Jay, Lizzie and the Tale of the Stairs

  Chapter 50

  If Only I’d Known…

  Peter and Judy were both really concerned when I left Waltham Ward. On seeing Ernie’s name there in front of me I felt dizzy. Sick. And my face turned the colour that I was used to in 1946. After lots of ‘are you OK’s?’ and ‘are you sure you’re OK’s?’ I wobbled out from behind the little counter and made my rickety way back to Dad and Rosie.

  They were still watching TV when I flopped in one of the chairs around Rosie’s bed and was quiet and staring on the journey home. Dad asked if I was OK so I nodded quietly and watched winter passing by the car window.

  I couldn’t believe it. Was the Ernie Raynor who had spent so much time in hospital opposite my Mum the Ernie Raynor from 1946? Was he the one and the same? Well, if he was then my ‘special powers’ – my help – had saved him. What’s more Albert’s journey had brought his son back home safely. Surely, it must be. He must have recognised me and that’s why he used to smile so much.

  But how? The only time Ernie saw me was as a ghost in the room where he was being held prisoner.

  As rain began to silently spray the windscreen of our car and Dad turned the wipers on I made a promise to myself to go back to Waltham Ward ASAP and ask some more questions.

  As it turned out I wasn’t able to get back to St Mary’s for three days. School was busy and Dad needed help with Mum. She was looking thin and weak now but she kept smiling. And I kept smiling back. But deep-down I was endlessly worried, a worry that just wouldn’t go away, gnawing at my insides like a caterpillar on a leaf.

  I caught the bus to the hospital and I was lucky to find Judy talking to a doctor. She smiled politely, finished the conversation she was having and leant over the counter towards me.

  “Hello again,” she said brightly. “Come back for some more?”

  I said ‘yes’ and that I needed to speak to her again. Judy seemed a bit anxious as she checked the time on her watch with a clock on the wall and looked up and down the ward. Then she looked at me. “OK. But we’ll have to make it quick.”

  I scuttled behind the counter. Judy had pulled up a seat so I pulled one up next to her.

  “Right then,” Judy asked me quietly, “what do you want to know?”

  “Well, is there anything else that you can tell me about Mr Raynor?”

  “You mean the old man you came in asking about the other day?”

  “Yes!”

  “OK,” said Judy thoughtfully, and it was then that I knew something was wrong, “but what do you want to know?”

  I felt awkward now. Guilty. Like I was doing something wrong. “How about an address or something?”

  Suddenly, like a cloud passing in front of the sun, Judy’s expression turned from happy helpful to one of sympathy. Her eyes widened and her head cocked slightly to one side.

  I hated that look.

  “Oh,” she said slowly like Mum does when I cut myself, “I’m sorry, but Mr Raynor…Mr Raynor died some weeks ago now.”

  I must have looked shocked. I was.

  “Died?”

  Judy nodded. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  I looked around as the dizziness and the sick feeling returned. Judy put a concerned hand on my arm, asked me if I was OK and got me a plastic cup of water.

  I knew we’d been here before.

  Judy sat with me for a bit, asked me if I was relative or something, stuff like that. Obviously I said no to everything. After a bit I felt better so Judy sat back in her chair and looked long and hard at me. “You know, I can’t make you out.”

  I sipped at my water. It tasted like plastic. “Why?”

  “Well, all this concern for someone you didn’t really know.”

  I felt Judy’s eyes searching mine for answers, the truth, not the half-lies I lived on these days.

  I shrugged. “Just felt I should have spent more time getting to know him, I s’pose.”

  Judy nodded slowly as if she understood.

  “Did he have any family or a funeral or anything?” I asked fishing for clues and to change the subject.

  Now Judy shook her head. “Don’t know. All I know is he died on the ward on my week off. Natural causes I think. He wasn’t well anyway.”

  Recalling something, Judy sat up. “I just remembered. There’s a small box in the office with a few bits and bobs he left behind. Nobody’s collected them as yet. I shouldn’t do this but we could have a quick peek.”

  This was a result.

  “And I mean quick,” Judy added sternly. “As much as I like talking to you, there’s sick people to see to.”

  Judy disappeared in the direction of the ‘bad news room’ – the room where the nurse and Dad had told me about Mum – then came back with a shoebox. She sat down and placed the box in front of us and gently removed the lid.

  We peered inside.

  An old watch, scratched;

  An empty wallet;

  £2.64 pence;

  A handkerchief;

  A faded with time, gold Jesus on the Cross;

  A black and white photograph, creased, torn at one edge.

  Judy carefully pulled out the photograph and we looked closely.

  I couldn’t believe what we saw.

  Smiling out of it, in withered black and white, were three people, gathered around an old sofa in a long forgotten front room.

  Those three people were Maureen, Lizzie and a very grey me.

  Judy the nurse was as dumfounded as I was. Looked me up and down. Rubbed her eyes. I thought on my feet. Told her that the grey teenager in the photo was a long lost cousin of mine and Ernie Raynor was, in fact, a relative. Judy agreed the likeness of my long lost cousin was uncanny. When I asked her if I could have the photograph Judy promised that she’d keep it and, if no-one came to collect it within a month or so, then she would gladly give it to me.

  I left Waltham Ward feeling happier than I had in a long time. Ernie had survived, had been brought safely home and had somehow found himself owning the photograph Albert had taken of us all, way back in 1946. My help and my ‘special powers’ had found him after all.

  I had done something. I hadn’t just stood by.

  I had done something because I could.

  When the bus dropped me off I made a quick detour to the site where I thought the ‘German’ house and the shelter would have been. Again the garage with the corrugated blue door, the new red bricks and the suspicious movement of front room curtains. I sat on someone’s garden wall for a while and thought about what was. What had been. I thought about myself and Lizzie’s first trip out onto the cold and dark streets of 1946. I thought about running away from Dr Meen over broken stones, through a very different world from the one I found myself in now. I thought about being captured and Beth’s Grandmother and the horrible cupboard. I thought about the New Order and the Junction-Sphere and I shivered as I remembered The Fathers and what might have happened if Dr Meen’s plan had allowed all this evil loose on the 21st Century. As I sat thinking an old lady passed by carrying an old shopping bag. She kept her eyes on the pavement as she passed and, when she was a bit away, just for a moment, I felt like shouting out ‘Lizzie!’

  Just in case.

  I mean, what stranger things could happen?

  But I didn’t and eventually I walked the short distance home.

  And it was then that I knew that I was wrong. Stranger things were possible. Stranger than I could ever imagine.

  My Mum was dead.