27.

Biddy was startled when she heard the rap of the door knocker. She looked up at the kitchen clock. It was 3 p.m. She must have been sitting at the kitchen table for a couple of hours now, maybe more. She remembered hearing the clock in the sitting room strike noon. She knew that she’d gone to the toilet shortly after that as she’d noticed there was hardly any tissue paper left on the toilet roll. She’d come downstairs and scribbled ‘toilet roll’ on the notepad that lay on the kitchen table, below ‘tea bags, eggs and bread’. Had she slept? She wasn’t sure. She rubbed her eyes and took a sip of tea from the mug in front of her. It was cold. She didn’t remember making the tea. Was it before or after she wrote ‘tea bags’ on the list? The rain was still pelting down outside, making a droning noise like background music. It had been raining like that for four full days now, ever since the day of her father’s funeral.

The front door rapped again. Perhaps it was Mrs Thomas. Perhaps it had been Mrs Thomas yesterday too. And maybe it was Mrs Thomas who kept on phoning. She had said she would ‘pop round, just to check’, when she’d brought her back after the funeral. She had also invited Biddy to her house for tea that evening. Her son Ian was coming with his new girlfriend, Shirley. This was the first time she’d met Shirley, she confided to Biddy in the car on the way back from the cemetery, and she was sure she wasn’t going to like her one little bit. Ian’s ex-wife, Penny, Mrs Thomas had said, was such a lovely girl. Biddy had smiled, for the first time in days, maybe weeks. Longer, probably. She’d never been much of a smiler, especially since the accident. But the name Penny made her smile.

Mrs Thomas, of course, didn’t know that was the reason. She thought Biddy’s smile indicated that she was accepting her invitation to tea, and, truth be told, was somewhat shocked by this response. She wouldn’t have offered if she’d thought there was any chance the girl would accept. Yes, she felt sorry for her, yes, she would do anything she could to help out at this difficult time, but the girl was odd, no doubt about it, and she didn’t want her to get too close. And Ian, who was a few years younger than Biddy, wouldn’t be one bit happy. She knew he had no time for Biddy, and really she couldn’t blame him. She remembered overhearing Ian and one of his school friends – she couldn’t recall his name – sniggering about her years ago when they were at school, not long before the girl’s bizarre accident on that field trip, calling her ‘Bloody Weirdo’. Naturally she’d scolded them and told them not to use such bad language. ‘But it’s what everyone at school calls her, Mum,’ Ian had pleaded in his defence. ‘Well, that doesn’t mean you boys have to,’ Mrs Thomas had admonished, but secretly she’d agreed. Ian hated it when she made him go round to number 17 to cut the grass; how on earth was he going to react when she told him that Biddy was coming for dinner? Tonight would be tricky enough without Biddy to deal with, and without Ian giving her dirty looks throughout the meal. How was she going to get out of this hole?

‘So, you’ll come?’ she asked, feigning brightness.

‘Oh. No. No, thank you very much, Mrs Thomas.’

Mrs Thomas was relieved. ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ she said.

Biddy didn’t answer, so Mrs Thomas took that as a ‘yes’. They had driven the rest of the journey back to Stanley Street in silence.

*

The person at the front door was really hammering now. Biddy thought they might actually break the door down. Maybe after all these years they should finally get a doorbell, so that people wouldn’t have to hammer, she thought. Then again, they didn’t normally get callers, apart from the postman who would knock now and again if he couldn’t get something through the letterbox, although that was rare – or the man from NIE who needed to come in to read the electricity meter. Sometimes people would call at the door to try and sell them something or talk to them about God, but her father would always close the door in their faces without ever saying a word. Biddy knew he was really starting to get ill when he let a young man trying to sell him a discount voucher for some local restaurants actually come into the living room last year, and then left him sitting there and went to bed. Mrs Clarke and Mrs Farmer, the district nurses, always knocked on the door. But they wouldn’t be coming anymore, so it couldn’t be them. And anyway, they never banged like that. She didn’t think that Mrs Thomas would bang like that either.

Anyway, there was no they anymore. There was only her.

Eventually the banging stopped, and Biddy breathed with relief. She took another sip of the cold tea, but a loud knock at the back door made her spit it out all over the table.

