‘If that was my family it would be a story repeated so often it would have grown legs and wings and taken off. There’d be some sort of shrine in a prominent room, with photographs and candles and shit.’
‘And that’s why we’re so different.’ Peg said.
‘I’d be angry not to be told.’
‘But it’s not really my business, is it?’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
The bus went on its way, bare tree branches rattling on its windows. Peg and Loz sat, hands twisted together, bleached by the fluorescent lighting of the upper deck. The coconut-oil smell of the immaculately groomed man sitting a couple of rows in front of them coloured the bus with an improbably exotic tang.
It
was
none of Peg’s business, though. Thinking about the silence around Keith’s awful death made Peg feel indescribably sorry for her tiny, grief-shrunken Nan, and this in turn made her feel bigger and more blurry than she had ever felt before.
‘You’re right, Loz,’ she said.
‘I’m liking the sound of this.’ Loz squeezed her hand and put her head on her shoulder. ‘What am I right about this time?’
‘I’m going to give finding my dad another shot. He
does
owe us. I’m not going to ask him for money, though. I just want them to get back together.’
‘Of course.’
‘It would mean the world for Nan if she saw him again before – before she . . .’
‘Shhh,’ Loz said, as another wave of tears took hold of Peg. ‘Shhh now.’
Five
‘Keep still.’
‘It tickles.’
Loz ran the clippers one more time over Peg’s head, then stood back to admire her work.
‘You’ve got a lovely head,’ she said, fetching a hand mirror from the bedroom. ‘So smooth. And your scalp’s the same colour as your hair so you look just like honey.’
‘Jesus,’ Peg said, examining her reflection in the cold morning light filtering through their living-room window. This hair-styling session had been Loz’s way of attempting to cheer Peg up after the upsets of the night before. But Peg wasn’t too clear how much better she actually felt on viewing the result.
‘You’ll get used to it. It’s lovely.’
‘Marianne will have a fit.’ Peg’s team leader at the library affected a flowing, earth-mother style – the complete opposite to Peg’s new, number-one-all-over look. She was also wondering what on earth Jean and Doll would make of it.
‘Fuck Marianne. She doesn’t own your head. I do.’ Loz bent and ran her lips over the smooth velvet on Peg’s scalp. ‘It sharpens you up, Peggo. Like how you should be more like inside. Here, hold on. I’ve got just the thing to complete the effect.’
Loz dashed into the bedroom where she bashed about opening and closing drawers, searching for the effect-completer, whatever it was.
As she waited, Peg looked around the flat and marvelled at the changes Loz had already wrought.
When Peg’s old flatmate – fellow-librarian Petra – lived here, it was a purely functional space that they used for sleeping and eating. When Petra moved away to live with her boyfriend in Brixton, Peg suggested to Loz that, as they spent nearly every night together anyway, it would make sense if she took Petra’s place on the rent book. She would have put it more romantically had she the equipment to do so; Loz was, after all, the love of her life, her first proper serious relationship. But practical forms of expression came more easily to her.
Loz had accepted like a shot, and Peg couldn’t quite believe her luck.
And now, already, after just four weeks, Loz had turned the bare little flat into a home. She had scattered old kilims and new cushions and hung paintings and art photographs that she had ‘nicked’ from her parents’ house up in Camden. She had filled the empty old fireplace with pillar candles and placed an essential oil burner on the mantelpiece.
Peg’s hundreds of novels – of the kind that might constitute the entire reading for a degree in English Literature at one of the older universities – had been joined on the burgeoning shelves by Loz’s equally vast collection of real-life crime books. She liked nothing better after a night sweating at the pass than to relax with a story full of brutal descriptions of dismembered corpses or ghastly doing-away-withs. Her addiction to this sort of book was the one big inconsistency in her otherwise politically exemplary life.
‘It’s good to measure my goodness against how bad other people can be,’ she had once tried to explain to Peg. ‘And the fact that it’s all actually happened makes me feel I’m learning about the real world, not just what some writer makes up.’
