by Kate Long
‘Ah, right, OK. No problem.’
‘Brilliant. I’ll bring him round Saturday afternoon, then?’
He hauled Kenzie off the fence and set him down behind it, out of sight. Then he laid his arm along the top and winked at me.
‘I hope you don’t mind my saying, you’re a star, Karen.’
‘No,’ I said. My cheeks were tingling under his gaze. ‘Actually, I don’t mind that at all.’
‘Hey, Charlotte, come see the show.’
Gemma was in Walshy’s room, leaning against the fluorescent green window-frame, her face to the glass. I hesitated for a second, then went in and stood next to her.
On the small lawn below, Walsh staggered under the weight of what looked like a bundle of saplings, all of them taller than him. He’d lurch to one side, try to correct himself and end up half-running in the opposite direction like a drunk waltzing.
‘Ding ding, round two,’ said Gemma.
‘What the fuck?’
She sniggered. ‘It’s a yurt. His dad sent it to him. You must have seen the big van pulling up.’
‘I’ve only just got back from a tutorial. What’s a yurt?’
‘A Mongolian tent. Don’t you know anything?’
‘We’re not that big on yurts in Wigan. I think Mum’s boss has a gazebo, but that’s about the limit. Anything more exotic and your neighbours ring for the police.’
It became clear that what Walshy was attempting to do was to make the sticks stand up on their own. Every time he got himself steady, he’d plant them squarely on the ground and step back, only they’d always fall over.
‘We could go out and help,’ I said.
‘We could.’
Neither of us moved.
‘What does he want a yurt for anyway?’
Gemma raised her eyebrows. ‘Partying, he says. He’s going to have lanterns and a barbecue or a mini-fridge, I wasn’t really listening.’
‘Most likely he’ll set the thing on fire. Or no, I tell you what, it’ll be like his own personal harem-space. He’ll round up all the women he fancies and herd them in.’
As soon as I spoke the words, I regretted them. Tactless enough to speak about her ex that way, even if I hadn’t spent a night last November rolling around on Walshy’s bed with my skirt up around my thighs. I thought Gemma must surely be able to see inside my head, see the images flashing across my memory.
‘Tim-ber!’ said Gemma as the bundle pitched and fell once more.
I tried to laugh, but for the moment everything was drowned out by the soundtrack of my own morbid confession: I snogged him, Gemma. While you were at a faculty party, we got drunk on shots and I let him take me upstairs. I let him and I enjoyed it. The fact it wasn’t total full-on all-the-way sex is no defence. Daniel’s heart would break if he knew; you’d never speak to me again. I am crap. I am Slut-Girl.
‘Oh, hang on, who’s this?’ Gemma craned her neck to see. ‘Yaay, it’s Roz to the rescue. Here she comes with her, hmm, towel.’
‘A towel?’
‘She’s twirling it into a sausage. I can’t see how that’s supposed to help.’
‘Perhaps she’s going to hit him with it.’
‘If we’re playing Whack the Walsh, I might go down and join in.’
Roz obviously had some kind of plan because she kept spreading her arms out and leaning forward. Walshy yawned and stretched and pushed his hair out of his eyes, and at one point walked over and kicked the bundle where it lay on the grass.
I said, ‘While I’m here, I’ve been meaning to say I’m sorry about Roz. All the Well-done-on-being-gay stuff.’
‘Oh, that, yes. Having a bit of trouble, isn’t she? It’s not your fault. I should probably have kept quiet.’
‘Don’t be daft. It’s up to you whether to tell us or not.’ I mimicked Roz’s slow, earnest tones. ‘If you feel gay, you must say.’
Gemma grinned. The yurt sticks were finally stable. We watched as Roz and Walshy linked hands and also held an end of the towel each to support all sides.
‘God, it’s like a scene out of The Wicker Man,’ said Gemma.
‘As long as nobody takes their clothes off.’
Slowly they shuffled backwards and, as if by magic, the sticks began to ease apart in a trellis pattern to form a circular corral. Narrow and high at first, it widened out until the top edge of the sticks finished just above head height. The structure looked shaky as hell, but you could see how it was going to work when everything was fastened down. Roz went to grab the towel they’d dropped, and Walshy nabbed the clothes prop so he could push the roof beams up from the inside, umbrella-style. I thought how much Will would love a tent, wondered if I could afford one.
‘Just the little matter of throwing the canvas over the top and mooring it all down,’ said Gemma. ‘And Roz’ll forever claim she built a yurt single-handed.’
