Gold Digger (21 page)

Money for the ticket was easy. He siphoned a little from his mother’s burgeoning purse every day. She was useless with it, never knew how much there was. She never noticed much and nor did Dad. They wouldn’t even notice he was gone. Should have kept his mouth shut, though. Shouldn’t have said anything to the stupid cousins, although he doubted if they heard.

Patrick loved trains. He went on one every day, only the Underground on the days he went to school, on the days when he didn’t bunk off. Di worried about that. No one else did.

‘H
e’s gone
where
?’

‘Said he was going to Grandad. What’s wrong?’

‘She’s done it, she’s abducted him. It’s her. She’s a spider and she got him into her web.’

Beatrice was so thrilled, she was clapping her hands. ‘We’ve got her now, we’ve got her, abduction, kidnap, the lot—’

‘Shut up,’ Edward yelled.

Shouting, screaming, fury, distress. Edward held up a magisterial hand.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Wait.’

‘He’s gone,’ Gayle said, so quietly she was almost inaud -ible. ‘He’s gone to
her.
’

‘Our boy has eyes in the back of his head,’ Edward said.

‘This could turn out fine. Should I ask Di’s father to look out for him? Just look out, not do anything? He’s there, isn’t he?’

‘No,’ Gayle said, knowing it was too late and he’d already done it. You undo that. We phone Raymond Forrest. We phone the messenger boy
.

P
eg loved this house, she really did. Even the cold bits, because it was the sort of house that hugged you. Peg was tired, in a good way. It came from all that cleaning. She had started at the top in the wide-open attics; it was such an open house, windows everywhere, light even when it was dark. She had done all the windows on the inside, worried about how the salt blurred the outside, because of the wind that carried the spray and plastered the salt against the glass.
It won’t last
, Jones said;
the rain’ll see to that.

The place wasn’t dirty as such, although much of it needed spring-cleaning and Peg reckoned she’d been born with a duster in her hand. There wasn’t anything bad about being paid to do work like this. There was a linen cupboard the size of a small room, warmed by a hot water tank: she was in love with that room, full of enough old cotton sheets for an army. She folded them with care.
Look at me
, she said to herself,
a few days here and I’m well at home
.

The feeling of being alright without being uneasy really
began because Di had given her clothes. It was not the fact that Peg had woken after the first, full night she had slept there to find a pile of them by the bed, it was the choice of them, not any old stuff, not clothes that would never fit, but carefully chosen, good stuff. Di had left the best and told her to take anything else that she liked. Cosmetics, perfume, make-up, help yourself, you know, just go in there and get it whenever you like, so that it didn’t feel like charity; it felt like a gift. Today, Peg was wearing a red sweater and black leggings with boots. She and Di were the same shoe size. It gave an uncanny sense of belonging, stepping into Di’s boots and finding them fit. It meant this was fate, and she was
supposed
to feel at home.

Peg was told what to do, did it willingly and then found other things to do on her own initiative. Jones tinkered and mended locks on windows and screwed down floorboards, did things with drains, muttered about installing a security system, kept on tinkering around as Saul ordered and was an excellent handyman and cook. That left Di free to closet herself with Saul and do stuff on the computer in the big room. The house was so large that hours could pass without any one of them being aware of where the others were, but Saul and Di were likely to be together, moving things about, organising quietly. When they all ate together, they talked easily of nothing and everything, mostly about the house and the virtues of the town which Di banged on about because she certainly liked the place. They did not talk about pictures and paintings, or the future, but they did talk.

Peg loved the pictures, but felt shy about passing comment, not wanting to ask the kind of questions that would make her look stupid. There were other things she liked
much more than the things hung up the walls, and paintings were by no means the only things collected here. Peg loved the stash of old suitcases with labels she had found on the top floor: then there were the map books, the drawers full of watches, and after that, there were the trunks full of children’s toys, and the other one full of fancy dress costumes … it went on and on. She even found a wooden box full of shells.
Just make things better,
Di said
. Make sure nothing’s got moth, or rotting.
Nothing was.

