where Pips keeps our little pick-me-ups? A mother needs a little pick-me-up occasionally, my pet. God made us mothers but He didn’t make it easy for us to stay on top of things. Pips understands. Pips says, “Let’s call these pills yours, Mum. They’re our secret, but say, if anyone asks, they’re yours.” Pippin’s not so nicely spoken as you, my pet, but his heart’s twenty-four-carat. But do you know what Yvette did to our pick-me-ups? Turned up uninvited one afternoon and without so much as a by your leave, she flushed them down the lavvy! My, Pippin turned the air blue when he got home and found out! Hit the roof! It was “my effing stock” this, “my effing stock” that! Never seen the boy in such a state! Went round to Yvette’s and, well, did he put her pointy beak out of joint!’ Her face clouded. ‘Yvette called the coppers. Shopped her own brother! He’d only biffed that froglet of a husband of hers a little bit! But Pips just disappeared after that. Days on end now, neither hide nor hair. All I want is a phone call from my son, my pet. Just to tell me he’s looking after himself proper. Some nasty types keep knocking our door down. The police are just as bad. “Where’s the effing gear this? Where’s the effing money that? Where’s your son gone you effing old bitch?” Oh, filthy language, they’ve got. But even if I had heard from Pips, I’d rather die than breathe a word…’
I opened my mouth to remind her about the antique shops.
She shuddered out a sigh. ‘I’d rather die…’
‘So, uh, could you give me a map of Cheltenham with the antique shops marked on it?’
‘No, pet. I don’t work here. Ask that lady behind the desk.’
The first antique shop was called George Pines, out on a ring road, wedged between a betting shop and an off-licence. Cheltenham’s s’posed to be posh but posh towns’ve got dodgy areas too. You cross a boomy rusting footbridge to get there. George Pines wasn’t what you have in mind when you think ‘antique shop’. The doors and windows had grilles. A note was Sellotaped to the (locked) door saying, BACK IN 15 MINS but the ink’d gone ghostly and the paper’d faded. A notice said, BEST RATES FOR HOUSE CLEARANCES. Through the grimy window it was all ugly big sideboards you get in grandparents’ bungalows. No clocks, no watches.
George Pines was long gone.
As I was walking back over the footbridge these two kids came towards me. They looked my own age but they’d got red-laced Docs. One wore a Quadrophenia T-shirt, the other an RAF T-shirt. Their footsteps boomed in time, left-right left-right. If you look kids in the eye it means you reckon you’re as hard as they are. I was carrying a fortune in cash so I kept my eyes sideways and down, on the fumey river of loud trucks and slow tankers flowing underneath us. But as the two Mods approached, I knew they wouldn’t go into single file to let me by. So I had to squeeze myself against the sun-hot railing.
‘Got a light?’ grunted the taller one at me.
I swallowed. ‘Me?’
‘Nah, I’m talkin’ to Princess fuckin’ Diana.’
‘No.’ I gripped the rail tight. ‘Sorry.’
The other Mod grunted, ‘Poof.’
After the nuclear war, kids like them’ll rule what’s left. It’ll be hell.
Most of the morning’d gone before I found the second antique shop. An arch led into a cobbled square called Hythloday Mews. Wails of far-off babies spiralled round Hythloday Mews. Lacy curtains blew over window boxes. A sleek black Porsche lay waiting for its master. Sunflowers watched me from their warm wall. Here was the sign, HOUSE OF GILES. The dazzling outside hid the inside. The door was propped open by a droopy pygmy with a sign round his neck saying, YES, WE’RE OPEN! Inside smelt of brown paper and wax. Cool as stones in streams. Murky cabinets of medals, of glasses, of swords. A Welsh dresser bigger than my bedroom hid the deepest quarter from sight. From here, a scratchy noise started up. The noise unfogged itself into radio cricket.
The noise of a knife on a chopping board.
I peered round the dresser.
‘If I’d known I’d end up with this mess,’ the dark American woman purred at me, ‘I’d have gotten the freakin’ cherries.’ (She was sort of beautiful but too off another planet to be fanciable.) In her sticky hands dripped a greeny-red fruit the shape