Margaret had a good job at a bank, no kids and one boyfriend, who knew she was an alcoholic but didn’t do anything to help. Margaret was on the list, along with Jeremy, who hadn’t shown up tonight, but (on the plus side) was mid-divorce, ran a digital marketing business and drove a Jaguar.
My phone gave a ping while Phil recited his own tale of woe, and a couple of people turned and glared at me. I checked the apologetic smile before it formed: Belinda wasn’t the apologetic type. Instead I shrugged, retrieved my phone from my handbag (crimson, faux leather), and made a show of reading the text that had come through before I put it back.
It wasn’t entirely show, though. The message had my mind twisting back and forth for the rest of Phil’s story and most of Isobel’s – Isobel was new and I only knew her name because she’d taken the unusual step of writing it on a large sticker she’d placed on her jumper, over her left breast. After Isobel, who managed to give us most of her life story in less than five minutes, smiling nervously the whole time as if she half-expected to be interrupted and shown the door, we started to wind up. I’d been planning to say something myself, because Belinda hadn’t spoken for a while and she wasn’t one to let herself get pushed into the background, but my head wasn’t in the game. My head was full of the message I’d just received.
It was brief. Corner of Williams Street and High Grove, 9 tonight, it said, and It’ll be worth it in lieu of a kiss or a smiley face. I didn’t recognise the number, and my first thought had been that it was a mistake, but that was too much like coincidence: there was a Williams Street and a High Grove close by, and they met not five minutes’ walk from the lock-up. It wasn’t Billy, not unless he’d changed his phone since this morning, but it might have been someone from the squat, Ryan, maybe, or Mia. Neither of them had my number, but they were in touch with Billy, they might have got it from him, and I’d had dealings with both of them in the past in which that kind of text wouldn’t have been out of place. Items bought, information paid for. Mia was most likely. She was always asking after me, according to Billy. It wouldn’t hurt to do some business with the old crowd.
Unless it wasn’t Mia. Unless it wasn’t the old crowd at all.
I thought it over some more as Elaine, the chair of our group, wrapped things up with a handful of announcements I didn’t take in. Addiction didn’t interest me, other than as a weakness I could exploit. These people were addicted to alcohol. The Bitch was addicted to power. Everyone had something, to some degree, and the more acute that degree, the more vulnerable they were.
I called Billy the moment I was outside and away from the rest of them, but there was no answer. As I put my phone back in the bag, I remembered him telling me I was as much an addict as anyone else.
“Really?” I’d asked. “So what am I addicted to.”
He’d shrugged. “Change,” he’d said. “You’re never happy being just the one person. Always looking to turn into someone else. Always on the look-out for the right you. What was it you called them? These characters you make?”
“Orphans,” I’d replied. I called them orphans because they had no parentage, nothing solid, nothing in the real world. I called them orphans because they came and went and when they finally disappeared, there was no grieving parent to miss them. I called them orphans because that was what they were, false blocks, dead ends, links in the chain that might cause a brief ripple when they first appeared, but would be skipped past and forgotten about in time. I called them orphans because I envied them their orphanhood.
I tried Billy again, one last time, still no answer, and I stood undecided for thirty seconds. I knew how to look after myself – I’d lived on the streets for long enough, got myself into and out of more scrapes than I cared to remember. But why walk into a scrape in the first place? That wasn’t my style. That wasn’t caution.
I looked around, and then down at my boots and my legs and my stylish denim skirt with its ridiculous gold belt, and I think it was the belt that decided it for me. Tonight I was Belinda. That was wrong, obviously: I’d stopped being Belinda the moment I’d stepped out of the AA meeting, and just because I was wearing her clothes I didn’t have to act like her. But I did it anyway. I did what Belinda would have done.
I texted Lena, checked the time and set off at a fast walk, thankful the skirt wasn’t quite tight enough to slow me down and the boots had short heels. It was ten to nine, and the rendezvous was a mile away.
7: 1989
MUMMY HAS BEEN home for six months now. I know that because she told me earlier today.
She didn’t say it like that, though. What she actually said was “Now I remember why I left.”
I asked her what she meant, and she just shook her head, her mouth curled up into a funny sort of smile that didn’t look like it belonged there, and her left hand tapping out a rhythm I didn’t recognise on the kitchen table. So I sat quietly, watching her hand, eating my corn flakes dry from the packet because when I’d asked her earlier if I could she’d just looked at me as if she didn’t understand the question and I’d assumed that meant yes.
After a while I asked her again what she meant, and she turned to me and the smile had gone. I hadn’t liked the smile very much but I liked her face without it even less, because her eyes had that hard look to them again.
“Six months,” she said.
“My birthday is in six months,” I replied, because I thought it might be and I thought maybe she’d like to think about my birthday, because then we could talk about cakes and presents and maybe she’d smile again, a proper smile, this time.
Instead she shook her head again and said “No it isn’t, Penny. But I’ve been back here six months and already I can’t stand it and I don’t see how I can be expected to stay here forever.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t really understand what she’d said, and I suggested maybe she could talk to Miss Parker from the Children’s Centre, because Miss Parker always knows the answer when there’s something I don’t understand. Mummy just stared at me for a minute, and that made me feel really uncomfortable, as if I’d done something wrong, again, but didn’t know what, as if I were expected to understand and say sorry. She couldn’t stand it, she said, but when she said “it” I knew it was me she meant. I didn’t know why, but I was about to say sorry anyway when she stood up and walked out of the room. I blinked and saw her opening the front door, walking away, never returning, but when I opened my eyes I could hear her heavy tread on the stairs. I waited until she’d reached the top, and then I put the corn flakes back in the cupboard and reached into the drawer where I’d put the toy soldiers and took them outside.
Daddy found me there later. I don’t know how long I’d been playing, but the sun was still quite high in the sky and it was warm enough – it had finally turned warm after a winter that felt like it had lasted a hundred years – so it couldn’t have been late. When he came out I had the soldiers lined up on the paving stone by the pond, waiting to dive into the murky depths and rescue the prisoners from the evil sea monster below.