A Gingerbread House Read online

  ‘Wh—’

  ‘Never mind asking why!’

  ‘I never asked why,’ I said. Was I hoping whoever it was would realize he wasn’t speaking to my mum? Maybe. But he only laughed.

  ‘Good girl.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  He cackled, making the cheap phone buzz. ‘That’s it, Lynne-dee-hop! Exactly. “Never met you in my life.” “Name doesn’t ring a bell.” That’s the idea.’ He paused and blew out a huge breath. ‘I’m man enough to admit when I’m wrong. I thought Big G was crapping out early but if we’d been in the game when this broke? A fucking lorry! A lorry-load of them!’

  ‘What lorry?’ I said. If this was a business matter, I should know about it. ‘Lorry-load of wh—’

  ‘Just turn on the ten o’clock news tonight and you’ll see.’

  The line went dead.

  The guy had said ‘lorry-load’ like it was a big fat deal. One lorry. A burner phone taped under a desk for one lorry? It was hard not to think he was kidding. But still, I opened the call history, deleted the record of the conversation and put the phone back in its little black tape nest, wiping my fingerprints off it as I did, feeling stupid to be so melodramatic, but not quite stupid enough to stop. Because if I was being honest, there were lots of things that were no kidding matter, even in single lorry-loads. Drugs, guns, the stuff for making bombs. I didn’t believe it yet, but I wiped my prints anyway.

  I left the office then, walking away from my five piles of sorted paperwork, and checked in at the loading dock. Egger, the warehouse foreman, was stressed by the number of men off sick but he was fine himself.

  ‘Lump of granite I am, Tashie,’ he said. ‘I never ail a day.’

  ‘Lucky,’ I said.

  ‘Ach, it’s easy if you’re not the one wiping bums and noses,’ he said. ‘My wife goes down like a skittle whenever one of the weans brings something home. No luck about it really.’

  A nice man, I thought. I always had. I’d always thought the same of Big Garry. Or close anyway. Not ‘nice’. But good. Straight. An open book. Not many words on the pages but an open book. I hadn’t really believed it was a cheater’s phone or I wouldn’t have answered it. Was it drugs?

  When I got back to the house, my mum was on her knees in the kitchen raking through the deep bottom drawer of the freezer.

  ‘You’re early,’ she said, twisting round. ‘Don’t tell me you’re feeling rough.’

  ‘I’m fine. How’s Dad?’

  My mum sat back on her heels and huffed out a laugh. She was wearing stretch trousers with net sections in them, and she sat comfortably on her folded legs, her posture perfect, the picture of the sweet life that comes when a well-to-do man loves you. Big Garry and Little Lynne had come a long way from that hand-painted sign on a single van, Bazz and me on bunk beds in a box room, all set with our aspirational names: Sebastian and Natasha. They’d arrived at a liveried fleet, giant cardboard cheques and this kitchen floor she was kneeling on in her black leggings, spotless because someone else swept and mopped it twice a week. It had been her one condition when he talked her into the flow-through family kitchen dining entertaining space. She’d muttered about the Sopranos and insisted someone else clean it.

  ‘He’s fine too,’ she said. ‘Right on the border between taking it easy and milking it, if you ask me. He’s said he could “probably manage” some fish tonight, and a rom-com.’ My mum bent over the drawer again. ‘I’ve got some of that prawns with ginger and spring onion in here somewhere.’

  ‘Prawns? Really?’

  ‘I’m not poaching white fish in milk for a man with a packet of Hobnobs hidden under the covers. I’m not his bloody mother.’

  ‘He’s never!’ I said. ‘He’s chancing it, isn’t he? State he was in this time yesterday.’

  ‘The one good thing about a stomach bug, to my mind, is it gets you off to a roaring start for a new diet.’ My mum had a habit of lifting her top and grabbing a roll of flesh above her waistband, tugging at it. She did it now.

  ‘Mum!’ I had always hated the sight, her fingers pinched white as she pulled at her own flesh, the raw dough look of the stretched skin.

  ‘You empty out at both ends then you’re off your feed for days after. He’s wasting a gift. Tell him from me if you’re going up.’

