by Jenny Colgan
“Nice evening?” said Grainne as she walked in.
“Uh, yeah.”
“Why haven’t you washed your hair? Were you out with a new man?” Grainne lived in fear of Lizzie getting a boyfriend and leaving her.
Lizzie slung her bag in the corner of her desk. It had taken her ages to get back to sleep again when Penny had bowled off to bed, and she felt fuzzy and out of focus.
“No,” said Lizzie. “How’s your cat? Bought her any new outfits?”
“Miss Friss is fine, thanks,” said Grainne. “And she likes getting herself dressed up, don’t you, sweetie?” She was addressing this to one of the photos.
“Are you sure it isn’t a bit cruel to put animals in hats?”
“Oh, I think they’re adorable,” said Grainne. “And Miss Friss loves her little bonnet. She told me.”
The reception phone rang.
“That’s her now,” said Lizzie. “All the mice are laughing at her and she wants to know what to do.” On seeing Grainne’s face she immediately regretted it.
“Actually, it’s Mr. Boakle,” said Grainne. “He wants to see you.”
Lizzie flinched. Why was the boss asking to see her? She had a horror of getting into trouble; she’d spent so much time trailing after Penny into the headteacher’s office. “You’ve got to look after your sister.” She could hear her mother’s voice again. “We’re all she’s got.”
Lizzie sidled into the back office, which was dark, chilly, and piled up with files of colorful stamp samples from around the world.
Mr. Boakle looked at her. “Ah. Yes. Ah, Lizzie, isn’t it?”
Given that she’d worked there for ten years, maybe it would have been nice if he occasionally remembered her name. No matter. She blushed anyway. Lizzie hated her tendency to blush, especially at times like this when really someone else should be embarrassed, surely.
“Take a seat. You may have noticed that it’s been pretty quiet around here recently.”
“Uh.” Actually, it always seemed quiet, but now she thought about it, yes, for the past few months Grainne really had been spending a lot of time knitting Miss Friss a Santa Claws outfit.
“People just aren’t using too many stamps anymore,” said Mr. Boakle sadly. “So they don’t collect them, see. There’s some new invention—can’t quite figure it out myself—called EU mail.”
“EU mail?”
“Yes, you know. Something to do with joining the Common Market, probably.”
“You mean email,” Lizzie ventured. “The thing that’s been around for years.”
“Something like that. Anyway, whatever the bloody thing is called, it’s cutting down on people writing letters something terrible. Sounds like a dreadful thing.”
“How it works is, you type in a letter, then you send it for free and the other person receives it instantaneously. For free,” said Lizzie.
Mr. Boakle paused. “Really? That sounds fantastic.”
“It is,” said Lizzie.
“Hmm,” said Mr. Boakle. “Hmm. That’s not good at all. Do you get many letters?”
“Do council tax summonses count?”
“Those damned franking machines,” said Mr. Boakle, his face going red. “Worst invention ever.”
“Until email,” said Lizzie meekly.
“Well. Anyway, that doesn’t matter because frankly the world of post has gone to hell in a handbasket and as a result I’ve got to lose a member of staff.”
Lizzie suddenly had a horrible vision of herself in a dinner ladies’ uniform and closed her eyes tightly to get rid of it. She couldn’t lose this job. Please no.
“Oh, please,” she said. She’d always thought being quiet and dependable, they wouldn’t mind her staying there . . . but now. What would she do? Well, she hadn’t thought that far ahead. But she couldn’t do what Penny did, shouting at drunks and hollering across hen parties asking who’d ordered the double portion of ribs. But without any qualifications . . .
“Elizabeth,” said Mr. Boakle. Briefly, Lizzie felt like she was in The Apprentice and wondered if he was going to point a big finger at her like Alan Sugar did, and growl, “You’re FIRED!” like a big grizzly bear, but he didn’t.
“I’m going to have to let you go. I’m really, really sorry.”
“But . . . but . . .”
“You’re young,” said Mr. Boakle. “There’s a big wide world out there. You should go and see some of it.”
“And how would I pay for that?” said Lizzie, feeling a huge lump in her throat.
Back in Brandford, their mother groaned a little and lifted up her legs again. They really were killing her. Oh well. She thought about her girls. She worried about them so much, she really did. Penny was out and about all over the place, never stopping, never eating a proper meal, and she didn’t even want to think about the kind of people she was hanging out with. Penny reminded her so much of Stephen it wasn’t funny. She was her father’s daughter all right.
And Lizzie was quite the opposite, seemed entirely happy to spend the evening with her old mum, eating choccy and catching up on the soaps. That didn’t seem right either. She’d wanted so much . . . well, wanting didn’t help anything, did it? It felt like such a long time ago, before she’d had them, when she’d met Stephen and everything had felt exciting and full of promise, and she’d been a young girl about town. He’d been so handsome and different from the boys she’d known at school. She’d grown up in Brandford, and headed to London as soon as she could, finding a job in Chelsea Girl, sharing a tiny, freezing flat in Bermondsey with four other girls. She’d loved it. They’d all shared clothes and spent all their money going up to town and having a laugh. She’d even had dreams of taking up acting. Best time of her life.
