approved of. One evening I brought back some scones for Mum but I got a bit of a strange reaction from her. At the time I concluded she was jealous of the time I spent next door. With my adult eye I can see that it was probably a lot more complicated than that. Maybe Mum felt that Mrs Mack was doing some of my mothering, whether she liked it or not.
Mrs Mack had her own son, a bloke called Douglas who lived in America and worked in a bank. She would show me pictures of him with his smiley, white-toothed wife and boast about how well he was doing. Douglas seemed fairly alien to me but even at that age I found it a bit sad that he never seemed to come and visit her.
One afternoon after school, she asked me to get something down from the top of her wardrobe. It was too high even for me, so I stood on a stool and reached over the tightly packed clothes that smelled flowery and old, just like she did. She was after a tin of photos.
‘Do you mean this one?’ I said and pulled out a wooden box about the size of a shoebox.
‘No!’ she said, sharply. ‘Put that one back right now!’
‘Why should I?’ I said, because I was stung, and it made me bolshie and mean.
‘Because I said so, young man.’ Mrs Mack’s voice was ice cold.
I, on the other hand, had flaming cheeks as I put it back and fumbled for the one next to it, a tartan tin with a picture of a Highland stag on it.
She must have seen my expression because her tone softened then. ‘Thank you, Elliott,’ she said, taking the tin from my hands. ‘I didn’t mean to snap. That one is just very private.’
I mumbled that it was okay, but it wasn’t really. You carry those sort of slights as bright, bitter humiliations at that age. You might be one and a half times the size of the other person, yet they still have the ability to cut you in two with their sharp words.
We went back through to the living room and she sat down in her favourite armchair. She had been intending to show me some of the photos, but I didn’t feel like it now.
She opened the lid of the tin with an expression of intense concentration and then noticed I was hovering by the door.
‘Are you just going to stand there like a long streak of bacon?’ she said. I would have smiled at another of her weird expressions under normal circumstances. They were often Scottish and nonsensical, like ‘Hold your wheesht.’ But something made me want to punish her a bit today for shouting at me. So I just shrugged.
She frowned.
‘Look,’ she took off her glasses, sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. Her voice was tight when she spoke again. ‘Has your mother no’ got anything she likes to keep away from prying eyes?’
I thought about Mum’s photo albums of her childhood and baby pictures of me, neatly stacked on the shelf by the telly. Anyone could look at those if they wanted and Mum wouldn’t care.
And then I got an almost physical thump of understanding. Mrs Mack meant valuable things. Jewellery, or money. I pictured a pirate’s treasure box, filled with gleaming gold coins and thick chains like the ones rappers wore, even though I knew it was more likely old lady jewellery or bank notes in there. The answer then was obvious.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We haven’t got anything like that.’
Mrs Mack made a dubious face and began to take out the pictures, placing them in a pile next to her on the sofa.
‘Well, I doubt that,’ she said, ‘but if you’re staying, come and sit down here. You’re giving me neck ache up there looking at you.’
I hesitated and then sat down. It was the only time I’d ever experienced a bit of tension in this house and I was glad to be given a way out.
Plus, I thought, later as I went home, I was flattered.
I had been allowed into her confidence.
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