As She Left It: A Novel Read online

  “Michael’s not in,” Opal said.

  “Where’s he gone and left you here on your own?” She was darting looks all around the kitchen as if Opal might have stolen her knickknacks or spray-canned the walls.

  “I let myself in,” Opal said. “And I found these in my room.”

  “Let yourself … ? Broke in, you mean?” Steph’s voice faded as Opal slid a single Yale key towards her.

  “I’ll not be needing this again, under the circumstances.”

  “How long have you had a key to my house?” Stephanie said.

  “How long have you been hoarding my mail? I can’t make out the postmarks.” She bent over and squinted at the nearest one.

  “It’ll all be junk,” Steph said. She had turned up her lip as if she could smell something, but her eyes were still wide. “It wasn’t worth sending on to you.”

  “That’s fraud,” Opal said. “Letting yourself into your childhood home with your own key isn’t breaking and entering, but this here is postal fraud.” She tapped the envelope, thrilling at the brisk, snapping sound it made.

  Stephanie flinched, then her eyes narrowed. “Childhood home?” she said. “You were no child when you landed here, lady.”

  “I was nine,” said Opal, and for a minute Steph looked confused.

  “Nine?” she said and looked down at her spread fingers, curling them back one at a time, counting. “You were going on thirteen.”

  “I was nine the first time I stayed under this roof.”

  “Aye, but that was visiting. You were twelve when you moved in and pulled your little stunt.”

  “Stunt?” Opal repeated, frowning at Stephanie, who flushed.

  “Just go,” she said. “Before—”

  Opal stood, lifting the bale of envelopes and hugging them to her.

  “It’ll be flyers,” said Stephanie. “It’ll be nowt.”

  “We’ll see,” said Opal. “I’ll take my time deciding whether to report the fraud.”

  “Who’d listen to you? People keep records, you know. You’ll have a big, fat file somewhere. All the juicy details.”

  “Juicy?” Opal repeated, frowning again.

  “Look, just get out before Michael comes back and sees you.”

  “Poor Michael,” Opal said. “Having you instead of a mother.”

  “What would you know about mothers?” Steph had said, but her voice was cracking. Opal tried to make her eyes as hard as pebbles, as flat as coins on the front of her face, but she kept hearing those two words—stunt, juicy—and she could feel her face tugging to make a frown again.

  No way would she remember. Time to go.

  Would there be spare bedding? When she was small, her one set of Bambi covers was taken off, washed, dried, and put back on again between one night and the next, and Nic’s nest was never dismantled and reformed. She looked around the room anyway, wondering where her mother might have kept some extra sheets, and her eye caught the edge of her old single mattress peeping out from beside the wardrobe where it had been stored.

  As she hauled it out, the curtain dragged away from one end of the window and although she didn’t want to be seen—not tonight, not yet—she couldn’t help herself, and she lingered there.

  Who lived here now? Who had come in the thirteen years since she’d been gone? Strangers. And they’d stay that way. She’d smile but no more. No chummy chats, no cups of tea. No prying. That was the best of a city. You could be all alone in the crowd. If there was nobody looking, there was nothing to see.

  Except … straight across at number five, she saw something that troubled her. Because how many people hung those plastic strap things at their doors these days, or put jam pots on the window sills to catch the wasps? How many people polished their windows until they glittered, right into the corners, and had one of those wide flat vases—made for windowsills, she supposed—dead centre in the living room window and another one exactly the same, precisely above it in the bedroom window, as if she’d dropped a plumb line down to make sure they were even? Not many. And how many people had a shopping trolley with a plastic cover to keep it clean as it parked outside their door on its own little plastic mat? Not even as many as that.

  Mrs. Pickess, wicked witch of Mote Street, was still around.

  Well, she could handle Vonnie Pickess, and at least the others would be strangers. As Opal shuffled farther in to the window to look at the top house, though, a car turned in at the foot of the road, roared up it, braked hard, and turned, coming to a halt crossways on the cobbles. She watched as the driver’s door and the house door both opened. A woman crossed the pavement and held out a folded cloth bundle to a young man (in slipping-down jeans and a vest so loose and baggy he might as well have been topless), who was crossing the cobbles to take it from her.

