Common People

by Kit de Waal

My mum couldn’t look after me on her own, nor did she want to. So her dad, my granddad, took me in, putting off his retirement so he could afford it.

  A few more years passed.

  I started primary school.

  My granddad became my legal guardian.

  We moved into a council flat, after our previous house got knocked down.

  My mum came to visit us every now and then, but usually she was too busy shooting up, or getting drunk – after she swapped heroin for booze – or being in prison.

  And the only time I would see Colin, now using again, was in the odd school holiday. I’d take the train to him in Newcastle and for several days we would go to the park, go toy shopping, watch films. At night he’d read to me and play me his records. I was reunited with the old gang – Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Joy Division. I was happy to listen.

  Colin enjoyed all the benefits of being a temporary parent. When I was back home in Manchester, I would build an image of him from only the very best memories. In my daydreams, I never thought of how thin he was, how pale, how his eyes were glazed and bloodshot. I didn’t think of the ugly marks down his arms or how he wanted to sleep all the time. Not once. In my dreams he was always awake, always laughing. In my dreams he was strong. He was calm. He was perfect.

  But then Mary came along. Mary waddled into Colin’s life when he was trying to beat his heroin problem for the second time. Mary was older than Colin, American, and drove a rubbish car. I didn’t much care for Mary and told her so. I said, ‘Mary, I don’t much care for you.’

  In truth, I had never much cared for any of Colin’s girlfriends, or his female acquaintances, or even the checkout girls who made conversation with him whilst giving him his change. They were all competitors for his time, which, for me, was limited to a few days per school holiday as it was. There was also the fear that one of these evil women would somehow turn him against me – a fear that became a reality when Mary appeared.

  I remember when I first met her. I was about eight. I was visiting Colin for the school holidays. Colin wanted Mary and me to bond, so he took us both to Seahouses. During the day, we went on a sightseeing trip that combined two of my favourite things – boats and seals. I spent the entire boat ride ignoring Mary, wondering why Colin was with her. Why would my dad, who I had been certain was both perfect and indestructible, choose such a woman? Maybe he wasn’t perfect after all. And if he wasn’t perfect, he may not be indestructible. He would die one day. It was the first time I had considered this. It was all I could think of for the rest of the boat trip. It was all I could think of on the walk back to the bed and breakfast.

  Later that night, I went to Colin and Mary’s room, which was next to mine. I knocked on the door. I entered.

  He wasn’t there.

  Mary lay on the bed by herself, a mug of coffee in her hand.

  ‘Where’s Colin?’

  ‘In the bath.’ She blew on her coffee, not looking at me.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, and turned to leave.

  I couldn’t wait any longer though. I needed answers. ‘Can I lie on the bed with you?’

  ‘Mm-hmm,’ Mary said, in a way that suggested she really wished I wouldn’t.

  I lay next to her. I had nowhere to rest my head – all the pillows were stuffed under her back – so I leaned on her bloated belly, facing her toes. At least that way she couldn’t see my face. Her whole body tensed. She wanted me to get off her, I knew she did, but she didn’t say so.

  ‘Is Colin going to die?’

  ‘We all die one day,’ she said, sipping her coffee, which made her belly gurgle and grumble.

  I tried to say something, but I couldn’t speak. I felt sick. Even me? I didn’t want to die. And I didn’t want Colin to die either.

  ‘He won’t die yet,’ she said. ‘Colin will probably live until he’s ninety.’

  Ninety? Ninety? Surely he was already nearly ninety? I wanted to hear that he would live for ever, or at least another 200 years or so. I started to cry, my body shaking all over.

  Colin didn’t see me crying, but Mary must have told him all about it later because he didn’t want to know me after that trip. He went away for four years. Actually, he didn’t go anywhere. He stayed where he was – in Newcastle – but he wouldn’t let me visit him any more. For four years I didn’t get a phone call, a letter, or even a birthday card. Nothing.

