by Louise Voss
Alaric didn’t seem impressed, though. ‘Well, actually, she’s not in prison as such, not at the moment, but she’s been charged and she’s out on bail. She’s had to go and stay with her folks in Cornwall pending a trial, which might not be for a few months.’
Pressing the ‘open’ button on the till, I enjoyed as always the satisfyingly heavy ker-chunk sound as the drawer shot out, even while my mind was reeling from the news of Caitlin’s tribulations. I began emptying the float into the tray compartments from the plastic bags full of coin denominations that Alaric had dumped next to it.
This was one of my favourite jobs at work, reminding me of the toy till I had when I was about nine, and how much I’d loved compartmentalising coppers even back then. As I did it, I felt a huge surge of guilty relief at briefly escaping the stifling, sad atmosphere at home. The knowledge of Dad’s imminent demise was so crushing that I found myself repeatedly trying to ignore it altogether; pretend it wasn’t happening – which was a lot easier to manage when I was busy elsewhere.
‘Don’t do that yet,’ Alaric said irritably. ‘Shutters aren’t even up!’
I rolled my eyes, making sure he couldn’t see me. I hated opening the shutters, they were so heavy and had a tendency to come sliding back down with a huge screech and thud if you didn’t click them into place fast enough at the top. ‘OK. But why’s Caitlin been sent to trial? Surely not just for trespassing?’
Alaric took a milk bottle from his satchel and popped the foil top, pouring it into his tea. ‘She didn’t go into too many details on the phone, but she’s been charged with GBH. Apparently she poked a copper in the face with a stick while avoiding arrest. He’s been blinded in one eye. I reckon she’s looking at doing time – a couple of years at least.’
‘Shit.’ I was horrified.
As I went outside and grappled with the heavy shutters, my mind reeled. I felt sorry for Caitlin. I could see how easy it might be, in the heat and fear of dozens of angry uniformed men charging at us, shouting and swearing, to lash out in self-defence. If I’d had a stick in my hands before I was bodily carried off the silo, who was to say I wouldn’t have done the same? Caitlin was tiny, about seven stone; no wonder she’d felt that she needed to defend herself.
I imagined the devastation on my folks’ faces if they’d had to actually bail me out, then sit in the public gallery watching me be tried in a court of law. It was bad enough having just been arrested! I felt a cold sweat of horror at my recklessness, and relief at having been let off without charge, especially in the light of the discovery of Dad’s terminal diagnosis.
Caitlin and I hadn’t been best mates or anything, but she didn’t deserve that. And even if she never knew it, I owed her a debt of eternal gratitude for putting the idea in my head in the first place, and therefore giving me the chance to meet Samantha.
I shoved the shutters into place with the long pole and went back into the now much-lighter shop, propping the pole back in the corner. ‘I didn’t even see her when I was there. Mind you, the place is huge,’ I said, noticing how dusty the till was. I found a grimy duster behind the counter and set to. ‘I don’t blame her for lashing out at them. The police literally carried us all off – it was pretty terrifying. She must have just been really unlucky that she injured one of them.’
Dusting done, I flicked the kettle back on to reboil and pointedly threw a teabag into one of the other tannin-stained mugs; an ancient chipped Southampton FC one emblazoned with the words ‘When the Saints Come Marching In’.
‘Do you have her folks’ phone number?’ I asked. ‘I’ll give her a ring to say I’m sorry she got nicked.’
Alaric shook his head. He’d sat down on the swivel chair with his tea and lit a cigarette, flicking through the pages of last week’s Melody Maker and scratching his black arm hair. He was the hairiest man I’d ever seen.
‘When’s the trial? Is she going to come back? What about her boyfriend? Will you have to get another full-time person?’
‘Blimey, Meredith, enough with the questions. I told her I’d keep a job open for her, but she was a bit rude about it. I let it go because she’s obviously under a lot of stress, but she basically implied that I could stick it.’
I suppressed a smile. Caitlin couldn’t stand Alaric – said he ogled her tits and made suggestive comments to her.
