I can hear the regret and guilt in her voice, and know that Mum’s video – the one with the You’ve Broken My Heart speech – has taken its toll on her as well as me.
‘About a year later, when I started working for a ball-bearing firm in the Midlands. And yes, it was about as exciting as it sounds, but it did allow me to get the experience I needed, do my marketing qualifications, that kind of thing. I moved down to London not long after, and life got … well, busy. And the more I stayed away from here, the harder it got to come back. Everything here reminded me of you, and us, and how broken everything was – and I couldn’t cope with that.
‘The only way I could move on was to ignore it all, and the cottage – Mum, our bedrooms, everything about this place – wouldn’t let me. So I stopped coming – instead she came to me, or we had weekends away. I never made any declaration, or even a decision … I just stopped coming. I’ve not actually set foot in here for about twelve years. Maybe if we had visited, she’d have introduced us to Lewis, who knows?’
‘Maybe,’ replies Rose, looking around at the living room in that way we’ve both been doing for the last few days – like she can’t really believe that she’s here now, and that she’s here because our mother isn’t.
It’s weird – the whole cottage is dominated by Mum; by her fragrance and her taste and her history. It’s there in every little ornament, every framed picture on the walls, every book on the shelves, every singed cake tin in the kitchen. She’s everywhere – but she’s nowhere.
‘I think,’ Rose continues, ‘that perhaps she liked having him to herself. We were both so tied up in our own problems, and we did that thing kids do. That thing where we don’t really imagine our parents having lives of their own, outside of us. So perhaps she enjoyed having a whole side to her existence that we weren’t involved in.
‘She told Joe a bit about him, though – said he moved to the village about five years ago. He’s basically winding down his business and decided to go into semi-retirement here. Anyway, he’s looked after her, hasn’t he? And helped her with all this. He’s been a better friend to her than we were, and we should be grateful. Though I’m still a bit disappointed they weren’t secretly bonking.’
‘Yuk,’ I reply, screwing my eyes up in disgust. That’s something I really don’t want to picture, no matter how efficient Lewis’s index-making skills are.
‘So,’ Rose says, gazing at Princess Diana’s slightly chipped face, ‘are we ready for the next one, do you think? I know we both needed some time off last night, but we might as well get on with it now. I’d ask how many more to go, but I’m guessing that’s obvious.’
‘I don’t think anything about this is obvious,’ I reply. ‘She may have decided to skip some letters because they were awkward, or invented new ones purely to amuse herself. I think, though, that there are only a few left that we can do here – looks as though we’re set to be on the move round about L.’
‘She’s sending us to ell?’ Rose asks, deliberately mispronouncing it.
‘Probably. She’ll be there with a diamond-studded pitch-fork, singing “Burn Baby Burn” and pelting us with garden gnomes made of cow pats … anyway. F is for Forgiveness, then. If you think you’re up to it?’
Rose nods, and makes a ‘move-it-along’ gesture with her hands, like she’s directing traffic and I’m illegally parked. She’s getting tougher as this thing progresses, which may or may not be a good thing – I suppose it depends on who’s on the receiving end of the toughness. I, on the other hand, feel as if I’m getting softer – more vulnerable, and more exposed. Being around Rose is like being emotionally exfoliated.
‘Okay … here we go …’ I say, fishing around in the box until I find the right packages. One is a big padded envelope, stuffed full of god-knows-what, with ‘open me second, for F’s sake’ written on the side in our mother’s handwriting. I put it to one side, and pick up the other.
It’s a plastic bag – an ancient carrier from a shop that no longer exists – with a big letter F scrawled on the side. I scrunch it up and squeeze it, as though it’s a Christmas gift and I’m trying to figure out what’s inside.
‘Is it a pony?’ asks Rose, sarcastically. ‘Please tell me it’s a pony!’
I ignore her, and use my nails to unpick the knot that’s been tied with the carrier bag’s handles. Once I’ve done it, and broken a nail in the process, I empty the contents on the floor, where they scatter and clatter on the parquet. We both look down, a bit befuddled. It’s a big mess of old-fashioned cassette tapes – C60s and C90s, some of them with writing on the paper stickers on the sides, some of them clear.
I root through them until I find a tape that looks a bit newer than the rest. Written on the side, in olde-worlde cursive script, are the words ‘Play Me!’
‘Wow,’ says Rose, leaning down to get a better look. ‘That’s a bitAlice in Wonderland, isn’t it? I didn’t even know they still made cassette tapes … Joe wouldn’t know what they were for. How are we going to listen to it? Even my car isn’t so old it has a tape deck.’
‘Never fear, Lewis is here …’ I reply, reaching back into the box and hefting out an old machine. It’s ancient, and I just about recognise it from our childhood. It’s long and flat, and has a lift-up lid where you slide in the tapes, and big clunky rectangular buttons that only let you record, play, erase, and go backwards and forwards.
It was probably once the cutting edge of technology, but now it looks like something out of one of those really dated science-fiction programmes – like the 1970s version of The Future.
I look at Rose, and she just nods. I can tell she’s nervous about what we’re going to hear, about our mother’s voice floating, disembodied, through the room, and so am I.
I slide the cassette in, close the lid shut with a clunk, and press ‘play’.
Chapter 37
Andrea: F is for Forgiveness
‘Darlings! I’ve gone old school – what do you think? Just thought I’d mix it up a bit. Or mix tape it up a bit, ha ha! I’m sure you’re sick of seeing my ugly mug on the TV screen – goodness knows the general public was, by the time Penny Peabody got killed in that tragic boating accident, poor love.
‘Anyway, I came across this old thing the other day, and thought it would be fun to record something for you. I’ve tested it out, and the quality is awful – but sadly I don’t have a soundman around to fix it for me, so you’ll just have to make do. Perhaps the crackling and echoing will add to the atmos – your mother’s ghostly voice, rising up from the Great Beyond!
‘Do you remember using this thing, actually? It seemed very cutting edge at the time, didn’t it? I used it for work sometimes, so I could listen back to myself when I’d rehearsed lines for auditions – but we also used it together.
‘We had a lot of giggles making recordings of us all singing, or doing little skits, and Poppy, there was one time when you were about eight, when you insisted on reading out “The Owl and the Pussycat”? But you always used to get the first few lines mixed up, and said, very seriously, that they went to pee in a beautiful sea-green boat, instead of the other way round! You were very angry with me for laughing, I seem to remember, your little face all screwed up with indignation.
‘I haven’t been able to find many of those recordings, which is a great pity – not only because I’d like to pass them on to you two, but because I would love nothing better right now than to sit here at night, in my old age, and listen to them. It would be wonderful to hear your childish voices and your innocent giggles filling these rooms again, keeping me company and making me smile. Happier times, so full of laughter.
