She began again. ‘Today is not about what happened between Bill and me. It’s about Hilda, and you and me, the two of us, and what’s left in this house. If you can’t see that, shall we try to do what we’ve come here for? Then I’ll go.’
Jeanette lifted her chin.
– You think you can run away. You always did
.
‘
Jeanette
. For Christ’s sake. Shut up. Shut the fuck up, and
stop it
. Stop
attacking
. I’m not your enemy, I never was.’
– You are shouting.
It was true, she was. Connie rubbed her face with her hands.
It became very important to make Jeanette understand what she was trying to say. She took two steps across the room and caught hold of her.
‘I didn’t think Mum would just go and die like this. It’s a shock. I still thought there would be plenty of time for the three of us to work out the…the resentments. They were always there, weren’t they, long, long before Bill? In this house. At Barlaston Road, even. Isn’t that right? That must be what you feel too?’
Jeanette’s flesh was solid under her hands. She was angry too, Connie could feel the heat of it.
– Resentment?
‘Yes. Couldn’t we talk about it?’
– Talk changes nothing
.
Jeanette made a twist, away from Connie, then beckoned. Connie followed her into Hilda’s bedroom.
The place where the divan base had rested was outlined in grey furry dust. The dressing table with the triple mirror
was gone, and the bedside tables. In the bay window, the curtains with the garland pattern sagged in loops from their tracks. Connie looked at what had once been familiar, and wondered how a person’s absence could be so tangible.
A pyramid of cardboard boxes stood in the middle of the floor. Some of Hilda’s clothes had been packed into them. Connie recognised a checked tweed coat.
– Do you want any of this?
Connie looked again at the boxes of clothes.
‘No. But thank you.’
Hilda hadn’t owned much jewellery, and rarely wore any apart from her wedding ring. On a plain cushion cover on the floor, a few costume brooches and a couple of necklaces were laid out. Connie reached down to touch the tweed coat, and then the small heap of faded glitter.
It was cold, and she had the sudden sensation of great distances and a wind blowing across them.
There was nothing, nothing at all to keep her in this house. It was as if she had never belonged or even lived here.
She reached down and picked up a brooch more or less at random. It was a ring of polished stones in a vaguely art nouveau setting.
‘May I take this?’
Jeanette nodded.
–
And there is something else. It’s yours
, she added.
She pointed out to the landing, where the square trap giving access into the roof space stood open. There had never been anything much up there, apart from a broken stepladder, some paint kettles with cracked residue in the bottom, a pair of deckchairs with the canvas frayed beyond use, and ancient cobwebs thick with soot.
– It was up there.
A smaller cardboard box stood a little apart from the others. It had once contained tins of corned beef. Connie
stooped down. She pulled aside the tape that had been used to seal it, grown brittle with age, and opened the flaps. A puff of dust rose. Inside the box, under some folded paper, she found an old brown leatherette shopping bag. It had looped handles, and the plastic material was torn around the rivets to reveal the yellowed padding beneath.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, although she already knew. Her heart was banging like a drum.
– You had better look.
Inside the bag, folded up together, lay a knitted baby’s blanket and a tiny yellow cardigan. As Connie unfolded the cardigan an ordinary cheap brown envelope fell out. Her hands were shaking as she opened the envelope’s flap. Into her uncertain hand an earring fell.
It was a little pendant of marcasites with a rod and a screw fastening for a pierced ear. She gazed at it, her mind racing. This, surely, had been her mother’s earring. The pair to it, she must have kept for herself.
Breathless, Connie closed her fist on it. It was more precious than the biggest diamond in the world.
‘These things are mine. They belong to
me.
’ She stared into Jeanette’s eyes. ‘Why didn’t Hilda give them to me?’
Jeanette shrugged.
– I suppose because you didn’t need them. Mum gave you a home, a new family. Why would you want those things?
‘Why?
Why?
Because these are mine.
This
is my identity.’
Angrily Connie shook the blanket at her.