Loz didn’t need the filter of literature to answer her existential questions. In this she was the complete opposite of Peg, who had liked nothing better than to lose herself in a fictional world. At least, this had been the case until Loz had shown her the seductions of real life.
‘Naomi and Richard hate my sort of books of course,’ Loz had said of her parents. ‘They think they’re awfully lowbrow. But it’s not all that far from Freud, if you think about it, and God knows Naomi’s read
him
enough times.’
But Loz’s biggest impact on the flat had been on the kitchen area. Before she arrived it had been so basically equipped that it would have been a real challenge to do anything other than microwave a ready meal. It now had the air of a semi-professional enterprise, with a block of razor-sharp knives, all sorts of chopping boards, and top-notch saucepans and woks. Previously empty shelves were now crammed with enough oils, herbs, spices and vinegars to stock a small specialist shop.
‘Kitchenware. It’s my only extravagance,’ she explained to an awestruck Peg as she breezed through the kitchen, emptying drawers and cupboards of their blunt, chipped and broken contents, scrubbing them clean, then restocking them with her state-of-the art kit.
Cooking was Loz’s passion. She was ambitious and would tell Peg bedtime stories of the restaurant she was going to run once she had saved enough, and how Peg would run the front of house and they’d live in a little flat above the shop.
Peg wasn’t so sure how much of an asset she’d be to Loz’s restaurant. She didn’t think she was really a front-of-house type, what with the wall that stood between her and everyone else.
It seemed harmless to humour her girlfriend’s dreams, though.
‘Here we are!’ Loz said, finally returning to the living room with two enormous silver earrings. ‘I got them when I was in India. Put them on.’
Peg did as she was told.
‘You look perfect!’ Loz said, clapping her hands together. ‘Look!’ She held the mirror up.
Peg watched herself in the glass, with her sharp-smooth head and the dangling jewellery. Her eyes looked bigger. She almost looked like she knew what she was doing.
She hardly recognised herself.
Peg wasn’t due in at work until after lunch, so, after Loz had set off for Seed, she thought she’d have another go at tracing her father.
She switched on the ancient jelly-coloured iMac she and Loz had found in a skip and which to their amazement worked when they plugged it in. It was the first home computer either of them had ever had: Loz’s parents hadn’t allowed them in the house, because Naomi said they encouraged insularity and undermined family interaction, and of course there had been no way that Doll and Jean could have either afforded or wanted such a thing.
Peg had inherited the family lack of interest in technology. At school, she was the kind of girl who escaped social purdah by curling up on her bed with a real book rather than the sort who hid in the impressively equipped IT suite. Under duress, she used computers at work, but she didn’t really know what to do with one at home or why, indeed, everyone else seemed to find it necessary to own one. In the same way as she favoured her pen and notebook over the voice recorder, she preferred looking things up in real books and sending proper letters.
The old computer finally completed its elaborate and long-winded firing-up process and Peg scanned the available networks for PARTYBOYZ, the sporadically available and appropriately named unsecured wi-fi belonging to Sandy, the nocturnal boy downstairs. She was in luck, so turned immediately to the Facebook account Gemma from Seed had helped her to set up. Or, as Loz had put it, the
Raymond Bait
.
‘If you can’t find him, perhaps you could reel him in,’ she said.
The account was in the full name she detested: Margaret Thwaites. It carried no information but her date and place of birth. The profile picture was a smiling, gap-toothed school picture taken when she was about ten which she had borrowed from its place on Doll’s bookshelves and which Gemma had scanned for her.
Peg was entirely sceptical – and her argument about her father already knowing how to find her if he wanted to still held true – but, with few other options, she thought she might as well just go along with it.
The downside was that, over the two weeks since she set the account up, she had acquired lots of friendship requests with messages from old schoolmates – she couldn’t really call them friends – asking how she was doing and telling her at length how brilliantly their lives were going in their entitled, graduate world – the world from which Peg had excluded herself.
Despite the vocal disappointment of her teachers and her straight-A A level results, Peg hadn’t taken the expected path of going to university. Instead she set off in search of the low-paid, low-stress jobs she felt she was more suited to.