  It was Doolal Joshi, she was sure of it. He was the same age as her and they had walked to school together, until they were nine and he turned into a boy and decided he couldn’t be seen with a girl. And that was Mrs. Joshi, for sure. She hadn’t changed one iota, not a jot—which was the same thing as an iota, whatever they both were. She was still making those sandwiches—Opal scrabbled in her memory for the right word … dosas!—and she must still be running the taxi business, because she had a headpiece on.

  So Mrs. Pickess and the Joshis. Not great but not the end of the world.

  Doolal got back into his car, revved the engine as if he was getting ready to launch a space rocket, backed up a bit, and roared off down the street again.

  Opal turned and pressed her face against the glass, watching until he had gone, and she was still looking when a red Transit van chugged impossibly slowly round the corner and pulled in across the street in front of No. 1. The driver’s door slid open and one after the other, four old men climbed down. She laughed out loud. It was the Mote Street Boys, still dressed in their shiny suits and narrow ties. Opal took hold of the rings at the bottom of the window and slid it very quietly open.

  “That piano stool’s like a bed of nails,” said Pep Kendal, knuckling his back.

  “It’s a good gig,” said Big Al. “Steady money.”

  “Tea dances!” said Jimmy D, the drummer.

  “I’ll rustle us up some dinner,” said Pep. It was his house, Opal knew. His kitchen.

  “You’re going to cook?” said Mr. Hoadley. “I’ll maybe just shoot off home.”

  “I’m going to phone,” Pep said. “Pizza.”

  “Aye well, all right,” said Mr. Hoadley. “No olives, mind.” He lowered his double bass case carefully out of the back of the van and stepped down.

  “Fish!” shouted Big Al. “Pizza?”

  Opal caught her lip and waited. The passenger door rocked slowly along its rail and then, hat on the back of his head, white hanky foaming out of his breast pocket, battered trumpet case clutched in one hand, out stepped Fishbo—Mr. Gordon, her old music teacher. How in hell was he still alive? He had already been an old man when she was tiny, and he looked truly ancient now, mummified nearly, all battered and leathery and so skinny that his suit hung off him like Doolal’s jeans.

  “Mooooon Reeeeebah,” he sang. “Wider dan dee miles.”

  “Fish!” Pep barked at him. “You know the deal.”

  “That’s the worst of letting him finish with ‘Moon River’,” said Mr. Hoadley. “It could be days now.”

  “Might as well ask my blood to stop flowin’ in my veins,” said Fishbo.

  “Could be arranged,” Jimmy D shouted from inside the back of the van. Still complaining, the old men filed into the house and closed the door.

  Opal slid the window back down and leaned her head against it. How could it be that they were all still here? Thirteen years, half her lifetime. She’d been to hell and back—well, Whitby—and yet here they all were as if it was yesterday. Just as she left them. People who knew her. Knew her mother was a drunk and her dad had walked out and she’d not been home since she was twelve. So much for being alone in a crowd in the big
bad city.

  But she couldn’t go back. To her old pals at the Co-op coming round with their questions; Jill at the salon and her sympathy; Steph and that look she always had on her face. Baz, the scumbag, most of all.

  She had to stay in Mote Street. Those seven brown envelopes she’d got at Steph’s house that day, they were a sign that it was meant to be.

  Back in her bedsit, away from Steph’s scorn, she had laid all seven envelopes out on the floor and knelt in front of them. The address was copied out in the same handwriting on the front of each:

  Miss O. Jones

  c/o 7 Upgang Close

  Westcliffe, Whitby

  YO21 3DT

  It wasn’t her mum’s writing, even though—she flipped one of the envelopes over—the sender’s address was Jones, 6 Mote Street, Leeds. It had made her heart jump up high into her throat, hardening like bubble gum spat into cold water, imagining her mum making these parcels for her, filling them with mementos and gifts for after she was gone. But Nic would never have spent—she peered at the label—three pounds forty-eight on postage, seven times over, and a brand-new envelope each time too, one that hadn’t been through the post already with the old address scribbled over.