Jeanette looked incredulous.
– An identity from someone who put you in a bag and left you under a hedge? You were lucky that Mum and Dad took you in. Even though you were what you were.
Connie kept her fist tightly closed. ‘What I was?’ she asked, dangerously.
– Not one of us.
Not creamy-skinned, plump, blonde, like Hilda and Sadie and their three pretty daughters. Different. Unidentified. Unidentifiable.
The divide had always been there.
At Barlaston Road, where old Mrs McBride brewed up her prejudice like a witch with a cauldron.
Inside the pin-neat rooms at Echo Street.
Not spoken of, never, of course not. But scrawny little Constance Thorne had always been different, with her loud voice and her singing, her tight hair and her skin a shade darker than anyone else’s in the street or the school. Not different by very much, but just enough for her to have to stand up to the schoolyard bullies and the casual taunts of girls like Jackie and Elaine.
Connie had learned to accept that she would never know her birth mother and father, or where they had come from or what their stories were.
There were tests, of course, modern ones, that would indicate exactly what mixture of blood ran in her veins. But no test, however elaborate, would tell her who she really was.
She folded the blanket, awkwardly because her hand was still closed on the earring. She tucked it and the cardigan away inside the bag.
‘“Lucky”,’ she said aloud.
Jeanette stepped close, putting her face up against Connie’s.
– Yes. Lucky.
‘Why did Hilda
want
to adopt a foundling?’
Jeanette’s face suddenly blazed with fury. She grabbed Connie by the shoulders and shook her. The loose words tumbled out and spit flecked Connie’s face.
– Why? Why do you think? Because of me. Deaf. Deaf. Deaf. They didn’t want another like me, did they? And with one deaf-and-dumb kid in the family, they weren’t going to get given a nice new pink baby. They were only going to get one like you.
Connie breathed in sharply. It was like being children again, fighting and scratching, trying to damage each other by any means.
‘You are a bitch, Jeanette.’
Jeanette ignored her. She was caught up in her own resentment.
– And what did you do in return? Tried to take my husband.
‘I didn’t try to take Bill from you. I made the mistake of loving him. I regret what I did.’
– If I am a bitch you are a liar.
Connie pulled away from her. She had to get away, out of the room before one of them hit out. She snatched up the bag, made sure of its contents, and ran down the steep stairs past the gaping removals men.
She heard Jeanette’s bellow.
– ‘Running away.’
The front door stood open. She ran out and slammed it behind her.
Leaving Echo Street for the last time.
She held the marcasite earring so tightly that the metal post dug deep into her palm.
It was still raining. The waterspouts gurgled with the rush of water and the palm leaves dripped a few inches from where they sat.
She glanced across at Jeanette.
‘Are you asleep?’ she whispered.
Jeanette opened her eyes and licked her dry lips.
– No
.
‘Would you like some juice? A cup of tea?’
– No. My back aches.
It was an hour before she could take more of her drugs. ‘Shall I massage your feet again?’
– Would you?
Connie shifted her place, gently lifted her sister’s feet.
– What’s the time?
She told her and Jeanette smiled.
– Bill will be back in a minute
.
Noah stood aside in the kitchen to call Roxana on her new mobile. Andy went on unloading shopping from supermarket bags and flinging open the doors to cupboards.
‘Forgot the bloody bog roll,’ he shouted.
Noah stuck a finger in his free ear. ‘Rox? Can you hear me? Where are you?’
Roxana had just left the offices of Angela’s production company. She was out in the street, dodging the home-going crowds on her way to the bus stop. She rocked on the edge of the kerb, her bag hitched over her shoulder and her phone clamped to her ear, then dived confidently through the stream of buses and taxis.
‘What is that? I am in the street, Noah. I am going to work, I can’t be late.’
She had done three hours on the telephone in Angela’s office, talking in Russian to unimportant officials in the Russian Film Institute who would eventually open the doors to conversations with the more senior officials who had the power to grant the production company the permits they needed to film in St Petersburg. Angela seemed pleased with her. Now she had to get to The Cosmos before Mr Shane noticed that she was late.