  ‘I’ll take him a cuppa. Check for chocolate round his mouth.’ My mum winked and turned back to the freezer drawer. I heard the voice again. You’re a good girl. Then I filled the kettle and put bags in two mugs, one for my dad and one for me. I’d hang out with him for a bit. He must be getting lonely. Was it guns?

  He was definitely better. He had sheets of the newspaper strewn all over his bedcovers and the remote in his hand, his glasses shoved up his head to let him focus on it. The French doors were thrown open to the Juliet balcony and the back windows were open too, so the air had freshened and it no longer smelled like a sickroom.

  ‘Thank God!’ Big Garry said, not quite his usual bellow but far from feeble. ‘I haven’t seen that besom since she cleared my dinner tray. She’s keeping out the road in case she catches it.’

  ‘I don’t blame her,’ I said.

  ‘She slept downstairs last night.’

  ‘I don’t blame her!’

  Big Garry patted the bed beside him but I snorted, handed over his tea mug and retreated to the rocking chair. My mum had breastfed me and Bazz in this chair – ‘Best way to get your waistline back even if it kills your boobs’ – and there it still was in their bedroom.

  ‘Egger’s on his feet and taking care of everything,’ I said. ‘He’s a nice man, isn’t he?’

  Big Garry shrugged. ‘He’s a good worker. Never gave me a minute’s worry so far.’

  ‘No sign of Her Ladyship in the outer office.’

  ‘Now, now.’

  I took a sip of tea and used the pause to look at my dad over the edge of the cup. I wished it was a bit of a flutter with another woman, even the missing assistant. He would blow it soon enough, then my mum would sack the bitch, tear a strip off him, get some new jewellery and settle down again. At least, that’s what I suspected. Who knew, really, about the inside of someone else’s marriage, even a marriage that had made you.

  ‘Anything else?’ he was asking me.

  I took a moment as if I was thinking – was it bombs? – then shook my head. ‘Nope. Ticking over. The contractor’s pretty pissed off with you for wrecking the projection output.’

  ‘I’ll cope,’ my dad said. ‘He’ll have to.’

  ‘You shouldn’t go digging around,’ I said. ‘Or if you want to, you should get yourself on a course and learn to do it without making a hash.’ I knew there was no chance of it. He would never think it worth the effort.

  ‘Paper and ink, Tash,’ he said, like clockwork.

  ‘But if you’d stick to paper then,’ I pointed out. ‘Instead of meddling online as well as killing the world’s forests to keep up with your printing out.’

  ‘He should never have had just the one copy. You’d never catch me with one copy of something that mattered. Belt, braces and glue, Tash.’

  ‘It wasn’t a document you screwed up. It was a—’

  ‘Belt, braces and glue. Anyway, he’s getting paid for redoing it.’

  Irritation distracts you. I was bugged by my dad still not understanding what he’d stuck his spanner in and why it wasn’t the consultant’s fault. And I was worried about the call too. Only later would I remember that he wasn’t beating himself up about having to pay for the same logistics twice. I asked myself when that had started. Back in the days when I was wee – waiting in reception with my colouring book instead of in the after-school club, or later – waiting for a free driving lesson instead of buying ten from a proper driving school – Big Garry watched every penny. He was already prosperous by then, but he was still careful. Somewhere along the line to the flow-through entertainment space he got lazy about money, careless about wasting it, almost as if he knew he had too much o
f it and regretted that, wished some of it would go away. But a whiff of guilt didn’t square with a few other things he’d always said, about honest reward for honest toil, about there being no shame in enjoying what you’d come by fairly, about never stopping anyone else from climbing the ladder alongside him, so he wasn’t going to feel bad about how high he’d reached.

  I ate my ginger prawns across the breakfast bar from my mum, sharing a bottle of white wine while we had the chance. Big Garry could be a bit of a face-ache about midweek drinking.

  ‘You sure you’re OK?’ she asked at one point. ‘You’re quiet.’

  ‘Fine. Just thinking.’ Drugs, guns, bombs.

  ‘You don’t want to be doing that,’ she said, as I knew she would. She always did. It was part of what made living at home so comfortable and so infuriating.

  ‘I’ll clear up,’ I said when we were finished.

