As She Left It: A Novel Page 9

  “Did he die while you were still there?” Opal said. “Or after you moved over?”

  “Long, long gone,” Fishbo said, too cryptically to be much help really.

  “What about your mum?” Opal said. “Sorry!” He had looked up at her with a sudden sharp look. “I suppose mums are in my mind.”

  “My mama was jest a chile when she had me,” Fishbo said, “and she lived to a fine age. Clean-livin’ woman, Baby Girl. She died five years ago.”

  “Wow,” said Opal, hoping that he would take it to be one of those meaningless expressions her generation went in for (awesome! fabulous!) and not what it was: amazement that someone so decrepit could have had a mother alive as recently as that. She gathered herself. “So you were still in touch with them then?” Fishbo nodded in that slow measured way of his that looked more like yoga than communication. “But you didn’t go back?” He began shaking his head. “And you really think there’s no way you could get in touch now?” Fishbo stopped shaking his head and looked at her, through her, through the wall behind her and the one beyond that.

  “You cain’t never go back,” he said. “Life is a one-way ticket. Ain’t no road home.”

  Opal was doing the slow yoga-nodding too now, thinking how much she used to love listening to Fishbo when she was a little girl; the slow rolling sound of his voice and the sudden flights up-tempo where his words were as sharp as his snapping fingers and his smile flashed like a light show, but now … Now everything he said sounded like something off a movie trailer or like it might be printed under the title of a trashy paperback, and his voice didn’t thrill her the way it used to. She thought of Margaret and Zula and how they sounded so mixed up and chopped about. Leeds and Meath, Leeds and India, all jumbled together. Why did Fishbo still sound exactly the same?

  Then she took a long, hard look at him, sitting there on his chair with its extra cushions, looking like a bundle of clothes with a head on top, like a scarecrow, and her heart melted again.

  “Did you have brothers and sisters?” she said. Let him talk about the past in any voice he wanted to.

  “Our house had more bunk beds than a dog has fleas.”

  “You’ve probably got nephews and nieces then,” said Opal. “And great-nephews and -nieces. Gordon can’t be that common a name in New Orleans.”

  And Fishbo’s eyes seemed to swim back into focus again and fasten on her face again.

  “What you …” he said. “Why you—who are you? You some kind of ghost come to haunt my last days? What’s going on?”

  “What?” said Opal. “Mr. Fish? It’s Opal Jones. It’s me.”

  “I’m tired,” the old man said, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes. “You leave me now, chile. Let me be.”

  Opal crept to the door and let herself out, closing it softly behind her. She was the master of getting silently through a door. Started learning how at ten, had it down pat by the time she was twelve. Steph used to lock up and take the key out after Opal moved there. But by then she was thirteen, her sneaking about days already over. “I was a prodigy,” she had said to one of the torn-faced social workers she used to sit with every week, the pair of them bored to tears. “Doing things way earlier than the rest. Like that Mozart bloke, yeah?” And she got written up for an uncooperative attitude, just because the miserable cow had had no sense of humor.

  The doorway at the end of passage darkened and she turned to see Pep Kendal standing there.

  “Is Fishbo all right?” she said, and even in her own ears she soun-

  ded like a tearful child. Pep beckoned her, and she went to join him. “Is he, though?” she said when the kitchen door was shut behind them. “He got confused there. Like an old person.”

  “He is an old person,” said Pep. “They’re called senior moments, love. Yours’ll be along someday too.”

  “I don’t mean like that,” Opal said. “He didn’t know who I was for a minute.”

  “He doesn’t eat enough,” Pep said. He was cooking, and he waved his spatula over the frying pan as if a brown, frilly egg and a few links of sausage were just what the doctor ordered. “And he’s got a chest infection, keeps him up coughing at night. He’s just tired.”

  “That’s what he said,” Opal agreed, glad to let the worry go.

  “I heard you practising,” said Pep, watching the sausages. He pushed his lips out, making his moustache bristle. Opal laughed.

  “Yeah,” she said. “What’s this thing at the end of next week?”

