A Friend of the Family Read Free Page B

smells – French polish, tired carpeting, dog hair – and taking in the scenery – the junk, the cardboard boxes, the piles of magazines and abandoned embroidery – and thought to himself, This is me, all this clashing and clutter, this hoarding and piling. This is what made me and this is where I belong. And this was why he hadn’t phoned ahead, why he hadn’t told anyone he was coming home. Because he’d wanted to find home exactly as he’d left it three years ago and not as some fussed-over, tidied-up, bunting-festooned facsimile stuffed with aunts and uncles and neighbours and chicken-paste sandwiches and pork pies cut into quarters. Because he’d wanted to smell bed on his dad and see last night’s dinner plates piled up in the kitchen.
    He heard a scuffling, scrabbling noise coming from the other end of the hallway.
    ‘Goldie!’
    An ancient, threadbare golden retriever put his nose to the air, turned and made his way slowly but enthusiastically towards Ned, who dropped to his knees to greet him. Goldie was fifteen years old and looked like he too might have been found on a skip. He was wearing a scuffed Elizabethan collar; and just above his left eyewas a shaved patch, zipped together with black plastic stitches, indicating yet another mishap. His eyes were thick and half-blind with cataracts. And he was opening and closing his mouth in an approximation of the bark he would never again be able to emit since a laryngectomy had left him mute four years ago. To compensate for his lack of vocal communication, he was wagging his tail so hard that he was almost back to front and his lips were stretched back into something that Ned had always sworn was a smile.
    ‘Ooh yes, ooooh yes. Goldie boy, I’m home – I’m home!’Ned grabbed the ruff of fur that poked out from under the collar and scratched him good and hard, trying politely to ignore the fact that dear old Goldie hummed to high heaven.
    He took off his boots and tiptoed quietly up the stairs, his socked feet instinctively missing the creaky bits and the ever-dangerous ‘seventh step’, which had remained unfixed since Gerry fell through it years ago when chasing Tony upstairs to give him a hiding.
    He stopped at the top of the stairs to look at all the old framed photographs on the landing walls, yellowed and pinkish with age and sun. Ned, Tony and Sean on the beach at Margate, Bernie in a straw hat, Sean on a carousel at the local fair, Tony and Ned sitting on a step in nylon shorts with sunburnt noses, the three of them in their first Holy Communion outfits – snugly fitting white shorts, starchy white shirts and bow-ties. The family likeness was uncanny. All three of them with the same bog-standard brown hair, triangular noses,determined chins, blue eyes and sticky-outy ears. Ned, skinny like his dad; Tony and Sean, slightly sturdier like their mum. Ned smiled at the images, so much a part of him, and made his way to the end of the landing, to his parents’ bedroom.
    His parents’ bedroom was, in some ways, the hub of the house. The bed was where they all used to congregate on weekend mornings, watching children’s television and eating their cereal while Mum and Dad went through the papers and drank leaf tea that brewed in a pot on the bedside table.
    The door was open – there was no such thing as a closed door in the Londons’ house – and the sound of Bernie’s snoring was now almost deafening. He pushed the door slowly and peaked around it to have a look at them. Their bed was a huge lace-festooned extravaganza of a thing that Bernie had bought from Biba in the seventies. It was four-poster and canopied with bits of twirly wrought iron all over the place. Bernie had attached things to the lace over the years – silk flowers, feathers, rosettes, tiny wire birds. Underneath this ornate marquee of a bed lay his parents. Ned felt a lump in his throat when he looked at them. His father was curled up on his side with his hands tucked under