Discovering Lara in a right tis outside the house was just the distraction I needed. Over the last few weeks, Francesca had been asking about the bloody gold box as though she had a sixth sense that I was holding something back. Her sulky attitude with me was starting to creep back in, the nasty jibes resurfacing. And last night she’d snapped at me. ‘I don’t know why you haven’t bothered to find it yet. Just tell me where you think it might be and I’ll go and look myself. I don’t know what your problem is.’
My problem was that I wished I’d never found the sodding thing. I’d sat for ages that afternoon, weighing up what would be worse: to change her memory of her mum forever, to allow her to discover that her parents’ relationship wasn’t what it seemed and to let her question Nico about the inscription and watch the certainties of his first marriage shrivel and shrink, rewriting a happy history into a flawed and buckled mess. Or to ditch the box and hope Francesca would eventually forget about it and get over her fury at its disappearance. In the end, I went with my heart. They’d both suffered enough and I’d just have to put up with Francesca being a bit pissed off with me.
So that afternoon, I’d waited until the house was empty, then peered out of the upstairs window to double-check Anna’s car wasn’t there. I couldn’t have her popping up like an all-seeing jack-in-a-box. The last thing I needed was her catching me in the act of what was effectively stealing.
But for very good reasons.
I shoved the box and all its contents into a plastic bag and strode off to the skip that seemed to have taken up permanent residence at the end of the road. As I got closer, my heart felt like it was going to squeeze through the gaps in my ribs and start ricocheting around the street. I didn’t know how burglars ever got up the courage to break into someone’s house.
I paused for a moment, looking up and down like some shifty lowlife about to leave a bag of cocaine in a hiding place. I had no idea how much the box was worth but it had to be approaching six or seven hundred quid. God. I could buy Mum a new fridge with that. And replace her telly with something that didn’t have high definition as a futuristic concept. I’d never owned anything that expensive in my life and now I was going to wang it in a skip. I might as well take a wodge of twenties and scatter them in the sea. I’d even thought about taking it to one of the charity shops in town but decided against it in case Francesca spotted it in there on one of her shopping marathons.
I hesitated, peering over the metal lip into the junk below. No money in the world would buy back the comfort of good memories. The happy family fug that Francesca was clinging onto had to be worth more than a few hundred quid. In the end, I convinced myself that several years paying for therapy if she found out what her mother was really like would cost much more than the fricking jewellery box.
So, with a quick glance around, I poked the bag between an old sofa and broken rocking horse, hearing a last gasp of flutes and violins as it slid, then crashed, into a space at the bottom. As soon as I’d done it, worry and guilt engulfed me, leading me into a thousand what ifs. Plus Beryl-like thoughts of what I could have spent the money on if I’d flogged it on eBay.
But Lara greeted me with such a level of nuttiness on the pavement outside my house that I barely had time to dwell on whether I’d made a great decision or a fatal one. I was capable of weird and wonderful behaviour myself – Nico was always teasing me about how he could hear me talking to myself as I sewed: ‘Perhaps a silver sequin next to the red one’ ‘What that needs is a nice bit of black lace’ – but Lara took it to another level.
Apart from the weirdo ‘we’re really rich but I’ve never bothered learning to drive’ bullshit, she seemed so dithery about getting to her dad, drivelling on about Sandro’s bloody swimming, which he didn’t seem to give the slightest hoot about missing. Christ, Mum’s rage if I put Sam perfecting his crawl above making sure she wouldn’t be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life would be enough to keep the whole of Scotland warm in winter.
When I finally persuaded Lara to let me take her to her dad via Mum’s, her reaction to seeing the estate reminded me of Nico the first time he’d come with me. Their middle-classness stood out like a vegan sausage in a greasy spoon café. Lara’s navy scarf, draped round her neck in a decorative rather than keep-the-cold-out loop, her light green cardigan with heart-shaped buttons, her hair shiny with expensive shampoo – she was missing that sharp edge of on-guard that defined the majority of the people who lived here.
But I had to love her for the way she was struggling not to look horrified at the puddles of piss, the remains of bicycles chained to the railings, the doors with their peeling paint. Such a contrast to the Victorian terraces we lived in now, painted pale pastel colours, with their dawn-to-dusk sensor lights creating a welcoming glow.
‘Did you live here for very long?’ Lara said as we ran up the stairs to Mum’s flat.
‘All my life until I had Sam. I was back here for three years before I met Nico because I just couldn’t afford to rent my own place any more.’
As I spoke, I realised I sounded as though I’d married Nico for his money. I hoped Lara knew me well enough by now to know it wasn’t true. Though she probably wouldn’t blame me for wanting to get Sam off the estate – her grip tightened on Sandro’s hand as we passed a couple of teenagers on the stairwell, the unmistakable smell of cannabis surrounding them.
Lara couldn’t have looked more twinset and pearls if she’d been carrying Margaret Thatcher’s handbag. She had the air of someone setting off on an adventure from which she wasn’t certain to return.
I propelled her towards Mum’s door before the threshold of her adventurous spirit was exceeded. On the other hand, the promise of a chocolate biscuit seemed to work wonders for Sandro’s courage, or maybe it was just the euphoria of his unexpected escape from armbands.
Mum threw open the door with her hair in a towel turban, even though I’d texted her to say we were on our way.
Lara looked as though she wanted to snatch up Sandro and hightail it back to the Boden areas of Brighton, where guest-greeting was more likely to involve a tray of homemade beetroot brownies or a gluten-free flapjack.