Raking the Ashes (15 page)

‘Well, hurry home when you can,’ Geoff pleaded. ‘I’m feeling crap here. Harry’s disappeared again. He won’t return my calls. And Minna’s going down to Torbury Bay.’

‘Torbury Bay?’

‘Cornwall. To meet Josh’s family. So I’ll be all alone.’

The tone of self-pity galvanized me into spite. ‘Why don’t you do something useful while she’s gone? Surprise her. Paint her bedroom. Tart up the kitchen. Put back that side of the porch Frances had to take down to park her wheelchair.’

‘Oh,
that
house. There’s no point really. After all, the lease will end in June.’

Can people sense when I turn dangerous? For it did seem to me that suddenly all the men had stopped their fooling and had fallen silent.

‘Lease? I thought that Frances got the house when you divorced.’

‘She did. But all those treatments … And the trip to Arizona, of course … This last place was a rental. Didn’t you realize?’

He must have known from the silence that this was news. I suppose he was waiting. Presumably he thought we’d run through the old, old performance: ‘You never told me.’ ‘Well, I thought you knew.’ He may even have been a step ahead, waiting for me to say ‘You
promised
me!’ so he could argue triumphantly, ‘No, Tilly. This doesn’t count. Frances had sold her last house long before you made me sign that piece of paper.’

Instead, I held the phone out to the wind. ‘Fixed pins in!’ I yelled. ‘Yoke pins to Out!’

It was a little skit we ran through each time Digger’s
wife
phoned up in tears. The man could only take so much, then he would rouse everyone standing round into performance to help him get away.

‘Raise yokes!’

They all came in on cue. ‘Disengaged fore!’

‘Yokes down!’

‘Disengaged aft! Check pins!’

‘Checked!’ I held the phone down close to the generator and kicked its tin side so hard I must have deafened him.

‘Raise yokes!’ I yelled again. ‘Disengage!’

‘Disengaged!’

‘Yokes up!’

I brought the phone back to my ear. ‘Sorry, Geoff. Got to go. These bloody rack and pinion gears are playing up again.’

I couldn’t even tell if we’d impressed him. I’d rung off.

BACK TO SQUARE
one, and Sol’s plan to get Geoffrey on his feet again before planting the boot on his backside. I started nagging Sol to look at Print-It! The first I heard that he was actually getting on with it was when Geoff told me Doris had begun complaining about some old geezer who sat for hours on the window ledge, claiming it was where he’d arranged to ‘meet his wife’. Doris was outraged that he’d even asked to use the lavatory, and, on his way out, stumbled through not just both storerooms, but also the little kitchen overlooking the back yard.

‘She calls you an old geezer,’ I told Sol next time we spoke.

Mightily put out, he said, ‘That isn’t
me
. I haven’t time to prowl around failing businesses. That’s Mr Stassinopolous, looking for a berth for his son.’

‘What does he think?’

‘Same as me. Prime site. One could make something of it. Have you spoken to Geoff?’

‘He’s banking on you.’

Clearly Sol and this Mr Stassinopolous had been discussing the terms. ‘A clear-cut take-over of the lease? A token payment for the stuff in the storerooms and simple transfer of all the equipment guarantees and rentals?’

‘He’s over a barrel, Sol. Now it’s all over, Geoff just wants to get out.’

And out he was. Within a couple of months, the deal was struck. Geoff handed over to the Stassinopolous boy, and came home pleased as punch, as if the deal had been a masterstroke of business acumen and not the end of his financial hopes. ‘He is a nice young man. Very pleasant, with a most charming wife.’ He was nodding in self-important fashion, as if to stress his feelings of satisfaction. ‘Naturally I asked him, as a favour to me, to keep Mrs Mackie and Doris on the books.’

I looked up from my estimations of fixed load. ‘Refresh my memory, Geoff. Why would the Stassinopolous boy owe you a favour?’

Geoff looked a bit put out. ‘Well, he has done rather well for himself, hasn’t he, getting Print-It!’

‘Thanks to his father.’

Geoff turned his back. ‘No need to be unpleasant, Tilly. I’ve left things ship-shape. He’s a fortunate boy. I reckon he owes me a favour and I think he knows it.’

‘Oh, yes? Watch this space.’

Indeed, within a month, both women were gone. George Stassinopolous paid them cash for a week or two while he was picking their brains, then waved them goodbye. Next time I glanced in the shop, it seemed to be staffed with students, the window was plastered with special offers, and, for the first time ever, the place appeared to be humming.