  Holding her lip in between her teeth, Opal worked her thumb under the flap of the first one, and ripped it open.

  Not junk mail, but no video of her mum’s dying wish either. No velvet roll of diamonds passed down the Jones line through generations, no sepia photographs of flappers and soldier boys, no treasure map, no magic beans, no safe deposit key, no ransom note of pasted newsprint letters—nothing that Opal had ever dreamed or dreaded finding. Just endless letters for Nicola, all opened out flat, envelopes gone. From the gas and the electric, the coal man and the hospital, the poll tax and the phone, the dole and the insurance and the housing assoc—

  Opal blinked. Those letters—seven of them from the housing association—were addressed to her. Miss O. Jones, and her name had been gone over in highlighter pen.

  They were from a woman called Sally Smith at West North West Homes (Leeds), which she knew was what the council was called now it was sold. Opal skimmed through them: condolences, advise, notification, warnings—endless guff about the tenancy, like it was any of her business. As for the rest … She looked at a gas statement and an electric, and her eyes widened. They weren’t reminders and red reminders and threats. These letters were receipts. Even the coal was paid, as far as Opal could tell, which must have been a nice change for the guy after all the years of Nicola trying to settle her debts with anything but money.

  But who the hell was paying Nic’s bills? And why did Sally Smith and the whole of the rest of West North West Homes (Leeds) think that Opal still lived in Mote Street? She looked at the last letter again, read it properly this time, and saw what it would mean. Then her attention snagged on something else she had missed before: the date in black numbers in the middle of the last letter, highlighted in yellow was 11 June 2010. Today. Opal blinked. This was the last day. She looked at her watch. It read 16.51, and she thought it was slow.

  She leapt over to stand beside the window, where the signal was best, and keyed in the number—Sally Smith’s direct number—waiting for it to ring and the recorded voice to tell her the office was closed for the day.

  “Transfers,” said the voice.

  “Hello,” said Opal. “It’s Opal Jones.”

  “Uh-huh?” said the voice.

  “You wrote to me?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “Seven times,” Opal said.

  “And what was this in connection with?”

  “The house in Mote Street?”

  “Number?”

  “Six.”

  “I meant the case number, flower. It should be on the letter.”

  Opal had let the paper slip out of her hand, and she knew if she bent to pick it up she’d lose the connection.

  “It’s umm … ” she said, trying to read it upside down where it lay on the floor.

  “Oh, hang on, here it is,” said the voice. “It’s right here on top of the pile. You’ve cut this a bit fine, haven’t you?”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’ll send you out an appointment letter,” the voice said, sounding as if she was going to have to write it in her own blood. “Get you in to sign up. Mind you answer this one.”

  “Sorry,” Opal said again.

  “Right.”

  “And sorry you won’t get the house back too. If you wanted it. For someone else, I mean.”

  “Six Mote Street?” Opal could hear the curl in the voice, and she remembered Steph’s face from an hour ago. “You’re welcome to it, flower. Nobody’s exactly queuing up to move there, are they?”

  So here she was. And it would be okay. Because even at twelve, Opal had been good at hiding. Mrs. Pickess and Mrs. Joshi and the rest of them didn’t really know her and wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

  In fact, it might not be so bad. Opal raised her head and looked over the road towards No. 3. If the Joshis and Mrs. Pickess and Peppermint Kendal and the Mote Street Boys were still here, was it stupid to hope … ? The net curtains covered the windows. And they were thicker than Mrs. Pickess’s nets. The house looked blinded by them. Impossible to see inside. Impossible to know who lived there.

  Then movement at the edge of her vision made her turn and squint down to the corner again. She blinked and put her hand flat on the glass. It was a tiny little woman, thin as a stick, nylon shopper in hand, almost-finished cigarette in mouth, orange tabard fluttering in the warm evening breeze.

  Opal leapt across the bedroom floor, clattered down the stairs, sprinted across the living room, and threw the front door wide.

  FOUR

  “MARGARET!” SHOUTED OPAL, BOUNDING across the cobbles like a puppy.

