‘What did you say, Gee-Gee,’ Daisy asked her great-grandmother, after wiping the old lady’s chin. She’d only been half listening, because she had been concentrating on getting the spoon into Gee-Gee’s mouth without dropping anything. Mentally her great-gran might still be okay, but physically Gwenda needed a great deal of help, and being fed was part of that.
‘I said, you need a dollop of good luck,’ Gee-Gee repeated.
Daisy sure did; a great big, steaming pile of it. She didn’t think a measly dollop would make much difference. Perhaps she should start playing the lottery, or betting on the horses – though knowing her luck at the moment, she’d lose every penny she had.
‘Fetch my bag, lovely,’ Gee-Gee said to Daisy, pointing to where she’d left it in the living room.
Daisy did as she was asked, hoping her great-gran wasn’t going to try to foist a tenner on her, like she used to when Daisy was a child. Daisy appreciated the gesture, but she didn’t want the old lady’s money – the poor old thing only had her pension, and most of that went towards her upkeep at the retirement home.
Daisy watched as the frail, trembling fingers, distorted by arthritis, probed and poked in the depths of the bag, her hopes sinking when Gwenda removed a purse. From past experience, Daisy knew not to argue, but to accept the money, then try to sneak it back into Gwenda’s purse when the old lady wasn’t looking.
‘Open it for me,’ Gee-Gee instructed, her gnarled hands clutching it awkwardly.
Daisy did as she was asked, making a face at the assortment of stuff inside: coins, hairgrips, old receipts (to Daisy’s knowledge, her great-gran hadn’t been anywhere near a shop for years), elastic bands, but no paper money.
‘There’s a sixpence in there somewhere,’ Gwenda said.
‘A what?’
‘A sixpence, an itty-bitty silver coin.’
Daisy stuck her fingers in, and dug through the various coins. Ten pence pieces, five pences, copper coins and the flash of pound coins, were mixed with money she didn’t recognise. Daisy held up one of them, a coin she’d first thought was a pound, but on closer inspection, it was a flatter colour and slightly smaller. She wondered which country it came from, and how it had ended up in her great-gran’s purse.
She held it up.
‘That’s a thruppeny bit, that is,’ Gwenda said, with a wistful look on her face. ‘I miss the old money.’
‘Old money?’ Daisy vaguely recalled a mention of pre-decimalisation money, but she hadn’t taken much notice.
Sandra said, ‘I remember it. You couldn’t get to grips with the new money for ages, could you, Gee-Gee?’
‘New-fangled rubbish. There was nothing wrong with proper money. Why did they have to change it?’ Gee-Gee’s expression folded into hundreds of creases as she screwed her face up in disgust.
‘Because everything was decimalised in the early seventies, no more twelve this, and shillings that,’ Sandra said.
Daisy remembered how, when she was younger, she’d hear Gee-Gee mutter, ‘How much is that in old money,’ and then doing some weird conversion on her fingers.
‘I used to get a sixpence every Friday night off my old da, for helping Mam around the house,’ Gwenda said. ‘I want you to have it, Daisy. It’s in there somewhere.’
Daisy scrabbled around some more, until she found the coin her great-gran wanted. It was small, like a five pence piece, and was remarkably similar. ‘I can’t take this,’ she protested. ‘It’s yours. You should keep it.’
‘It’ll bring you luck,’ her great-gran said. ‘But only if you find it in your pudding.’
‘Huh?’ Daisy raised her eyebrows at her mother and mouthed, ‘What’s she talking about?’
‘Christmas puddings,’ Nan said. ‘When I was a girl, she used to make her own Christmas pudding every year, and she used to hide a sixpence in the mixture. Whoever got the sixpence was supposed to have good luck all year. It never bloody worked.’
‘That’s because you hated Christmas pudding and never ate any,’ Gwenda said.
‘I remember – you were still making them right up until Great-Grandad died,’ Daisy’s mother declared. She turned to David. ‘You never knew your great-grandad, did you? He died when you were a baby, but Daisy might remember him.’
Zoe giggled, one hand held delicately over her mouth. For a dentist’s wife, she was really reluctant to show her teeth, Daisy thought. She’d actually forgotten Zoe was in the room, the woman had been so quiet.
‘Have you got any brandy, Sandra?’ Gee-Gee asked.
‘Mum, you can’t drink, not with the tablets you’re on,’ Elsie protested.
Gwenda replied frostily, ‘I haven’t had a drink since 1992.’
‘What happened in 1992?’ David asked.
Daisy watched him slip a choice slice of roast beef onto Zoe’s plate and smile at her drippily, and she felt slightly nauseous. And rather envious, if she was being truthful. No one had ever picked out a nice slice of beef for her. Not that she wanted them to, but the offer would have been nice.
‘I stopped drinking alcohol, that’s what happened in 1992,’ Gwenda said, and her mouth became an inverted smile. She clearly wasn’t going to say anything more on the matter.
But Elsie was. ‘She got drunk and demolished your great-granddad’s garden shed,’ she said.
Gwenda glowered at her daughter.
What was it with the women in my family, Daisy wondered. They were always bickering and trying to score points off each other.
David smiled. ‘You go, Gee-Gee.’
‘Go where?’ their great-gran wanted to know.
‘It’s a saying, Gee-Gee,’ David tried to explain.
‘What is?’ Gwenda asked.
Zoe giggled again. She’d hardly said a word all through lunch. In fact, Daisy wondered if her sister-in-law was actually able to speak at all. She also wondered what a supposedly intelligent man like her brother, saw in the air-head; apart from her prettiness, Zoe didn’t have much else going for her, Daisy surmised, meanly. Then immediately felt guilty for thinking such sour thoughts. After all, she’d never really taken the time to get to know the other girl.
