Authors: Debbie Johnson
Cigarette smoke, that’s what came first. The place always reeked of it, which wasn’t surprising as Coleen had chugged her way through forty a day, every day, since I’d met her. She’d always tried to chase away the smell of the ciggies with air fresheners, and that was there too: the fake floral smell of a plug-in. There was one in every spare socket, and she kept the refills in little stacks in the cupboard under the sink. Tiny cardboard boxes promising Essence of the Rose and Garden of Eden. As though collecting them was her hobby.
I walked through into the living room, with its old-fashioned video player and an antique telly – the kind with the fat back. She’d never moved into the realm of the flat screen, or even the DVD. As long as she could record
Casualty
to watch after the bingo, she was happy. Ish.
The kitchen was tiny, built as an added extension to the original two-up, two-down design. It was in there that the smells really kicked in. Even more cigarette smoke, as this was her lair of choice, the place she would while away her hours. A scorched scent, which I realised came from a kettle left to boil without enough water. She only ever put in enough for one cup – stingy, even with the stuff that flowed freely from a tap. A big mug with ‘Best Nan Ever’ on it was next to the kettle.
I’d bought it for her on a school trip to Chester Zoo. It was patently untrue, but lots of the other kids had been buying them for their parents, so I’d felt obliged. I was only little – part of me was probably hoping that if I said it, it might come true.
She never said thank you – that wasn’t in her vocabulary – but she hadn’t thrown it away either, which I’d half expected. In fact, it had been given something of a starring role in the kitchen – as her tea bag mug. Each time she made a cup, she’d lob the old bag in there, wait till it was full, then put them all in the bin. There were about five in there now, the once-white insides of the mug stained deep brown from years of abuse.
The ashtray was still on the table, full as usual. One of her crossword magazines had been left folded open nearby, a pen lying on top of it. I sat down and picked up the magazine. She’d been struggling on seven across. So was I, so I put it back down. Looked around. At the pen, the mug, the kettle, the ashtray. All signs of a life very much interrupted. I’ve heard people say this before, so I know it’s not a startlingly original thought, but it really did feel like she’d just popped out to the shops. Maybe to buy a plug-in, or something.
She could be walking back in at any minute, bustling and scowling and moaning. Emptying her carrier bag, then shoving it into the tiny drawer next to the sink that was already full to bursting with other carrier bags. Making a cuppa, lighting a fag. Giving me a dirty look for being in the way, or possibly for existing at all.
I simply couldn’t imagine this house without her in it. For all her faults, she’d been a permanent feature in my life. Like malaria – deeply unpleasant, but always there. For years, we’d sat in this kitchen together, me passive smoking, Coleen doing her puzzles. The kettle boiling and filling the room with steam. The clunks and clicks and glugs of fridge door opening, milk being poured, spoon hitting china. Beans on toast for dinner. Crumpets for breakfast. Heinz soup in cans. A Swiss roll for high days and holidays. Tea, fags, and stodge. If they did an autopsy, that’s what they’d find flowing through her veins.
I flicked on the radio – a late-night chat show – and looked in the fridge. It smelled sour, which wasn’t a surprise. She’d not been at her best for the last couple of days, what with being in Intensive Care and all. Contents: milk, butter, and two slices of ham curling pink and fetid in its already-opened plastic wrapper. One jar of piccalilli, the metal screw-top lid twisted down tight.
The sight of it made me feel unbelievably sad – not for myself, for once, but for her. This had been her life. This tiny room, with a sandwich for one, using a solitary tea bag at a time. Measuring out her life in fags and brews, constantly scared. Constantly looking over her shoulder, closing herself off from emotion, in case it jumped up and bit her on the arse.
God, we were two of a kind, really. I’ve always blamed Coleen for the way I am, but, I now realised, it was my fault – in part, at least – that she’d ended up like that. She’d told me in hospital that she was scared of ‘them’ – but also that she was scared of me. Me, a little girl. Wee orphan Annie, dumped on her doorstep. Of all the big bad things I’d learned over the last few days, this felt the biggest and the baddest – not that I was a goddess in human form, or that I was destined to have a baby with a man I’d just met, but the truth about Coleen. And me. And the ‘us’ that never was.
