As She Left It (7 page)

That evening she lay in it, banked up on three pillows—they were Nicola’s pillows and it was Nicola’s covers she was under, but in this bed it was all right somehow. This was the kind of bed people were born and died in; this wouldn’t be the first time a young woman had lain under inherited blankets in this bed and put her head on the same pillow where her dead mother had rested hers. But something about the foot post troubled her. She shut one eye and then the other. She looked to the left-hand side and then the right and then she sat up straight and stared.

That right-hand foot post, the one where the duster had snagged, was squint now. The main column was straight like the left one and the big square blob with the vines carved into was still square too, but the ball on top of that had four roses carved on its four sides. And she was looking down the length of the bed at the
left
edge of one rose and the
right
edge of the next one round, instead of at one whole flower, face-on. And the horse-parade plume thing on the top was facing the window, its narrow side to her instead of showing its three feathers like the other one. Opal knelt on the crackling mattress—one look inside the plastic had convinced her she wouldn’t unwrap it—and shuffled down to the end. She grabbed the squint plume and twisted it back. It turned without protest back to its proper place. Opal gave it a rub with the hem of her pajama top and started shuffling back up the bed again. Then she stopped, returned to the foot, and twisted the plume the other way.

It turned, and turned, started to wobble and then, without warning, came off in her hand—impossibly heavy—and clunked a chrysanthemum as it fell onto the bed beside her. She stared at the brass threads revealed on the thick peg that had held it in place and peered at the matching brass threads inside the stump of the post, standing decapitated now. Then she rose up on her knees and peered down into the bedpost itself, into the brass-lined cavity there. In it, curled round into the shape of its hiding place, was a thick sheet of yellowed paper folded in two.

Opal reached in to grasp it but then drew her hand back, snapping it against her chest and staring around the dark bedroom, her heart walloping. She could hear something. Somewhere—she couldn’t have said if it was above her or below—someone was very quietly weeping.

NINE

F
IRST THINGS FIRST,
O
PAL
made damned sure the weeping was real and not some mad ghost-crying she had released from the little brass hidey-hole where it had dwelt. She reached in, grabbed the paper, and pulled it out. The crying just carried on, not any louder or any softer than before.

It was bad enough, though, and she hopped out of bed and put her head round the curtains, looking out into the dark street. Maybe one of the Joshi boys had dumped a girlfriend and she had come to moon under a streetlamp and stare up at his window. But there was no one out there and anyway, the sound was definitely coming from inside. She followed it out into the passage and along to the back of the house and the attic stairs, then climbed them as quietly as she could. She didn’t know whether her ears were getting attuned or if she was really getting closer.
Warmer
, as they used to shout playing hunt the thimble. (It was never really a thimble. Who had thimbles? But hunt the ring pull didn’t sound the same.) Yes, she was getting
warmer,
and her mouth had gone dry. She would much rather be getting
cooler, cold, stone-cold, in the deep freeze, up at the North pole, Opal
. If there really was someone crying in her attic, the farther away she was, the better. But her feet kept moving her forward all the same.

She was halfway up there now. Who the hell would have broken into her house, gone up to an attic full of bags of booze bottles, and sat down to weep there? The sniffs and sobbing were louder than ever. A tramp? An old friend of her mum’s? Then a thought came crashing in so hard and fast she could almost taste it and now her feet
did
stop moving, frozen to the carpet, legs like columns of stone.

The thought was so loud inside her head she couldn’t believe it hadn’t clanged out all around: it was Craig Southgate. She raced up the rest of the steps and fumbled for the attic light switch. Little Craig—nearly fifteen now—had come to a house he thought was still empty, across the road from his granny’s, to look out and … but there was no one there. And there was no window up here to look out of anyway.

Then a throat was cleared, and Opal heard footsteps cross an empty space. That was no teenager and there was no empty space to walk across in her attic. It was next door.

She stared at the dividing wall, a single course of bricks. It seemed like she’d got a new neighbor then. Moved in to his dream house and gone straight up to the attic all alone to cry his eyes out.
Welcome to Mote Street
, she thought.
I wonder what brought
you
here?

Opal slumped for a moment, as the adrenaline left her and a foolish feeling washed into its place. Then she remembered the note in the bedpost and raced back downstairs again.
The piece of paper,
she told herself sternly as she clambered back up onto the bed.
Who said it was a
note
?

But it was—or part of one at least. She opened the paper very gently, easing the brittle fold apart, and held it up under the ceiling light (she hadn’t got as far as lamps on bedside tables yet). It was handwritten, in pale ink, old-fashioned writing from when children were taught how to write and all used the same loops and curls and the same little flicks joining each letter to the next, like toy elephants nose to tail.
South
, it said at the top of the page. Underneath were these words:

Because bad things happen to little girls

Opal let the note fall onto the bedcover and stared at it. She said it aloud: “South—because bad things happen to little girls.” The night was as hot as ever and the dash up the attic stairs to where it was even hotter under the rafters had left a film of sweat across her back, but she shivered now. It was horrible, even though she didn’t know what it meant. In fact, it was the worse for that. What was
South
? Someone’s name? And what about the rest of it? She couldn’t tell if it was a threat or a motto or some kind of … what was the word …
incantation
. As soon as she had it, she pushed
that
thought away.

And the note just stopped there. It started up in the middle of a thought and then it stopped again. She looked inside the bedpost, but she knew it was empty. So where was the rest of it?

Opal smacked her head with her hand and rolled across to the other side. She twisted the left-hand foot post hard, but it wouldn’t budge.
Maybe
, she thought,
it goes the other way, mirror-image to its partner
, and she tried reversing. Now there was some movement, but she had tightened it with her first twist, and she had to get up and stand on the floor, bracing herself, wrestling the plume in a two-handed grip before she felt the thread start to give way and could spin it clear.

