Jo nodded. Her dad had grown runner beans; she remembered her mum making her a wigwam in the garden out of the bean poles. She followed Eve down some stone steps to a wooden door, where Eve pushed the ivy aside and opened the door with a new-looking key. ‘First rule of squatting,’ she smiled. ‘Fit your own locks.’ The door opened into a dank, low-ceilinged room with a hole in the floorboards that must have been four feet across. ‘Mind where you tread.’ Eve flicked a switch as she took Jo’s hand and pulled her inside. An un-shaded light bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting a sickly light over the room.
‘How come there’s electricity?’
‘Oh, it’s perfectly legal. We just had a meter reading and got it turned back on. They’re not allowed to refuse to connect services just because you’re squatting. Some people tap into the meter and steal the electricity, but we don’t think you should do that unless you absolutely have to do. Although we did give a false name for the bills.’ She giggled. ‘Just in case. Anyway’ – she gestured with her arm – ‘this is it, home, sweet home.’
Jo could feel the cold air on her face as she picked her way across the rotting floorboards. The smell of damp was overwhelming. There was an orange fungus growing on the walls and the ceiling had collapsed in one corner, leaving a hole where the joists showed through and a pile of rubble on the floor beneath it. She shivered; God, it was cold in here. That shop doorway was starting to seem attractive compared with this mouldering basement. What had she done, coming here? Eve didn’t seem the sort of person who would live somewhere like this. But then they went up some stairs and through another door into a large, bright hallway. The few remaining black-and-white tiles on the hall floor were cracked and broken, but you could see it must have once been quite impressive – it reminded her of Eaton Place on Upstairs, Downstairs. A huge wardrobe had been pulled across the front door, which had planks of wood nailed across it anyway. Eve took off her coat, revealing a long, emerald-green skirt with a man’s white shirt belted over the top. The black-velvet choker around her neck completed the romantic, gypsy look. She wore DMs, too; Jo was glad she’d worn her own DMs and not the red platform boots with the black stripe down the side; she’d been so tempted to bring them, but they took up too much space and anyway, they hurt her feet, so they’d gone in the jumble with the rest of her clothes.
‘This is the living room,’ Eve said, parting what looked at first like a bead curtain, but which, when you looked properly, turned out to be made entirely of tiny shells.
Jo took hold of one of the curtain strands and ran her fingers along its knobbly length. ‘There must be hundreds of shells here. I bet it would take ages to thread them all onto strings like this.’
Eve nodded. ‘It did, but I think it’s rather pretty, don’t you? Definitely worth the effort.’
‘You made this?’
‘Created with my own fair hands.’ Each individual shell had been painted in graduating shades of yellow through to a deep, russety orange, and they’d been strung so that, when you looked at the whole thing together, it resembled the flames of a bonfire. ‘It’s fab. It must be brilliant to be able to make stuff like that. To create something of your own.’
Eve smiled. ‘I make loads of things – jewellery, bags, scarves, candles. It all sells well at the markets, especially in the summer. I’ve always loved making things, ever since I was a kid. I used to make everything they did on Blue Peter. Drove my mum loopy.’
Jo smiled and stepped through the curtain into the living room. The floorboards were bare here as well, but they looked dry and in good condition, and with the squares of carpet here and there it felt almost cosy. She walked over to the fireplace and looked into the mirror that was propped up on a wooden fire surround. What a state she looked. Her hair was greasy and there were dark smudges under her eyes. She’d barely thought about her appearance for the last couple of weeks, but Eve was so pretty she felt dull in comparison.
In the fireplace stood a black iron grate in which were the remains of a fire – a few burnt-out lumps of coal, some charred wood and a lot of ash. To one side was an old tea chest full of wood and newspaper and with a guitar resting against it, and on the other, a Calor gas heater, which Eve managed to light on the third attempt, filling the room with the smell of Calor gas. Eve flopped onto the sagging sofa in front of the huge bay window, which had one cracked pane with a criss-cross of black tape holding it together, and old-fashioned wooden shutters on either side. Jo had always wanted to live in a house with shutters, ever since her mum used to read her ‘The Night Before Christmas’ in a whispery, excited voice: . . . Away to the window I flew like a flash tore open the shutters and threw up the sash . . .
