My dear Stevie, the letter began. I’m dead.
I know, Stevie thought sadly. I went to your funeral.
You’re getting nearly all my money.
I know that, too. The solicitor told me, but what he didn’t say was why, she mused.
You’re wondering why.
Got it in one, Aunt Peg. You always were a canny old lady. Stevie smiled, recalling her favourite image of her – long white hair, purple lace-up boots, bright pink denim jacket (where on earth had she managed to get that from?) and pushing a supermarket trolley with a stuffed cat in the child’s seat. Bless her, but she had been rather eccentric. Or mad, depending on one’s point of view.
It’s because you deserve it, and you need it, too. Now, I know what you’re thinking, that money won’t make you happy, but at least it might just make things easier for you. All I ask is that you spend it wisely and don’t fritter it away on baubles and geegaws.
Geegaws? What the hell are geegaws? And who said money can’t make you happy? People with loads of it, that’s who.
Do something with it you would never have the chance to do otherwise.
Yeah, like backpacking around Australia, or spending three months in the Caribbean, or buying a BMW convertible, or… the possibilities were endless. For the first time since the funeral, excitement rolled in her stomach, sending little flutters up through her chest.
Oi! I know exactly what is going through your mind and I call that sort of thing frittering. You’ll have nothing to show for the money once you’ve spent it.
Stevie looked up from the letter with a sigh. Riiiight… as if a whole load of drunken memories, a new car, a great tan and a designer wardrobe were nothing. Hey, perhaps Steve will be interested in me again, she thought, now she didn’t have a reason to be miserable anymore. Steve and Stevie – she’d always thought they’d sounded like a drag act.
She returned to the letter with a mixture of reluctance and a sense of comfort. Reading it made her feel as though her dead aunt was in her head and could read her thoughts.
And don’t think about courting that Stephen boy again, either. He’s in your past and that’s where he should stay.
Courting? What kind of a word was that? Unless it was an old-fashioned way of saying two people were getting friendly between the sheets.
Please, use the money to follow your heart. I know you’ll spend it well. I have total faith in you. You always were my favourite. I know I shouldn’t say it, but it’s true. I loved you like a granddaughter and I always will, wherever I am now.
Your loving aunt – Peggy.
The last paragraph was Stevie’s undoing. She put the letter down, leaned forward, folded her arms on the table and sobbed her heart out.
Despite feeling the old lady had one hand on her shoulder, she knew her aunt had truly gone.
Her sobs turning to sniffles and snuffles, Stevie sent her aunt silent thanks for her generosity and wondered how she was going to explain her inheritance to Hazel. She was going to have to tell her mother what Peg had done, and she wasn’t looking forward to it one bit.
Hazel Taylor wasn’t a bad woman, she just hadn’t approved of her aunt. Peg had never married, had been as mad as a box of frogs and had lived in a houseful of cats right up until the day she’d been forced to relocate to Stanley Road Residential Home. Oh, and she’d had a really odd dress sense.
Stevie’s mother had totally disapproved of her aunt’s eccentricity, and she often took a black delight in recounting stories that Peg had variously been a madam in a strip-club; a cat-burglar when she worked in a posh hotel; a nude model for an under-the-counter magazine. Stevie had once asked her mother what that meant, and Hazel had wrinkled her nose in disgust and had hissed ‘porn’, before refusing to elaborate any further.
And Hazel had consistently compared the rather flighty Stevie to Peggy (not the porn bit, obviously, or the cat burglar part), which made Stevie think that if her mother had a favourite child, then it certainly wasn’t her. In some ways, Stevie couldn’t blame her. Fern, four years older, had always been a diva of a child, and had appeared to resent having to share their mother with the squalling, red-faced infant that was Stevie. Apparently, Fern had been a model baby, sleeping through the night from day one, never crying, and was so good that Hazel never even knew she was there.
Her mother had known Stevie was there, all right! Stevie, according to her mother, had hardly ever slept and had cried all the time for no discernible reason. She had driven her mother to her wit’s end, as she had frequently told the young Stevie.
Fern was charmed, too. Very charmed. The kind of charmed which meant if her sister bought a raffle ticket, she’d win first prize. The kind of charmed that led Fern to have a small lottery win on the one and only time she’d played it; to get PPI cashback, although she’d never taken out a loan in her life; to receive a nice compensation claim for sexual discrimination when it transpired her male equivalent at work was being paid more than her. That kind of charmed.
It wasn’t all about money, either. The two girls were total opposites. Fern had loved school, Stevie had hated it. Fern had played with dolls, Stevie had climbed trees and more often than not had fallen out of them and broken something. Fern was Mary in the reception class Nativity play, Stevie was one half of the donkey – the not-so-nice half with her nose up Nigel Hemming’s farty bottom, and the donkey had to be quickly guided off the makeshift stage when Stevie persisted in blowing loud raspberries and waggling the donkey’s tail. Fern had handed her homework in on time without fail, Stevie used to claim the dog had eaten hers (“but, you don’t have a dog!”). The list went on.
As the two girls grew older, Stevie’s sister was clear about what she wanted to do: get married and have babies. Fern very quickly found husband material in the form of Derrick Chalk (“all my friends called me Dezza” – purleeze!), had the traditional white wedding with Stevie doing a guest performance as a pink meringue, and proceeded to produce two daughters with the minimum amount of fuss. The eldest was named Jade, and the next little Chalk to put in an appearance was called Macey, and apparently both were just as perfect as their mother.
And there was Stevie – jobless, boyfriendless and homeless. Jobless because of that stupid bus, homeless because she was jobless and couldn’t afford her share of the rent on the astronomically pricey flat which she had shared with four other people, and boyfriendless because Steve was an arse. So Stevie had temporarily moved back in with her mother until she found another job.
Actually, it was about time she started looking for a job, now her leg was almost mended because, let’s face it, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds wasn’t an amount one could live off for the rest of one’s life, was it? And once she’d secured herself a job, then the next thing she needed to do was to find a place of her own to live.
Stevie, pleased with her sensible decision-making, set about job-hunting. It was only later, when she’d folded the precious letter to put it in her keepsake box where she kept her memory things, like the tiny fossil she had found one year on holiday in Cornwall, a stolen lock of Steve’s hair, and her very first Valentine’s card (no need to tell anyone she’d been twenty-three at the time), she noticed the PS on the back.
PS Don’t be sad. I haven’t left you, even though it may feel like it. And don’t forget, there are more things in heaven and earth…
Now, what was the old bat rambling on about? Stevie wondered fondly, and put the letter carefully away, a sad smile lighting her face.