‘I think she’s broken up with that bloke of hers too. She made some self-pitying comment about how she’s lost everything, including the love of her life…’
He sighed dramatically, as if Caitlin’s misfortunes were nothing more than an irritation to him – which they doubtless were. Alaric had never been big on empathy.
‘Gonna put an ad in the Journal today, and I’ll do a sign for the window too. Now, could you unwrap those Heaven 17 albums and top up the bin? We sold out last week.’
He slurped his tea and turned away from me, while I cut open the box of records and wondered if Samantha needed a job. It would be so cool to have her working here too. I wished I didn’t have to do my A levels. I wouldn’t have minded a full-time job here myself, aside from the obvious downside of having to work with Werewolf Al.
Then I thought: Did I have to do my A levels? Who said? Everyone just expected it, that was all. Because I was bright, they expected I’d go to university and get a good degree, then … then what? I had no idea what I wanted to do. Until now, the future had always just stretched ahead of me in a fluffy cloud of vague non-specific achievement. But what my day at Greenham Common had shown me all too clearly was that there were people – women – out there making decisions based on their principles, not on some woolly sense of entitlement. Women to whom the expression ‘changing the world’ was not an aphorism but an actual goal. Women like Samantha.
My thoughts were never far from Samantha, mostly in the form of fretting, and almost certainly as a displacement activity – something to stop me dwelling on Dad’s illness. She had warned me she would be staying at Greenham for a bit and would therefore be incommunicado, but I worried constantly that I would never see her again. She had my phone number; she could easily have gone out to a phone box and rung me if she’d wanted to. I’d seen a little queue of women at the one on the road just outside the camp.
I couldn’t bear the thought of never seeing her again. I relived our kisses over and over again, feeling the same guilty thrill as her soft lips pressed against mine and her tongue slipped inside my mouth. I couldn’t tell anybody about her, particularly not Charlotte and Julie, after their disgusted comments about lesbians being at Greenham. It seemed like such an embarrassing cliché, to have gone there once for a few hours and come away as a newly gay woman. They’d probably either take the piss out of me for it, or go weird on me and start assuming I fancied them or something. To my knowledge there were no lesbians at all in my school – amongst the pupils, anyway. We all knew that the PE teachers were ‘lezzers’: a word that I would never allow to cross my lips again.
Thinking of lips brought me right back to Samantha. I stared out of the shop window at the passers-by, mostly determined-looking housewives with empty wheely shopping bags, heading to the marketplace for the best selection of fruit and veg. Bet none of them had ever felt another woman’s breast. They didn’t know what they were missing.
‘Oi, Earth to Meredith,’ said Alaric crossly. ‘If you’ve got nothing better to do, go and sweep the dust bunnies out from under the display racks while we’re still quiet.’
I scowled but obeyed. With men like Alaric about, who wouldn’t want to date a woman instead?
28
1983
Meredith
One day before the end of term I was walking into town after school with Julie and Charlotte. We’d just sat our first mock A level – English lit – and had decided to treat ourselves to tea and a jam doughnut at Reeves the Baker. We were ambling along the gravel riverside path that was the more scenic route into the centre of town, our waistbands rolled over so many times that our grey skirts r
esembled wide fabric belts, and our ties in knots bigger than our fists.
I had tuned out of the conversation they were having about whether Steve Francis and Neil Hart fancied them – mostly because I could have told them the answer was almost certainly ‘no’, at least, not half as much as they fancied themselves. My head was full of Keats, The Fall of Hyperion, particularly a line that ran, ‘one minute before death, my iced foot touch’d the lowest stair…’
That line stuck with me. I’d laughed about it with the girls – ‘my iced foot’, like an iced bun or a foot in a bath of ice cubes. But secretly it haunted me, the cold descent to your fate, the knowledge that you’d reached the end of your life, the bottom of the staircase, no going back, not ever…
Dad’s iced foot had touched the lowest stair three weeks ago. It was as if, from the moment he told me he was dying, back in April, he had to get down to the business of actually doing it. Almost overnight his eyes turned yellow and the knobs of bones sprouted everywhere on him, like a grim budding magnolia but in reverse.
