‘Did you steal that from home?’ she asks, pointing at the tin.
‘Well, as it’s my home as well, technically I don’t think it would be called stealing, do you?’
‘Mum would go nuts if she could see us now … especially when she realised you had that tin …’
Poppy stretches out, her limbs so long her grubby, bare toes touch the end of the tent, and replies: ‘Nah, she wouldn’t. Well, maybe about the tin. But she wouldn’t mind us lying here having a smoke, I don’t think. Mum was working in show business in the Seventies, dahling, don’t you know? She’s probably snorted cocaine off Oliver Reed’s arse! Plus she paid for the tickets and everything – I don’t think she was under any illusions that we’d be spending the weekend behaving like nuns, do you?’
Rose ponders this, and it takes her a few moments to drag her mind away from the image of her mum and Oliver Reed. Is he on the list, she tries to recall? The list that her and Poppy keep, of names their mother has dropped from her more glamorous days? She seemed to have known – and ‘known’, she suspected, could mean anything from having met on set to had lunch with to shagged in an orgy – pretty much every big-name actor of her era.
The girls know there is truth in it. When they were younger, they joined her on set in various locations, and found it all pretty boring. To them, it was just what happened when your mum went to work, even if it sounded glamorous from the outside. And to them, Mum was just Mum, even if she did once paint Joan Collins’s nails for her.
‘No, you’re right,’ she eventually concedes. ‘She wouldn’t mind. Actually, I kind of wish she was here, don’t you? She’d be a good laugh.’
‘Don’t tell anyone,’ replies Poppy, whispering conspiratorially, ‘but I think she might actually be here. I think she might have been one of those naked ladies with the blue-painted boobs, the ones who were doing yoga around the camp fire earlier …’
Rose bursts out laughing at the idea, and Poppy joins in. Everything really does still seem very, very funny. For some reason.
They laugh for what feels like hours, until the bongos finally go silent, and peace falls over their little patch of Glastonbury.
Chapter 9
The Present Day
The phone rings, and Rose is so shocked she physically jumps. The tub of Heroes jerks from her lap, and the shameful evidence of her binge eating spills out on to the carpet in a mass of shiny, multi-coloured foil wrappers. She kicks them under the sofa with her bed-socked feet.
It’s the landline. Nobody ever calls her on the landline any more. In fact, nobody ever calls her full stop. Apart from Joe, when he needs a lift or wants to check if he can stay out later.
Joe … she reminds herself that he is upstairs, safe, and that the landline call will not be from the police, telling her he’s had an accident, or been beaten up by chavs, or fallen down a well. Which means it will probably be some nice man from India worrying about her levels of life assurance cover, or possibly her mother, calling to tell herPoldarkis on.
Once she’s calmed down, she reaches over to the side table, and answers with a cautious hello. She doesn’t like to be rude to the nice men from India, they’re just trying to make a living after all, but she doesn’t want to encourage them either.
‘Good evening,’ says the voice, too posh and well modulated and elderly and English to be a nice young man from India. ‘Am I speaking to Mrs Rose Young?’
Rose mutters yes, and is suddenly, for no apparent reason, gripped by utter dread. Her entire body feels cold and shaky, and she has an almost irresistible urge to put the phone down. To end this conversation – this conversation she is convinced must not be allowed to happen.
‘Rose, my name is Lewis Clarke-Smith, and I’m afraid I’m calling with some bad news …’
Chapter 10
Approximately 200 miles away, in Islington, Poppy is still trying to muster up the energy for a quick shower, and debating how short a skirt she should wear for tonight’s adventures.
She is surprised when the landline rings, and it takes her a few moments to find the handset. Kristin would text her if she wanted to get in touch, so, she deduces, it must be her mother, who tended to stay up late watching re-runs of old TV shows and critiquing everyone’s performance. She might have some stern words to utter about that scything scene.
Poppy slings back a gulp of her G&T, and answers.
‘Hi, Mum!’ she says jauntily, trying not to let any of her borderline maudlin mood seep down the phone lines to Shropshire. Everything in the garden must always be rosy, as far as her mother is concerned, or she’ll just worry about her.
‘Erm … no, I’m afraid not,’ comes the reply. It’s a man’s voice, someone older, deep in tone and precise in enunciation. ‘Is that Miss Poppy Barnard?’
‘It is,’ she says, starting to get annoyed now. ‘To whom am I speaking?’
‘My name is Lewis Clarke-Smith,’ he says, ‘and I was a friend of your mother’s.’
Poppy barely registers the name, and is no longer concerned with his enunciation. She only hears one word of that sentence: ‘was’.
The glass falls from her hands, and spills the remainder of her drink across her Lycra-clad thighs.
Chapter 11
