by Carol Morley
‘Linda!’ I shouted.
She stopped and turned around.
‘I really need to talk.’
She bit her lip and for a moment I thought that I had won her back. But then she shrugged.
‘We’ll have a really good chat tomorrow, Ann, honest.’
‘But you promised!’
Linda waved her hand, an apologetic dismissal. She got up and walked away arm in arm with her soldier. I lost her in the dunes.
Annoyed that Linda had gone off with her soldier, I decided to kiss my soldier. His lips wrapped around mine and his fumbling, eager hands darting about my body bored me. I closed my eyes and pictured a photograph of Dad I’d seen once; he was wearing a uniform with shiny buttons and a diagonally-worn soft looking hat. When I’d asked him about it he told me that most men his age had done National Service, which was like being in the army. Dad had worn another uniform too, though I’d never seen it. My sister had told me that he had been a prison officer. But when I asked Dad about it his face clouded over and I knew not to ask again. Did working behind bars do your head in that badly? Was that part of what made him do what he did?
‘I can’t believe you’re only fourteen,’ the soldier said, pausing for breath.
He pulled me to the ground and lowered his body on top of mine and his weight pressed me into the sand as he wormed his urgent tongue into my mouth. How far was Linda going to go with her soldier? I watched the yellow full moon bright in the sky, hidden now and again behind drifting luminous clouds. It felt like the soldier was starting to suck blood from my neck, but I didn’t care, I would comb the bites out in the van on the way home like Helen had taught me to do years ago. He lifted my skirt and worked his fingers into my knickers and inside me, pushing them deeper and deeper. I moaned because I knew he would like that.
‘Let’s do it,’ he said and then added, as an afterthought, ‘Please.’
I wondered if I should.
‘Go on,’ he said.
He started to beg, which really put me off and then he kneeled beside me and his underpants were down. And there it was, in a nest of dark blond hair. Glistening. I’d never looked at one so closely before. It looked back at me with its slit, lidless eye and waved a little. His balls were not at all what I thought they would look like. I had imagined two separate and distinct round spheres either side but they weren’t exactly round and they were in a tight bag of skin covered in hair.
The soldier pushed my head down. I closed my eyes and pretended my mouth was a hand and tasted salt. What would I do when all that white stuff exploded in me? I tried not to think about it. I thought about the kinds of things the other soldier was doing to Linda. It didn’t seem right. I pulled away before that stuff choked me to death.
‘What is it?’ he said.
‘I better get off.’
I stood up and the soldier zipped up and stood up next to me, slinging his arm around my shoulders.
‘I hope Linda’s all right,’ I said.
On cue I heard Linda’s voice. She stepped out of darkness onto the moonlit beach with her soldier.
‘What’s the time?’ I asked.
‘Bang on midnight,’ my soldier said.
‘We’re supposed to be back now,’ I said.
Linda looked dreamily into her soldier’s eyes.
‘I better be going, Nigel,’ she said.
I didn’t even know the name of my lad. Had he told me? I didn’t remember and I didn’t care. The soldiers walked us back to the apartment and we necked our goodbyes before they reluctantly left and we waved them off like they were going to war.
Later, when Linda was in her bunk I asked her what she had done with Nigel; a crap name if ever I’d heard one.
‘Just hung out in the dunes, nothing much,’ she said.
Was she telling the truth? I wasn’t sure. But I felt strangely left out. If she had gone all the way with her soldier then I should have gone and done it with mine.
*
In the morning, the youth club leader looked startled by the love-bites on my neck, but she didn’t say anything. They didn’t matter, anyway. I knew that they would be gone before I got back to Stockport, all I had to do was comb them so they’d resemble a natural rash. We all went for one last walk to the beach. There we found, mashed into wet sand, but sticking out because of the red pompom, my missing sock. None of us could believe that it hadn’t been swept away. I took it as a sign from God that I would get together with Linda. I just had to be patient.
