that would change the way she saw the world. Serena said frames were everything. “But they could send them through the post to you, lovey! I’m sure they would!” Melissa exclaimed.
“You don’t see the point,” Serena snapped. “It’s the getting of the thing myself. It’s a trip.”
“A trip.” Melissa tutted.
“Look. Those are my new eyes we’re talking about. I have to see everything through them.”
Aunty Anne was pursing her lips. I could tell she was torn between Serena’s extravagance and Melissa’s prudence, so she kept out of it.
Katy and David seemed pleased with themselves.
Katy was wearing a wry, lopsided smile.
I had seen before somewhere.
And I’m not working up to ending this with a wedding
It’s what everyone wants
but they like a wedding before everything stops
Well, not here.
Serena, become an accomplice to Katy and David, was making plans. I listened, astonished, as Josh hung on her every word. She thought the young couple should strike while their iron was hot, and get themselves hitched. Don’t let your golden chances pass you by, all that. Even more amazing, Katy was talking it all in, too. I thought maybe she was different since Argyle.
I didn’t like the way Joshua let Serena make plans. She leaned across the table, keeping her chin low, her eyes big. I remembered the times Josh was away and Serena was my link and how glad I was of her company. How glad she made me of her company.
It was late. Our guests were staying over. Camping out all over the house.
It was a cold night. Our guests were drifting about the upper landings, hunting out blankets, spare pillows, filling hot water bottles.
Josh stopped me in the hall. “You don’t look right,” he said.
It was like being caught not looking convincing. “I don’t?”
“Like everyone’s getting under your feet.”
I shrugged. “I wish Mandy had come round.”
He looked pale at this. “She’s playing it cool.”
“Because I didn’t like her new book.”
Josh hadn’t read it, of course. I wondered what he’d think. I hadn’t told him what it had made me think.
In the confusion of everyone going off to bed, I slipped out of the house, taking only one bag.
The last thing I saw of Joshua: him going off to bed with his hot water bottle.
I walked out of Greenwich and, stupidly, stood in the middle of the mostly-empty road to check my bag for necessities. It would be too embarrassing to go back now. Tampons, ciggies, cheque book, cards, Joshua’s adoption folder. I was almost in New Cross before I could flag down a cab with its yellow light on.
He asked me where to.
“A fair distance,” I said. “Out of London, I think. Not sure yet. Hang on.” I slammed the door shut and slid back into the dark, cool seat. “Just drive.”
He shrugged, and drove.
In the meagre, fleeting light, I opened my bag, lit a ciggie quickly, took a deep breath and ripped open the brown envelope.
A sheaf of crumbling papers and I scanned them quickly for a place name, anything. It seemed indecent, being too hasty, when the information had lain hidden so long. Yet maybe haste would make it current again. The driver was impatient.
“Any ideas yet, hon?” he growled.
Then I found it. Her name was Lisa Turmoil. She was a hairstylist, or at least, that’s what she used to be. And she was in the North of England. We would be driving all through the night.
“Well?” he asked again.
“Blackpool,” I said. “We’re going to Blackpool.”
What I was doing was brave. I told myself this again and again as we gunned up the various motorways.
Now we were in the twisted guts and intestinal chambers of the country.
Now we were in the clogged and sooty bronchial tubes.
I lay on the back seat and listened to the easy motor, my driver swearing and muttering, the regular thunk of the meter. It was counting down and ravelling up my fortune, portion by tiny portion.
I woke in the North of England, in Blackpool, at drear day.
There were sea gulls making rich pickings of the crap left on pavements the night before on the Golden Mile. Nothing had changed. We pulled up in an empty side street and the cabby and I stretched our legs.
“I have to get some breakfast,” he grunted, and wanted paying there and then. I wrote a quick cheque, one so fast I barely had time to register the amount as I wrote it out, or to make sure that I had done
