by Sharon Maas
Gran’s mattress lay in the middle of her bedroom floor.
The stamp album was gone. The one with our – that is, Gran’s – British Guiana Penny Black. The One Cent Black on Magenta, twin brother to the rarest stamp in the world. A tiny scrap of paper worth a fortune.
I screamed at Gran as I punched in the number for the police.
‘I told you! I told you! You stubborn, pig-headed old woman! I told you to put it into a safe! Now see what has happened! You’ll never get it back! Serves you right!’
Gran, for once, was speechless. She sat there on her Luxury Commode in the middle of her room, looking dazed. After a few minutes of me ranting she found her voice.
‘But how they know? How they know to find this house!’
My carefully cultivated deference to old age flew out the window.
‘Of course they found it! You think you can hoard a valuable thing like that and not even try to hide it, and it’s not going to get stolen? What world do you live in?’
‘But I hid it good! Under the mattress!’
I rolled my eyes. Gran wailed:
‘In broad daylight! In broad daylight they break in here! Oh Lordy! While we was in Church! Why de good Lord didn’t strike them down?’
And so it continued: Gran wailing and me yelling and Mum watching, shaking her head as if wearying of the whole drama.
The doorbell rang; it was Sal.
‘Thank God!’ I said, hugging him. ‘All hell’s broken loose here.’ I led him into Gran’s room.
‘Ah, Sal, my sweetheart boy! Give you old Nanny a kiss!’
Sal chuckled and bent over, kissing her leathery cheek. She kissed him back; left cheek, right cheek, left cheek.
‘So, what’s going on?’ Sal asked innocently.
I pointed to Mum. ‘Go on, tell him. It’s your fault anyway.’
Mum just sighed and turned away. It’s what she always does when she’s in the wrong. I followed her, still ranting; somehow, I could no longer bring myself to scream at Gran, so Mum had to take the brunt of my wrath. Gran slammed the door after I left the room. Mum went into the kitchen, me hot on her heels.
‘You’re just so scatty! You live in a dream world! I could see this happening weeks ago! I told you! I told you about the alarm! This is not a safe area, and you know it!’ Mum only moved about the kitchen in silence, making coffee.
‘The stamp’s not even insured! I just can’t believe such irresponsibility! It’s like I’m the mother and you’re the child!’
Mum had a non-policy of contents insurance: we had nothing anyone would want to steal, so why waste the money? Now that had certainly come back to bite her.
‘Would you like a cup too?’ Mum asked mildly, as she poured water into the machine. I replied with a new rant. Mum didn’t reply. The machine began to gurgle. I ranted on. No reaction. I flounced into the garden and smoked a cigarette, a second cigarette. Sal stayed with Mum and Gran. The traitor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INKY: THE NOUGHTIES
It took the police all of two hours to arrive. Maybe because it was a Sunday, maybe they had other burglaries to deal with. No doubt if it had been our Docklands loft, they’d have been on our doorstep in five minutes, but that’s life.
‘Don’t touch anything! Leave everything just the way it is!’ I yelled at Mum and Gran at the start of those two hours. I stormed upstairs, slammed my door, and buried myself in a book till the moment the doorbell rang. The police had arrived.
I sat on the edge of Gran’s bed, seething to myself. They first questioned Mum and Gran, who sat next to each other on the sofa. Sal leaned against the mantelpiece. The mattress still lay on the floor. I pointed to the bedsprings. ‘That’s where she hid her stamp album,’ I said. ‘It’s gone.’
‘So that’s all they took? The stamp album? No valuables?’
I waited for Mum or Gran to give details of the stamp. But all Gran did was reach into the fireplace, remove the grid, and produce her jewellery case of carved purpleheart. I couldn’t believe she’d chosen the fireplace to hide that box in. What if I or Mum had made a fire in it for her? Typical. OK, it was summer and so it was hardly likely, but still.
She opened the box and showed the officer her gold jewellery.
‘They din’t find this. I hid it good, nah? See, real gold from Guyana!’
