Chapter 17 #2
‘I’m even seeing the faces of people who sold stories about me to the press.
You’ve got some nerve.’ I pointed at Ron Something.
‘You made her redundant.’ I pointed at Lizzie, Faye and Shona, her old college housemates, one by one.
‘You were supposed to be her friends. You all dropped her like a stone. Was that cos of me? Cos of who I am?’
Someone in the audience was weeping. I didn’t see who but it was catching, like a fire in a wheat field. I looked up into the eaves of the chapel and addressed the man himself.
‘The Lord Is My Shepherd, that’s a joke. You weren’t with her AT ALL. You weren’t looking after her. I prayed every night for ten years you’d take it away from her. And you fucking ignored me. How could you be so cruel as to take away the one person I had? She’s all I’ve ever known.’
‘Ivy, let’s go, come on …’ said Larry softly, appearing beside me with Melissa.
‘Get off me,’ I snapped, pulling away and addressing the congregation again. ‘Don’t waste your lives relying on God. He won’t protect you, or the people you love. It’s just a fairy story we made up so we feel better about death. But believe me – there’s NOTHING after this. Death. Is. The END.’
‘Ivy, please!’ Melissa sobbed, tugging on my cardigan sleeve.
‘And you can give it all the “Our Father, who art in heaven” bollocks till the cows come home, but it won’t change a thing.
She’ll be ash soon. Ash and memories. Like my dad.
’ I clutched the little bottle necklace.
‘And I have to stay here on this earth for Christ knows how long, wondering who the hell I’m supposed to be without them! ’
There were small screams and gasps peppered throughout the congregation. I looked down at my hand – it was covered with bright red blood. Blood on the lectern too. Spatters on the Bible. Glass diamonds everywhere. I’d smashed the glass of water. And I hadn’t even noticed.
It was at this point that my legs buckled and I fell, probably the result of not eating for nearly twenty-four hours, not sleeping properly all week and quite a lot of blood.
I suddenly became aware of lots of people, legs, arms, surrounding me, body warmth and a whole host of different black fabric against my cheeks.
Crowding me, flicking water onto my face, leading me up and out of there, into the stark daylight.
Next thing I knew, someone was wrapping a coat around me – some black fleece number that stank of Chanel and I was sitting on a wooden bench in the remembrance garden outside, with a bandage around my right hand, facing one of the myriad trees planted for some dear departed.
A little football fan called Billy who adored Bristol Rovers.
An avid gardener called Jack who ‘loved his dahlias’.
A nana of six who ‘had a smile for everyone’. Not bloody now she didn’t.
‘What happened?’ I croaked groggily.
Heather checked my bandage and sat beside me on the bench. ‘You fainted. It was getting quite hot in there.’
‘Shit. I didn’t know what I was doing. I just lost it.’
‘You can say what you want today. There’s no right way to grieve.’
‘I just couldn’t stand it. All those fake tears.’
‘She pushed a lot of people away,’ said Heather.
‘What?’
She nodded. ‘The ones who sold stories or pictures of you. The ones who dared question why she was bringing you up, of all the children she could have adopted. You’re right though – there are a lot of two-faced people in there. I’ve got no time for that Ron idiot.’
‘I can’t believe she lost all her friends for me.’
‘She loved you more than she loved them. She’d have done anything for you. She would have died for you.’
Heather was crying by this point. I don’t think I’d ever seen her cry before. It only really dawned on me then that she had lost Mum too. They’d been friends the whole time I’d been alive.
‘I’ve really offended them all,’ I said. ‘And God, I wish I smoked.’
She reached inside her jacket and pulled out a pack of Embassy. ‘I’m trying to give up. You’d be doing me a favour.’
‘I never knew you smoked.’
‘Never done it in front of you, that’s why.’
I took the offered packet and plucked one out.
Heather cupped her hand around the flame as I inhaled it into life.
After a deep, fat drag a large cloud of the poison inside me blew out into the memorial garden.
My head swirled and the knot in my shoulders began to melt away.
I focused on the tree just to the right of us.
It was for an eight-year-old girl who’d died nineteen years ago.
The base had been decorated with colourful pebbles, a washed-out Sindy doll and a host of freshly dug pink and purple pansies.
River appeared through the big black gates of the crematorium and lingered, looking at gravestones. Heather followed my line of sight.
