Nothing Left Unsaid

by Janey Godley

Genres: Mystery; Thrillers; Domestic Thrillers

Synopsis

'Vibrant, warm and often hilarious. An absolute delight' JANE FALLON
'Read Nothing Left Unsaid in two greedy stints. It's a novel written with wit, righteous rage and compassion' NIGELLA LAWSON
'A warm, touching and humorous hymn of praise to those she describes as "wee warrior women"' SUNDAY TIMES SCOTLAND

GLASGOW, 2019. Sharon has rushed home at the news her mother has been admitted to hospital. It's clear Senga's life is coming to an end. As Sharon gathers family and friends together to say goodbye, Senga, as always, does things in her own mysterious way. She instructs Sharon to find the red diary she kept in the 1970s and to read it. There's something Senga needs to talk about while she still has time. The journey into her mother's past is both shocking and surprising, forcing Sharon to re-evaluate her own childhood, her marriage and what she wants her own future to hold.

GLASGOW, 1976. Life in the tenements of Shettleston is a daily struggle. You need your wits about you to survive, and your friends. Senga has both in spades: she is part of the Shettleston 'menage' alongside her friends Bunty, Sandra, Philomena and Isa, and whatever life hands to them - cheating husbands, poverty, illness, threats and abuse - they throw something back just as hard. These women are strong because they need to be. And they never, ever walk away in times of crisis - as Sharon is about to find out.

Praise for Janey Godley:
'Sharpest-elbowed comedy in the world' The New York Times
'A great comic' Billy Connolly

Release date: May 12, 2022

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 256

Sample

CHAPTER 1

2019

Day one

Sharon

My mother, Senga, was the knot that kept the fragile rope of our scattered family together.

Sitting in that gloomy hospital room, watching the Glasgow skyline form shadows on the curtains as the hours passed from morning to afternoon, I waited as all the daughters have waited before me, for the doctor to tell me if we were approaching the end of her life.

I stared at her. It had been a few months since I’d last seen her and so much had changed. I’d come back to Glasgow from Bristol this morning, as she’d deteriorated quickly from her initial diagnosis of cancer, but now she seemed stable. I had left a mess behind me and, to be truthful, I wasn’t in a hurry to go home. My husband had left me after a fucking typical mid-life crisis, my daughter had a new baby to focus on and Mum needed me. Of all her children, I was always the closest geographically and the first to come back and see her when a crisis hit. My brother John was in Spain; my younger sister Janet lived in London, but was incredibly focused on her theatre job in the West End. My PR work could be done remotely from anywhere.

So, back I’d come, I didn’t know how long for. I didn’t know what the future held. But I knew Mum needed me.

Mum and I were both very alike in a sense, though not physically – I was the tall one with the lanky athletic figure and blonde hair; she was small, dark, curvy, with brilliant dimples that made her face almost cartoonish when she smiled. She still had the most amazing crystal-clear blue eyes, but now she looked as though someone had created an inflatable version of her but not quite inflated it.

Mum and I had always had a good relationship growing up. It was different times back then; as the eldest, at thirteen years old I’d had a wee Saturday job in the local fruit shop, which was normal back in the seventies. We’d kind of grown up together, as she’d had me so young. But, as always, time and life take you apart. I’d moved to England, got married and, well, you know how it goes. But she was always my rock if I ever needed anything. Now, she needed me.

In a small, pale green side room in the big Victorian hospital in Glasgow, the doctor sat me down and confirmed my fears. She was dying; he didn’t know how long she had left but all they could do was keep her comfortable. He said that I should stay in Glasgow and contact my siblings as well and prepare for the hard news. Then he showed me out of the room and rushed off towards the lifts, his white coat flapping behind him.

I didn’t know what to say, and he rushed off so quickly that I was momentarily stunned, left adrift in the high-ceilinged hallway, staring at a faded painting of a pale orchid, clutching my handbag to my chest as porters pushed sickly old people past me in giant wheeled beds.

Back at her bedside, the beeping of machines broke the silence; and the smell of disinfectant and lingering aroma of boiled food hung in the air as I stared at her. Long gone was her thick hair, loud laugh and big smile. Here lay a selection of fragile bones covered in pale, yellowish skin, breathing quietly and intermittently. I watched and waited; I tried to match her breathing but it made me feel dizzy.