On the journey home I combed my lovebites and mulled over whether Linda had actually got swept away and done it with her lad. She fell asleep and was voted the most angelic looking sleeper. The more I thought about it, the more I decided that it was ridiculous to even think that she had done much with Nigel. When the van dropped me in Mersey Square, Linda was groggy with sleep, and looked so innocent when she said goodbye that I realised she was definitely not the type to go all the way with a lad.
As I crossed the road to the phone box my suitcase broke. I looked down at the sky blue curve of handle left in my hand. The rest of the case flopped slowly onto its leatherette side. I looked around at the orange-lit square and beyond, to the red-brick viaduct, the biggest in the world, I’d heard, made up of millions of bricks, and all at once the weight of not knowing where I lived fell on me. I wanted a house, a home, a front gate, a cat, a bed, a dad – and not just any dad, my dad.
I kicked the edge of my suitcase towards the telephone box. I opened the red door and stepped inside. I unfolded a scrap of paper with my sister’s number on it. I phoned the operator and reversed the charges. Susan answered and said that Mum had decided that we were going to be staying at hers for a bit and that I should get a taxi to her flat. Susan said that she would wait outside with the money to pay for it.
*
Mum was sitting on the settee in Susan’s lounge. I could tell things weren’t going well by her faraway gaze. I discovered a cardboard box she had packed with things I might need and I pulled out my school uniform. I put a towel on the floor, laid out my uniform on top and sponged it clean with a damp dishcloth and ironed it dry and flat. School was on the horizon. At least it was something to do.
For a few days I slept on cushions on the floor next to the settee where Mum slept, but the sounds of her sleeping kept waking me up and I didn’t want to share a room with her anyway, so I dragged the cushions into the kitchen and wedged them into the small space. I found it easy to sleep there, lulled by the gentle hum of the fridge.
*
Back at school I was allocated CSE classes and only put into GSE classes for English and Art. I took this as evidence that the school had no idea who I was. I knew I wasn’t thick and that Dad would have been disappointed that I was in the bottom classes, but I was never going to show anybody that I cared, though the news had brought on a headache unlike any I’d ever had before.
The distance from school to Susan’s flat was miles and I could hardly build up the energy to catch the two buses to get me back. The second bus I caught terminated early and I walked the rest of the way in the rain. My head felt elastic and stretched with thoughts that kept snapping. My bag of schoolbooks felt heavier with each step.
As I trudged alongside cars that were speeding towards warm houses, cooked dinners, happy families and soft, furry pets, I knew I was literally on the road to nowhere. Maybe I really was stupid. Sleeping on the kitchen floor was my future and I was living in a fantasy if I thought I ever had a chance of being a pop star.
I stopped by a deep murky puddle in the road and waited. Cars avoided it but when a lorry came along and drove through it, the water rose in a slick oily curtain and smacked me. I dripped and squelched my way to Susan’s flat, half wishing that I’d had the nerve to step off the pavement and stand in front of the lorry and end it all. The front door key was under a stone in front of the house as Mum thought it was common to have a key on a string around my neck.
When I got in, she was do
zing, curled on her side on the settee. She hadn’t been going into work lately. I stood in front of her and thought how I must look like a drowned rat. Then I began to wonder where that expression had come from. Who had used it first and how come everybody started to use it? And why did I care anyway? My own voice inside my head was getting on my nerves. It dawned on me that I no longer had conversations with God and God no longer had conversations with me.
I shook Mum awake. ‘I’ve got a really bad headache, Mum,’ I said.
She looked drowsily at me and sat up.
‘I promise you,’ she said, ‘I’ll get things sorted.’
*
When I got back from school the next day, Mum was standing waiting by the door.
‘I got us somewhere! I spent the morning looking. We’re off. Right now. Get your things, Ann. This is it! I’ve done it.’
It was a boarding house on the A6, and Mum and I were sharing an attic bedroom.
