Asking For Trouble (13 page)
I was sorry I’d asked to borrow the camera. But his attitude made me more than ever determined. ‘Don’t be so negative! Have a little faith in me, can’t you? I took his money and I’m trying to earn it.’
‘There’s more to this than taking the old man’s money!’ he retorted suspiciously.
‘All right! I have a stupid feeling that somehow I let Terry down, when she lived with us. I was mean to her.’
‘No, you weren’t. She was mean to everyone else. You used to moan about her all the time! And even if you were, there’s nothing you can do about it now!’
I lost my temper. ‘That’s a cop-out of an attitude! I’m not just giving up!’
Ganesh yelled, ‘This isn’t about her at all, is it? Or old Alastair! This is really all about you and
your
father! You think you let him down. You just want to put this business of Terry right because you wish you could put right the way you think you failed your old man. Do you know what you’re in danger of doing? You’re in danger of adopting this Alastair Monkton as a substitute father-figure! That’s a very dangerous thing to do. It’s risky for you and him and it’s unfair on him!’
I was in no mood to be psycho-analysed. ‘Are you going to lend me a camera or not?’
He went upstairs and came down after some minutes with a really neat little camera in a leather case on a strap. ‘Don’t lose it! It’s fool-proof. A six-year-old could work it. Don’t put your finger over the lens.’
As he handed it to me, he muttered, ‘I wish I could come with you. But we’re busy in the shop and Dad’s back is playing him up. He can’t lift the crates. But promise me, you’ll keep in touch.’
‘Promise, Gan.’
Ganesh’s remarks about my appearance had hit home. I had to admit he was right. I’d stick out like a sore thumb around the Astara Stud. I had to look respectable. They were a traditional lot in the country or so I imagined.
I washed my hair and tried to style it. In the squat long hair wasn’t practical because we only had hot water if we boiled a kettle. Although I kept it short, it was longer than I had it in my punk days when I wore it cropped down to a quarter-inch stubble and coloured it purple. Now it was back to its normal mid-brown.
At the time I’d been going through my purple phase, I had a gold ring put through the outer edge of my right nostril. I was still at school then. I think that was what finished the headmistress off as far as I was concerned, the day I walked in with my purple hair and nostril-ring. I just wasn’t the image she wanted for the school. She told me so. They were trying to turn out ladies, even in these benighted days. She meant, of course, that well-heeled parents, arriving to visit the school with a view to sending their precious daughters there, didn’t expect to see a purple-haired, nostril-ringed punk lounging along the corridor. There was a barney. I was told to take out the ring and grow my hair. I refused. About a week later, Dad got The Letter. Goodbye, Francesca. We tried to make you one of us, but you weren’t suitable material. No one can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. It was couched in more official phrases, the letter, but that’s what they meant.
A little later, when I was on the drama course which I was also destined never to finish, I swopped the nostril-ring for a nostril-stud, gold with a diamond chip in it which twinkled in the sunlight. I still wear the stud. It fixes in with a fitting like a tiny Allen key. If I leave it out for any length of time, the hole in my right nostril fills up with soap. Sorry, but that’s life, full of sordid details.
I sorted through my wardrobe. I’d got my best clean jeans with no holes in them, a clean shirt, a denim waistcoat and my Victorian-style lace-up ankle boots with little heels. All put together it didn’t look bad when I studied myself in the bathroom mirror. Although that mirror didn’t encourage confidence in your appearance. It had livid patches all over it. If you looked at yourself in the nude in it, the reflection made you look as if you had leprosy.
Apart from the nostril-stud, I’m not one for jewellery. But I have Grandma Varady’s gold locket so I put that on. I used to babysit for Lucy while she was out job and flat hunting. When she left the squat, she gave me her good jacket because I’d always admired it. It was blue-grey loose weave with a pretty silver-grey satiny lining. She’d always kept it in a polythene bag away from the children so it was quite smart. It was a bit on the big side for me, so I turned the sleeves up and the satin lining showed on the outside but it looked quite good.
So that was what I would turn up in Abbotsfield wearing. I wasn’t sure how long I’d be staying. (Or if I’d be thrown off the place as soon as I got there.)
