So what happened next?
A cup of tea. That’s right. It had been an exhausting afternoon, and she and Anne had rolled their eyes at each other after they had seen most of the children out the door, and gone to turn on the kettle. They were in the kitchen having a well-deserved sit-down when Ms. Buck approached her with the phone, and Suzy had asked her to bring Rae home. She had buttoned up the little girl’s coat against the rain. The little girl had seemed quite subdued as they walked along the wet pavement.
And then that boy had appeared behind them on the bike and . . . and . . . no, that was still blank. Debs sat down in her own kitchen with her tea, searching her mind for something, anything.
It was when she stood up to fetch some more milk that a thought dropped into her head with a heavy crash.
She did remember something else. Something, come to think of it, that was quite odd.
What has that woman done to my flat?
In the daylight, new revelations keep emerging this morning. I was too preoccupied in the kitchen last night to check around all the rooms properly, only noticing vaguely that my sheets smelled different as I collapsed onto my pillow and slept properly for the first time in weeks. But today it all becomes clear.
I nearly jump in shock when I walk into the kitchen to find a photo of Rae on the fridge door, which is now sparkling white. It is a photo I have always avoided looking at. Tom took it when Rae was a few weeks old, right after the first operation and she had lost so much weight. She is tiny, like a little baby rat, with wrinkly pink skin. Her chest is so thin it’s almost concave. Debs has stuck other photos beside it with fridge magnets that she appears to have brought with her. One is from last year, of Dad and Rae on the beach at Skegness, their hair blown to the side, laughing, the wind farm in the background. A second shows
Tom and Rae on a slide at the park, when she was about two, Rae tucked up in scarves and hats inside his arms. There is one from Halloween last year, too: Rae and Henry dressed as pumpkins, and me and Suzy as witches pretending to be scary.
For a second, I stare, distracted. It’s funny. When you look at all the photos together like this, my life, and Rae’s life, look almost normal. You wouldn’t know that she’d had two heart operations. Thoughtfully, I open the fridge to fetch milk for my coffee.
Jesus, what now?
All the old jam jars at the back have been removed; the newest ones now sit in neat rows along the top shelf, labels to the front. Withered vegetables have been removed from the drawer, which has been scrubbed and put back in place.
I shut the fridge, shaking my head. That photo of Rae is bugging me. Where did Debs find it? I think for a second, then march across the kitchen to the drawers where I fling most things I keep meaning to file later. I pull one open and stare. Everything has been tidied. Debs has gone through my flat, gathered up all the loose photographs she could find, and sorted them out. Some she has placed in frames or hung on the fridge; the rest she has sorted into photo wallets and placed tidily in the drawer. I flick through the first one. “Rae As A Baby,” it is neatly titled. I feel sick.
Quickly, I start marching round the kitchen checking all the other drawers, cupboards and surfaces. This is unbelievable. She has used saucers and elastic bands to group paper clips, hair bands, and pens. Current bills sit arranged in an old letter rack that the previous tenant left on the wall above the phone. Rae’s school letters have been removed from the piles on the countertop and pinned neatly on the clipboard, replacing old hospital
letters I forget to bin, which have been filed neatly in a paper folder marked “Medical.”
Medical? I think. She’s read our private stuff.
“Bloody hell. This is ridiculous!” I say loudly to myself. I walk in to check the sitting room. There is a clean jam jar full of dusky peonies on the coffee table, which has been cleared of the teetering piles that seem to accumulate round my flat and polished till it gleams. Even the baseboards look brighter, as if she’s washed them down. On the back of the door, there is a new display of Rae’s best drawings placed inside pretty colored paper frames.
“Unbelievable!” I exclaim. The cheek of it.
I say that because that is how I know I should feel. I should feel violated and angry and humiliated.
But actually, I want to cry.
“My pillow smells of strawberries,” Rae says, walking in, smiling. “Can it always smell of strawberries?”
“Hmm. I don’t know,” I mutter. Our newly laundered bedding always smells of nothing apart from hot radiators.
