Chapter 6
I’m still shaky the next morning, eyes playing tricks again, and I can’t face looking at listings, but I need to start working no matter what John says. Not that I can shrug off what John says across the board. Which is another thing I need to deal with.
There’s nothing except the dead room stopping me working, because with good enough Wi-Fi anyone can work anywhere.
Kai and I couldn’t have lived in Hawaii if that wasn’t true.
We certainly wouldn’t both have been at that APAC convention in New York, both of us thousands of miles from home, meeting each other, changing our lives forever.
So—again in theory—I haven’t made any difference to my career, running home like this.
My accent is what it was when I lived in America, only less exotic.
My contacts haven’t got harder to access, as long as I remember when they’re sleeping.
But the longer I leave it, the more work I’m missing out on and the more subscribers my YouTube channel is losing from lack of new content.
I’ve forgotten the password for my SoundCloud, but my website is in good shape, with show reels and raw reels right there on the home page.
The raw reels were one of Kai’s great enthusiasms. He even offered to raw read any extract a prospective client sent through, in real time.
Like he was holding up a copy of that day’s newspaper or something.
I never dreamed anyone would take him up on it.
Shows what I know. “They humanise us, Lindsay,” he’d say.
“Plus producers see how clean our first reads are and they know we won’t waste studio time.
It’s all about the Benjamins. You know that. ”
I would sound like a Galápagos turtle if I tried to raw read right now. I would sound worse than I did when I tried for that self-help book. I have got to stop crying and get some honey. And a dead room, I think, coming full circle. I need to speak to John. Two birds, one stone.
He’s sitting there in the Portakabin, like my dad always did.
But my dad wasn’t using a laptop. John’s going to wreck his neck or at least his wrists if he doesn’t ditch the jewellery display case and get a proper table to put his knees under.
A better chair than the old leather recliner he’s slouching in wouldn’t hurt either.
“What’s up?” he says. His hands are very busy suddenly, as if he’s clicking away from a web page he doesn’t want me to see. I make a point of not looking.
“You’ve made some changes, right?” I begin.
I wave around the cabin. There’s a Keurig instead of Dad’s grimy old kettle and a stack of disposable coffee cups instead of the chipped mugs with their whole history ground in around the handles.
The small electronics on the wall shelves are MP3s and Xboxes instead of CD players and video cameras.
“Up front here and back in the Barrens.”
“What do you know about the Barrens?” His voice is loud and hard, and his chest rises and falls far too fast.
“Oh, John,” I say, dropping into the duct-taped office chair he keeps for elderly customers. They use up a lot of time, poring over coins and medals, but they spend decent money so he takes care of them. “When are you going to stop pretending you’re all right?”
“When are you going to turn back into my sister instead of a therapy-mad bloody daytime-telly social worker?”
“For God’s sake,” I say, “if you and me can’t talk about this to each other, what’s the point of me being back here?”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” he says. “You should deal with your own shit, Lindsay, and not . . .”
“Project it?” I say. “Okay. I’ll deal with my own ‘shit.’ Meanwhile, I was wondering if you’ve got anything like an unused trailer or something.”
He’s staring at me and his breath is picking up again.
“It doesn’t need to be kitted out. In fact, it would be better if it was empty.”
I can see a vein in his neck. I feel cruel but I need him to stop shutting me out. “You know what would be perfect?” I say. He narrows his eyes. “Remember the caravan?”
The blood drains out of his face so suddenly that I can see the dark shadow of his stubble against his white skin. I reach out and his hand is damp against my fingertips. I don’t think he even notices I’m touching him.
“What caravan?” he says. “I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, John,” I say again.
Then I’m back in the past. It was our best-ever find.
My dad had salvaged a two-berther, or agreed to take it as part of a house clearance maybe.
He probably meant to use it for something specific, like he used a horsebox for books and a tent for toys.
But there must have been a busy flu season.
Or maybe it was the Christmas that Cellardine’s Works folded and he got all the contents: strippable machinery, goods to resell, endless metal shelving, catering equipment and canteen fittings from the proper old-style works cafeteria, not to mention the office furniture that some feckless manager had just refurbed in a doomed attempt to show off to potential new customers.