Then she stirred and her eyes opened and she looked at me. We hadn’t spoken since I’d arrived in Glasgow – her neighbours had phoned to tell me she’d collapsed at home and they’d called an ambulance.

‘Mum, it’s me, Sharon,’ I whispered. I just wanted to hear her voice.

She was working her mouth but nothing was coming out; her lips were dry and she was struggling to swallow. I held up the beaker of water and let her sip through the straw.

She took another breath and locked eyes with me.

Her first words weren’t what I expected. Not ‘Sharon, I love you’ or ‘It’s good to see you’ or ‘Thanks for coming’. She sat up, grabbed the side of the bed and rasped, ‘Sharon, I wrote it all down in the big red book, it’s in my house. You must stay there and read it.’ She lay back gently and I was sure she gave a weak smile. She patted my hand and added, ‘I’d like to see the old gang again before I die.’ Then her eyes closed.

I stared at her, confused. Could she be gibbering from the morphine, and half believe that that bloke from This Is Your Life, the old TV show, was about to meet her at the gates of heaven with his Big Red Book and present her whole life in one episode?

I sat in the quiet room just watching her, waiting for more information, but it was clear she was asleep; her breathing was weak but steady.

What the hell was that about? A book?

Then, somewhere in my memory, I saw a young Senga sitting in a tank top and shorts, writing in a red book as she chain-smoked at the big open tenement window. She was singing along to the radio – ‘You to me are everything’ – as the airless bedroom flooded with sunlight, and I suddenly knew what she was talking about. I remembered that book. She used to pop it on top of the old wooden wardrobe when she heard anyone come into the room.

That big red book.

I left the hospital at seven o’clock, after a hunt for my car in the massive car park, and parked on the road outside her building. The streetlights illuminated a neat row of flats and mature trees lining the pavements, so different from the loud, imposing tenements where we’d grown up. I knew Senga was close to her new neighbours so nothing had changed there; I would pop in and thank Betty, who had called me and let her know the news.

I unpacked my car, grabbed my small case, laptop and coat, and crunched through the autumn leaves, which were ankle-deep as I walked to her white-painted door. It had marbled glass panels at the top in the shape of a sunrise, and a big gold horseshoe door knocker.

There were three locks to negotiate. I got everything into the ground floor flat and switched on the lights.

Her place was small, tidy and smelled of her favourite scent, Tweed. Everything was floral; every time I visited, she’d added more floral chintz.

I closed the curtains and unpacked the food I’d bought in the city centre supermarket on the way back from the Royal Infirmary. I had a wander round the flat to check all was OK; there was some unopened mail on her hall mat, and a single slice of stale bread in the toaster. There was no sign of where she’d fallen, other than an undrunk cup of tea on a side table. My chest tightened with guilt: she must have been terrified lying in here, so weak, dependent on a neighbour coming by to help. Why hadn’t she told me she was so bloody ill? I’d spoken to her last week and she’d assured me she was fine and I didn’t need to ‘come up the road’ as she called it.

I felt like a shitty daughter.

I opened a few cupboards and drawers and checked all the obvious places, but no sign of the red book. But Mum was right: it was here, just as she said. Still on top of her big brown freestanding wardrobe, of course, along with her floral folder of important documents. Not such a secret hiding place, if you knew where to look.

Senga’s big red book.

She did write everything down. She must have wanted it to be read. Why else would she write it?

I clutched it. I could smell the old cracked leather on the cover and I tentatively opened it. A stained, brown official-looking envelope slid out the back, and I could see through the transparent window on the front that it had some photos in it. I couldn’t wait to look at them, but right now I just wanted to start reading, so I put them to one side.

Suddenly I could hear the clacking sound of Scholl’s wooden sandals on the concrete and the voices from the tenements, feel the catch in my throat from cheap cigarettes. These were the scents and sounds of my mother as I remembered her – the feisty, gobby woman who sat in her bra out in the back garden in the summer and let me count the freckles on her chest as she stared into the wide, open sky. Her voice shouted off the pages as I started to read.

I settled down and got stuck in.

1976

June, Monday

So, I have decided to write my diary again. The last one got burned in the great caravan fire of 1975 in Anstruther, when the gas bottle exploded and my auntie, wee Bridie McBride, who used to come on holiday with us, near had a heart attack. She lives up in Springburn now where she runs a shop. So, I am starting my diary again, because I like writing.

