Four

Joan Peat

She always stayed in the middle room until after Anna had left for work.

It wasn’t necessary for Joan to sit by the window watching, though: listening was usually enough.

Their little side street was quiet. There weren’t many cars that actually used it, particularly very early in the morning when her neighbour went to work.

Today, Anna had broken her routine and had left the house later than she usually would to go to work and returned way before her shift finished. And now Joan had just heard the back door slam – she was off out again.

Anna had parked her car at the front of the house. Joan watched her as she approached the driver’s door.

She’d piled on weight over the last couple of years, Joan had noticed. She seemed to live in either her Royal Mail uniform, or jeans, boots and a grey oversized sweatshirt which made her look rather slovenly.

Joan had rarely seen Anna in make-up, and in recent weeks she had taken to wearing a rather unflattering dark brown baseball cap that only highlighted her pasty, slightly bloated complexion.

Still, Joan firmly believed that the Anna she used to know was in there somewhere; she was just hiding away, too afraid to come out. She lived in hope that someday there would be a glimmer of that enthusiasm for life that the young Anna had.

As soon as her neighbour drove away, Joan hoisted herself up from the armchair and walked into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea.

Both Anna and Linda, her care assistant, were under the impression Joan was unable to move of her own accord. Joan didn’t consider the fact that she could move was a full-blown fib; it was just that Joan hadn’t furnished them with the truth. There was a difference.

Anyway, she often did have difficulty, and even on a good day she wasn’t exactly sprinting around the house like Mo Farah.

So Joan preferred to think of it as a little white lie.

Generally, it was true that she could still get around without any assistance. Some days, she even made it upstairs, if she was careful not to push herself too hard and took the odd breather on the way up.

It was so nice seeing Anna and Linda regularly. If they thought Joan could manage, they’d probably stop coming round as often, and that was the last thing she wanted.

It was surprisingly easy to fool other people: even the district nurse, Jasminda, who called on her every couple of months to check her swollen, ulcered legs.

They were all so trusting of Joan and took her completely at her word. After all, why would she mislead them over something like that?

Well, loneliness was the reason why.

Joan thought it got used a lot, that word: ‘lonely’. It got used by people who hadn’t a clue of its true meaning. People who had no experience of the suffocating sheet of silence that attached itself to you like cling film from the moment you woke up.

It got used by people who had no concept of what it felt like to have to put the radio on in the other room in order to pretend family or friends were over to visit.

But, in Anna and Linda, Joan knew she still had real people to talk to most days and that helped her to breathe. It helped her to get through each long week, a day at a time.

All of the people who Joan saw on a regular basis came here because they thought she couldn’t move and couldn’t manage without their help. And, in a way, they were right.

The truth was, she really couldn’t manage without them.

Joan felt lucky to have such caring souls around her.

And after all, she had always tried to do her bit in the past, helping others by doing what she could to ease their burden.

Take Anna.

They had been neighbours for nearly thirty years now, and Joan had virtually fostered her when she first came out of the hospital. Until she turned eighteen, anyhow.

Anna had no one else left in the world to turn to.

The way Joan looked at it, her legs might be on their way out but there was nothing wrong with her memory or her hearing, even if she was well on the wrong side of her seventies now.

Unfortunately, that also meant she was able to recall every detail of what happened next door thirteen years ago.

What a terrible business it had been.

She could remember just as clearly the day that the Clarkes first became her neighbours.

There had been a light dusting of snow overnight on the morning that Monica and Jack Clarke arrived next door with their little girl, Anna.

Joan and her husband, Arthur, had heard that Jack Clarke had been a faceworker at Annesley Colliery but he’d been trapped in a piece of machinery on a shift and lost his arm.

The Clarkes used the compensation to buy the little terrace next door to Joan and Arthur, to be nearer to the city so that Monica could look for some part-time employment there, apparently.

Arthur had still been alive then, of course. Fit as a fiddle he was, cycling a thirty-mile round trip to the factory every day. That was two years before the pancreatic cancer got him, six weeks from the diagnosis to his death.

Joan placed her cup and saucer down gently on the coffee table and looked out onto the road.

Monica Clarke had been snooty and unfriendly from the start; although quite where her airs and graces came from, Joan couldn’t imagine.

‘A bottle blonde with no manners and far too much cleavage on show,’ was how Arthur had described Monica when she first emerged from the removal van Jack had hired.

Monica had ignored them waving hello from this very window. Arthur had always been such a good judge of character.

Little Anna, though: she’d turned right around and given them the biggest smile.

Sweet little thing, she was. All fair curls and blue eyes, like a china doll.

Joan and Arthur’s daughter, Janet-Mae, was at university by this time, studying for her business degree at Manchester. She came home when she could but that wasn’t very often.

When Joan had set eyes on little Anna, her heart swelled with memories of when Janet-Mae was small and still needed her. It had been too long.

Joan stared out now at the space where the Clarkes had parked their van all those years ago. It had rained overnight and the gutter was filthy, scudded with mud and leaves and clusters of grit that stuck to the edge of the kerb like tumours.

She averted her eyes and recalled how Anna had stood out the front waving away at them until Monica came out and grabbed her arm, yanking her roughly away.

It wasn’t long, of course, before they discovered Monica’s penchant for alcohol and men.

As a regular churchgoer, Joan made a concerted effort to avoid joining in with the neighbours’ whispered tales of Monica’s colourful nightlife, whispered over garden walls and at the corner shop. But it wasn’t easy.

From her upstairs window, late at night, Joan saw Monica on more than one occasion in the arms of a man who most definitely wasn’t her husband. Far more likely someone else’s.

The Clarkes had only lived next door for a year when Monica fell pregnant with Daniel.

Dear Lord, the arguments had gone on for weeks. With the help of an upturned glass against the joining wall, Joan could often hear what was being said virtually word for word.

Suffice to say, Jack Clarke seemed to be utterly convinced the child wasn’t his, and within the month he’d left home. Leaving behind a pregnant Monica and his daughter Anna.

That was the last time the Peats saw him.

Six months later Jack Clarke was dead. They heard he’d had a drunken argument with an HGV in town and, predictably, had come off worst.

That was when little Anna first started visiting Joan and Arthur regularly.