Relatively Strange (43 page)

Chapter Forty-Eight

Ed had supplied enough food to get me across Europe, let alone back to London, even including a small thermos of hot sweet tea. I appreciated the warmth of the drink as much as the warmth of the gesture. Inside Miss Peacock’s neat package, when I unwrapped it, was a small, brown leather strap. I’d last seen it braceleting Sam’s sore wrist. Dark brown leather on the outside, there were blood stains turned paler brown on the inside. It was still fastened at the buckle but cut jaggedly through the middle of the leather. The sheet of paper round the strap held three words in Miss Peacock’s distinctively strong hand –
Job well done!

I looked at the broken strap in my lap for a long time. Then I re-wrapped it carefully in the note and put it at the bottom of my bag. I’d arrived at a crossroads and as Miss Peacock had pointed out, had choices to make. She was right when she said it wasn’t easy to live comfortably with a foot in two camps. I’d had a taste of both and despite the deep-rooted conviction that getting Sam out was the best thing I’d ever done, I was pretty certain how I felt. I wasn’t cut out for heroics. I didn’t want an involvement in the sort of life or death, seat-of-the-pants situation from which I’d just emerged. I certainly didn’t want to be doing battle with people who, in furtherance of ambition and obsession, could justify what they’d done to Megan and the others. Through some quirk of nature, I’d been born the way I was. I hadn’t chosen to be different and although there were some undoubted benefits I thought, on the whole, the time had come for me to give Normal my best shot.

*

I arrived home to bustle and sadness. There’d been nobody there when I phoned earlier because they’d all been at the hospital. Grandma had died that morning, whilst I was sound asleep in Oxford and all the busy rites of a death in the family had moved into full and unstoppable swing. Whilst memories of the next couple of days are not as clear in my mind as those of the preceding adrenaline-fuelled ones, mixed with the solemn ritual of service, burial, tears and remembering, were images of more violent, unexpected and untimely ends. As I mourned the death of a feisty old lady who’d been so much a part of my life for all of my life, I also took the opportunity to mourn other briefer, infinitely more tragic existences.

I was acutely aware, back in familiar surroundings, of the privacy of which I was assured. Nobody could stroll in and out of my mind whenever they chose and I didn’t have to work hard at guarding my thoughts. I was pretty certain I viewed this as a bonus and if my feelings were at times ambivalent, and if I thought fleetingly of the ease of communication I’d known with the others, I’d sense enough to realise that to regain any sort of equanimity, I had to accept the choices that had been made for me and by me. I was back in my world, I owed it to myself, my family and indeed my ex co-conspirators to deal with that. I was also wont to remind myself that whilst communication had certainly been a doddle, life with the Peacocks hadn’t exactly been a laugh a minute.

Because of the timing of my homecoming, questions about my days away had initially been far more cursory than expected and certainly not answered as completely as they could have been. Even the bruising on my face had been only briefly exclaimed over and explained away by collision with a carelessly-open cupboard door. By the time there was a chance to go into things more fully, I had prepared a censored and sanitised version of events that wasn’t going to alarm anybody unduly.

Also, and rather oddly I didn’t waste any time worrying about official repercussions from my Oxford activities. If Miss Peacock had said they were dealt with, dealt with they were. And if my parents intuited there was more to the story than I was mentioning, perhaps they didn’t really want to know details and were just more than happy I was back. I understood very clearly that they’d thought the temptation of being with others like myself would lure me away long-term. But when my mother asked, seemingly casually one day, whether I was staying in touch with Glory and the others I realised I didn’t have even have their phone number, Peacock wasn’t an uncommon name, I certainly couldn’t have found the Oxford cottage on my own and I didn’t know their exact London address – so the answer, even had I wanted it to be different, was no.

*

I returned to school after the Easter holidays; to my new slightly politer friendship with Faith, which only relaxed to a more natural state when we were together with Rochelle and Elaine. Faith had spent two weeks away with her mother and Shirley in Bournemouth where they’d been on earlier holidays. Her mother had said she didn’t think she could cope with a new area right now. They’d stayed in a hotel this time, something they’d never have dreamt of doing before. Her dad had always preferred self-catering, said that way you knew what you were eating and that it’d come out of a clean pan, onto a clean plate.

And as it so happened, the hotel was all very clean and well-kept and the food was delish. But of course, she said, none of them really enjoyed it, it was terribly hard being three not four. We all hugged her and I read clearly, before I remembered I was going to try not to do that so much, that they’d eaten fish and chips whenever they wanted and Mrs Brackman had bought herself a swanky turquoise swimsuit which they’d all gone to choose, holding on to each other and rocking with laughter, when she mistakenly tried it on back to front. And she’d gone into the sea with them for the first time in their lives, laughing and splashing like a kid. And although they kept telling each other how sad they all were, deep in the depths of Faith’s mind, buried where even she couldn’t see it, was an indisputable fact. Whilst previous holidays had been a minefield, this was altogether a more relaxed affair than any of them could remember. Rochelle had supervised, dried tears, found lost suitcases and comforted two new little step-sisters – who both threw up during the course of the evening – at her mother’s third wedding. Before which, Rochelle reported, a complete wobbly had been thrown. On the point of entering the Register Office, Rochelle’s mother had refused to go a step further until she was assured she was doing the right thing. Rochelle’s mildly pointing out there was still time to change her mind had, unfortunately, launched her mother in an entirely different direction and she’d become hysterical and accused Rochelle of never really liking Ian and of being determined to spoil the big day. It wasn’t really her mother’s fault Rochelle said, she’d had a great deal of stress over the last few years but there was, she confessed, a fleeting temptation to find the nearest blunt object and utilise it to hit repeatedly, the head under the little pink marabou feather trimmed hat with the half-veiling. We couldn’t help but laugh and Rochelle laughed with us, so much so that, still shrieking, we had to play the familiar hunt the inhaler.

