The HAPPINESS FACTORY E-Book

Jo McMillan

• Herausgeber: Bluemoose Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 413

Beschreibung

It's about the families we run from and a love story to the families we make for ourselves – sometimes in the most unexpected places. It's a portrait of a country as it emerges from a Maoist past into its roaring global present. And at its heart are fathers: the way they make you and mark you, and how they follow you, however far you go – even to the furthest edge of China.

Leseprobe

The Happiness Factory

Jo McMillan

Dedication

For Isobel: wife, mother, survivorwith love

Copyright © Jo McMillan 2022

First published in 2022 byBluemoose Books Ltd25 Sackville StreetHebden BridgeWest YorkshireHX7 7DJ

www.bluemoosebooks.com

All rights reservedUnauthorised duplication contravenes existing laws

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication dataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Paperback 978-1-910422-85-4Hardback 978-1-910422-86-1

Printed and bound in the UK by Short Run Press

Excitement

兴奋期

Chapter one

Where the skin of the earth shudders into the foothills of the Shunhua mountains, in a clearing above the mist and fringed with frangipani, Mo Moore set up a factory which, to this day, makes happiness.

Actually, it makes sex aids. Her goods sell all around the globe, and her biggest buyer is a British high-street chain. The boxes say simply: Made in China. In fact, they come from the place where Mo made a family and that she still calls home, a place too small for any map – the tiny, teetering village of Pingdi.

China began where Mo’s father ended. It began with a letter addressed to the Night Duty Officer, Eden House Care Home, and said:

Dear Ms Moore,

You are unaware, I believe, that your father passed away in June. May I offer my belated condolences.

As Executor of his Will, I was instructed to liquidate the family firm and other assets, which task is now complete. All relevant taxes and fees have also been paid, and his affairs, I trust, are finally settled. Please find attached all relevant paperwork.

My apologies for the delay in informing you of events, but with your change of name and the long-standing severance of family ties, an address was not easy to come by.

With all good wishes for the festive season and for the New Year.

And a signature Mo didn’t recognise. She read the letter again. Long-standing severance of family ties. She thought: you mean running away, and going into hiding, and changing our names in case he found us?

And now he was dead.

Carol delivered the letter at the end of Mo’s night shift. Mo listened, as she did every morning, to Carol parking her car – in and out and in and out – the furry dice swinging from the rear-view mirror as if casting her fate for the day, until at nine on the dot, she’d lined it up exactly in the space marked MNGR. Then the slam of the door with a hip. A kerfuffle of bags in the corridor, which was Carol collecting the post, and the knock at Mo’s door – always the same, Beethoven’s Fifth. ‘Now there’s a turn up. Hey ho, Mo, four in a row.’

Carol said things like that.

And she would know about things turning up, about statistical anomalies like Mo getting four letters in one day. Carol, Manager, Eden House – Men’s Wing, kept a keen eye on the comings and goings of the care home. She had an infallible memory and the kind of brain that could juggle numbers and come up with the likelihood of anything. She knew the risk of Mo getting diabetes due to working nights, of Eden House taking a knock in this year’s winter flu, of a meteor striking earth and causing mass extinction.

Carol’s wrist, slung with good-luck charms, reached into the darkness of the room. ‘There you go, Mo,’ and she handed Mo what turned out to be the Death Letter and three Christmas cards from Yorkshire. ‘Sleep well,’ she said, her voice in retreat because her phone was already ringing.

Attached to the solicitor’s letter, a Statement of Assets for O’Shea & Sons, the family firm handed down through four generations. And now it had been liquidated. Listed too was the Dunn & Dunn Quality Home of Character, the house where Mo had spent her first eleven years, with the Doric columns and the weather vane that spun to Atlantic depressions, with the orangery and double garage with two cars – both of them his and one of them vintage. He shammied them every Sunday while her mother vacuumed the insides, fingering the dashboard and wondering where she’d take herself if she ever learnt to drive.

Also released were insurances, pensions and a ‘portfolio of investments,’ the papers said, and a column of financial acronyms Mo couldn’t begin to decipher. Then, at the bottom, almost a footnote, the sale of ‘assorted military memorabilia’. Selwyn had liked his weaponry. He’d put together a prized collection on long weekends and on bank holidays, when he’d browsed the antique shops of northern market towns, while his wife read the boxes of dusty yellow postcards and his daughter stared out of the window, cracking sherbet lemons and willing time on.

Which meant Sold: the sabre that had charged with the Light Brigade. Sold: the Luger from the Second World War that her father kept under the bed, the tip worn to a shine, wrapped in a Taylors of Harrogate tea-towel, placed out of reach ‘and don’t you dare ever go near it.’ Which meant Sold: the musket balls from the English Civil War. And, suddenly, her father’s patter came back to her about men and their Roundheads as his friends and their wives arrived for dinner, and her mother took their coats.

Also in the solicitor’s envelope, a copy of Adult Toys International Trading, a magazine Mo hadn’t seen since the day she and her mother had walked away from the family home into freezing sleet and left him. On the cover, ‘The Gay Issue’ and a smiling map of Ireland. The Republic had just decriminalised. The question exciting the industry: ‘Is this our biggest breakthrough market since Hong Kong?’

