The Age of Misadventure. Judy Leigh
lady’s voice rasps, ‘I have a shotgun in here. And if you don’t believe me, you burgling bastard, try me. Come in here and I’ll blow your bloody head off.’
‘Nan?’ I whisper as loudly as I can. ‘Nanny, it’s me, Georgie.’
I hear the expletive under her breath. Then she calls, ‘I haven’t got my teeth in. Don’t come in yet.’ I wait, staring in the dark, then she says, ‘All right. You can come in.’
I tiptoe into her bedroom and she switches the bedside lamp on. The room floods with orange light. She sits up in bed in a duck-egg blue winceyette nightie with ruffles at the neck and blinks. Her hair’s dishevelled, tufty and tucked under the green woolly hat. I glance round the room. The old wardrobe with the silver mirror reflects our shapes back to us: a ghostlike sliver of a woman sitting up in a bed with rumpled blankets and another woman in a bulky coat, shivering. The room’s bare except for the wardrobe, a pile of old books and newspapers in the corner, and several cardboard boxes full of junk. There’s a pervasive smell of dusty old clothes and stale piss.
I take a breath. ‘You haven’t really got a shotgun, have you, Nan?’
‘Don’t be daft. You think I’m mad? What do you want here at this time of night? Your house burned down, has it?’
I move to the edge of the bed and sit down next to her, taking her hand. Her fingers are stone cold.
‘Nan, I have some news for you. I don’t want you to worry.’
She leans forwards and her lip trembles. ‘Bonnie, is it? Is she all right?’
‘She’s downstairs. With Jade. We’ve got the car outside. We have to go away.’
It takes her a while to take this in. She frowns, her face a creased map of the tropics, and her eyes glitter.
‘What about me?’
This is it, I think. Here we go. ‘You’re coming with us. To Brighton.’
‘Over my dead body, Georgina. I’m not going anywhere.’
‘I can’t take care of you here, Nan. Not now. Please, trust me on this. It’s not good for Bonnie to stay here. Adie’s done something stupid; he owes money and he’s made some enemies.’ I take a deep breath, finding the right words to coax her to leave the house she’s lived in for over sixty years. ‘We have to go, Nan. All of us. Jade’s going to Brighton to live with Luis. Bonnie needs to get away, just for a short while. We’ll all go with Jade.’ I stop there: I’m about to say ‘to keep an eye on her’, but it’s best to say nothing.
Nanny stares, her mouth a straight line, and I wonder how I’m going to persuade her. Then she eases her legs out of bed, feet encased in hairy socks, and turns to me.
‘We’d better get packing then, Georgina. I can’t do it myself, can I? I’m in my eighties. You make sure I have plenty of warm clothes. My own towel. Plenty of Guinness. And I’ll need to take my heart tablets and my arthritis tablets. And some photos – Wilf and the one of us and our Josie and Kenny at the caravan site in Wales.’
I must have my mouth open, because she says, ‘Stop staring, Georgina. Come on. You can tell me about it as we go. I hope you’ve brought some sandwiches and a flask for the journey. I like my tea sweet. And I’m not sitting in the front seat. I don’t like all those blinding headlights. They give me a headache.’ She struggles to her feet. ‘Well, I suppose it’ll be an adventure. I don’t get out much.’ She pushes me away with her hand. ‘Go on with you, then. I’m going to get dressed. I don’t want you staring at my bits and bobs. Get packing. I’m going to Brighton.’
It takes us two hours to pack to Nanny’s satisfaction. I do most of it. Nanny spends the time patting my faux-fur coat with Bonnie in it and asking Jade what Spanish men are like between the sheets and whether sex is banned the night before a football match. Jade replies with deliberately outrageous comments.
‘We have this game, Nanny, where I wave a red sheet at Luis and he puts his fingers on his head like bulls’ horns and chases me naked round the bedroom.’
Nanny believes her. Her eyebrows shoot up under her woolly hat like circumflexes.
By five o’clock, we have her strapped in the back of the car next to Bonnie. She’s still stroking the arm of the faux-fur coat like it was Blofeld’s white cat. Jade’s next to me, chatting to me to keep me alert. Bonnie looks miserable.
‘What’s the plan, Georgie?’
The idea came to me straight away, before we collected Nanny, and it seems like a good strategy for escape.
‘We’ll make sure Adie doesn’t know where we’re going. The plan is to drive north for a bit, to take money from a bank and a cashpoint in Edinburgh, so that we put him off the scent. You text him you’re going to the airport there, Bonnie. He’ll believe you because we’ll leave a trail of evidence. Adie’ll follow you north. We’ll have a rest in Edinburgh for a few hours, then join the M1, find a bed and breakfast or a hotel off the motorway, where we can sleep properly and recharge our batteries.’
‘Edinburgh? I thought we were going to Brighton?’ Jade’s eyes blaze.
‘We are going to Brighton. Via Edinburgh.’
‘That’s mad, Mum. This whole thing is ridiculous.’
I hope my daughter doesn’t wake Nanny, who’s snoring.
‘It’s just a few hours, Jade. Bonnie can’t risk Adie following us.’
‘Then what?’ Jade’s voice is sulky: she’s tired and, just as she did when she was a child, she becomes moody.
‘Then we’ll go on to Brighton. You can meet up with Luis and we’ll lose ourselves somewhere, find a place to stay for a bit until we can sort all this mess out with Adie.’
Jade tuts loudly. ‘You’re not staying with Luis and me. Couldn’t you just drop me off and go somewhere else? East Anglia? Or Cornwall. That’s a long way away.’
I decide to say nothing. She must already feel that I’m trying to be a gooseberry. And it’s true: it’s a case of two birds with one stone. Bonnie’ll be safe from Adie and I’ll check my daughter isn’t moving in with a rampant Lothario. She turns a shoulder away from me, sulking.
It’s half past five, but the traffic’s starting to build. I turn onto the motorway and glance at other cars, to see if Adie’s following us. Several heavy lorries lumber past. I blink to keep alert. The sky is tinged with pink and the light gradually lifts the darkness away.
Nanny and Bonnie nod off on each other’s shoulder and Jade keeps me awake by talking non-stop about Luis and his footballing history.
After an hour and a half we’re on the outskirts of Leeds, and I know the age and background of every member of Luis’ family, his team and all the details and permutations of the offside rule. She plies me with coffee from the flask and I drive into a dappled crimson dawn. The wheels thrum on the tarmac and the dancing red brake lamps swirl in front of me, blurring away into the distance. I yawn. Jade puts rock music on the radio and the powerful sounds of The Disturbed fizz through my brain and my focus improves. My limbs feel heavy and my ankle on the accelerator aches with stiffness.
It’s well past past eleven o’clock as we drive through the Old Town part of Edinburgh. It’s a beautiful city and I wish I was awake enough to enjoy it. I concentrate on the shuffling traffic. Jade’s in a bad mood; she’s turned away from me and she’s texting with a passion. I pull up outside an ATM, lean over to the back seat and shake Bonnie awake.
‘We’re here.’
She sighs and opens one eye. ‘Brighton?’
‘Edinburgh. Bonnie, have you got your bank card, the one from your joint account with Adie?’
She looks puzzled. ‘Yes …’
‘Right. The maximum