Free The Secrets We Left Behind by Susan Elliot Wright Page B

taken this lot to the launderette, couldn’t she? Six weeks. She could have come in here and changed the bed, at least. There was a sticky glass and a Kellogg’s Corn Flakes mug on the
bedside cabinet, along with a jumble of pills, a box of tissues and a pot of Nivea face cream. She slid open the top drawer; more pills, more creams and ointments. She picked up one of the tubes
and smiled when she read the label. She remembered her mum’s voice, incredulous:
‘Anusol,
I ask you! Why not call it
arsehole
and have done with it?’
    When she was a little girl and they’d lived in Padstow, she’d loved going into her mum’s room because it smelt nice and there were pretty bottles on the dressing table and
necklaces hung over the mirror, and sometimes, her mother would let her try on her shoes and clip-clop about in them like a grown-up lady. But this room bore no traces of that mother. There was
still a perfume bottle on the dressing table, but it was covered with dust; her mother hadn’t worn perfume or jewellery for years. Under the bed there were two carrier bags full of bottles,
mostly sherry or Martini, which was what her mum drank in the evenings; during the day, she’d sometimes slip some vodka into her tea when she thought Jo wasn’t looking. Those damn
bottles. She remembered wondering why her mum always took a clinking carrier bag with her when she went to the corner shop, and one day, she watched out of the window as her mum stopped at a litter
bin, glanced around and then lifted the carrier bag and tipped the bottles into the bin. It was only when Friday came around and Jo saw the dustmen taking the lids off the bins all along the road
that she understood. That was back in the days when her mum still cared what people thought.
    Jo tried to think of the old mum, the mum who used to know so many songs that you could say any word you thought of and she’d know a song with that word in it; the mum who used to fold a
sheet of paper, make little cuts or tears in it and get Jo to tap it with her finger and shout
Abracadabra
and then, magically, open the paper out to reveal a string of paper dollies holding
hands, or a beautiful peacock with a fanned tail, or a swan with its wings outstretched. For a second, the memory was so strong that her mum, the funny, happy, laughing mum, felt intensely real and
present, but then it was gone, leaving an imprint on the air like when you’ve just blown out a candle. For the first time since she was a little girl, she climbed into her mother’s bed
and cried herself to sleep.
    *
    Mr Rundle was very sorry to hear of her mother’s death. She was welcome to stay in the flat until the end of March, he told her, and she wasn’t to worry
about the two months’ rent they owed. ‘You’ll have enough to think about, young miss.’ His craggy forehead wrinkled as he lit his pipe. ‘I’m not short of a few
bob these days, and your mum was a good tenant, mostly.’ He asked about the funeral and Jo admitted she had no idea what to do, so he and Mrs Rundle took over the arrangements, much to
Jo’s relief. A week later the three of them, together with Rob Trelawney and his parents, her friends Sheena and Jackie, a nurse from the hospital and Miss Bradwell, her mum’s social
worker, sat round on chairs and packing cases drinking weak tea out of disposable cups; Jo hadn’t realised you were supposed to provide tea and cakes after a funeral and she’d given
away most of the crockery. There hadn’t been a lot to get rid of. The WRVS and the Salvation Army had taken most of the household things, and Mrs Rundle had helped her bag up her mum’s
stuff for the church jumble. It fitted into four dustbin bags; not much to show for a whole life. Apart from clothes, her mum owned very little. She’d sold most of her jewellery ages ago,
except for a Victorian cameo brooch that had belonged to her own mother. It was the only thing Jo wanted to keep; it would remind her of