What now?
Briefly, I glance back at the bungalow and hear Deborah laughing raucously. Then the party sounds fade as I hurry across the garden and through our side gate, and stride away down Sycamore Grove.
I speed-walk until I come to the last of the pebble-dashed bungalows, their shrubbery primped, not so much as a nugget of gravel out of place. The pathway that leads into town is long and straight with flat fields on either side.
The first houses in Shugbury proper are low-slung cottages adorned with climbing roses and honeysuckle. Then the town centre starts with its tearooms and antique emporiums, and its gift boutiques selling expensive candles and cashmere scarves. There’s none of your rowdy small-town crowd here. No teenagers littering the town square with fast food cartons and ‘copulating in the graveyard’, as was reported on our local news site about an incident at a music festival at a nearby, less salubrious town.
Locals dismayed by youths’ outlandish behaviour.
That would never happen in Shugbury.Locals dismayed that Kate Weaver’s dip is shop-boughtis as bad as things get around here. And teenagers generally don’t come here. You see the odd one being dragged around the antique shops by their parents, looking as if they might impale themselves on the memorial gardens’ railings if they’re forced to look at one more grandfather clock. But they don’t show up with their own tribe, for fun. And the only copulating in the bungalow I’ve just left has been taking place every couple of months at the very most, in recent times. Vince seems to regard it as a chore that’s best done swiftly, with minimum fuss – like trimming his nasal hair or bleeding a radiator (not that he’s ever bled a radiator). Last time we were doing it he didn’t even finish the job. He gave up halfway through and rolled off me. ‘Bit tired, Kate,’ he announced, yawning for effect. He never looks tired when Deborah is fluttering around him. He’s alert then, like a fox, primed for action.
Passing the library now, I shiver and rub at my chilled upper arms. My work blouse is clinging damply to my body, and I’m aware of a hollow feeling in my stomach.Go home, you raving bloody lunatic!I tell myself. But I can’t.
The bus station has come into view now: a graceful red-brick curve with planters of pansies at regular intervals. At nearly 8.30p.m. the kiosk is closed with its shutter pulled down. Just one bus is sitting there with its lights off.
Across the road from the station, I perch on a damp bench. My plan is to compose myself, then head back home and quietly slip back into the house.
My phone rings, sounding far louder than it does normally. I grab it from my pocket. Of course it’s Vince. It stops finally, and there’s a brief pause before it starts trilling again. I stare at the bus station, feeling panicked now as my phone rings and rings.
Pushing my hair from my eyes, I watch a man with a rucksack checking his phone by the parked bus. An elderly couple are consulting the timetable on the wall, and the yellowy streetlights are giving the concourse a sulphuric glow.
Then the bus’s lights flick on. A driver has climbed in, and now the engine has been turned on too. Its destination sign illuminates, displaying a single word.
The elderly couple are about to board. Gallantly, the man steps aside to allow his wife on first. The way he touches her arm as she does so seems to squeeze my heart. Now the bearded guy gets on too. At the sound of feet hitting the pavement I turn to see a young woman with long dark brown hair racing towards me. Pausing to check for traffic, she sprints across the road towards the bus station. Even from this distance I sense her relief as she jumps onto the bus. She laughs with the driver then flops down onto a seat.
The driver seems to be checking something on a clipboard. Then the bus door closes.
Again my phone starts to ring. This time I don’t take it out of my skirt pocket – because now my attention is on the bus.
It’s pulling out of the stance. It’s going to London. And all of a sudden I’m propelled right back to a rainy day in Glasgow, forty years ago.
‘Where are we going, Mum?’ I asked. She’d bundled my little brother George and me, plus a few bags of possessions, into a taxi.
‘On a trip,’ she replied.
‘A trip? Where to?’
Mum was too busy dealing with George, who was three, to answer me as we set off. ‘Just forget about them,’ she murmured, kissing the top of his head.
‘But I want them! I want my slippers!’ he roared. In our rush to leave they’d been left behind.
‘I’ll get you another pair,’ she promised.
‘I want those ones. Can’t we go back and get them?’ George wailed as we left our familiar neighbourhood behind.
‘Sorry, love. We just can’t.’ Mum doted on George and would have asked the taxi driver to turn back if it had been possible. That in itself told me that we’d had to leave when we did. That it was more important than those furry brown slippers with claws – bear-feet slippers – that George loved so much he sometimes wore them to bed. At nine years old I understood that I had to be brave, even though Mum had let me grab only three of my Famous Five books and not my complete library of twenty-one.
She’s a proper little grown-up, that one,my aunties used to say. George, meanwhile, had ‘the face of an angel’, whereas I would surely ‘grow into’ my looks. While that didn’t happen, I’d later be praised for being a grafter at school, slogging to pass the exams I found far from easy. Meanwhile George, who’d turn out to be a musical prodigy, would gain straight-A grades, seemingly without effort.
On that wet afternoon all of that had yet to happen, and he wiped away his tears and looked up at Mum. ‘Why didn’t we get the bus?’ he sniffed.
‘Because a taxi’s quicker,’ Mum replied.
‘Wedon’t go in taxis,’ he muttered, and he was right. Taxis were for posh people like our dad’s mum, Granny Fleming, who lived in a smarter Glasgow suburb, where there were restaurants and expensive boutiques instead of off-licences and betting shops. She kept sherry in a crystal carafe, and reckoned our dad, Derek, was a perfect husband and father and the most wonderful man in the whole of Scotland.
On the outside he seemed it. TheoutsideDerek Fleming was a respected surveyor who played golf and went fishing and had a favourite Italian restaurant where there was a trolley laden with puddings.
OutsideDerek Fleming knew lots about whisky and wine – in company he’d make a great show of swirling his glass around and sniffing it – and adored our mum, Joyce, and his two children. ButinsideDerek Fleming was different. This Derek was convinced our mum was having an affair with the quiet man in our local corner shop, all because he’d given her a box of Terry’s All Gold at Christmas.
