The writing on the wall, p.1
The Writing on the Wall, page 1
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Dedicated to all the fifteen-year-olds, good luck.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Part One
2021: Hermione: Friday
Saturday
1975: Helena: Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Part Two
2021: Hermione: Saturday
1975: Helena: Sunday
Hermione: Monday
1975: Helena: Monday
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Helena
Hermione
Special Thanks
If You Liked This, You’ll Love…
Copyright
PART ONE
2021
HERMIONE
FRIDAY
It’s one of those global-warming days when London is kind of melting, the pavement chewing gum has turned back to goo and the bins outside the flats stink so bad, you have to hold your breath until you’re well clear. Hello, climate change.
School finished yesterday and I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Everyone else was like, ‘Finally, let’s get out of this dump.’ Even some of the teachers seemed to be legging it. I felt a bit choked up clearing out my locker, so many memories, but then I found a Tupperware at the back that was so full of mould, seriously, it was like something out of one of those forensics TV shows that my mum likes watching on Sky and I stopped feeling quite so sentimental.
My mum, Tessa, is mad for true-crime shows. Her favourite thing is stories about serial killers, which is a bit worrying given she’s about to drag us both off to live with some bloke she’s only been seeing for the last six months. Apparently, he asked her to go and live with him in his big posh house up north and she said yes without even discussing it with me. She’s even gone and sublet our flat to some bloke she knows from the pub. When I told her she should hand the keys back to the council because there could be a family that could really do with it, she said, ‘It’s a crummy two-bedroom flat on the thirteenth floor of a crappy high-rise, it’s no good for families.’ And I suppose she’s right. The lifts are forever out of order and some of the graffiti might be a bit confusing to little kids. Still, my mum says the useless lifts have saved her a fortune in gym memberships and their utter shitness is the reason why she still has the best legs this side of the Elephant and Castle. My mum occasionally suffers from high self-esteem.
I did ask if I could stay in the flat by myself, but she just laughed, and when I said maybe Dad could move back in with me and we could keep an eye on each other, she just laughed even more and said Casper couldn’t be trusted with a loaf of bread never mind a fifteen-year-old daughter. I thought the loaf of bread was an odd analogy, but I could see her point. My dad is quite rubbish, although if you were in a lift with him when it broke down, you’d probably have quite a good time.
It’s a done deal basically. I’m not legally old enough to live alone, and so in 24 hours I have to go north, to the bit where it’s always raining on the TV weather forecast. Mum tries to cheer me up by WhatsApping me photos of the house. It’s fucking massive, like something you’d see in Clapham or Dulwich Village, this big red-brick thing with loads of windows – but so what? Our block of flats has got loads of windows, like loads, and sometimes when I’m coming home at night on the bus in the dark and I see it in the distance, it looks like a great big cruise ship out at sea. I can’t imagine living in a building that no one else lives in, I’ve never lived in a house before, I’ve never walked out of my front door and straight on to street level.
I didn’t tell Amisha, Millie or Rhiannon for ages. I kept thinking the situation might change, that Mum might meet someone else, preferably someone local, and things would stay the same. Not that I want things to stay the same, not entirely. I love my mates and I love London, even though some days it really upsets me. I think big cities can be quite cruel. There’s all the homelessness and too many people out on the street who aren’t being looked after properly and everyone talks about mental health, but nothing really ever gets done. Loads of girls in my year have got eating disorders and I know at least two people who regularly self-harm, their shirt sleeves covering up those tell-tale silvery-white blade marks running up and down their arms.
I try and shake off all this negative stuff as I jump on a number 12 bus heading for Peckham. My mum’s busy packing everything into bags and boxes and then unpacking everything because ‘actually I need the iron’. She’s got no method; everything’s just chucked in all together. She drives me mad. I can’t stay home. If I stay home, she wants me to start packing too and I can’t face it. In any case, it’s the first day of the summer holidays, and even if I have to leave tomorrow, today I can still hang out with my mates and lie on the grass in the sun, listening to music and arguing over Maccy D’s versus Manze’s pie and mash. It’s too hot for pie and mash really, it’s too hot for anything except boy watching, ice lollies and chilled Diet Cokes. I’ll pack tonight. Mum’s mate Patti’s cousin Daryl is picking us up in a van at 9 a.m., though Patti says knowing Daryl, it’ll probably be more like midday. I don’t have much stuff anyway, just clothes, a box of books, my phone and my charger. We don’t need to take towels or bedding, apparently Paul’s got everything. My mum smirks when she tells me this. I reckon she thinks she’s landed on her feet.
The bus rumbles through Camberwell Green. Up the hill to the right is the hospital where I was born. I’m South London to the belly button; I don’t even like to go north of the river. God knows how I’ll survive in the actual north of the country. They’ll think I talk funny and it’s not as if I don’t get bullied enough here as it is, and this is where I’m from. Not badly bullied, not like some kids, but there’s just a bunch of bitches in my year that make life difficult for me, make me feel like my tongue is too big for my mouth, make me sweat, and I swear when I get anxious, my sweat smells of fried onions.
