Chapter Thirty-Five
Posh women with dirty houses sometimes phone me. Posh men never do.
Until today, when this solicitor bod burst into my morning with the sort of booming confidence it would be impossible to argue against. My ears closed down, rejecting the steamroller voice, pushing away his words.
‘I’m sorry to be the bearer of ghastly news.’
I’d just got home from what was always my worst job of the week – cleaning the changing rooms at Surrey’s grottiest leisure centre. The phone rang shortly after I’d gone upstairs for a bath to scrub every trace of old plasters and plughole cack off my skin. As I clumped down to the kitchen wrapped in a towel that barely covered my backside, I was praying that the call was from Colin, with good news about work. Instead I stood there, holding the phone away from my ear so I didn’t drip water into the receiver while Mr William Lah-di-dah bellowed away at a slight distance, a sort of old Etonian-cum-Clanger. Then I heard it.
‘I’m afraid Professor Rose Stainton passed away last Friday.’
I pressed the phone into my forehead as I tried to take in the fact that my favourite – and best paying – customer had died. My oddball ally, with her outrageous old lady comments and bursts of unexpected kindness, had gone. I hadn’t even said goodbye. Froths of shampoo seeped out from under my towel turban and mingled with the sting in my eyes.
‘Mrs Etxeleku? Are you still there?’
‘Yes, I’m still here.’ I couldn’t be bothered to correct him. I’m not a Mrs. I’d given up waiting for Colin to pop the question. And my surname is pronounced Ech-eleku, not Et-zeleku. If only my father had hung around long enough for me to be born, I could have had a nice English name – Windsor, Jones, even Sidebottom – on my birth certificate, rather than the blank that made my mother clamp her mouth shut like a Venus flytrap every time I tried to discuss it. Instead I’ve spent thirty-six years lumbered with a Basque surname no one can pronounce.
‘How did she die?’ I heard a wobble in my voice. I leant against the wall, the chilly December draught blowing under the back door, licking around my wet knees.
‘A heart attack.’
‘Was she on her own?’
‘Yes, she managed to call an ambulance but she was dead by the time they reached her.’
He sounded as though he was discussing an order for a Chinese takeaway. I was obviously just a number on his neatly typed list of people to phone – a nobody, someone he needed to tell they no longer had a job. He paused. I imagined him sitting behind a heavy wooden desk, glancing down the page to see who came after ‘cleaner’. The idea that someone who spent her life wiping globs of toothpaste off sinks could be friends with someone who spent hers debating Kafka wouldn’t have crossed his mind. I started clattering about, throwing dirty cereal bowls into the sink and hurling trainers and football boots into a heap by the back door. I had no claim on Rose Stainton. I was just the woman with the mop, the skivvy who washed out the kitchen bin.
‘Anyway, part of the reason I’m calling is that her solicitor would like to see you,’ he said.
‘Solicitor? Is something missing?’ I said, panicking. Surely they weren’t trying to track down the parrot head bookends that the old lady had given me. I didn’t even like them. In my experience, solicitors weren’t people who wanted to see you. They were people who were instructed to see you. Middle-aged men in too tight shirts, who turned up at police stations to work on the pathetic little stories of drug addicts, drunkards and the bog standard low life that hung around our estate. The sort of men who’d saved Colin’s sorry little arse on more than one occasion.
‘No, Mrs Etxeleku. No, of course not, nothing like that. I believe there was something in the professor’s will that Mr Harrison would like to discuss with you.’
It was only after I’d put the phone down that the numbness started to fall away. My teeth were chattering. I pulled on the tracksuit bottoms Colin had left on a chair and grabbed my long cardigan, still damp, from the clothes airer. In films you see people burst into tears, sobbing, ‘I can’t believe she’s gone.’ But I started yelling. ‘Ghastly. Bad. Atrocious. Horrendous. Horrible. Hateful. Crap.’ That was one of the professor’s little games, getting me to think of different words to mean the same thing. When I got to ‘crap’, I banged on the window at the mad git next door who was flicking his terrier’s turds through the broken fence again. He appeared to be aiming for our paddling pool, left out since the summer, which had now become a slimy green home to water boatmen and other wildlife. He waved his shovel at me and smiled like a loon.
The professor had always talked to me like my opinions counted. She knew about Shakespeare, Dickens and foreign writers I’d never heard of before. She really liked Gabriel García Márquez and kept asking me to pronounce Spanish words for her. It embarrassed me because most of the time Mum and I had spoken English together, or at least my mother’s peculiar version of it. I wish she’d spoken more Spanish or even Basque to me, but 1970s Sandbury wasn’t a place to be foreign. It was an English market town, where a wool shop, a cobbler’s and a stamp collector’s shop were among the high street’s thrilling diversions. Mum saw England as the land of opportunity. She might sound like she’d missed her vocation as Manuel’s wife in Fawlty Towers but she was going to make damned sure that her daughter didn’t sound like a ‘second-class immigrant’.
I gave up trying to sort out my shithole of a kitchen and plonked down into a chair. I shoved aside Colin’s dirty plate to find the Open University application form that had arrived that morning. I had been intending to tell the prof this week that I was definitely going to enrol. I’d looked forward to seeing her formal manner give way to that excitable hand waving thing she did, which often ended up with her knocking over her little china teacup on the tray. She used to crack me up when she swore. Sometimes she’d say, ‘bugger me’ or ‘bloody hell’, but she never sounded like Colin when he’d been on the Guinness. More like she was just experimenting, seeing how swear words sounded. I loved the way she spoke, all those words perfectly formed, all the letters where they should be. She never used language to make me feel stupid.
I tore the application form up into tiny little pieces, like a dud lottery ticket. There was no way I could afford it now. I watched the paper float down onto the cork floor, noticing again that no matter how often I washed it, something was always gooing up the cracks between the tiles. I couldn’t even