It was unbearable to watch, so I’d closed my eyes and turned the other way.
Selfish.
During the funeral I had yearned for Samantha. She was my future, but I hadn’t heard from her since April. I didn’t think I’d ever see her again, and to my shame, this upset me almost as much as losing Dad.
I hadn’t thought about Mum at all.
The girls were talking fast, gesticulating wildly, as if all the words they hadn’t been allowed to speak during the three-hour exam were now spurting out of them in a saved-up torrent. I probably couldn’t have got a word in edgeways even if I’d wanted to. They usually made me laugh with their intense diatribes on boys, but today I felt too spent to engage. Or perhaps I felt that I’d grown apart from them, since Greenham and Samantha and Dad’s death. I really didn’t care whether Neil Hart got the highlights in his hair done at a salon or just used Sun-In like the rest of us.
I drew a short way away and was idly watching the hypnotic dark-green swirl of the river weed under the surface as I walked, trying to spot the minnows and occasional freckled trout darting through it.
Someone was cycling towards us, and I instinctively moved closer to the riverbank to allow the cyclist to pass between us. She was almost upon us when the sun suddenly glinted on her hair, like a celestial arrow pointing her out to me. I gasped so hard and stopped so suddenly that Julie ceased mid-sentence in her impassioned rant about how much it hurt to get highlights, especially from her hairdresser, who seemed to take pleasure in snapping on the thick rubber sieve-hat, then dragging the hair strands through with the metal crochet-hook.
It was Samantha.
‘I swear she’s trying to stab me with that thing … What’s the matter, Meredith?’
I ignored the question. Samantha screeched to a halt beside me, the edge of the wicker basket on her handlebars touching my right breast, her eyes greedily latching onto mine and holding me in her amber gaze. She looked astonishingly beautiful, red hair streaming, like a Valkyrie on two wheels; an angel of death who would rip me away from my old life forever. I felt a slow smile spread across my face and wanted to run into her arms, yelling with joy. But then I saw Julie and Charlotte gawping first at her, then at me, then at each other, and I felt gauche in my rolled-up skirt, jumper tied round my waist, ankle socks and – the shame – I even had a naff flowery hairband in my hair, the one I’d had since I was eleven years old. I wanted to rip it off and throw it in the river. I couldn’t have looked more like the schoolgirl I was unless my hair had actually been in pigtails and I’d had ink splotches all over my fingers.
‘Hiya,’ I said, grinning at Samantha, questions tumbling over themselves behind the dam of my mouth. I immediately firmly closed it to prevent myself either kissing her or giving her the Spanish Inquisition.
‘Hey, you,’ she drawled, grinning back and pushing her hair out of her face. ‘Long time, no see. I have your brother’s rucksack and sleeping bag back at my place. Got time for a coffee?’
I glanced across at my friends, who both raised their eyebrows at me. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Great, about Pete’s things. He’s been moaning about them for weeks. Samantha, these are my mates Charlotte and Julie. Charlotte and Julie, this is Samantha; we met at Greenham a couple of months ago.’
‘Ohhhh,’ they chorused, their faces alight with prurient interest. I immediately flushed scarlet, agonising that they could see how turned on I was just to be in Samantha’s presence. I had to glance down at my nipples to make sure they weren’t betraying me through my thin bra and white shirt. Samantha clocked me looking and I could have sworn she read my mind. Her lips twitched with amusement, and my blush developed a blush of its own.
‘Jump on. You can ride shotgun,’ Samantha said, wheeling her bicycle around on the path in a brisk 180-degree turn and patting the spring-loaded metal rack on the back of it.
I slung my schoolbag over my shoulder, climbed on and held myself steady by grasping the edges of the rack behind me in the way I’d seen teenage boys do, although I’d have preferred to wrap my arms around her waist. She pushed off and began to pedal hard back the way she’d just come.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I called over my shoulder to the girls, sticking my legs out to the sides to get them off the ground. As Samantha managed to get up a bit of speed, I could feel their eyes burning into the back of my head. There would be questions, I could tell, although I didn’t think they would suspect that there was anything sexual between us … would they?