That night, I lay there in the single bed opposite her bed, looking at the bland slope of ceiling above me, listening to the traffic hurtling past, thinking of all those people going places.
brynn
She looks in a newsagent’s window at the white cards with handwritten adverts for used bicycles and odd-job men and rooms to let. For some reason she begins to cry and can’t seem to stop. The shopkeeper comes outside and brings her inside and sits her on a chair and makes her a sugary cup of tea.
The shopkeeper gets out of her that she is searching for a place to live with her daughter. From the window he takes a card advertising rooms in a boarding house and shows it her. She tells him it isn’t suitable, she’s looking to rent a two-bedroom flat. He says it will probably be fine for getting on with, and, after some persuasion on his part, she eventually agrees that after all it is only for the interim.
She sits there drinking the sweet tea while the shopkeeper serves a customer cigarettes. A memory comes to her from the time before the psoriasis appeared. She’d been pregnant with Rob and she’d gone to a sauna for the first time and fainted. The woman there had given her a soft-boiled egg to revive her. It was the best egg she’d ever eaten. She hadn’t known she was pregnant but the woman hinted as much. It’s funny how she still thinks of her – bending over with the egg, long, deep lines from the corner of her nose to her mouth, filled with brown nicotine.
The newsagent comes back from serving his customer and suggests she use his telephone to call the boarding house. She doesn’t like being pressured, but he dials the number and she speaks to the landlady – a nicely-spoken woman called Shirley. She books a room with two single beds, full board. As she leaves the shop she reminds herself never to come this way again.
a little life
The steam rose from the electric kettle. ‘When I was pregnant with Rob,’ Mum said, ‘I had a sauna and fainted. The manageress of the place gave me a soft-boiled egg to revive me.’ Mum had a kind of longing in her voice that I didn’t understand. It was only an egg, after all.
The kettle switch clicked off. Mum put it on to boil again. We were in the room reserved for guests, cooking eggs inside the kettle for our tea. Shirley, who had turned into the meanest landlady in the world, according to Mum, barged in with two plates and set them down on the table in front of us.
‘Just making a cup of tea,’ Mum said, looking guilty.
‘Spaghetti bolognese. My best dish,’ Shirley said, and then winked at me. I looked down at my plate. I was used to spaghetti out of a tin – short, red and normal-looking; this looked long, ill and anaemic. Shirley left the room and came back with a small pot that looked like a saltshaker.
‘Go easy with this, it costs a fortune.’
As Shirley left, I examined the label.
‘What is it? Something foreign?’ Mum asked.
‘Parmesan cheese.’
For a few minutes, we twirled our forks in the food. Mum tried a mouthful and chewed it with a sour face.
‘Muck,’ she said. ‘Have you noticed that Shirley doesn’t feed her family what she gives us? They’re always wolfing down Kentucky Fried Chicken. It’s very expensive that, you know.’
Mum passed me a hard-boiled egg and I peeled it and dropped the shell onto my plate. I bit into the glossy whiteness of the egg and looked at the yellow, liquid centre. There was a banging sound from the kitchen.
‘Better hurry!’ Mum said.
We popped the rest of the eggs into our mouths at the same time. Still swallowing, I unfolded the local newspaper and we scraped Shirley’s food from our plates onto the centre pages. I folded the food away and hid the newspaper package behind the settee, ready to take later to a bin a few streets away.
‘You enjoyed that then,’ Shirley said, when she came to collect our empty plates.
‘Delicious,’ Mum said.
‘I know.’ Shirley laughed. ‘Shouldn’t go saying it myself.’
We were the only guests in the house. I asked Shirley if I could have my own bedroom since there were so many empty ones, but Shirley said no. She said a guest could ring up at any time, and every room had to be ready for last-minute bookings.
Although our room did have a sink, it was rare that the water was hot in the morning. Shirley would grudgingly put the immer sion heater on for twenty minutes when we requested our weekly bath allowance, but that was all. ‘She’s a miserly so and so,’ Mum moaned, though she never complained to Shirley.
