Ha ha! Not to be smug, girls, but I told you so! I saw all your eye-rolling whenever I told you this story, but it’s true – and here is the evidence! I thought I’d lost this, but Lewis has helped me empty the entire contents of the attic recently, looking for other things, and he unearthed this – for some reason it was being used as a bookmark in the manual that came with my Jane Fonda Workout, which probably explains why I never saw it again!
Anyway – here we are. Me and the King. I was very young here, in the States doing some awful show for St Patrick’s Day, and he wasn’t at his peak, poor man. But he was very sweet, even then. A real gent, even though we were all dressed like leprechaun strippers.
Good luck with the rest, girls – hope this made you smile.
Now, as Mr Presley might say, goodnight, and thank you, thank you very much!
Chapter 36
Poppy
When Rose comes downstairs the next morning, looking bleary-eyed and still tired, she catches me out with Lewis’s index spread before me on my lap.
‘You’re skipping ahead, aren’t you?’ she asks, pointing at me accusingly.
I nod, and try not to look guilty. I’m a grown woman and she doesn’t have the right to tell me off. At least that’s what I keep reminding myself.
‘She probably knew you would,’ she adds, wandering into the kitchen in search of coffee.
‘I know,’ I shout through to her. ‘It’s like with those books with all the endings. I always cheated, and she knew I would with this – so it’s all deliberately obscure.’
Rose comes back in, using the same mug she always used when she lived here – a giant one with a picture of Princess Diana on the side.
‘Did you look at P and Q? And … well, do you even want to find out about our dad? I was only two when whatever happened happened, and I don’t even remember him. Sometimes I think I do, but I suspect I’m making it up. What do you think?’
I’m nowhere near as certain as Rose that I want to find my long-lost father. If he’s even alive – there’s no promise of that in what our mum has cryptically said so far. He could be dead, or in jail, or living on a small Pacific island creating animal-human hybrids in his evil-genius laboratory for all we know.
This whole thing with Mum, with Rose, feels like enough of a head-fuck to me – but if she wants to know, for Joe, for herself, for whatever reason, then I won’t stand in her way.
‘I do want to, and I did. But it wasn’t much help. All P says is that we’ll need our passports, and Q is for Questions. It’s like the rest of the index – deliberately obscure, like I said.’
‘What do you mean?’ she asks, sitting down opposite me.
‘Well, some of them say what the letters stand for – like D for Daddy Issues – but some don’t. Some just have the letter, and a note about what to look for, and which box it’s in. Others have little comments by the side, which I suspect are from Lewis – I think Mum was so caught up in this she forgot about real life.
‘So he’s helped out by giving us pointers, things like “will involve driving”, or “pack for an overnight trip”, stuff like that. It’s like they shared one giant brain – she did all the wacky creative stuff, and he was all solicitor-like and sensible. It’s weird that we don’t know him better, isn’t it? What did she tell you about him? I’m a bit freaked out that he seems to have been so important in her life, and we never even met him …’
She nods, grimaces as she scalds her tongue on the coffee, and says: ‘I know what you mean. It doesn’t exactly make me feel like a good daughter either. But I suppose that we’re the ones who insisted on keeping our lives separate, aren’t we? I’ve not been back to this place since … well,since. What about you?’
‘I moved out when I got that job with the publishing company in London, and came back briefly after I got sacked.’
‘You gotsacked?’ she says, eyes wide and tone incredulous. ‘But why? You seem so … sorted. Although I did always wonder why you ended up doing what you’re doing, for, you know, a dog food company.’
‘Luxury pet supply specialist,’ I correct, automatically. Understandably enough, she pulls a face.
‘Yeah. Okay, luxury pet supply specialist. But it’s not publishing, is it? I always thought that if you did go into marketing, it’d be for something creative, or arty, or important.’
‘Pet supplies are important,’ I insist, stubbornly clinging to my defence of a job that in all honesty I absolutely hate. ‘To the millions of people who love their pets.’
She holds one hand up in the air, as though she is giving up, and concentrates on her coffee instead. We are both silent for a while, until I try and find the words to break it.
‘I got sacked because I was a mess,’ I say, simply. ‘It was after everything that happened with Gareth, and you wouldn’t have anything to do with me, and Mum was freaking out, and basically … I couldn’t do the work. I missed meetings. I turned up late every morning, dressed like a bag lady. It was a competitive environment – lots of bright young things want to work in publishing – and at that stage in my life, I just wasn’t bright enough.’
I can see her churning this over in her mind, and am half expecting some kind of sharp rebuttal – a ‘so, you’re blaming me, then, are you?’, or ‘so you’re saying it was my fault, your epic career fail?’
Instead, she chews on her lip, and twists strands of her frizzy hair around her fingers, something I always remember her doing when she was trying to be patient with me. When I’d stolen one of her tops, or accidentally locked her out of the cottage, or made some ridiculous proclamation, like ‘science is rubbish, I don’t know why you like it.’
‘Right,’ Rose says, quietly. ‘I see. Well, shit happens. So when did you move out again? Mum always tried to tell me what was going on, but I wasn’t in the mood to listen. I used to bite her head off if she even mentioned your name, to be honest.’
