Joanna Trollope - The Other Family

‘It’s a job !’

‘Yes,’ Chrissie said, ‘they were so nice to me. I met Mark’s father, and al his uncles, and they were lovely, so welcoming.’

‘You’l be so good at it—’

‘I hope so. Nine-thirty to six, four weeks’ paid holiday, pay-as-you-earn tax.’

‘Chrissie,’ Sue said, ‘this is good. This is even great. This is like starting again, and do not, do not , do not tel me that starting again is the last thing you want to do.’

‘OK,’ Chrissie said.

‘You’re smiling.’

‘I’m not—’

‘You’re smiling.’

‘It’s relief,’ Chrissie said.

‘I don’t care what it is. You’re smiling. And the flat?’

Chrissie took a sip of wine.

‘If I don’t sel the house—’

‘You will sel the house.’

‘I can’t afford the flat on what I’l be earning.’

Sue cleared a heap of T-shirts and a pair of swimming goggles off another chair, and sat down.

She said, ‘What about those girls?’

‘Wel , Amy—’

‘I don’t mean Amy. I mean Tamsin and Dil y.’

Chrissie said cautiously, ‘Dil y is looking for a job—’

‘Is she now.’

‘And Tamsin. Wel , I don’t real y know what’s going on with Tamsin.’

‘Do sit down,’ Sue said.

Chrissie said, sitting, ‘She keeps talking about moving in with Robbie, but she doesn’t do it. He’s built her an amazing cupboard, apparently, but she doesn’t seem in any hurry to fil it. He’s like a dog, sitting there hoping for chocolate. I thought he was so strong and masculine, and would support her the way Richie did, but she doesn’t seem to want to let him any more.’

‘You can’t have both of them living with you—’

‘I could—’

‘No,’ Sue said.

‘There’s just enough room—’

‘ If you get the flat—’

‘Yes. If—’

‘Stil no,’ Sue said. She leaned back, twiddling her wine glass round by its stem, watching it, not looking at Chrissie. ‘Do you real y want them to live with you?’

There was a pause, and then Chrissie said slowly, ‘I don’t know if I want to be alone.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No.’

‘You don’t know what it’s like. You might love it. You might prefer it, actual y, to living with two people who ought to be fending for themselves.’

Chrissie said nothing. Sue went on leaning back. Then she took a mouthful of wine and said, ‘Wel , Amy’s having a go at it, isn’t she? Amy’s trying to swim without her family water wings on, isn’t she? Instead of banging on about how you don’t like what Amy’s doing, why don’t you try imitating her instead?’

Scott had given her some money. She’d felt very awkward about confessing that she’d spent the money her mother had given her on CDs at the folk club, and that her card would probably be rejected at an ATM, but he’d held some notes out to her that morning, saying, just take it, don’t say anything, take it.

‘But I feel awful—’

‘You’re family. Take it.’

‘I shouldn’t—’

‘Yes, you should. Anyway, I want to. I want to give it to you.’

‘OK,’ Amy said. She glanced down at the notes in her hand. It looked as if he’d given her an awful lot. ‘That’s – so great. Thank you.’

‘It’s nothing,’ Scott said. ‘The hard part is now.’

‘The hard part?’

‘You’re going to North Shields. You’re going to see where Dad and my mother grew up, went to school. You’re going on your own.’

Amy looked at him.

‘Why aren’t you coming?’

‘Because I’l colour it for you. Because you’ve got to see it through your eyes, not mine.’ He grinned. ‘Don’t worry. I’l tel you where to go.’

Amy said doubtful y, ‘Is this a good idea?’

‘Was last night a good idea?’

Her face lit up.

‘Oh, yes !’

‘Then trust me,’ Scott said. ‘Walk your feet off and come back and tel me. I’l be waiting for you.’

She had walked, on her own, up the steep streets to the metro station at Monument, and there, as instructed, she had bought herself a return ticket to North Shields, feeling as she did so that her very anonymity in the Saturday-morning crowds was as exciting as the adventure itself. She sat, as Scott had told her to, near the front of the train so that she could have a sense of the scene through the windows of the driver’s cab, as they sped out of the glowing underground station and out on to the raised rails through Manors and Byker, past the cranes of Walker and Wal send and out along the river shore through Hadrian Road and Howden, through Percy Main and Meadow Wel , to North Shields.

On the platform, busy with people who belonged there, who knew where they were going, she said to herself, ‘This is it.’

‘Start with the quays,’ Scott had said. ‘Head for the river. Head for the quays.’

You could smel your way to the shore, almost at once. The air smel ed of water, river and sea, rank and salty, and overhead there were gul s, wheeling and screaming, huge black-headed gul s with heavy beaks and solid, shining bodies. Amy headed south, staring up at the sky and the clouds and the shouting seabirds, staring about her at the street and the houses and the children, scuffing along together in packs, just as Richie must have done when he grew out of being that toddler in hand-knitted socks and bar shoes.

And then, quite abruptly, she was on a ridge high above the water, standing by a house which had plainly once been a lighthouse, looking out across the great breadth of the Tyne River, to South Shields and Jarrow, a name Amy knew because of Bede, the seventh-century monk who lived in the monastery there, whom she remembered because a history teacher had once told her class that he kept a precious store of peppercorns to make monastic food less boring. The road she was standing on was quiet, much quieter than the streets near the metro station, and the gul s seemed to be whirling higher, their cries echoing in the wind up there, the wind that was blowing in off the sea, blowing Amy’s hair across her face, obscuring her vision. She caught it up in both hands, and twisted it into a rough knot behind her head, and set off down a steep and turning path to the shore.

And there was Fish Quay, as Scott had said it would be, the quayside where his grandmother and great-aunts had gutted herrings for a living.

He’d said that in their day, in his mother’s girlhood, the herring drifters had been packed in against the quayside several deep, but now the water lay almost empty, just a straggling line of trawlers moored alongside battered iron-roofed sheds, with the water slapping at them and long rust marks streaking their sides. Everything was shuttered, al the doors were closed, there was nobody on the street, no movement except the odd plastic bag and scrap of paper litter lifting in the wind and skittering along the surface.

She walked slowly along the quay, past the bacon grocer’s with its jol y chal enges painted in the window glass – ‘If you aren’t wearing knickers, smile!’; ‘Never go to bed mad: stay up and fight!’; ‘Do not enter the shop if you have no sense of humour!’ – past the fish and chip shops, past the Royal National Mission to Deep Sea Fishermen, and the warehouses for Larry’s Fishcakes and Blue Dolphin Seafoods, and came out at the end into the Low Lights car park, where there was a bench looking out across the wide, crinkled grey river melting into the further grey sea and, on the horizon, the silhouetted statue of Admiral Col ingwood, where Scott said he and his mates used to gather after school, standing like Earl Grey high above the world below and gazing forever eastwards from his grassy mound.