  What had happened was this. Mary married Colin the first chance she got and told him to break off all contact with me. She also told him to grow a beard, so he looked less boyish. He threw away his razor and listened to her argument for throwing away his son. She suggested that if he wanted to beat his heroin problem, once and for all, he should avoid reminders of his past, his guilt. Seeing me reminded him of the past and made him feel guilty – for leaving when I was little. Mary assured Colin it was for the best. She said, ‘Colin, it is for the best.’ He considered it and agreed, cutting all contact. If I hadn’t cried on the bed with Mary he may have decided differently. But my weakness of character had made me, in his eyes, as disposable as his razor.

  They moved to a country house outside of Newcastle, Mary and Colin did, and the only reminder of either of them having a previous life was Mary’s two dogs. Colin was safe in his little husband–wife cocoon, protected from memory, guilt and crybaby sons.

  But after four years it all collapsed. Mary waddled back to America and I got to speak to him again. I was even allowed to stay at his house in the country. I began to dream, as I had when I was younger, of Colin and me building our own cocoon, a father–son version. As it turned out, he now only wanted a pod for one.

  This became obvious when I got to his house. I was reminded that I was not at the top of his list of interests – music held that spot. Colin’s record-cover images outnumbered photos of me by several thousand to nil. He gave me a chance to be a part of his musical world though. He said I could have one of his albums. I could choose anything I wanted. I could have picked Iggy, Bowie or Joy Division, embracing our shared history. Or I could have chosen one of his latest favourites – Depeche Mode, REM, Primal Scream – and we could have begun an exciting future, discovering new music together.

  But I chose Erasure, the tape in his collection he disliked the most. The Erasure album had been an unwanted present from someone with bad taste, someone who didn’t understand music should be serious and dark, who didn’t understand that Colin’s collection had no place for such poppy twaddle.

  Erasure didn’t fit in at my school back home in Manchester any better than they had fitted into Colin’s music collection. For a class project, on a topic of our choice, I picked Erasure. My presentation consisted of me explaining to the class why they were the greatest band on the planet, and then giving proof by playing their three best songs on a tape player. The class weren’t convinced. They were all boys – we were at an all-boys school, so they had to be – and when my presentation finished they just sat there, staring. Apart from Scott Brierley, who couldn’t stop laughing for some reason.

  ‘Right,’ Mr Sweetman had said, leaning back in his chair, his pen in his mouth and his hands on the back of his head. You could see the sweat patches under his armpits. ‘Any questions?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Scott Brierley said, still laughing. ‘What the fuck was that?’

  ‘That’s not a proper question, Brierley,’ Mr Sweetman said. He didn’t tell Scott Brierley off for saying fuck, like all the other teachers would have. Mr Sweetman didn’t care about swearing, or the rules. He often had the top button of his shirt undone. And his sleeves rolled up.

  ‘OK,’ Scott Brierley said, looking serious as he formulated a proper question. ‘Why did you not mention that they’re massive benders?’

  I turned to Mr Sweetman, who said, ‘Answer him then, Sharpy.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked Scott Brierley.

  ‘I mean, they’re obviously homos. So why didn’t you put that in your little speech?’

  He didn’t know what he was talk
ing about. Vince Clarke, the keyboard player, was a bit funny-looking, but all the women must love the singer, Andy Bell, who probably had loads of girlfriends. Being a ladies’ man, they called it. I’d heard people say that about Colin.

  ‘Andy Bell is a ladies’ man,’ I said.

  ‘A lady boy, more like,’ Scott Brierley said, and the rest of the class laughed. Christopher Keville pretended to sneeze and shouted ‘poof’ at the same time.

  ‘I’d never listen to shit like Erasure in a million years,’ Scott Brierley said. ‘But my uncle knows all about them. He says they’re definitely a pair of benders. And anyone that listens to them is a bender too.’

  I looked to Mr Sweetman again, who was swirling his pen around in his mouth and nodding, like he agreed with Scott Brierley’s uncle.

