Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (3 page)

Auntie’s grave was at the end of the next path, on the corner where it met one of the main aisles. Of course, it wasn’t really her grave, it was just the place where Minty had buried her ashes. The grave belonged to Maisie Julia Chepstow, beloved wife of John Chepstow, who departed this life 15 December 1897, aged fifty-three, asleep in the arms of Jesus. When she’d brought Jock here she’d told him this was Auntie’s grandmother and he’d been impressed. For all she knew, it might be true. Auntie must have had two grandmothers like everyone else, just as
she
must have. She was going to have Auntie’s name put on the stone, she’d said. Jock said the grave was beautiful and moving, and the stone angel must have cost a fortune, even in those days.

Minty took the dead stalks out of the stone pot and wrapped them in the paper that had been round the tulips and narcissi. She poured the water out of the bleach bottle into the vase. When she turned round for the flowers, she saw Jock’s ghost coming down the main aisle toward her. He was wearing jeans and a dark blue sweater and his leather jacket, but he wasn’t solid like he’d been last night. She could see through him.

She said bravely, though she could hardly get the words out, “What d’you want, Jock? What have you come back for?”

He didn’t speak. When he was about two yards from her he faded away. Just vanished like a shadow does when the sun goes in. Minty would have liked some wood to touch or maybe to have crossed herself, but she didn’t know which side to start from. She was shaking all over. She knelt on Auntie’s grave and prayed.
Dear Auntie, keep him away. If you
see him where you are tell him I don’t want him coming here. Always and forever
your loving niece Araminta.

Two people came along the path, the woman carrying a little bunch of carnations. They said, “Good afternoon,” the way no one ever would if you met them outside in the street. Minty got up off her knees and returned the greeting. She took her parcel of stalks and her empty bleach bottle, and dropped them in one of the litter bins. It had begun to rain. Jock used to say, Don’t worry about it, it’s only water. But was it? You didn’t know what dirt it picked up on its way down out of the sky.

Chapter 2

AUNTIE’S REAL NAME was Winifred Knox. She had two sisters and a brother, and they all lived at 39 Syringa Road with their parents. Arthur was the first to leave. He got married and then there were just the sisters at home. They were much older than Auntie, who had been an afterthought, the baby of the family. Kathleen got married and then Edna did and their father died. Auntie was left alone with her mother and cleaned offices for a living. Her engagement to Bert had been going on for years and years, but she couldn’t marry him while Mum was there dependent on her, in a wheelchair and needing everything done for her.

Mum died the day before Auntie’s fortieth birthday. She and Bert waited a decent interval and then they got married. But it didn’t work, it was a nightmare.

“I didn’t know what to expect,” Auntie said. “I suppose I’d led a sheltered life, I didn’t know anything about men. It was a nightmare.”

“What did he do?” Minty asked.

“You don’t want to know, a little innocent like you. I put an end to it after a fortnight. Good thing I’d kept this house on. If I’d any regrets it was not having any little ones of my own but then you came along like a bolt from the blue.”

Minty was the bolt and her mother was the blue. Her name was Agnes and she’d been Auntie’s best friend at school, though they hadn’t seen so much of each other since then. No one was surprised when Agnes appeared with a baby; she’d been asking for it, going with all and sundry. There was never any mention of the baby’s father; it might have been a virgin birth for all the talk there was of him. It was the early sixties and people weren’t anywhere like as strict as they’d been when Auntie was young, but they still looked down their noses at Agnes and said the baby was a liability. Agnes brought her to Syringa Road sometimes and the two of them pushed the pram round Queen’s Park.

That afternoon in May when Minty was six months old there was no talk of park visiting. Agnes said could she leave Minty with Auntie just for an hour while she went to visit her mum in the hospital. She’d brought a supply of nappies and a bottle of milk and a tin of puréed prunes for babies. It was funny how, whenever she told Minty this story, Auntie never left out the puréed prunes.

The time Agnes came was just after two and when it got to four Auntie began to wonder what had happened to her. Of course, she knew very well that when people say they’ll be back in an hour they don’t actually return for two or three hours; they’re just saying it to make you feel better, so she wasn’t worried. But she was when it got to six and seven. Luckily, what few shops there were in the area stayed open round the clock, so she asked the lady next door—that was before Laf and Sonovia came—to keep a lookout for Agnes and she took Minty in the pram and bought baby porridge and more milk and a bunch of bananas. Auntie’d never had any children of her own but she was a great believer in bananas as nourishing, the easiest to eat of all fruits, and liked by everyone.