The officer made a note in his book.
Impatiently, I said: ‘The stamp, Gran. Tell them about the stamp!’ I looked at the officer. ‘A very valuable stamp was stolen!’ I said.
He coughed. ‘A valuable stamp? How valuable?’
‘Well, it’s one of the rarest stamps in the world. A similar stamp was sold for almost a million dollars at auction, but that was in the seventies. So I guess, on today’s market …’
‘Inka!’
‘Mum, if you won’t speak up then I guess I have to. We’ve got to get that stamp back and if we don’t tell them how valuable it is, they aren’t going to look for it. It’s as simple as that.’
‘Can you confirm that, Ma’am?’
Obviously, these officers didn’t believe me. I looked from Mum to Gran in frustration. Mum’s face was as if carved from stone and Gran just sat there chewing her cud. It was the most frustrating interview in my life. You’d think the burglars had just dropped in for tea.
. But then, Mum was the most secretive person in the world. All this questioning and disclosure must be driving her crazy.
But finally, Gran saved the day. She couldn’t keep it in.
‘The most valuable stamp in the world! Worth a fortune’ she exclaimed, and launched into a rambling speech that not only told the entire history of the stamp but made it clear that it had magical properties and was, possibly, responsible for the establishment of World Peace.
The police finally left. Mum relaxed. Gran, beside herself with laughter, pointed at me.
‘Look at you face! Look at you face! Bring out the camera, Rika!’
I was totally nonplussed. Why was she so insouciant about it all? As if it was all one big joke? Something was going on.
‘What’s going on? Mum?’
But Mum just shook her head and left the room. Gran laughed some more.
‘Them thief-man, they stupidy bad. They got the shell but not the nut. I done take out that stamp and hide it.’
My heart leapt. ‘You have it? You hid it? Gran, where?’
I think, under normal circumstances, she would never have shown me. But pride made her do so; this hiding-place was just too good to keep to herself. She shuffled over to the Luxury Commode Chair. She lifted the red velvet seat. She removed the bed-pan. She carelessly handed it to Sal to hold, sloshing around the urine in it for good measure, spilling a few drops on the carpet, and probably onto his jeans. He took it with, to his credit, only the slightest flaring of the nostrils.
Then Gran reached inside the hole left by the potty and, leaning precariously forward over the rollator, felt along the inside walls of the wooden bedpan box, her eyes vacant with concentration. Suddenly, the intensity on her face melted into a smile of triumph. She withdrew her hand and held up her treasure, encased now in a transparent plastic zip lock envelope: the British Guiana One Cent 1856 Black on Magenta, Quint edition.
Gran gave a most wicked cackle. She clacked her dentures at me and declared:
‘See? They didn’t find him. Nobody don’t like to interfere wit’ ole-lady piss!’
* * *
‘And you knew all the time! You let me make a fool of myself!’
Who else could I let my anger out on but Mum? But again, she wasn’t accepting it.
‘I tried to warn you, Inky. But you just rushed ahead. You were just raging and ranting and you didn’t let me get a word in edgewise. It’s your own fault.’
‘So, now what?’
Mum turned on the tap and held a glass jug beneath it. Gran, exhausted by all the drama, had lain herself down for a rest and promptly fallen asleep, and Mum, Sal and I had fled
to the kitchen for a much-needed coffee break. Mum said, her back turned to me:
‘Well, we can hope that the police think we’re just a bunch of kooks making much ado about nothing. That they think Gran’s just a silly old goose babbling nonsense. We can hope they think you’re an attention-seeking hormonal teenager. Otherwise ...’
‘Otherwise what?’
‘Well, what do you think? The cat’s out of the bag. Gran just made her little secret public. That means …’ I waited, but nothing more came.
‘What does that mean?’ I hated it when Mum spoke in unfinished sentences. Her ellipses drove me crazy, demonstrating, as they did, her laziness of speech. She liked me to second guess her thoughts, finish her sentences for her, which led to me having to pull information slowly out of her nose and contributing to our famously ragged conversations.
