As She Left It (2 page)

My home
.

“It’s a cottage,” she had said to Jill at the salon on her last Saturday, because once, on holiday with Steph and her dad in Norfolk, when Michael was a baby, she’d seen terraces of flint houses, one window beside the door with one window upstairs, and
they
were called cottages. “In a wood,” she had said to Jill. Meanwood, the district was called, after all.

“Watch out for the little old man then,” said Jill. Opal stared at her in the mirror and forgot to pass her the next square of foil.

“You know …
in a cottage, in a wood
,” sang Jill. Her lady, whose hair was half-covered with folded foil, joined in. “
A little old man at the window stood.
” Then they both stopped with their mouths open, before laughing.

“I forget the rest of it,” said Jill.

“I’ve never heard that,” Opal said.

“Your mum never sang it to you?” said the lady, then shut her mouth and opened her eyes wide.

“It’s okay,” Opal said. “I don’t mind talking about her. It. Her.”

Jill and her lady both shook their heads, and, instead of poking her with the handle of her tint brush like usual, Jill gave Opal a gentle nudge to restart the supply of foil.

“Poor mite,” said her lady. “When did she die then, love?”

“About eight weeks ago,” Opal said.

Jill’s lady tutted. “Early days yet. You’ll have had a lot to do. Funeral and paperwork and all that.”

Opal nodded, but Jill flashed a warning look.

“Don’t you think about the funeral again, Opal,” she said. And then into the mirror. “It nearly floored her. She came back here a physical wreck. Didn’t you, love?”

The lady clucked in sympathy. “Well, it’s a lot to ask of a young girl. What about your dad? I mean, I take it they were divorced, but even so … ”

“My dad died five years ago.”

Now Jill’s lady made a kind of whooping noise, like the audience at a circus when an acrobat falls into the net. “Eh, dear,” she said. “Both your mum and your dad gone, and you only … ”

“Twenty-five,” said Opal. “I’ve still got my stepmother. I could stay here. Be near her.”

“Is this Stephanie?” said Jill, as if Opal could have more than one stepmother, and she frowned as she paddled the tint onto the foil and crimped it shut like a pasty. Opal hadn’t realized Jill knew Stephanie’s name.

“But a
stepmother
,” said the lady. “No, you go, love. Make your own way. Bright lights, big city.” She made it sound like London or something. Opal wished it was: hundreds of miles away, the farther from Whitby, the better. But an hour away in Leeds would have to do.

She smiled into the mirror.

“You can’t pass all that up to stay put here,” the lady was saying. “Not with nobody but a wicked stepmother to tie you.”

Opal nodded, but inside she was blotting the words out. She wasn’t running away. Baz was nothing to her. Baz was the mayor of Nothingtown in Nowhere County.
Free as a bird
, she told herself,
moving on to better things, plenty more fish in the sea
.

Where to sleep though?
she asked herself, back out on the landing again. Her old room—what was left after indoor plumbing had replaced the outhouses on Mote Street and the bathroom had been carved out of it—didn’t seem to have a bed anymore. She stopped in the doorway and stared. The pink woodchip was the same and the fuchsia-pink nets crossed over the window and held with ruffled ties, but her pine bed with the drawers underneath was gone and with it the white unit that made up her dressing table, homework desk, and wardrobe. The room was full of nothing but black sacks with that lumpy shape Opal knew so well. She kicked one gently and felt the scrape and clunk of the bottles inside it. So upstairs she went again, up to the attic, telling herself her bed would be stored there. But before she reached the top of the stairs, she could see the rough sea of bin-bag tops stretching all the way across to the front wall. There was the odd cardboard-box island, but no furniture at all. If her old mattress was on the floor under a bag of empty brandy bottles, it could stay there.

And so she would have to sleep in her mum’s room, in her mum’s bed. She came down the attic stairs and edged along the corridor. The door was ajar, and she stretched out a foot to push it all the way open.

The curtains were shut, like always, and the bed was heaped up with pillows and cushions, like always, piled high with quilts and blankets. A nest, a lair. Magazines and a toilet roll, some clothes, some bottles of course, an ashtray and a big soup tin without its label for emptying the ashtray into. Where the quilts and blankets were pushed back and the pillows and cushions were flattened, was a round hole. Tiny. Big enough to hold her mother? Must have been.

