Tarnished (21 page)

‘I’m sorry.’

‘No need. It wasn’t your fault.’ Jean let out a great sigh and turned, smiling brightly to Peg. ‘What are them other ones, then?’ She laid the picture of her fiancé on the bedspread and pointed at the remaining photographs in Peg’s hand.

‘I was wondering who this girl is. And that’s Dad, isn’t it?’ She handed over the photographs of the blonde.

Jean looked at them, and as her eyes focused on the images she became stiller, more concentrated. ‘You found these next door?’ She looked up sharply.

Peg nodded. ‘In one of the boxes Nan kept by her chair.’

‘They shouldn’t’ve been in there,’ Jean said. Then, before Peg could really register what was happening, she started to rip the photographs up. ‘This is a girl that should not be remembered,’ she said as she tore. ‘She were trouble then and she’d be trouble now, if she wasn’t in the past. And him and all.’

She picked up the photo of Tony and started tearing it, too. Then the family portrait of Doll, Raymond, Jean and Keith.

Peg stood there speechless as Jean continued, shredding the photos until they were tiny pieces of confetti, her cheeks wobbling, the flesh on her arms swinging as she worked. Then, finally, when she was finished, she brushed the pieces away from the bed as if they were radioactive, as if they could in some way harm her. When at last the bed was clear, she looked up at Peg.

‘Are there any more in there?’

‘There are loads of photographs.’

‘I mean of them. Of that . . . that floozy and him,’ Jean said, almost spitting the words out. There was something dark in her look; something that could have been anger, but which also had the colour of fear in it.

‘A few. I think so, yes.’

‘Get rid of them. Burn them.’

‘But what about Nan? What if she wants to keep them?’

‘Listen,’ Jean said, grabbing Peg’s arm and pulling her close. ‘Mummy doesn’t even know who that little whore is. She’s never heard of her, all right? She means nothing to her and she never, ever will. Understand?’

‘Yes. But if she didn’t know her, why did she keep the photos?’

‘You ask too many questions, Peg. I want you to stop it now. It’s no good for any of us.’

As if she had been unplugged, Jean fell back onto her pillows. She closed her eyes and sighed so heavily that, for a second she confounded the automatic bellows that worked so hard to keep her air-bed inflated.

‘Hadn’t you better go and catch that train, Meggy?’ she said at last, without opening her eyes.

Then

‘It’s no coincidence that you just take one letter away from brother to get bother,’ Aunty Jean tells me as I do her toenails for her.

I’m doing what Nan has taught me, following the instructions I’ve written down in my Commonplace Book. I’m almost as good as a professional chiropodist, which means foot doctor.

‘Dr Meggy come to save your soles!’ I say to Aunty Jean’s feet whenever I start my sessions.

I’m about nine here.

Aunty Jean only walks a little now – from her bed to her toilet or to her trolley, which is parked at the top of the slope outside her back door. But Nan says even that little time plays havoc with her poor feet, the weight she is now. They’re completely flat underneath, completely puffed up on top, and all splayed out with hard skin and little white bobbly bits which Nan says is thrush, which I think is quite funny, like a bird growing out of her toes.

Then I look up thrush and I see it’s down to sweaty feet that don’t see the air enough. So I tell Aunty Jean this, and every time I’m in there I make sure those feet are out of their covers, having an air.

‘You’re as good as Mummy,’ Aunty Jean says.

‘I’m training her up well, aren’t I?’ Nan goes as she bustles by with a pile of clean sheets for the airing cupboard.

I lift Aunty Jean’s feet out of the warm water bath I’ve been soaking them in.

‘I wouldn’t mind a brother, though,’ I say as I start to file away at her softened calluses.

‘No, you’re better off on your own, Meggy,’ Aunty Jean says. ‘So you don’t have to share with anyone else. The things I had to give up because I had brothers.’

‘Brothers?’ I say, laughing. ‘You only had the one brother, silly.’

‘Yes. Silly me. Brother, I meant.’

She just blustered over her slip and I swallowed it whole.

Hook line and sinker.

If I hadn’t been such a gullible child, I’d be having an easier time now.

Stop.

I’ve got to stop blaming myself.

Breathe.

‘What did you have to give up?’ I say, wiping the flakes of dead skin away from her feet then patting them dry.

‘Where do I start? I always had to share everything, from Mummy’s cuddles to sweets, to felt tips. I even had to share my pet rabbit.’

‘No!’ I go, using an orange stick to scrape away her cuticles.

