When Brenda opens the door to us, I don’t recognise her at first. She’s always been old. But now she looks ancient. It’s like her whole body has shrunk but her skin has stayed the same size. There’s an expectation in her eyes when she first opens the door; a tiny spark of something there. But when she sees Mum and me standing on the doorstep, the spark goes out and her shoulders slump, making her seem smaller than ever.
‘I keep thinking it’s her,’ she says. ‘Every time the door goes, I think its Jackie and she’s forgotten her key again.’ She puts her hand to her mouth and presses down hard as though she’s trying to keep something from coming out. A wail of despair, I think or a howl of grief. She takes a shaky breath and looks at us again. ‘Violet?’ she says.
‘Yes, Brenda,’ I say, as though I’m talking to a child. ‘It’s me. We’ve brought you some soup and thought you might like a bit of company?’
‘You?’ she says. Her eyes widen and suddenly she looks like the old Brenda again. ‘How dare you come here! Get away! Get away now!’
‘Brenda?’ says Mum. ‘Come on, love. It’s us. Look. It’s me and Violet. Shall we come inside and have a cuppa?’
‘You’re never stepping foot inside this house again,’ Brenda spits. ‘Either of you.’ She points a finger at me; a wavering, putting-a-curse-on-me finger. ‘You killed Jackie,’ she hisses. ‘If you’d never left her … if you’d never left her on her own. If you’d done what any friend would do, and walked home with her that night … she’d still be here. My Jackie would be here and not laying on a slab in the mortuary!’
‘Brenda!’ Mum shouts in shock.
‘I blame her!’ Brenda finishes, before she slams the door in our faces.
‘Well!’ Mum breathes out after a moment. ‘I know grief does strange things to a person … but … that!’ She grabs the basin of soup from my hands and puts it on the doorstep. ‘It’s hit her harder than we can have imagined. Obviously. Poor woman.’ She leaves the soup on the doorstep and takes hold of my arm. ‘Come on, love. Let’s go home,’ she says gently. ‘And take no notice of Brenda. She doesn’t know what she’s saying. It’s just the shock and the grief talking. That’s all. She’ll come round. You’ll see.’
She twitters on, offering me words of comfort all the way home. But they don’t make any difference, because I know Brenda’s right. It’s my fault Jackie’s dead. I knew it straight away. And wherever she is, Jackie knows it my fault too. And the only way I can make things any better is to find out who did this dark and terrible thing and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The news of Mr Harper’s release is the talk of Battersea, according to Mum. ‘Poor man,’ she says as she dishes out a plate of cheese on toast. ‘He’s never going to be able to hold his head high again. People will always suspect him, even though he’s innocent. I wonder if he’ll stay here. Or if he’ll have to move away.’ She looks at me all smugly. ‘So much for being a Little Miss Know-it-all,’ she says. ‘Seems you don’t know everything after all, Violet.’
Of course I knew as soon as the police came to tell us the news about Jackie that I’d been wrong about Mr Harper. I’ve never been wrong before. But I don’t want to give Mum the satisfaction, so I pretend I didn’t hear her and instead I watch Joseph closely as he chews on a bite of cheese on toast. It takes him four chews before he swallows and I follow his Adam’s apple as it leaps in his throat. He washes the toast down with a few gulps of tea, then helps himself to another slice. He pauses before he takes a bite and looks over at me.
‘You all right, Violet?’ he asks. ‘Have I got something on the end of my nose?’
I shake my head.
‘Only you’ve been staring at me all through supper. Thought there might be a reason for it?’
I ignore his question and help myself to the last slice of cheese on toast. ‘You going out tonight?’ I ask.
‘Uh huh,’ he mumbles through another mouthful. ‘Got to see a bloke about some part-time work in a garage. Just a few hours. But it’s a start.’
‘So you’re planning on staying around for a while, then?’ I say. ‘Shame. I hoped you’d be going back to France.’
‘Oh, Violet. Don’t start!’ Mum bangs her teacup down in frustration.