Selwyn would have said: ‘I’m not happy at all about the gay thing’. He was either happy as a sandboy or not happy at all. Nothing in between. He wouldn’t have been happy at all because, as he used to say, everything had its place: coats went in the coat cupboard; shoes went on the shoe rack; men’s privates went in women’s privates. ‘Privates’ was the term he used in front of his daughter. It’s what he would have said if he’d read ‘The Gay Issue’ over family breakfast, spooning down his porridge while Sue sliced the bloomer and put it in the toaster and stood ready with the lever the minute he was done.

Adult Toys International Trading was bookmarked, and when Mo opened it, there it was: the black-rimmed notice that Selwyn Roderick (‘Roddy’) O’Shea, former Treasurer of the British Adult Toys Association and Honorary Fellow of the International Guild of Adult Toy Makers had passed away peacefully at home after a short illness. His funeral had taken place in the Norman church in the town where she’d grown up – no flowers please, donations to the Rotary Club or the Yorkshire Stroke Society. He’d been buried in the graveyard that stippled the hill in sight of his workplace office. It was the graveyard too, where Vanessa Francine lay, having died of something pernicious before the age of thirty. That was all Mo had ever known about her father’s first wife. That, and that her white-pebble grave was tidied by a man in a gardening apron who picked at weeds by annual subscription. And that one time, under a bright July sky, her mother, Susannah Moore, had got chatting with a man who’d brought flowers – gorgeous red gladioli – to the grave of a woman called Vanessa.

Once every year, Susannah went to the cemetery and spent time among the children’s graves. She found them the saddest – the diminished plots, far too small for that much loss; the toy windmills that spun across the years the child hadn’t lived to see; the cast of a palm, make-believe small, but proving this child too had been here and had also left its mark.

Susannah, though, didn’t have a grave, so she borrowed other people’s.

And that, Mo thought, was the problem with cemeteries: people chatted, they bonded over ghosts, because there’s nothing so attractive as another person’s loss. In this case, they chatted about her ‘lost child’ and his ‘dear first wife.’ Which meant Selwyn was counting on a second.

Mo pulled down the blackout blind, got into bed and told herself to sleep. But her father wouldn’t let her. She tossed and turned, trying to find the comfy dent in the mattress. The room seemed smaller than ever, the walls closing in.

At the last Eden jumble, she’d tried to make more space by giving away the clutter – the books from college she’d lugged around for years; the dumb-bells, the bread-maker from David Dave, never used and still in its wrapper. And one time last autumn, when the light had slanted in and shown up all the dust, she’d packed everything away, done a clean, and never really unpacked again. Just-Ex Dave had said, ‘There’s less of you every time I come here.’

Which was true.

Mo was – though she didn’t know it at the time – absenting herself from Dave. She said, ‘Sometimes you have to put your life into boxes to see how much life you have left.’

She had one box. A big box. But just the one.

Now Mo got out of bed, opened the blind and re-read the solicitor’s letter. The word ‘liquidate’ struck her. Not ‘wind up’ or ‘close down’. ‘Liquidate’ sounded like exterminate, annihilate, eliminate. When her father put an end to things, it was always total destruction.

So, she thought, Selwyn had decided that he would be the last O’Shea and Son, the end of the line. He’d decided that his estranged daughter would have no interest in taking on the family firm.

Definitely no interest in that.

When Mo was seventeen, the careers advisor at her school had asked what she wanted to do when she left. She thought: well, at least you didn’t say ‘when you grow up’. Because by that time, Mo already felt old. She felt ancient – exhausted by her mother’s state, by her father’s campaigns against them.

It was break-time. Through the window, Mo listened to the hard jar of footballs hitting walls. ‘I want to work with kind people.’

‘Nursing, perhaps? Nurses are kind.’

Mo thought about that, picking at a picked-at scab.

‘Or a midwife?’

She couldn’t cope with babies. She couldn’t, at that point, cope with much at all. But babies? They were so complicated and underestimated. People had no idea of the enormity of what they were doing when they made them. But Mo didn’t say that. Instead she said, ‘I’m not keen on the word “wife”.’

‘Or a vet, then?’

‘They put things down.’

‘But only out of kindness.’ The careers advisor looked at Mo. His eyes closed. ‘If you close your eyes, where do you see yourself ten years from now?’

Mo watched his eyelids flutter. Long lashes. Smooth skin. A young man, new to the job. ‘Hopefully, I’m still alive, I’m still breathing.’

He opened his eyes and laughed. He loved this job, she could tell. Teenagers and their skewed ambitions: they had too much of it or none at all. It was be the Prime Minister or just have working lungs.

Mo said, ‘I just want to survive.’

A different careers advisor might have said, ‘Is everything all right at home, Mo?’ This one listed jobs that involved survival skills: ambulance service, mountain rescue, RNLI.

‘I want to work with people who’ve done it,’ Mo said. ‘People who’ve got through life, despite everything.’

‘That’d be old people. You don’t mean old people?’

But maybe Mo did mean that.

