Wildest of All Read online

  ‘I’m afraid that’s how it is in the entertainment industry. Always someone waiting to take advantage. But Nettie was a good girl from a good family and she was smart enough to walk away. It cost her to do the right thing though. She had to give it up. I hear it’s even worse these days. Casting couches and all that.’

  Emma’s face burned a furious red.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing to do with talent, dear,’ Anne said. ‘No one goes off talent these days. It’s all about the casting couch. You need to watch – ’ that last part directed at Danny who, upon hearing his name, was immediately reminded of all those occasions in the classroom when he’d been caught daydreaming.

  ‘Sorry, Ma?’

  ‘Your girls. If they fall off the track, it’s hard to get them back on.’

  Danny’s eyes flicked quickly over to his daughters, who stared back in alarm, but Anne’s gaze travelled to Jude, and from there to Sissy who, Anne realised with a jolt, was staring at her with eyes just like Peter’s, angry, challenging, untamed. The shock caused her stomach to spasm and she grappled for her bag to find her heartburn tablets.

  ‘Are you all right, Mammy?’ Danny sprang forward, took her bag and found the tablets straight away.

  She waved him off, yes, yes, everything’s fine, no need to fuss. She turned her face away as she swallowed the pills and waited for the pain to subside. She tried to steady her breathing, but the intensity of Sissy’s stare had disturbed her. It was as God told her. Without a doubt, there was work to be done here.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Blood and Raspberries

  Her father’s death had made her famous. Every corridor she walked down, every corner she turned, eyes were on her, a strange being, something other. In social sciences they’d been taught that the ‘othering’ of people was a step on the road to genocide. The thought darted around in her mind and she couldn’t tell whether it was trying to escape, or if it was looking for a suitable space to nest. Grief flopped and twisted inside her like a divided worm from biology. It furrowed dark lines like charcoal on paper in art class. It wiped out any pretensions to the real thing in English poetry. It suffused her system and crawled beneath her skin like ants.

  Sometimes she was dizzy with it and she ran to Cam, who always made himself available for her, losing two different jobs in the process. Rik, jealous of their closeness, began to bunk off too. They became comfortable with their freedom, revelling in mid-morning coffees or afternoon cinema trips, or first-person shooter games and a smoke when one of them knew their house would be empty.

  One day, Sissy came in from a downpour to find Rik’s parents drinking tea with her mother and grandmother. This had never happened before. Mr and Mrs Sutton were considered a pleasant enough, but slightly odd couple. Shy, they stayed away from social events, including school fetes and so on, so that Sissy didn’t know much more about them than the little Rik told her. They were indulgent, a soft touch, they desired great things for their only child, though of course his happiness was really the only thing that mattered.

  ‘Naive,’ Anne had called them after meeting them at Parents’ Night the previous year.

  Mrs Sutton, a softly-spoken woman with caramel hair and watery blue eyes, sat with her hands neatly folded on the table. They fluttered up before her whenever she spoke, all her nerves fizzing up into the air around her.

  ‘Sissy.’ Up and down went the hands, over flashed the eyes to her husband, seeking reassurance, out came a dainty tinkle as she cleared her throat. ‘Come and take a seat, dear.’

  Mr Sutton rose and pulled the remaining empty chair back from the table. Sissy looked to her mother for a clue but her gaze was turned towards the garden. Her red eyes and puffy face were evident even from the side. Anne’s face was furious. Resisting the urge to run away, Sissy approached the table.

  ‘Is Rik okay?’ she asked. He’d been in fine fettle when she’d left him half an hour earlier, stoned from an afternoon spent with Cam’s home-made bong. She’d been feeling mildly fuzzy herself, but this unexpected welcome committee had flipped the switch on her paranoia.

  ‘Yes, yes, dear,’ said Mrs Sutton, patting the table again. ‘Come. Just a few questions. Nothing scary.’

  The expression on Anne’s face suggested otherwise.

  Mrs Sutton explained in her breathy voice how worried she and Rik’s father had become of late. Rik had been missing classes, it was quite unlike him, did she know of anything that may be upsetting him?