Joseph sighs and puts his unfinished piece of toast back on his plate. ‘How long are you going to keep this up for?’ he asks. ‘It’s all getting a bit boring. But for your information, no … I’m not going back to France. So do you know what, Violet? You’d just better grow up and get used to the fact that I’m back.’
I finish eating my toast and brush the crumbs from my hands. ‘So where are you meeting this bloke then?’ I ask. Because I don’t believe him for one second. He’s drawn the curtains across his eyes.
‘None of your business,’ he mutters.
His answer doesn’t surprise me. I take my plate over to the sink to rinse. ‘Oh, by the way, Joseph,’ I say. ‘You’ve got some crumbs on your chin.’
He glares at me and scrapes his chair back from the table. He does it with such force that Mum yelps and her teacup bounces from its saucer and rolls across the table. Joseph grabs his donkey jacket from the back of the door and slams out of the kitchen. The air vibrates and the pots on the draining board rattle. Mum glares at me and presses her lips together into a thin line.
So … I think. He’s got a temper.
Later, after I’ve heard Joseph come home and creep up the stairs to bed, the house is quiet. Everyone’s asleep. Except for me. I sit cross-legged on bed and open my notebook. I read through all the scribbles on the pages and remind myself of everything I know about Joseph so far.
There’s the love letters from Arabella: evidence of their secret affair.
Their affair is discovered and Arabella’s family disown her.
Joseph travels to England and Arabella plans to join him.
In the meantime, she is disturbed by some of the things that Joseph talks about in his letters back to her.
He talks of dark places and of things that fill her with horror.
When she finally arrives in England, they meet at the pump house. Why?
Arabella writes that she is frightened of Joseph.
And then there are no more letters. Did something happen to Arabella?
And now there’s the other thing too. Why did Joseph lie about where he was on the night Jackie was murdered? He said he was working in the shop all night and then went straight to bed. But I saw him walking towards the Roxy.
Joseph’s got a temper. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And I remember what he told us all as we sat round the kitchen table on his first night back home. The war did things to people. Terrible things, he said.
All I can think is, how terrible is terrible? And all I can see in my mind is Joseph winking at Jackie. And where is Arabella?
The moon’s splashed a silvery patch on to the rug on the floor. It’s later than I thought. Much later. And suddenly I don’t want to think any more. I don’t want all this blackness in my head. I don’t want to be in this dark place. I just want nothingness. I close my notebook and just manage to drop it by the side of my bed before my head sinks down on my pillow and the next thing I know, Mum is hammering on my door.
‘Come on, Violet! What are you doing? Time to get up. It’s late.’
All Her Kisses
‘You all right, love?’ says Mum as I pick at my breakfast. ‘You managing to sleep okay?’
I grunt at her.
‘Listen,’ she says. ‘You do know Brenda didn’t mean anything by what she said yesterday, don’t you?’
I grunt again. Of course Brenda meant it. Because it’s true. It is my fault that Jackie’s dead. Mum leans towards me and kisses me lightly on the cheek. It’s as much of a shock as if she’d slapped me. For a second, the world feels better, but then I remember all the other times she could have kissed me, or hugged me and never did. All the times I fell and scraped my knees, the times I was stuck in bed with the measles or the mumps
or just a fever, the hundreds of times that Norma was rotten to me. Mum never kissed me then. All her kisses were planted on the face of a dead boy in a photograph frame. She had to wait until my best friend was murdered to award me with a kiss. I quickly wipe the greasy mark of her lipstick off my cheek.
Joseph breezes into the kitchen and my heart turns cold. I look down at my plate as he grabs his coat from the back of the door. ‘No time for breakfast this morning, Mum,’ he says. ‘I’ll grab something while I’m out.’
I glance up and see him kissing Mum quickly on the cheek; so easily and naturally. And then he’s gone.
‘Where’s he going?’ I ask.
‘To work,’ she says. ‘He’s got some hours in that garage. Heavens, Violet, don’t you ever listen?’
‘How do you know that’s where he’s really going?’ I say before I can stop myself.
‘What are you talking about? Of course he’s going to work. Where else would he be going? Honestly, Violet, sometimes I think you live in a different world to the rest of us.’
