Milo blocked out her voice and kept going. He had to see Gran and he had to find out what was going on.
Gran sat in her armchair by the window, her head dropped down to her chin.
Milo knelt down on the floor beside her and took her hand. She winced. He looked closer and saw that there were some bruises along her wrists. A sick feeling settled in the pit of his stomach.
‘How did this happen, Gran?’
She tried to open her eyes but her head just bobbed back down to her chest. He’d never seen her this sleepy at four in the afternoon.
Milo put Hamlet down on Gran’s bed and went to get Gran’s pad and pencil and placed it on her lap.
‘Here, Gran, write down what happened.’ He nudged her gently to see if he could wake her.
Gran opened her eyes for a second, tried to hold the pencil with her fingers but she couldn’t grip. She let it drop to the floor.
‘It’s okay, Gran,’ he said, putting his arms around her shoulders and pulling her in close. Gran had always been skinny but now her bones poked out of her skin, he could feel them through his jumper. ‘It’s okay,’ he said again, breathing in the smell of apricots on her neck. ‘I’ve brought Hamlet for you, and Gramps’s bagpipes.’
He waited for her to respond but she didn’t say anything.
‘Let me make you a cup of tea, Gran. And you can have some shortbread, that will wake you up.’
Milo had found a second-hand travel kettle in the RSPCA shop and when he said he couldn’t afford it, the woman behind the counter agreed to swap it for the torch Dad had given him last Christmas. Then he’d packed up Gran’s tartan mug and some tea bags and some milk and bought a packet of shortbread from Poundland, which didn’t look very nice but it was better than nothing and he’d brought it all to Gran’s room and set up a little tea station for her. There was something else he’d added to the tea station: a day-by-day pill box that he’d found at Boots. As he looked down at the tray, he noticed something strange.
Someone had added two pills to every day, those green and white pills the doctor prescribed for when Gran had trouble sleeping, for when she needed to be calmed down. Gran hated how those pills made her feel so she wouldn’t have put them there. She’d taken all the pills for today so if whoever it was had added the sleeping pills to today’s pile, she would have taken those too, probably without realising. No wonder she was so out of it.
Milo’s mind raced ahead. That explained why the whole home was quiet so early. Nurse Thornhill must have given those pills to all the old people.
He poked the green and white pills out of the rest of the week and went to flush them down the loo and then came back and kissed Gran on the forehead.
‘Don’t worry, Gran,’ he whispered into her hair. ‘I’ll figure out a way to get you out of here.’ He placed a blanket over her knees, picked up Hamlet and the bagpipes and slipped out of her room.
18
SANDY
‘It’s past visiting hour,’ said Nurse Thornhill standing on the doorstep of Forget Me Not.
Sandy felt like she was back at school, hauled up in front of Mrs Horn, her headmistress. If you don’t pull your finger out, Sandy, you’ll end up on the dole. She hadn’t been so wrong.
‘I know.’ Sandy bit at the nail on her little finger. ‘I know. I just thought that maybe Milo had come to see his gran. Could I…’ Sandy craned her neck and looked over Nurse Thornhill’s shoulder.
Nurse Thornhill shifted her body to block Sandy’s view. Amazing how much space such a skinny woman could take up.
‘Your son isn’t here.’
‘But you don’t understand. Milo, he’s…’
What could she say? That her nine-year-old son was so upset with her that he’d run out into the dark streets on his own? That he’d rather Sandy had left and that his dad had stayed? And that the only person besides his dad who made him happy was his gran, so this was where he’d come?
‘I understand that it can be distressing,’ said Nurse Thornhill, smiling through her white teeth. ‘Getting used to a loved one no longer being at home is a phase experienced by all our clients.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘Which is why it’s important to establish boundaries.’ She paused. ‘Why don’t you come back in the morning?’ Then she leant forward and lowered her voice. ‘And perhaps you can bring along the fees you owe.’
Nurse Thornhill shut the door before Sandy had the time to reply.
Sandy went and stood on the pavement and looked up at the windows. She thought she saw Lou’s face leaning in towards the glass. This was for the best, that’s what she’d told herself. Lou needed proper help. But now, with Milo so upset, Sandy wasn’t so sure any more.
She leant against the railings outside Forget Me Not. The metal bars pushed through her beautician’s coat into the soft flesh of her shoulders. She’d put the coat on for Gina, her last client. The rest of the time she preferred the comfort of her tracksuit bottoms and sweatshirt. She’d been proud of her uniform once, how professional it made her look; You look like a doctor, Andy said, kissing her and lifting her off the ground. Underneath, she wore nothing more than her bra and her suck-in pants, anything else added bulk. Women who visited the salon wanted to be treated by someone with a good figure, who looked after herself. Someone who kept her husband.
Sandy took a packet of cigarettes out of her pocket. She only allowed herself to smoke outside the house.
