‘Are you staying for some lunch, Tilly?’ my father said.
He leaned over to speak and ruffled her hair again. Whenever Tilly was there, he became a cartoon parent, a surrogate father. He swooped down to fill a gap in Tilly’s life that she never realized existed, until he highlighted it so exquisitely.
She started to answer, but he had his head in the fridge.
‘I saw Thin Brian in the Legion,’ he was saying to my mother. ‘Guess what he told me.’
My mother remained silent.
‘That old woman who lives at the end of Mulberry Drive, you know the one?’
My mother nodded into the peelings.
‘They found her dead last Monday.’
‘She was quite old, Derek.’
‘The point is,’ he said, unwrapping a cheese triangle of his own, ‘they reckon she’d been dead for a week and no one noticed.’
My mother looked over, and Tilly and I stared at the plate of Quavers in an effort to be unremembered.
‘They wouldn’t have discovered her even then,’ my father said, ‘if it hadn’t been for the sme—’
‘Why don’t you girls go outside?’ my mother said. ‘I’ll shout when your dinner’s ready.’
*
We sat on the patio, our backs pressed into the bricks to keep us in a ribbon of shade.
‘Fancy dying and no one misses you,’ Tilly said. ‘That’s not very Godly, is it?’
‘The vicar says God is everywhere,’ I said.
Tilly frowned at me.
‘Everywhere.’ I waved my arms around to show her.
‘So why wasn’t He on Mulberry Drive?’
I stared at the row of sunflowers on the far side of the garden. My mother had planted them last spring, and now they stretched above the wall and peered into the Forbes’ garden, like floral spies.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Perhaps He was somewhere else.’
‘I hope someone misses me when I die,’ she said.
‘You’re not going to die. Neither of us are. Not until we’re old. Not until people expect it of us. God will keep us safe until then.’
‘He didn’t keep Mrs Creasy safe, though, did he?’
I watched bumble bees drift between the sunflowers. They explored each one, dipping into the centre, searching and inspecting, until they reappeared in the daylight, dusted in yellow and drunk with achievement.
And it all became so obvious. ‘I know what we’re going to do with the summer holidays,’ I said, and got to my feet.
Tilly looked up. She squinted at me and shielded her eyes from the sun. ‘What?’
‘We’re going to make sure everyone is safe. We’re going to bring Mrs Creasy back.’
‘How are we going to do that?’
‘We’re going to look for God,’ I said.
‘We are?’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we are. Right here on this avenue. And I’m not giving up until we find Him.’
I held out my hand. She took it and I pulled her up next to me.
‘Okay, Gracie,’ she said.
And she put her sou’wester back on and smiled.
27 June 1976
It was Are You Being Served? on a Monday, The Good Life on a Tuesday, and The Generation Game on a Saturday. Although for the life of her, Dorothy couldn’t see what people found funny about Bruce Forsyth.
She tried to remember them, like a test, as she did the washing-up. It took her mind off the church hall, and the look on John Creasy’s face, and the spidery feeling in her chest.
Monday, Tuesday, Saturday. She usually liked washing up. She liked to watch the garden and idle her mind, but today the weight of the heat pressed against the glass and made her feel as though she were looking out from a giant oven.
Monday, Tuesday, Saturday.
She could still remember, although she wasn’t taking any chances. They were all circled in the Radio Times.
Harold became very irritable if she asked him something more than once.
Try to keep it in your head, Dorothy, he told her.
When Harold became angry, he could fill a room with his own annoyance. He could fill their sitting room, and the doctor’s surgery. He could even fill an entire supermarket.
She tried very hard to keep things in her head.
Sometimes, though, the words escaped her. They hid behind other words, or they showed a little of themselves, and then disappeared back into her mind before she had a chance to catch them.
I can’t find my … she would say, and Harold would throw choices at her like bullets. Keys? Gloves? Purse? Glasses? and it would make the word she wanted disappear even more.
Cuddly toy, she said one day, to make him laugh.
But Harold didn’t laugh. Instead, he stared at her as though she had walked into the conversation uninvited, and then he had closed the back door very quietly and started mowing the lawn. And somehow the quietness filled a room even more than the anger.
She folded the tea towel and put it on the edge of the draining board.
Harold had been quiet since they’d got back from church. He and Eric had deposited John Creasy somewhere, although Lord knows where, she hadn’t even dared ask, and he had sat down and read his newspaper in silence. He had eaten his dinner in silence, and dropped gravy down his shirt front in silence, and when she asked him if he wanted mandarin segments with Ideal milk for afterwards, he had only nodded at her.
When she put it down in front of him, he said the only sentence to come out of his mouth all afternoon. These are peaches, Dorothy.
It was happening all over again. It ran in families, she’d read it somewhere. Her mother ended up the same way, kept being found wandering the streets at six in the morning (postman, nightdress) and putting everything where it didn’t belong (slippers, breadbin). Mad as a box of frogs, Harold had called her. She was around Dorothy’s age when she first started to lose her mind, although Dorothy always thought losing your mind was such a strange phrase. As if your mind could be misplaced, like a set of house keys, or a Jack Russell terrier, as if it was more than likely your own fault for being so bloody careless.
They’d put her mother in a home within weeks. It was all very quick.
It’s for the best, Harold had said.
He’d said it each time they went to visit.
After he’d eaten his peaches, Harold had settled himself on the settee and fallen asleep, although how anyone could sleep in this heat was beyond her. He was still there now, his stomach rising and falling as he shifted in between dreams, his snoring keeping time with the kitchen clock, and plotting out the afternoon for them both.