So yeah, there have been moments when I’ve daydreamed about getting away from here, living somewhere completely different, but I never meant Lancashire, I meant Melbourne or Manhattan. I mean, who’s ever even heard of Lytham St Anne’s?
SATURDAY
Patti was wrong about Daryl. He turned up with the transit van bang on 10 a.m. and Mum basically yelled at me until the three of us were strapped in a row on the front seat and Daryl was asking her for the postcode of where we were going. Mum looked blank and called Paul, who had to repeat it about ten times before Daryl could punch it into his phone.
As we swung out into the traffic on the Walworth Road, my mum said, ‘That’s it, Hermione, there’s no going back now. Goodbye, London; hello, new life!’
I told her I felt sick and I noticed Daryl roll his eyes. Mum told me not to be silly and handed me a plastic bag ‘just in case’. Suddenly Daryl looked at his phone and said, ‘Fuck me, it’s two hundred and fifty miles away. No one told me it was a five-hundred-mile round trip. I’m meant to be going out with the lads tonight!’ Mum ignored him, reached forward and switched the radio on and tried to sing along to Dua Lipa without knowing any of the words.
So here I am in my new bedroom, feeling like I just fell down a rabbit hole. Somewhere among all these boxes and bags is a bin liner with all my summer clothes in it, but I can’t find the stupid thing. Mum is being useless, wafting round the place with this stupid grin on her face, telling me how lucky we are to be living here.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, this house is like mega, seriously. In London it would cost a couple of million. Paul bought it about ten years ago before his wife died and his children left home. Yup, basically Paul is a sixty-year-old widower with two grown-up children. Nice one, Mum. Catch.
His kids, Nick and Lucy, are in their late twenties. Nick lives in Manchester and works in computers and Lucy lives in the Lake District and has a baby. So the man my mother is shagging is a grandfather, which is pretty icky. My mother pretends to be interested in his grandson but believe me, she isn’t. She’s not great with little kids, and I know this from experience. She just hasn’t really got the patience. She likes the idea of them, but the reality is something else. She told me once that the day I could put my own shoes on, she felt like she’d been reborn. I mean, that’s not a very nana-like t hing to say, is it? And she can’t knit.
Paul is my mother’s knight in shining armour, without the armour. He is big and pink, with a big pink face that looks bigger than it actually is because his pale gingery hair is receding. Paul is everything that my dad isn’t. He is sober, solvent and has a clean driving licence. This is probably why my mum has gone running into his flabby pink arms. Honestly, I’m not even kidding, Paul looks like something out of a butcher’s shop.
I don’t belong up here. I’m a born and bred South Londoner, which, incidentally, is where my dad still lives. And that’s another thing – when am I going to see my dad again? Let’s just say his visits weren’t exactly regular even when we lived in the same city, and he still hasn’t replied to the text I sent him over a week ago, but at least when I lived in London, there was always a chance I might bump into him. Now I’ve been uprooted, I probably won’t ever see him again.
Mum says it’s just like repotting a plant and that with all this space and fresh air, I’ll be thriving before I know it. Ahem, this is the same woman who killed every plant we ever had on our kitchen windowsill back in our flat in Camberwell. My dad was the one with green fingers, which is of course what got him into trouble, growing skunk with a mate in Streatham. I was only little when that happened and while he was inside, he got my mum to tell me he was on a space mission for the Russians and I believed her. At night I used to look out of the window hoping to see him on the moon. I pictured him in his jeans and denim jacket, wearing his cowboy hat, and I wondered if he’d been allowed to take his guitar with him in the rocket.
I used to draw pictures of him singing on the moon, in Russian, of course. I would make up the lyrics and croon along while I coloured him in: ‘Piski poski svetlosko Dobyeski.’ See, that’s the trouble with being an only child – you’ve got no siblings to tell you when you’re being bat-shit crazy.
I suppose the one and only good thing about being dumped two hundred and fifty miles away from all my mates is that Paul has given me ‘carte blanche’ to redecorate this bedroom. That’s what he actually said – ‘carte blanche’. What a wanker. Mum is thrilled. She was all like, ‘Isn’t Paul generous? Imagine, Hermione, your very own bedroom and you can paint it any colour you like.’
Paul’s usual tomato-coloured face turned several shades lighter – as if he was suddenly slightly unripe. ‘Well actually, Tess,’ he stuttered, blinking like an idiot owl, ‘I’ve got a few tins of magnolia paint in the garage. I thought maybe that could be put to good use?’
As luck would have it, the tins of hideous magnolia had dried up, because ‘someone’ hadn’t put the lids back on properly. Ha. This meant Mum and I could visit Homebase in Paul’s car, which Mum accidentally scraped getting too close to a bollard and we had to patch it up with a red Rimmel nail varnish. ‘Don’t tell Paul,’ she giggled.
I can’t wait to get rid of the wallpaper, which is this weird embossed blue and gold striped number and truly hideous.
