piano, in a community whose focus was entirely taken up by life in the shipyards and on the herring drifters. And in imagining her father as a boy, as a young man, Amy’s imagination had also latched on to that other young man, on to Richie’s son, who looked, albeit in a weaker version, so disturbingly like his father, and presumably sounded like him too, the Richie whom she, Chrissie, had first gone round to see at the stage door of the Theatre Royal in Newcastle to tel him that she not only thought his performance wonderful but that she was sure there were hundreds of thousands of women in the South of England who would think so too.
Perhaps, Chrissie thought, opening her eyes, and straining her gaze up towards the shadowy ceiling, perhaps that is al Amy is doing. Perhaps she is just trying to recapture her father through that – that man. Perhaps she is trying to bring her father back by hiding his baby picture, by going on about Newcastle, by playing, over and over, al the pieces they played together. Perhaps she doesn’t have the faintest idea how much pain she is inflicting, how disloyal and cal ous she seems. Or perhaps I – Chrissie felt the tears start again, spil ing in a warm stream out of the sides of her eyes and down her face into her hair – perhaps I am the one in the wrong; I am the one too insecure and jealous and vengeful to let her seek solace in a way that suits her but is so painful for me.
Chrissie rol ed on to her side, careless of her clothes in a way that Richie, she thought now angrily, would have probably rejoiced to see. She could picture herself at that stage door, dressed like a pretty urban hippy, in 1983, pink suede boots and a floating print frock and her hair in long curls caught up with a slide decorated with a dragonfly. He’d looked at her as if she’d been offered to him on a plate, the perfect little pudding complete with a silver spoon. He’d said, ‘I’ve never sung south of Birmingham, pet,’ and then he’d laughed and she’d looked at his teeth and his skin and his thick hair and she’d thought, ‘I don’t care if he’s over forty, he’s gorgeous,’ and two weeks later he’d taken her to bed in a hotel with brocade curtains and fringed lampshades and they’d drunk champagne in a shared bath later and he’d told her he didn’t make a habit of this, that he was a family man, but, by heck, she was worth making an exception for. And on the train back to London, a heart pendant from Richie on a chain round her neck, she’d told herself that she’d found a man and a cause, a lover and a life’s work. She would bring him south, she would marry him, she would make him a Southern star.
On the table at her side of the bed, the phone began to ring. She waited for a moment, waited for Amy or Dil y to stop what they were doing and pounce on it, but they didn’t. She rol ed back across the bed and picked up the handset.
‘Hel o?’
‘Wel ,’ Sue said, the other end, ‘I don’t like the sound of
Chrissie swal owed.
‘Lying on my bed and remembering—’
‘And snivel ing.’
‘That too.’
‘Remembering when he was hot and you were hotter and the future was bright with promise?’
‘Yes.’
‘Right,’ said Sue. ‘Stop right now.’
Chrissie gave a shaky little laugh.
‘You be thankful,’ Sue said, ‘that you didn’t get lumbered with a decrepit old granddad to nurse. When men stop being hot, nobody looks colder.’
Chrissie struggled to sit up.
‘You’re a good friend.’
‘So, what’s happening?’
‘Today,’ Chrissie said, ‘a very unsatisfactory family conversation about the future.’
‘Such as?’
‘Nobody seems to care much about what I do or what happens to me because they al have plans for their own futures.’
‘Surely you exaggerate—’
‘Only a bit.’
‘OK,’ Sue said, ‘come right round here, and we’l discuss your future and drink green apple Martinis.’
‘What?’
‘I have no idea either,’ Sue said, ‘but they’ve just been demonstrated on the tel y. That il egal y gorgeous Nigel a woman. Get off that bed and get in your car.’
‘Thank you,’ Chrissie said fervently.
‘If nothing else,’ Sue said, ‘my children wil make you feel real y grateful for yours.’
Chrissie put the phone down and swung her legs off the bed. A tiny movement by the bedroom door caught her eye, the door handle turning fractional y and silently. Then it was stil , and the sound of light, quick feet went down the landing.
‘Amy?’ Chrissie cal ed.
There was no reply. Chrissie went over to the door and opened it. There was no one there, but the air on the landing had an unmistakably disturbed quality. Chrissie listened. No sound. No flute, no voice on the telephone. She shut the door again, very careful y, and turned on al her bedroom lights. Then she went into her bathroom and turned on al the lights there too. She looked at herself steadily in the mirror. Maybe Sue had something. Maybe whatever had propel ed her twenty-three-year-old self round to the stage door of the Theatre Royal in Newcastle in 1983 was stil in there somewhere, under al the layers superimposed by the years, by the children, by Richie.
She leaned forward and inspected herself closely.