‘Yes. I won him in a raffle with my own ticket, but Mummy said I had to share him with Raymond. “You must share, Jeanie”, she said.’

‘That’s not fair,’ I go.

‘He didn’t do his fair share of the work, though, and the poor, poor rabbit died in the end.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. And it was all his fault, because he didn’t shut the cage door properly after he’d been cuddling it and a fox got it and ate it all up except for the little powder-puff tail.’

‘That’s horrid.’

‘I loved that rabbit like it was my baby,’ Aunty Jean says. ‘Keith, I called it.’

SHE CALLED HER RABBIT KEITH!

I’m about to say what a funny name that is for a rabbit, but I look up at her and I see her eyes are tiny staring slits, like she was that fox getting ready to pounce.

‘But I suppose Daddy was only a silly little boy back then,’ I say instead.

‘He was old enough to know better.’ And just for one second, Aunty Jean turns her angry stare on me. But then she goes back all soft again and looks at her toes. ‘You’re doing a lovely job there, Meggy. Light me a cig, will you?’

I do as she asks and she sits there puffing away while I rub the special oil round her cuticles and set to with the clippers.

‘Gently now,’ she says. Once I cut a bit too low and she screamed the bungalow down. I’m ever so careful now.

Aunty Jean rests her cig on the pelican ashtray and helps herself to a chocolate digestive from the pack by her bed.

‘Want one?’ She says, only half holding the pack out to me.

‘I’m all right, thanks,’ I say.

Thrushy feet don’t really make me very hungry for chocolate biscuits.

‘And of course brothers are always the favourites,’ Jean goes on. ‘We girls don’t get a look in if there’s a boy. If there’s a fight, and you go to your mummy and say that he started it, she’ll never believe you.’

I rub the anti-fungal cream into her feet, taking care to get it right down between the toes. Then I wipe my hands with a tissue and fetch the five bottles of nail varnish from the dressing table.

‘What colour is it today, madam?’ I hope one day she’ll choose all five and I can paint each toe a different colour, but she hasn’t yet.

‘Red, I think,’ she says.

I put the toe dividers on – her toes are so puffy they overlap. Then I lean over her feet, holding my breath so that I don’t smudge. Nan’s shown me this, too. Three firm lines up the nail, the first in the middle and the other two either side of it. Not too much varnish on the brush.

I really am like a foot doctor doing this.

‘Ten-bob note goes missing from Mummy’s purse and you tell her you saw him take it, but he says he didn’t, and guess who gets believed, eh? Not the sister, that’s for sure.’

‘Poor you,’ I go.

‘He eats all the biscuits, and who gets the blame? Old muggins here. No, Meggy, you’re lucky you don’t have to share anything or anyone with anyone else.’

I nod as I screw the nail varnish lid back on.

But I’m thinking that if I had anything or anyone to share and if there was someone I had to share her or it with, I wouldn’t be unlucky.

I’d be glad.

I’d be really glad.

And now of course I wonder if there ever was a rabbit called Keith.

Twenty

‘How is Mrs Thwaites?’

‘Mrs Thwaites . . . ?’

The nurse’s hostility was only slightly undermined by the seasonal tinsel headband she wore like some sort of ersatz halo.

‘Mrs Thwaites. She was admitted last night.’

‘Oh.’ The nurse jiggled her mouse and peered at something on her computer. ‘Yes, she’s not doing too badly. A little confused, but she’s eaten well and she’s been, so it’s all good signs. Oh.’ She looked up at Peg for the first time and saw the bunch of lilies she had bought in the hospital shop. ‘You can’t bring them in here.’

‘But . . .’

‘It’s an infection risk. Hospital policy.’

‘So why do they sell them in the shop?’

‘You’ll have to ask them that. We have to take care on the wards. I’ll keep them in the nurses’ room until you go.’

‘I’ve brought her wash bag and some overnight things,’ Peg said.

‘Good. Now if you’ll excuse me. You’ll find Mrs Thwaites in bay F.’ The nurse took the flowers from Peg and swept them away into a room with a laminated ‘Private’ sign on it.

Peg blinked and shook her head as if trying to clear her ears of water. Then she found her way to Doll, who was fast asleep, looking even tinier than before, lying with her mouth open and her hand still pick-picking at the blanket.

Peg took her hand and held it lightly. A sweet smell rose from her grandmother’s body, like mouldy bread or very old biscuits in a tin. Poor old Dolly, she thought. How awful to have given all your love to your family and for it to come to this – a long-dead husband, a son who won’t talk to you and a bed-bound daughter, completely dependent on others for her well-being.