‘Biddy?’ a man’s voice called.

Who knows me? she thought, suddenly scared. What man knows my name?

‘Biddy?’ the voice called again. ‘Are you in there?’

She jumped up and stood against the wall opposite the back door. Through the glass panel at the top of the door she could make out the frame of a tall man wearing a big heavy coat. The rain and the fading light made it impossible for her to see his face. She twisted her fingers into the palm of her right hand and shoved her hand into her mouth. Screwing her eyes shut, she bit down hard, breaking the skin on her knuckles with her teeth. She’d stopped using the pins long ago – after the fall, when Alison couldn’t get to her anymore and the need for them abated. Besides, following the fall, there’d been other pain to deal with. But in recent years, as the anxiety of dealing with her father’s illness increased, she had taken to biting her knuckles as a form of relief. They were a mess.

‘Biddy? Is that you? Please let me in. It’s Doctor Graham. I just want to check that you’re all right. Remember, I promised I would call?’ Biddy looked around the empty kitchen. She stopped biting her hand and sucked the blood from the cuts on her right knuckles. Why was Dr Graham calling to see her? He had always come to see her father, but why did he want to see her? Why now? She didn’t remember him making that promise. And she certainly hadn’t asked him. If she needed to see him about her pills, she always made an appointment at the health centre. But she didn’t need any pills. She had enough to do her for a while.

‘Biddy, I can see you. I can see you standing against the wall. Won’t you just open the door, please? Really, I just want to make sure that you’re OK.’

Biddy wasn’t sure what to do. She was relieved that the caller was Dr Graham and not a stranger. And he was a kind man. He was always nice to her and had never made her feel like a weirdo, not even once. And he had been so very, very good to her father. But she really didn’t want to see or speak to anyone.

‘Biddy, please. I’m getting absolutely soaked out here. I promise I won’t stay long. Well, maybe just long enough for a cup of tea and a Kimberley biscuit. I’ve even brought a packet with me, just in case you haven’t managed to get out to the shops this week. See?’

Biddy saw the outline of a plastic Tesco bag being held up against the glass on the back door. The thought of a Kimberley biscuit made her hesitate. She had given her father the last one in the only packet they’d had in the house last Sunday with his afternoon tea, and had intended to get some more when she went to Tesco on Tuesday to do the shopping. But then things had changed, and she never got to Tesco. And the garage at the bottom of the road where she went for basics didn’t sell Kimberley biscuits. That’s why she hadn’t written Kimberley biscuits on the list. She didn’t want to go to Tesco at the moment, so there was no point. But she would love a Kimberley biscuit right now, and a cup of fresh tea. Trouble was, she’d used up the last of the milk with her last cup. She went back to the table, wrote milk down on the list then opened the kitchen door.

‘I don’t have any milk. So if you take milk, you can’t have a cup of tea.’

Dr Graham was prepared.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, squinting in the rain. ‘I brought a pint of milk too, just in case you hadn’t had a chance to get out in this blessed rain,’ he added, pointing at the plastic bag. ‘Semi-skimmed, hope that’s OK?’

Biddy nodded. She opened the door wider, took the bag from him, put it on the table and limped over to the sink to fill the kettle.

 

