Tarnished Read Online Free PDF Page A

Butterly.
    ‘I’m worried about Mummy,’ Jean said, wiping her mouth with a Wet One. She put another cigarette to her mouth and looked up at Peg, a depth of seriousness in her eyes.
    ‘You and me both, Aunty Jean.’
    ‘It’s just, if she’s talking about Keith, then, well . . .’ Jean drew on her Marlboro again and blew the smoke out up at the ceiling, adding another tiny tint of yellow to the nicotine stain blooming on the Artex.
    ‘She didn’t know who I was when I turned up,’ Peg said.
    ‘Oh dear.’
    ‘We need to start thinking what we’re going to do with her, Aunty Jean. She won’t have any help, but she can’t go on like this.’
    ‘No. I know. It’s a dreadful problem, I know.’
    Peg braced herself and finally gave voice to the thought that had been gnawing at her since she witnessed Doll’s earlier confusion. ‘It’s just I don’t know how much longer she’s going to be able to stay in the bungalow.’
    Jean shot Peg a horrified look. ‘You’re not talking about putting Mummy in a home , are you, Meggy? You can’t do that, though. It would kill her to move away, away from all her things. Away from me. Do you want to kill her?’
    ‘Of course I don’t,’ Peg said, twisting her fingers into knots so tightly that they hurt.
    ‘I won’t have it, you hear me? I won’t have it.’ Jean stubbed her cigarette out in the mouth of the pelican-shaped ashtray. She screwed the Wet One up into a ball and jabbed it at her eyes, which started to bulge as a coughing fit took her over. The spasms racketed through her, making her fleshy body quiver. Tears blobbed in her eyes and spilled onto her blotchy cheeks.
    Peg rushed to the kitchen to fill one of Jean’s special sipping cups with water. She held it in front of her aunt, who gulped it down between desperate wheezes for breath. Then she took the oxygen mask from where it was still perched on the top of Jean’s head and pressed it to her face.
    ‘Thank you, dear,’ Jean gasped. With quivering fingers she pressed the mask tight against herself, fell back against the pillows, closed her eyes and breathed in as deeply as she could to activate the oxygen.
    Peg hovered anxiously over her while the moments passed. Then, without warning, Jean shot out a hand and squeezed Peg’s arm so tightly in her hot fat palm that she nearly yelped.
    ‘And if you throw Mummy in a home, Meggy,’ she said, lifting the mask away to speak. ‘Then what about me? What’s to become of me?’
    Peg knew this was the big issue. Thinking about it made her head ache; she had no answer for it. But she couldn’t let Jean know that. She took a deep breath and looked her aunt straight in the eye. ‘Don’t worry, Aunty Jean,’ she said. ‘I’m never going to do that to either of you.’
    She made sure both Jean and Doll were comfortable for the night. Then, her brain like scrambled egg, her eyes tight like two little raisins stuck on the front of her face, she steeled herself for the chilly walk to Whitstable Station, which she decided tonight would be the longer, beachfront route. She wanted to be whipped clean by the salt-sharp wind.
    She had just fastened the front gate when she turned and nearly bumped into Mrs Cairns.
    ‘Heel, Scotty,’ Mrs Cairns said to her greying Jack Russell which, as usual, greeted Peg with bared fangs. ‘How are they doing, Margaret?’ she asked, her blob of a face a picture of solemn concern.
    ‘Oh, they’re fine, Mrs Cairns,’ Peg said, hitching her rucksack on her back and fixing a smile onto her face. ‘All jogging along nicely.’
    Allowances had to be made for Mrs Cairns. Her only child – a ‘hulking great slow boy’, as Jean put it – had hanged himself in a police cell about twenty years ago, and, according to both Doll and Jean, she had not been right since then.
    ‘Your grandmother didn’t look all that smart yesterday. She was out the front here in her dressing gown at eleven o’clock in the morning calling for