“It’s like Granny has come from heaven and tidied it all up for us.”
I spin around.
She is watching me carefully, gauging my reaction.
More than anything, I am shocked. I’ve never told anyone this, but sometimes I pretend when Rae and I are walking into our cold, dark flat in the evening that my mum will be there. She will have tidied up, and cooked us one of her roast dinners. The table will be laid, and she’ll give us both a hug. And I’ll sink into her, knowing that she’ll take all the responsibility off me for a few hours. That she’ll put Rae to bed for me, and read her a proper story instead of rushing through as fast as is
decent. Then she’ll feed me, and sit and listen when I tell her how scared I get about losing Rae. And she’ll let me get it all out, then ask me what I think I should do, and let me work it out for myself, just like she did when Kieran Black chucked me for Jane Silvering, and I started a band with two boys at school instead and found that practicing Blondie songs in our barn was much more fun on Saturday afternoons than Kieran’s soggy kisses in the village bus stop. Or when I failed my maths GCSE and she suggested I do a week’s work experience in a local recording studio in Lincoln, and I came home desperate to retake my maths exam and get to sound engineering college as soon as I could.
Yes, if Mum were here. Maybe I’d find the space to work this all out myself. I’d find perspective. Perhaps I would never have lost Tom.
“Rae,” I say, remembering something. “You know how we have a Friday night midnight feast like me and Granny used to do?”
She nods.
“There was something else we used to do, too.”
“What?” she says, perking up. Her eyes are bright today, sparkling.
I go to the drawer and pull out the packets of photos Debs has stored tidily, and bring them back and place them on the floor. Then I hunt in my room for a couple of old photo albums that I was given when we had Rae, but never used.
“This is what me and Granny used to do. We’d put in our family photos and write funny stories to go with the photos to make a history of our family.”
“I seen those at Granddad’s house!” she shouts, excited.
“Good.”
We start with the earliest photos of her. The way Debs has grouped them, I am surprised how many there are. Tom used to take them, not me. I tried to stop him but he said we should take them in case we lost Rae; or later on to remind ourselves how far she had come.
She picks up a photo of herself when she is about three, after her big operation, finally, to repair the narrowing in her artery. Kaye is sitting on a bed with her, and she is holding a bowl and smiling.
“Hmm, what should we write here?” I ask.
“We could write that my favorite thing to eat at the hospital was ice cream and jelly,” Rae says.
“So it was,” I say, amazed. “I’d forgotten. And Kaye brought you an extra one as a treat, which cheered you up, didn’t it? Let’s write that.”
“Mum,” Rae says. “When Granny died, who looked after Granddad?”
I look down at the photos.
“Um. Granny’s sister, Aunty Jean, I suppose, and some of Granny’s friends and their neighbors.”
She waits. I can hear her hesitate, wondering whether to say any more.
“Not you?”
I put down the photos.
“No. Not me very much.”
She touches my hand, and I look up.
“You know, Rae, Granny died the week after I started my new job in London. And I had just moved into my new flat with Sophie. And I probably should have moved back home then to look after Granddad, but I didn’t know what to do. So I waited for him to ask me, and he didn’t. And I didn’t go.”
“Was Granddad very sad?”
Memories of that cold, dark year that Dad and I never discuss come floating back. “I think he probably was sad, and now I think I probably should have gone home, but then I didn’t ask him. I was very sad, too, and being in London and doing my new job made it better.”
“But then I got born ill and you had to look after me?”
I stare at her, realizing the implication.
“Rae. No!” I exclaim, grabbing her close to me till her hair pushes into mine, our curls merging into one mousy mass, just like mine and Mum’s used to. “Oh God. Is that what you think? Rae! That is not something you ever, ever have to worry about. Nothing will ever make me as happy as looking after you and helping you get better. Not my job. Nothing.”
I rock her gently back and forth as if she were a baby again, and wonder what on earth I have been thinking. The sun’s rays shine blue through Debs’s gleaming windows.
