Later that night, as we lay in bed, she told me what she’d wished for – that she might one day come and live with us – and in the darkness we listened out for the sound of sleigh bells, and even though we were probably too old to still believe, we heard them outside and I saw her smile, wide and uncynical, and I was grateful that I had a brother who’d wanted to stand outside in the cold and dark and shake a small church bell simply to make her feel good. But we all did everything that first Christmas to make her feel good.
The following morning, I woke her up early and we crept downstairs and saw the pillowcases bulging with gifts and the part-eaten carrot and mince pies and the half-drunk sherry and the soot scattered on the carpet leading from the hearth. I looked at her as she stood transfixed, as tears ran down her cheeks, as she said, ‘Father Christmas never visited me before. I don’t think he ever really knew where I lived.’
I picked up the phone. I knew her number off by heart now, it had the rhythm of a poem with all those fives and threes, and it rang briefly and clearly before she answered.
‘It’s me,’ I said, happy to hear my best friend’s voice. ‘Happy Christmas, Jenny Penny!’
‘Elly, I can’t talk for long,’ she whispered.
It was hard to hear what she was saying, so soft was her voice.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘It’s all gone wrong.’
‘What?’
‘We have to go,’ she said.
‘When?’ I said.
‘Now. Soon,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘Because we have to.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘We just have to,’ she said. ‘I can’t say anything else, I’m not allowed to. She won’t let me.’
‘But where are you going?’
‘I don’t know. Mum won’t tell me. She said it’s best that no one knows.’
‘Even me?’ I said.
‘I’ve got to go, she’s coming. I’ll let you know when I get there,’ she said. ‘Bye, Elly.’
The line went dead and the last of my words disappeared into an unforgiving silence.
I summoned my mother away from the television marathon that had become as traditional to our family as turkey and mince pies, and told her what had happened. She didn’t know anything for certain, she said. Just suspected.
‘We have to wait and see,’ she said. ‘When they get there they’ll let us know.’
‘Get where?’ I said.
‘To safety,’ she said.
Ginger stayed on with us after Christmas to perform at the Harbour Moon for New Year’s Eve. She was topping the bill with a Tony Bennett impersonator who she called T. B. and who she hated because he made her feel ill.
‘He doesn’t even look like Tony Bennett,’ she said when she got the news. ‘I look more like Tony Bennett than he does,’ and Arthur nodded in agreement. The money was good, though, and it was actually the party of the year for our village, which was a little bit like topping the bill at Vegas if you really used your imagination. The village became a playground for dressing up and people came from afar to show off their fancy-dress costumes, which had been planned months in advance. My father had started mine four months before and only he and I knew what it was going to be. All we said was that it was going to be bigger and better than the previous year’s attempt, which wasn’t going to be too difficult, seeing as I had been a thumb.
They were all in the living room, slouched around and unruly, and I could hear my brother goading Ginger and Arthur into another chorus of ‘Why Are We Waiting?’. My mother crept out into the hallway to make sure I was all right.
‘One more minute,’ my father said to her, as he shook out my costume.
The trouble was, my heart wasn’t in it any more. My worry for Jenny Penny had dulled all enthusiasm, and for a whole week I’d waited by the phone, waited for the news that never came. It was only because my father had made such an effort that I ultimately would too, and together we marched into the living room and waited for the lights to dim and the chatter to still.
I put on the shimmering grey dress with fin slits for hands and attached the long fish-tail train. I could have been a mermaid, or even one of the Three Degrees, at this stage and it was fun to keep everyone guessing. Then my father carried in a very large box and the room hushed. He opened the box and took out something shaped like a helmet, which was covered by a beach towel. He placed it over my head and through the eyeholes I could see the striped towelling pattern and what I could only make out was a piece of dry seaweed.
‘Da-nah!’ shouted my father, and he suddenly whipped the towel away. Everyone gasped. Through my eyeholes I saw hands quickly reach for mouths.
‘What is she exactly?’ asked Ginger, downing an early Scotch.
My father turned to me and said, ‘Tell them, Elly.’
‘I’m a MULLET!’ I shouted, and everyone went, ‘Ah yes, of course.’
‘Two gin and tonics and a water for the fish,’ said my brother for the fifth time that evening. He was dressed as Liza Minnelli, and looked really pretty until you saw that he hadn’t shaved, either his face or his legs. When we left the house both my mother and father had shed a tear as their beloved son walked out into the cold night air dressed as a daughter, unsure as to what he might return as. That, my father would later say, was one of the unexpected gifts of parenthood.
By the time we got our drinks Arthur had secured the best seats in front of the fire by cleverly feigning illness. My brother moved my seat a little further back from the hearth, reminding me that I was still flammable and that it would be really embarrassing if I caught fire. It was about this time, I think, that I spotted the Womble in the corner watching us. He had been following us earlier because I saw him in the Jolly Sailor, where he’d had an altercation with a dog (a real one). He was standing alone next to the clock and it said half-past eleven.
