Chapter 36
Poppy
When Rose comes downstairs the next morning, looking bleary-eyed and still tired, she catches me out with Lewis’s index spread before me on my lap.
‘You’re skipping ahead, aren’t you?’ she asks, pointing at me accusingly.
I nod, and try not to look guilty. I’m a grown woman and she doesn’t have the right to tell me off. At least that’s what I keep reminding myself.
‘She probably knew you would,’ she adds, wandering into the kitchen in search of coffee.
‘I know,’ I shout through to her. ‘It’s like with those books with all the endings. I always cheated, and she knew I would with this – so it’s all deliberately obscure.’
Rose comes back in, using the same mug she always used when she lived here – a giant one with a picture of Princess Diana on the side.
‘Did you look at P and Q? And … well, do you even want to find out about our dad? I was only two when whatever happened happened, and I don’t even remember him. Sometimes I think I do, but I suspect I’m making it up. What do you think?’
I’m nowhere near as certain as Rose that I want to find my long-lost father.
If he’s even alive – there’s no promise of that in what our mum has cryptically said so far.
He could be dead, or in jail, or living on a small Pacific island creating animal-human hybrids in his evil-genius laboratory for all we know.
This whole thing with Mum, with Rose, feels like enough of a head-fuck to me – but if she wants to know, for Joe, for herself, for whatever reason, then I won’t stand in her way.
‘I do want to, and I did. But it wasn’t much help. All P says is that we’ll need our passports, and Q is for Questions. It’s like the rest of the index – deliberately obscure, like I said.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asks, sitting down opposite me.
‘Well, some of them say what the letters stand for – like D for Daddy Issues – but some don’t.
Some just have the letter, and a note about what to look for, and which box it’s in.
Others have little comments by the side, which I suspect are from Lewis – I think Mum was so caught up in this she forgot about real life.
‘So he’s helped out by giving us pointers, things like “will involve driving”, or “pack for an overnight trip”, stuff like that.
It’s like they shared one giant brain – she did all the wacky creative stuff, and he was all solicitor-like and sensible.
It’s weird that we don’t know him better, isn’t it?
What did she tell you about him? I’m a bit freaked out that he seems to have been so important in her life, and we never even met him … ’
She nods, grimaces as she scalds her tongue on the coffee, and says: ‘I know what you mean. It doesn’t exactly make me feel like a good daughter either.
But I suppose that we’re the ones who insisted on keeping our lives separate, aren’t we?
I’ve not been back to this place since … well, since. What about you?’
‘I moved out when I got that job with the publishing company in London, and came back briefly after I got sacked.’
‘You got sacked?’ she says, eyes wide and tone incredulous. ‘But why? You seem so … sorted. Although I did always wonder why you ended up doing what you’re doing, for, you know, a dog food company.’
‘Luxury pet supply specialist,’ I correct, automatically. Understandably enough, she pulls a face.
‘Yeah. Okay, luxury pet supply specialist. But it’s not publishing, is it? I always thought that if you did go into marketing, it’d be for something creative, or arty, or important.’
‘Pet supplies are important,’ I insist, stubbornly clinging to my defence of a job that in all honesty I absolutely hate. ‘To the millions of people who love their pets.’
She holds one hand up in the air, as though she is giving up, and concentrates on her coffee instead. We are both silent for a while, until I try and find the words to break it.
‘I got sacked because I was a mess,’ I say, simply.
‘It was after everything that happened with Gareth, and you wouldn’t have anything to do with me, and Mum was freaking out, and basically …
I couldn’t do the work. I missed meetings.
I turned up late every morning, dressed like a bag lady.
It was a competitive environment – lots of bright young things want to work in publishing – and at that stage in my life, I just wasn’t bright enough. ’
I can see her churning this over in her mind, and am half expecting some kind of sharp rebuttal – a ‘so, you’re blaming me, then, are you?’, or ‘so you’re saying it was my fault, your epic career fail?’
Instead, she chews on her lip, and twists strands of her frizzy hair around her fingers, something I always remember her doing when she was trying to be patient with me.
When I’d stolen one of her tops, or accidentally locked her out of the cottage, or made some ridiculous proclamation, like ‘science is rubbish, I don’t know why you like it. ’
‘Right,’ Rose says, quietly. ‘I see. Well, shit happens. So when did you move out again? Mum always tried to tell me what was going on, but I wasn’t in the mood to listen. I used to bite her head off if she even mentioned your name, to be honest.’
I can hear the regret and guilt in her voice, and know that Mum’s video – the one with the You’ve Broken My Heart speech – has taken its toll on her as well as me.
‘About a year later, when I started working for a ball-bearing firm in the Midlands. And yes, it was about as exciting as it sounds, but it did allow me to get the experience I needed, do my marketing qualifications, that kind of thing. I moved down to London not long after, and life got … well, busy. And the more I stayed away from here, the harder it got to come back. Everything here reminded me of you, and us, and how broken everything was – and I couldn’t cope with that.