‘It’s that lad again; the one who beat the living daylights out of Mitch.’
‘Yeah. His name’s River.’
‘The River?’ she said, mildly shocked, looking towards him again. ‘Goodness me.’
‘Rhiannon sent him.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I messaged the prison. She wrote back. She said she’d asked someone to keep an eye out for me.’
Heather just nodded and dragged on her cigarette, long and hard until it was almost all ash. ‘Has there been another threat?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, before what she’d said landed. ‘What do you mean “another” threat?’
‘There was a poison pen letter came to the house a few weeks back. I intercepted it on Claudia’s behalf. I didn’t want her worrying about it, or you for that matter. It came to nothing so I assumed it was just an empty Bad Seed attempt to get close to you. I imagine they sent one to Rhiannon too.’
‘Whatever.’
‘You don’t care?’
‘I have so many things in the air that I should be caring about right now that I don’t know how to separate them.’
Her face fell. ‘Oh, Ivy.’
‘I keep having dreams about my dad. AJ, I mean,’ I told her. ‘Nice dreams. We talk, he smiles. I can’t ever hug him though. What does it mean?’
‘It means you want your dad.’
‘But I didn’t even know him.’
‘Doesn’t matter.’ She smiled, stubbing out her cigarette.
‘Thank you. For not making me feel even more like an idiot than I already do. And for sorting everything with Mum. And … everything.’
‘You’re welcome, darling. I’m glad River’s watching out for you. That’s settled one of my worries at least.’
There didn’t seem to be a good moment to change the conversation around to finding out if Rafael was alive, and if my little brother was with him, so I kept it to myself. Perhaps it was better she didn’t know – it was a risky situation and Heather had always been careful to steer me away from risk.
I looked back towards the chapel. ‘I’ll have to get another tiny bottle so I can hang a bit of Mum around my neck too. I can’t believe the next time I see her she’ll be ash.’
Heather rubbed my arm. ‘That’s not all she is, Ivy.
She’s in everything you do. Everything you say or believe or feel.
That all comes from Claudia. You stand up for yourself.
You’re curious, you’re not afraid to say what needs saying.
You care deeply about animals and doing the right thing.
You’ve got wonderful self-esteem. That all comes from her. ’
‘What about my temper? And my hair? And my long fingers and thumbs, and my freckles and my ski slope nose? That’s all Rhiannon and AJ, isn’t it? And what about Tommy, Rhiannon’s dad – my grandad. It ran through him as well – the killing gene. What if I’ve got that?’
‘There’s no such thing as a killing gene. And if there is, well, then you have a choice, don’t you? Maybe it ran in your family until it ran into you?’
I smiled. ‘I like that. What about my alcoholism? That’s linked to mental health issues and trauma, isn’t it? I read this thing online about—’
‘—you’re not an alcoholic,’ she laughed, pulling a tissue out of her sleeve and blowing her nose with it.
‘I did a striptease in front of the whole of Year Five.’
‘It doesn’t matter. You were in crisis.’
I looked around for River again but he’d disappeared. ‘Maybe I need rehab or something.’
‘Alcohol was a crutch when you needed it. You just wanted to be numb for a while. There have been times in my life I wanted to shut everything out. There’s no shame in it. I can’t begin to understand what you’re having to process. But from what I can see, you’re doing enormously well.’
I glowed from within. ‘So I’m not just evil?
Cos I saw this thing online about this scientist monk who grew all these pea plants to figure out how traits get passed down, like flower colour or texture.
And he found out some traits are dominant and some just wait for the right host. What if the evil gene in Rhiannon, in Tommy, what if it’s hiding in me, waiting to come out? ’
‘You’re not evil in the slightest,’ she said.
‘I don’t even think Rhiannon is entirely.
And I’d bet that AJ wasn’t entirely pure and innocent either.
But what does it matter? That’s just blood and bones, and yes, you get those from your mum and dad, but the important stuff, how you’ve been loved, how you’ve been socialised, that’s come from everywhere else.
From Claudia, from me. From friends, school.
You’re little pieces of everyone you’ve ever met; everything you’ve ever learned.
You’re … unique.’ She tucked a curl behind my ear. ‘Something entirely your own.’
I remembered what I’d read in the first Sweetpea book – how Rhiannon had saved Heather from being raped by two men in a van.