And that was how she went into Elderly Care. Now she looked after people with loose outlines who sat in hard chairs and napped to daytime telly. They drank warm squash from plastic beakers and urinated into nappies. Most days somebody died. Then relatives would arrive looking sad, or relieved, or both.

Would Selwyn O’Shea ever have imagined that his daughter was now Night Duty Officer in a place called Eden? If she opened her window, smells crept in of custard, gravy, soup – anything that didn’t need teeth – and on stormy days, the shipping forecast because the Head Chef’s husband worked on the trawlers. If she stood on her bed and the mist cleared, she could just see the Isle of Wight.

What would Selwyn think if he knew where she was now? He’d say, ‘It’s all very well looking after other people’s fathers, but isn’t blood thicker?’

Mo opened her Christmas cards. They were from people she knew up north – people, at least, sheused to know. Mo hadn’t caught up with anyone since she’d moved away for this job, and wouldn’t now till who knew when? Tina, her neighbour at Number Two, had sent her ‘Help the Aged’. Mr Sadler at Number Six, who hadn’t left the house since his cerebellar stroke, had gone for ‘Save the Children’. And her best mate, Spud, had dipped her baby’s hand in paint and pressed it onto a cereal packet.

But then, they’d all done that: all her friends had moved away – to big houses in small towns with buttery kinds of names – and were now mostly mothers. Their husbands took reliable trains on scenic lines to the office and were home in time for Blue Peter. They had back gardens with trees that grew golden pears and giant peaches, and from time to time they’d ring Mo up and fight wistfulness on the phone.

Now Mo heard voices outside her door. Two residents were taking a long time to say hello in passing. Then, coming down the corridor, the whistle of Larry the Handyman. He worked his way through the Wing every morning, tightening loose things, loosening tight things and knocking out ‘Chopsticks’on the piano. And against it all, the crash of pans from the kitchen, the squeal of gulls caught on gusts of wind and, from the morning mobility class, the awful cries of men battling their own bones.

When the job advert said ‘live-in’ Night Duty Officer, Mo had imagined a flat in the Eden House grounds with a walk along a strip of crazy paving to get to work. In fact, she had a single room with a shower and a fridge and a view of the garden wall. Mo’s room was on the Red Corridor. It was like living on the Central Line.

It was the first time Mo had lived with anyone since she’d left home. She hadn’t moved in with any of her three Daves: not Radio Dave, not David Dave and not Just-Ex Dave, even though he’d bought a two-bed – one room each. He’d be a flat-share lover, if that’s how she wanted it.

But why won’t you live with me?

Because she needed her own front door.

Because she sometimes wanted to be unavailable.

Because separate addresses made it easier when it came to splitting up.

Because life was complicated enough, wasn’t it? Living itself was a feat, just keeping the show on the road. But living with? It multiplied all the complications.

But Mo hadn’t said any of that. Instead, she’d moved abag in – a truckle case with pyjamas, earplugs, bed-socks, nibbles. And twice a week, she’d taken the bus to his place until she’d got this job. It was promotion. It was Management. It was more money. So, until a couple of months ago, they’d commuted to each other, travelling end to end of the Great Escape Rail Link: his turn, her turn, his turn, her turn to travel.

At the end of the day shift, Carol called round to Mo with tea and dockets, and a rundown on the day’s events and Neighbours. She fanfared the headlines: into three figures on the Christmas raffle, and light-fingered Lou lifted three thousand dollars from the Ramsey Street coffee shop, and… Carol stopped. ‘Are you all right, Mo, or is it the lighting, only you look pale...’

‘My father’s died.’

‘Oh, pet… sweetie-honey, I’m sorry.’ Carol put down her Love Is… mug and reached an arm around Mo’s waist. ‘And I was the messenger too, wasn’t I? That big envelope. I thought it was heavy. Have you kept it to yourself all day? You should have come out and said something, it’s not good keeping it all bottled up.’ She squeezed Mo as if she might contain ketchup. Mo felt the pinch of Carol’s rings. She had more rings than fingers: signet, engagement, wedding, anniversaries and meaningful gemstones to ward off the worst. ‘You know what’ll happen now, don’t you?’

He’d already had his funeral.

Carol picked up her mug and stared into it. ‘You’ll get pregnant,’ as if she’d seen it in the leaves. ‘It’s what happens.’ It’s what had happened in her family. She named all the people who’d been conceived straight after a death, and Mo couldn’t help wondering what plague had struck the Chaffeys that so many people had died.

‘I think pregnancy’s unlikely.’

‘Unlikely doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Do you know how unlikely you are, Mo, what the chances are of you being here on this planet?’ She said of all the gazillions of sperm Mo’s father had made, and all the eggs her mother had carried, the two that happened to meet were her. What were the odds? Nigh-on impossible. And yet it had happened. ‘Imagine if it hadn’t been your sperm, if it’d been one of the others. What then? That’s what I think if it’s been a bad day at the office: at least it wasn’t One of the Others.’ Carol felt her wrist and tinkered with her lucky charms. She said, ‘The reason why it happens, and the reason why I say pregnant, is the reason why Todd and Phoebe came up with that name for their daughter.’

Mo had made a point of never watching Neighbours.

‘Hope.’