Her head ached at the mess.
Milo, so angry with her.
Gina, abandoned in the shed, half-plucked.
And goodness knows what the new lodger thought, Milo bursting in on him like that. She needed Al to stay. A month’s rent and she might be able to persuade the bank that she could keep up with the mortgage payments. And she had to pay the fees for Forget Me Not before Nurse Thornhill piled on the interest.
Sandy blew smoke up at the clouds and cursed at the moon. Bloody Andy, leaving her to deal with all this by herself. She hoped the baby he had with his Tart turned into a demon from hell.
‘Good evening.’ A man nodded at Sandy and skipped down the steps of Forget Me Not, stumbling on the last one.
He straightened up and looked at the moon. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ he asked.
Sandy shrugged and stubbed out her cigarette. The man towered over her. She looked down at her trainers; when had she given up wearing heels?
A cloud swept across the moon. The sky ripped open and drops of rain fell on Sandy’s bare forearms. Small, icy darts. Milo struggled to see in the rain, like the telly when it’s fuzzy, he explained to her. The static swallowed up the sounds he relied on to get his bearings.
The man stood in front of Sandy and bowed his head towards her. ‘Your lips, they are blue.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You are cold.’ He took off a green waterproof, the kind you can scrunch up and fold into a neat pocket. Sandy had seen them in Poundland, stacked up in neon colours. ‘Have this.’ He held out it out to her.
‘No, really…’
‘I insist.’
Sandy felt the rain on her forehead. There’d been a time when she wouldn’t have left the house without an umbrella, horrified at the thought of her carefully straightened hair turning to frizz. But since the summer she’d cancelled three appointments at Slipton Highlights. She couldn’t face the women there, shooting glances at each other in the mirrors when they thought she wasn’t looking.
‘A lady must keep dry,’ he said.
He had huge brown eyes that took over his face and the kind of eyelashes Sandy’s clients would die for.
Sandy took the green nylon waterproof, squeezed it over her beautician’s coat and lifted the hood over her hair. A man giving her his coat – when had Andy last done that?
The man was already heading down the road when Sandy called after him: ‘How will I get it back to you?’
‘No need,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘It is a gift.’
The rain hammered down as Sandy
turned to go. She didn’t know where else to look but she couldn’t go home until she’d found Milo.
As she turned the corner onto the high street, Gina’s red Mercedes drove past, white headlights on full beam. The car crashed through a puddle, leaving Sandy behind, drenched.
19
TRIPI
Tripi sat on the bench shivering, looking into the canal. Maybe he shouldn’t have given away his waterproof, but the woman looked so sad he hadn’t been able to help himself.
For a moment, he saw Ayishah’s face in the ripples of the watery moon, like the school photograph he had of her, except in the ripples her face was alive. She smiled at him like she had on that last day when they thought they’d made it. An hour from the Turkish border, an hour from freedom. Everything will be right as rain, she’d said.
Tripi bit into the salmon sandwich he’d taken from the nursing home. They put nice food out on visitors’ days. Nurse Thornhill had instructed Tripi to pack away the cakes and sandwiches the moment the guests left. They’re a sneaky lot, she told him, nodding at the old people in the lounge. Leave the things out for a second, and they’ll be at them like vultures.
As Tripi ate his sandwich, he took out the pocket dictionary from Ayishah’s backpack and scanned down the definitions for vulture. The first two entries described the big bird of prey he knew from back home: huge shoulders under a black cloak of feathers, a sharp, curved beak. But it was the third definition that made him think of Nurse Thornhill: a person or thing that preys, especially greedily or unscrupulously, and then he looked up the strange word with all the vowels: unscrupulously: unrestrained by conscience. He thought that Nurse Thornhill must have got her vocabulary wrong.
When she wasn’t looking, he’d wrapped a few of the sandwiches in paper napkins and brought them to Mrs Moon. He hadn’t seen her eat anything since she’d arrived.
Tripi closed the dictionary and stroked the front cover. It was Ayishah’s. She loved to learn new words and phrases; she wrote them in the front cover and in the blank spaces at the top of the pages. They had a competition for who could find the most interesting English sayings.
‘My teacher told me my work was tickety-boo,’ she said. She loved that phrase: it meant that everything was fine. ‘When we’re in England, everything will be tickety-boo.’ Tripi remembered her brown eyes shining and how he worried that he would not be able to protect her from all the men who would fall in love with her.
He looked back into the water, searching for Ayishah, but this time he saw the face of the little boy with the focused eyes, his skin as pale as the moon.
Tripi turned round and looked at the boy holding – could it be? – a pig under his arm. And bagpipes, that funny instrument from Scotland.
Perhaps the cold had frozen Tripi’s brain. He blinked and looked again but the boy was still there with his pig and his bagpipes.