  ‘No,’ Sissy replied, feigning surprise, wondering how it was possible that she had somehow appeared to have slipped through the truant-catcher’s net.

  Mrs Sutton took Sissy’s hand. It was soft and warm. Sissy was surprised at how repellent she found it.

  ‘I know you have your own problems to deal with, Sissy, and you don’t want to be worrying about Rik. But if there’s anything you can think of, please let us know. We’re so worried about him. You’re one of his best friends.’ She turned tearfully to Anne. ‘We don’t know what to do. He was doing so well. He’s starting university in September.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Sutton, with a little shake of his head and a small laugh-like sigh. ‘Supposedly. The jury’s out.’

  Sissy became increasingly aware of her grandmother’s thunderous stare and looked to her mother for assistance, but Jude remained captivated by the view from the kitchen window. She’d noticed lately that the garden needed attention. The weeds had run wild. The trouble was the garden had been Peter’s domain. It was difficult to know what was worth keeping. What if she pulled up something precious? The preoccupation was as irritating to Sissy as Anne’s stare was frightening.

  ‘Goodbye, Jude,’ Mrs Sutton was saying. ‘I hope we haven’t put you out. It’s been lovely to see you,’ and then in that low confidential tone people sometimes use when they’re trying to indicate discretion, ‘If there’s anything we can do…’

  Anne walked them down the hall and showed them out.

  ‘Is everything all right, Mum?’ Sissy whispered. Jude finally looked at her, and for the first time in a long while Sissy had the urge to climb into her lap and wrap her arms around her mother’s neck.

  ‘You, young lady.’

  Sissy turned to see her grandmother’s small figure in the doorway.

  ‘You’ve got some explaining to do,’ Anne said, pointing a finger.

  In the time it took for Jude to look back out of the window, Anne had crossed to the kitchen drawer and taken out a white envelope which she thrust into Sissy’s face.

  ‘Letters from school! How could you do this to us?’

  Sissy took it and spread it flat, blinking as she registered her school’s headed notepaper. It had all caught up with her at last.

  She was surprised by how little she actually cared. Perspective, as her father might have said, is a great thing.

  ‘So what?’ she said, determined to deflect Anne’s fury.

  ‘Where have you been going?’ Anne demanded to know. ‘Because you’ve certainly not been in school.’

  ‘I’m seventeen,’ said Sissy, proud that her voice came out so calm and measured, especially compared to her grandmother’s. ‘I don’t have to go.’

  ‘You’ve no idea how lucky you are. I didn’t get half your chances, Cecilia Donnelly.’

  ‘Please don’t call me Cecilia. You know I don’t like that.’

  ‘Well, unfortunately, the world doesn’t care what you like, young woman.’

  Their voices fell away as Jude, who had been momentarily forgotten, took a bowl from the cupboard and stepped into the garden. Sissy was struck by what a mess her mother was. Bare feet sticking out from beneath Peter’s old pinstripe pyjamas, a grey bobbly cardigan swaddling her top half, and her hair a frizzy mess. She walked over to the raspberry canes, bending beneath the weight of ripe fruit, and began to pick. Two for the bowl, one for her. She looked like she belonged in an asylum. A sudden swell of emotion caught in Sissy’s throat.

  ‘You see what you�
�re doing to her,’ Anne hissed. ‘Think of someone other than yourself for a change.’

  Sissy stared at her grandmother, open-mouthed. Even Anne seemed slightly taken aback by her harshness.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Jude smiled vacantly as she stepped back indoors. ‘Everything’s settled anyway, I hope. The raspberries are perfect. Does anybody want some?’

  Sissy turned to Jude, mouth still hanging open. Once upon a time, she would have been picked up and comforted.

  ‘Well, they’re here if you want them,’ Jude said, putting them on the table as she trailed past and left them both momentarily united in surprise.

  ‘The doctor’s upped her dosage again,’ Sissy said.

  Anne sniffed. ‘She misses your father, of course.’

  ‘She wasn’t even related to him,’ Sissy said.