She hadn’t died here; she had gone to the hospital, admissions, acute medical—or that bit of acute medical that was basically the drying-out ward really—then HD, ICU, and
there
she had died. But it had started here. One night—or one morning more probably—Nicola had climbed in, and she had never climbed out again.

But looking at it, it was her dad dying Opal couldn’t get out of her mind. She could picture him, lying in the hospital with a mask over his face, tubes in him, needles on the backs of his hands. Steph would have had to bend close to his mouth to hear him whisper.

“Tekk care ot lass.”

Except that was her granddad’s voice she was hearing, and it was her granddad who had had the mask and the needles. Her dad never even made it to a bed, pronounced dead on a trolley in Accident and Emergency—or maybe even in the ambulance. Couldn’t have been at the house, or they would have taken him straight to the mortuary. And it was A&E Steph had phoned from to tell her.

“Look after Opal,” her dad would have said. “Tell her I love her. Let her have something of mine to remember me by.”

Which Steph completely hadn’t. And Opal wouldn’t have chosen anything big—like his camera or bird binoculars or the sound system from the house or anything like that—but by the time his funeral came round, everything was gone. Every last thing. His clothes and his jewelry, even his scratchy bathrobe that hung down to Opal’s ankles, that she would have curled up in whenever she wanted to remember him. Although, thinking about it, that bathrobe must have been long gone because he’d got it when he was still with her mum.

Missing out on a keepsake wasn’t the half of it, though. And she’d never have known the rest if Steph hadn’t gone off for a long weekend and left Michael in charge. One of the envelopes had come that very weekend and Michael, who didn’t know he shouldn’t, or maybe because he missed her and wished he was still her brother …

Well, he’d phoned to tell her anyway.

THREE

“
W
HEN’S SHE GETTING BACK?”
Opal had asked, the cheap handset creaking from how hard she was gripping it.

“Monday teatime,” Michael had said.

Opal took the afternoon off to be on the safe side and was there at three o’clock. At four, Steph came huffing in with her little case on wheels and three carriers of shopping she’d done, and Opal was sitting there with the big brown envelopes—seven of them, still unopened—on the breakfast bar in front of her.

Stephanie’s eyes literally bulged as she took in the scene.

“Did Michael give those to you?” she said and then bellowed with her head back. “Michael! Get down here.”

“Michael’s not in,” Opal said.

“Where’s he gone and left you here on your own?” She was darting looks all around the kitchen as if Opal might have stolen her knickknacks or spray-canned the walls.

“I let myself in,” Opal said. “And I found these in my room.”

“Let yourself … ?
Broke
in, you mean?” Steph’s voice faded as Opal slid a single Yale key towards her.

“I’ll not be needing this again, under the circumstances.”

“How long have you had a key to my house?” Stephanie said.

“How long have you been hoarding my mail? I can’t make out the postmarks.” She bent over and squinted at the nearest one.

“It’ll all be junk,” Steph said. She had turned up her lip as if she could smell something, but her eyes were still wide. “It wasn’t worth sending on to you.”

“That’s fraud,” Opal said. “Letting yourself into your childhood home with your own key isn’t breaking and entering, but this here is postal fraud.” She tapped the envelope, thrilling at the brisk, snapping sound it made.

Stephanie flinched, then her eyes narrowed. “Childhood home?” she said. “You were no child when you landed here, lady.”

“I was nine,” said Opal, and for a minute Steph looked confused.

“Nine?” she said and looked down at her spread fingers, curling them back one at a time, counting. “You were going on thirteen.”

“I was nine the first time I stayed under this roof.”

“Aye, but that was visiting. You were twelve when you moved in and pulled your little stunt.”

“Stunt?” Opal repeated, frowning at Stephanie, who flushed.

“Just go,” she said. “Before—”

Opal stood, lifting the bale of envelopes and hugging them to her.

“It’ll be flyers,” said Stephanie. “It’ll be nowt.”

“We’ll see,” said Opal. “I’ll take my time deciding whether to report the fraud.”

“Who’d listen to you? People keep records, you know. You’ll have a big, fat file somewhere. All the juicy details.”

“Juicy?” Opal repeated, frowning again.

“Look, just get out before Michael comes back and sees you.”