‘It’s not. . . what I expected. You know, for a squat.’
‘There’s no need to live in squalor, not unless you have to.’ Eve adjusted the brightly coloured scarves and shawls draped over the back of the sofa so that they covered the worn bits. ‘The addicts who lived next door to us in St Leonards; they lived in squalor, but I suppose if you’re out of it half the time . . .’
Jo nodded. Her mum had been ‘out of it half the time’. They hadn’t lived in squalor, but things had changed. Her mum still wiped the kitchen table, ran the carpet sweeper over the living-room floor and cleaned the loo, but it was Jo who’d kept the place generally clean and tidy for the last couple of years. Her mum still cooked, but it was usually beefburgers or sausages with beans or chips. Now and again, she’d have a good day and fill the freezer with Bolognese sauce and chicken casserole. But a day’s proper cooking always meant she’d start drinking earlier because she felt she deserved a ‘reward’, and by the time Coronation Street came on she’d be slurring her words. It seemed like a completely different lifetime when they’d all lived in a nice house and her mum and dad had given dinner parties where there would be white wine in the fridge, gin and tonics before the meal and brandies afterwards. She liked the smell of alcohol on her parents’ breath when they came up to tuck her in; it meant nice things, men in smart jackets, women wearing perfume and bracelets, flowers in the dining room and leftover pudding in the fridge the next day. After her father left, her mother still had a gin and tonic before dinner, and on Sundays, she’d buy a bottle of Blue Nun and even let Jo have half a glass with Sunday lunch. Later, when Jo was fourteen, she was allowed a glass of sherry or a Martini and lemonade on Friday nights, which became Pizza Night. They’d buy cheese and tomato pizzas from Bejam and pep them up with olives and capers and little bits of ham. There was no telly on Friday nights – it was their night for talking, her mum said, for spending time together. They’d sit in the kitchen with the cassette player between them on the table, singing along to Bonnie Rairt or Joni Mitchell, and they’d be having a really nice time, then something would change very suddenly, as though her mother had become a different person. One night, her mum had been crying and trying to sing at the same time, the tears running down her face and twisting her mouth out of shape. Jo didn’t want to have to deal with it, so she said she was going to bed. Her mum grabbed her wrist. ‘Not yet, Jo-Jo. Don’t go yet.’ Her eyes were glazed and her hair was a tangled mess from where she kept running her hands through it. ‘You listen to me, Jo-Jo.’ She was slurring her words. She wiped the tears with the back of her hand, streaking her face with mascara, but then she seemed to forget what she was going to say. Her upper body swayed as she tried to pour more sherry from an empty bottle. ‘Shit shit shit. Where’s that other bottle? Sure I had another bottle.’
‘You’ve already drunk it, Mum,’ Jo said.
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re trying to make out I drink too much, aren’t you? And I don’t appreciate it, Joanna, I really don’t.’ She picked up the empty bottle again and poured several drips into her glass. ‘I think it’s time you went to bed, young lady.’
‘I know. I just said I was going to bed, but you said—’
Her m um banged her hand down hard on the table, making the glass
es jump and rattle. ‘Don’t try to be smart with me, missy.’
‘I wasn’t, I . . .’ But she stopped because her mum was crying again.
‘Jo?’ Eve’s voice broke in and rescued her from the memory.
‘Sorry, I was miles away.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She followed Eve up two flights of stairs and along a dingy passageway where the plaster was bulging in some places and coming off the walls in others. Most of the rooms on the top floor were unused. In one, there was nothing but a dressmaker’s dummy and a grubby brown armchair with straw spilling out of a tear in the seat, in another, a couple of empty suitcases and some boxes of old toys. ‘Oh wow.’ Jo walked across the room. ‘Spirograph, Monopoly, Beetle Drive – I used to have all these.’ She rummaged in the box. ‘Oh look, a Tressy Doll!’ She fished the doll out, pressed the burton in its back and tugged on a section of hair, which then lengthened, appearing to ‘grow’ from the top of its head as if by magic. She remembered the advert on television: Tressy from Ideal; her hair grows! Granny Pawley had bought it for her that first Christmas after her dad left, the one where her mum hardly stopped crying. Jo had been thrilled with the doll, especially as it came with its own brush, comb and curlers. But when she showed her mum how the hair could change from a neat bob to flowing tresses at the press of a button, her mum had wrinkled her nose. ‘Ugh. Take it away, Jo-Jo, it’s creepy.’
