confirmation. ‘Listen to me. Get on the train. Don’t even think about driving. Come straight down. I’ll pick you up at Swindon. We can fetch your car some other time. Don’t go to Frannie’s, come to me, for tonight at least. Then tomorrow I’ll drive you back to London, load up your stuff, and…maybe it’s time you came home.’
There it is. The H word. A shudder goes through me, relief this time, though mixed with something darker. Avebury tugging at my string, reeling me back in.
Get in the van, Indy
‘Do you good to hang out at Fran’s as long as it takes.’ John’s gone into fatherly mode, he being the nearest thing I have to a dad, Lars (or whatever the Icelandic backpacker’s name was–I’ve never known) being blissfully unaware of my existence. ‘She always keeps the bed made up, she’d love to see you–there’s more room there than in that shithole of yours in London.’ The voice coming down the phone line is like the water of a hot bath. I can feel myself relaxing, letting the warmth slip over my tense skin. ‘Find a job, nothing demanding. They’re always looking for people in the caf or the shop.’ Easing it all away. I can almost smell the scented steam. ‘Give yourself time. Frannie could do with some help.’
An unexpected drip from the cold tap. ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Only that she’s over eighty. Not as spry as she was. And she sold the car a couple of months ago, said she was too old to drive.’ ‘She told me she still walks a couple of miles every day’.
‘Oh, yeah, she’s up and down that path from Trusloe to the post office at Big Avebury, rain or shine. But you might see a change.’ Another long draw on the roll-up. Anyway, that’s not the point. You get your arse down here and we’ll talk everything through.’
I can feel myself getting tearful again. ‘John, I don’t know…’ Because I’m bad luck. I’m widdershins. I’m not safe to be near.
‘None of us know, Indy That’s bleedin’ life. Stop thinking so hard, and live it.’
A dusty golden harvest moon is hanging low on the horizon as I drive my rust-nibbled red Peugeot past the art-deco garage on the road into Avebury, two days later. Alban Elfid, the autumn equinox: strictly speaking, still a few days away, but who cares with a moon like that casting its magic?
Alban Elfid, said John in London this morning, as we loaded the back of his pickup for him to drive ahead with my stuff. Harvest home. Whatever you like to call it. A time for reflection and healing. I know you don’t believe any of it, Indy, but doesn’t matter, I believe it for you. You couldn’t be coming back at a better time.
The road bends, passing a high bank and an enormous diamond-shaped stone, and I’m inside the Avebury circle. It gives me a jolt every time: the stones gleaming like big scary teeth in a smile that sweeps towards the church tower rising out of the trees. My route takes me through the old cottages and the circle, and out again towards Avebury Trusloe, with its grid of twentieth-century former council houses. Poor old Frannie–she’d have loved to live in a thatched cottage in Big Avebury but, buy or let, they’re way beyond reach of her pension. So she’s in Little Avebury, as Avebury Trusloe is known locally, with the rest of the exiles.
Past the cricket field, past the National Trust car park, off the main road, and a bit of a wiggle takes me into the cul-de-sac where Frannie bought Bella Vista, a red-brick semi, after I left home four years ago. Whoever named it was incurably optimistic. It has a view mostly of identical red-brick semis and bungalows, although from the bedroom window, if someone held your ankles, you might glimpse an awe-inspiring panorama of waterlogged fields and the odd telegraph pole. Frannie adores it.
When I climb out of the car, she’s already opened the front door, standing there with a beaming smile bunching the smoker’s wrinkles that seam her cheeks. Suddenly I can’t think why I stayed away.
‘Hello, stranger,’ she says, in her gravelly voice–such a big voice, I always thought, for such a small person. ‘Your bed’s made up. Beans and bacon for tea.’
Our ritual every year when the home-grown runners were ready in the garden at Chippenham. It was the first meal she made me when Social Services left me with her in 1989, the year she took over my upbringing. I’m vegetarian, I said to her. Bollocks, she said. Eight years old? Too young to be vegetarian. You ever tried bacon? ‘Tidn’ really meat.
I give her a hug, feeling the boniness of her back through her lumpy hand-knitted cardigan. I’d swear she’s shrunk: I have to stoop. Her hair’s cut badly–why do hairdressers always hack old people’s hair as if they won’t mind the shape so long as it’s short?–but still the colour of sweet sherry. She seems to think I don’t realize she dyes it; that I never noticed her locking herself in the bathroom every six weeks, leaving clots of purplish foam clinging to the back of the tap after she’d wiped the basin and let herself out.
‘You OK?’ I say to her.
‘I’m OK. What about you?’
‘I’m OK.’ And I am, now I’m home.
I follow her along the hallway to the kitchen. Not quite so spry, maybe, but still a bounce in her step. She is OK.
Then I see the tin on the table.
‘Not fresh beans, then?’ Trying to make it casual, uneasy all the same. Fran never serves tinned vegetables she could grow herself or buy fresh.
‘Lor’ sake, India,’ she says. ‘Don’t you know there’s a war on?’
While Frannie wields the tin opener, humming ballads from the Blitz, I go upstairs to check where John’s put my things. Mostly, it seems, in the front bedroom, where the bed’s made up for me. ‘Fran! Mind if I shift some of my things down into the dining room?’
A clatter, a muffled ‘Oh, buggeration,’ from the kitchen. That sounds like the old Frannie. She comes out into the hall. ‘You can’t, India, I’m sleeping in there.’
‘You what? I lean over the banisters. She’s standing at the foot of the stairs with her hands on her hips.
‘John moved my bed downstairs in the summer.’
‘What’s the matter with upstairs?’ A worm twists in my gut. I can hear myself sounding like a social worker jollying her along. ‘Don’t tell me you’re too old to climb stairs. John said you were down the post office showing them how to hokey-cokey the other week. Left leg in, left leg out, shaking it all about like a spring lamb.’
‘Lights,’ she says. ‘Bloody lights, can’t sleep at night because of ‘em.’
‘Your room’s at the back. No lights out there, apart from the people in the bungalows, and far as I remember their average age is ninety-two. Anyway, you could’ve moved into the other bedroom. I don’t mind swapping.’
There’s a guilty but defiant look on her face. ‘Buggerin’ lights. Keep me awake. Rather be down here.’
‘What brought you back?’ she asks over supper.
‘Bored with London.’ Steve’s staring eyes, which a part of me never stops seeing, accuse me of cowardice, as well as murder, but I can’t burden her with the truth. ‘And to be honest, Fran, I don’t think I’m getting anywhere in television. You need connections, or luck, or mega-talent, preferably all three, and I haven’t any of those.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she says briskly, the way she always does. ‘You’re a clever girl, India. Don’t know where you got it from, but you are. Anyway, you stay here long as you want. John said you needed a good rest.’
‘I’ll find a job.’ I take hold of her hand as she reaches for her glass of water. Her knobbly fingers are cold between my warm ones. ‘Can’t ask you to support me.’
‘You’ve no idea what money I got.’ She’s grinning.
‘Millions, probably, all under the mattress. I don’t care. I’m not going to sponge off you.’