‘I know why you’re going to Shadley Oak,’ said Kelly, twisting and untwisting a tube of lipstick so that the pink tip flickered like a tongue.
‘So do I,’ said Netta. ‘I’m going to help my brother and my mother move house.’
‘No. There’s another reason.’
‘Is there? Kelly, please stop fiddling with that, you’ll break it.’
‘It’s too neutral for you anyway. I told you loads of times you should wear something in the red-brown range.’ Netta’s stepdaughter dropped the lipstick and picked up a mascara instead. ‘You want to know my theory about your real reason?’
‘What, my real, deep, subconscious reason?’
‘Yeah actually,’ said Kelly, who had just passed a Higher in psychology and had thus become Sigmund Freud. ‘There’s no need to take the piss.’
‘Sorry. Go ahead.’
‘You’re going because you’ve run out of people to worry about. Dad’s off to the States, I’m leaving home and there’ll be no one around for you to organize. It’s like when hens sit on china eggs when there aren’t any real eggs to sit on.’
‘Right.’ Netta finished untangling a pair of tights that had emerged from the washing machine in a knot. ‘Do I really remind you of a hen?’
‘No, that’s a metaphor,’ said Kelly, impatiently. ‘I mean a simile.’
‘Big bust, short legs.’
‘No. Anyway, your bust’s not that big; Eleanor Kerr in my class is a double-D and she just shoves them into people’s faces, she thinks they’re fantastic. And if you’ve got short legs, then mine must be like a tiny dwarf’s or something.’
‘You’ve got lovely legs.’
‘Look, you haven’t said about my theory.’
‘Oh, um … no, that’s not why I’m going.’
Kelly shrugged. ‘If it’s subconscious, you wouldn’t know anyway. Dad, tell her what I said was right.’
‘What?’ Mick, lying on the bed next to Netta’s half-packed suitcase, opened his eyes.
‘Tell Mum she’s only going so she can boss them around.’
‘All right. Netta –’
‘Yes, Mick?’
‘You’re a wonderful woman.’
‘Thank you, Mick.’
Kelly groaned. ‘What about me, then?’
‘You’re wonderful too,’ said Mick.
‘What about Shona?’
‘She’s wonderful.’
‘Clare?’
‘Wonderful.’
‘Jeanette?’
‘Wonderful. You’re all wonderful. I’m surrounded by wonderful women.’ He closed his eyes again and clasped his hands across his stomach. ‘I’m a very lucky man.’
Kelly looked at him pityingly. ‘You’re so pathetic, Dad. You think just because you put women on a pedestal they’ll do anything for you. What about Auntie Vi?’
‘Wonderful.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘If that really was my subconscious reason,’ said Netta, ‘wouldn’t I be looking forward to going?’
Kelly looked at her. ‘Aren’t you, then?’
Netta snorted and shook her head, and carried on sorting socks; some things were just too complex to explain, even to herself.
It was odd to be travelling south on a Sunday; as Netta worked her way through the newspaper she kept catching herself thinking that the scenery should be moving in a different direction, that hills should be bulking the horizon and the prospect of home and Mick and a nice glass of wine in front of the telly moving ever closer. Instead, by the time she had reached the arid pages of ‘Your Money and You’ the countryside had flattened into a series of hedgeless fields, all stubble and seagulls, and the accents of those boarding the train were beginning to acquire the clanging ‘g’s that still infected her own speech.
‘It’s all very well leaving us lists,’ her mother had said on the phone, after one of Netta’s recent visits, ‘but Glenn and I are busy people.’
‘I know, Mum. That’s why I left the list. I thought it might simplify things for you – furniture you want to hang on to, furniture you don’t want but that you could sell and furniture for dumping. All you have to do is show it to a clearance firm and they can give you a quote. And I left you a list of clearance firms. With numbers.’
‘Yes, now I’m not at all sure what you did with that particular piece of paper.’
‘I left it on the sideboard in the living room. It had “Clearance Firms” written on the top of it. As a sort of clue.’
‘Was the back of it blank, though?’
‘I don’t know. Probably.’
‘You see, the telephone’s on the sideboard and if I need to take a very important message and I’m looking around for something to write on, then I might just use the nearest … in any case I’m not at all sure the small maroon sofa should go.’
‘But I thought you said that –’
‘And Glenn’s decided he wants to keep his desk.’
‘But I talked to him about –’
‘Coral’s just arrived, dear. I’ll phone you during the week, oh, did I tell you that we decided against the Lilley Road bungalow?’
‘What? You did what?’
‘I went back there with Glenn and do you know – I walked into that dark front hall and I had a frisson. I suddenly thought, no – no, this is not for me. Bungalows are for old people.’
