The A-Z of Everything

by Debbie Johnson

  ‘So he’s helped out by giving us pointers, things like “will involve driving”, or “pack for an overnight trip”, stuff like that. It’s like they shared one giant brain – she did all the wacky creative stuff, and he was all solicitor-like and sensible. It’s weird that we don’t know him better, isn’t it? What did she tell you about him? I’m a bit freaked out that he seems to have been so important in her life, and we never even met him …’

  She nods, grimaces as she scalds her tongue on the coffee, and says: ‘I know what you mean. It doesn’t exactly make me feel like a good daughter either. But I suppose that we’re the ones who insisted on keeping our lives separate, aren’t we? I’ve not been back to this place since … well, since. What about you?’

  ‘I moved out when I got that job with the publishing company in London, and came back briefly after I got sacked.’

  ‘You got sacked?’ she says, eyes wide and tone incredulous. ‘But why? You seem so … sorted. Although I did always wonder why you ended up doing what you’re doing, for, you know, a dog food company.’

  ‘Luxury pet supply specialist,’ I correct, automatically. Understandably enough, she pulls a face.

  ‘Yeah. Okay, luxury pet supply specialist. But it’s not publishing, is it? I always thought that if you did go into marketing, it’d be for something creative, or arty, or important.’

  ‘Pet supplies are important,’ I insist, stubbornly clinging to my defence of a job that in all honesty I absolutely hate. ‘To the millions of people who love their pets.’

  She holds one hand up in the air, as though she is giving up, and concentrates on her coffee instead. We are both silent for a while, until I try and find the words to break it.

  ‘I got sacked because I was a mess,’ I say, simply. ‘It was after everything that happened with Gareth, and you wouldn’t have anything to do with me, and Mum was freaking out, and basically … I couldn’t do the work. I missed meetings. I turned up late every morning, dressed like a bag lady. It was a competitive environment – lots of bright young things want to work in publishing – and at that stage in my life, I just wasn’t bright enough.’

  I can see her churning this over in her mind, and am half expecting some kind of sharp rebuttal – a ‘so, you’re blaming me, then, are you?’, or ‘so you’re saying it was my fault, your epic career fail?’

  Instead, she chews on her lip, and twists strands of her frizzy hair around her fingers, something I always remember her doing when she was trying to be patient with me. When I’d stolen one of her tops, or accidentally locked her out of the cottage, or made some ridiculous proclamation, like ‘science is rubbish, I don’t know why you like it.’

  ‘Right,’ Rose says, quietly. ‘I see. Well, shit happens. So when did you move out again? Mum always tried to tell me what was going on, but I wasn’t in the mood to listen. I used to bite her head off if she even mentioned your name, to be honest.’

  I can hear the regret and guilt in her voice, and know that Mum’s video – the one with the You’ve Broken My Heart speech – has taken its toll on her as well as me.

  ‘About a year later, when I started working for a ball-bearing firm in the Midlands. And yes, it was about as exciting as it sounds, but it did allow me to get the experience I needed, do my marketing qualifications, that kind of thing. I moved down to London not long after, and life got … well, busy. And the more I stayed away from here, the harder it got to come back. Everything here reminded me of you, and us, and how broken everything was – and I couldn’t cope with that.

  ‘The only way I could move on was to ignore it all, and the cottage – Mum, our bedrooms, everything about this place – wouldn’t let me. So I stopped coming – instead she came to me, or we had weekends away. I never made any declaration, or even a decision … I just stopped coming. I’ve not actually set foot in here for about twelve years. Maybe if we had visited, she’d have introduced us to Lewis, who knows?’

  ‘Maybe,’ replies Rose, looking around at the living room in that way we’ve both been doing for the last few days – like she can’t really believe that she’s here now, and that she’s here because our mother isn’t.

  It’s weird – the whole cottage is dominated by Mum; by her fragrance and her taste and her history. It’s there in every little ornament, every framed picture on the walls, every book on the shelves, every singed cake tin in the kitchen. She’s everywhere – but she’s nowhere.