Then Carol said she’d have a quiet word in key ears, and soon after, Larry called round. ‘I don’t think I knew you even had a father.’

‘I didn’thave a father.’

A shrug of his huge shoulders. ‘I suppose death is something that touches us all at some point in our lives.’ In Larry’s hands, a bouquet of hammers and chisels, a bunch of metal flowers.

Then the Head Chef came by in her bloodied apron bringing condolences from the kitchen. ‘When my dear Dad, God bless him, passed…’ and she described a state of magnificent grief Mo simply couldn’t imagine. ‘We’re all very sorry for your loss.’

‘No need. We weren’t that close.’

‘But still…’

‘I know. I know.’ Though the Head Chef didn’t. Very few people had any idea about Selwyn.

That night, Mo did what she’d done every night since getting this job – went to the lounge and drifted through the magazines. She picked up My Life, which Carol brought into work ‘in case family want something to browse, to pass the time while Dad’s sleeping.’ The crossword was half done, the horoscope annotated, the telly ringed. Mo did the personality test. She found out she had a tendency to be impulsive, was more superstitious than she realised, and dependent and independent, depending. She turned to the feature ‘I changed my life…and it changed me!’ The women were always pearly and smiling, and caught at the end of a laugh. They looked astonished at what they’d done, their eyes so bright they could have been polished.

This woman had thrown it all in – her husband and a job in marketing – and got on a plane to Peru. Why Peru? In truth, she said, it could have been anywhere. But the one thing she packed whenever she travelled was her good luck Paddington Bear. In Lima, she’d learnt to knit. She took to bowler hats. And now she sold knitted Paddingtons all over the world, including to Hamleys.

Mo gazed out of the window. Beyond the glass was the rest of the world. Her horizon stopped at The Needles. But follow a line from the Isle of Wight and you got to France and Mali and Ghana. She knew because she liked to spend time with the atlas – the out-of-date Collins that called Zimbabwe Southern Rhodesia. She’d even been there once, to visit Selwyn’s uncle before it was taken over. And Canada to visit a cousin who lived at number one-thousand-and-something because Canada was huge and needed long streets. Also Australia to see his brother Dennis, who was doing all right with sheep.

Mo picked up the atlas now. She held it to her face and inhaled. Then she fingered the pages till at the back she reached the maps of the night sky. Mo had always wanted to learn the constellations: it would help if she ever got lost at sea. Sometimes, when she heard the shipping forecast, she wondered what it would be like to be on a ship actually going somewhere and really needing to know.

Learning the constellations was like learning the positions of cricket. She’d done that once for Radio Dave – except the stars began with the Big Bang and lasted millennia, and her relationship with him had started softly and petered out after a season. But he’d seen her through her mother’s death, just when everyone – except Mo – was taking their final exams. He’d been the kindest, loveliest man and had made her fall in love with Daves in general. After Radio Dave came David Dave, who wasn’t a true Dave because he wanted all his syllables. After graduating, he’d gone into Social Care Management and had helped Mo get her first job. He knew why she didn’t have her degree, even though – apart from the piece of paper – she was qualified. David Dave was practical, and going out with him was like walking on one of those conveyor belts at the airport, where you get to where you’re going really fast without even trying. He was a facilitator, although sometimes he could be of too much assistance. One day he announced he wanted to facilitate Mo’s well-being. ‘I want to look after you. I want to take care.’ Which was kind, but also depressing because it meant she needed looking after. And it turned David Dave from a boyfriend into something else. It was the word ‘care’ that did it – odd, really, given that Care was what they both worked in and cared a lot about. Which shows how careful you have to be with words.

Also with people.

Mo had left him after that.

He said, ‘You always do a runner.’

‘Idon’t do a runner. I remove myself from situations.’

‘That’s just a question of speed. If in doubt, run. It’s been the motto of your life,’ and he recited all the things she’d run from – her father, of course; jobs that weren’t going well; university, which wasn’t fair; the Brownies. Did she really tell him that?

Then there was a pause. A fallow patch. A long one. And then, finally, came Diploma Dave, who was now Just-Ex Dave. He was the one who’d suggested Mo did the BTEC in Grief and Bereavement. A diploma like that would mean she zipped up the career ladder, death not being something many took as a specialism. And it was the BTEC that had got Mo this job at Eden House. When the contract went out to tender, they had to have someone on the staff who could deliver the Service Level Agreement, who was trained ‘to interact meaningfully with a close family member before, during and after their Loss’. Also to show that ‘we will care, we do care, and that we have cared,’ to care in all the tenses.

‘It’d be a useful experience – in so many ways,’ Diploma Dave said. ‘Everything you do…’ He reached out his arms. ‘Come here,’ and Mo flattened her face in the smell of the spaghetti he’d cooked the night before. ‘Everything you do is defined by loss. Of your mother. Of your father.’

‘I’mnot defined by my father. Everything I do is theopposite of my father.’

‘Exactly.’

And that was the thing: Daves understood. They were untroubled, understated, unironed, uneventful men. And not one of them liked Perry Como, or Pontefract cakes, or had a vintage car.

