Haven't They Grown(38)

I ring the bell and we wait. ‘We might have to wait a while,’ I mutter. ‘Getting to the front door in a house this size …’

It opens surprisingly quickly. A woman who looks around my age, wearing cut-off bleached-denim shorts and a pink long-sleeved top, smiles at me and Zan and says, ‘Please say something nice!’

Not the response I was expecting.

Her frizzy brown hair has streaks of grey in it. Round her neck, on a leather cord, she’s wearing a huge silver pendant that looks like a jellyfish, with a shiny dark green stone at its centre. ‘I like your pendant,’ I tell her, hoping that’s nice enough.

She beams at me. ‘That’s the best thing you could have said. You can come again!’ She laughs. ‘I couldn’t adore it more, and I’ve worn it every day since I bought it and, do you know what? No one has said anything about it apart from you. No one’s spontaneously said, “What a beautiful piece of jewellery!” Look, it’s two-sided. Nautilus with a malachite eye on one side, ammonite fossil on the other. Oh – that wasn’t what I meant when I said, “Say something nice!” I wasn’t fishing for compliments!’

‘Jellyfishing for compliments,’ I say, trying to present myself as the sort of person this woman would get on well with.

‘Huh? Oh! No, a nautilus is very different from a jellyfish. Though in the grand scheme of things, they’re both in the sea, so … hey!’ She shrugs. ‘I’m sorry. You must think I’m high on drugs. I’m really not. I’m just kind of excited. I don’t normally … wow, I mean, shut up, Tilly, stop blathering on at these poor people!’

‘Hi, Tilly. I’m Beth Leeson. This is my daughter, Zannah.’ I hold out my hand. She shakes it. ‘Please don’t stop blathering on our account. We came here to blather, as a matter of fact, so … if you blather first, I’ll feel less guilty about my own blathering!’

I can feel disapproval radiating from Zannah. As soon as we’re alone, she’s going to list all the ways I handled this wrong.

Tilly from number 3 appreciates my act, anyway. She’s laughing like a drain. ‘Okay, well, do you wanna come in?’ she says. ‘Assuming you’re not serial killers, or canvassers from an evil political party? They’re all evil these days, let’s face it. I’d vote Lib Dem but there are only about three of them left and one’s a golden retriever.’ She throws back her head and cackles again.

‘We’re neither murderous nor political,’ I tell her.

‘Fantastic. Come in, then.’ We can’t. She’s blocking the doorway. ‘I’ll tell you what I meant. So. For months, I’ve not been answering the door when the bell rings. Justin and the kids are out all day during the week, and I’ve got those hours and only those hours to do all my work – I work from home – and clean, and cook, and the rest, you know how it is. So, my New Year’s resolution was: no more rushing to the door when the bell rings. I stuck to it, too. Religiously. Unlike my other resolution, which was to cut out sugar and flour and alcohol, but hey! And at first it was so liberating. Understanding for the first time in my life that my doorbell – like my phone, like my email inbox – is there to serve me. Not the other way round! You know? And it’s been amazing, I’ve been so productive since January, but … lately, I’ve started to think it’s a shame. Who knows what those doorbell rings might be, you know? What if I’m too willingly closing myself off to new, fantastic experiences? So today, on an impulse, I thought to myself – I needed a break, to be honest – “Get off your arse and open that door.” And immediately panicked in case it was something dull like a survey about shopping habits. I never shop, anyway. Hate it. Waste of a day.’

‘If you want the opposite of dull, you’re in luck,’ I tell her. ‘I rang your bell in the hope that you’d answer a whole load of … unusual questions that no one else will answer honestly – about Wyddial Lane.’

‘What kind of unusual?’

‘It’s a long story. The short version is, I had some friends who used to live at number 16, and—’

‘Number 16. That’s the Caters, right? And before that …’ She stops. Her eyes widen. ‘Lewis Braid? Is he your friend?’

‘Not any more, no. Not for twelve years.’

‘But you’re here to ask unusual questions about him? Please say you are! That man is crying out to have unusual questions asked about him. Well, the opposite actually – he’s not crying out for it, he’d hate it, but the world is, or at least, I am.’

‘I am too,’ I say.

She moves to one side and waves us in. ‘I’m so glad I opened the door,’ she says as we follow her across a wide entrance hall and into a messy kitchen with a red Aga and many blobby children’s paintings stuck up on the walls. ‘This was meant to be – I truly believe that. Time to rethink that resolution!’

I try not to stare at the most eye-catching thing in the room: an enormous and scary-looking wall-chart calendar with boxes for all the days of the year, and black and white drawings of branches and leaves wrapped around them. There’s tiny, spidery handwriting in many of the boxes in four different colours: red, green, purple and orange. It’s weirdly beautiful, as long as you don’t need to read the writing.