And Stephen. He’d swept her off her feet without a second thought. And she’d fallen for it too, completely. Upmarket boy like him, bit of Essex trash like her. Why had she thought it could work? But she’d thought it would be fine, that love would pull them through.
She remembered, after five whirlwind months, the mixture of terror and excitement she’d felt on finding herself in the pudding club. Her mother would have a fit. But he’d do the right thing—Stephen Willis was a proper, well-brought-up boy, not like the drunken wife beaters from around her area. She hadn’t known it was babies then, not till the doctor said he thought he heard two heartbeats.
In a pub in Chelsea, on a really lovely sunny autumn day, around the corner from his mum’s cluttered flat, he’d had a port and lemon (she was paying), and she’d had a Bacardi and lime (they weren’t so hot on not drinking during pregnancy in those days), and she’d broken the news. He’d just stared into his glass.
“Darling,” he’d said. “You daft cow. You stupid cow. That’s no good, is it?”
And his handsome face—Penny looked just like him—had twisted up into a mean look, and his eyes had turned cold on her, just like that.
She’d managed, of course. Well, she’d had to. Oh, the neighbors had been awful; that Eilish Berry, thinking she was better than them, taking herself off to London, and back less than a year later with a bun in the oven. Two buns, actually. Her mother had been furious to begin with, and softened, inevitably, when the babies came. They’d got their own council house and they’d all been there ever since, even though the estate just got worse and worse. She’d liked working at the school when the girls were little, she could walk there with them and home again at night and be off at holiday times. Until they got to about ten, of course, when Penny disowned her completely through embarrassment, which she didn’t seem to have shaken off now, seventeen years later. Eilish sighed.
She hadn’t seen Stephen much after that; he’d practically disappeared off the radar altogether. His mother, though, had tried—sent her some money and some ludicrously impractical knitted outfits, itchy and full of buttons. She’d taken the girls over there a few times when they were small, but Stephen’s mother’s place was a terrible mess, a huge old apartment in Chelse
a that she’d filled with junk since his father had died. Mrs. Willis was a bit like one of these shut-ins, with piles of newspapers all over the place. It wasn’t hygienic, and it took four hours to get there and back and the girls screamed so hard that, after a while, they just stopped and got on with their own lives. She’d watched the girls. It wasn’t as if having no dad was particularly unusual in their part of the world. He’d visited for a while, every now and again, turning up with toys. Whenever he left, Lizzie would sit by the doorway for the next two days in case he came back. Penny would bite everyone in their nursery. She didn’t think they’d remember; they were three when he stopped.
Then they’d seemed all right, until they’d hit their teens. Lizzie had gained puppy fat she couldn’t grow out of. She never mentioned it, just gradually became more and more introverted till now, in her twenties, she barely went out at all. There’d been hardly any boyfriends—that last chap was a plank of wood—but she seemed happy to sit at home and watch life pass her by.
Penny on the other hand turned wild. She couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, up to all sorts of trouble. She’d done her best, thought Eilish. She’d tried to get Lizzie to be more sociable, while at the same time keep Penny in check. Forcing them together only made Lizzie more painfully shy and Penny more outrageous than ever, but she was glad they were still together.
“Look out for Penny,” she said to Lizzie all the time, till Lizzie worried sick. “She’s not sensible like you. She could do something stupid in a heartbeat.”
And she would have told Penny to look after Lizzie too, if Penny would listen to her, or stop for just a second. But she didn’t.
Probably for the best their dad never appeared again. But she still had her lovely girls.
“Oi! You! Wanker!” Penny was shouting at the back of a departing fat man, part of a group of blowhard salesmen who’d come in for lunch to celebrate some bonus, then acted like they were city millionaires, ordering ridiculous cocktails and not drinking them, making her run around, asking if they could order “off menu,” to which Penny had retorted that they’d cook one of their heads if they could fit it in the deep-fat fryer. They’d guffawed lustily and asked her if this was one of those American theme bars where the women wore bikinis, and she’d said no, it was one of those American theme bars where everyone tipped 20 percent. Whereupon they’d got up to go, leaving a catastrophe of thrown food, knocked-over glasses, and ripped-up paper napkins, and they’d left her . . . a pound.
She held it up in the air.
The fat man turned around. He had grease from his surf and turf platter spattered all down his Crazy Frog tie.
“What?” he said.
She held the pound coin out to him.
“You left this behind.”
His Neanderthal brow furrowed in incomprehension.
“That’s for you, darlin’,” he said.
“You’d have got more if you’d have given us a quick flash,” said a weaselly-faced man next to him. He looked at his watch. “There’s still time!”
“Why don’t you take it,” said Penny, advancing and handing it to the fat man. “Buy yourself a magnifying glass so you can see your own dick one of these days.”
Eilish was falling asleep. She got so tired these days. The phone rang, starkly, shaking her out of her dream. Her television program had finished, and some house show was on. Eilish loved house shows. She would pretend she was the one who had to choose between the town house, the modern bungalow, the apartment in the stately home. Very rarely were the customers offered two-up two-downs on a council estate.