Now Mo picked up the local paper. Selwyn, apparently, was out tonight. Aries was bright and clear at nine o’clock in December. He was a Ram, born on the first of April, which made him the butt of easy jokes. He wasn’t happy at all about his birthday, so he always said he was born on the second and it was ‘close enough to midnight to be true.’ Selwyn’s mug bore his zodiac sign – a ram’s head and horns. It was drawn in outline, and sat on the breakfast table facing Mo and her mother like a womb and fallopian tubes. It was a big mug with a fat handle for a slow cuppa while he read the Telegraph. On his side of it, the inscription: Aries demands love for, like the infant, without love Aries dies.

Not that Selwyn thought much of the stars. They’d always been there, he said, and always would be.

‘Not always. Not before the Big Bang.’

He said they were just like the pattern in the wallpaper – and who got excited about that?

‘But the stars change.’

‘No, they don’t.’

‘Yes, they do.’

‘No, they don’t.’ Just like Punch and Judy.

And so it was. Selwyn took command of the night sky. He ordained that the stars were still and eternal. And so, for the eleven years that Mo lived with him, that is what they were.

Still and eternal.

It sounded like the kind of thing you’d find on a gravestone.

Mo hadn’t seen it in years, but she could still picture the cemetery that overlooked their Yorkshire town. She wondered who her father’s neighbours were, how much elbow room he’d got for himself, what view he commanded, how close to the top of the hill he’d managed to secure his plot. Was it an eternal Quality Home of Character with the Burmese marble that his father, Stanley, had? She wondered about the wording: Loving husband? Loving father? The things that gravestones said...

And that was when Mo heard her name. Mr Nash, bent out of shape by compression of the spine and reflections in the glass had tottered round to find her all the way from Room 42. It was the meaning of life, though he didn’t know it – he was way too old for things like that.

She opened the lounge door.

‘Can’t you sleep, Mo?’ he said. ‘Do you know what I do when I can’t sleep?’

He was doing it right now. He called round and delivered messages that, at three in the morning, often felt like the meaning of life. Mo wasn’t sure where he got them from – if he made them up, or if the preacher from the Gospel Group put them into his head. But Mr Nash stood in his pyjamas and bare feet and said things like: You will be free of your past when you realise you cannot be free of your past. But the one that seemed to haunt him was: You live once, but you die twice – the second time when everyone who’s ever known you has gone and there is no-one left to speak of you.

Mr Nash didn’t have any children.

‘Will you speak of me, Mo?’

Tonight, Mr Nash had had a nightmare that this was his last winter and, given he was almost one hundred, it might well have been true. Mo came out and took his offered hand, and they sat in the lounge and watched the first snow of winter fall through a slice of yellow moon. It landed on the rockery and settled, turning the houseleeks into outsized flakes.

Mr Nash said, ‘Snow makes me think of Gladys.’

They’d met in the hard winter of 1916, courted in its first flurries, declared themselves in the thick of a blizzard, and drawn hearts in the drifts in Regent’s Park before Mr Nash was sent off to France. Gladys told him afterwards that they hadn’t melted for months. She had cold ears for the rest of her life, he said – never recovered – the lobes like drops of ice, like frosted pearls.

Gladys was ten years dead.

Mr Nash visited her grave on the first of every month. It was his only outing from Eden, and he was devoted to it. He went in all weathers in his black worsted coat and fedora, and always took Gladys a bunch of white roses: they looked like her pearl-drop ears. And when he got back he was frozen, his nose dripping. He was smaller and older and ‘each time closer to her,’ he said.

Mo thought: I don’t need a corpse.

Seventeen years of nothing, and from nowhere a Dead Dad.

She gazed out of the window to where a chaos of snowflakes eddied and then settled and made a cushion on the garden bench. It was where, every morning, Larry had his cigarette and polished with his overalls the plaque that said: In Memory of All Who Sit Here.

Mo had done her best to forget she’d ever had a father. As Selwyn himself would have said: ‘Could you just do us a favour and kindly bugger off?’

Chapter two

In the morning, Carol knocked – quieter than usual – and put her head round the door. She gave Mo an envelope. It had no stamp. It was from Carol-and-everyone-at-Eden-House and the only condolence card Mo ever got for her father: a black-inked sailing ship touching the fine horizon of a wide, blank sea. Carol had already conveyed to Mo her take on loss and its reparation, and she hadn’t had time to go round collecting signatures. So she’d filled the space with fat felt-tip: YOU ARE NOT ALONE!!!

‘And a bit of good news,’ and she read Mo her My Life horoscope: Be ready for major change. Things you want will become available if you keep an open mind. Look in unexpected places. It was the June issue and Mo had already read it. ‘A horoscope isn’t news, Carol.’

‘Oh, pet…,’ as if of course it was, and Mo must be really out of sorts. Carol believed in reading the signs. Not signs in general, but the signs, put out there by the designers of the universe, the makers of fate. She asked Mo how she was doing.

There were five stages of grief and, as far as Mo could tell, she wasn’t feeling any of them. She was feeling dumped on. Put out. Pissed off. ‘Oh, you know how it is. These things are hard to put into words.’

