The taxi driver knows me. He keeps stealing glances in his rear-view mirror until we stop at some lights. Then he turns in his seat, eyebrows raised.
‘No way. It is you, isn’t it? From that show. Years ago.’
I smile tightly.
‘I thought it was when I saw you. Do you know what, I wouldn’t have recognised you either, only I had your mate in here a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘Eddie.’
I stare blankly at him for a second or two until my brain makes the connection.
‘You mean Joey Fraser?’
‘That’s him. He hasn’t changed, has he? I told him, I said he hadn’t aged a bit. Do you know what he said? He said Hollywood suited him. He was right. He looks twenty if a day.’
I’m grinding my teeth again. I can hear the clicking noise my jaw is making. The taxi driver is still talking but a dull heat is building in my chest. My blood pulses hot.
‘He said he was over here for the funeral. I suppose you’ll all be going, won’t you? Here, when you see him, you tell him Lee says hello? He’ll remember me.’
‘What— What funeral?’
The taxi driver looks at me in the mirror again and his expression is impossible to read.
‘Lesley Patterson.’
Lesley Patterson. I have to think for a minute. Older than me, with long red braids down to her waist. Not now, of course. Then, I mean. She had played my sister Lucy in the show. She’d had freckles and goofy teeth and when she’d had braces fitted at thirteen they’d taken all her lines away. I swallow, clutching hold of the seat for support.
‘She’s dead?’
‘You didn’t know? It was in the papers.’
‘What happened?’
Suicide. It hadn’t made the front page. It was a small story on page eleven, next to a recall advert for baby food. She’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning, the report said. I Google further and discover she’d fed a hosepipe from the exhaust through the window of her car in the little garage attached to the house. Her husband had discovered her nearly seven hours later, when he’d noticed the dogs barking at the garage door.
My phone starts ringing. Marco. I pick up.
‘Did you know about this? About Lesley Patterson?’ I ask him.
‘Hello to you too. Yes, I did.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I did.’
I catch my breath.
‘When?’
‘When it happened, last week. We talked about it over dinner. Remember?’
I stare at the wall. I don’t remember, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I’m so hazy on things these days.
‘I don’t, no. I don’t remember.’
‘Are you okay? You said at the time it didn’t bother you. You and Lesley weren’t close, you said.’
That sounds about right, like something I’d say. Because of course we hadn’t been close, had we? She barely spoke to me on set, and off set they would all go and play cards together, without telling me. I’d walked in on them all once, all five of them, the Marigold children. Teasing each other, playing with Lego, laughing. Their faces had fallen when they’d seen me. The room had gone horribly quiet. I’d only been seven years old. I’d just wanted to join in.
‘No, I suppose we weren’t.’
‘Listen, this isn’t why I called. You’ve left your purse in my car. Shall I bring it round?’
‘Yes. I’ve been looking for that everywhere. Could’ve sworn I left it at home.’
‘Nope. It’s right here. I’ll drop it back, I’m only twenty minutes away. There’s – uh – there’s a lot of money in it, Stella.’
‘Is there?’
‘Yeah. About three hundred pounds in cash. Is there anything you want to tell me? You’re not dealing drugs, are you?’
He laughs nervously. I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t remember taking that money out, but I suppose I must have done at some point. It seems like a lot, and I wish I could remember what I needed it for. It’s not the first time I’ve done something impulsive with money. I once paid for Carmel and me to go to Ibiza when she’d been so skint she’d been eating ketchup sandwiches with sachets stolen from the local café.
I hang up, drumming my fingers restlessly. I can feel the edges of myself and the anxiety that waits there, sharp as blades. I hope Marco will have some more pills for me. I deserve some more pills.
Chapter 6
‘She was unhappy,’ Aunt Jackie had told me after my mother’s suicide in 1994, the year I turned thirteen. ‘She had suffered years of clinical depression,’ the local paper had said, while the report in the Cambridge Courier had described her as being ‘prone to spells of melancholy’. It made her sound pre-Raphaelite. My father had said she had never been the same since I was born, a weight I carried with me for almost a decade until my first round of therapy in my twenties. I believed him, you see, believed that my birth – painful and messy and bloody – had somehow triggered this suicidal impulse in my mother, like a switch completing a circuit which lit something in her head.
I didn’t find out about the debt we were in until we were forced to sell the house a year after her death, and even then I didn’t understand. When I asked my father he simply said they had made some bad financial decisions. He didn’t tell me that those decisions had been made with cash in unmarked brown envelopes in a bookie’s where the smoke hung in the air like a medieval mist. When my mother had asked him to stop before he ran us into the ground, my father, always convinced of his next big win, had started placing bets in secret. He’d drained my account first, the one my mother had set up for me with the money made from the Marigold! series. She’d been clever enough to insist I couldn’t touch it before I was eighteen but not clever enough to stop my dad occasionally forging her signature on the account book he used to make the withdrawals. He’d intercepted the statements until all the money was gone, every penny I’d earned, bled away.
Once Mum discovered the extent of it – the overdraft, the remortgage, the loan sharks, the money missing from the emergency kitty she had stored behind the loose bricks of the fireplace – that was the beginning, I think. The long slide down. I would dream of horses, in all my years at college. Pounding hooves, sprays of turf, the smart flat crack of the riding crop. I would dream of my dad and me in the stands and in his hands hundreds and hundreds of betting slips, some stuffed in his pockets, some drifting to his feet like confetti, too many to hold. We were screaming the names of the horses until sweat sprang to our brows and always, always, it would change, and we would be screaming my mother’s name until our voices cracked and shook.
I wonder how he felt. That blood clot slowly moving towards the soft, vulnerable part of his brain. How it felt to lie in his tiny rented flat with the slow, mournful buzz of the freezer and inside it, encased in ice, their wedding rings, the two most precious things he owned.
Ten minutes after Marco arrives Carmel is home, her hair damp with the rain. She makes herself tea and stands in the doorway to the kitchen, her hands wrapped around the mug.