  Anne frowned.

  ‘By blood, I mean,’ she explained. She knew she was being irrational but she didn’t care, and then she began to panic about not caring. What kind of a monster was she? ‘What about the rest of us?’ she cried, tears threatening to overwhelm her.

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ Anne barely whispered. ‘How dare you? How dare you? I’ll not have this behaviour. I will not.’

  The injustice was too much for Sissy, whose emotions breached her ability to hold them.

  ‘He was my dad!’ she burst forth, and left the room in such a furious hurry, Anne didn’t know if it was the fact she hadn’t eaten all day that caused her head to spin, or if it was just the power of Sissy’s tailwind as she went. Whatever it was, she had to reach out and grasp the back of a chair to keep herself from falling.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Streamlining

  The bungalow had been a mistake. Everyone had thought it, including Anne, but Patrick had insisted with uncharacteristic vigour, and so they’d sold the family home that had once belonged to Patrick’s parents and moved to a newer part of the city.

  ‘But you grew up here,’ Susan had said.

  He’d shaken his head.

  ‘It’s a money pit,’ he’d replied, which was true.

  ‘But we grew up here!’ Susan had countered, which, in spite of wishing to remain in the house, irritated Anne enough to point out that as Susan had moved to Manchester, she was really in no position to comment.

  The bungalow was north-west. ‘Handy for Loch Lomond,’ Patrick said, though their visits would always only be counted on the fingers of one hand, because not long after the move, Patrick had keeled over and died, leaving Anne alone in a tiny house bursting with too many mementos of the old place.

  Gradually, she’d filtered their possessions into something more appropriate for her new home, but it had taken years, and she had to admit the streamlining still wasn’t done. Black bin bags of clothes she had no use for lined the bedroom. Boxes of books were stacked against a wall. The old antique furniture was really too dark and too big for the bungalow’s small rooms. Everything about the house irritated Anne, from the decision to buy it, which hadn’t even been hers in the first place, to how she lived in it. The problem was she hated it all so much, she could hardly bear to think about how best to sort everything out. The junk hemmed her in and she began to see it as a metaphor for her whole life. Just typical of Patrick to do this to her. Thankfully, Peter and Danny were so good at getting her out and taking her places that over time she’d become practiced at not seeing what was right in front of her.

  Peter’s death, however.

  Now the bungalow made her want to tear her eyes out. She emptied boxes, looking for items that had belonged to Peter when he was a boy. She turned up a Robert Burns certificate, given in recognition of excellent recitation. No mention of what the actual poem had been. It bugged her, and Susan and Danny were no help. It was unfair to expect them to remember when she herself couldn’t, especially as they would have been so small at the time. Still, it rankled. Facts were slipping away, their family history being forgotten.

  She found a tattered old teddy bear that Susan swore was hers, but Anne decided had belonged to Peter. She washed it by hand, using the fancy shampoo and conditioner she’d been given one Christmas and had been keeping for the right time. Years of grime washed away in just a few moments. She gave the bear a blow-dry and tied a green ribbon round his neck for Celtic, then she sat him on top of the bookcase in the living room, but when she realised she couldn’t look at it without getting a crick in her neck, she put him on top of the television. He was better than most of the stuff that was on, anyway.

  Ever since Patrick died, Anne had resisted all of Susan’s attempts to help clear the place, but Anne’s search for traces of Peter had re-opened the matter.

  ‘You can’t live like this, Mum.’

  As in the weeks after Patrick’s death, Susan was spending every free weekend in Glasgow, far from her family in Manchester. Heaven only knew what her husband made of it, Anne thought.

  ‘I mean, look,’ said Susan, holding up a pair of old brown trousers her father had tended the garden in, and that had been inadvertently set free from the confines of some old box or sack. ‘There’s absolutely no reason to have these now, Mum. I doubt even the charity shop would take them. Let me just take it all away for you. You’ll be much happier, I promise.’

  ‘I can do it myself. I’m not infirm and I’m not having strangers paw through my private things.’