Oh, who cares, I thought, as Samantha’s wheels crunched over the sandy gravel.
‘Follow the yellow brick road,’ I called.
‘Well, I am from Kansas,’ she called back, laughing, and I felt pure happiness – for the first time since Dad’s death.
‘So,’ she said, once we got into town, the girls mere specks in the distance behind us when I’d glanced back. ‘Where shall we go?’
I directed her to another tea shop, one as far away from my friends’ usual haunt, Reeves, as I could think of, with lots of upstairs nooks and dark little corners. We ordered a pot of tea and toasted teacakes and found the most distant table, in a top room that only held two, the other one unoccupied. Once the elderly, cross waitress had struggled up with our tray and dumped it accusingly in front of us, Samantha poured the tea. Then she stopped, mid-pour, leaned forwards and kissed me before I had a chance to ask her where she’d been, what she’d been doing, why she hadn’t been in touch, whose camper van she had been sleeping in, whose pillow had her head been on for the past two months…
‘My dad died,’ I said instead, when we came up for air. I waited for the gasps of sympathy, but all she said was, ‘Move to London with me’ – more of a command than a question. ‘My mate Marsh has got an awesome squat in Willesden we can live in. I’ve been sorting it all out these last few weeks. Sorry about your daddy, he seemed real nice.’
‘OK,’ I replied, all the questions fleeing, forgetting that I had four more mock exam papers to sit; forgetting my promise to Dad to look after Mum, forgetting that Pete would be left to cope on his own. ‘When do we leave?’
So this was what being in love felt like. No wonder people raved about it.
29
Present Day
Meredith
The woman detective, Gemma, texted Meredith that afternoon asking if she could come over and see her at Minstead.
Now what? thought Meredith, but she texted obediently back to say yes, of course, and to remind Gemma that she was at home in the cottage, having taken a few days compassionate leave. She couldn’t face being in the shop, knowing that Ralph wasn’t upstairs in his office, or around for coffee, or to have a laugh with in staff meetings.
She had been in the front garden, ostensibly weeding, but also trying to make sure that none of Ralph’s shirt buttons were visible after she’d thrown them into the flowerbed in panic the previous week. The weather had changed, banks of dark grey clouds rolling
across the hills, heavy with threatened rain, casting a pall over the grounds. Her mood felt as dark as the sky and wasn’t helped by Paula, who rang her as she was wrestling with the root of a stubborn bramble.
‘Why did you ring the police to tell them about the lion?’ Paula demanded as soon as Meredith answered. ‘I told you I’d let them know! Now they’re all suspicious, like I’m hiding something!’
Meredith wiped her free hand across her sweaty forehead. She wasn’t sure what to say – she didn’t want to freak her out any more than she already was. ‘Oh Paula,’ she began carefully. She’d been going to say something like, we have to tell the police everything, no matter how inconsequential it seems, but then realised how massively hypocritical that would be.
A robin hopped along the crazy-paving path, stopping with its head on one side to regard her. They stared at each other for a long while. Meredith couldn’t shake the sensation that it was judging her.
‘Look,’ she continued to Paula, and the robin. ‘I’m sorry if you thought I was interfering, but I’m worried. It’s not just the lion. You said the door was left open. I really don’t want to freak you out, and I’m not saying there’s any connection to any of it, but with … what happened to Ralph and Andrea, unless the post-mortems show that they both died accidentally, I just think we can’t be too careful.’
She tailed off, rubbing a burgeoning blister on her thumb made by the spade’s handle. She had decided not to burden Paula with all the other weird stuff that had been going on with her. And neither Paula nor Ralph ever knew the truth about who she used to be, nor how she really got the scar on her hand.
‘DS Davis is coming over to see me today,’ Paula said. ‘It might be with the results of the post-mortem. I asked him, but he wouldn’t tell me on the phone. Which means it’s not good news.’
