The Missing Marriage. Sarah May

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      ‘He died in an accident. You’ve got no colour,’ she said suddenly to Anna.

      ‘I’m not sleeping well.’

      ‘I can tell. That’s what make up’s for, you know – the bad days.’ Her eyes moved, disgruntled, over Anna’s running clothes – noting them for the first time – before she turned to look out the window again.

      An optimistically red Nissan was busy parking on the street below, and a woman was getting out and glancing up at the house.

      ‘That hair.’

      ‘What about my hair?’ Anna patted her head.

      ‘Not yours.’

      ‘Whose hair, Nan?’

      Short term memory loss and lack of concentration were meant to be side effects of the morphine they were giving Erwin, but if anything it was Mary who was suffering these symptoms on his behalf. The thought that Mary might be siphoning off some of Erwin’s morphine crossed Anna’s mind – and not for the first time either.

      ‘Laura could have had anyone with that hair, and yet she chose Bryan Deane.’

      ‘Or he chose her.’

      ‘Maybe, but if you’d asked me all them years ago who was most likely to end up with Bryan Deane, I’d have said you were. Don’t look at me like that. I used to see you together. You didn’t grow up alone. I was there as well, remember?’

      She glanced at Erwin, whose head had rolled back onto the pillow, exhausted, his mouth open and the breath rattling through it still.

      ‘He stopped breathing last night, and I was so angry with him,’ she said, becoming increasingly distressed. ‘I was angry with him for making me that afraid. I’m angry with him for dying, Anna. I’m just – angry. I feel angry the whole time. Love hangs on strange threads,’ Mary concluded, making an effort to control the tears.

      Anna left Erwin – and Mary – with the nurse, Susan, who was in her late forties and who entered the Fausts’ lives with fortitude, humour, the re-issued eau de toilette of Poison, and a portable oxygen canister.

      Within minutes of her stepping inside number nineteen Parkview, normality had been restored and the terrors of the night vanquished. By the time Anna left, Erwin was breathing normally and Susan was sitting at the drop-leaf table in the kitchenette with Mary.

      Anna got into her car and paused for a minute – pressing her forehead hard into the steering wheel before turning on the engine and driving out of the estate past the parade of shops where Mo’s used to be. Curious about the shop that had featured so prominently throughout her childhood, she parked the car.

      There were only two shops still open on the Parade – a fish and chip shop called The Seven Seas, and the convenience store that used to be Mo’s – although this wasn’t immediately apparent given the caging across the windows on the outside of both.

      There was no longer a post office inside Mo’s, but the security glass had been retained – behind which there was a till, an overweight girl in a tracksuit, a child, and most of the shop’s alcoholic stock.

      ‘Milk and eggs?’ Anna asked, not particularly hopeful.

      ‘Back of the shop – in the fridge.’

      She felt the girl’s eyes on her as she made her way towards the back of the shop, which smelt of underlying damp and rotten lino.

      Anna recognised the lino – it had been there in Mo’s time when there had been a baker’s, butcher’s, grocer’s, hardware store, chemist and hairdresser’s owned by Mo’s twin sister on the Parade. It was where all the women on the estate used to go to get their hair done, including Anna when she was small. She hated getting her hair cut so much that Mary used to have to bring one of Erwin’s belts with her to the salon so that they could tie her into the chair in order to keep her still.

      She and Laura used to spend most of their summers walking between Mo’s shop, the park and home. Anna could even remember the way Mo’s used to smell – of sherbet, newsprint and hairspray from the salon next door. There had been a pink and green rocket outside whose presence it was difficult to justify given that nobody she knew ever had ten pence to spend on a rocket ride – the pennies they pooled together went on sweet things.

      They would walk sluggishly, tipping back sherbet, towards the park the houses on Parkview overlooked to the rear. A park that had been in perpetual decline, and whose play equipment – erected on concrete in the hedonistic days before health and safety – was painted metal that got chipped and rusted, a fall off which resulted in broken teeth, fractured elbows, hairline cracks to the skull and tetanus jabs.

      Anna would sit behind Laura on the metal horse as the sun moved across the sky, not speaking, surrounded by roses that never seemed to bloom, the horse’s rusting saddle dying their thighs a feint red – until the big boys crawled up out of the sewage outlet where they kept their stash of pornography and sniffed glue. When the big boys appeared it was time to go home, but if they were out of glue, and walked in a straight line still with eyes that weren’t red, they let Laura and Anna play chicken with them on the railway line that ran between the Alcan aluminium smelting plant to the north, and Cambois power station to the south – the power station whose four chimneys would have filled the horizon through her apartment windows at the Ridley Arms if they hadn’t been demolished in 2003.

      Until the summer Jamie Deane, Bryan’s older brother, put his hand up Laura’s skirt and Anna and Laura stopped going to the play park.

      The memory took Anna by surprise, and for a moment she forgot what she was doing and stood staring into the fridge at the back of the shop. She’d forgotten all about Jamie Deane.

      ‘You alright?’ the girl shouted out.

      Anna jerked in reaction to this, getting the milk and eggs out of the fridge and walking back towards the glass booth at the front. Distracted, she pushed the money across the counter, took her change and was about to leave when she said, ‘You’re not by any chance related to Mo are you?’

      ‘Daughter.’ It was said without hesitation, and without interest – as if nothing she ever heard or said would change her fate; this included.

      ‘Say hi to her for me, will you? Hi from Anna – the German’s granddaughter.’

      ‘She’s dead,’ the girl said, without expression.

      Anna quickly left the shop with an acute sense of depression – not only at the demise of Mo’s empire, but at her lineage as well. Mo herself had been a large, bright, singing woman with a sense of humour that could cut you in two.

      The same couldn’t be said of her daughter.

      She was about to get into her car when something caught her eye – a burgundy Vauxhall, parked outside one of the bungalows arranged in a semi-circle round the green that the Parade backed onto. Retirement bungalows – most of them in pretty good repair still, the gardens well tended.

      While outdated burgundy Vauxhalls weren’t exactly unique – especially not here on the Hartford Estate – Anna was certain that the one parked in front of the bungalows opposite was the one she’d been in the night before; СКАЧАТЬ