Peg just wanted to be where she was with no one else in the world knowing she was there for the time being. She did not want to know what would happen next, so it was nice when Saul and Di went away to London and left her and Jones. She really, really liked Jones; she was dead easy with Jones as Jones was with her. They were in the same boat, homeless but at home. With Di and Saul out of the way – and she liked Saul OK, he was funny, but there were buts, such as the way he looked – she could ask all she wanted and say what she thought. As if she would.

The bruise had faded, but her hair was such shit, and she had a thing about her hair. She really needed to get it fixed – the state of it troubled her, so bloody thick it was out of control. It was the only feature of herself she could not sort out and it made her feel like a slag, now she had clothes and a job. One of the good things about Jones was that you could talk to him about stuff like that.

‘So go and get it done, why don’t you?’ Jones said the morning after Saul and Di left. ‘Monica’s never busy on Tuesdays. Go on, girl, you’ve worked hard and you’ve got your pay. Monica will fix you up. Get out of here and get straight back before the rain sets in. It’s going to be nasty later. You haven’t seen real bad weather yet.’

He showed her where to go on the map. Peg didn’t want to go out alone, yet, but the hair was too important and the place would be easy to find. She wrapped up warm in one of Di’s jackets, the nice green one. The colour combination of red and green reminded her of Christmas, she felt jaunty and free to please herself. When she came back, she would tell Jones what was really bothering her, because she really was in the shit, except it didn’t feel like it right now. She felt OK.

The sea was too vast for Peg: she did not really like walking alongside it with all that noise it made. It was better seen from the inside of a window; closer than that, it was threatening, and she had no wish whatever to pass by the pier, so she followed the back way via a wide and well-used path which sent her uphill first, skirting the backs of the big houses, and then down into the town. It kept her away from the stirring wind, which sounded better in trees than it did with the crash of water. Sweeter in summer, perhaps: would she still be here in the summer? What did it feel like on a warm day, would it be that different? She didn’t care. If this would keep her safe for a bit, that was fine.

Monica’s was dead easy to find and when she did, it was half empty and it made her feel like a kid because the three other customers were ancient. Monica was an old crow, obliging although hardly friendly to a stranger without an appointment, nodded her to a chair, and said, yes, you’ll have to wait a minute. She did.

Peg waited and listened as Monica fastened rollers into an old, grey head with a mouth that talked all the time.

‘So where’s that Jones when you need him?’ Delia said. ‘He was supposed to be fixing my door. Left his rod on the pier all night the other night. Someone came and stole it.’

Peg opened her mouth and closed it again, sitting very still, thinking of the rod leaning against the back door. Di had gone and fetched it that first morning when they all slept. Peg looked around. When she was small, she had a burning ambition to be a hairdresser. That way you got to make people happy all the time, like cleaning, you could only make things better. You couldn’t go wrong with that, even though this Monica was not exactly a bundle of laughs and she seemed a bit stressed out.

‘Jones knows when he’s in trouble,’ Monica was saying. ‘He goes walkabout. He’s good at hiding.’

The old head nodded.

‘’Cos old Quig’s hanging around, is that it? That who he’s running from? You were sweet on him once, weren’t you, Mon?’

‘Shush, you. That was a long time ago,’ Monica said, finishing off. There was a cackle of laughter.

‘Get on with you, you’d still give him house room, you would.’

The lid of the hairdryer came down. Monica turned to Peg. ‘Hair needs cutting right back,’ she said, abruptly ‘Nice jacket, that. Where did you get it?’

‘Charity shop,’ Peg said, defensively, without thinking why she said it.

‘Clever girl,’ Monica said. ‘I suppose you got the jumper there, too. Thought I’d seen them before. Got to be careful about what you give away in this town. Cut and blow dry’s ten pounds today, alright?’