“Poor Michael,” Opal said. “Having you instead of a mother.”

“What would you know about mothers?” Steph had said, but her voice was cracking. Opal tried to make her eyes as hard as pebbles, as flat as coins on the front of her face, but she kept hearing those two words—
stunt, juicy
—and she could feel her face tugging to make a frown again.

No way would she remember. Time to go.

Would there be spare bedding? When she was small, her one set of Bambi covers was taken off, washed, dried, and put back on again between one night and the next, and Nic’s nest was never dismantled and reformed. She looked around the room anyway, wondering where her mother might have kept some extra sheets, and her eye caught the edge of her old single mattress peeping out from beside the wardrobe where it had been stored.

As she hauled it out, the curtain dragged away from one end of the window and although she didn’t want to be seen—not tonight, not yet—she couldn’t help herself, and she lingered there.

Who lived here now? Who had come in the thirteen years since she’d been gone? Strangers. And they’d stay that way. She’d smile but no more. No chummy chats, no cups of tea. No prying. That was the best of a city. You could be all alone in the crowd. If there was nobody looking, there was nothing to see.

Except … straight across at number five, she saw something that troubled her. Because how many people hung those plastic strap things at their doors these days, or put jam pots on the window sills to catch the wasps? How many people polished their windows until they glittered, right into the corners, and had one of those wide flat vases—made for windowsills, she supposed—dead centre in the living room window and another one exactly the same, precisely above it in the bedroom window, as if she’d dropped a plumb line down to make sure they were even? Not many. And how many people had a shopping trolley with a plastic cover to keep it clean as it parked outside their door on its own little plastic mat? Not even as many as that.

Mrs. Pickess, wicked witch of Mote Street, was still around.

Well, she could handle Vonnie Pickess, and at least the others would be strangers. As Opal shuffled farther in to the window to look at the top house, though, a car turned in at the foot of the road, roared up it, braked hard, and turned, coming to a halt crossways on the cobbles. She watched as the driver’s door and the house door both opened. A woman crossed the pavement and held out a folded cloth bundle to a young man (in slipping-down jeans and a vest so loose and baggy he might as well have been topless), who was crossing the cobbles to take it from her.

It was Doolal Joshi, she was sure of it. He was the same age as her and they had walked to school together, until they were nine and he turned into a boy and decided he couldn’t be seen with a girl. And that was Mrs. Joshi, for sure. She hadn’t changed one iota, not a jot—which was the same thing as an iota, whatever they both were. She was still making those sandwiches—Opal scrabbled in her memory for the right word …
dosas
!—and she must still be running the taxi business, because she had a headpiece on.

So Mrs. Pickess and the Joshis. Not great but not the end of the world.

Doolal got back into his car, revved the engine as if he was getting ready to launch a space rocket, backed up a bit, and roared off down the street again.

Opal turned and pressed her face against the glass, watching until he had gone, and she was still looking when a red Transit van chugged impossibly slowly round the corner and pulled in across the street in front of No. 1. The driver’s door slid open and one after the other, four old men climbed down. She laughed out loud. It was the Mote Street Boys, still dressed in their shiny suits and narrow ties. Opal took hold of the rings at the bottom of the window and slid it very quietly open.

“That piano stool’s like a bed of nails,” said Pep Kendal, knuckling his back.

“It’s a good gig,” said Big Al. “Steady money.”

“Tea dances!” said Jimmy D, the drummer.

“I’ll rustle us up some dinner,” said Pep. It was his house, Opal knew. His kitchen.

“You’re going to cook?” said Mr. Hoadley. “I’ll maybe just shoot off home.”

“I’m going to
phone
,” Pep said. “Pizza.”

“Aye well, all right,” said Mr. Hoadley. “No olives, mind.” He lowered his double bass case carefully out of the back of the van and stepped down.

“Fish!” shouted Big Al. “Pizza?”

Opal caught her lip and waited. The passenger door rocked slowly along its rail and then, hat on the back of his head, white hanky foaming out of his breast pocket, battered trumpet case clutched in one hand, out stepped Fishbo—Mr. Gordon, her old music teacher. How in hell was he still alive? He had already been an old man when she was tiny, and he looked truly ancient now, mummified nearly, all battered and leathery and so skinny that his suit hung off him like Doolal’s jeans.