Meanwhile, Geoff took his time, looking for work. Every few days, when I prompted, he’d say in lordly fashion, ‘I’m just asking around a bit,’ as if he’d spent his life hobnobbing with useful business contacts instead of being a rather stay-at-home bloke, happy to go for days on end speaking mostly to food-shop assistants and to his own employees.

‘Why don’t you phone that firm who used to drop off your paper and stuff?’ I suggested one morning.

‘Stationery Supplies?’ Geoff looked quite pleased. ‘Excellent idea, Til. I should have thought of that myself.’

I made the mistake of warming to the notion. ‘As I recall, you were forever going on about how hard it was for them to find a reliable driver.’

‘
Driver?
’

His beady look annoyed me. ‘Well, what did you think? That, with your track record, they’d invite you to sit on the board?’

He turned back to his paper. ‘I’m sure you don’t mean to be horrid, Til.’

Don’t say a word, I told myself. It’s not your problem. There’s no need to rise to the bait. You can get through this without pointing out that you’re right and he’s wrong. And Geoff is bound to find a job. Employers are supposed to spend their waking hours scouring the land for clean and literate people.

That gave me another idea. ‘Have you tried going down the Job Centre?’

If I’d said ‘Have you tried selling your sperm?’ he couldn’t have acted more startled. ‘Sorry, Til?’

‘The Job Centre,’ I repeated. ‘Have you been down there? Have you signed on and given them your details?’

‘No, I haven’t!’

He was quite short with me. I left the room, thinking I’d give him a couple more days. Surely the idea would sink in that he was going to have to junk his lofty so-called ‘management skills’, and get a real job. Failing that, I planned to put Sol’s plan in mothballs and kick him out anyway, pitiless as it might appear to him and to others. I was halfway up the stairs when the phone rang. Hoping it might be some stab at employment in the
offing
, I stayed on the landing to listen. It was a little hard to make out what was going on at the other end. All I could hear from Geoff were broken-off phrases: ‘No, Harry—’ ‘Slow
down
. I can’t follow—’ ‘Start
again
, Harry.’ ‘How can—?’ ‘Please, Harry! Stop!’

It sounded so desperate that I leaned over the banister. Spotting me standing there, Geoff frantically signalled me through to the bedroom to pick up the extension. He was still trying to calm his son: ‘Take it easy, Harry. Try to expl—’ ‘Harry, I can’t make sense of—’

I picked up the phone. If Geoff hadn’t made it clear that it was Harry, I’m not sure I’d have guessed. The voice was strung out and hysterical. The words were spat out at machine-gun speed. The venom in the voice was horrible. It was a hate call and the object of the hate was me.

‘See, Dad? Did you hear that click? She’s picked up one of the phones. She’s listening! She listens to everything, Tilly does. She—’

‘Harry, this is ridic—’

‘You don’t know what she’s like. You think she’s nice, but she’s not. She’s actually
dangerous
. She can send voices into people’s brains to stop them thinking their own thoughts. She can—’

I put the phone down. Bloody, bloody drugs! Wouldn’t you know it? Just as the moment arrives to
make
a break for it, here comes the son to join the needy father. I flung the wardrobe doors wide. There were my trusty matching carry bags. There were my clothes. My toiletries were standing in a row, just waiting to be tipped into their daisy-lined holder. Just make a run for it, I told myself. Leave Geoff in this stupid house for now. Let him get on with it, and pay a solicitor to winkle him out later. Anything –
anything
– rather than have more of your life chewed up by these endless delays and your own indecision. Quick! Take your chance, Til. Bugger off. Then you can live alone.

Alone! Even the word sounded magical. To think and feel only as I chose. Be answerable to no one, feel guilty about nothing, live my own life and feel time my own again. It would be like a
gift
. Manna from heaven. But even as I was hurling the first clothes into the bag, there came a swipe of real shame. There you go, whispered the part of me that wasn’t quite tough enough. There you go, drizzling your petty discontents over everything, and putting your grievances above the problems of a damaged boy. For a moment I froze, my folded jeans in my hand. But then I tossed them into one of the bags as planned. After all, who had let this problem arise in the first place? Who was it who had allowed his son – against clearly stated advice – to spend the most testing week of his young life in a flat
with
a druggie? What had Geoff
thought
would happen, for Christ’s sake? Did he assume that Tod would sit on his bean-bag, puffing away on prime spliffs, and good old Harry would be waving away each offer of blissful oblivion with some namby-pamby, wholesome ‘No, thanks. I think I’ll have a cup of tea’? The stupid,
stupid
man, forever allowing his problems to breed out of sheer bloody idleness.