‘Where’s the brandy?’ Gwenda demanded.
‘I told you, you can’t have any,’ her daughter said.
‘It’s for the pudding,’ Gwenda argued.
‘What pudding? I’ve not bought any pudding. You can have a biscuit or a French Fancy.’ This was from Sandra.
‘I don’t want any pudding,’ Gwenda said.
‘You just said you did! Make your mind up.’ Sandra stood up, huffing, and clattered plates together.
‘For the Christmas pudding,’ Gwenda enunciated, slowly and clearly, despite her lack of teeth. She’d taken them out yet again, and Daisy guessed she’d shoved them down her bra for safe-keeping.
Daisy watched the exchange in amusement. Conversations could be quite surreal in her house. Oh dear – she was already back to thinking of this house as hers, as if she was going to be living here forever. It had been her house once, she supposed, as in, she’d lived there since she was born, but technically it was her mother’s house, and Daisy so didn’t want to be that thirty-year-old woman who still lived at home with her mother.
‘We haven’t got a Christmas pudding,’ Sandra pointed out.
‘You will have, if Miss Miseryguts there gets up off her backside and makes one,’ Gwenda came back.
‘Stop a minute – Miss who?’ Daisy asked.
‘Miseryguts.’ Gwenda stared at her defiantly.
‘You mean me?’ Daisy queried.
‘If the cap fits.’ This time Gwenda smirked at her.
‘I don’t know how to make a Christmas pudding,’ was all Daisy could think of to say.
‘I’ll show you,’ Gwenda said.
Elsie said, ‘You can’t cut your own dinner up. How are you going to make a pudding?’
‘Mum, don’t be mean!’ Sandra exclaimed.
‘Well, it’s true,’ Elsie said, sulkily. ‘She never showed me how to make a Christmas pudding.’
Oh God, get me out of here, Daisy pleaded silently. If she had to put up with this for the next few months, she’d be asking to swap places with Gee-Gee and go and live in the old people’s home.
‘I’ll tell her what to do and our Daisy can do it, can’t you, Daisy?’ Gwenda insisted.
‘Yes, Gee-Gee.’
‘And I never showed you, Elsie, because you don’t like Christmas pudding. How many times do I have to tell you?’ Gwenda scowled at her daughter.
Elsie’s face folded in on itself as she sulked. Daisy made to leave the table and let the bickering old biddies get on with it, but Gwenda had other ideas.
‘Is that corner shop still open?’ she asked.
Sandra nodded.
‘Right, my girl, I need brandy (unless Sandra has drunk it all and if she has, you’d better add that to the list), plain flour, that sugar that’s not dark, but not white. Oh, what’s it called?’ Gwenda wrinkled her nose up as she thought.
‘Muscovado?’ Zoe piped up.
‘That’s it! Eggs, butter, mixed dried fruit, raisins, candied peel, almonds, oh, and brandy,’ Gwenda said. ‘Did I say brandy?’
‘You did, Gee-Gee,’ David said, then added, to Daisy, ‘I’ll come with you to help you carry it. Will you be alright on your own Zoe-poo?’
Zoe-poo? Ug. Daisy made gagging noises. Of course she’ll be alright – she was being left with three elderly ladies for about half an hour, what could possibly happen? Actually, maybe he had a point.
Zoe, predictably, giggled, and this time she added a simper to it. Daisy had never seen anyone simper before. It took a certain skill.
She stuffed her feet into her boots and shrugged on her coat, grabbing an umbrella from the stand in the porch on the way out. Christmas was less than a week away, but the weather was being predictably British – wet and gloomy, with not a festive snowflake in sight. At least the outside matched her inside – she felt like a drizzly December afternoon, all miserable and glum.
‘I’m sorry about Freddie,’ David said, as the pair of them stomped down the street. It was only three in the afternoon, and already the streetlights were on. Daisy debated whether to put the umbrella up and risk poking her brother in the eye, or put the umbrella up to purposely poke her brother in the eye. She did neither, pulling her hood over her head instead, to keep off the worst of the fine mist.
‘You really didn’t know?’ David persisted. He liked a good bit of gossip, did Saint David. Now if anyone had told her that her brother was gay, she might believe them. He was too perfect to be a typical beer-swilling, football-ogling bloke, then she mentally apologised for stereotyping gay men and straight alike. She was just being mean.
‘No,’ she said curtly, stuffing a lock of hair back beneath her hood. It immediately popped back out again.
‘What are you going to do now?’ he asked. ‘You can’t stay with Mum forever.’
‘Why not?’ Daisy was indignant. It wasn’t as if she was scrounging off their mother. Daisy paid rent (albeit a small token amount) and a sum towards food and bills though she might have to consider upping it, what with the amount she was eating at the moment.
‘Because the pair of them will drive you mad,’ her brother said, linking his arm in hers. ‘You could always move in with me and Zoe for a time, if you need to,’ he added.
Aw, that was so sweet of him. But they were newly-weds, and Daisy was well aware what that meant. Not only were they blissfully happy, in a shiny new house, but they were probably at it like rabbits too. Her brother meant well, (though Daisy sometimes had the feeling he was rubbing her nose in it), but all his generosity served to do, was to highlight what she didn’t have. Thanks, David, I owe you one…
Anyway, as tempting as the offer was, she didn’t think she could put up with Zoe for more than an hour or so before she tried to bash some personality into that pretty head of hers. Daisy would take her chances with her mother and grandmother, thanks all the same.