Arthur nudged my brother and said, ‘Womble, ten o’clock,’ and before I could say no it’s not, it’s half-past eleven, the Womble made his way over to us.
‘Hi,’ said my brother, ‘I’m Liza and this is Fish.’
I raised my fin and stifled a yawn behind my papier-mâché head, which was suddenly feeling very heavy.
‘And I’m Freddie Mercury,’ said Arthur, nervously securing his moustache.
‘I’m Orinoco,’ said Orinoco in a very deep voice; a voice that, had it really belonged to a Womble, would have frightened small children and would never have made them the popular creatures they became.
His name was Paul, I think, and he was from Manchester. When he took off his head, he had short brown hair – or maybe it was long; I can’t really remember – but all I knew was that the energy of our wonderful evening suddenly changed and he was the cause. I tried to stay awake, tried to hear their whispered banter, the jokes they steered away from me, but it was useless; I wasn’t part of them any more and my eyes started to close before the opening bars of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ gathered up the drunken, rolling voices. The worry about Jenny Penny, the glass of champagne, the subsequent sips of clandestine booze had ambushed my young mind and I couldn’t remember anything after that; not the journey home, or Arthur leading me through the front door into my mother’s arms. I didn’t remember Ginger tap dancing on the flagstones, or Arthur telling the rude story about Princess Margaret. All I did remember was my father kissing me good night and saying, ‘Have a wonderful year, Elly.’
I woke up four hours later, hungry and wide awake. The house still felt warm as I crept downstairs. I saw empty bottles and streamers strewn around the living room; Ginger’s shoes and her feather boa snuggled in a chair. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a large glass of water and went to the cupboard for a piece of Madeira cake. And as I put the glass onto the draining board, I looked through the window and saw the hazy shape of my brother running into the forest, followed at the tree line by a haggard shadow. It must have been my brother because he
still had on his patent heels and his wig, and both caught the light from the moon. I stuffed the remainder of the cake into my mouth, put on my mother’s jumper and boots, and crept out into the cold, new January air.
I picked up a stick and ran as hard as I could to the edge of the forest. I stumbled twice until my eyes adjusted to the darkness, until I could again follow the sounds of breaking twigs up ahead. I wasn’t scared, felt emboldened by my imagined role as protector, and I raced ahead, dodging the low branches of naked shrubs. The sounds of giggling were to my left, beyond a cluster of heavy oaks and when I came to their wide trunks, I crouched down and carefully parted a clump of ailing ferns. And then promptly threw up.
I sat on my bed and looked over at the Womble perched on the dressing table. It had come with me from my other life, a present from Jenny Penny for my seventh birthday. She had given it to me at the end of my party, when the guests and the cake had all gone, and she’d said, ‘This is the best present you’ve ever been given. And I’ve given it to you.’
Now as I looked at it I no longer thought of her or the wrapping paper she made, or the poem attached to its scarf, entitled ‘Best Friends’; no, I now thought of my brother on his hands and knees blurred in the forest dark with the unmistakable shape of a children’s toy thrusting behind him; its deep Northern voice saying, ‘Happy New Year, Joe. Happy New Year, ugh, ugh, ugh.’
I got up and put the toy in an old plastic bag, which still smelt of onions, and placed it at the bottom of a cupboard with all my old shoes. The following week I would take it to a charity shop, where it would sit in the window between a battered copy of Jaws and a tarnished silver toast rack. It would sit there for weeks. Retribution of sorts.
I never told my brother what I saw that night, not until years later, anyway, when we were sitting by the jetty as adults with adult lives. And he wouldn’t remember that night, like so many others he wouldn’t remember, and when I told him he buried his head in his hands and laughed and simply said, ‘What’s a fucking Womble?’
And I never did hear from Jenny Penny to say she was safe. Never received the call or the letter to say where she was or why they’d left, or what she was doing now. I called her old number not long after she disappeared and a man had answered and shouted at me and I hung up, scared. Wondered what he might have done.
Then another time, about a year later, I sat quietly on my bed and thought about her, attempting to mend that telepathic bridge that had fallen in her wake, and as the room stilled and the sun shifted beyond the trees, numbers appeared behind my eyes, the order deliberate and significant, the numbers constantly repeating. It was her, I was sure. My hands shook as I picked up the phone. I dialled the numbers and waited for her voice. It never came. Instead I heard a woman ask, ‘Golden Lotus. What is your order, please?’ It was a Chinese takeaway restaurant in Liverpool; a place that would actually have tentative relevance years later.
I simply had to accept that she’d been swallowed by that New Year and I had to let her go. But every anniversary I heard her harried breath whispering, ‘I’ll let you know when I get there. Bye, Elly. I’ll let you know.’
