Read Telling Lies to Alice for Free Online

London . . .” and it was Mrs. O’Shea and Mrs. Cooper from up the road. Granddad almost pulled my arm off dragging me inside. “What have you done to yourself? Talk about the dog’s dinner.” I felt about an inch high, but I wanted him to see that I was still the same person so I said I’d come down to his allotment and give him a hand like I used to when I was little. I didn’t have anything to protect my dress so Granddad wrapped a bit of sacking round me but it must have been dirty because when I took it off there was mud all down my front. My grandma was clucking over it—“Why did you let her do that, Bert? She’s spoilt her new frock—they don’t grow on trees, you know!” as if I was about six, but Granddad just winked at me and said, “Well, it looks better like that, if you ask me,” because it was from one of those boutiques in the King’s Road, all swirly and garish, so the mud toned it down a bit. I suddenly thought, you old . . . whatever, you did it on purpose. I suppose I should have got angry with him, but I was too busy trying not to laugh.
    It’s a shame Granddad’s dead now because he would have loved it here with the chickens and the vegetable patch and everything, and I could do with some advice. . . . I’m glad he died before Lenny did, though. He always got on with Lenny and he would have hated all the stuff in the papers, but I do miss him. Not Grandma, because I always felt I was a bit of a nuisance to her. Mind you, from her point of view, there she was thinking her child-rearing days were over, and I came along. . . . She told me Mum was no good at it, she was always leaving me on my own in the caravan and forgetting to change my nappies, so she’d taken over.
    I’ve got a film of them that Lenny made. He was trying out this 16-millimetre cinecamera he’d just bought. It only lasts a couple of minutes, but it’s Granddad in the garden, looking after his sweet peas, and then you see Grandma come out the back door and start cutting flowers with her big sewing scissors. Granddad hated cut flowers—there were no vases in the house and normally he’d never let anyone touch his garden. I’ve never been able to work out if Lenny’d suggested it so Grandma would have something to do in the film or if she was doing it deliberately to wind Granddad up but either way, he doesn’t say anything. Then my mum’s old spaniel, Tinker, comes trotting down the path and wags his tail at Granddad so he looks up to see if Mum’s coming, too. She’s obviously standing just out of the shot because he’s saying something and beckoning, but she doesn’t appear. That’s all it is, really.
    Lenny’s projector must be upstairs somewhere, but I don’t know how to work it. In any case, it would only make me cry, so what’s the point? Typical of Mum that she wouldn’t join in, even to please Granddad. He wanted to be friends with her but she wouldn’t let him. She’s like Grandma, closed off from people. They hardly ever saw each other—you can see on the film, when the dog comes in and Granddad starts talking to Mum, Grandma doesn’t even look up.
    Not that I can talk, because I’ve never been close to Mum, either. I’ve been trying to go there more often because her health hasn’t been so great—although I get the impression that she’s not really bothered one way or the other. She won’t come and stay with me because she doesn’t want to leave her animals.
    To be honest, I’d been starting to wonder if it was worth the effort, but last time I saw her I was telling her about the farm and she suddenly said, “I’d always thought you might turn out like me.” When I asked what she meant, she said, “Well, you’re about twenty-six, aren’t you?”
    “Thirty.”
    “Oh, are you? I’d had enough of it by the time I was twenty-six. You must be a bit slow on the uptake.”
    “Enough of what? What are you talking about?”
    We were sitting on either side of the caravan table and