She rattles on and on. I stop listening to her and think about the French letters again, wondering if I missed something. There might be other clues, something that would explain where Arabella is, and why Joseph doesn’t mention her. Something that would stop me thinking he’s done something terrible to her.
I leave Mum washing the pots and peer into the shop. Dad’s busy cleaning out the fryers, so I run up the stairs and straight into Joseph’s room. I push my hand under his mattress and feel around with my fingers. Where’s the bundle of letters? I push my hand and arm further under. I search near the head of the bed, all through the middle and down to the bottom. They’re not there. They’re gone. He’s taken them. I pull my arm out and sit back on my heels. Why has he moved them?
I quickly search the rest of his room, but the letters are nowhere to be found. He must have taken them to work with him, or destroyed them. I kick his bed frame in frustration. It feels like someone’s stolen a book from me that I’ve only half read and now I’m never going to know the ending.
I need more clues, I need to know the rest of his story. Because if I don’t, then I’m going to be left with this horrible, dreadful, unthinkable thought that’s buried deep inside my head, the one that’s growing bigger and bigger every day. And I won’t be able to live with that.
I wander back to my room, hoping to be by myself for a while before Dad shouts me down to help with the fryers. I open the door and my heart does that thing it does when somebody jumps out at you unexpectedly. It stops for a second. Then when it starts beating again, it’s such a shock, it hurts my chest. The bundle of French letters is on my bed. And on top of them is a note.
YOU ONLY HAD TO ASK
I can’t settle.
I wash the mud off a load of potatoes and peel the skins off as thinly as I can. I sweep the shop floor and count change into the till. I start ripping up a pile of newspapers. One page after another into a neat pile. Then I stop. Jackie’s face smiles out at me from a copy of The Sunday People. Her eyes laugh into mine. We’re proper grown-ups now, Vi, she’d said that day. And it hits me again. Sudden and violent.
Dead.
Jackie is dead. She’ll never be a proper grown-up. Never. She’ll never go to another dance. She’ll never pack another bag of sugar. She’ll never get kissed again, she’ll never get married, and she’ll never have babies. She’ll never sit on her nan’s sofa again, eating custard creams and watching Coronation Street.
The cold air of the back kitchen turns into cotton wool around my head. There’s a whooshing in my ears and I stick my head between my knees, like I do if I ever feel faint from period pains. I take deep breaths.
In, out. In, out. In, out.
I stare at the floor. It needs washing. There’s potato mud smeared all over the lino and over in the corner there’s a collection of dust and fluff and grease stuck to the bottom of the skirting board. There’s a coin too, just poking out from under the work counter. I think it’s a threepenny bit.
I lift my head. The whooshing has stopped, but my hands are freezing. I look at Jackie’s photograph again. I can’t add the page to the pile of ripped newspapers. I can’t have her smile wrapped around a six of chips. I fold the page carefully and slip it into my pocket.
My stomach jumps. It feels like there’s a small bird trapped inside me, trying to find its way out. It flutters frantically around my chest, head and stomach. Every time I hear a door bang, the bird dives into my chest and sits on my ribs like a budgie on its perch, flapping its wings madly.
Mum comes through with a clean apron for me. ‘We’re opening in a minute,’ she says. ‘You ready?’
‘When’s Joseph coming back?’ I ask her.
‘Don’t know,’ she says. ‘He’s not sure how long the garage wants him for today. And anyway, what’s that got to do with you being ready for work?’
‘Nothing,’ I mumble. The bird inside my chest is going crazy. How did Joseph know I’d looked at his letters? Perhaps I’d put them back in the wrong place. And now he’s been in my room. Did he read my notebook? Does he know that I’m on to him? Thinking about him being in my room – breathing in my private air, creeping across my floor in his big, black boots, kneeling down to look under my bed – makes my stomach clench and my scalp feel dirty. But I did it to him, so I must be just as bad. Tit for tat.
I serve in the shop over the lunchtime shift. The time passes in a blur of panic. I’m only half aware of how the customers are looking at me, and what they are saying.
‘How could she have let that poor girl walk home on her own?’ someone mutters. And someone else. ‘Poor Brenda. And to think she treated that girl like her own.’