But then, if a person lived to be as old as this, wasn’t a certain souring inevitable? Didn’t things always, ultimately, end badly? There’s almost always disease and disability at the end of a long life, and no family was ever simple.

Peg checked herself, shocked. When did she start thinking this way?

When everything had started to get complicated.

It was as if Doll had been the seal on a Pandora’s box of secrets, which, as she unravelled, flew out like moths hungry for fabric to gnaw into and lay their eggs.

As if she could read her granddaughter’s thoughts, Doll sighed heavily and opened her eyes. ‘Hello, Meggy dear,’ she said, as if she were in her lounge and Peg had just been out in the kitchen.

‘Hello, Nan,’ Peg said, leaning forward and kissing her on the cheek.

‘I’m ever so hungry, dear. Is it lunchtime yet?’

‘You’ve had your lunch, Nan. Shall I see if I can find you a cup of tea and a bit of cake?’

‘You’re a good girl,’ Doll said, and Peg went off to the WRVS shop at the ward entrance, where an apple-cheeked woman of indeterminate middle age presided over a tempting array of home-made cakes and biscuits. She selected a nice slice of fruitcake for Doll and a slab of chocolate sponge for herself, then took them back to the ward.

Doll polished her cake off before she even touched her tea.

‘Nothing wrong with your appetite, then, Nan.’

‘I want to go home,’ Doll said. ‘It’s horrible in here. She—’ She lowered her voice and pointed to a red-faced woman in the bed opposite sitting with her hands folded in front of her and gazing out of the window. ‘She swears all the time. It’s sending me demented, Meggy. Makes my ears bleed. And her next door –’ Doll nodded to the closed curtain to her left – ‘farts all the time. It’s parp, parp –’ she blew a raspberry – ‘twenty-four hours a day. I don’t think I’ve slept more than a wink all night long, Meggy.’

‘You’ll be out of here before you know it, Nan.’

‘They don’t run this place properly either. It’s filthy – look at that.’ She pointed to a ball of dust and hair resting where two grimy skirting boards met in the corner of the cubicle. ‘I’d have got the chop if I’d let it get like that. The matron’s not in charge and they all seem to just do their own thing.’ She leaned forward and whispered: ‘And not one of them speaks proper English.’

‘I’m sure they do, Nan.’

‘And they’ve got to clear up. The mess is dreadful – there’s blood all over the floor. Look at it. Can you get the mop, Jeanie?’

‘It’s Meggy, Nan.’

‘Meggy?’ Doll peered at Peg and nodded. ‘Where’s Jeanie, then?’

‘She’s back at the bungalow.’

‘Is she now? Silly girl. Doesn’t she know she’s needed here? But Meggy, what I don’t get is how those rooms there,’ Doll said, pointing to two doors off the main corridor at the end of her branch of the ward, ‘are empty and I’ve got to be in this bed here. Why can’t I go in them?’

‘I suppose they’re private rooms, Nan.’

‘Oh.’ Doll looked glum. ‘Private, are they?’

‘’Fraid so.’

‘Can’t Raymond pay?’

‘Eh?’

‘He’s the reason we’re in here, isn’t he?’

‘Not this time, Nan.’

‘Really?’

‘You just had a bit of collywobbles.’

‘Oh. I thought . . .’ Doll’s hand strayed over her hair, as if trying to find somewhere to land.

‘I’ll ask about the private rooms, if you like. Just to make sure.’

‘Don’t make a fuss on my account though, will you, Meggy?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I don’t want a fuss made.’

‘No.’

Peg settled Doll down with a
People’s Friend
magazine and packet of chocolate digestives she had bought at the same time as the flowers. Then she kissed her and, with a promise to come back the next day, started to put her parka on.

‘I wish Jeanie could pop in and see me,’ Doll said. ‘She never comes and visits.’

‘It’s a bit difficult for her, Nan. Remember?’

‘Is she still running round after that bastard Tony?’

Peg blinked. How strange that Doll should mention him just hours after she had uncovered his photograph. ‘It’s not Tony, Nan.’

‘He’s a right little fucker,’ Doll spat.

Peg had to stop herself from gasping at not only the language but also the venom in her grandmother’s voice. The woman opposite – the one Doll said swore a lot – shot over a disapproving glance.

‘Aunty Jean’s a bit stuck in her bed,’ Peg said, steering her away from the subject of Tony.