The baffling thing was that Mum seemed happier. She was getting sociable with Shirley, even though she said she didn’t really like her. Then Mum managed to get her old job back working at the market research company. On weekends I worked there too.
*
‘So she said a couple of lesbians had moved in next door, turned out she meant Lebanese!’
The office erupted into laughter and I looked around at all the women. There were no men, because Dolores the supervisor had got around equal opportunities at the Job Centre by pretending that the office only had a female toilet.
Because I was fourteen and not a trained interviewer, my role was to call people up and recite the opening part of the interview script. I used my posh phone voice and thought of the way Dad had liked me to say things.
‘Hello my name is Ann Westbourne and I am calling from Moor Marketing Research.’
Sometimes the phone would be put down before I’d finished saying ‘hello’. Other times, I lasted a little longer, but it was hard to find a person who was willing to talk and who had also seen the advert in question on the television. The few times that happened I was triumphant, like I had scored a winning goal. My job was done.
‘Please wait a moment while I pass you to an experienced interviewer.’
I would jam my hand over the receiver and wave in all directions. A free interviewer would hurry over to finish the survey while I took her place.
Dolores often took a break from supervising the office so that she could phone home to talk to her two wolfhounds. According to Audrey, who took pride in being regarded as the best interviewer by Dolores – and had even been invited to her house – Dolores doted on her dogs in the way she did because she was unable to have children. This all stemmed from her husband’s first wife stabbing her in the stomach out of jealousy.
‘Her dogs go and see a psychiatrist,’ Audrey told me.
‘You’re joking?’
‘No, not at all. It’s the truth, pure and simple,’ she said.
I looked at Dolores and wondered what she could have done to her dogs that they needed to go to a psychiatrist.
And then I looked at Mum and wondered what she had done to Dad.
Mum was on the phone in the middle of saying ‘advertisements’. She was always criticising the way some of the others in the office pronounced it, but she only disapproved of their pronunciation behind their backs, never to their faces. Why could she never say it to them? She would be charming at work and then as soon as we left her face would fall and she would gripe about all of them. It was exhaust
ing. Why did everyone fall short of Mum’s expectations? Why couldn’t she make friends with them?
‘Would you say you thought it was excellent, very good, good, neither good nor bad…’
Had it got Dad down too, that Mum was so picky over people? Was it all her fault?
‘Anything else you recall?’
Mum tugged the hem of her dress over her American Tan covered knees. She was getting bigger and her body stretched the seams of her dress, which had once been baggy. I hoped I would never get fat like her.
‘And what is the occupation of the head of the household?’
She put down the phone and checked her paperwork. She glanced out of the window at the line of trees losing their leaves and becoming lean. Her smile slipped and she circled the gold band of her wedding ring with her thumb and index finger. What on earth was Mum thinking about? Was she thinking about Dad? About what she had done to him?
The psoriasis on her wrists stared at me and I switched from blaming Mum to feeling sorry for her. I was horrible. She was trying her best. Not only did she have this job, she was cleaning all the offices in the building as well. She was doing so much to make ends meet. She probably saw me as an ungrateful so-and-so. I remembered being little and Mum showing me how to catch the fluffy seeds from a dandelion clock that blew in the wind. She told me the seeds were fairies and gave me a matchbox with sugar in it for the fairies to live in, and she used to put lemon in my hair to make it go blond.
There was another time, sharp in my mind; Mum picking me up from infants’ school early, telling the teacher that I had a dentist’s appointment, but when we got outside she burst into tears and it turned out I didn’t really have to see the dentist. When I got home I realised that Dad wasn’t there. He’d gone off again.
What sort of a life has Mum had since Dad has gone? What sort of life did she have with him when he was alive? What sort of life was she having with me? I felt bad.
‘You okay, Mum?’ I asked.