‘But … but, hang on, the whole reason you’re moving in the first place is that you can’t manage the stairs any longer, and you won’t get a stairlift. What are you going to do? Buy a tent?’
‘There’s really no need to be sarcastic, Brianetta.’
‘But you told me you liked that bungalow.’
‘The proportions were all wrong, I felt stifled. And before you say anything, Glenn completely agreed with me, and as well as that he was worried he wouldn’t be able to get his trolley in through the side gate.’
‘But you were supposed to exchange next Monday.’
‘Don’t shout, dear. Wasn’t it lucky I had the urge to look round one more time? It would never have suited us.’
It was at this point that Netta (who had measured both gate and trolley and yes, it would have fitted, with room to spare) had realized that traipsing from Glasgow to Birmingham every third weekend was not only ruinously expensive but also completely pointless, since there were all those unmonitored days in between during which everything could slide out of control again.
‘Mum still doesn’t get it,’ she’d said to Mick. ‘After all these years she still doesn’t understand how much Glenn prefers order and predictability, and … and decisions.’
And she’d made a decision of her own: if she wanted her brother’s first move in more than three decades to be as trauma-free as possible, then she would actually have to be there, ensconced in Shadley Oak over the crucial period, observing, nudging, guiding …
Outside the train, fields had given way to warehouses and concrete stanchions and odd sections of wasteground, splashed purple with buddleia, and people in the carriage were beginning to assemble their luggage. Netta collected up the unread bits of the paper and put them into the bag that Mick had thrust into her hand just before seeing her off at Glasgow. It contained a box of Black Magic, which he considered to be her all-time favourite confectionery, since he had bought her some on their first date seventeen years ago and she had praised his choice lavishly, as she had also praised the bunch of carnations and the, frankly, dreadful Italian restaurant to which he’d taken her; he was so pleased to have nailed her taste that she’d never had the heart to tell him that she really preferred milk chocolates.
There was no fast train to Shadley Oak. After she’d wheeled her suitcase the length of New Street Station, and bumped it down a steep flight of stairs, and waited the expected twenty minutes for the arrival of the 3.05, and then a further, entirely unexplained, sixteen minutes, two little carriages eased their way shyly up the platform and, after a long pause, opened their doors with a hiss. ‘Arriving at Platform 4 is the 3.05 to Shadley Oak,’ said the announcer, mendaciously, as everyone surged forward and Netta, using her suitcase as a wedge, attempted to get a seat, ‘stopping at Fretley Hall, Adstone, Calls Cottage, Salley Bridge, Opley, Cherton, Stagg Street, Hoddles Green, Spittles Green, Shotton, King’s Heath, Clay Hill, Sprent and Shadley Oak.’ She was within feet of success when a crocodile of narrow-hipped teenagers shimmied past her and settled in triumph in the last remaining free spaces.
‘Brilliant,’ said one of them. He looked up, caught Netta’s eye, flinched at her expression and looked away again. She rested one buttock on her suitcase and braced herself as the train moved off.
She could have recited the list of stations in her sleep. The quaint names, which should, by rights, have belonged to a chain of half-timbered villages jingling with morris dancers, were merely the labels on a series of identical suburbs oozing outward from the city. All that could be seen from the train were steep embankments, topped with fences and sheds and sticky-leaved trees. Netta tried to read the sports supplement and then gave up and stared out of the window. She could feel the familiar itchy sense of claustrophobia creeping across her, the prefigurement of Shadley Oak, a place so horribly small that you could see the edges from the middle.
‘When you come back from there,’ Kelly had said recently, ‘you know, after you’ve been for a weekend on your own, without Dad, when you come back you’re always really crabby and smart-arsy.’
‘Says Queen Crabby of Smart-arse.’
‘Yeah, that’s the sort of thing. That’s exactly the sort of thing you say. And if anyone says anything back you give one of your death stares.’
‘Do I?’
‘Yeah. And you’re really sarcastic. Much worse than usual.’
It had been a chastening conversation; if that’s what a weekend could do, what kind of monster would she turn into over a longer stay? She was going to have to watch herself. She was going to have to practise patience and good humour. She made a creditable start by not swearing when the carriage lurched just outside Stagg Street and she fell off her suitcase and all the teenagers laughed. She dusted herself off and graciously accepted the offer of a corner seat from a man in a suit, and almost instantly fell asleep, her head drumming gently against the window.