‘Ah, bless. But of all of us at Eden House, you’re the one qualified to manage things like this.’ Mo’s official title was Night (and Mortality) Duty Officer, but ‘let’s drop the bit in brackets,’ Carol had said, ‘for the brevity of all concerned.’

For the final assignment on her degree, they’d all had to keep a reflective journal. Her tutor had said: ‘I want to know how, deep down, loss feels for you.’ Mo hadn’t had a chance to do it. She’d been too busy. Her mother had been dying at the time.

Carol said, ‘This is stage one, isn’t it?’

‘Denial.’

‘Only four more to go.’

If Mo had a reflective journal now, she’d have written I could be furious with you, Selwyn, but I don’t want to be because that’s what you were. So instead I’ll do forgetting. I’ll be completely calm and make a cup of tea. ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she said to Carol.

‘Oh, hon. You’re so… I don’t know how you do it. I’dbe in pieces.’

Mo wanted to say: actually, I amin pieces. I’m just stuck back together with glue that’s proved, over the years, to be fairly durable. The lines aren’t entirely straight. A professional restorer wouldn’t be impressed. But then, I did it myself, with a little help from my Daves.

But Mo didn’t say any of that. She said, ‘Earl Grey or Assam?’

After the tea and Bourbons, and ‘Sleep well,’ and ‘Anything I can do, you know where I am,’ and a rattle of Carol’s charms, Mo went to the window. She put the Eden House condolences between Just-Ex Dave’s Christmas card and a pot of basil groping for the light.

Mo had written to him in October to say: Sorry, I’m really sorry, but I just can’t do this anymore. She’d written one night when no-one was stirring on the Men’s Wing, and there was no wind, and even the gulls had given up crying. She said she didn’t know why she had to end it, but she just had to. She asked him if he knew why.

Dave had written a whole essay around Season’s Greetings in nine languages from Amnesty International to say: honestly, he’d seen it coming. It’d been brewing for months. It wasn’t easy, he said, commuting to a relationship in a tiny room in an institution. He had to sign in and sign out, and it made loving Mo feel like a prisoner-befriender scheme. And when she came up to him, it was day release. ‘Life’s just become too small for you,’ he wrote. ‘You need air. Go somewhere. Do something.’ He’d signed off: Go well, Mo! D xxx

Not love. But still, she’d got his usual three kisses, the kisses he’d press to her cheeks if they ever met again. And then a P.S.: But the main thing is: Just go!

Mo went to the sink and stared at herself in the mirror. There she was, Mo Moore – according to Carol, a singular human event and, despite her declaration otherwise, completely and utterly alone: she had no father, no mother, no partner, no siblings, no children, no family at all. Even when she searched for it, she found no family likeness. There was no trace of either of them – not the O’Shea jaw, not the flash of Moore auburn hair. Mo had a long, pale, cricket-bat face, which was why Radio Dave had loved her.

Mo opened the wardrobe and knelt down to the safe. The safe had been installed, Carol said, to scupper the chances of potential intruders. In reality, it was against forgetful residents who wandered in from time to time, thinking they lived there, or that Mo was their daughter or their wife.

She tapped in the code: 150176 – the date she and her mother had left Selwyn, the date that had changed everything. Inside, her birth certificate, a tin of Sue’s ashes, the solicitor’s envelope. Also, one or two photos of residents who’d died and thank-you letters from their family. Sometimes, Mo would take them out and hold them up to the light and say their names and remember.

Just-Ex Dave had found the photos disturbing. ‘You keep dead men in your cupboard?’ He said, ‘You’re not happy, Mo.’

‘I’m not unhappy.’

‘Yes, you are.’

‘Am I?’ How did Dave know so many things she didn’t?

And now Beethoven’s Fifth, tapped so lightly Mo almost missed it. Carol put a hand into the room. ‘Recorded delivery.’ She was whispering. ‘Thought you should have it even though you’re asleep.’ Mo took the envelope and Carol pulled the door to.

Mo knew who it was from – she recognised the postmark. She was careful with the envelope, didn’t want to rip it. It wasn’t a letter this time, though. A compliments slip said:

I am pleased to inform you that you are the sole beneficiary of your father’s estate. I enclose a cheque for the amount due. Your father appended one condition, namely that his grave is suitably maintained in perpetuity. I have taken the liberty of arranging the matter and subscribed to a GOLD service. I attach a standing order to Yorkshire Parks and Leisure and would be glad if you could submit it to your bank.

Mo removed the paperclip and a cheque fell into her lap. It was inscribed in effortless copperplate and issued by a London bank she thought was a wetland bird. Her eyes fell to the noughts – not so many that they blurred, but enough to have to count them twice, to say the number out loud and check against the longhand that filled both lines.

Mo paced her room. She did circuits of the rug. She knew she was really happy and really not happy – she didn’t know why. Dave would know, if she could have asked him. Actually, she knew why.

She was bothered by the fact that a man who’d threatened to kill her had decided to leave her everything he had.

Why would her father – a man she hadn’t seen for seventeen years – decide to be nice now?

Why not leave his estate to his brothers? Selwyn had thought a lot of Ted and Dennis. Or his niece? He’d always had a soft spot for Debbie.