I started cleaning the fridge, just for the sake of something to do with my hands. Spray, scrub, rinse, over and over. Then the surfaces – spray, scrub, rinse. Then the tabletop. Then the window ledge. Spray, scrub, rinse. A fine old ditty.
I realised my fingers were hurting, but carried on anyway. I welcomed a bit of physical pain. It distracted me from the confusion of missing someone I’d been halfway to hating.
When the kitchen was spic and span, I went and flicked on the heating, adjusting the thermostat to high. As ever, it was freezing in here, so cold I could see breath clouds every time I exhaled.
‘Sorry, Coleen,’ I mumbled, knowing that if she was watching me from on high (something I should really have asked while I was in the Cavern, instead of getting my party on), she’d be bloody seething. I didn’t even have a hat and scarf on, for Christ’s sake, and I was going all out on the gas bill.
I wandered through the house to the stairs, drew a deep breath, and went up. My own room held nothing but horror for me: those long-ago memories of the night I arrived, left to shiver and shake and sob in a tiny bed in a cold, dark room. Crying for my mummy and daddy, and scared of the wicked witch downstairs. Nothing much changed over the years – apart from the crying. I gave up on that pretty soon, when I realised it did no good. Nobody was coming to help me, and the wicked witch downstairs didn’t care if I cried so hard my eyes fell out. ‘Cry more, pee less,’ as she’d once said in a particularly charitable moment.
I’d never been able to figure out why, if she was my mummy or daddy’s mummy – like grandparents were supposed to be – she was so horrible to me. Why she seemed to hate me so much. Why she was nothing like them at all. That bedroom – and all the lonely nights I’d spent in it – had never provided me with anything like an answer.
So I left the door closed, and moved on. I paused at the bathroom, and my nose betrayed me again at the lingering smell of Radox bath salts. It was as close as she got to a luxury: a soak in the bath at the end of a long hard day smoking and complaining. Obviously being that mean – and, I now knew, that frightened – took it out of a woman. She’d go in, lock the door even though there was only me in the house, and stay there for an hour, topping up the hot water every few minutes. I wondered now what she thought of, while she lay there in an avocado-coloured bath suite, surrounded by steam that billowed in the always-frigid air.
I’d assumed at the time she was indulging in fantasies about torturing kittens, or hunting down endangered species on the Galapagos Islands with a blunderbuss. Now, I suspected, she’d indulged in other fantasies. Perhaps one where she’d been allowed her own life; where she’d married and had kids and held down a little job at Iceland. Coleen, unlike most, probably appreciated the value of a normal, mundane life. Because despite appearances – the fags, the radio, the little terraced house – her life had been anything but mundane.
Yes, she had been a miserable old hag. And most likely she always would have been, no matter what had happened. But she’d also been a miserable old hag who was terrified. And, of course, who’d said she’d always loved me.
Hmmm. Much as I tried that coat on for size, it never seemed to quite fit.
I went into her bedroom – the only room where she didn’t smoke, and a place I’d not been allowed on pain of a sovereign ring to the side of the head. Obviously – being a child – I’d snuck in there on a few occasions, knowing she’d batter me if I was caught. Kids will do these things. I was always very disappointed at what I found. No torture chamber. No clothes racks full of ball gowns. Not even a naughty book on the bedside cabinet.
It was just a room. A room with hideous floral wallpaper that hadn’t been touched since the Seventies, and a big, bulky, dark-wood wardrobe that might now be classed as vintage but was actually just plain ugly. A view from the narrow window into the small backyard. A double bed which, as far as I knew, only ever had one occupant. And, bizarrely, a huge stuffed lion in the corner: big enough to sit on, it looked ancient and well used, missing one eye and part of its nose. She’d never let me play with it, and I’d only ever seen it during illicit smash-and-grab visits, but I’d always wondered if it had been hers as a child, impossible as it was to imagine her as a child.
I sat on the bed, suddenly exhausted – must be watching my nan die, nearly following suit myself, and my mammoth night out with the ultimate deity. The five pints of Guinness probably hadn’t helped, either. It felt like years since I’d had normal food in normal company followed by a normal night’s sleep in my own bed – but, in reality, it had only been a few days. Just … very busy ones.
The bed squeaked and sagged down on one side, and I saw the indentation on the pillow where Coleen had laid her head for all those years. Had she read before she fell asleep? Done her crossword? Said her prayers? I had no idea at all.