  ‘Three plates and a wipe round the microwave!’

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ I said. ‘Literally.’

  Even such a tiny attempt at a joke reassured her. She wrinkled her nose at me and disappeared into what they called ‘the messy room’ to watch the kind of junk television she’d never get away with when Big Garry was on his feet and in charge.

  At five to ten, I went upstairs. I never watched the news normally and didn’t want to raise suspicions. There was national politics, international politics, and some scandal about corruption. I didn’t see how any of that could relate to my dad and a phone taped under a desk. My mind was drifting when I caught ‘… have uncovered what appears to be part of an operation stretching overland from eastern Europe and the Near East all the way to the French ports and into Britain …’

  I heard my parents’ bedroom door banging open and my dad’s voice shouting down the stairs. ‘Lynne! Lynne, get up here.’

  ‘… although the UK collaborators in what police are describing as the most ambitious single attempt ever discovered have thus far evaded detection.’

  Of course, I thought. Of course. Not drugs or guns or bombs. People. I turned the volume down in case he could hear it through the walls and gave my attention back to the newsreader.

  Now he was saying: ‘Seventeen of the forty individuals are being cared for in hospitals in Calais while French officials—’

  And just like that my life was over. Oh, I kept breathing in and out, and I kept eating, burning calories, eliminating waste. I kept sleeping and waking. But my life as the lucky daughter of a good man and his loving wife, heir to his solid business, resident of his comfortable house … all of that was done.

  No more worker bee. Hero or villain now. Black hat or white hat. I didn’t think my life was going to have decisions like that in it. Probably no one does, eh?

  TWO

  Ivy had waited outside as long as she could, standing in the plume of light from the open door, looking up and down the street through the fog of her own breath, glancing at the sparkle of frost around her feet whenever a car passed her. She remembered Mother whispering, always in the larder cupboard, as if she waited for Ivy there.

  ‘Don’t look into passing cars, if you’re stood on the pavement ever.’

  ‘Why?’ Ivy had stared up into Mother’s face.

  ‘Why do you think?’ The voice was so sharp it rang, even in here with stacked shelves on three sides, sacks of spuds and onions over half the floor.

  At seven years old, Ivy didn’t know. She knew now, so she looked down at her feet in their short boots as the cars went by. There was a six-inch gap between her coat hem and boot tops but legs never seemed to register cold. She had her sheepskin mittens on. And at least it was dry. Someone even said that, hurrying past her on the step.

  ‘Brass monkeys! But at least it’s dry.’

  Ivy still hadn’t managed to find an answer by the time the woman had thrown open the door and disappeared inside. ‘Brass monkeys’ was an expression she always wondered about. There was nothing obviously coarse in it, but the sort of people who used it and the sort of chuckle they got when they did made her doubt. That woman, in her body-warmer, parking her little car in such a neat twist of reversing, locking it with such a jarring toot, breezing past Ivy with a casual word, she was just the sort of person to use vulgar slang to a perfect stranger.

  Unless …?

  Ivy turned and looked in through the half-window. Unless … She peered past tattered notices and bits of leftover tape, just in time to see the tail of the body-warmer whisk out of sight.

  Unless that was Myra? But they had agreed that whoever got there first would wait outside. ‘Hook up at the door’ Myra had written in her email. And now Ivy was sure. Because when she’d read that, she felt her mouth purse in that way Mother’s used to, that way she’d found her own begin to as the years rolled by. Years of uncouth boys on the late bus, sniggering girls passing in the street, nasty jokes in every sit-com and innuendo everywhere. Even on the news these days. Of course a woman – she’d laugh to be called a lady, her with her little car and her body-warmer – who said ‘hook up’ would say ‘brass monkeys’ too. But if that was Myra why had she walked past? Ivy could feel the tightening at the back of her throat that meant tears were coming. She heard Mother’s voice again, not a whisper this time and not behind the larder cupboard door. She’d sing this out across a room. ‘Someone ring the plumber! The tap’s dripping.’ Little Ivy would swallow the tears and smile, or run away and hide if she couldn’t help them spilling.