Well, I say it’s a diary – it’s just me putting everything down. It helps me think better when I can get all this out. Keeps my head clearer and gives me something just for me. I want to write about my pals, the strongest women I know. They’ve seen me through thick and thin.

Anyway, Sharon has given the whole street nits AGAIN. I can do without the neighbours shouting at me, like it’s my fault all the kids huddle together on a blanket out the back court.

Just heard a radio programme about Sid James. He died a couple of months ago. I liked his Carry On films; Davie Dunsmore, our coalman, is his spitting image when his face is washed. Davie lives near to me and looks out for me, as do my neighbours, especially Frank downstairs.

My husband Billy left me two years ago and is now living with a woman called Donna who lives up at the bus terminus, so he better not be bothering me again. He’s a bastard and I never should have married him. I was too young – we were all too young, getting married as teenagers. Who the fuck lets kids get married? Anyway, Dirty Donna can keep him, I don’t want him back. Apparently she makes good soup and is awfully energetic in bed, according to Frank downstairs. The stupid lassie is nineteen and loves the Bay City Rollers, so now at thirty years of age, Billy is head to foot in tartan, the daft eejit. Well, they can Shang-a-Lang together for all I care. Good riddance. He couldn’t wire a plug, change a baby or keep a job. I hope she can get the shit stains out of his underpants, because his mammy never showed him how to wipe his own arse.

Need to go, the provy man is here and I don’t have the money this week so I am going to let our dog Laddie chase him down the close.

Thursday

Am sweating. Apparently, it’s the hottest summer since the sun was invented.

Woke up, smoked three fags, made tea and pulled on my good American Tan tights and Scholl’s sandals with my new floral smock from Chelsea Girl. I look OK for a twenty-nine-year-old woman who’s had three kids, with one boob bigger than the other and soaked in sweat.

It’s the kids’ school trip today. Who knew they needed suntan cream for the bus run? I don’t know anyone who has any. So there’s me hanging out the back window screaming, ‘Does anyone have suntan cream for the weans?’ I startled Mrs Wilson, who was out beating her big rug over the washing line. Apparently it’s the carpet’s fault her son Derek still hasn’t got married. She never stops going on about it, even tried to pair me up with him, no chance!

Anyway, nobody had any sun cream, coz it’s Glasgow and when would we need it! So I just sent the kids on the school trip and hoped for the best, and no doubt they’ll come back like wee grilled tomatoes. Won’t do them any harm, some calamine lotion will sort them out. No lasting damage. I love my weans, they keep me going.

Sharon sorted the packed lunches for everyone. She’s thirteen and always helps me out – she’s a doer and doesn’t moan the face off me. She’ll be a great mother.

Her younger sister Janet is only ten but already scares me shitless – she can’t play skipping with her rope after she near-choked the Catholic twins up the next block. We’re sticking with ‘it was an accident’ but she scares us all with her Boris Karloff eyes and her weird dreams that she keeps writing down at school in her story jotter.

My John, my angel, my sunshine boy, is eight years old and he is going to play football for Rangers when he’s old enough, according to his da. John might actually love dancing more than football but he’s got fast feet and, unlike our Janet, he’s great at skipping. He’s the quietest of them all, a thinker.

Anyway, I got the kids out the door, told them not to eat all their lunch on the bus to the beach and let Laddie out at the same time, and then I poured myself some orange squash. Fuck, I was thirsty.

It’s exhausting getting them all out in the morning and they only have to walk half a mile to school. When I was a kid, we had to walk three miles rain, hail or shine, and that was after I had helped my mammy at her job cleaning the bingo hall at seven a.m.

Kids nowadays have it so easy.

Friday

Woke up, smoked two fags and had an instant coffee with dry milk as we don’t have a fridge and every pint turns to cheese in this heat.

Still really hot. Mrs Galbraith fainted in the steamie. She was folding her clothes one minute, lying on top of them the next. At least they were clean.