Hope for the best and plan for the worst
, said William of Orange, or somebody. I got out my green and purple duffel bag and put in a towel with my toothbrush and soap. Then I put in three pairs of clean knickers and a spare pair of opaque black tights and spare shirt. There was still room so I added a sweater in case it turned chilly and finally my one blue cotton button-through skirt, because I wasn’t sure quite where I’d end up and it might be somewhere that jeans didn’t suit. That skirt was handy because it didn’t need ironing, it was meant to look crumpled.
I managed to get it all in and just do up the zip. I’ve always carried my money in a purse on a cord round my neck under my shirt. The places I’d lived in, you kept your money on you and you didn’t let anyone see it.
Amongst Nev’s books was one called
Three Plays
by Turgenev. One of the plays was entitled
A Month in the Country
. That seemed an omen so I put the book in my pocket to read on the bus.
I’d got that far when the doorbell rang. It was Ganesh.
‘I thought, if you hadn’t left yet, I’d come to Victoria and see you off.’ He picked up my duffel bag. ‘What on earth have you got in here? A crowbar and a hammer?’
‘Ha-ha! My overnight essentials. I might stay a few days.’
He was frowning at me, studying the outfit. But he didn’t say anything and I asked, nettled, ‘Something wrong?’
He shook his head but still didn’t say anything.
I couldn’t be bothered whether he approved or not and turned away to check I’d not left anything I’d need.
From behind me, Ganesh said very loudly, ‘I wish you weren’t going down there on your own. You don’t know a thing about the place. Or who will be there.’
‘It can’t be worse than this flat!’ I pointed out snappishly.
‘Have you got my camera?’
‘Here.’ I picked it up and slung it across from one shoulder, bandolero fashion.
‘Want me to show you again how it works?’
‘Thanks, but I remember! I’m not totally simple! And you don’t have to come to the coach station!’
‘If I have to come looking for you,’ he said. ‘I want to know which bus you went on, where it was going, and what time it was supposed to get there. It’ll give me something to go on when I report you missing to the police and we start tracing your last movements.’
It wasn’t exactly an expression of confidence.
At Victoria I got a seat on a bus going to Basingstoke. Ganesh went off somewhere and came back with a plastic carrier containing two packets of crisps, a box of orange drink with a straw and a tuna sandwich in a triangular box.
‘In case you don’t get a chance to buy lunch.’
I knew Ganesh was the best friend I had, more than that really. But all I said was, ‘Thanks!’
When I actually got on the bus, sat in my seat by the window, I found I was really suffering a bad case of butterflies. My stomach was just a quivering jelly mass.
I could see Ganesh standing by the side of the bus with his hands shoved in the pockets of his black leather jacket. His long black hair curled loose round his face. He has nice hair. I can understand why he doesn’t want to cut it off, even if his dad does believe it would be the first step on the pathway to success. He looked worried. I smiled brightly and waved to him. He took one hand from his pocket, waved back and gave a thumbs-up sign.
Then we were off. I was on my own, just me and Turgenev.
I wondered if Ganesh was right and I would find a murderer down there in the country. And I wondered what I’d do, if I did.
The coach crawled through mid-morning traffic out of London. I’d brought along a little notebook and I thought I better start off straight away being organised, the way a proper detective would be. So I began to write down all I knew about Terry under the heading ‘Lines of Inquiry’.
But it was difficult to write clearly as the bus wove in and out of traffic. There wasn’t much room and an old woman next to me took out her knitting. She was doing some sort of complicated stitch which meant that every other minute she threw the wool over the needle with a flourish and her elbow stuck into my ribs. When this happened, she said, ‘Sorry, dear!’ But then she did it again.
I squashed myself up in the corner of my seat, which was by the window, put the notebook away and decided to think it through. But that didn’t work, largely because I’d been sleeping so badly the last few nights. My brain was sluggish. It was the warmest day for weeks and it was really hot in the bus with the sun beating in through the window. We were stuck in a traffic jam. I decided perhaps I’d better leave it for a while, and come back to it when I had my head together.
The jam was building up. The old lady next to me was unscrewing her vacuum flask. She was obviously a seasoned coach traveller and preparing to sit it out. I took Turgenev from my jacket pocket and made a start on
A Month in the Country
.