There was another sheet just like the first.
East
, it said.

when someone finds this after I am gone

But what did it mean? Opal put the two sheets side-by-side, first
east-south
—
when someone finds this after I am gone because bad things happen to little girls
. And then
south-east
—
because bad things happen to little girls when someone finds this after I am gone
. Neither order was all that great. And there was no capital letter to say where it was supposed to start and no full stop to finish it off. Even with both bits, it started in the middle and stopped before the end, only just a bit longer.

Then she smacked her head again. She didn’t
have
the start and the end.
South east
was the middle.
North south east west
, it went, round the compass, round the four posts of her bed.

Except her bed wasn’t a bed, was it? She stood at the head and squinted hard at all the undulations of the carving, looking for a join. The grain of the wood bloomed and withered in a pattern like a flame and—she had missed this before—there was a tiny hairline crack running up the inside of this top right post. Right the way up, no joins, no secret compartment, no more of the note there. The rest of it, the start and the end, north and west, were with the other headboard, wherever it might be.

She stared down at the footboard again. It looked grotesque with its heads lolling on the covers, and she picked up one of the tops to replace it, wondering whether to put the note back too.
when someone finds this after I am gone
. What if no one had ever found the rest of the note in the headboard? What if it had been destroyed and that’s how the foot came to be matched up with the wrong partner? What if she—Opal Jones—was the only someone who had ever found anything?

And suddenly the brass threads screwing shut the secret place where the note had lain for years and years, since little girls learned to write in that loopy way, were glinting in Opal’s mind like the golden thread that had brought her here and made Margaret tell the secret that only Opal knew. And in a picture in her head, the little lost boy and the little girl—who sounded pretty lost to Opal—had joined hands and were walking away into darkness, maybe going to be lost forever, unless Opal followed them and brought them home.

Could she do both? She had told Fishbo she didn’t have time for another job. Turned him down like a bedspread, as Margaret used to say.

But that’s different
, she thought, laying the pages of the note on the dressing table and going to screw the tops back onto the bed again. There was no golden thread tying her to Fishbo. He thought there was, of course, because of her suddenly appearing, his old pupil, but he was just an old man who needed a stand-in if he was going to keep up with the rest of his band and not … what had he said? … lay down his sorry head and die.

Two mysteries was more than enough, she told herself, getting back into bed and burrowing down. Plus a job. Two mysteries and two jobs would be crazy. Things didn’t come in fours, everyone knew that. Things came in threes. Craig Southgate, the little bed girl, and … a job at Tesco. Except that didn’t sound like three; it sounded like two of something and one of something else.

She sat up, punched her pillow (releasing a faint trace of old tobacco), and lay down again, finding herself wondering if Fishbo had really worked in a tobacco field when he was a boy. Big Al and Pep Kendal had rolled their eyes when he said it; Opal had seen them and thought it was pretty mean, when he was old and he thought he was dying and would never go home again because everyone he had to go home to was—

Sitting up this time, she scraped the back of her head on one of the outcrops of carving on the back of the bed; she’d have to watch out for that. She rubbed it roughly as she got up, shrugged out of her pajama shorts, and pulled her leggings back on again. She slid her feet into flip-flops and buttoned her camisole top up to make it look like a tee-shirt if she was lucky.

Things came in threes. Not jobs—unless you were Margaret Reid—but special things. Golden thread things. And she had hold of all three ends now. She was going to find out what happened to Craig, solve the mystery of the little bed girl, and get Fishbo back with his family.

She let herself out of the front door and trotted over the road to tell the boys she was ready to join the band.

TEN

B
UT THE TROUBLE WITH
having three fine threads of gold twined together to form a rope tying you to three separate quests—one tragic, one mysterious, and one pretty urgent, if Fishbo’s cough was anything to go by—was that the induction and training process for a full-time job as a cog in a machine as mighty as Tesco took up a pretty big slice of your time.

And for the first two weeks or so, even when she lay in bed at night, the pick and the rumble, the trays and the dollies, the codes and symbols and substitution rules were all her skull could contain.

She had expected to find herself stacking shelves and she wouldn’t have minded. But on her first proper day, she was told that she was shadowing a picker.

“What’s that?” Opal said.

“It was in the induction,” the team leader said (like anyone had listened). “Picking” turned out be the Tesco word for shopping—they had to have a special word for it. Doing the shopping for all those people who sat at home at their computers instead of coming out and doing their own. Pat, the picker Opal was shadowing to see if she was any good, had been in it since the beginning.

“Twelve years,” she said. “Started when there were only two of us and one van. You stick wi’ me, love.”

“Like a shadow,” said Opal.

“Charlotte’s got you in here,” Pat said. “Put in a word for you. So let’s crack on.”

Opal turned to look at the device clamped to the edge of the trolley, concentrated hard on the buttons and the little screen.

“You scan the team pad, scan your own badge, scan the customer’s badge, and then you’re ready to start the pick,” said Pat. “It goes frozen, ambient, and then chilled. No booze or fags. If they’re on your picking list, they shouldn’t be, and you just ignore them.”

“Frozen, ambient, chill,” said Opal, looking over the list. “What if you can’t find something?”

“Substitution rules,” said Pat. “Now, I’ll find the right shelf and you do the picking.”

“Right away?” Opal said. “Whatsisname—the team leader—said we were just to watch at first.”

“You’re a bright kid,” Pat said.

And they wheeled around the quiet shop as smooth as if they were on casters just like the trays. Frozen, ambient, chilled. Round and round, up and down, out to the warehouse, onto the shop floor, tray after tray. By lunchtime, by the time of the postmortem up in the canteen, when Opal was filling in shift sheets, Pat said she could do the afternoon on her own.