There was high-fiving going on now, and stepping back to admire the result, and adjusting the footings and more admiring. Roz put her arm though Walshy’s and leaned against him. She clearly fancied him, despite the fact she was practically married to Gareth. Last term, for instance, we’d been shifting furniture around to make more space, and Walsh had looked across at her as she hauled the sofa and gone, ‘Hey, I never noticed before but you’ve got a tremendous pair of boobs on you.’ Instead of being outraged, or at least pretending to be outraged, she’d only sniggered. ‘I’ll tell Gareth on you,’ she taunted. ‘Fuck, don’t do that, he’d snap me like a twig!’ Walshy said, and made such a pathetic face he had us all laughing in the end. It was hard to stay cross with him for long because he took himself so lightly.
‘It’s funny, I just assumed she’d be OK with me coming out. I’ve known her since the first term and she always seemed cool about . . .’ Gemma waved her hand, searching for the right word. ‘About difference.’
‘It’s her background. Roz is OK really, if she stops and thinks. It’s not as if she doesn’t rate you any more. It’s that you’ve forced her to revise her world view: you know, whatever she thought lesbians were like, they weren’t like you. And that’s freaked her temporarily. Give her another month and she’ll be fine.’
‘I suppose so. She was all right about you having a baby, in the end.’
‘Huh?’
‘Like, she was a bit weirded out by Will at first. Not by him, I mean. By you being a mum.’
‘Bloody hell. What did she say?’
I could see it was dawning on Gemma that she’d put her foot in it. ‘Oh, nothing much. It was only that she didn’t know any other teenage mums, just what she’d seen on TV really, so it was out of her comfort zone. And the point is, she’s completely fine about it now. She thinks Will’s great, she really does.’
My head was reeling. This was what, in the back of my mind, I’d always worried about. Because in those first weeks as a Fresher I had been shy about mentioning Will. I didn’t know how other students would react. Then I had a long talk with Daniel and he’d said, ‘Look, Charlotte, society’s moved on. This isn’t like the olden days when unmarried mothers ran off and drowned themselves in millponds for shame. No one will care that you’ve got a son.’ I thought, Yeah, he’s right, and I’d got stuck into student life and assumed they’d just accepted it. Now I realised I must after all have been the object of gossip, of finger-wagging or worse, sympathy.
Down on the lawn Walshy had started a grass fight, dodging in and out of the yurt’s framework. Roz shrieked and spun on her heel, her tremendous bosom swinging. I thought, It’s funny, even at school, even before Will arrived I was on the outside, never totally fitted in. Perhaps the problem was simply me.
Gemma stood up, wiping dust off her jeans. ‘Everyone talks about everyone else here. That’s a given. The trick is not to think about it.’
It’s all right for you, Gemma. You were brought up to be confident and cool. That’s just the way your brain works.
What it must be like, not to give a damn.
‘I wo
uldn’t have mentioned it,’ said Ivy, peeling off her headscarf and folding it into triangles, ‘only Maud says he were going like a rat up a pipe, whizzin’ from one end o’ t’bypass to th’ other. How the police didn’t clock him, I don’t know. He’s a lucky devil, your Steve, int he?’
Stupid, more like. I said, ‘I don’t see that I can do much about it. I never wanted him to have a motorbike in the first place, but he wouldn’t be told. Not about anything. Not when we were married and even less now. Was he at least wearing his helmet?’
‘I’ve no idea, it weren’t me who saw him. I’ve brought you them photographs, though.’ She sat herself down on the sofa and opened her handbag. Inside was an A5 brown envelope that she slit open and tipped up onto the cushion beside her. A handful of very small black and white prints spilled out. ‘They’re not all of your mum, I could only find two with her on. But there’s others I thought you might be interested in.’
I came and perched on the sofa arm to see.
She passed across the first photo and it was a high-street view, the road surface cobbled and empty of cars. Shop signs hung from brackets; a man in a bowler hat stood under one of them. Ivy tapped a building on the extreme left of the picture. ‘Now. That were t’Grapes. Where Londis is.’
‘What, this is Bank Top?’
