Bin bags and other boxes lined the floor in here, too, all neatly labeled. All contained her parents’ things, or stuff that didn’t have a home, or jobs she’d taken on and hadn’t given back.
Feeling daunted by the size of the task facing her, Martha wrapped her arms across her chest. She wondered if Gina had glanced inside the room when she used the bathroom. Her cheeks flushed as she imagined what her nana’s carer might describe her as. A hoarder? A bit strange? Can’t let go of the past?
Could any of those be true?
Martha wondered how she could have let things get so bad. The house was a mess and it had to change.
She had to change.
As she tried to swallow away a chunk of paracetamol that had lodged itself in her throat, she realized she had less than three days to sort things out.
Before Zelda, Will and Rose came to stay.
Thank goodness for Betty’s enormous collection of local business cards. Martha found one for a Man with a Van, Leslie Ross. He claimed to move anything and everything quickly. Without any work on for the rest of that week, Leslie offered to be with her within an hour.
Martha warned him to watch out, because the street was narrow. “Look out for the house with the shopping trolley parked outside,” she said.
After dressing in her usual clothes, she took a further, preventive, paracetamol, and drank four glasses of water. She pulled on her yellow rubber gloves and, with her chest out and chin jutted, she launched into Operation Clear Out.
With a handful of fluorescent yellow cardboard stars (also from Betty’s collection), she stuck one to everything she wanted to keep. Anything that had to go got a green star. Pink stars were reserved for the items that she wanted to return to their rightful owner.
If there was anything that Martha didn’t need, no longer wanted or didn’t remember, she tugged it out of the master bedroom and onto the landing. Finding no point in battling to carry items downstairs, she gave the smaller ones a firm shove off the top stair. She grinned as she watched them tumble, slide and crash to the bottom.
A small broken chest of drawers sledged down, and she threw a painting of a bowl of fruit like a Frisbee. She pretended to be a footballer as she gave a small plastic box full of Betty’s old crochet patterns a firm kick. Then she trod downstairs and took great delight in slapping the pile with a bunch of green stars.
Leslie turned up and nodded all the time Martha explained what she wanted to achieve. He was a wiry man with rusty hair and he wore oversized navy dungarees. His movements were small and fidgety, like a bird on the lookout for bread crumbs. He didn’t remove his white earphones as he talked.
“So, Mrs. Storm,” he repeated after her, his words as twitchy as his actions, “anything with a green star is going—the yellow-and pink-starred stuff is staying? I like to ask because some people tell me to move stuff and then they want it back, and sometimes I’ve finished my job and then people decide there’s other stuff they want moving. Right?” He readjusted his left earplug.
“Yes.” Martha nodded, in case he couldn’t hear her.
“Good. Got it.” He jerked his thumb at the pile at the bottom of the stairs. “You been having a good old clear out? A spring clean some people call it, even if it’s not technically spring. Well, I’m not exactly sure if February is classed as spring or winter, it’s one of those in-between months, isn’t it? Some people might say it’s one, and others, the other.”
She nodded again.
“Good. People in this country just buy loads of stuff, don’t we? You go on holiday and you only take a few things with you in your suitcase, and it does you just fine for a week or more. All good, you don’t need anything else, don’t even miss it. Then, when you get home, you buy clothes, you buy furniture, you buy ornaments, you buy food, you buy paintings, you buy this and you buy that, and you end up with a house full of stuff. Is that what happened to you?”
“Something like that.” Martha smiled wryly.
“You can live without it all, Mrs. Storm. Most people can,” Leslie said. “You’ll see.”
Leslie set to work immediately, moving the stuff from the bottom of the stairs into his van, to dispose of. He worked methodically, totally focused on the job.
The chaise longue proved tricky to get through the bedroom door and, even though Martha didn’t really want to keep it, she agreed to let it remain in the room. It didn’t look too bad after she’d vacuumed away the dust and covered her untidy reupholstering with a blanket off her own bed.
Under a pile of her dad’s black suits, she discovered an old radio. After plugging it in, she fiddled with the knobs and found a station that played rock music. She turned the volume up from two and a half to five (not loud enough to give her another headache) and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening blitzing her parents’ old bedroom.
As she carried on with her mission, she imagined that she might feel sad, nostalgic or melancholic, but instead she found herself singing. With each item that Leslie removed, Martha’s shoulders felt lighter, as if she was casting off the person she didn’t want to be any longer.
She decided to reposition the chaise longue under the window, to allow more space to walk around the bed. Its wheels squeaked as she tugged it. She moved the bed by a few inches, too, and spotted a white envelope on the floor, in the space it had vacated. About to toss it onto her rubbish pile, she opened it first. There was a piece of paper inside and she read the words printed across the top.
“Marriage Certificate.”
It belonged to her parents and, as Martha looked at it more closely, she thought of how they never mentioned their wedding. She could only recall them celebrating their anniversary once. They’d held a party in the dining room but she’d been too sick to attend. She’d stayed in bed, with her head under the covers and a bucket at the side of the bed. And the next day, her parents told her that Zelda had died.
In the dining room, there was a wedding photograph of her dad in a black suit and her mum in a white shiny dress with a nipped-in waist, but Martha didn’t ever recall them reminiscing about their big day. She wasn’t even sure where they’d gone for their honeymoon. Where did you go in the UK, if you already lived at the seaside?
After reading the certificate, she now knew they married in Sandshift church in February 1966.
Glancing around, she tried to find somewhere safe to put it, so it didn’t get thrown away. However, her senses urged her to take another look.
Betty was nineteen years old and Thomas was thirty-three when they married.
February 1966 was only four months before Martha was born.
So, Betty must have been pregnant when she walked down the aisle.
Martha felt as if a small light flashed on in her head. Her parents had to get married for appearances’ sake.
She’d always felt removed from Lilian but couldn’t fathom out why, other than they liked different things. It was a feeling, rather than definite knowledge. Now, though, she had found a reason.
She was the daughter her parents didn’t plan for.
They had planned for Lilian.
Her father wouldn’t have liked an unborn child shaping his life.
Martha placed the certificate on the windowsill and told herself to forget it, that it didn’t mean anything. She had to focus on clearing up.
But all the same, she couldn’t stop her mind from flitting back, to the date printed on the certificate.
23
Midnight Mission
Martha carried on with her clearing-out session into the evening, and over the next two days. Slowly, the house started to look more like a home, rather than a scrapyard. It would be impossible to sort out absolutely everything in such a short time, but the changes she and Leslie made were immense.