Only when they had left the Manchester conurbation behind did Paula seem to relax at all. She still sat hunched forward in her seat, though, gripping the steering wheel so hard her knuckles were white and squinting at the road and the cars ahead as if they were some sort of malevolent entities bent on her destruction. She doesn’t like driving, Sarah realized. It must run in the family. Her father and mother, she remembered, had never owned or driven a car in their lives.
Soon the Pennines loomed ahead, furry green hillsides made eerie by mist swirling on their lower slopes.
There was still plenty of traffic on the roadway as it passed through the grimy urban sprawl around Rochdale and Oldham, but the cars thinned out as it climbed a long, slow hill and cut a swath through the Pennines.
All around, sheep grazed and becks and streams trickled through deep clefts in the dark green hillsides, flashing in the winter sun. They passed lonely barns, hamlets, small stone bridges, a reservoir. At one point the roadway got so high up that Sarah’s ears went funny like they did on the plane. She yawned.
Paula glanced sideways again. “Tired? You’re quite a hit over here, you know. There’ll be plenty of people in the village wanting your autograph. Just thought I’d warn you. You probably get enough of that over there.” She jerked her head back, indicating the Atlantic.
“Not really,” Sarah said. “Hardly at all, in fact.” In the first flush of her television success, Sarah had worried about people recognizing her and approaching her in public places. She dreaded living the kind of life Elvis Presley had, for example, imprisoned in Graceland, having to hire a whole movie theater just to see a film, or an entire fairground to go on one ride, always surrounded by bodyguards.
But after a while, she had learned a very interesting thing: people tended not to recognize her unless she went out of her way to be noticed. As herself, she could walk along the street, shop in the Beverly Center, or browse along Rodeo Drive, and nobody came up demanding autographs.
On the other hand, if she dressed more like Anita O’Rourke, then people spotted her immediately. Most of the time she went around in jeans, a T-shirt and a Dodgers cap. Even the detective she talked to at the beach hadn’t recognized her at first.
Again, she thought of the letters and the body in the sand. She remembered the touch of the hand, cold and stiff like a broken marble statue, and then the dark blood clotted with sand. There had been a body, she couldn’t deny that, but it had nothing to do with her. When she went back there with the police, the heart had gone. She had been under so much stress she must have started seeing things, she told herself.
“Have you seen the show?” she asked Paula, snapping herself out of the reverie.
“Oh, aye,” said Paula. “We seem to get nothing but American stuff these days. The kids like it. Not that I think they understand it, mind you, but they know it’s their Auntie Sal. It’s not bad.”
“And Dad?”
In the silence that followed, Sarah looked at her sister’s profile and saw the lips pressed tight together, the dry, raw skin of her cheeks. Paula had never been the beauty — always just a little too shapeless, her features just a little too pinched and sharp, hair too coarse and oily — but the years had also been unkind to her.
Though she was only thirty-six, Paula looked in her mid-forties, at least, Sarah thought, with deeply ingrained lines around her eyes and the corners of her thin lips, and a permanent aura of weariness and suspicion. She could do something about herself if she tried — wore more suitable clothes, went to a good hairdresser and chose the right makeup, for example. Her eyes were still beautiful. A lighter blue than Sarah’s, they could light up a room when they weren’t poisoned by distrust and bitterness, a sense of always being hard-done-to, as they usually were.
“He doesn’t watch much telly,” Paula said finally. “Only old films on video.”
“What does he do?”
“Reads the paper. Looks at his stamp albums. Stares into space a lot.”
“Does he get out much?”
Paula shot her a scathing glance. “He’s got bloody emphysema,” she said. “He spends most of his time in a bleeding wheelchair with an oxygen tank strapped to the back. What do you expect?”
Sarah said nothing. She felt herself redden.
“Course,” Paula went on, “it’s the bloody pit that caused it, you know. Over thirty years down that pit, he was, then what do they do? Thatcher’s lot closes it down and chucks him out on the dole, that’s what. On the bloody scrapheap in his prime. A few years later he starts getting shortness of breath. And do you think there’s any compensation? Is there hell-as-like.”
Sarah remembered that her father had smoked about sixty unfiltered cigarettes a day as well as working down the coal mine, but she didn’t see any point in mentioning that to Paula. She also had to get used to the idea that, while Paula might complain about not getting money she felt she was entitled to from the government, any offers of help from family or friends would be taken as charity and dismissed. It was fine for the state to pay out, but not for her sister to do so.
Sarah had been allowed to put down the deposit on the cottages and pay for the renovations when they were knocked into one, but Paula would struggle with the mortgage, with the help of Dad’s pension and her earnings as a barmaid, and she even made it clear that she regarded the down payment as only a “loan.” Stubborn northern pride, Sarah thought. But she knew she might not have got so far without it herself.
They edged away from the difficult subject of their father and Paula asked Sarah about life in Hollywood. Somehow, Sarah got the impression she didn’t have much interest except for the occasional opportunity it gave her to put down the Americans and their ways.
To Paula, Sarah soon began to realize, Hollywood was, quite simply, a fantasy. It wasn’t real; it didn’t exist except on celluloid and in newsprint; its inhabitants were cartoon figures or cardboard cutouts that just happened to look like handsome men and beautiful women. Their real-life exploits were scripted to titillate the masses.
Actually, Sarah thought with a smile, Paula wasn’t far wrong, if only she knew it.
The sun had disappeared behind clouds now and rain was already starting to spatter the windscreen. Paula turned off the M62 south of Leeds and swung north-east toward the York bypass. It was too warm in the car now. Stifling. Sarah found herself fading in and out of sleep.
Rothwell, Swillington, Garforth. She saw them all through half-closed eyes. Run-down housing estates, burned-out cars on patches of wasteland, the odd small park with bare trees and empty flower beds, lots of pubs, squat churches, schools with iron railings around the playgrounds, zebra crossings and Belisha beacons out front, the occasional strip of shops — newsagent’s, mini-market, DIY, grocer’s, turf accountant’s — all in the inimitable mixture of dirty red-brick and dark millstone grit.
The road ran close to the house and shopfronts, separated only by a narrow flagstone pavement. Everything seemed so tiny, so scaled down. It all felt so close, pressing in. Stout old women in threadbare overcoats waited at pedestrian crossings, faces obscured by umbrellas.
Paula cursed the weather and lit another cigarette. Sarah opened her window another inch. The cool draft roused her a little. She could hear the hiss of the wheels along the wet road surface. The rain smelled fresh and sweet. A few drops moistened her cheek.
Paula glanced sideways. “All right?”
“Mmm. Just a bit tired.”
“Forecast says we’re in for a miserable Christmas,” Paula said with relish. “Rain, rain and more rain. Maybe gale force winds, too. And hail. We won’t be having a white Christmas this year. That’s what they say. Course, they’re not always right.”