‘It might mean nothing. But if some over-zealous reporter gets hold of that information …’
She shrugged and spread her hands into a widening circle, telling me to use my imagination and tell her what would happen. I decided not to. Instead, I changed the subject.
‘I don’t get how they found us, anyway. They must have been watching our house for weeks, to know that we all go to church every Sunday. And surely they looked through the album before they took it, and saw that the stamp was missing?’
‘Well, for one, these were most likely common-and-garden burglars, not experienced antique thieves. They wouldn’t have known one stamp from another, and it was full of stamps. All they wanted was the album.’
‘I don’t believe it, Mum. They must have at least checked to see if that particular stamp was in it? Surely whoever commissioned them must have told them what to look for?’
‘Well …’ There they were again, those ellipses. They would hang in the air until either Sal or I asked the next obvious question. I kept silent, tired of the game. But Sal continued to play.
‘Well, what?’
Mum looked uncertain whether or not to talk, her eyes slightly glazed over as she withdrew into her dream world, but then a little jolt of decision went through her as she opted for full disclosure. She poured us all coffee, and signalled to us to grab our cups and follow her to the dining table. After we had all taken our seats, she spoke again.
‘You see, I did anticipate something like this happening. After we kept getting all those phone calls, I began to wonder if that dealer was unscrupulous enough to try and steal the stamp. And I talked to Mummy about that possibility.’
Another long silence.
‘And then?’ I prompted.
‘I got a replica made, a fake we could keep in the album, just in case. As a decoy. We replaced the original with the fake. Gran hid the original in an original place known only to herself. And that’s it.’
Sal laughed. ‘And you really had us all fooled! The way Inky went ballistic … that was fantastic!’
I didn’t think it was that fantastic, and said so.
‘You should have told me! You let me make a fool of myself!’
But Sal, again the traitor, was on Mum’s side.
‘Uh-uh. You chose to go ballistic. Your Mum did try to calm you down but you weren’t listening. You ran with your temper. You can’t blame her for that! If you’d just shut up she might have told you. Nobody wants to confide in a Rambo.’
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Sal was always supportive of me; that’s one of the things I loved most about him. He never put me down in public. And now this, in front of my own mother! She, who was responsible in the first place for not keeping the garden tidy and the alarm on!
‘If she was that scared about burglary, why didn’t she use the alarm system? We’ve lived in this house for almost three years and she’s never once switched it on.’
Mum said mildly, vaguely, ‘It’s not working. I think it needs new wiring or something.’
‘Well, for goodness sakes …’ I had no words left, no arguments.
‘Anyway,’ said Mum with great finality, ‘we have to put an end to this nonsense. I’m going to phone the police in a minute and tell them we found the stamp. I’ll tell them Mummy is just forgetful and couldn’t remember she’d taken it out and hidden it elsewhere. If all is well, maybe we can keep the secret.’
‘Nan’ll be disappointed,’ said Sal, ‘but you’re right.’
‘The thing is, Mummy doesn’t really care about the stamp itself. She’s not a stamp collector; she doesn’t have a passion for it. For her it’s just the fact that it’s an heirloom she’s been entrusted to pass on.’
‘So why the big fuss with the police?’
Mum looked even more miserable.
‘You don’t know Mummy. She’s wily and manipulative. She loves the limelight – used to be an actress. She’s got an agenda, and if I know her …’
I let Mum and Sal chat for a while. Mum was wondering how they’d traced our address from our telephone number, and Sal explained how easy that was. They discussed burglaries they had known. Mum spoke about the creepy feeling in her guts, now that invaders had entered her house, her panic at first seeing the broken window. I couldn’t help it, I had to butt in.
‘And all you could think of was your bloody laptop. Which, after all, is insured.’
‘There are some things that are irreplaceable,’ was all Mum said to that. ‘Work, for instance.’
‘You can back up work. You do back up your work, don’t you?’ Mum made a face so I assumed she didn’t. I stormed on.
‘You can’t back up that stamp. That was the first thing I thought of. The Quint!’