She awoke with a jerk, and the awareness that she was dribbling. Wiping her mouth discreetly, she glanced around; the teenagers opposite were all asleep, keeled over like a row of toppled dominoes. The carriage was half empty, and outside – she saw with a slump of the heart – was the last vestige of the green belt, the sweep of farmland that separated Shadley Oak from Sprent. Ahead she could see all the familiar landmarks: the cluster of trees on a tump just outside the town, the tower of the fire station, the spike of the abbey spire, and reaching across the fields, further on every visit, the mud roads and neat brick outlines of the new estate.
It was easy to spot her brother among the small crowd waiting on the platform. He had a bright-red Puffa jacket, an A3 clipboard and a shopping trolley filled with old bottles. Netta waved as he slid past the window but he failed to see her, his attention fixed on something a few feet above the roof of the train. There seemed, she noted, something indefinably wrong about the shape of his shoulders, a kind of lumpy asymmetry reminiscent of Richard the Third.
She stood for a moment in the aisle, trying to prise the telescopic handle from the top of the suitcase. ‘Hey,’ said one of the teenagers, newly awake, a girl with fluffed blonde hair like duck down and eyes made small by fiercely applied eyeliner. She was staring at something further along the platform. ‘Hey Jamie – hey, look who’s come to meet us.’ Her mouth split into a laugh, and Netta stiffened, mid-task. The girl’s neighbour unglued his eyes and blinked towards the window. ‘Oh yeah.’ He smiled; not a cruel smile, but a sleepily derisive one. ‘Yeah. It’s the Rubbish Man.’
Glenn was still looking skywards as she approached him, and she followed the angle of his gaze. On the parapet of the footbridge that crossed to the other platform was a three-quarters empty bottle of Grolsch. There was a tension about his body as he looked at it, a sense of a gundog straining at the leash.
‘Hi Glenn.’
He swung round, rather unwillingly.
‘Oh, hello.’
‘Thanks for coming to meet me.’
He nodded a couple of times, one eye still on the bottle.
‘Glenn, what’s happened to your jacket?’ She’d been right about the shoulders; the coat, which he’d chosen for his last birthday, had lost its smooth, inflated profile and now looked as if an enterprising designer had tacked a piece of red nylon across a relief map of the Pennines.
‘I washed it,’ said Glenn.
Netta gently fingered, and then squeezed, one of cuffs; the stuffing had the consistency of a cardboard eggbox.
‘What did you wash it in?’
There was no answer and he moved his arm away, uncomfortable with being touched for too long. ‘It’s quite rare for me to find one of those bottles. They have a unique ceramic swing-top, patented in 1898.’
‘Do you want to get it? I’ll keep an eye on the trolley.’
He was off before she could finish the sentence and she watched him walk towards the staircase with the strange arrhythmic gait that made him look as if he had a stone in each shoe. He overtook a couple of pensioners and took the steps two at a time, clipboard swinging erratically.
Sunday was bottle day; she’d forgotten. Monday was plastic and polystyrene, Wednesday cans and if she’d been unwise enough to book her ticket for Friday, then Glenn would have turned up at the station with the haul he classified as ‘miscellaneous’, and she might therefore have been greeted by an old gas burner and a roll of mouldy lino.
On the footbridge he picked up the bottle, looked at it carefully and then continued across and disappeared down the steps on the far side. Netta nudged the trolley a little way up the platform, towards the exit. After a moment she was overtaken by the teenagers, already deep in conversation (‘Froggy’s a twat.’ ‘She’s a twat.’ ‘No, you’re a twat.’); they looked at her in passing, snorted and shambled off through the mock-Pugin archway. After a moment they reappeared, and one of the boys sprinted up the platform and – before she could say anything – lobbed a half-empty 7-up can into the trolley, spraying her with an arc of droplets.
‘There you go.’
‘It’s bottle day,’ she said coldly, picking it out again.
‘You his new assistant?’
‘Bugger off.’
‘Don’t you fucking swear at me,’ he said, with sudden aggression. He lingered, staring hard at her, until one of his friends called him away.
‘Fuck you, Mrs,’ he said, venomously, over his shoulder.
She took the can to the nearest bin, her heart beating uncomfortably fast, aware that she had mishandled the situation. Something similar probably happened to her brother almost every week but without the same consequences, his very impassivity seeming to act as a shield, whereas she’d gone off like a landmine at the first provocation. It was her old Glenn-defence button, still touch-sensitive after all these years. She rubbed a streak of 7-up from her chin and looked around for him; the train was pulling away, revealing an empty platform opposite and a picture-postcard view of Shadley Oak.