It did not end well for the men, but it meant Heather had been her lifelong servant after the fact.
That’s how she’d got involved in my adoption in the first place – Heather had sorted it all out.
But I didn’t mention it. I rubbed the silver panther earring with emerald eyes that was jumping through the hole in her earlobe.
‘I like your earrings. I haven’t seen these before.’
‘Your mum bought me them, about ten years ago, for my birthday. I keep them for best. You feeling better now? Come on then; they’ll all be piling out soon.’
We finished our cigarettes and stubbed them out on the arm of Barry Bentley, Husband of Mavis’s bench, before heading back towards the throng. The clump of anxiety in my chest had given way to emptiness and I realised how hungry I was and made a plan to stuff my face at the wake.
Then I had to deal with the onslaught of hugs and head pats from people spilling out to the strains of the exit song from Les Misérables, which was when I realised they were playing the wrong one; ‘On My Own’ – instead of the one I’d picked out for her, ‘Empty Chairs at Empty Tables’.
It was strangely appropriate though, as I stood there like a right orphan, and they all snaked out in their long black mournful line dropping condolences like sweet wrappers as they went.
‘Oh Ivy I’m so sorry I can’t tell you how sorry I am Oh Ivy you poor thing,’ they all gabbled and garbled and muttered and offered and all of them were fine about my whole outburst thing. Ron Pondicherry even apologised.
‘You are right, Ivy. It was sheer cowardice that stopped me visiting when she was poorly. You had every right to say that.’ He then bunged me a stash of twenty-pound notes, patted my head and minced towards a burgundy Mercedes with a half-his-age companion.
I put the money in the cancer charity box that the funeral director’s son was holding.
Others made a point of telling me how powerful my speech was.
They introduced themselves one by one, people who’d worked with her at various newspapers and magazines – some limping old guy called Jeff who’d been an old colleague in local press.
Another guy called Bill, a posh guy called Edmund and a really glamorous-looking newsreader I recognised – actual Daisy Chan, who was the lead anchor on the teatime news on Sky.
Everyone else wanted directions to the wake.
‘Oh, it’s just up the road. The map’s on the back of your Order of Service, and there’s free parking for two hours at the Tesco on the roundabout.
’ I must have said that about eighty times, each time followed by a simpering smile and a silent wish that it was them in that furnace right now, not her.
I was interrupted by a man I didn’t recognise but I knew was famous. He had that kind of tan; wore that kind of suit; had that kind of hair.
‘That was a beautiful ceremony,’ he said, blue eyes sparkling.
‘So nice to meet you, Ivy.’ He held out his hand to shake and I felt something inside his palm.
It was a gold-backed business card with the name ‘Guy Majors, Journalist’ in gold lettering.
I then recognised him from several of the Sweetpea documentaries I’d watched online.
‘You’re the one who did that show about Rhiannon.’
‘Three shows to date actually,’ he heh-hehed. ‘And you know we’re doing the TV special in a few weeks. My live-from-Haverfield-Prison exclusive?’
‘Yeah, I heard.’
‘I wondered if you’d like me to talk with the governor about a meeting. I can make it happen, Ivy. Just say the word.’
‘A meeting?’ I said. ‘With Rhiannon?’
‘Yeah.’ His gold tooth glinted in the weak mid-morning sunlight. ‘She’d love to meet you. I imagine you must be pretty curious to meet her too.’
‘No,’ I lied.
‘Have a think about it. You’ve got my card if you should decide it’s something you’d like to pursue. I can make it happen, just say the word.’
I stared down at the gold-embossed card.
‘Your mother – Mrs Silverton, that is – was never keen on me talking to you about it, but, well, you can make your own decisions now, can’t you?’
‘I suppose.’
He scratched his nose as a cluster of gold bracelets and a shiny gold watch tumbled down his tanned wrist. ‘She’s kept her nose clean for a long time so they’re relaxing the rules regarding visitors now. I could get you in the week before my live interview, if you wanted?’
‘Why then?’
‘Well, we could use some of the footage. Splice it in the live interview to show a more human side to Rhiannon. Be quite the scoop – Sweetpea and dort reunited. No other journalists would have the access. You don’t have to be on camera – just a few snaps.
Think about it, Ivy.’ He winked and turned on his heel, his soles click-clacking on the concrete as he walked away.
‘Prick.’