  “Silver wedding,” said Pep. “The Mote Street Boys played at their reception, and they want us back again.”

  “Great!” said Opal, feeling a trickle of cold down between her shoulders at the thought of a function room full of people, all dressed up, all staring slack-jawed at the stage where she was trying to play a scale.

  “They moved away from Leeds, obviously,” said Pep. “Mote Street means nothing to them. They’ve been down in Coventry.”

  “Is it really that bad?” Opal said. “The ‘Mote Street’ thing? Why didn’t you just change the band’s name?”

  “Ah, the youth of today,” said Pep. “Got an answer for everything, eh?”

  And because it was far too close to the truth—the way Opal had waltzed back in here and decided she could fix all the problems, solve all the mysteries, make life perfect for everyone—she didn’t give him any backchat. He went over to a cupboard and got a plate out, then looked over his shoulder. “One or two?” he said.

  “Plates?” said Opal. “Well, he’s out for the count, I think.”

  “I was inviting you to dinner,” said Pep. “You want it engraved?”

  “I want my egg broken,” Opal said. Pep brought two plates over to the counter, picked up the spatula, and drove its edge into the middle of one of the eggs.

  “Hey,” Opal said. “That was the good one. What a waste! You shouldn’t break the good egg.” Pep put an arm around her shoulders and gave her a quick squeeze; Opal couldn’t tell why.

  “He’s really upset about his family too,” she said when they were sitting opposite one another at the little kitchen table. Opal rolled a sausage up in a slice of buttered bead and squirted in ketchup, like a hotdog. There was a lot to be said for single men who didn’t care about manners. “You know, since the hurricane.”

  Pep chewed and swallowed, then ran his tongue around the outside of his bottom teeth.

  “Ah yes,” he said. “The hurricane. New Orleans and the French Quarter and the Gordon family scattered to the four winds and poor old Eugene who cain’t never go home.”

  “What?” said Opal.

  “We’ve been hearing a lot more about Norlins again since Katrina blew through.”

  “So who’s Eugene?”

  “Eugene Gordon, my lodger,” Pep said. “Fishbo!”

  “Look who’s talking,” said Opal. “Pep!”

  “Here,” said Pep. “I was called Peppermint since primary school—after Kendal Mintcake.”

  “Who?” Opal asked.

  Pep stared at her. “Mean to say you’ve never had a bar of Kendal Mintcake? On a day at the lakes?”

  “When was I at the lakes?” said Opal. “Nicola wasn’t exactly the type for picnics, you know.”

  “But I’d bet you all the money in my pockets,” Pep said, going back to the subject, “that Gene Gordon made up ‘Fishbo’ for himself.”

  “Why are you being so mean?” asked Opal. Pep screwed his tongue into a back molar and worked it round there, saying nothing. “He’s supposed to be your friend.”

  “He is my friend, the old fart. I wouldn’t change him, which is just as well because he’ll never change now. Just nod and smile, love. Like we all do, while he’s looking. Nod and smile.”

  “I don’t know what you’re on about,” Opal said.

  “Well, do me a favour and don’t try to work it out,” Pep said. “He’ll be enjoying having you back and telling you all about it. Don’t spoil it for him, eh?” He shook his hea
d then and laughed. “Louisiana!”

  “What about Louisiana?” said Opal, sounding scrappy even to her own ears. Once again, Mr. Kendal was hitting far too close to home. “We’ve all got to come from somewhere.”

  “Exactly,” said Pep. “Well put, love. I wish you could convince her next door. She had a right go about the Joshi boys again to me yesterday. Terrorists, she reckons. Or on their way to it.”

  “God, I know,” said Opal. Then she dropped her knife and fork. “Christ, I asked her over for tea.”

  FIFTEEN

  OF COURSE, MRS. PICKESS was up on a chair at Opal’s window, scrubbing away at the glass hard enough to go through it to the other side. And she didn’t miss Opal coming out of Pep’s either.

  “Oh, there you are,” she called over. “I thought I’d just crack on while the light was still good.”