I let the words drift over my head and pretend they’re talking about someone else. Finally, the last customer leaves and I sit with Mum and Dad in the kitchen and try to eat a ham sandwich. All the time the hairs on the back of my neck are prickling; waiting for the sound of Joseph walking through the door.
Dad goes to the front room for his afternoon snooze and Mum sits and hems some new curtains for Norma. White cotton with a smattering of cornflowers. ‘I know I shouldn’t be sewing at a time like this,’ she says guiltily. ‘But I have to do something. Or I’ll go mad thinking about that poor girl.’
The quiet of the house is unnerving; like a Sunday afternoon with nothing to do. I drift from room to room. I tiptoe around Dad, asleep in his armchair. He’s got a hole in the toe of his slipper and a button missing from his shirt that makes it gape open around his belly. I can see his string vest. I stare at the mantelpiece and notice that Mum’s put a trinket there instead of Joseph’s photograph. It’s a brown china dog standing on its hind legs with its tongue hanging out. It’s an ugly thing and I don’t know where she got it from. I wander back to the kitchen and straighten the plates on the dresser. I open and shut cupboard doors and I fill the kettle and empty it again.
‘For God’s sake!’ says Mum. ‘Can’t you find something to do? Go to your room and read one of your books or something. Moping around’s not going to do you any good.’
I think of the letters still sitting on my bed, making a dent in the counterpane. It’s three o’clock. Joseph could walk through the door any minute now. The waiting is agony.
I climb the stairs and clump along the wooden floor of the landing to my room. I close the door behind me and take a steadying breath. They’re still there of course, glaring at me accusingly from the middle of the bed. I sit down next to them. Maybe they are simply just love letters. Maybe I’m wrong and there is no dark secret to be found. Maybe that’s what Joseph’s telling me. I’ve got nothing to hide. You could have just asked me, if there were things you wanted to know. You didn’t have to steal my letters. But, here. Have them anyway, you nosey little cow.
The light in my room suddenly dims and bullets of rain begin to batter against the window. I shiver and pull my cardi close around me. I pick up the letters and weigh them in my hands.
All those words scrawled across all those sheets of paper.
Maybe I’ve read too much into it. Maybe I translated some of the words wrong. Or maybe Joseph knows I didn’t manage to untangle all those foreign sentences. He’s been clever. He’s bluffing. Here, Violet. Take a good look. Read them all if you like. You won’t find a thing. But I know I’m not wrong about this. I’ve got that feeling. Joseph’s love story isn’t all it seems. It isn’t a love story at all. It’s a horror story. I know this like I know that Brenda’s never going to forgive me, that Beau wishes Mrs B was his mum, that Norma’s never going to be happy with Raymond, and that worst of all, Jackie’s death is not the last terrible thing that’s going to happen to us all. I lie down on my bed and curl up into a ball. I listen to the rain and try not to think about anything at all. I must drift off into a dreamless sleep because the next thing I know, I wake with a start to the sound of voices coming from downstairs.
The rain has eased off and the empty sky outside paints my walls with a sickly yellow light. Joseph’s home now. I can hear him laughing with Mum. A door bangs. ‘Go and towel yourself off,’ she shouts. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’
Heavy footsteps up the stairs and along the landing. They stop outside my door. The sound of him breathing. A faint whistle through his nose. Then a knock. ‘Violet? Are you in there?’
My heart’s banging hard, like a hammer. But I get up from the bed with the letters in my hand. I open the door. He’s dripping wet. His hair is flat to his head and his face is flushed and greasy with rainwater. The bottom of his denim jeans are dark and water is pooling around his boots on to the landing. I hold out the letters to him and he takes them.
‘Did you find out what you needed to know?’ he asks.
I shrug. ‘Not really.’
‘You only had to ask,’ he says. ‘You didn’t have to snoop around. I know what you think of me, Violet. But you’re wrong, you know. I would have liked to have told you the truth. I thought you’d be the one person to understand. But I don’t know if I can trust you now.’ He waves the letters in my face. ‘It’s just words, Violet. But they were meant for me, not for you.’
V for Violet Page 16