‘The only way I could move on was to ignore it all, and the cottage – Mum, our bedrooms, everything about this place – wouldn’t let me.
So I stopped coming – instead she came to me, or we had weekends away.
I never made any declaration, or even a decision …
I just stopped coming. I’ve not actually set foot in here for about twelve years.
Maybe if we had visited, she’d have introduced us to Lewis, who knows? ’
‘Maybe,’ replies Rose, looking around at the living room in that way we’ve both been doing for the last few days – like she can’t really believe that she’s here now, and that she’s here because our mother isn’t.
It’s weird – the whole cottage is dominated by Mum; by her fragrance and her taste and her history. It’s there in every little ornament, every framed picture on the walls, every book on the shelves, every singed cake tin in the kitchen. She’s everywhere – but she’s nowhere.
‘I think,’ Rose continues, ‘that perhaps she liked having him to herself. We were both so tied up in our own problems, and we did that thing kids do. That thing where we don’t really imagine our parents having lives of their own, outside of us.
So perhaps she enjoyed having a whole side to her existence that we weren’t involved in.
‘She told Joe a bit about him, though – said he moved to the village about five years ago. He’s basically winding down his business and decided to go into semi-retirement here.
Anyway, he’s looked after her, hasn’t he?
And helped her with all this. He’s been a better friend to her than we were, and we should be grateful.
Though I’m still a bit disappointed they weren’t secretly bonking. ’
‘Yuk,’ I reply, screwing my eyes up in disgust. That’s something I really don’t want to picture, no matter how efficient Lewis’s index-making skills are.
‘So,’ Rose says, gazing at Princess Diana’s slightly chipped face, ‘are we ready for the next one, do you think? I know we both needed some time off last night, but we might as well get on with it now. I’d ask how many more to go, but I’m guessing that’s obvious.’
‘I don’t think anything about this is obvious,’ I reply.
‘She may have decided to skip some letters because they were awkward, or invented new ones purely to amuse herself. I think, though, that there are only a few left that we can do here – looks as though we’re set to be on the move round about L. ’
‘She’s sending us to ell?’ Rose asks, deliberately mispronouncing it.
‘Probably. She’ll be there with a diamond-studded pitch-fork, singing “Burn Baby Burn” and pelting us with garden gnomes made of cow pats … anyway. F is for Forgiveness, then. If you think you’re up to it?’
Rose nods, and makes a ‘move-it-along’ gesture with her hands, like she’s directing traffic and I’m illegally parked.
She’s getting tougher as this thing progresses, which may or may not be a good thing – I suppose it depends on who’s on the receiving end of the toughness.
I, on the other hand, feel as if I’m getting softer – more vulnerable, and more exposed.
Being around Rose is like being emotionally exfoliated.
‘Okay … here we go …’ I say, fishing around in the box until I find the right packages. One is a big padded envelope, stuffed full of god-knows-what, with ‘open me second, for F’s sake’ written on the side in our mother’s handwriting. I put it to one side, and pick up the other.
It’s a plastic bag – an ancient carrier from a shop that no longer exists – with a big letter F scrawled on the side. I scrunch it up and squeeze it, as though it’s a Christmas gift and I’m trying to figure out what’s inside.
‘Is it a pony?’ asks Rose, sarcastically. ‘Please tell me it’s a pony!’
I ignore her, and use my nails to unpick the knot that’s been tied with the carrier bag’s handles.
Once I’ve done it, and broken a nail in the process, I empty the contents on the floor, where they scatter and clatter on the parquet.
We both look down, a bit befuddled. It’s a big mess of old-fashioned cassette tapes – C60s and C90s, some of them with writing on the paper stickers on the sides, some of them clear.
I root through them until I find a tape that looks a bit newer than the rest. Written on the side, in olde-worlde cursive script, are the words ‘Play Me!’
‘Wow,’ says Rose, leaning down to get a better look. ‘That’s a bit Alice in Wonderland, isn’t it? I didn’t even know they still made cassette tapes … Joe wouldn’t know what they were for. How are we going to listen to it? Even my car isn’t so old it has a tape deck.’
‘Never fear, Lewis is here …’ I reply, reaching back into the box and hefting out an old machine.
It’s ancient, and I just about recognise it from our childhood.
It’s long and flat, and has a lift-up lid where you slide in the tapes, and big clunky rectangular buttons that only let you record, play, erase, and go backwards and forwards.
It was probably once the cutting edge of technology, but now it looks like something out of one of those really dated science-fiction programmes – like the 1970s version of The Future.
I look at Rose, and she just nods. I can tell she’s nervous about what we’re going to hear, about our mother’s voice floating, disembodied, through the room, and so am I.
I slide the cassette in, close the lid shut with a clunk, and press ‘play’.