  She wanted to run away now. She should have known better than to try to change her life. For a while there it had seemed easy. She wanted a friend and she wanted a cat. She knew how to get a cat – you go to a pet shop – but how did a woman in her fifties who lived alone and worked at home get a friend? ‘Join a club’ was the answer she kept reading. But she didn’t want to learn salsa or slog up and down hills in the rain. When the solution arrived in her mind she laughed out loud. And her first few days as a member of I Heart Cats and Cats, Cats, Cats online were the happiest she could remember. It was only very slowly that she realized her new friends were all in Texas or Adelaide. She was down to checking once a day when she met Myra. Right here in Scotland and inviting Ivy to meet tonight, at this very gathering.

  ‘I don’t go out much at night in the winter,’ she had told Myra, in the chat column.

  ‘Oh, I know!’ Myra typed back. ‘You always think after Christmas, spring’s round the corner. February gets you every time, eh?’

  So Ivy had agreed to wrap up and venture out to meet, ‘irl’, as Myra said. And now, after she’d been stood here for – she struggled at one cuff with the other mitten until she uncovered her watch – twenty-five minutes, her so-called new friend had walked right by. Of course, the twenty-five minutes wasn’t Myra’s fault, strictly. Ivy liked to be punctual and, with the buses the way they were, that meant early. It was just gone half past now.

  On that thought, the tears dried up. Of course Myra went rushing by and straight inside. She didn’t want to be late. She’d assume Ivy was inside too by now. She’d never think Ivy would stand here like a lummox while the clock ran down, would she? Myra would be thinking this stupid woman standing on the step was here for something else: waiting for a lift, or on her way to an eight o’clock start.

  Ivy wrestled the swing door open – these mittens made her hands next to useless – and trotted, almost sprinted, down the corridor the way Myra had gone, the thick soles of her short boots squeaking on the tiles.

  She burst into the room, already apologizing.

  ‘—sorry I’m so late. I was waiting outside and I never noticed the ti—’

  But for once she had caught a bit of luck. She wasn’t late, because it wasn’t that sort of do. The meeting room was laid out in rows, with a flyer on every seat and a podium at the front, but the women were hugger-mugger at a table on the far side, inspecting something – was it cats? – and helping themselves to coffee from a sloping cardboard can the like of which Ivy had never seen.
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br />   Myra, if it was Myra, was deep in the huddle – it was gift baskets they were looking at – and Ivy’s luck had run out. She couldn’t get near her. When they all had their coffees and buns and were drifting towards the seats for the presentation, she was trapped behind three huge women – immense they were – swapping phones and scrolling through pictures, and when she turned to go the other way she found the row of chairs behind her was full, everyone’s bags on the floor. She’d have to clamber to get out, so she sat, sweltering in her big coat, with no cup of petrol-can coffee, never mind a bun, and she couldn’t even see Myra now.

  She didn’t like to keep searching; there was a very odd little woman sitting a few rows back whose eyes were fixed on Ivy every time she caught them. So she sat forward, tears close again. She’d look a fool if she stood up so soon after sitting down. But she’d never get her coat off struggling with it in her seat, and she’d catch her death later if she went back out with none of the benefit, not to mention she could already feel a sheen on her lip from the heat.

  A short, square woman with a no-nonsense haircut was climbing the podium and it was too late to do anything, because the meeting had begun.

  ‘Welcome to the first Grampian Nine Lives League meeting of a brand-new fund-raising, cat-defending year,’ she said, to a ripple of not quite excitement but definitely enthusiasm ‘We’ve got the worst of the winter by, although you wouldn’t think so tonight!’ There were a fair few scattered titters. This, Ivy thought, was an easy crowd. ‘We’re delighted to see so many new faces. Angie’s going to go round with membership forms while I’m doing my little bit of housekeeping. So if you’re new, just put up a paw – claws in, please – and we’ll furnish you.’

  Ivy put both hands in her coat pockets and slid down in her chair. The words of the squat woman washed over her. It was so warm in here, typical community hall. They used to be chilly and dank, but you’d never get away with it now, with Health and Safety. Now, a heating system pumped hot water through under the floor – Ivy could feel the warmth stealing up through the thick soles of her boots – and she wasn’t the only one growing drowsy as the dry voice wore on, talking about kitten fostering now.