As Dr Graham watched Biddy munch her third Kimberley biscuit in swift succession, he wondered if she’d actually eaten a proper square meal since her father had died. Since his collapse last Sunday, actually. He looked at her, worried by what he saw. She was painfully thin and deathly pale, with deep, dark hollows under her eyes. And, disturbingly, she looked even more shambolic than usual. Her wild, curly, copper hair was a mess of tats and frizz. It could do with a good cut, but he doubted that Biddy had ever been to a hairdresser in her life. The long-sleeved top she was wearing was at least two sizes too big and covered in stains. It looked like the type of garment some of his elderly patients in nursing homes wore, women in their eighties with senile dementia. He thought about his own daughter, Jemma, who was almost twenty-one and gorgeous – always turning up at the house with a new hairstyle, courtesy of her madcap hairdresser friend, Lulu, or some new outfit that she’d ‘just picked up’ at Topshop. Jemma and her friends were so vivacious, so full of life, so determined to make the most of their lives; some, like Jemma, studying for degrees, some, like Lulu, already working, others off travelling the world. Biddy was just a few years older, yet she might as well be living in a different century. She had no job and, as far as he could see, no friends or interests, apart from watching daytime TV and soap operas in the evenings. Every time he had called at the house in recent months, she was either watching some drivel on television or attending to her father. At least when her father was alive she’d had something to focus on, someone who needed her attention, a reason to keep going. But now, well, he didn’t know what would become of her. He was aware, of course, that there had been a strange and terrible accident when Biddy was just fifteen. She still took painkillers, but, thankfully, there had never been a recurrence of the apparent psychosis reported at the time of the accident. Seeing her at the funeral, however, and looking at her now, he feared that she could well be heading for some kind of breakdown. He knew from her records that she had self-harmed in the past, and possibly still did, judging by the state of her raw, blood-stained knuckles, so a suicide attempt was something he had to consider. She needed help, but he’d need to be creative as he certainly didn’t want to simply prescribe anti-depressants. And he very much doubted she would attend a regular counselling appointment if he made one.

A plan had loosely started to form in his head, but first he needed to win Biddy’s trust, a task he knew would not be an easy one. Apart from the ‘no milk’ greeting, she hadn’t uttered another word to him since she had reluctantly let him in, just nodding or shaking her head in response to the few polite questions he had asked. Not that this surprised him, as she’d rarely ever spoken to him when he had called to attend to her father. Watching Biddy munch another biscuit, however, the doctor was pleased with himself and saw his action this afternoon as a minor but speedy breakthrough. Every single time he had made a home visit to Mr Weir over the past three years, Biddy had presented him with a cup of tea and a Kimberley biscuit, on her father’s request. The doctor wasn’t really a biscuit person, never ate them at home or at coffee break in the surgery, but, as he prided himself on being an ‘old-fashioned’ GP, tea and biscuits came with the territory. In some houses, it was custard creams, in others chocolate digestives. Now and again there was a freshly baked scone or bun, which he did enjoy. Here, at number 17, Stanley Street, it was always Kimberley biscuits, and right now, they, and the painting in Mr Weir’s bedroom, were his only connection with Biddy, the only tools he could think of using to reach out to her.

‘Biddy?’ he asked, casually.

Biddy looked at him blankly as she chewed her fourth biscuit.

‘You know that lovely painting in your father’s bedroom, the one with the seagull on the beach?’

He saw her swallow her mouthful of biscuit with a gulp and then bite down on her lip. He saw her cheeks burn and her neck flush a mottled red. He watched her eyes dart from him to the floor, to the kitchen table, to the door into the hall, and back to the table again. Her discomfort was obvious, but he carried on, his tone bright and casual.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ he continued.

Biddy continued to stare at the table and didn’t answer.

‘The painting. It’s beautiful,’ he smiled. ‘Did your father paint it himself?’

Biddy glanced up at the doctor, chewing her lip, a look of genuine confusion etched on her face.

‘Or,’ said Dr Graham, hoping that his hunch was correct after all. He had never seen her paint nor seen any evidence of an artistic hobby, but he just had a feeling the painting was hers. ‘Did you?’

Biddy bit hard into her bottom lip and clasped her fingers tightly around her cup. Swallowing hard, she nodded her head quickly.

‘You did?’ Dr Graham leant slightly towards her across the table. Biddy instinctively leant back.

‘Oh, Biddy, please don’t be embarrassed. It’s exquisite. Truly beautiful. It’s Cove Bay, isn’t it?’

Biddy nodded again, her expression now one of surprise.

‘Well, I must say, you are an extremely talented young woman, Biddy. Really, I wish I had an ounce of your talent.’ He paused for a second, as though lost in thought.

‘You know the cottage in the background, the one with the blue shutters?’

Biddy nodded.

‘Well, a friend of mine lives there now. Moved in just recently.’

Biddy looked up at Dr Graham, her expression a mixture of shock and awe. ‘Really?’ she gasped.

‘Yep,’ he smiled, taking another biscuit from the now half-empty packet, ‘really.’