The town looked lovely from up here; she’d give it that much. It lay in a shallow valley, the abbey and its green grounds at the centre, the gunmetal curve of the old moat separating church land from the medieval streets; even Mick, not renowned for noticing anything that wasn’t either edible or on fire, had admired it on his first visit. The residential edges had thickened and spread over recent years and the skyline was pocked with bad planning decisions, but the abbey was still the dominant building – lichened, buttressed, its image reproduced on a million tea towels, together with those of its famous swans. Netta could see three of them now – flakes of white on the dark water. Between the ages of eleven and fourteen Glenn had been phobic about swans, necessitating a long detour on the way to school. The phobia had disappeared overnight, to be replaced by a fear of spoons. He still hated spoons, though nowadays he didn’t mind being in the same room as one.
Where was he? There now seemed to be no one on the entire station, apart from herself. There were no buildings on the other side of the tracks, only a long spiked fence and a gateway that opened onto a steep path down to the car park, the latter invisible from where she stood.
‘Glenn!’
In the silence that followed her shout she could hear the abbey bell strike four. She parked the trolley by the exit, left her suitcase beside it, crossed the footbridge and spotted him immediately. He was coming across the car park, walking fast, his head thrust forward with excitement.
‘I’ve worked out exactly what happened,’ he said when he was still yards away, his words emerging in a pauseless, monotone rush, ‘you see until last year there was a bottle bank at the end of the car park and some people aren’t aware that it’s been moved which is why they’ve all been left.’
‘Glenn,’ she said gently, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I haven’t seen whatever it is that you’ve seen.’
‘I’ll show you, there was a similar example last month–’ he turned around mid-syllable and Netta followed him down the path and across the tarmac ‘– only it was to a lesser extent which is why I decided to check the area on a regular basis although because of the amount left here today it was obvious to me from the top of the footbridge that there was going to be work needed, look–’ He thrust out a hand. Piled in a corner, heaped against the chain-link fence, were hundreds upon hundreds of bottles – some in bags, some loose and lying in pools of their own contents, some crusty and ancient, some in pieces. ‘I may find when I’ve checked my figures that this is definitely a record,’ said Glenn; he smiled, showing an endearing line of gum above his top teeth.
‘That’s certainly a lot of bottles,’ said Netta, fatuously.
Her brother leaned over and plucked at one of the carrier bags. It split as he raised it and the contents rolled across the tarmac. ‘I shall definitely need my trolley,’ he said. ‘It may well take two loads, I may well be working late into the night.’
‘Can’t you do one load now and one tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow’s plastic and –’
‘Polystyrene. Sorry, I wasn’t thinking.’ This last remark was to herself; Glenn was already halfway across the car park. She followed him. ‘Glenn, I think I’ll phone for a cab and let you get on with it.’
‘Yes, all right.’
‘Shall I tell Mum to keep tea for you?’
‘Yes, all right.’ He was sprinting up the path to the station, focused utterly on the task ahead.
‘Glenn, you will be careful with that broken glass, won’t you? Do you have any glov–’ She stopped as her eyeline reached the level of the platforms. Apart from Glenn’s trolley, they were completely bare. Her suitcase had gone.
‘Camera?’
‘No.’
‘Walkman?’
‘No.’
‘Wallet?’
‘No, everything like that’s in here.’ She patted her handbag.
‘So it’s just the clothes then. And toiletries and things.’
Netta sat back and rolled her shoulders. She simply couldn’t get Constable Whittaker to comprehend the seriousness of what had happened. He was a sweet-faced, rather nervous young man, who hadn’t yet bulked out to match the breadth of his shoulders. She couldn’t imagine him chasing villains over walls; indeed, filling in the boxes on a sheet of paper seemed to be testing his strength to the limit, necessitating frequent pauses and effortful sighs at the challenge of the task.
‘Right. So, anyway …’ He ran his finger down the form. ‘So what is the, um, the work that you do, Mrs … Etter–’
‘Mrs Lee,’ she said, for about the tenth time. ‘Brianetta Lee, except that everyone calls me Netta. I’m a dietitian.’
‘Right. That’s like, er, Weight Watch–’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I work in a hospital. I’ve taken a six-week locum job at the General.’
‘Right.’ He nodded a couple of times. ‘But with fat people.’
‘No, more usually I’m helping people to put on weight, rather than the other way round. People with chronic illnesses and –’ Why am I explaining this, she wondered, what is this, a careers talk? ‘Dietitian,’ she said with finality, pointing at the form.
‘Right.’ She saw his pen hesitate after writing the first two letters of the word.
‘I could fill it in myself,’ she suggested, tactfully, ‘if you found it helpful.’
‘No, we have to do it. It’s er … security.’ He paused a little longer and then, with sudden decision, wrote a flurry of letters, all crammed unreadably together. It looked, from where she sat, as if there might be an ‘s’ and an ‘h’ in there somewhere.