‘This is my work room.’ Eve opened the door to a large room with two tall, uncurtained windows that let in lots of light. ‘It’s where I make my jewellery and suchlike – things we can sell at markets and summer fayres – brings a bit of money in.’
Along the wall under the windows were two pasting tables set up as a work bench and a pain-spattered step-stool. This was a treasure trove; there were different types of crystals, shells, bits of coloured glass, beads, feathers, squares of leather, paints, dyes, glues – Jo had never seen anything like it. She took a piece of clear crystal and held it up to the light, then she sported some coloured feathers. She picked one up and brushed its soft fronds against her cheek. ‘What are these for?’
‘I’m making a dream-catcher,’ Eve said. ‘It’s nearly finished – look.’
It was a beautiful thing, a tea-plate-sized wooden hoop with an intricate network of purple threads woven across it like a spider’s web and decorated with tiny silver beads that caught the light; red and purple gull’s feathers hung down on silver cords, weighted with more silver beads at the end. ‘Tell you what, you can have this one when it’s finished, if you like.’
‘Really? Wow, thanks.’
She followed Eve back along the passage past a miniature flight of five stairs leading to a little square door, which led to a storage cupboard. On the next floor down, Eve pointed to various doors. ’Bathroom on the left. A bit ancient but everything works. We use an immersion heater for hot water, but it’s expensive, so we try to be careful. That’s my and Scott’s room, and the one right at the end next to the stairs, that’s the thinking room – it’s got windows all round and you can see the sea. And this’ – she flung open the door to an enormous, high-ceilinged, bay-windowed room – ‘is yours.’
She felt a twinge of disappointment. The floor was strewn with empty beer cans and newspapers – mainly the Hastings Observer and the Sun. A grubby orange sleeping bag had been thrown across a couple of wooden pallets; next to it was an overflowing pub ashtray. The room smelt faintly of feet.
‘Oh my giddy aunt,’ Eve said, ‘I completely forgot. We had another friend staying recently, and I haven’t been in here since he left. Elliot – he’s an actor. An absolute sweetie but a filthy pig to have around the house. He got a part in Z Cars.’
Something about the way Eve talked made Jo smile. She hadn’t heard anyone talking about giddy aunts since Granny Pawley caught her trying to hide the cat under the bedclothes. Eve was smiling too, but quizzically, as though waiting for Jo to explain, but she couldn’t. Eve was just. . . funny. The room, though; the room was disgusting. Could she realistically tolerate living in this smelly, male-haunted space? But there was something about the way Eve said another friend that made her feel comfortable, as though she already belonged here.
‘It’s a good house.’ Eve moved around the room, stuffing papers and beer cans into a black rubbish sack. ‘But the neighbours are a bit square – they called the police when they saw us moving in, so we keep ourselves to ourselves now. The police got in touch with the owner, so he knows we’re here, and he said that, as long as we look after the place and don’t cause any trouble, we can stay until he’s ready to sell it.’
‘When do you think he’ll want to sell it?’ Jo was already worrying about when she might have to leave.
‘I don’t know. He’s got a few other houses, I think, and he lives abroad now anyway, so he’s not in a hurry. He’d have to do it up and sort out the damp in the basement, and that’ll cost a fortune so it’ll probably be yonks before he gets round to it. And all the time we’re living here, it’s being heated and no one’s going to break in and mess the place up.’
It was lovely listening to Eve talk, no matter what she was saying. She had the sort of voice that was so clear you could hear every single, separate word. Jo had a sudden flash of memory: her mum, back in the days when she still laughed and sang, sitting at the piano wearing a pale lemon jumper and with a matching cardigan slung over her shoulders. They’d been to the pictures to see The Sound of Music, and now her mum kept singing all the songs. ’Come on, Joanna-Pianna,’ she said, pearly-pink-tipped fingers poised over the keys. ’Let’s see what we can do. Let’s start at the very beginning, she sang, trying to sound like Julie Andrews. A very good place to start...’