I wish I could have completed that college drama course. It was just getting interesting when I quit. I remember being told to think myself into a part as I read it. So I cast myself as Natalia and set myself the intellectual exercise trying to be her.
I admit the first thing which struck me was that it must take Russians ages to carry on even a brief conversation, what with calling each other by such complicated names all the time.
Leaving that aside, I found the play was about a group of people shut up in a country house in the wilds of Russia in the 1840s, all bored stiff and trying to get off with one another. Not very successfully, I might add, which considering how long it took one character to ask another character to go for a walk, wasn’t surprising.
Was I going to find life like that when I got down to the country? The heat was overpowering. I closed up the book and I fell asleep with my head propped uncomfortably in the angle between the back of the seat and the window.
When I woke up we were belting along the motorway. I drank Ganesh’s orange drink and ate a packet of crisps. I still hadn’t worked out what I was going to do when I got to Abbotsfield. I hadn’t planned this at all well. Just borrowing a camera wasn’t enough. And now, before I knew it, we’d reached Basingstoke and I had to get off the coach.
Like most people, I suppose, I’d always vaguely thought that ‘going abroad’ or to a foreign country meant crossing the borders into another nation’s territory. Some foreign countries appear more alien than others, to the mind. I, for example, have never thought of Hungary as a foreign country because Grandma Varady talked of it so much. Yet I’ve never been there and, were I to go now, it wouldn’t be the Hungary Grandma remembered. It would be somewhere else, resembling nothing I’d ever imagined. Perhaps that’s the reason I’ve never made a serious effort to get there. I want to keep my image of it intact.
The truth is subtler. It usually is. None of us has to travel very far to find a different tribal territory, certainly not outside the boundaries of your own country. You need only travel a few miles, or streets. A mere block away and hey presto, you’re a foreigner. That’s what Ganesh had been trying to tell me and he was right.
I realised that as soon as I set foot to the ground in Basingstoke. I didn’t belong here. I didn’t know where to begin. I pottered around for a while and bought a paper bag of vinegar-drenched chips and ate them in the street while I wondered whether to go on, or just find a coach back to London. It hardly seemed possible that only this morning I’d been in my familiar surroundings of boarded-up houses and crumbling blocks of flats.
Basingstoke, on the other hand, had an air of depressing respectability, a pleasantly dull sort of little place, busy enough. It must have been just a market town to start with but some years ago, the modern world had hit it and now it even had a couple of shiny office blocks, giving it a foot in both camps. The people scurried about, mostly looking ordinary and harassed. In the crowd was a scattering of women in calf-length skirts teamed with knitwear-over-a-blouse. Some of them wore headscarves, expensive headscarves, which made them look like off-duty Royals. Me, tie a headscarf on me and I look like a babushka.
Time was getting on. I still didn’t know what I was going to do when I got to Abbotsfield, or how I was going to get there, or find the Astara Stud, or where I was going to sleep that night or anything.
I thought about telephoning Alastair Monkton and letting him know I was on my way, but I chickened out when I got to the callbox, and anyway, I didn’t have the right change. Besides, if I rang, anyone might answer and whoever it was might be far less welcoming than I hoped Alastair would be. If Alastair were there. Suppose he was away? What did I do then?
By now I was muttering like Mad Edna as I talked myself out of going to the stud. But if I turned back now, after coming this far, I’d lose all self-respect. Ganesh would crow over me for weeks.
I got a grip on my nerves and went in search of a local bus to take me to Abbotsfield.
I was lucky to find a bus which went to Abbotsfield at all. It arrived there late afternoon, around five o’clock. A couple of women with shopping bags got off and disappeared quickly. I was left staring round me.
It had been a pleasant drive if you like countryside. It was pretty, I suppose, but it might just as well have been on the moon as far as I was concerned. I’m a townie, through and through, and was realising it with horrible clarity, even more so than in Basingstoke which had at least offered a jumble of streets and shops. I like bricks. You know where you are with bricks. You turn a corner and there are more of them. Turn a corner in the country and you never know what you’re going to find. You can hide in a town. You can’t hide in the country, or I couldn’t. It was all too open. Miles of empty fields. On the other hand, you could bury a body out there and who’d find it?