Furious again, I hurled the things I couldn’t do without, one after another, into the bags on the bed. Geoff was a lazy shit. He was a selfish bastard. I’d warned him again and again. Now let him reap what he himself had sown. Was it
my
job to stick around to help him pick up the pieces? For heaven’s sake! It wasn’t as if I’d been put on the planet to sort out things for Geoffrey Anderson. It was time he learned to clear up his own messes. They were his children, after all, not mine. In went the clock and the toiletries. In went the things I needed from my top drawer. Was it my fault that, when the letter came from my solicitor asking him to leave, he wouldn’t even have a home to offer his son and his daughter? No, it was not. It was because he hadn’t ever made the effort to learn the very first thing about himself, and coming to terms with all your own limitations is the most basic part of growing up. If tens of thousands of little girls can face the fact they’ll never be ballerinas, never have a horse
of
their own to adore, never strut down a catwalk to a chorus of gasps, what is so wrong with one man coming to realize he doesn’t have the skills to run a shop? You can’t forever be throwing things away, then piteously looking round for someone else to bail you out. Was it my fault he’d tossed half his savings down the drain to help a woman waste money on crystals and weird therapies and a whole host of other crap peddled to people so scared of dying they’ve taken leave of their senses? Bad enough that he hadn’t dared tell me. But surely even Geoffrey could have summoned the guts to try to stop Frances. Terence had tried. He’d even written a letter to try to get Geoff to support him. Perhaps if the two of them had managed to hold firm then, come the end of June, Harry and Minna might still have had a roof of their own over their heads instead of becoming even more dependent on mine.

Grim thought. I forced the last of my computer stuff into the bag. The phone call with Harry couldn’t last for ever, however loopy the lad had become. Geoff would be up the stairs soon, to report. I wanted to slide out before the tears, before the argument. I simply wanted to be gone. I knew what everyone else would think. I didn’t have to wonder for a moment what my brother would say when I told him I’d scarpered. ‘Oh, come on, Til. So Geoff let a few things
slide
. Give the poor man a break. It’s only because he’s so taken up with spoiling you that he never bothers with other things. As for his secrets, don’t forget he hides the truth just as much from himself. Let the poor sod off the hook, Til. You’re no picnic to live with either. So go back home.’

No, I thought. Not this time. No one will persuade me back. Not Ed. Not Donald. Not even the blokes in the office or on the rig. I’ll have no more of men sticking together to support their own crappy standards. Ed had been quick enough to make it clear he didn’t want to risk his own share of my mother’s money or easy way of life. What had he said? ‘No worries, Til. He won’t get a bean out of me. I’ll be as hard as nails.’ So now, his shade could not cajole me into some softer path to take myself. No, I was off. And slinging the computer case over my shoulder, I reached down for the travel bags.

And felt the whole house shake. Downstairs, the front door slammed. I could hear footsteps hurrying down the path and I crossed to the window. My car was blocking Geoff’s, and, without even glancing up, he started sorting through his bunch of keys to find my spare. I struggled with the window latch as I banged on the glass. ‘Hey! Take your own car! I need mine. Hang on a moment till—’

But even before I’d managed to make myself heard,
Geoffrey
had thrown himself into the driving seat, slammed shut the car door and sped away.

Leaving me with a twelve-year-old hatchback with a rusty floor, a boot that won’t open and a temperamental starter. I sank down on the bed. How many times in a row could my determination to get away be derailed by this family? Come
on
, I urged myself. Make a break for it. A car counts for nothing. Take a taxi if you must. Or, just for now, drive off in his bloody heap.

But just the fact that I’d been left with a car I couldn’t depend on drained a lot of my fury away. After all, whose fault was that? Mine. Mine alone. I’d promised to fix the sodding starter motor weeks ago, and never bothered. Geoff, on the other hand, would never have put off doing that sort of favour for me. He was a generous-spirited soul who held me so dear that things he could do for me always came top of his list. At heart, let’s face it, how you judge a man depends on what you value and what you want. If what I wanted was love, Geoff offered it in spades.