Elaine and her parents had spent two sedate weeks in the South of France, their first time ever on foreign shores, a trip that had been over a year in the meticulous planning. Although, Elaine said they’d departed in such a flap that they’d got all the way down the road in the taxi before they realised her father wasn’t with them. He’d gone back into the house for the fourth time, checking he hadn’t inadvertently switched anything on during his three earlier checks. And, if we recalled, Elaine recounted wryly, the agonies of indecision her mother went through trying to make a choice in an English restaurant where she understood everything on the menu, picture France, where she didn’t!

I listened and laughed and empathised and read between the lines of the trials and tribulations of my friends and somehow didn’t think it appropriate, in answer to their questions as to what I’d got up to, to go into mine. So I told them instead about Grandma and they all apologised for not knowing, said they’d go round and see my mother, Rochelle gave me a long sympathetic hug and we moved on to safer ground.

Chapter Forty-Nine

Friendships; unbreakable, immutable, bound to last forever, don’t. The security of the quartet, Elaine, Rochelle Faith and myself, rock-solid through school years began to shift, realigning almost imperceptibly as we moved in new directions. Faith and Elaine were university bound and preoccupied with choosing ‘A’ level subjects whilst Rochelle, caving under a weight of emotional blackmail, gave up a coveted nursing college place to work in her newest step-father’s handbag business. For lack of any other heartfelt direction, I accepted a place on a secretarial course at a local technical college – shorthand and typing, said my parents, will always see you right.

Although I reached my late teens at the end of the swinging sixties, what was going on in Carnaby Street, never really bothered to take the tube out to Hendon. True, at college, the halls and rec. rooms were filled with enough suspiciously sweet-scented smoke to make ambling between lectures quite a relaxing experience and our Social Sciences tutor was invariably so stoned, he regularly passed out toward the end of a lesson. But in our house, pot was still something in which you cooked soup, heavy drinking was anything more than two cups of tea and the sexual revolution was as far removed as the Russian one.

My social life over those next few years certainly wasn’t what you’d describe as comfortable. I don’t think anyone ever disputes the awfulness of self-doubt, dances and dating but if you recall how heart-stoppingly uncertain it was, wondering what someone you fancied thought of you, imagine how uncomfortable it was to actually know! I was desperately short-sighted and far too vain much of the time to wear the glasses I needed. But hopes that myopia lent a romantically dreamy gaze were definitively squashed when I overheard myself thought of as the short, squinty one. Then there was the figure-hugging tweed skirt, purchased with my first ever, Saturday morning job wages. If brevity and tightness produced what I felt to be an enticing wiggle, the thought, loud and clear as I walked past a resting builder,

“Look at the bum on that!” was not what I’d hoped for. Mind you, having a wheelbarrow full of half-mixed cement, up-end itself swiftly and inexplicably over his legs and feet wasn’t quite what he expected either, so neither of us had a very good day. And yes, I was ashamed afterwards.

*

A course of driving lessons were my 18th birthday present from my parents. Mr Goldie, my driving instructor used to pat the dashboard of his trusty Triumph Herald and declaim it’s never good enough to read the road, you must also read the minds of the other drivers – although he probably never had a pupil who could choose to take him so literally. I generally enjoyed my lessons, although appreciated that possibly the same didn’t apply to the long-suffering Mr G. Despite nerves of steel he was still given to the odd squeak of panic in extenuating circumstances although, quite frankly, I always thought there was a lot that could be done to improve the signage for one way streets.

At the time I was taking lessons with him, Mr Goldie was a man not untroubled by challenges in his home life. I was often aware, as we drove our accustomed side-roads route round Hendon, chivvied by home-bound commuters, infuriated at being kept from their tea, that he was concerned – and not just with my driving. With his daughter recently married and his son backpacking in Nepal, Mr Goldie had been very worried his wife might be struck with empty nest syndrome. This however had proved not to be the case and Mrs Goldie – hitherto a pillar of the local W.I. with more jam under her belt than Robinsons – had slipped off, rather smoothly, the shackles of hitherto established domesticity.

She’d taken to cooking a lot of foreign, highly spiced meals and just last Friday, after a particularly stressful day, when a six-times driving test failure had made it to seven, Mr Goldie, trudging wearily up his garden path with thoughts of slippers and pipe was surprised to have the front door whipped open by the lady of the house. She had two glasses of wine in one hand, a rose between her teeth and an outfit that left far less to the imagination than might have been wise.

Mr Goldie was in somewhat of a turmoil over these unnerving turn of events. After all, he reasoned, last Friday, he could easily have been the Man from The Pru and that would have done no-one’s nerves any good. He appreciated the Change did funny things to a woman of her age but really couldn’t say whether he’d be relieved or regretful when this phase passed. I did know that he’d have died a million deaths if he had even the vaguest notion that I too now, had a vision in my head of Mrs G and the rose, which somehow I couldn’t quite shake off either.

Of course, I suppose what everyone craves in their life – me and Mrs Goldie no exception – is a spot of romance. But for my part, hormone-charged commentaries surging through the minds of my male contemporaries, to whom each new set of breasts was a revelation, each pair of mini-skirted legs a thrill and every slow dance an un-missable opportunity to press throbbing areas of anatomy against an unwary hip, came as a bit of a shock. There were also occasions when I could have well done without knowing that the youth, in whose sweaty grasp I was currently clasped, had screwed his courage to the sticking point to ask the girl standing next to me for a dance, lost his nerve at the last minute and grabbed the nearest thing to hand – me.