  ‘I’m hardly a stranger,’ Susan said, looking hurt.

  ‘Fine. If it’ll keep you quiet.’

  And that had been the mistake she had deep down known it was, because once they had moved past the clothes, the books, the knick-knacks, they had come across photographs going back a century, and Susan had wanted to know every detail about every one of them. A pot of tea was made, the radio went on, and they settled down to go through them.

  ‘Incredible,’ Susan said. ‘Look at this. Even in black and white, it’s like looking at Sissy.’

  Anne took the photograph and peered at it. She remembered the occasion well because the photos had been done the week before Nettie and Margaret left for Australia. Even after all these years, Anne still felt embarrassment at the difference between them; Nettie, smiling and glamorous in her tight skirt and full make-up, and she in sensible brown lace-ups and her dowdy Sunday suit. She was working for Patrick’s parents by that point, though she was still to meet their son.

  Susan was right, Sissy was strong here. She’d never noticed a resemblance between them before, though everyone agreed Sissy was more like Peter than Jude, so it stood to reason. Anne felt an unexpected flush of warmth for her granddaughter, and began to sort through the old pictures with enjoyment until the news came on and Susan turned the radio up. The announcer was talking of unpleasant matters and Anne began to talk louder.

  ‘Ssh, Mum, I need to hear this. It’s in my catchment area. The kids will be talking about this on Monday.’

  The story was of an alleged sexual assault involving a young footballer and a teenage girl in a hotel room.

  ‘There’s just so much of this stuff around at the moment,’ Susan said afterwards. ‘It’s frightening.’

  ‘That poor lad though,’ said Anne. ‘Mud sticks. That’s his career ruined.’

  Susan was aghast. ‘What about the girl?’

  ‘She shouldn’t have been in his hotel room to start with,’ said Anne, surprised she had to explain such a thing.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mum,’ Susan replied, in that annoying, condescending, school teacher way of hers that she never seemed able to leave at work. ‘She has the right to say no at any time. And if he ignored her – well, I’m afraid it’s rape. Oh look!’

  She held up a photo of Anne and Patrick, walking, hand in hand, down the aisle on their wedding day. ‘It’s you and Daddy. See how happy you look. This one deserves a frame.’

  Keeping her hands tightly clasped on her lap, Anne leaned over to see it more clearly. The truth of Susan’s words landed like a chisel chipping into rock, causing a fracture some
where beyond what was visible to the human eye. She felt it almost as a thaw, or a sudden opening right at the centre of her. Despite the chill their conversation had created, there was no denying the happiness bursting from her in that photograph.

  CHAPTER NINE

  A Little Thinking Space

  Jude had covered all the mirrors in her bedroom and bathroom with towels and sheets. She didn’t care that it was perceived as bizarre behaviour by her daughter and mother-in-law. The Jude in the mirror was a false one belonging to another time. The real Jude was in search of herself. She had no idea who she was any more. It had been years since she’d been alone. With the passage of time, she realised she’d been little more than a child when she met Peter. Without him, everything was new. She remained a mother, but she was a mother whose child didn’t want her.

  The doctor had upped her prescription again. A little thinking space, he’d called it.

  Peter told everyone it was love at first sight. She’d liked that version of events. It gave them substance, something for people to ooh over, made them something concrete. Privately, she felt he’d simply worn her down, turning up at her work night after night until, at her boss’s urging, she’d given in and agreed to a date.

  The restaurant was a country house outside of the city, where silver cutlery lay in rows alongside white porcelain plates on white linen tablecloths. The wine list was expensive. He’d pointed to one and suggested they order it.

  ‘That’s almost four months’ wages for me!’ she’d exclaimed, as yet unused to his wicked sense of humour. He did ask for bottled water, which Jude considered to be an extravagance, but he also settled for the house red, which she found reassuring, and it disappeared more quickly than she anticipated. He said he was a man of appetites, and patted his rounded belly proudly. She told him he wore it well, he was lucky he was tall. He took her honesty on the chin. By the time they were on their second bottle, she’d forgotten to be intimidated by him.