  Opal didn’t say that it was the first week in July and the light would be good until ten o’clock, she just mumbled apologies and stood with her head down until Mrs. Pickess had finished telling her how fine it was and how she was quite happy to get on with it on her own and how Opal shouldn’t feel bad and her hip was hardly bothering her in this warm weather anyway.

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” Opal said.

  “See and empty it out,” Mrs. Pickess called in the front door after her. “Refill fresh from the tap.”

  It does look good, mind, Opal thought staring out while the water boiled for the tea, even if the view through the sparkling glass was of Mrs. Pickess on her chair, polishing madly with a page of crumpled tabloid, her skirt hem lifting to show the frill of her underskirt and her shirt collar slipping aside to show its shoulder straps. Who wore full-length underskirts anymore, never mind in a heat wave? “Are you not roasting?” Opal shouted. “Would you rather have something cold?”

  Then she had to sit through the explanation of how hot tea cools you down on a warm day, as well as a lecture about putting hot teabags in the bin and how it would attract vermin and how she would look out for a little teabag dish for Opal next time she was down at the city markets, but until then she should use a bowl, next to the kettle, with a folded square of kitchen paper in the bottom to stop it staining.

  “I haven’t got any kitchen paper,” Opal said. “I’ll use toilet roll.” And Mrs. Pickess looked as if she might gag.

  “Well,” she said, looking round, once she had recovered. “You’ve made a start.” Opal fixed her eyes on Mrs. Pickess’s face, refusing to look around her kitchen and see where she might have failed. A start! She had been up until after midnight last night making sure the kitchen and living room would pass muster. She would never have invited Mrs. Fussy Knickers in after just a start.

  “And now with my windows so nice and clean, it looks lovely,” was all she said. “You came round and did the back first, didn’t you?” The evening sun was blaring in through the clean glass and bouncing around the kitchen like a pinball. Opal thought she better not say that she had quite liked the softness that came from the dust and smears.

  “I did,” said Mrs. Pickess. “I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

  “I’m very grateful.”

  “Well, I’ve done what I can,” said Mrs. Pickess, “but my days of going up a ladder are behind me.”

  “Of course they are,” said Opal, hoping it wouldn’t have been more polite to disagree. “I’ll ask the Joshis if I can borrow a ladder. They’re bound to have one. One of the lads might even offer to hold it steady for me.”

  “If you can catch them in between prayers,” Mrs. Pickess said.

  Opal smiled. Pep Kendal was right. “Prayers?” she said.

  “Five times a day,” said Mrs. Pickess. “I saw something on the telly about it. A big curtain down the middle of the room.”

  “They’re not Muslims, Mrs. Pickess,” Opal said. “They’re Hindus.”

  “Pffft. It’s all the same,” said Mrs. Pickess. “They can’t fool me.”

  “You’re right,” Opal said. “We’re all the same. Good for you.” Mrs. Pickess’s eyes narrowed to slits, but she said nothing. “Where do you come from, originally?” Opal went on. “I’ve never met anyone else called Pickess. Where’s that from?” Mrs. Pickess put her mug down on the table with a crack, making Opal think that if she’d used cups and saucers, like Mrs. Pickess said, she’d have six cups and five saucers now.

  “My husband’s family—the Pickesses—were greengrocers in Osmondthorpe since Queen Victoria,” she said. “You can still see their name on a gable end. And my family were called Thirsthwistle.”

  “Bloody hell,” said Opal.

  “Which is a fine old Yorkshire name.”

  “You should have gone hyphenated,” Opal said, which wrung a laugh out of Mrs. Pickess at last.

  “I was so glad to get rid of it,” she said, “I’d have married Mr. Pickess if he’d had a glass eye and wooden teeth.” She heaved up a sigh like a load of wet washing from a twin tub and huffed it out again, slumping. “We had thirty happy years and he left me well set. There’s not much more you can ask for.”

  “Did you never have children?” Opal said, only realising that minute that she had never seen youngsters visiting No. 5 when she was a kid.