“Personally,” she’d said, “I’d regard anyone who turned up their nose at bananas with the deepest suspicion.”

Agnes didn’t come back that day or the next. She never came back. Auntie made a bit of an effort to find her. She went round to Agnes’s parents’ place and found her mum had never been in hospital, she was as fit as a fiddle. They didn’t want the baby, no thanks, they’d been through all that when theirs were little and they weren’t starting again. Agnes’s dad said he reckoned she’d met someone who’d take her on but not the kid as well and this was her way of solving that problem.

“Why don’t you hold on to her, Winnie? You’ve none of your own. She’d be company for you.”

And Auntie had. They gave her the baby’s birth certificate and Agnes’s dad put two ten-pound notes in the envelope with it. Sometimes, when she’d got fond of Minty and looked on her as her own, Auntie worried a bit that Agnes would come back for her and she wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. But Agnes never did and when Minty was twelve the mum who hadn’t been in the hospital came round one day and said Agnes had been married and divorced and married again, and had gone to Australia with her second husband and her three kids and his four. It was quite a relief.

Auntie had never adopted Minty or fostered her or any of those things. “I’ve no legal right to you,” she often said. “It’d be hard to say who you belong to. Still, no one’s showing any signs of wanting to take you away, are they? Poor little nobody’s child you are.”

Minty left school when she was sixteen and got a job in the textile works in Craven Park. Auntie had brought her up to be very clean and though she’d been promoted to machinist, she didn’t like the fluff and lint that got everywhere. In those days everyone smoked and Minty didn’t like the smell or the ash either. Auntie knew the people who ran the dry cleaners. It wasn’t Immacue then but Harrow Road Dry-Cleaning and an old man called Mr. Levy owned it. Minty stayed there for the next eighteen years, at first when Mr. Levy’s son took over, then when it became Quicksilver Cleaners, finally working for Josephine O’Sullivan. Her life was very simple and straightforward. She walked to work in the mornings, worked for eight hours, mostly ironing, and walked home or got the 18 bus. The evenings she spent with Auntie, watching TV, eating their meal. Once a week they went to the cinema.

Auntie was quite old when her voices began. Both her sisters had died by then but it was their voices she heard. Kathleen told her she ought to go to the pub after the cinema, take Minty, it was time Minty had a bit of life, and to make it the Queen’s Head, it was the only one round there that was properly clean. She used to go in there with George when they were courting. Auntie was a bit doubtful but the sisters were insistent and after she and Minty had been to see
Heavenly Creatures
the two of them went shyly into the College Park pub, the Queen’s Head. It
was
clean, or as clean as you could get. The barman was always wiping down the surfaces and with a clean cloth, not some old rag.

Edna didn’t talk about pubs or having a good time. She kept telling Auntie to concentrate and she’d see her dead husband Wilfred. He was dying to “get through,” whatever that meant, though why Auntie should want to when she’d never been able to stand Wilfred Cutts she didn’t know. Then God started talking to Auntie and the sisters took a back seat. Young Mr. Levy said, “When you talk to God it’s praying, but when God talks to you it’s schizophrenia.”

Minty didn’t laugh. She was frightened of having God in the house, always telling Auntie He was training her to be the angel of the Lord and not to eat red meat. Auntie had always been a great one for the royal family and she could remember Edward VIII renouncing the throne for love of a woman, so it wasn’t surprising when his voice joined God’s. He told her he’d got a son, born in secret in Paris, and then
he’d
had a son and she was to tell the queen she’d no business being where she was and this King Edward X ought to wear the crown. Auntie was arrested trying to get into Buckingham Palace and they wanted to put her away, but Minty wasn’t having that. While she had her health and strength Auntie was staying put.

“She’s been like a mother to me,” she said to young Mr. Levy, who said she was a good girl and it was a shame there weren’t more like her.

In the end Auntie had to go, but she didn’t live long in the geriatric ward. She’d made a will a long time ago and left Minty the house in Syringa Road, and all the furniture and her savings, which amounted to £1,650. Minty didn’t tell anyone the amount but let it be known Auntie had left her money. It proved Auntie’d loved her. When she added it to her own savings the total came to £2,500. Any sum over a thousand pounds was real money, Minty thought, proud of what she’d amassed. It was after that that she collected Auntie’s ashes from the undertakers and buried them in Maisie Chepstow’s grave.

