Strangers by Rosie Thomas

He crossed to the vast television set and turned the volume knob, and silence descended.
    ‘Eh? I was watching that, Stevie. Don’t play about, there’s a good boy.’
    ‘Nan, I want to talk to you. I’m going to live up West. I’ve got a room and everything. I’ll be all right.’
    He had been so callous in those days. Nan had just sat and stared at him, with her big pale fingers twisting in her lap.
    ‘Eh? Live up there? What for? You live here, love. Ever since you were that high.’
    She held her palm out, a couple of feet off the lino, and Steve thought, Yes, I do remember. And ever since I’ve wanted to get out . ‘I can’t live here for ever, Nan. I want to get on. I’ll come and see you weekends, I promise.’
    Her face went sullen then. ‘After all I’ve done,’ she murmured.
    She had done everything, of course. Mothered him and fended for him, and bought his food and clothes for ten years. He couldn’t pay her back for her devotion, he knew that with chilly sixteen-year-old detachment.
    ‘I’ll come and see you often,’ he repeated. ‘And as soon as I’ve made it I’ll buy you a better place, up near me or here, whichever you like.’
    ‘Make it?’ she snapped at him. ‘How are you going to do that? What about school? You could go to college. Mr Grover told me himself.’
    Patiently he had tried to explain it to her. ‘I don’t need to go to college. It’s a waste of time, all that. I’ve got a job, Nan. I’m not going back to school.’
    She was too angry to listen to him. So he had hugged her unyielding bulk, picked up his belongings, and marched out.
    All he felt was relief as he left the Peabody Buildings. He bumped past each pair of heavily-curled brown-painted balcony railings, down the tight spiral of stone steps to the road. He walked briskly up the street to the bus stop and then stood peering eastwards into the traffic for the first sight of the bus that would take him up West for good.
    The job was as a messenger for an advertising agency, and his home was a second-floor bedsitter with a restricted view straight down into the Earl’s Court Road. As soon as he arrived, Steve knew that he would never look back. After eighteen months as the Thompson, Wright, Rivington messenger boy he was offered the humblest of jobs in the media buying department. That job led to another and then another, and then to the huge leap upstairs to the circus of the creative floor. From Thompson, Wright, Rivington he was headhunted by another agency, and he began to enjoy money for the first time in his life.
    Then, Steve remembered, I wanted everything. I was so busy making sure I got it that I never thought about anything else.
    There were plenty of other people like him, and the time was ripe for all of them. His agency career began with the first shy appearances of pink shirts at client meetings, and it blossomed all through the sixties and into the seventies between lunches at the Terrazza and afternoons at the Colony Club, punctuated by parties swaying with girls in miniskirts and location shoots in exotic places and creative crises when somebody, usually Steve himself, managed to come up with a headline in the nick of time. Perhaps it hadn’t really been like that at all. It felt too far back to remember. But it had seemed easy and so congenial that for a long, long time he had gobbled up everything that came his way.
    Some time during those years, Nan had died. Steve had been in Cannes at the time of the funeral, doing business, and he couldn’t fly back home for it. But he had paid for everything to be done properly. And he had sent a wreath, which was more than Nan’s only daughter, Steve’s mother, had bothered to do. If she even knew that her mother was dead. Steve himself had hardly seen her since she had taken him, at the age of six, to live with his grandmother.
    ‘Poor Nan,’ he said softly. And then, is remembering always feeling ashamed?
    No, it wasn’t so for Annie. Annie