Helen Grant - Ghostwriter

“Although we don’t know each other, we’re familiar. If this note has you intrigued, meet me at The Loft tonight at 7. If you’re not there, I won’t contact you again.”

The words were scribbled in childish black ink on a scrap of pink paper. Edie scanned them quickly and paled, thinking someone was watching her.

 She read the note again. And again. Once more. She read it sixteen times in total until she knew the words by heart.

It was unsigned. A burst of curiosity sprang to life from some dark corner of her psyche, a foolish feeling but pleasant enough. A lazy gathering of butterflies roused from hibernation in her belly. Was this an admirer or a joke at her expense? There were plenty of likely candidates for the latter.

Or it could be a murderer, a stalker, a rapist, someone watching, waiting to pounce, Edie thought, shivering.

“Now you’re being silly!” snapped a romantic voice in her head, “This is for real, girl. Some old fool has got the hots for you!”

Edie glanced down at her scruffy trainers and cringed. Who was she kidding? What kind of fool would want her and her temperamental baggage? Twenty-one years of marriage to Raymond, four kids and two Grandchildren, had rendered her fashion sense somewhat complacent. Gone was the agile, rosy-cheeked young thing Raymond had once nicknamed his Southern Belle. In her place were ripped jeans, a shapeless grey t-shirt, panda eyes and greasy hair scraped back in a messy knot – a far cry from the college girl in bobby socks, full-skirted and slim-waisted, that Raymond had fallen in love with.

She screwed the paper into a ball and hurled it through the open window. She knew all the words anyway. “Probably one of the kids having a joke at my expense,” she cringed. For Paul, her eldest, the village prankster, his Mum’s birthday coinciding with April Fool’s Day was a combination too potent to resist.

Sighing, she cracked two eggs against the rim of the frying pan and watched the yolk mingle with the vegetable oil and fatty juices. The bread heels sprung from the toaster as Raymond thudded down the stairs in heavy boots. What would it be this year? Estee Lauder? The diamond choker she’d been admiring in the Argos catalogue? No - just cheap chocolates and a wink that her official present was en-route. So predictable. So Raymond.

He approached from behind, “How’s the birthday girl?” Before she could reply, he slid his beefy brown hands around the white folds that used to be her waist and nuzzled his minty breath into her neck.

“Any post?”

“Nothing,” Edie lied.

“No cards?”

“Nope.”

“No parcels?”

“Nothing.”

Edie bit back hot tears. Gifts she could live without, but cards were a common courtesy. Raymond shuffled some cornflakes into a white bowl. Edie wiped her hands on a starched towel.

“Any second now, there’ll be a knock at the door and it’ll be one of the kids with an afterthought from the garage,” he said cheerfully.

Edie wasn’t convinced. Scraping a chair across the tiles, she gestured for Raymond to sit. Spreading his arms helplessly, he said, “They’re good kids really, they mean well.”

Edie shrugged. She wanted to point out that he hadn’t given her the cheap chocolates yet, but stopped herself in time. Raymond rubbed the soil from his palms across his
greasy mouth. When he popped a nugget of bacon onto his tongue, it was brown and grimy. Edie winced. Glancing down, she noticed his crotch was more meaty than usual. He must have noticed because he said, “Something take your fancy, Edie?”

He was wearing sloppy jeans and a blue t-shirt with a sulphur-yellow beanie pulled over his ears, concealing the bedraggled black mess underneath.

With the bright-eyed, manic expression of someone who’d been nipping at the brandy, Edie watched him unbuckle his belt. With the grace of a Trojan horse, he pulled a crumpled box of Milk Tray from his underpants and slid them across the table. In the three seconds it took for him to prize them out, Edie made up her mind to turn up at The Loft after all.

When she arrived, she chose the farthest couch from the door. Someone pushed a glass of champagne into her hands and she looked up to see a dickey-bowed waiter smiling sympathetically.

“You look like you need something stiffer,” he laughed smuttily, raising an eyebrow, “Been stood up?”

“No, just early,” Edie barked, smoothing the silk of her dress across her knees. The waiter grinned, “Well, just give me a nod when you need a refill.”

“What are you doing, girl?” she muttered, fiddling nervously with her fringe, “Dressing yourself up like a dog’s dinner, for the benefit of a few words on a scrap of paper. You’ll be the laughing stock of the neighbourhood, after this.” Glancing at her watch, she decided to give it five more minutes before leaving by the side door.