Me, Bunty, Isa, Sandra and Philomena Fitzgerald have started a menage. We’ve known each other since we were wee, and we’re always reminiscing about the stuff we’ve got up to over the years. There’s five of us in all and we all pay £3 a week, and every Friday one of us gets the £15 kitty. Menage is also a French word and someone asked me if it meant three people having sex, but that’s big Lorna over the way for you, the weirdo. They’ve been my pals for years; we all met as school lassies at the youth Co-op dance hall and some of us go as far back as the Brownies. We lived in each other’s houses growing up. Since Billy left, we’ve seen each other every other day, when we can. I wouldn’t have got through the past year without them.

It was my turn this week for the menage, so I bought the kids summer clothes and treated myself to a demi-wave with the money. I felt like Princess Margaret with a full purse.

Went down to the phone box to call my cousin Bella, who now lives in Leeds with her husband, Carl. She moved there after she got hitched because Carl’s from Jamaica and people round our way didn’t take well to mixed marriages. Personally I don’t care – he laughs loud and cooks good food and, unlike my daft bastard of a husband, he doesn’t punch his wife’s face into blue tattoos, so he’s all right by me.

My other cousin Monica has moved to Canada – I’m the one who got stuck here.

Picked up the Daily Record and some fags and headed back home, then I put on the radio and listened in to Tony Blackburn and danced about to the music. Gary Glitter is brilliant and, yes, I would love to be in his gang!

We watched Top of the Pops last night. I like to imagine I could be one of those dancers like Pan’s People or whatever they’re called now. I have hot pants at the ready. Sharon tells me I am so embarrassing but I don’t mind, at least I can still squeeze into them, and am still young-ish.

CHAPTER 2

2019

Day two

Sharon

What a night. I fell asleep dreaming about the seventies. I got up and made myself a coffee as the morning light poured through the stiff, white net curtains in Mum’s wee ground floor flat. So much floral going on. Why did everything she own have to be covered in flowers? It was enough to give you a migraine. But then again, I’m not surprised: our childhood home had been a mishmash of second-hand sofas and clashing wooden tables (my uncle Alex had even painted our Artex-coated walls in an array of garish colours over the years before he died in the late eighties). Maybe all the floral was Senga’s own style finally coming out, now that she could afford it.

I picked up the book from the duvet and took it to the living room to get back into it. It was wonderful to hear Mum’s voice again, through the red book.

It was utterly compelling, but not a diary in the sense of what I imagined a diary to be: no short mentions of appointments, as in my work diary, or middle-class mutterings of weddings and happy records of births; no recipes, or polite descriptions of local events with some interesting pressings of local flora. It was a full-on stream of consciousness about everything she experienced in the seventies.

So, Mum was a secret writer, a bloody good, interesting writer, my forgotten childhood documented in biro, written at pace, full of sweary language. You wouldn’t get that on Mumsnet.

The memories felt so present, so real, almost as though I was right there with her; she certainly had a way with words. Her beautiful handwriting was neat and clear and she described all those people with such vivid clarity, I could see them all. Davie Dunsmore and his big daft face, Laddie, our old black and white mongrel dog, Mrs Wilson in her floral pinny and Janet with her deadly skipping rope!

Mum was right, she had looked good in hot pants, though it had made me so furious back then: why couldn’t she dress like my schoolteacher and be like a normal mum? I forgot she was only twenty-nine years old when I was thirteen.

The old woman lying in that hospital bed was so far removed from the woman who’d had a fist-fight with a big Alsatian dog outside the grocer’s when it tried to bite our John and drag him on to the main road. This was the woman who’d called Maggie Thatcher a cow at the top of her voice. It seemed unbelievable that such a vibrant life force could fade.

When did she go from that vivacious, young woman, dancing to Gary Glitter, to the frumpy, middle-aged curtain-twitcher who’d hated swearing and sex scenes on the telly? Never mind that . . . my dad and Dirty Donna dressed in Bay City Rollers tartan? That’s a horrible flashback!

Yet here it was. In her own blue pen in her big red book.

My mum had never told me exactly what happened between her and my dad. I do have memories of the fighting and anguish he caused her, but the details were forgotten. Maybe she felt it wasn’t something you discussed with your kids.

But her pals, she had so many pals, they shared everything. I haven’t heard her mention Isa and the gang in years; what the hell happened to this merry band of women?

I wanted to find out more, but there was so much to do.

I took a quick peek out of the curtains. Autumn was in full flow in Govan: the trees were golden and heavy with crisp leaves and there was a fine frost o. . .