  ‘I think,’ Rose continues, ‘that perhaps she liked having him to herself. We were both so tied up in our own problems, and we did that thing kids do. That thing where we don’t really imagine our parents having lives of their own, outside of us. So perhaps she enjoyed having a whole side to her existence that we weren’t involved in.

  ‘She told Joe a bit about him, though – said he moved to the village about five years ago. He’s basically winding down his business and decided to go into semi-retirement here. Anyway, he’s looked after her, hasn’t he? And helped her with all this. He’s been a better friend to her than we were, and we should be grateful. Though I’m still a bit disappointed they weren’t secretly bonking.’

  ‘Yuk,’ I reply, screwing my eyes up in disgust. That’s something I really don’t want to picture, no matter how efficient Lewis’s index-making skills are.

  ‘So,’ Rose says, gazing at Princess Diana’s slightly chipped face, ‘are we ready for the next one, do you think? I know we both needed some time off last night, but we might as well get on with it now. I’d ask how many more to go, but I’m guessing that’s obvious.’

  ‘I don’t think anything about this is obvious,’ I reply. ‘She may have decided to skip some letters because they were awkward, or invented new ones purely to amuse herself. I think, though, that there are only a few left that we can do here – looks as though we’re set to be on the move round about L.’

  ‘She’s sending us to ell?’ Rose asks, deliberately mispronouncing it.

  ‘Probably. She’ll be there with a diamond-studded pitch-fork, singing “Burn Baby Burn” and pelting us with garden gnomes made of cow pats … anyway. F is for Forgiveness, then. If you think you’re up to it?’

  Rose nods, and makes a ‘move-it-along’ gesture with her hands, like she’s directing traffic and I’m illegally parked. She’s getting tougher as this thing progresses, which may or may not be a good thing – I suppose it depends on who’s on the receiving end of the toughness. I, on the other hand, feel as if I’m getting softer – more vulnerable, and more exposed. Being around Rose is like being emotionally exfoliated.

  ‘Okay … here we go …’ I say, fishing around in the box until I find the right packages. One is a big padded envelope, stuffed full of god-knows-what, with ‘open me second, for F’s sake’ written on the side in our mother’s handwriting. I put it to one side, and pick up the other.

  It’s a plastic bag – an ancient carrier from a shop that no longer exists – with a big letter F scrawled on the side. I scrunch it up and squeeze it, as though it’s a Christmas gift and I’m trying to figure out what’s inside.

  ‘Is it a pony?’ asks Rose, sarcastically. ‘Please tell me it’s a pony!’

  I ignore her, and use my nails to unpick the knot that’s been tied with the carrier bag’s handles. Once I’ve done it, and broken a nail in the process, I empty the contents on the floor, where they scatter and clatter on the parquet. We both look down, a bit befuddled. It’s a big mess of old-fashioned cassette tapes – C60s and C90s, some of them with writing on the paper stickers on the sides, some of them clear.

  I root through them until I find a tape that looks a bit newer than the rest. Written on the side, in olde-worlde cursive script, are the words ‘Play Me!’

  ‘Wow,’ says Rose, leaning down to get a better look. ‘That’s a bit Alice in Wonderland, isn’t it? I didn’t even know they still made cassette tapes … Joe wouldn’t know what they were for. How are we going to listen to it? Even my car isn’t so old it has a tape deck.�
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  ‘Never fear, Lewis is here …’ I reply, reaching back into the box and hefting out an old machine. It’s ancient, and I just about recognise it from our childhood. It’s long and flat, and has a lift-up lid where you slide in the tapes, and big clunky rectangular buttons that only let you record, play, erase, and go backwards and forwards.

  It was probably once the cutting edge of technology, but now it looks like something out of one of those really dated science-fiction programmes – like the 1970s version of The Future.

  I look at Rose, and she just nods. I can tell she’s nervous about what we’re going to hear, about our mother’s voice floating, disembodied, through the room, and so am I.