These Facebook messages unsettled her. She thought she had done with those girls: despite a lack of specific early memories, she knew from a lingering rotten taste in her mouth that her schooldays had been harshly unhappy, and it was doing her no good at all to see these faces and hear these names again. This led her to wonder if perhaps Loz was right – if perhaps her lack of memory was some sort of defence mechanism masking a hideous lurking truth too horrible for her conscious mind to deal with.
She shook the thought from her mind. She was over-glamorising her situation. She just had a poor memory, that was all.
The PARTYBOYZ network, infuriatingly slow at the best of times, took ages to load her page; she sat looking at a blank screen for what seemed like an hour. Then the blue header bar appeared and she saw, wearily, that she had four new friend requests. More girls she wished gone from her life.
But of course there was nothing from Raymond.
She had exhausted Google, too. His name returned quite a few results, and she had written to the Raymonds whose addresses were listed and who seemed to be about the right age. She received a few replies in the SAE she had enclosed in each letter, but, while they showed sympathy for her situation, none was her father. She supposed she should go and turn up on the doorsteps of those who hadn’t got back to her. But, with some as far away as Durham, Aberdeen and even California, the expense of doing so was beyond her, especially with such a slim chance of success.
It was hopeless. It was a big world and she was never going to find her father.
As she shut the whirring, clicking computer down, the old familiar feeling crept up on her.
She was useless.
Six
‘I do miss him, you know, Meggy. Oh, devils. This is all skew-whiff.’
Two weeks had passed, Peg had got no nearer to arriving at an answer to the problem of what to do with her grandmother and her aunt, and the decline in Doll’s thought processes seemed to be accelerating.
They were sitting together in the bungalow lounge and Doll was looking down critically at the mess of items on the hospital-style wheeled table suspended over her chair. She had bought it many years ago for Jean, but it hadn’t really fitted over her, even back then. Now it wouldn’t have a chance. Never one to entertain waste, Doll had taken the table for herself, using it to store the essentials of her daily routine: tissues, the TV remote, three pairs of smeared and greasy glasses, a prayer book, a tin of sticky humbugs, a magnifying glass. She also kept her pencil case to hand, and two elastic-band-bound bundles of jotters full of diagrams and notes – her Commonplace Books.
She had always kept these notebooks, maintaining that they helped her keep her ‘bearings’. Peg had been taught the habit too, although it had tapered off for her some time in her teenage years, and she had lost or thrown away her early efforts. Her new red notebook was, in some way, an attempt at a revival, she supposed.
As with everything else, Doll had of course held on to all hers. Filled with personal observations, recipes, knitting patterns and little drawings that reminded her, for example, how to wire a plug, or how to bone out a chicken, they were sort of illustrated diaries. Until recently, she had kept them tucked away. ‘Private and personal’, she called them, and Peg understood that to look in them would be as bad as spying on her naked. But with her fading focus, Doll had taken to leaving her current efforts open and visible, and Peg had unavoidably seen that they now were filled with indecipherable, shaky spider handwriting and random doodlings. If these were her bearings, then here was evidence of how rapidly she was slipping away from them.
‘Who is it you miss, Nan?’ Peg asked. Remembering Jean’s warnings, Peg hoped she wasn’t about to bring Keithy up again.
‘This goes
here
, not
there
.’ Doll tutted at the objects in front of her and shifted them around. ‘Have you seen my thingamabob?’
‘Which one?’
‘This.’ Doll reached for her lipstick, which had its own place next to a tiny gilt hand mirror. ‘Raymond. I miss Raymond of course.’ She took the top off the lipstick and, using the mirror, drew a line as shaky as her handwriting round her mouth. ‘He’s been gone for days, hasn’t he?’
‘Years I should say,’ Peg said.
Bloody years.
‘Oh, what did you do to your hair, dear?’ Doll said, reaching up and touching Peg’s scalp. It was the fifth or sixth time she had asked the same question, and Peg gave her the same answer as she had on the previous occasions.
‘It helps me think more clearly, Nan.’
‘Does it, dear? Perhaps I should have a go at that hairdo myself.’