And then Tripi realised that Little Milo was crying: those thick drops that stream down children’s cheeks. Ayishah had only ever cried once. Not when their parents left when she was ten and Tripi twenty-two. Not when she came home from school one day and told him how her best friend had not turned up for registration and that the teacher said she was never coming back. She had cried when she did not come first in an English test at school; she had been sure The Queen would find out and be disappointed in her.
Milo sniffed. ‘Can I sit on your bench?’
Tripi laughed. ‘It’s everyone’s bench.’
Milo sat down, put the bagpipes in a heap at his feet and rubbed one of the pig’s ears.
‘Shouldn’t you be at home?’ asked Tripi.
Milo shook his head.
‘But your parents will be worried.’
‘No, they won’t.’
‘But they must be.’ Tripi thought of Ayishah and how he did not like her being out in the streets at night, especially in those last few months before they left. Although there was no war in Slipton, this little Milo was younger than Ayishah.
Milo rubbed his cheeks with the back of his hand. ‘Dad’s gone and Mum’s only worried about money and her stupid salon and there’s something wrong with Gran and I don’t trust Nurse Thornhill, I don’t think she’s looking after the old people properly.’
Like Ayishah, Tripi thought, this little boy sees too much.
‘Your gran would not want you to be out here in the dark,’ he said.
Milo shifted his head and searched Tripi’s face. ‘But you’re out here, and you’re okay.’
Tripi shook his head. ‘I need to find a house, otherwise I cannot keep my job. And it is not okay here, it is cold.’ He coughed and pointed at his chest.
Milo sniffed again. Tripi gave him his handkerchief and Milo blew hard.
‘I thought only old people had hankies like these,’ said Milo, handing it back soggy and scrunched up.
‘My father thought that having a linen handkerchief was the sign of being a gentleman.’ Who knows when you might need to wipe away a girl’s tears, he’d said.
From Milo’s crinkled nose, Tripi guessed that the boy did not yet see girls as people to whom he might lend his handkerchief.
‘I know a house where you could live, it’s pink.’
‘A house?’
‘Yes, a house on the corner of the high street.’
‘It must be expensive to live on the high street.’
Milo shook his head. ‘It’d be free.’
Tripi’s wrinkled his brow as he translated the word to make sure he had understood it properly.
‘Free? I do not understand…’
‘I heard it on Gran’s radio. If no one lives in a house for ages and ages, you can claim squatter’s rights. I walk past the house every day on the way to school and Big Mike, the guy who used to live there, hasn’t been back for over a year.’
‘What is a “squatter”?’
Milo laughed.
‘Why is this so funny?’
‘You say it like it’s a rude word. Squatters are people like you, who can’t afford to pay rent or buy a home. They find empty houses and live there and if they don’t get caught, they can stay there for years and years.’
Tripi felt the damp creeping into his lungs again. ‘Get caught?’ He shook his head. ‘I cannot have trouble with the police.’
‘You won’t get caught, not here. The police in this town are rubbish. Last year, someone broke into Mum’s shed and smashed the lights in her sunbed and the police still haven’t found out who it was. Anyway, I’ll be your lookout.’
But the policeman had found Tripi in the park and thrown him out.
‘I don’t know,’ he kept saying. ‘I don’t know. What if this man, Big Mike, comes back?’
‘Mum says Big Mike went to Thailand to meet his mail-order bride, Lalana, and that he must have decided to stay out there because its nicer living in Thailand than in Slipton.’
A MailOrderBride? Was this an English convention, to order brides through the post? Perhaps Tripi would find a wife more easily than he thought.
‘An empty house…’ Tripi shook his head again, but this time it was not worried shaking but amazed shaking. Could it be that he might have a roof over his head at last? An Englishman’s home is his castle. Wasn’t that the saying?
Milo got up. ‘If you look after Hamlet and keep Gran’s bagpipes safe, I’ll show you where it is.’ The boy’s tears had dried on his cheeks and his eyes shone.
‘Now?’
Milo nodded.
‘Okay,’ said Tripi.
He looked at the pig with its white ear and its black ear and its shiny wet snout and thought about that line in the Koran about swine being unclean. Muslims were not allowed to eat pork, but there was nothing that said that you could not live with a pig, was there? If you do not like it, you will have to forgive me, Allah.
The pink house rose from the corner at the end of the high street. In Syria the houses sat large and low and flat, here they were skinny and reached up to the sky.
&nbs
p; ‘We’re going to have to break in,’ said Milo, shoving the front door with his small shoulder.
Tripi looked around the street, nervous that the policeman from the other night might be watching.
‘We should try the back,’ said Milo. ‘Back doors are always easier.’
Tripi followed Milo through a hole in the fence into the back garden. Weeds and long, yellow grass frozen into spikes, a shed with a broken window, cigarette butts on the patio.
What Milo Saw Page 8