  I considered what Scott Brierley had said. Now that I thought about it, Andy Bell never referred to women in his songs. He usually just sang something that could describe a man or a woman, like ‘you’ or ‘darling’ or ‘lover’. And in one of their live videos he did wear a blue sparkly cowboy hat, covered in sequins. He also wore matching cowboy chaps with no trousers on underneath, showing his bum cheeks. That did seem a bit odd. Maybe Scott Brierley’s uncle was right. And maybe Colin thought the same thing – that listening to Erasure might make me gay. Colin always seemed proud of how easily he could make women smile, and do other things, and clearly hoped I would make women smile, and do other things, just as easily one day. He really wouldn’t much like the thought of me being gay. He would hate it even.

  ♫

  Thanks to some heavy traffic earlier, we are now listening to my Erasure album for the third time. We are just over halfway through. Colin grips the steering wheel with both hands, leaning over it while staring at the sky, as if praying for someone, something, to end his ordeal. He now carries the guilt from running away when I was little and from breaking contact for four years. The guilt prevents him from speaking up, from ending the ordeal himself.

  The sixth track, ‘Love to Hate You’, repeats its dramatic chorus one last time and then fades to silence. We aren’t too far from his house and there is no traffic now. We probably just about have enough time to make it to the end of the album again. But then he finally speaks up. He can’t take it any more. He pauses the tape and suggests we listen to something else. ‘How about some Iggy or Bowie, Ads?’ he says. He is reaching out. His eyes say, You remember Iggy Pop, don’t you, Adam? I played him to you when you were in your mother’s womb, fighting to make it out alive. It saved your life. His eyes say, You remember David Bowie, don’t you, son? We listened to him when you used to stay with me. We were happy then. We can be again. Just give it a chance. His eyes, soft and pleading, know things can be different. You can forgive, they say.

  I look at him closely and I see it too – a different path. I can see us putting on Iggy or Bowie, singing along and playing air guitar for the rest of our days. Together. I see us in our own father–son band – him on vocals, me on bass. Happy. I see us sharing albums, sharing passions, sharing our lives. I see a future for us after all. A future with no more guilt, no more resentment, where our music will always play, our song will always be sung. I see it. I can forgive. Just take the Erasure tape out of the player, his eyes say. Put something new on. Let’s start again.

  But before I can agree, I look down from his eyes and into his thick brown beard. I think of how much I like the next song, ‘Turns the Love to Anger’. I think of my mum and how things may have been different for her if she had just run off to a different city, like he did. And I think of being on the bed with Mary, crying, knowing for the first time that Colin would die. My dad will die and I’ll be left alone, again. I lean forward. My finger skips over the eject button. I press play.

  A Pear in a Tin of Peaches

  Lisa Blower

  Imagine if you will: I am six years old. I have big blue eyes, the sort that tell my stories whether I like it or not. A blonde kiss-curl strokes the left of my forehead, and I am tall for my age, garrulous. Here I am talking to the apple trees in my back garden in Baddeley Green, Stoke-on-Trent. Cookers mainly. I call them Bonksik, Jumba and Jonty. I am telling them the story of the two girls. The one who has the posh pram and the other who pushes a tin cart with a wonky wheel that falls off and rolls into the pond.

  ‘What happens next, Nan?’

  Nan doesn’t tell me the next bit. Nan’s too busy writing to Mr Del Monte to tell him that she’s just found a pear in her tin of peaches. ‘When you buy peaches you expect peaches,’ she wrote to the global fruit merchant. ‘And a pear don’t make a peach.’ He sent her a 50p voucher for a tin of pears. She sent it back and told him, ‘I didn’t want pears. I wanted peaches.’ He never replied.

  Fresh peaches came in a punnet of six. Stoke-on-Trent is made up of six towns: ‘Six hearts, beating disharmoniously,’ says Linden West, which makes the place, somehow, placeless.