  Margaret Reid let out a screech like a demon. “Aaaiiyee!” She threw her cigarette down on the pavement and opened her arms. “Opal Jones, as I burp and fart! I cannot believe it. Is it truly you?” Her accent, fifty years after she had left Ireland as a bride, was Meath and Leeds curdled together, and Opal let out a clear peal of laughter like a bell as she threw herself into Margaret’s arms and hugged her.

  “The size of you!”Margaret said. “Have you been stood in a bag of peat all this time? You’re a giant, Opal.” Opal held on and hugged even harder, drinking in the cocktail that took her back twenty years to when she sat on Margaret’s lap for stories: pink floor soap and Elnet hairspray, setting lotion and chip fat, nicotine and a hard day’s work in a nylon overall.

  “But where had you put yourself? Why were you not there for Nicola’s sendoff? I couldn’t believe it.”

  Opal hesitated, but before she could answer, Margaret gasped, making herself cough.

  “Lay me down dead!” she said. “What am I thinking? Opal, my soul, I’m so sorry for the loss of your dear mother. You’re in my prayers.”

  At last Opal drew back, so she could look Margaret in the eye.

  “For real?”

  “Jesus, no!” said Margaret. “If I prayed for you, black sinner that I am, you’d be struck by lightning for sure.”

  And so Opal managed to dodge the question of where she had been when Nicola, her own dear mother, had been laid to rest—or turned to ash actually—never mind where she had been for the thirteen years beforehand.

  “And how are you, Margaret?” she said. “Still working, anyway. How many jobs have you got now? And how’s Denny? Is he at the track? Have you still got your dogs? I haven’t heard them.”

  Margaret walked backwards and rested her bony bottom on the painted windowsill of her living room. Her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses and always a bit watery (whether from the smoking, the Elnet, or the floor soap, who could say), were glistening and glittering now, fat tears trembling against her lower lashes.

  “Margaret?”

  “You don’t know?” Margaret said. “You never heard what happ-

  ened?”

  “No,
” said Opal, faltering. “At least, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh, you’d know if you knew,” Margaret said. “Your mother never told you?”

  “We didn’t … What is it?”

  “And maybe your father didn’t want to tell you. It’s nothing for a child to hear.”

  “I’m not a child now,” said Opal.

  “Come inside.” Margaret lowered her voice. “Only don’t go jumping in the air and cursing when you see Dennis, mind.”

  Opal shook her head, not understanding, and Margaret fitted her key in the lock and opened the door.

  “Here I’m back, Dennis, my soul,” she said, “and you will not guess if you live to be Nancy who I’ve got with me.”

  “I heard through the window,” said Dennis. “Opal Jones has come home.”

  Margaret’s living room was right through the front door, right off the street like Opal’s own. She followed her in and turned, peering towards where his armchair had always been. Then the smile froze on her face, and she was sure he must have noticed in the split second before Margaret slammed the door and shut the sunlight out again.

  The Dennis Reid she remembered had a blue car and a moustache and two greyhounds called Bill and Ben. He worked in a mattress factory and kept sweeties in one pocket, dog treats in the other, and he used to pretend to mix them up all the time.

  And maybe that man was still in there somewhere, but around him, in the last thirteen years—and it must have taken all thirteen, surely—had grown another man. A hulk of a man, a mountain. He was wedged, lapless, into a two-seater settee, beached there; legs splayed wide but still packed hard together, a broad expanse of hairless bloated ankle showing between his trouser hem and slipper top; arms like gammons, elbows pushed out by the bulging ring of his girth, hands—inflated surgical gloves, white and shining—resting dully on the wooden arms of the couch, fingers—uncooked sausage fingers—hanging down.

  “Hiya, Mr. Reid,” Opal said, shocked out of friendliness by the sight of him.

  “Cup of tea?” said Margaret. She was hopping about, putting her bag away, getting her fags and lighter out of her pocket, patting at her hair as she peered into the mirror over the fireplace. “Come on through, Opal, and we’ll let himself be in peace.” But when the kitchen door was closed, her routine flagged, and she gave Opal a look of pure misery as she sank down into a seat at the kitchen table and clasped her hands together on its top.