Or else Battersea Dog’s Home? Selwyn loved dogs – though they’d never had one because the fur would show on his Quality wool carpets, and because they needed walking, and he was too busy, and he didn’t want his wife or daughter out in the park after dark, and then it’s not fair on the dog. So he took passing possession of other people’s, knew all the breeds, ruffled the scruff of the neck, said, ‘There’s my boy!’

Why had her father thought of his daughter after all this time?

Mo lay on the bed doing mental arithmetic, thinking how many years she could get by without having to work – and double that if she went part-time; or maybe she could retire if she cut back on everything and ate baked beans for the rest of her life. And she drifted off to sleep in a cloud of fractions and unlikely life-choices.

A couple of hours later, Mo woke with a start. Through the wall, Mr Turner had pulled the alarm thinking it flushed the toilet. It would take a while for the corridor to quieten, so she reached for something to read. Under the bed, the Gay Issue of ATIT. Mo flicked through the pages, releasing the smell of expensive ink and turning down corners of the things she’d go back to. She skimmed her father’s notice. So, she thought, over all those years, Selwyn could have been anywhere – half a world away, on the other side of the globe – and now here he was, former Treasurer and Honorary Fellow, in a Gold grave in Yorkshire.

Mo’s gaze slipped over the staples to the classifieds, slid across discounts on lubricants and love-beads, and then stopped on an ad that said:

Why not fresh start in beautiful China? Come and see the future! Make an adventure! Huge space house and grounds of wild nature!

Plus local handicraft factory for easy take-over.

Call Mrs SuPingdi, P.R.C.

Mo’s hand reached for the phone. An index finger dialled. She listened to a distant ring. Then a voice yelled ‘Wei!’

‘Is that really China?’

‘China.’

‘Oh my God,’ and Mo put the receiver down. What on earth was she doing? She lay on the bed listening to her heart, wondering if that pounding was excitement or panic. She grabbed the solicitor’s envelope and breathed into it, calming herself. After a while, she peered inside, found a manila cul-de-sac, a dry, dead-end that smelt of antique drawers. Mo’s hand drifted back to the phone. She lifted the receiver and consulted the mouthpiece as if it were an oracle. She put it to an ear and listened to the hum of English indecision.

Years later, when Mo told the story, she said it was the fresh start and the adventure that did it. Also ‘huge space’ and ‘wild’. The word ‘factory’ didn’t register except as something that happened to come with the house.

This time, the voice took longer to answer.

‘Excuse me, is that Mrs Su?’

‘Is.’

‘It’s just that…well…’ Mo took a deep breath. ‘I’ve seen your advert in Adult Toys International Trading and I’m wondering is it still available?’

‘Available.’

Oh, she thought. That complicates things. ‘So…how much are you asking?’

Mrs Su quoted a figure in Renminbi. ‘Which country you call from?’

‘I’m in England.’

‘Sterling money! Excellent.’ She did the conversion in her head and told Mo how much in pounds.

Mo thought: that’s peanuts,and then wished she hadn’t. It was the kind of thing Selwyn would have said. The Quality Home had been full of things that had cost him peanuts or been going for a song. She said, ‘That’s a very reasonable price.’

‘You are a very reasonable person to say so.’

‘Have you had other interest?’

‘Interest, but he is not paying English pounds with foreign connections to the outside world. I have not sold to him.’

Mo said, ‘I’ve never been to China, but it all sounds very exciting and…’

‘No buts. You are The One.’ Her words tolled across the globe, loud enough to escape the receiver, where they hung and eddied, then drifted to the floor. She told Mo she’d meet her in Hong Kong and take her to Pingdi. ‘I show you the property, the wild, the woods, the Menglang, I show you the everything. I show you future chances you cannot believe.’ She said, ‘You buy your flight ticket, I buy your visa. I get you F-type.’

‘F for what?’

‘For feasible. In Hong Kong, no embassy, no apply, no waiting, no why you want to go to China, do you have friends there, what kind of friends, do you have AIDS? Just, cash please.’ A brief pause, but only to catch her breath. ‘Come quick! As quick as you can. I am already waiting.’

And then the line went dead.

Mo listened to the sounds of the Eden House canteen – the splutter of blenders and slug of mashers, the makings of formless food. She caught the smell of semolina, which meant today was Tuesday.

Mo picked up her inheritance cheque and held it in both hands. It was like a giant business card, like a Golden Ticket to the Chocolate Factory. What should she do? Something sensible, such as invest it, or whatever it was you did when you understood money? Or should she just take the money and run?

If in doubt, run.

So Mo went to the bank. She handed over the standing order for Selwyn’s grave.

The clerk said, ‘What reference shall I put?’

‘SOS.’

‘Is that a charity?’

Did you have to feel charitable for it to count as charity? ‘It’s my father.’

‘That’s very nice,’ she said, ‘helping him along.’

‘He’s dead.’

She blushed. She fiddled with her necktie – red-and-white striped and tied in a huge bow. Why did bank clerks have to dress as clowns? She said, ‘Well, you’re helping him along anyway, wherever he is, wherever you go after this life…’ She glanced at the standing order. ‘…such as Yorkshire.’

‘And I’d like to pay in this cheque.’