‘Right,’ he said again, leaning back with the air of a job well done. ‘Well, we’ll contact you if we hear anything, Mrs Etterly.’
‘Lee. If I was Mrs Etterly, that would make my first name Brian, wouldn’t it?’
He nodded, absently. ‘So when you get people who need to put on weight, how do you do it?’
‘Can I – before I answer that – can I ask you if anything’s going to happen?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Is anyone going to look for this suitcase?’
‘Oh yeah. Definitely. We’ll issue a description.’
‘Because there’s nothing particularly saleable in there, and I’m sure it was those teenagers and they just did it out of spite, because I had that… because I swore at them. So I’d imagine it’ll end up simply being dumped. In a front garden or, I don’t know, a piece of wasteground or something. And it’s labelled,’ she remembered suddenly, ‘there’s one of those built-in bits to write on, just under the handle, under a flap; I filled it in when we went to France last year – it says “B. Lee”, I think, to match my passport.’
‘I’ll make a note,’ he said, not making a note. ‘So when you get people who –’
‘Look, Constable …’ He straightened slightly, the title acting like a hook on the back of his jacket.
‘Yes Mrs – madam.’
‘I know it’s just a suitcase and it’s just some clothes, but the thing is – the thing is, I would rather have lost my Walkman and my camera and my wallet, because they’d be much easier to replace.’ Her work outfits, she could hardly bear the thought that her work outfits had gone – those long-jacketed suits that made her feel streamlined and professional and even sexy in a managerial sort of way. It had taken the fashion industry years – decades – to get round to a style that suited her, and she’d plenished her wardrobe against the long dry season of buttock-length skirts and wispy tops that was bound to follow. And her bras, her lovely bras from Grey’s of Glasgow – all the support and none of the whalebone – big bras that didn’t look as if they’d been lashed together by a team of scaffolders, big bras that masqueraded as tiny, chic, lacy … she shook her head involuntarily, as if listening to an exquisite piece of music.
‘You all right?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ she said, with a slight, shameful, husk to her voice.
‘Only I’ve got…’ Looking a little panicked, he fumbled in one of the desk drawers. ‘I’ve got something for you … it’s here somewhere. I saw it this morning.’
‘I’m all right, really.’ Crying over a bra. That was what ninety minutes in Shadley Oak had done to her.
‘It might be in the other drawer. Hold on, hold on–’ He held out a warning finger, as if she were poised to cast herself, weeping, over his desktop. ‘Yeah, I’ve got it, I’ve got it. Here it is.’ With an air of triumph he pulled out a small orange leaflet and handed it to her. She turned it over and read the title: ‘Dog Fouling and the Law’.
‘Oh.’ He took it back again and looked at it. ‘I thought it was the victim-support one.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘There’s a pile of them on the main desk.’
‘Thanks. I really ought to go now.’ She should get to her mother’s, phone home, arrange for the remains of her wardrobe – tracksuit bottoms, faded beach dresses, underwear of fraying antiquity – to be packed up and sent express delivery. ‘Please, please, call me if you find anything – you can get me at the General during the day. Or at my mother’s in the evening.’
‘No problem.’ He glanced down at the form again. ‘Monk’s Way?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that that road where there’s no numbers, just names?’
‘That’s the one,’ she said.
The nine-house cul-de-sac had been built by her father’s firm and the keynote had been individuality: ‘No one here’s just a number,’ he’d say as the postman randomly distributed letters and the neighbours convened in the middle of the road to swap envelopes, ‘we gave every house a touch of character.’ He’d liked the concept so much that he’d kept the central plot and greatest characterization for himself. Netta, feeling like a day-tripper without the ballast of her suitcase, walked up from the main road past Glebe Cottage (curved drive edged with green brick), Abbey View (wrought-iron balcony above the garage), Moatside (eyebrow window in the roof) and The Leas (Victorian lamp-post beside the front door) before turning along the familiar pink and yellow path. None of the other houses had both a lamp-post and a carriage lamp. None of the other houses had a green bottle cemented onto the wall beside the garage, angled so that it appeared to be pouring champagne into the pewter-lidded tankard cemented just below it. As a child Netta had been proud of these eccentricities, as a teenager she had been ashamed; now they simply seemed symbols of a bygone age, as remote as wattle and daub. The name of the house was obscured by the ‘SOLD’ sign stuck in the terracotta wheelbarrow beside the front step, and as she waited for her mother to answer the door Netta tilted the board to get a glimpse of the varnished oval with its poker-work italics. She wondered what the next owners would make of the single word it bore: ‘Briglennia’.