She didn’t notice the blue envelope at first. It had come yesterday and fallen into the wire letterbox that hung on the back of the front door and then lain there. Normally Jez sorted their mail, pulling out business letters to take up to his office, but he had returned late from Birmingham last night, blaming the trains—as she had suspected. Vondra was checking it out with the train company right now, along with the name Michael Roachley. Suzy was walking round the house, waiting with a sick stomach to hear back from her.
The reason she even noticed the blue letter was that the white one had landed on top of it today when the mail arrived this morning. A white envelope with an American stamp attached. The front was handwritten and the stamp featured a white mountain and a skier jumping high off one of its slopes.
Just the sight of the mountain made her stomach twist with homesickness for the open spaces of home. The long, narrow hall of her Victorian terrace closed in, the house’s inadequate,
cramped innards suffocating her. The handwriting belonged to her sister. Suzy frowned, opening it. Why wouldn’t she leave her alone? The usual news about her kids and Denver, probably, written in a cheery, home-cooked style with endless exclamation marks. No—Faye, she was definitely not feeling homesick for.
Suzy removed her sister’s letter, carefully tore off the stamp, and threw it unread into the recycling box. Her sister could go to hell.
See how she liked it.
The stamp, however—she would stick that up on the fridge and show the boys.
She opened up the catch of the letterbox and five more letters fell out, plus a few junk mail leaflets and a local paper. She sorted through them. There were the usual brown typed envelopes for Jez, two bills, a children’s catalog she had ordered to buy the boys some clothes for summer, a charity request, and a letter in a blue envelope.
She glanced at it to see whether it was business or personal.
The name on the front made her freeze.
Craning her neck up the stairs to check that Jez was firmly ensconced in his office, the door shut, she placed the rest of the mail into piles, took the blue envelope, and sat on the bottom step. She looked at it again. Should she? Would he know it was due? Nervously, she used one nail to gently pry open the glued flap. There was a letter inside, also written on blue paper.
She took it out and opened it flat.
Through the wall, she heard an old-fashioned clock begin to chime midday with long, ponderous strikes.
By the fourth strike she thought someone had made a mistake sending this blue letter. By the ninth, she had realized that it wasn’t a mistake.
By the twelfth, she looked up, and everything fell into place with a sickening thud.
With careful folds, she put the letter away neatly in her jeans pocket and wandered shakily into the kitchen with the phone, and dialed a number.
“Vondra?” she whispered.
“Suze? Hi, I was just about to ring you, sweetheart.” Vondra’s warm, treacly voice had a new triumphant tone to it. “I’ve just found out who Michael Roshlé is. And that’s not all.”
I look in our empty fridge, wondering whether I should ask Tom to bring over something for lunch for me and Rae.
I wonder what mood he will be in this afternoon.
The doorbell rings and I hear Rae jump up to the window.
“Aunty Suzy!” she shouts, and sits back on the sofa.
I open the front door. For the first time that I have ever known Suzy, her smile is missing. Her face looks gaunt, and her eyes red, as if she has been crying.
“Oh God, what’s wrong?” I say in a panic.
She shakes her head.
“No, it’s nothing.”
The muscles in her face are fighting to control her emotions. Tears spill down her cheeks despite them. My heart thumping, I usher her in.
In two and a half years, I have never seen her like this.
“Suzy. What is it?”
She wipes her eyes.
“Sorry, it’s just something with Jez.”
“With Jez?”
“And his dad.”
“Oh. Oh, OK,” I burst out, relieved.
She looks at me quizzically.
“I just thought it was something I’d done. You know, being a bit stroppy yesterday.”
She shakes her head and tearfully touches my arm. Fascinated, I can’t stop looking at this new Suzy. Open. Vulnerable. Not so bloody functional. How different things might have been if she had been like this from the start. Maybe if she had shown me her fragility, her flaws, I might have connected emotionally with her. Maybe then we could have been real friends. Maybe I could have been honest with her from the beginning about who I was.