The clerk stared at it. She stared at Mo, and then she dropped from her seat. ‘I won’t be a moment.’ She tapped a code into a door and disappeared.

It took a while. Mo sat in the scoop of a leatherette chair and listened to a couple suggesting each other’s possessions as security on a loan. When the clerk returned, she apologised. ‘It was rather a large amount and it triggered our Fraud Alert. But it should have been our Privileged Customer Procedure. Can I book you an appointment to discuss your options?’

But all Mo wanted was traveller’s cheques. ‘And £500 in Chinese money.’

She looked unsure at that. Did they use actual money over there? So she looked it up, and it turned out they did, and it would take three days to arrive from London.

Then Mo said to expect a large withdrawal from Hong Kong.

‘Visiting family?’ She said she’d always wanted to visit family. In Australia. For her eczema. But she was stuck in a booth behind bullet-proof glass in a bank overshadowed by Woolworth’s. A painted nail worked at a patch of skin.

‘I’m emigrating,’ Mo said.

‘For real? For ever?’

Yes, for ever. For ever and ever amen. ‘For now,’ Mo said. It made her sound less reckless, including to herself.

Then Mo went to Thomas Cooks and bought a one-way ticket to Hong Kong. She borrowed a phrasebook from the library and learned to say ‘hello,’ ‘thank you’ and ‘goodbye’ in Chinese. She got jabs for hepatitis and jaundice, and tablets in case of the water.

When she told Carol she was quitting her job and going to China: ‘China?’ A pout as if to place it. ‘That is unexpected. But didn’t I tell you? Or rather, didn’t the stars?’

Then Christmas came. The choir from the boys’ school gave a carol concert – real-life children with voices and hearts that hadn’t yet broken. Mistletoe hung in the lounge for anyone who could purse their lips and stay steady enough to kiss. There was an advent calendar, and residents took turns to open it, taking pleasure in counting down their days.

The day Mo left, Carol gave her the latest issue of My Life. Under the Editor’s Letter she’d written in that loping hand of hers: Send us a Paddington Bear (or whatever it is they have over there)! Love you! Miss you already!!! Mo also got a present, a pannier for the bike she was sure to ride in China, made by the Wednesday rattan class. She spent that day as she had every day of the last eleven months: listening to stories with unreliable names, and managing the basic functions of whatever life was left to the people who called this home. She made Mr Wright his last cup of tea – two bags, not stirred, not shaken.

Mr Turner said, ‘Does it have to be China? It’s an awfully long way to go to get away.’

Mr Nash said, ‘What’ll I do now when I can’t sleep?’ His fingers fluttered upwards and landed weightless on Mo’s palm.

‘Have you ever done anything impulsive, Mr Nash?’

‘I’d do everything impulsively if I could see where I was going.’ His hand slid back to his lap. ‘I’m sorry you won’t be here for my centenary.’

There’d be a scattering of nieces and nephews holding paper plates of white-triangle sandwiches, spreading out in the lounge and trying to fill it. ‘You know what you are to me, Mo.’ He put his hands to his face. It could have been Hide-and-Seek: he’d count to one hundred and come to China and find her. Mo knew she’d remember that moment. Of all the pictures of all the residents, that was the one she’d take with her. She pressed her lips to what was left of his hair and kissed him, his skin cool and dry and smelling of the baby lotion he’d won in the summer raffle. You weren’t supposed to do things like that. It crossed professional boundaries. But then, Mo didn’t work here anymore.

She looked away. In the garden, Larry the Handyman was putting the finishing touches to his farewell monument. He’d swept up the snowdrifts and turned them into a sailing ship. Mo was taking the slow boat to China.

She had her last meal in England in the Lucky Star Noodle Bar with its All-You-Can-Eat Seasonal Buffet. Mo sat next to the counter, at a table too small for two. Beside the till, a golden Buddha laughed at everything, its lap heaped with fortune cookies. From the speakers, Boyz II Men sang ‘End of the Road’. Early the next morning, Mo would be on her way to Hong Kong. The plane would tip away from the earth, and something heavier than air would take to the air – that was the magic of it. She’d press her face to the window and wave to the shrinking tentacles of suburbia, and say ‘Goodbye England. I’m never coming back.’

Around her, families ransacked kettle-drums of cooling noodles. Brassy laughter filled the café on this sunny winter afternoon. Tomorrow, Mo thought, she was heading to an entire land of noodles – of firecrackers and lanterns, wild tigers and paper dragons, triple-jointed acrobats and one-hundred-year-old eggs. A Forbidden City of concubines and eunuchs. Men in silk pyjamas with plaits to their waists and women with bound feet.

Or did she just make all that up? Actually, she had no idea what China was like. She had no idea what life was like when you didn’t work in Elderly Care, when you weren’t on call against final indignities, against life’s last loss.

Mo watched the diners. She matched fathers with daughters, and mothers with sons, picking out shared features and tied fortunes. And her thoughts edged, despite themselves, towards a grave in Yorkshire. She couldn’t imagine that towering man, her father, shrunk and weak and wistful like the men in Eden House. She couldn’t imagine his rage and thunder, cold and stilled. She had no idea what was left of him now, how long a body lasted in rained-on