Careful not to smudge her lipstick, she gulped back a mouthful of champagne and looked around herself. Apart from two other people, a middle aged lady in a black cloak with a long auburn braid tied in a white ribbon and an elderly man by the window sporting a tweed jacket and silk cravat, the bar was virtually empty. The man raised his glass and nodded. Edie groaned, “Please, it can’t be …” It wasn’t.

She remembered back to that morning when, bang on cue, Paul had graced their doorstep at ten, with a lopsided grin and frog-like voice hidden behind three feet of lumpy, green foliage. Edie stifled a giggle when she remembered how he’d tripped over the step, chipping a tooth, but had swallowed his pride and joined his Father in their own version of Happy Birthday.

Five minutes later, when her glass was almost empty, Edie strode across to the bar to settle the bill.

“Looks like you were stood up after all, then,” the waiter grinned.

“Yes, it does, doesn’t it?” Edie barked. Half a minute of innuendos later, he was forced to eat his words when a voice appeared at her shoulder, “The traffic was bad, sorry.”

The waiter, pretending to mop up a spill on the bar, gave a little half shrug. Edie noticed his cheeks had flushed purple-pink.

“You look absolutely fantastic,” said the voice.

“Thank you … ” Edie’s hand tightened around the stem of her glass. Hesitating for a moment, she drank in the familiar accent. There was something strangely warm about the twang but she wasn’t sure why because the voice was so quiet. Without looking around, she announced confidently, “I shouldn’t have come, I’m sorry. I’m a married woman with four kids and three Grandchildren.”

“Me too, my sexy Southern Belle!”

Edie spun around to face the noise. It took a few seconds to sink in but when it did, the shock registered clearly on her mouth. There was no sound, just an O shape.

An orchestra belted out a symphony from somewhere outside her head. Swooping his arms into an arc, Raymond burst into a quirky version of Happy Birthday. The waiter, pouring two fresh glasses of champagne, raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he shook his head, laughter streaking his cheeks, “The look on your face!”

“Curiosity got the better of me,” Edie giggled.

“What were you expecting?” Raymond offered an arm.

“Some one else perhaps, a prank probably - who knows? I wasn’t going to come.”

“But you did …”

“You silly old fool! You didn’t have to go to such extremes! The chocolates were fine.”

Raymond chuckled and it wasn’t long before Edie joined in. They laughed all the way to bed that night.

“My name is Verna Peek and I was born on the eighteenth of February 1946.”

I had agreed to meet Verna as I too had been adopted and knew nothing of my birth father. I was born in a sleepy village called Darite, close to New Liskeard in Cornwall, England, on November 27th, 1945. My birth mother had been sent to Cornwall so that noone would know she was pregnant.

“What was your real mother’s name?” I asked, watching her nervously smooth her red and white candy striped skirt across her knees. We were eating strawberry ice cream, sitting on a bench on Plymouth Hoe. The Hoe is where people used to gather, during wartime, to party it up – where there’s a big stretch of grass and a square for dances and the like.

“Rebecca Martha Alberta Moyes,” Verna said proudly, squaring her shoulders and probably hoping I didn’t notice the crack in her voice, “She was a charming, high spirited woman who wore African print shirts and wild hairdos, so full of energy that she seemed to be dancing even when she was standing still.”

“My mother was quite the opposite,” I smiled, “Shy and intriguing and only seventeen years old when she was sent away. She hadn’t seen a woman nursing a baby before, least of all nurse one herself.”

“That must have been difficult.” Verna whimpered.

“I’d say.”

Many families had lost their means of livelihood during the Plymouth Blitz and my mother’s had been no exception. Her father was seventy-four years old and couldn’t help at all. Consequently, I was adopted when I was six weeks old. Verna had been a similar age too.

“Tell me about your father,” I said, imagining a tall, fair skinned and sandy haired man, not that much dissimilar to Verna herself.

“My mother said he looked like a blonde Clarke Gable. He wore a moustache and his friends called him ‘God’s gift to English girls’.” She paused, gazing nostalgically towards the lighthouse with its red and white stripes not much dissimilar to Verna’s skirt, where seagulls squawked overhead and young families picnicked on the grass. I wondered if she felt sad that he was a mere snippet of information rather than a physical reality, a proper father who spun wartime yarns at picnics on Sunday afternoons?

