“Pleased to meet you,” he says, holding out his hand. His voice sounds deep and gravelly, like a fox in a house full of hens. Quite aggressive hens, actually, judging by the appraising looks he’s getting.
“Sorry, how long do you think?”
“Before we get back?” I nod, and Doreen shrugs. “How long is a piece of string? They’re talking about taking the thing away for detonation.”
“It’s that big?” Whit asks.
“What does that mean?” I ask, my head swinging between the two. “Isn’t anyone freaked out by this?”
“Of course we are, love. But they’ve been finding bombs in London since the Luftwaffe buggered off home. We just take it in our stride, don’t we, girls?”
Again with the agreeing chorus.
“So will we be allowed back, do you think?”
“Once they’ve moved the thing.”
“Can I offer you a nice cuppa tea, loves?” Sadie, the owner of the garden wall, asks Whit and me.
“We’ll budge up,” Doreen says, already moving the women along the wall with her butt. “Sit yourselves down. It won’t be long.”
24
WHIT
Aunt Doreen.She’s truly an unreliable narrator because it was long—very long—before we found out what was going on. While Amelia insisted I go home, suggesting I must have better things to do, I didn’t leave. I’m sure I have better things to do, more important things at any rate, but I find I can’t leave her out in some random street, facing such uncertainty.
So I stay. I drink countless cups of weak-as-piss tea and eat more rich tea biscuits than I’ve had in a decade. I listen to the oldies gossip and almost choke on a mouthful of tea when one of Doreen’s lesser fans takes me aside to tell me I ought to protect “young Amelia’s impressionable mind” because Doreen is a “goer” and a “man stealer.” Apparently, all the men of a certain age in this borough know Doreen can “suck a golf ball through a garden hose.”
Might it be a family trait?
More tea drinking. More gossip. More worried looks from Amelia.
I let Sadie’s grandson sit in the driver’s seat of my car to pretend he’s Batman and agree with the oldies that it’s a good thing it’s not raining. There are definitely better uses of my time, but I just can’t get my feet to take me.
A little after four in the afternoon, news is brought to us by means of a community police officer. She’s wearing a high viz jacket about ten sizes too big, which makes her look like a little girl wearing her father’s coat. But she has the appropriate amount of authority in her tone to get the older ladies to pay attention. We’re told that the houses in Doreen’s street, plus three others, are off-limits until the almost eighty-year-old bomb, that is likely highly volatile, is moved off-site for a controlled detonation.
Cries of dismay go up, but it’s not the young WPC’s fault, so no one gives her a second look as she moves along to deliver the news elsewhere.
“But we don’t have any of our things.” Amelia looks genuinely dismayed.
“Well, I did think ahead,” Doreen says, reaching for a blue, white, and red checkered shopping bag. Large and square, you could probably fold a dead body in it. “Not much, of course. Just a few things. Here.” She thrusts a phone charger Amelia’s way.
Amelia blinks. “Anything else?”
“I thought there was more,” Doreen says, digging deeper into the bag, “but this is all my stuff. My makeup bag…I wouldn’t go anywhere without that.”
“Too right,” strikes up one of the chorus.
“Me either,” agrees another.
“I have my good shoes and a change of undies, my slippers, plus my nightie and face cream. And my vibrator, of course.”
“Aunt Doreen!” Amelia declares, her face a picture—a picture of a thousand burning suns.
“What’s wrong with you?” the older woman demands. “I’m sorry I didn’t get more of your things, but by the time I’d chased Brian around the house—”
“Who’s Brian? Actually, you know what?” Mimi holds up her hand. “Don’t answer that.” She also seems to be resisting a shiver of discomfort.