  “We never did,” Mrs. Pickess said, taking another biscuit and snapping it in two. “But Mr. Pickess never cast it up to me. Not a word.” Opal nodded, but she couldn’t help thinking he must have semaphored his feelings somehow, or else why did Mrs. Pickess assume the guilt and feel humbled and lucky instead of never casting it up to him. “And they’re not all joy, not by a long chalk.” She put one of the pieces of biscuit in her mouth and chewed it steadily, with a circular grinding motion, her gaze fixed on the tabletop.

  “Margaret would agree with you there,” Opal said, and Mrs. Pickess shifted gladly to someone’s else’s troubles—as Opal had known she would.

  “Poor Margaret,” Mrs. Pickess said. “And as for Denny—have you seen Denny?” Opal nodded. “Poor Margaret.”

  “Karen really never comes near her? Never at all?”

  “Not for over five years now. She was always a funny one. Not family-minded. But after Craig went, it was more and more strained and longer and longer in between and then she just stopped coming.”

  “You’d think it would be a shared thing, wouldn’t you?”

  “And that’s not all. She’s moved house now, and Margaret doesn’t even know where she’s gone.”

  “And she was an only child, Karen, wasn’t she?”

  “The only one.” Mrs. Pickess ate the other half of her biscuit. “Margaret wanted a big family, of course … you know … and one time her and I very nearly fell out over it. She was going on about it—Karen would be five, then—about how she was cursed and her arms ached for another baby and there was no justice in the world when all her sisters had such crowds of them. Well, Opal, I snapped. Just the once, mind. I told her she was blessed, not cursed. That she had a beautiful little girl—and she kept her lovely when she was a child, just like a little doll, always in a dress and white socks and gloves for church, like a little doll in a box. I’d have given …” Mrs. Pickess grappled with another sigh and got it out of herself. “But look at us now. I wouldn’t swap with Margaret now. Karen gone and Denny just sitting there in the living room.”

  Opal knew that for years Mr. Pickess had just sat there in the living room too, in an onyx jar in the alcove beyond the fireplace, with his British Legion medal in an open box in front of it. It had fascinated her when she was small and she had hatched numerous plans to get Mrs. Pickess to leave her alone in there, planning to open the top of the jar and peer inside to see if there were any big bits. Teeth, maybe. Or a toe, that you could grow a new Mr. Pickess from.

  “Opal?”

  She shook herself back from the memory. “And Craig,” she said.

  “Hm?” said Mrs. Pickess.

  “Denny just sitting there, Karen gone, and Craig disappeared who knows where.”

  The sun was having i
ts last gasp before it set behind the trees in the back gardens of the big houses over on Grove Lane, and as Mrs. Pickess looked up, the light shining through the scoured glass showed a face not even just naked, but peeled, suddenly stripped of a mask no one knew was there until it had gone. Opal blinked and in the time it took to shut her eyes and open them, the look was gone; the sun had slipped below the highest little twigs and leaves on those far-off trees, and Mrs. Pickess was herself again.

  “It must have been terrible for you all,” Opal said, steeling herself, hating herself for dredging it up. Mrs. Pickess said nothing. “I didn’t know about it until I came back, you know. Margaret told me. Just the bare bones. And I didn’t want to keep on at her.” Still nothing. “But it’s just so hard to imagine. It’s such a quiet street, for one thing. And everyone’s always looked out for everyone else. How could a little boy just suddenly be gone that way?”

  Mrs. Pickess spoke at last. “The bare bones?”

  Opal thought about Mr. Pickess’s toe on its bed of ash again. “I mean, just that he was playing outside and then he was gone and no one could find him.”

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Pickess said. “Only minutes it was, and the whole street out on the hunt for him. And give them their due, those … ” she waved over her shoulder towards Zula’s corner of the street, “they all pitched in just like the rest of us.”

  “And you never heard anything?”

  “Me?” said Mrs. Pickess. The light was fading fast now, so Opal stood and turned the light on. “You’ll need to shut your door else you’ll have flies all through,” Mrs. Pickess said, but Opal sat down again and left the door to the yard open.