“He was a handsome Canadian, based at a camp at Coypool, near Plympton. My mother met him at a dance on Plymouth Hoe in 1945. She thought he was an airman but he might have been part of a visiting squadron as there were few air bases in Plymouth. There were aircraft carriers in Plymouth Sound though.”

“And he was 26?”

“Around that age, yes.”

“And your mother was how old?”

“Twenty one.”

“And from Plymouth?”

“Not from birth, no. Her family moved here when she was a small girl, eight or nine if my memory serves me correct. She was a local girl through and through. Lived the rest of her days with her elderly parents and disabled brother in a small flat off Plymouth Barbican.”

“And never married?”

“There were others but none like Willy Powers. She held him in high esteem until the day she died, despite the way he treated her.”

“Willy Powers …” I whispered, taken aback at hearing his name. I noticed there were tears streaming down Verna’s face. The fine-grained skin on the backs of her hands was damp and glistening and the curly corners of her eyes were wet. What I hadn’t expected was the sorrow I felt on behalf of Verna.

“Why are you crying?” I asked.

“Some people have experiences in life that define them forever,” she said, “With my Mother, it was unmarried motherhood. It changed her completely. She told me the worst days had been the ones where she had time enough to think and her recurring thought was ‘What am I going to do with all the years ahead of me?”

“Are you glad you found her again?”

“I only knew her for a short time but it was a comfort, yes. At first I pushed her away. I said ‘Why couldn’t you have died and Daddy gone on living?’ It was she who had me adopted, after all. I always asked myself whether things would have been different had my Father not disappeared like that.”

I had to admit that I often wondered the same thing. Would my Mother’s family have felt the same shame had my Father been around to support her? Would she have been hushed away like some shameful secret had he asked my Grandfather for her hand in marriage? She never recovered. One time a man asked her out, a year or two after my adoption, and she accepted but was then filled with despair at the sight of the wiry red hairs on his forearms. He wasn’t my Father, that was the problem. He was a perfectly decent man, but he wasn’t my father.

Verna turned towards me, smiling now. She was terribly attractive when the sun illuminated her features, with her animated expression and yellow silk hair. She took my hand and let her eyes rest on my fingers.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet me today,” she said, her eyes twinkling, “I had a little trouble accepting my Mother when I found her but I know it’ll be different with you. Do you mind if I tell people you’re my sister? It sounds so much nicer than half-sister.”

I nodded, feeling privileged and nourished.

“Had our Father not disappeared the way he did which of our Mothers do you think he’d have married?” I asked.

“Neither,” said Verna with an impish smile. I huddled into her for warmth. She sang a sweet melody as the lights of a passing cargo ship lit up Drake’s Island.

Peter looked up at the dilapidated building, shielding his pink brows from the glare of the midday sun. Fumbling in his pocket, he pulled out a scrap of blue paper.

“Beautiful day,” he said to the silver-haired man who had been watching him from one of the wrought iron balconies. The man nodded, his face gleaming with a fine film of sweat as he unbuttoned the cuffs of his tartan shirt and rolled the sleeves to his elbows.

“Aye, another day of sunshine,” he agreed, threading his tobacco-stained fingers together and stretching them into an arc above his head.

Peter unfolded the paper and studied the words carefully. The package should have reached them by now. He had promised he would send it straight away when she called to say she was getting re-married and wanted him to send the rest of the girl’s things. He could have packed up every trace of them there and then and shipped their memory to the forwarding address. Was there any point in causing a fuss?

He continued to mull things over for a bit. Then he looked up, his eyes narrowing the way they did when something had angered him.

“Are ye from these parts originally?” he asked, stooping to tie his lace. The man nodded, rubbing the heel of his palm across his butter coloured chin, the corners of his mouth twitching into an upward curve.

“Born an bred,” came the reply from a smile crinkling the outer corners of his eyes, “My ancestors were travellers. They came to Malta from Sicily and never left,” he paused to rub away an itch from the end of his nose, “I met my wife when I was working as a tour guide in Gozo.”

Peter thought back to that morning when he had witnessed an argument between the man and a plump looking woman in red velvet pumps with yellow cloth roses on the toes.