There was a dusty glass of half-drunk water on her cabinet, along with a box of tissues and a packet of Rennies. Standard-issue night-time fare for women of her age, I suspected. I could see a solitary silver-grey hair shining on the pillow, and found myself leaning over to pick it off. It looked almost magical – a last remnant of the sadly departed.
As I leaned down, I smelled her on the pillow. Her shampoo, her bath salts, her cigarettes. Her. All of her. Years’ worth of her.
I lay down on the bed, picked up the pillow and hugged it to me, clinging to it while I cried. This is going to sound weird – in fact, this
is
weird – but for a few minutes there, that pillow actually became Coleen. Like some freaky transubstantiation shit had occurred, and that pouffy, squishy collection of fake duck down and cotton really did turn into her. The actual physical woman. Except, you know, rectangular and made of fabric.
It’s hard to explain how or why we react like we do in these situations, but that’s what happened. Maybe it was the smell and that single, shining hair, or the sight of the neglected old stuffed lion, but something made me think that Coleen was there with me once more. In the form of a pillow.
So I did what Coleen would never have let me do in actual real life, not while she had strength left to fight me off: I hugged her and squeezed her and cuddled her and cried all over her. I told her I loved her, and I kissed her, and I rested my head on her and I blubbered and I howled.
And you know what? She didn’t mind. She was a lot more compliant – not to mention comfortable – in pillow form.
Seeing everything I’d seen tonight – touching all those lives, experiencing all those joys – had made me even more appreciative of what I’d never had. And what Coleen – poor, sad, lonely, frightened, indigestion-riddled Coleen – had never had, either. Her whole life had been wasted, unless you counted keeping me alive for the last two decades. Gabriel would see that as all that mattered – as a victory – but I couldn’t feel that way. She’d missed out. I’d missed out. And maybe, if I’d done to her what I was doing to this pillow, I might have found a way to break through her fear to the woman who lurked inside. It was when I was busily shedding snot and tears all over my fake, far-more-affectionate nan that I heard a noise on the stairs. A creak, which meant someone had trodden on the fourth step up.
There was someone in the house.
I jumped up from the bed. The Overlord had warned me during the cab ride that I needed to be careful, that Fintan, cheated of his prize and chased away, would now have declared all-out war. The place could be crawling with men in black, all looking to kill me – and here I was, stuck on my own in an empty house in Anfield. No High King. No warrior slaves ready to use their sword arms. Not even Carmel and a plant pot. He’d also told me that he’d be sending a protector – but there was no sign of this mythical being right now, when I needed it most.
There was nothing pointy or lethal-looking in the room, and my own fighting skills were about as much use as the stuffed lion. The very, very large stuffed lion … I ran over, grabbed it, and climbed into the cavernous wardrobe, pulling Leo over me. The thing was huge. If I huddled in a corner, on top of the shoes, it would just about cover me.
OK, I admit it. Not the most brilliant of battle plans – but it was all I had right then. At some point, assuming I survived the night, I needed to learn how to look after myself. To fight, to run faster, even to use the power of my mind to protect myself better. Fionnula used spells to enclose her land, and I’d seen Gabriel use magic to cause rockfalls. Maybe I had that in me too. It had to be better than hiding and quaking and waiting for something to happen. It was going to be hard to protect the fate of the whole world if I couldn’t even protect my own.
But that was for the future – and tomorrow, as everyone knows, is another day. Right then, I had nothing. Apart from the ability to stay very quiet, and hide beneath a giant cuddly toy, pondering how rubbish I was.
I held my breath and waited, hearing the door to my old bedroom open. A pause, then it was quietly closed again. The bathroom was next, and the sound of the airing cupboard door being swung to and fro, the slight swoosh of the shower curtain being pushed aside. Whoever was out there was searching for something. Probably me.
I realised I was still holding my breath, and let out a long, slow, hopefully quiet stream of air. I was sweating, through a combination of the fear and the heating and being crushed by the lion. My heart was building up to a full-on cardiac, pounding so hard I was convinced it could be heard outside in the street. The sharp end of one of Coleen’s shoes was poking into my backside, and all I could see was one tiny chink of light gleaming through the keyhole. This, I decided, was most definitely not a dignified way to spend your last minutes of mortality.