Once more, it struck Jo painfully and powerfully that she would never hear her mother’s voice again, ever. How could that be possible?
‘Right, that’s a bit more like it.’ Eve tied up the rubbish bag she’d just filled and surveyed the room. ‘Mind you . . .’ She picked up the sleeping bag between her thumb and forefinger and held it away from her like it was covered in dog shit. ‘You absolutely can’t sleep in this. There’s a clean one in our room, and extra blankets, too. You’ll be snug as a bug in a rug.’
Jo smiled. Every time Eve opened her mouth, she reminded Jo of her mum or of Granny Pawley.
‘At some point we’ll need to talk about practical matters, of course.’
‘I don’t have much money left, but I’m sure I can get a job soon. I —’
‘Tomorrow.’ Eve waved her hands around as if she was shooing the words out of the window. ‘We’ll talk about the boring part tomorrow. Scott’ll be back later. He’s working in the hotels at the moment – kitchen porter. He started training as a teacher but he’s a musician really, so he’s concentrating on that now. He does a bit of busking and he’s got a couple of gigs over the weekend. Once the summer comes, the busking goes really well, and there are the summer fayres, too, so there are plenty of ways to make a few pounds.’ She started to walk towards the door. ‘Come and talk to me while I make us some dinner.’
The kitchen was enormous with a rickety wooden table in the middle. A floor-to-ceiling cupboard in one alcove was painted a pale yellowy-brown, like the Wimpy Bar French mustard that Rob said was really cat poo. The tiles behind the sink were a similar colour and mostly cracked or broken, as were those in the large recess cut into the chimney breast. ‘Did this use to be a fireplace?’ Jo looked up at the brickwork. ‘It’s bigger than me!’
‘Probably. Humungous, isn’t it? Makes a brilliant cooking area.’
On one side, tucked into the recess, was a red-topped Formica table with two rusty-looking Baby Belling cookers resting on it; on the other, an enamel-topped table served as a work surface. There was an old leatherette armchair to the side of the fireplace and a couple of fire-side chairs on the opposite wall near another Calor gas heater. The room reminded her of Granny Pawley’s dinette. She settled herself in the armchair and watched while E
ve took tomatoes, onions and mushrooms from a cardboard box under one of the tables, and then set to work chopping and slicing. Jo was mesmerised as she watched Eve deftly peeling the onions and then chopping them in no time before starting on the mushrooms, and lastly the tomatoes. It was as though there was no effort involved; it would have taken Jo ages to do the same thing, but Eve just made a few smooth, graceful movements and, bingo, the job was done. Eve opened the window. ‘Here.’ She tossed Jo the pack of Cheddar cheese she’d taken from the windowsill. ‘You could grate that and open a tin of beans if you like. We haven’t got a fridge yet, but it doesn’t matter this time of year. I’m sure we’ll find one before the weather turns warmer.’
While Jo grated the cheese, she watched as Eve fried the onions, mushrooms and tomatoes and tipped them into a pie dish. Then she whisked up the eggs and poured them in as well, sprinkled cheese over the top and put the whole thing in the Baby Belling. ‘There,’ she said. ‘An oven omelette. Stick those beans in a pan and then we can relax.’ Jo emptied the beans into a saucepan and was about to throw the can away when Eve grabbed it and peered inside. ‘Wait,’ she said. Then she nodded. ‘Oh, that’s okay. You have to leave at least three beans in the tin, you know. One would be lonely, and two might fight. So it must be three.’ She looked up at Jo and grinned. ‘Always three.’
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
After they’d eaten, Jo borrowed Eve’s key and popped out for cigarettes. She could smell the sea and, although it was almost dark now, she had a sudden yearning to see and hear the waves, so she took a detour along the coast road where the wind coming in off the Channel made it feel even colder. A few spots of rain hit her face. Hastings was very different to Newquay. It was a pebble beach for a start, and it sloped down to the sea in stages, like shelves. The beach in Newquay was sandy and flat and wide, whereas this was divided by wooden groynes at regular intervals all the way along to the pier, giving the impression of many smaller beaches.
The Secrets We Left Behind Page 9