I chose a bright-orange emulsion, Dulux ‘Blazing Sunset’, which set my mum off reminiscing about this Greek island she and my dad took me to when I was about three. Apparently, they had this crummy room above a taverna overlooking some dustbins, and I erupted with chicken pox as soon as we landed and the owners wouldn’t let me in the bar. So every night my mum just sat with me in the room, while Casper went downstairs, got pissed and forgot to bring us up any dinner. I’ve still got a scar just above my right eyebrow.
Mine is the smallest bedroom at the back of the house, which is cool with me, because it’s furthest from where my mother sleeps with Paul. Sadly, it’s also nearest the bathroom and I can hear Paul when he goes for a shit at 7.30 on the dot in the morning. Honest to God, it sounds like an elephant is sitting down for a massive crap and I have to play some music to drown out the trumping. There’s an en suite in their bedroom but Paul obviously doesn’t feel comfortable stinking it out in front of my mum. Next to the loo is a family bathroom, and then back along the landing towards the front of the house are three other bedrooms.
Mum and Paul have got the biggest. It’s got a bay window, and once upon a time someone thought it would be a good idea to paint it a really vile green. I don’t think the place has been redecorated since the 1980s. There’s a lot of sickly coloured walls and this horrible dark-red carpet running through the house like a river of blood. Apparently, Paul and his wife were going to do the place up, but then she got sick and died about five years ago.
There’s a photograph of the four of them, Paul and Melanie, and their kids, Lucy and Nick, on the mantelpiece in the dining room. Melanie looks out of the photo with a suspicious expression on her face, almost as if she knows there’s another woman shagging her husband.
Not that Tess would ever admit it, but neither Mum nor I really know how long it’s going to take until our new lives feel normal. It’s like trying to wear in a new pair of shoes that don’t really fit and may turn out to be a terrible mistake.
Thank God I’ve got ‘Project Redecorate Bedroom’ to keep me occupied over the next few weeks. Paul was a bit put out when he saw the orange paint I’d chosen. He kind of flinched and said, ‘Crikey, that looks a bit loud,’ but to give him his credit, he didn’t make me change it. He also went back to Homebase and bought a couple of scrapers, some brushes, a sponge paint roller and tray thing – in other words, everything me and Mum had forgotten.
Then he gave me a long lecture about scraping all the layers of wallpaper off before I actually paint the walls – like, obviously.
Scraping wallpaper is dead boring. The trick is to really soak it. Paul gave me the sponge he uses to wash his car with. My dad never had a car. Casper is either a bus or cab boy, depending on how much money he has. Trouble with my dad is that when he does have money, he splashes it about. I remember one birthday he took me and ten girls from my class to Planet Hollywood in a stretch limo for burgers and then to a matinée of Grease in the West End. The year after that he was inside, and no one came to my party because I didn’t have one.
If you soak the paper for long enough and you get the scraper in at just the right angle, you can peel a big chunk of the paper away from the wall, which is really satisfying, like peeling off nail varnish. But sometimes, the paper seems really glued down and you’re chipping away for just a measly little strip. The main problem is that there are two layers of paper to get rid of, the hideous stripy blue one and then, beneath that, this purple and pink floral wallpaper. It’s kind of cool actually, but the colours are a bit bleurgh. I think it’s from the 70s. I’ve seen a photo of my nan wearing a blouse in a similar kind of pattern. She was pretty, my nan, back in the 70s. She had my mum when she was really young. That was the trouble with my nana – she did everything really young. She was only fifty when she died.
Once I get down to it, the wall beneath the two layers of paper is that funny orangey-pink plaster colour. There are a few cracks in the surface, but I won’t tell Paul because he’ll start banging on about getting some filler and I’ll be stuck here all summer. Not that I’ve got anywhere to go. This house isn’t really near anything; you have to catch a bus to get to the closest town. It’s a number 11 but it’s not red, so in my eyes it’s not a real bus, it’s an imposter. I mean, green and cream buses, what’s all that about?
I’ve sussed out the nearest stop though. It’s diagonally opposite a crappy little shopping parade consisting of a newsagent’s, a greengrocer’s, a chemist and a hairdresser’s called Toni’s of Switzerland. Honestly, it’s like living in Alan Partridge land.
I haven’t actually taken the bus to town yet, but I will, soon as I’ve finished this.
The bus over Waterloo Bridge was always my favourite. On a clear day you can see everything from St Paul’s Cathedral on the right to the Houses of Parliament on the left. In London you’re in the centre of the universe; here I can’t even walk to a fried chicken shop.
My mum offered to help with the wallpaper scraping, but since the sun came out she’s been on a sun lounger in the back garden. Mum fancies herself with a bit of a tan. It always annoyed her that my dad used to go brown really quickly. I imagine Paul uses factor fifty and gets funny about wearing a hat. My mum is wearing her bra and knickers, the ones she dyed purple when she was going through her purple phase. We had this big pan and everything she could squash into it, she dyed deep purple. Course, it’s a bit washed out now and most of her undies look a dingy grey. She’s smoking a fag and I reckon there’s vodka in that Diet Coke. Old habits die hard.