A long time passed before she went back to the pub. The following week Laf and Sonovia hadn’t wanted to see the film so she’d gone alone; she didn’t mind that, it wasn’t as though she wanted to talk in cinemas. Wisely, she went to the six-ten showing when hardly anyone else did. There were only eight people in the seats besides herself. She liked being alone with no one to whisper to her or pass her chocolates. On the way back she dropped into the Queen’s Head and bought an orange juice. Why, she couldn’t have said. The pub was half empty, it seemed less smoky than usual, and she found a table in the corner.

All her life Minty had never spoken to a man who wasn’t someone’s husband or her employer or the postman or bus conductor. Those sorts of people. She’d never seriously thought of having a boyfriend, still less of getting married. When she was younger Sonovia used to tease her a bit and ask her when she was going to get a man of her own, and Minty always said she wasn’t the marrying kind. Auntie’s mysterious but horrific account of her marital experience had put her off. Besides, she didn’t know any unattached men and none showed any signs of wanting to know her.

Until Jock. Not the first but the second time she went into the pub she saw him looking at her. She was sitting at that same corner table on her own, dressed as she always was in a clean pair of cotton trousers and a long-sleeved T-shirt, her hair newly washed and her nails scrubbed. The man she stole cautious glances at was tall and well built, long-legged in blue jeans and a dark-blue padded jacket. He had a handsome face and a nice tan; he looked clean and his brown hair was short and trim. Minty had almost finished her orange juice. She stared into the golden grainy dregs of it, to avoid looking at the man.

He came over, said, “Why so sad?”

Minty was too scared to look at him. “I’m not sad.”

“You could have fooled me.”

He sat down at her table, then asked her if she minded. Minty shook her head. “I’d like to buy you a real drink.”

Auntie sometimes had a gin and tonic, so Minty said she’d have one of those. While he was getting her gin and a half of lager for himself, Minty felt near to despair. She thought of getting up and running away but she’d have had to pass him to get to the door. What would Sonovia and Josephine say? What would Auntie have said?
Have nothing to do with him.
Do not trust him, gentle maiden, though his voice be low and sweet.
He came back with the drinks, sat down, and said his name was Jock, Jock Lewis, and what was hers.

“Minty.”

“Yum, yum,” said Jock. “Sounds like something that comes with a shoulder of lamb.” He laughed, but not unkindly. “I can’t call you that.”

“It’s Araminta really.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Minty, Minty, the rick-stick Stinty, round tail, bobtail, well done, Minty.” He laughed into her incredulous face. “I shall call you Polo.”

She thought about it, understood. He didn’t have to explain. “I’m Jock. John, really, but everyone calls me Jock. Live round here, do you?”

“Syringa Road.”

He shook his head. “I’m a stranger here myself but I soon won’t be. I’ve got a place up in Queen’s Park, I moved in on Saturday.” He glanced at her hands. “You’re not married, are you, Polo? You’ve got a boyfriend though, I’m sure you have, just my luck as usual.”

She thought of Auntie who was dead and of Agnes going off to Australia. “I haven’t got anybody.”

He didn’t like that. She couldn’t tell why but he didn’t. She’d said it very seriously, of course she had, it was serious to her. To make it better she tried to smile. The gin had gone straight to her head, though she’d only sipped a few mouthfuls of it.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll make you laugh. Now listen. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drownded. Who was saved?”

It was easy. “Pinch Me.”

He did so. Very gently on her upper arm. “Caught you out, Polo.”

She didn’t laugh. “I ought to be going.”

She thought he’d try to stop her but he didn’t. “Here, have one for the road.” He offered her not a drink but a Polo mint. “I’ll walk you home. I’ve not got my car with me.”

She didn’t believe in the car. Not then. Besides, if he’d had one and offered to drive her she’d have refused. She knew all about not taking lifts from strange men. Or sweets. They might be drugs. Wouldn’t being walked home be just as dangerous? She couldn’t refuse; she didn’t know how. He held the pub door open for her. The streets round here were deserted at night except for groups of young men, wandering, filling the width of the pavement, silent but occasionally letting out bestial yells. Or you’d meet just one, loping along to the deafening beat of a ghetto blaster. If she’d been alone, she wouldn’t have risked it; she’d have got the bus. He asked her what was behind the high wall.

“That’s the cemetery.” She didn’t know why she had to add, “My auntie’s ashes are in there.”

“Is that a fact?” He said it as if she’d told him something wonderful, like she’d won the lottery, and from that moment she started liking him. “Your auntie was very important to you, right?”

“Oh, yes. She was like my mother. She left me her house.”

“You deserved it. You were devoted to her and did all sorts of things for her, didn’t you?” She nodded, speechless. “You had a reward for your good services.”