The phone rang again and, grunting a little as she moved her legs, she leaned over to pick it up, listening in silence, until finally, “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”
Lizzie looked at the phone. Mum. How was she going to tell her she’d been let go? Just shucked off, not needed. After all the work . . .
“How’s Mr. Boakle?” said Grainne.
“Sorry,” said Lizzie, making her mind up. “I have to take this call.”
She sank to her desk, steeling herself not to cry. But her mother didn’t even ask her how she was, just poured it all out in a rush. After asking her to slow down and repeat herself several times, Lizzie just blew her ratty fringe out of her eyes, and pushed back her chair from the desk.
“Oh my God,” she said.
Penny was staring at Ravi, who was staring at the floor.
“You can’t talk to customers like that!” Ravi was saying. He was about sixteen years old, and on a management training scheme that somehow made him her boss even though he hadn’t started shaving yet. Disciplining people obviously made him unbelievably unhappy.
“OK,” she said. “I won’t do it again. But they were disgusting losers.”
“They were customers, Penny,” said Ravi.
“I know, I know,” said Penny. “Most of our customers are disgusting losers, right, what can you do . . .”
“No,” said Ravi miserably. “I mean, it says in the handbook . . .”
The handbook was a huge color-coordinated folder that laid out every single piece of information required to run the All-American New York Diner, including how many umbrellas per pina colada (2), how many napkins per rib rack (7), and how strong a word you could use against a customer before you were in serious trouble (meanie). Penny could get around Ravi, but nobody could get around the handbook. She sighed. Her phone rang, again.
“Oh, answer it,” said Ravi, trying to put off the inevitable. Why hadn’t he gone in for musical theater like he’d always dreamed of? He could be living in the real New York by now. He stared out of the window, looking at the 1,500-space car park and the way the clouds looked like they were touching the top of the gray corrugated-iron Bowl-o-rama.
“Mum?” said Penny. “What is it?” She listened intently.
And, finally, “Oh my God!”
She ripped off her employee badge, which said, “Hi. My name is Penny and I want y’all to have a nice day now, d’you hear?,” threw it on the floor, and stamped on it.
“Ravi,” she said. “You are a nice man. And not a very big one. So, it’s going to be a bit painful to do what I’m about to suggest next. But I really do insist that you take this”—she lifted up the heavy handbook—“and turn to the color-coded section where it explains exactly how to get it up your arse.”
Chapter Two
The three of them crammed into the small front room at Parkend Close. This in itself was unusual. Penny was always just passing through.
“So, explain again slowly,” said Penny. Lizzie had come in with a tray holding three cups of tea, the strongest thing they had in the house, and a new packet of chocolate digestives.
“Your gran . . . not Nana, but your dad’s mum. Well, she’s not well. She’s had to go into a home.”
“What’s wrong with her?” said Penny impatiently.
“I don’t know,” said their mum. “Just old. Not dementia, just an ‘episode’ they think.”
“You mean, crazy,” said Penny with a shudder. “Remember you used to take us there. Brr. There were tins of dog food everywhere.”
“And she didn’t even have a dog,” said Lizzie and Penny at the same time.
“Yes, well, she’s not crazy,” said their mum, “just a bit mixed up, that’s all.”
“There were cobwebs. And spiders,” continued Lizzie, suddenly sounding exactly like her six-year-old self.
“But she wants to—” Penny shook her head. It didn’t feel quite real.
“She wants you to move in there, yes,” said their mum. “According to the nurse, she thinks somebody’s going to nick her fifty years’ worth of back copies of the Radio Times.”
“But why us?” said Lizzie.
“You,” said their mum. “Not me, of course, oh no. But you two apparently are the only family she’s got left, or at any rate the only family she kept mentioning to the nurses.”
“But we don’t know her,” said Penn
y.
“Well, blame your useless bloody vanishing dad for that, love.” Their mother reconsidered. “And it’s my fault, too. She did want to see you, but it was always such a long way in, and you two hated going so much, and she never offered to help pay the fares, or buy you anything. She lives in that big place in Chelsea and she never helped us out at all. I think she gave it all to your dad. I expect that flat’s all that’s left.”
“Big place in Chelsea,” breathed Penny, as if saying, “the magical land of Oz.” “We’re moving to Chelsea.”
“For a bit,” said their mum. “Just till she gets well enough to go home.”
“But she’s really old and mad and stuff,” argued Penny. “I mean, she’s not likely to be—”
“Penny!” said their mother sharply. “Have a little decorum for once.”
“I don’t see why I should,” said Penny. “She owes us, doesn’t she? We haven’t had so much as a Christmas card from her for over twenty years, and as for . . .”
“Did she . . . I mean, doesn’t she know where Dad is?” asked Lizzie timidly. Although their mother almost never talked about their dad, saying only it had been short, occasionally sweet, and that she’d been delighted with the results, i.e., them, she had never quite gotten over her childhood fantasy that it might all have been a mistake, that he might have been hit on the head by a brick and suffered terrible amnesia, and didn’t even know he had twins.