I missed her. I would always miss her. I often wondered how it would have been if we could have experienced the coming years together. What would have been different? Could I have changed what happened to her? We were the guardians of a secret world; a lonely world without the other. For years I would flounder without her.
Part Two
1995
Brixton was angry, Brixton burned. That was the story I was meant to cover six days after my twenty-seventh birthday, but I didn’t show, something I still can’t fully explain. I’d had moments like that before – the sudden expiration of confidence or care – but never such a panic; one that gripped me with the hold of terror and made me feel both I and the world was all wrong. I told no one. Turned off the phones instead and hid at Nancy’s. I lost my job. Not for the first time. Made up excuses. Not for the first time. And it was into this broken world that the card arrived. As if she knew. As if she’d been listening and waiting, like she always had. My lifeline.
I opened the balcony doors to the dull December morn and sat overlooking Charterhouse Square; sounds of children squealing, and playing catch. I watched a boy race behind a bench and tumble freely onto a pile of coats, which turned out to be a pile of friends. I stirred my coffee, sipped it from the spoon. It was a cold day, would get colder still. A yellow tinge to the overcast light. It would snow before the end of the year. I pulled the blanket tighter around myself. I watched a small girl hide behind a tree; it took ages for her to reappear.
It had been fifteen years since that strange Christmas Day, when the past tired of us and closed its fragile doors. You won’t remember me, she wrote, but of course I did the moment I saw the scrawl of writing, black and unchanged and smudged across the envelope, and my joy was unchanged as I read the words You won’t remember me. She’d made the card herself, something she always did because she was keen on crafts, and whenever she came to school with glue or glitter in her hair everyone knew she’d been making something – birthday cards or Christmas cards – and everyone secretly hoped to be the lucky recipient of those laughed-at creative efforts because they were good and they spoke loud, for they said, ‘You are special. I have chosen you.’
But it was only ever I who received such a card.
It was a simple piece of blue paper folded down the middle with fragmented pictures of flowers and wine on the front, of mountains and smiles and cut-out letters like a ransom note, but saying Happy Birthday instead. And there between the letters I saw her again on the pavement in her favourite shoes, waving and receding, when she was nine, when I was nine, and when we vowed to keep in touch.
I looked again at the envelope. My parents had redirected it to Nancy’s flat in Charterhouse Square where I was temporarily staying. Originally, though, it had been sent from Her Majesty’s Prison.
The seagulls were loud that morning and drew me harshly away from the stillness of the bed. I picked up my water and drank through the minuscule specks of dust that had landed on the surface during the night. The house was quiet, my room stifling and radiator hot. I got up and went to the window and opened it wide to spring. It was still cold, with not a hush of breeze, and the cloudless sky reached beyond the trees like the morning itself, suspended, unmoving, waiting. I watched Arthur down below slowly raise himself into a headstand, his small red satin shorts (once my father’s) slipped to his groin revealing legs the colour and texture of bone. I had never seen his legs before. They looked as if they had lived a different life. They looked innocent.
Age had taken little from him and he still refused to reveal the time or circumstances of his earthly departure. Most mornings when I was home I’d sit with him at the water’s edge and watch him look towards the opposite bank, as if death were waving to him like a teasing friend, and he would smile and his smile would say, Not today, rather than, I’m not ready.
His knowledge had freed him from fear, but had left us with the ultimate burden of waiting. Would he prepare us? Would he suddenly disappear from our lives to shield us from the ultimate loss? Would we play a ghoulish part in this final act? We knew nothing; and had he not moved his foot when I coughed, I would have believed he’d been taken there and then in that upturned state like a wingless angel who’d unexpectedly crashed headfirst to earth.
On my way downstairs I peeked into Ginger’s room and could just make out her bald head nestled between the pillows like an abandoned egg. She was breathing hard, deep in sleep. This was her good phase, the phase between chemotherapy when she had energy and fun, just no hair.
The last round had been brutal, and the five-hundred-yard walk from the hospital to Nancy’s front door was made in a cab, her face leaning on the open window’s frame as her stomach churned over every bump. She liked to rest on the balcony, huddled in an eiderdown that barely kept her from cold, and there she flitted between wake and sleep with n
o concentration for anything except the occasional cup of tea, which she now took sweet.
I crept into her room and picked up the cardigan that had fallen on the floor. My mother laid out clothes for her every morning, because decision making had become hard and made her panic, and only my mother had noticed that. There was no left, no right any more in Ginger’s world; life was lived straight ahead. I closed the door because sleep was what she needed most. Sleep and luck.
I stumbled into the kitchen and turned the radio off. More about the massacre at Dunblane. The whys. The blame. The searing anguish of surmise. I watched my mother finish the last of her coffee. She was standing at the sink where a shaft of soft yellow light caught the side of her face, emphasising lines now permanently etched there. She had aged well, the process had been kind. And she had left nature alone, opting instead to banish vanity like the meddlesome, suffocating weed it was.