‘Well, of course she didn’t think of the stamp,’ said Sal. ‘It’s a fake, and she knew it!’
‘But the original was still in the house. Gran might think the potty chair’s a brilliant hiding place but in fact she just got lucky. A more professional thief would have looked there too. If you ask me it was a pretty obvious place.’
But nobody was asking me. Mum and Sal were once again discussing robberies they had known. Mum even went so far as to tell him about some robbery in Guyana way back in the last century. When I started to roll a cigarette nobody even glanced at me, and when I went outside to smoke it, I might as well have been invisible.
Autumn was in the air. The leaves in the hazelnut tree above me were turning yellow and the slight nip in the temperature made me hug my arms as I sat smoking at the garden table. I wished I’d brought a jacket. On the other hand, maybe that coldness didn’t come from outside at all. Maybe it came from inside. Maybe it was a part of that vague sense of restlessness and discomfort that nagged deep inside me, an itch I couldn’t scratch. An itch I couldn’t even name.
A constant irritation, like a colony of ants burrowing nests within my heart. And I had no idea how to stop them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
DOROTHEA: 1950
Dorothea was alone downstairs. It was near midnight; they were all asleep. She sat at the dining-table, typing, enclosed in a circle of light from the overhead lamp. She knew she wouldn’t sleep tonight. The moon was swollen; great and white, sailing across an empty night sky. It would be full in a night or two, and she was wide awake. She might go for a walk on the Sea Wall once this report was finished. Her typewriter clacked away, leaving her cocoon of light to echo into the empty space of the drawing room. A cool sea breeze wafted in through the wide-open gallery sash windows, playing with the papers on the table beside her. She weighed them down with a water glass. Occasionally, a mosquito landed on her bare arm, and she slapped at it, usually missing.
Suddenly Kanga, the family dog, broke into furious barking, leaping at the gate and snarling as if an axe murderer had come to visit. Normally, she’d ignore the noise, for Kanga barked readily: at passers-by on the avenue across the street, at the sugar-cane man strolling by with his cane-juice press-machine, or in sympathy with the neighbour’s dogs who were every bit as vocal. Since more often than not it was a case of crying wolf, nobody bothered to check the gate when he
barked, but the extra rage in his voice tonight, and the rattling of the chain as he flung himself against the gate, made Dorothea walk to the window.
The figure on the bridge was just a black silhouette against the floodlight from the lamp-post behind him; a man’s figure: hands, wide apart, resting on the top of the gate, out of reach of the leaping dog. He wore a hat. Something about the casual pose coupled with the jaunty tilt of the hat made Dorothea’s heart leap. She raced to the front door and tore down the stairs.
The dog moved away as she came and stopped his snarling and leaping, looking up at her with eager expectancy; but there were no pats for Kanga tonight. Her hands fumbled as she unlocked the padlock and unwound the chain that held the two wings of the gate together. Then it was open, and she was in Freddy’s arms, her hands groping his head as if to ascertain that he was real, no ghost, no vision. His own arms were strong around her, and still, and he was whispering her name, over and over, like a mantra. Even Kanga fell silent, in awe of the moment. He paced around the couple on the bridge, his body snaking in step with his wagging tail, sniffing Freddy’s legs, whimpering and hanging out his tongue in approval.
‘Come up, come in,’ said Dorothea breathlessly, and edged him towards the open gate. But Freddy resisted.
‘Is Mam home? I want to be alone with you, first. Just for a while. Can we go somewhere?’
‘She’s gone to bed. But I can wake her! She’d want me to!’
‘No. Let’s go. Please. Just for a while.’
‘She’ll hate me for it, if I keep you from her even a second longer than necessary.’
‘Please.’ Dorothea thought of getting her bicycle, for old time’s sake, but the car would save time.
‘Just a second.’
She raced back upstairs, grabbed the car key, and flew back down to Freddy. They opened the gates together, then she backed the car into the street and Freddy closed the gate, winding the chain back around it without locking it.