  I slide the cassette in, close the lid shut with a clunk, and press ‘play’.

  Chapter 37

  Andrea: F is for Forgiveness

  ‘Darlings! I’ve gone old school – what do you think? Just thought I’d mix it up a bit. Or mix tape it up a bit, ha ha! I’m sure you’re sick of seeing my ugly mug on the TV screen – goodness knows the general public was, by the time Penny Peabody got killed in that tragic boating accident, poor love.

  ‘Anyway, I came across this old thing the other day, and thought it would be fun to record something for you. I’ve tested it out, and the quality is awful – but sadly I don’t have a soundman around to fix it for me, so you’ll just have to make do. Perhaps the crackling and echoing will add to the atmos – your mother’s ghostly voice, rising up from the Great Beyond!

  ‘Do you remember using this thing, actually? It seemed very cutting edge at the time, didn’t it? I used it for work sometimes, so I could listen back to myself when I’d rehearsed lines for auditions – but we also used it together.

  ‘We had a lot of giggles making recordings of us all singing, or doing little skits, and Poppy, there was one time when you were about eight, when you insisted on reading out “The Owl and the Pussycat”? But you always used to get the first few lines mixed up, and said, very seriously, that they went to pee in a beautiful sea-green boat, instead of the other way round! You were very angry with me for laughing, I seem to remember, your little face all screwed up with indignation.

  ‘I haven’t been able to find many of those recordings, which is a great pity – not only because I’d like to pass them on to you two, but because I would love nothing better right now than to sit here at night, in my old age, and listen to them. It would be wonderful to hear your childish voices and your innocent giggles filling these rooms again, keeping me company and making me smile. Happier times, so full of laughter.

  ‘I have a suspicion, Rose, that you taped over them all during that phase where you borrowed albums off your friends and recorded them. All those precious childhood sounds, wiped out for the sake of A-ha and Paula Abdul! There is no justice in the world!

  ‘I found some of your old compilation tapes, though, which I’ve left in the bag for you – even the bag is an antique, from that little dress shop I used to take you to, remember? When you needed something special for a frightfully important event – school discos and the like – we’d go there and you were allowed to choose what you liked. I know the selection wasn’t great, and you’d have preferred Top Shop but, being honest, girls, I only went there for one reason – they let me pay on tick and spread the cost out over the year!

  ‘It’s long gone now – I suppose everybody has credit cards these days instead. Anyway. I think the bag is a nice reminder, although goodness knows why I still have it. Enjoy the tapes as well – although I have to say I think some of your musical choices were a bit dubious. I enjoyed the rock history phase where you got into Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell well enough, but I have to draw the line at New Kids on the Block.

  ‘Right, I’m sure I’ve waffled on enough, and I’m feeling a tad on the tired side today, so I’ll get to the point. I hope you enjoyed Elvis, and the cassette tapes, but I’m afraid this next one won’t be a huge amount of fun. Because F is for Forgiveness, girls – and that is a tough nut to crack.

  ‘The older you get, you know, the more you realise how important forgiveness is. I’ve learned to forgive certain people certain things – like you two, for being so obstinate all this time; and your father, for things that darkened my life way back when; even you, Poppy, for stealing that lovely little tobacco tin from the cabinet in the Posh Room – that belonged to my grandfather, by the way, so please take care of it.

  ‘Forgiveness is always painted as a frightfully selfless act – full of virtue and nobility. But, truth be told, forgiveness is just as important for our own sanity as it is for the people we are so nobly forgiving. Holding on to old bitterness, to anger, to resentment – well, it drives you just a little bit mad, doesn’t it? I’d suggest, if I may be so bold, that both of you are shining examples of that.

  ‘Rose, you were never able to forgive Poppy for what she did – and Poppy, I don’t think you’ve ever forgiven yourself. Or forgiven Rose for shutting you out of her life. You two darling girls, who should be so close, have built up this enormous gap between your lives, and filled it all up with anger.