Dad replaced his and Mum’s cars with new ones, cash down, off of Cellardine’s.
But anyway, then or some other time, he managed to overlook a caravan.
John and I found it hidden behind a stack of insulation panels.
It was like hacking through vines and uncovering a castle.
It was a fort, pyramid, spaceship, galleon, submarine, Tardis and sometimes just a caravan, one that we hitched to a pony and took around the quiet lanes of a magical summer, home from boarding school and free as a pair of birds.
It was everything to John and me. Until it wasn’t.
When he speaks again, I realise I’ve been quiet long enough to let him rebuild all his walls. “Why do you want a caravan anyway?” he asks me. “Where are you going?”
“I don’t,” I assure him. “Nowhere. I want somewhere to set up a temporary . . . audio pod.”
“Dead room,” he says. “Chloe told me.”
I nod, but what I’m thinking is when exactly did Chloe tell my brother she hated the name of my workspace? And why? Does she text him like she texts me? I still can’t get my head round the fact that I left and these people carried on without me.
“Dead room, right,” I say. “So that I can start working again. I’m too scared to look at my contact page and see what I’m missing, but there’s no point if I’ve got nowhere to do it.”
“So leave it.”
“I need to get back in the game, John,” I tell him. “Keep my name current. I can’t slip.”
“In the dog-eat-dog world of audio narration,” he says, deadpan.
“As opposed to the hard-bitten mean streets of house clearances and scrap dealing,” I say.
“Speaking of which,” says John, because a car has pulled up in the parking spaces outside the gates and someone is approaching, setting off a beeper on John’s computer.
The Portakabin door swings open and it’s the kind of couple you never used to see in Menstrie when I lived here before.
Two men, gym honed and dressed to the nines in tailored shorts and leather sandals, both with severely sculpted beards and one-shouldered backpacks.
One of them is wearing blue aviator shades, which tells you that blue aviator shades are in fashion again, rather than that he might not be.
“We’re looking for vintage sinks to make a water feature,” one of them tells John.
“No problem, gents,” John says, getting to his feet. “Sounds nice. If you promise to tag Lord’s when you post the finished project, I’ll knock a few quid off for you.”
I see both men let their shoulders drop when they realise that this rough-sounding scrappie isn’t the bigot he might have been. I smile at John’s back and think, if he needs to keep it all tamped down, why don’t I let him? He’s grown up into an okay kind of man despite everything.
He turns and walks backwards to talk to me. “Why don’t you do something more like settling in, Lindsay? Not moving again or starting work when you’re still not able for it. Do something nice for yourself, eh?”
More evidence that he’s basically all right.
Kind in his own way, coping the best he can.
And he’s got a point. There is something else for me to do, something that definitely counts as settling in.
Making friends is something nice for myself, in anyone’s book.
Not letting another person slip out of my life is something nice for myself.
Peggy March is in a nursing home. How hard can it be?
Just my luck to be trying this where four counties meet, though, instead of bang in the middle of Yorkshire or something.
I sit on Zak’s bed, with the monsters watching, copying and pasting until I’ve got a page of numbers to try.
There are more residential care homes than I can believe in Perthshire.
Quite a few actually in Dunblane. Stirlingshire is just as bad.
Clackmannanshire isn’t but it’s too close to home for me to tackle before I’ve honed my spiel.
West Fife is much more manageable, with no more than a dozen that look like the kind of place Mrs. March’s kid might have moved her into.
Did she say if it was a son or a daughter?
Probably a daughter, I decide, from the way the old lady was so instantly at home with me.
I lift my phone.
“Can I speak to Peggy March?” I ask when someone answers at the first one.
“No Peggy March here.” And they hang up.
I stare at my phone for a moment then redial.
“Hello again,” I say. “Did you mean to cut me off like that?”
“What? Wait, are you not cold-calling?”
“What?”
“Oh man, hen,” the voice says. “You wouldn’t believe the cold calls we get. Our residents—no offence to them—are not great at protecting personal data. It’s half the effing job some shifts.”
“But Peggy March isn’t actually one of your residents?”
“Yeah, no, but they do that too. Make up random names to ask about.”