I
t wasn’t easy being in there, because Monica never said anything else and kept interrupting her styling to answer her phone and Peg was glad to get out of there even if she was
pleased with the result.
Nice jacket
, Monica said again.
Have you signed the register? Only I got to keep records
. Peg signed her full name without thinking and then, instead of looking at the other shops as she had planned, bought a packet of three-inch screws from the hardware shop and other stuff on a list as directed by Jones, plus a bottle of wine, and then she lost her nerve and began to scuttle home, again avoiding the sea as far as she could. The sky was huge and threatened rain. There were flood signs in windows, sandbags outside doors; she had heard warnings on the local radio when she was working in the morning, remembered Jones saying about how it would get
nasty
. None of that worried her, no flood could possibly threaten that house which had so quickly become hers, but she wanted to be indoors near a fire. She dreamed of cheese on toast as she walked faster, trying to look over walls into gardens, meeting no one but a man and a dog hurrying home, all the time afflicted with the feeling that someone was following her and knowing that was absurd; no one knew who she was, or where she was, and Jones said there were no police in this town. All the same, it did take all the pleasure out of light, floating, freshly cut hair.

When she got indoors, marvelling still at the possession of her own key to the place, locking the door behind her as instructed, she shouted for Jones.

Jones was in the cellar. She could hear banging.

They were getting on well, Jones and she. No silly business, no touching up. Just like having an uncle or a grandad, only one who never criticised. He praised her instead; ever so keen on the way she worked. He’d say things like,
my word, Peg, look what you’ve done, you’re a right grafter, you are. Where’d you learn to polish like that, Peg? My mum,
Peg said.
She was a cleaner. Ah,
Jones said
, that’s what you and Di got in
common, her mum was too.
That boggled the imagination, but it did explain something. If you got to live in a place like this purely for the price of cleaning it, life had all sorts of possibilities. Did the man who owned it give her mum the house or what? The truth was, that although Peg liked Di, big time, and was curious about her, Di was a bit scary and she didn’t really want to know too many details of her life history, not yet, except perhaps the romantic bits, not until she’d proved herself. It was Jones she wanted to impress. It was Jones who was going to save her from her own sense of shame and realise she wasn’t really that bad, despite what she’d done and that fucking warrant for her arrest: Jones who would say it’s OK to skip bail, I’ll hide you, ’cos Jones knew the inside of prison, too.

The encounter with Monica had upset her more than the walk home in the rising wind, and she went over it in her mind. Lovely short hair from a nasty hairdresser who thought she was a thief, asking her about the clothes, for shit’s sake, making her sign a register, and yes, she had signed her full name, never mind. And then someone following her home, and the house beginning to rattle and make noises in the north easterly wind she had heard about. It was Jones she needed and Jones was in the cellar, yelling up from the other end of those creepy stairs, telling her to come down. She obeyed.

Never liked cellars, or basements, for that matter. When Peg got her own place, it was going to be on the sixteenth floor, with windows on all sides. She did love heights, even though living in a fourth floor flat with a stepfamily had proved to be a nightmare. She wanted to tell Jones about that: she wanted Jones to know about
her
life. Jones was a person you told things, but Jones was preoccupied, banging
around down here. That worried her. He wouldn’t be doing that if Di was here, she knew it. Di never said that anything, any room, any corner, was off limits, not even her bathroom, but Peg had the feeling that the cellar was. She herself had once looked round the door and gone no further. It was just too big and she had to confess she had never been down a cellar before, except in a pub and then it was small.

‘What are you doing?’ she said.

‘Testing, just testing. Ah, I see what he did. Bricked off the far room to keep out the sea and left the door.’

Peg smelled the smell of the place, surprisingly warm for being underground, like being in a Tube station on a cold day. Good enough for storage, things wrapped in canvas, more bloody pictures perhaps, as if there weren’t enough. Jones was looking at the table in front of the door, a nice thing, wasted down here. He’d been banging at the walls, installing something small on a hook, and his face gleamed with sweat and she had to admit she had seen him looking nicer.

‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Look at this ceiling.’