Part 33 (1/2)

'I can't afford the flat on what I'll be earning.'

Sue cleared a heap of T-s.h.i.+rts and a pair of swimming goggles off another chair, and sat down.

She said, 'What about those girls?'

'Well, Amy-'

'I don't mean Amy. I mean Tamsin and Dilly.'

Chrissie said cautiously, 'Dilly is looking for a job-'

'Is she now.'

'And Tamsin. Well, I don't really 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 fill 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-'

'Still no,' Sue said. She leaned back, twiddling her wine gla.s.s round by its stem, watching it, not looking at Chrissie. 'Do you really 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, actually, 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, 'Well, 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 s.h.i.+elds. 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'll colour it for you. Because you've got to see it through your eyes, not mine.' He grinned. 'Don't worry. I'll tell you where to go.'

Amy said doubtfully, '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 tell me. I'll 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 s.h.i.+elds, feeling as she did so that her very anonymity in the Sat.u.r.day-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 Wallsend and out along the river sh.o.r.e through Hadrian Road and Howden, through Percy Main and Meadow Well, to North s.h.i.+elds.

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 smell your way to the sh.o.r.e, almost at once. The air smelled of water, river and sea, rank and salty, and overhead there were gulls, wheeling and screaming, huge black-headed gulls with heavy beaks and solid, s.h.i.+ning 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 s.h.i.+elds 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 cla.s.s 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 gulls 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 sh.o.r.e.

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, all the doors were closed, there was n.o.body on the street, no movement except the odd plastic bag and sc.r.a.p 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 jolly challenges painted in the window gla.s.s '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 Collingwood, 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 gra.s.sy mound.

She subsided on to the bench. It was wonderful there, so big and so bleak, all that sea and sky, but it was sobering too, laden with all those lives, those past lives, battling and struggling and hating the sea as much as they needed it, relied on it. Amy put her hands into her hoodie pockets and breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. This was the sort of place that last night's music had come from, it was people who'd lived and laboured here who had instinctively recorded how they were feeling, how they were thinking, in a way that could be easily remembered, could be simply pa.s.sed on. She sniffed once or twice in the wind. If she shut her eyes, she could conjure up that girl last night, the girl with the flute and the lovely, light, straightforward singing voice. If she kept them shut, she could imagine Scott as a boy down here, as a teenager in his school uniform with his tie bunched up in his blazer pocket, and not just Scott, but her father who might even even have sat on this bench, or whatever was here before this bench, and looked at the sky and the sea and the gulls, and thought and thought about music too.

She opened her eyes and tipped her head back, wriggling herself down until her body was in a straight line, shoulder to heel, the back of her head balanced on the back of the bench, and stared up at the sky. She felt taken over, bowled over, blown away by a sudden and extraordinary wave of happiness.

'Don't read anything into this,' Margaret said.

Bernie Harrison was in an armchair in her sitting room, legs crossed, very comfortable. He had a cup of coffee balanced on the arm of the chair and Dawson, stretched in his usual place along the back of the sofa, was keeping a discreet but definite eye on him.

'What would I read?' Bernie said.