“Was that your wife Aa saw ye wi earlier?” he frowned, remembering the way she had pulled an ugly face at him as she bounded down the stairs in a flurry of foul words. Peter remembered her because of her strange appearance, a round-eyed thing with a face the colour of pink vinyl and a bubbly head of black curls.

“Aye, Jolly old thing, eh?” the man laughed unexpectedly. There was an irritating half-smile about his lips.

Peter coughed to clear his throat of some phlegm and forced his gaze back to the scrap of paper.

“Any idea where Stanley Street is?” he frowned, fiddling with the thick silver hoop dangling from his right earlobe.

Grim concentration attached itself to the man’s rubbery features. He pointed towards the end of the road where two youths were unloading boxes from a blue truck.

“Two kilometers that way,” he nodded, “Past the market and the post office. Turn left at the church and follow the road to the harbour where you can jump on a bus that will take you straight there.”

Peter lifted his rucksack from its position by the wall and fastened the straps around his waist. He looped the strap of his camera around his neck so it rested against his chest and saluted the man the way a Junior Rating does an Officer on a warship, “Ye have yourself a good day, noo,” he said before dragging his prosthetic foot across the gravel.

The man gave the faintest of smiles before wetting his fingers and running the tips through the silver ribbons on his scalp.

The road was narrow with high-rise apartment blocks on either side. Peter passed a wooden hut where a gaggle of drunken men were gathered around a table, ranting at each other in their native language, the surface strewn with bottles, cards, coins. Dragging the soles of his reddish brown boots, he stamped on the cigarette butts littering the ground, the smoke rising from them making his nose feel crinkly inside.

“Hey! You wanna join us? Plenty to go around!” called a voice from behind. Peter did a half-turn. A square-jawed man with a bristly crew cut stared at him menacingly, holding a deck of cards in one hand and a half-chewed baguette in the other. Peter raised his hand and shook his head, mumbling something about time being of the essence. The men burst out laughing and everybody seemed to start laughing. Peter turned beetroot.

The heat was intense, burning the back of his neck and clinging to the greying bush drooping from his armpits. He swallowed a piece of toast that was lodged behind one of his molars, feeling it hurt all the way down his throat.

“See fit Aa’ve brought ye!” he imagined himself saying as they opened the door, “Colouring books an crayons an a gumball machine for Agnes an a new dolly for Claudia cos Grandpa remembered hoo sad ye were when Max chewed the head off rag dolly Anna.” They’d giggle and throw their arms around him, their childish breath nuzzling close. Then he’d ask where their Ma was and they’d say she was taking a nap, like old times when he came to pick them up on a Saturday, before she decided to take them away.

Moving through the street, the fusty smell of an alehouse nipped the back of his throat and for a second he was tempted to succumb to his vice and flail through the door to wet his parched lips.

“Take charge o yourself, ye old fool,” he barked, thinking back to the times when she’d lunged at him with eyes like ice picks after discovering he’d spent the best part of a Saturday at the pub instead of somewhere educational as promised.

“Hey girls, ye dinnae mind ye old Grandpa wetting his mooth, do ye?” he’d slur, his toxic breath languishing on their Ma’s doll-like features, causing her to flinch.

They’d shake their little heads in unison, staring up at their Mammy through innocent eyes - the older girl, Agnes, nudging her sister. Claudia would squeal and shake her head madly; hidden behind a veil of scrappy blonde curls.

“There’s a wee park at the side o the garden wi rabbits an goats, an the kids are allowed in the lounge. They come an go as they please. Ach, it’s ok. Stop ye frettin, woman.”

“Rabbits an goats? Ye think that makes it alright?” their mother would hiss, spit flying from her mouth, “Ye think it’s healthy for children to spend every Saturday in a smoky hovel?

“Ye think it’s normal for a man o your age to leer over every slice of skirt that breathes? Ma always swore ye were a loser Da – an she was right enough.”

That last sentence stung but he didn’t say so. He didn’t want her to know her tongue had worked its magic again, stabbing at the corners of his conscience like rat poison.

Stepping away from the kerb, he whistled a jazzy tune, a stirring of excitement rustling in his belly. A weight slipped from his shoulders.