‘When can I see you?’ Noah asked.
‘I am not sure. On Saturday?’
‘That’s four days’ time.’
‘I know that. What can I do?’
Roxana could see her bus, stalled in the traffic a hundred yards down the road. She attached herself to the crowd of people waiting at the stop, then began the process of slipping between them to bring herself closer to the point where she calculated the jaws of the bus would open up.
Noah frowned. He admired Roxana’s capacity for work, but her availability as a girlfriend was severely limited by it.
‘You can let me pick you up from the club tonight.’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don’t want you to see me in that place. You don’t understand why, but I don’t want it.’
‘I do understand. Sort of,’ Noah sighed. ‘But…’
‘Noah, here is my bus. I will call you tomorrow.’ She chirped a kiss to him. She was at the front of the crowd now, and as the doors opened she skipped inside and inserted herself into a just-vacated seat.
Roxana couldn’t help smiling. She kept counting them up, as if the wonders of her life might otherwise be snatched away. She had two jobs, one of them in the
film business
. She had an English boyfriend who called her more often than she needed to hear from him, a savings account, a mobile phone, an Oyster card, and a place to live that made her feel as if she was in a movie. She was a London girl.
The bus lurched and a man fell against her. He took longer than necessary to get up again.
‘Sorry, love.’
Roxana straightened her skirt over her thighs. ‘No worries,’ she said, as the production-company receptionist did about a hundred times a day.
Noah helped Andy to put away the rest of the shopping. He balled up the empty bags and threw them into the cupboard where they kept the ironing board.
‘You okay, mate? Is everything all right with you two?’ Andy asked him.
‘Yeah. Sure. Well, in a way. Roxana seems full-on, but at the same time you know that she’s keeping quite a lot back. She’s protective of herself. I suppose that’s the way you have to be, where she comes from, and after what she’s been through. But I wish I could convince her she doesn’t have to be like that with me.’
Andy eyed him. ‘You’re serious about her.’
‘It takes two to make a relationship serious, I find.’
‘Yeah. It does. I thought when you first brought her back here that she might turn out to be just a gold-digger. But she’s not like that. What are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to see her tonight, for a start. I’ll pick her up and take her home from that pole-dancing club.’
‘Right. Need any help with that? You know, I could come with you, take a look round, see if any of her friends need to work on their self-revelation issues?’
‘Yes. No thanks, mate. I’ll manage.’
‘Sure?’
‘Certain.’
It was a quiet night at The Cosmos, which was always harder than when it was busy. When there weren’t enough customers to fill the bar and the tables, even the low lighting couldn’t quite conceal the tatty fittings and grimy carpets. Roxana worked the pole as enthusiastically as she could, exaggerating every undulation of her body. She locked eyes with each of the men in turn but she couldn’t make a single one of them pay for a private dance. Towards the end of the interminable evening, Mr Shane sent for Roxana to come to
his office. Scarlet, the girl who delivered the message, wiggled her hips and smirked.
‘Fuck off,’ Roxana hissed at her.
Mr Shane took his cigar out of his mouth and exhaled a swirl of dirty blue smoke.
‘Shut the door. Come here.’
Roxana took one small step forwards.
‘Here,’ he indicated with the butt of the cigar. ‘That’s better. Well, now. Hmm.’
His manicured hands twitched her lace top away. He put the cigar back in his mouth, reached up and with a deft, insolent movement unhooked her bra.
Roxana looked straight over his bald head. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting.
Casually he fondled her. ‘You were late tonight, weren’t you? But you’re quite good, the punters like you. Do you enjoy your job here?’
‘It is a job.’
‘Like to keep it, would you?’
Now his hands slid over her breasts and insinuatingly over her hips. There was no doubt what Mr Shane had in mind. The same thing as Leonid. Always the same. Hatred stabbed through her.