  Baddeley Green. That’s pretty placeless. A westward thoroughfare to Leek, on to Buxton, and we lived on the main road, two doors up from Bill’s Butchers, where my sister filched a pot of salmon paste, and two doors down from the newsagent’s, where I’d befuddle Nigel with my many birthdays (Nigel, who fashioned wooden partitions in his spare time – we had one behind our front door – would give you a block of Dairy Milk on your birthday). We were a two-up-two-down semi overlooking trees; galley kitchen, side alley and downstairs bathroom, with no central heating, two buck rabbits and a twin-tub. We were lucky enough to have a garden – my first memory is of my sister taking her first steps towards me in the garden, my second making escape routes in the sandpit – but we also played in the backs, which were just that: the backs of houses. Where the dogs cocked their legs and the lads snaffled fags, where footballs got booted – Cost kick a bo agen a wo an yed it till it bosts? – and Jacqui W. would flash her front bottom for a pear drop. I remember we once found some dead gerbils rotting inside a pack of Quavers. Old man Mole would shuffle up to us good-for-nothings, brandishing his stick – ‘You should all be in bloody work!’ We were always ten pence short of a 99, high on sherbet, and no one was ever allowed chewing gum because of what happened to that little girl. Chew, chew chewing gum, don’t chew chewing gum. That’s what brought me to my grave.

  I couldn’t find the grave last time I looked, and that irked me. We used to go roller-booting round the crem with my nan. She’d take us from one grave photograph to the next to the next; ritual visitations to check on those whose young lives had been snatched by motorbikes, illness and, of course, chewing gum. I should’ve known exactly where it was, because I could always see the top of my nan’s head, cleaning Granddad’s grave with a Brillo and a squirt of bleach. The flowers she laid on him were always plastic, like on most graves in Milton Crematorium: cost-effective, annual-respects-paid-plastic with the colours bleached out.

  ‘Ta-ra then,’ Nan would say, then tell us that when she died she’d be going on top of Granddad, ‘for the first time in years’. And not to forget to have engraved: Too pretty to die. ‘I was that beautiful I could’ve been murdered,’ she used to say, with grave honesty.

  Honesty ruled the roost, family, and my childhood was all the peachier for it. My dad was an overhead linesman on the Midlands Electricity Board – he moonlighted on weekends to buy new settees and French dressers. We used to buy him tools for his box at Christmas. My mum was a housewife who worked in Burtons on Saturdays. We’d spend Saturday mornings doing the dying fly with Sally James, drinking Ribena in milk (Nesquik was ‘too dear’), with runny-egg oatcakes, and we might go play up the fields/down the wreck/round the backs with whoever knocked on the door and asked if you were coming out.

  True, there were times when everyone else seemed to be out at Alton Towers except me, and Sally Midwinter (oh, what happened to you, Sally Midwinter?) once sent me a birthday card that said, I do not like you or your house it smells, as I never had the right trainers (partly why I could never get my run-up right), only Clarks
, and wore hand-knitted ballet boleros in the wrong pink. I wasn’t the carnival queen but played Mary Poppins; I was in the Elves, Frobisher and the netball team. I was knee-high to a grasshopper and saw a lot of folk down there too. But at school I was taught to look up to people. Mrs Galley. Mrs Kaczmar. Miss Wade. We’d learn about the kings and queens, the Second World War, and practise long division.

  ↑ North

  South ↓

  Understanding that we were always somewhere in between, hiding behind the settee from the milkman and, if we weren’t careful, passed by.

  Passing by our front window were the protests. Stop this. Save that. We’d sit in our wellies in the gutter sucking on rhubarb sticks dipped in cups of sugar. Some of us got to get up from the gutter. Others just didn’t know how. Many gave it their best shot and ended up back down there. Because 244,800 miners had been employed in the Staffordshire collieries in 1984. There were still kilns in use across 298 factories and 70,000 pottery workers. Today there are fewer than 7,000 people employed in the factories, forty-seven kilns cold as the grave.

  Back to those crematoriums, then; back to a post-war Hanley, where my nan could fall out with the shop steward, walk across the road to another factory, start working there by the afternoon shift. She was a dipper and she married a placer, and after they were married and after the Germans bombed their chip shop, and after my granddad had returned home, burned in the liberation of Rome, they lived with my nan’s mother Martha – or Patty as everyone called her – in a two-up-two-down with tin bath and outside loo, two children by then too. Peaches, plural.

  Nan’s father was a plural too. He had a second family with Phoebe up Stone Road. Nan said that one day she was walking down the street and this girl was coming towards her and it was like looking straight in a mirror. She went home and told Patty, and Patty told her that her father had always been a beggar for second helpings. He never did know what he had at home.