  ‘There does come a point, though, where you really have to let go – because if you don’t, all that resentment will eat you up. Like a plague of emotional locusts, it’ll strip the flesh from your bones, and leave you bare and exposed and brittle. Forgiving someone doesn’t just save them – it can save you as well.

  ‘So, this is your next task, and this one is aimed mainly at Rose – although Poppy, you have a big part to play. After the unpleasant events of that dreadful party to see in the new millennium, Poppy came back here in all kinds of pieces. Rose, you had your own ordeal to cope with. I was stuck in the middle, trying to mediate and getting nowhere. I look back now and wonder what else I could have done – if there is anything I could have said or written or yelled to stop what came next. If I could somehow have been a better mother, and sorted it all out for you?

  ‘But of course that’s pointless, and only serves to make me feel guilty – which I’ve decided not to allow. I did my best, and that’s all I could do. I’ve begged you girls not to feel guilty about any of this, so I won’t impose it on myself either.

  ‘Back then, though, Poppy, you were desperate to make it up to your sister. To beg her forgiveness. To explain what had happened, and why it happened, and tell her how sorry you were. I saw you, for months on end, desperately making phone calls that were never answered, sending texts that were ignored, firing off emails that bounced back. That’s when you started writing the letters – big, long, old-fashioned letters.

  ‘You scribbled away in that big A4 notepad, filling pages and pages with your scrawl, bundling them into envelopes and sending them off to your sister. Every time I saw you lick a stamp, you had this awful, pathetic, hopeful look on your face – like this would be the one that made the difference. That this would be the one that made it right.

  ‘The fact that they were all returned, unopened, devastated you – but you carried on writing them, for such a long time. Definitely while you were here, and I think while you were in London, messing up that publishing job.

  ‘Every one – every single one – came back. It got to the point where the postman thought we were all mad, and I was starting to agree. I even wondered – because I do have a dramatic turn of mind, darlings, just in case you hadn’t noticed – if Gareth had been intercepting them, keeping them from you somehow, Rose.

  ‘But no – because when I asked, you simply said that you didn’t want to hear anything that Poppy had to say. I know, of course, that it was your way of coping. Your way of dealing with it all – but it was cruel, my love. I suppose it was easier for you to just blame her – to ignore any of her pleas, to block out any defence, and cast her as the villain of the piece. It allowed you to take Gareth back, and plan a wedding, and build a life with him – because while it was all Poppy’s fault, it couldn’t be his, could it?

  ‘Obviously, that wedding – that marriage – was a ter
rible mistake, and the only good thing to come out of it was Joe, bless him. But I also think that refusing to ever read those letters was a mistake, too.

  ‘Once you decided to move down to London again, Poppy, I know you bagged them all up in a big black bin liner and threw them away. You were making a fresh start, and that was part of your process. But being the sneaky old coot that I am, I kept them – you always were lazy, so that’ll teach you to leave putting the bins out to me! I kept them, tucked them away in the attic in the hope that, one day, Rose would finally be ready to read them.

  ‘She never was, but recently, I read them.

  ‘I should probably apologise for this invasion of your privacy, but I don’t think I can. I’m a dying old lady and I have waived all claims on good behaviour.

  ‘They were heartbreaking, those letters – all that pain and all that need, ignored and then cast aside. And I was furious – at him, mainly, but also at all of us, for letting this go on for so long. Now I can only hope that Rose might finally be willing to hear what you had to say to her, this sister who loves you so much.

  ‘I can imagine, my loves, that you are both having a giddy fit right about now – Rose, at the thought of reopening these old wounds, and daring to entertain the possibility that you also played a part in this mess. And Poppy, I know, this will be a shock – you’re probably very cross, and very unhappy at being asked to do this.

  ‘Because I am asking – not telling. I have chosen some of those letters – not all of them, there were so many, and forgive me for being critical, but they were a little on the repetitive side, sweetie! – and I’ve put them in the padded envelope. Now, Poppy, this is up to you – I might have invaded your privacy by reading them, but now it’s your decision whether you choose to let Rose read them as well.