“Call for help!!” came a voice, hurtling towards him from the red lips of a girl in a white knit dress, “The market’s on fire!” the girl sobbed, her dark eyes filled with something worse than fear. The noise from her mouth wasn’t a scream, more a high-pitched squeal, sharper than a police siren. She wore blue ribbons. The ends were charred with soot, “My mum’s in there!” she gasped, battering Peter’s chest with her small fists, “Help me find her!”

Peter held the girl at arms length, “Slow doon lass! Fit is it? Fit’s wrong?”

“The markets on fire! Look! Can’t you see the smoke? Any fool can see it!”

Peter turned and stared. Black smoke seeped from under two wooden doors, wrapping itself around the church steeple. He sniffed the air and gagged. The stench reminded him of burning carcasses as a lad. He jerked his head backwards, covering his mouth and nose. Charred faces burst through the doors, ripping off their shirts and using the rags to cover their features.

“That way!” Peter yelled, pushing the girl away.

“My Mum! Please find her!”

“Run towards the harbour an stay there. It’s no safe here.”

“My Mum! I can’t leave her!”

“I’ll find your Ma.”

Praying quietly for divine assistance, Peter pushed through the panic. It was only when he was inside he realised he hadn’t asked what the girl’s Ma looked like. The fear in her eyes had scrambled his thoughts to a mushy pulp. She had an apple of a face and red-tinted curls, quite pretty in a Romany kind of way.

He stared in horror. The market was a jungle of angry red flames, slicing through pink meat and liquor bottles and jars of striped candy. People tripped over each another, their faces powdered with soot. He kept his hands to his face. Smoke stabbed at the hollow behind his eyes, making them sting. With adrenaline pumping through his veins, he lunged into the chaos.

“Help!” cried a watery voice from outside his head. Looking down, he noticed a tiny hand snake its way from under a table, sliding towards his boot. He crouched and stared for what seemed like an age before letting his hand slip from his mouth. The blue hooded eyes, sloping at the corners, were like her Ma’s.

“Agnes?” Her face didn’t flinch. There was an eerie silence.

She broke the ice, “Grandpa, help.”

Without hesitating, he scooped his Granddaughter up, cradling the back of her bedraggled head. She nuzzled her nose and dry lips into the warm skin of his neck. He handed her a tissue and she used it to cover her eyes.

“Where’s ye Ma?”

“At home wi Vernon.”

“Vernon?”

“Mammy’s fiancé,”

Peter pushed through the panic, forcing his way through the smoke towards what looked like a door. Dozens of bodies lay crumpled in a heap, their limbs twisted like spread-eagled pink dolls. He couldn’t have been more than two feet from fresh air when he stumbled over the red velvet pump. The pink vinyl was now black rubber, the same colour as the bubbly curls sprouting like daffodils, just over an inch long, from the scalp. The lips were rolled back in a snarl, revealing damaged brown teeth. Peter spluttered on an acidy bubble of vomit that had risen from his belly to his mouth.

He sidestepped around the shoe and various other twisted limbs until he found the relief of clean air. Then he lowered Agnes down and held her at arms length so he could get a better look at her face, “Where’s your sister?” he asked, thinking how pretty she looked in her cream pinafore splashed with red cherries.

“Wi Mammy.”

“So who are ye wi?”

Agnes cowered behind her hands, peering sheepishly through the narrow gaps in her fingers.

“Aa ran away.”

“Ye ran away? Fit on earth for?”

Wondering what kind of mother would let her 6-year-old daughter slip away unnoticed, Peter begged Agnes to tell him what had made her so sad that she felt she had to leave. She hesitated for what seemed a long time.

Finally, tilting her head to one side, she smiled, “I missed you, Grandpa”

The words snatched the breath clean from his lungs. It was as if he’d heard a shocking newsflash or glimpsed a possibility that had never entered his head before. He pulled Agnes into an embrace and held her tight, thinking if he squeezed hard enough he might dry her tears. He whispered something about missing her too and made a promise not to stay away again.

“Grandpa’s been an old fool,” he sniffed, rubbing the wetness from his eyes, “But aa’m here noo an this is where Aa’m stayin. Ye’re gonna take mi home an Aa’m gonna make friends with Ma and then we’re gonna make up for lost time – hoos aboot that?”

Agnes slipped her hand into Peter’s. The strength of her grip surprised him.

“An another thing. This Vernon chap – do ye think Aa’ll like him?”

She didn’t answer that time, but Peter caught the beginnings of a smile.