‘Oh aye. So, your mother’s mother – Polly, your grandma Marsh – she used t’clean for the landlord. She did all sorts for anyone, actually – laundry and fruit-picking – owt to earn a penny here and a penny there. And she’d to take Nancy and Jimmy with her on these jobs, either that or leave them with her mother, Florrie. Only Florrie was a harsh woman, what you’d call a last resort when it came to childminding. So when your grandma Marsh was working in t’pub, Nancy would play down below in t’cellar out of the way, and she’d open a window and when us kids saw that, we’d all climb in as well. We’d to be careful, like, because we’d have been in trouble if we’d been caught.’
‘What did you get up to? Under-age drinking?’
Ivy laughed out loud. ‘I should think not. No, we climbed about on t’barrels and threw a rubber ball and hid from each other. It were a good place for hiding because it were pretty gloomy. Oh, and there was a frog’d sit under one of t’barrels and drink beer as it dripped.’
‘Get away.’
‘It’s true as I’m sitting here. Talking of frogs, see this drinking fountain?’ She slid another photo out, again a street scene but one I partly recognised because it featured the spire-end of the church. Next to Saint Mary’s, against the wall of a building long gone, was a plain stone basin and metal spout. ‘Nan’s brother Jimmy once filled t’bowl wi’ tadpoles. He used Polly’s milk pan to fetch them from t’ditch at t’bottom of the graveyard. He allus was drawn to water, that lad. And these taddies, they looked so funny, wriggling about. Us kids were two-double laughing. Well, except for Jacky Ollerton, that were t’teacher’s son, who told him if a policeman caught him he’d be locked up because the fountain was the property of the mayor. Jacky said putting taddies in there was same as putting them in t’mayor’s hat. And then a policeman did come! Sergeant Battersby walking up Church Street towards us, large as life and twice as ugly.’
‘My God. So did Jimmy end up in prison?’
‘Did he heck, we all scarpered. Hello, what’s t’cat got in its mouth?’
Pringle had slunk in under the table and was gnawing at something pink and plucked-looking. I thought briefly of the ‘human hand’ story – thanks for implanting that image in my head, Steve – but this lump of flesh was bulbous at one end and bony at the other, not hand-shaped at all. ‘Hell’s bells, it’s a chicken leg.’
‘Ooh, hey.’ Ivy seemed impressed. ‘Perhaps you could train him up, get him to bring you fillet steak next time.’
Pringle paused and stared at us, as if considering the option.
‘I tell you what, Karen, he’s put some weight on since he’s been living here. He’s like a different animal. You’ve got the magic touch.’
‘I’ve got the fat touch.’ I prodded my own stomach unhappily.
‘Get away. You’re a bonny woman. At least you’ve a bust.’
‘I’ve one of those, all right.’
The photos sat between us in a spill of nostalgia. I thought of Mum’s plump figure, how as a little girl I’d sat on her lap and pressed my head into her squashy bosom. In middle age she’d worn ecru corsets with diamond-shaped panels down the front; I could remember them hanging over the maiden to dry above the cooker.
‘These pictures are brilliant. Can I take them to school and photocopy them?’
‘You can have ’em.’ She shoved two or three in my direction. ‘See, you get to a point in life and you look around and it’s all clutterment. You say to yourself, What’s this for? And this? Why am I hanging on to it? You want to get a big broom and sweep everything away. It’s the past, you know? It’s gone. Buried. Meks no difference now.’
You’re wrong there, I thought.
Walshy wanted to christen the yurt immediately. Soon as the last peg was hammered home, he sent Roz off to Spar for peanuts and wine while he got Gemma and me to carry the kitchen chairs outside. He was after lighting a row of candles, but I told him there was no point in the daytime and he’d be better saving them for when it dropped dark. Instead he brought his radio down and tuned it into some cheesy local station. By the time Roz returned with her clanking carrier bag, we’d actually abandoned the chairs – too upright, not yurty enough – and were lolling around on cushions, barefoot, to Wonderwall.
Really I had an essay to be getting on with, so when Gemma came round with the wine I only let her fill my glass halfway. I’m not much of a drinker anyway, I just don’t enjoy the sensation of letting go and not caring. Always at the back of my mind I’m worried I might be needed suddenly: what if there’s a problem with Will and I need to get back home pronto? Us mothers can’t afford to get wrecked. We have to stay Alert and Responsible. I’ve no tolerance for alcohol anyway, I reach the jelly-legs stage while everyone else is still just warming up. ‘You need to put in more practice,’ Roz told me once, as though getting drunk was some kind of critical life-skill. I said, ‘It makes me miss my son.’ That shut her up.
I watched Roz now, lying half-propped up on her elbows like a sunbather. On one side of her Gemma sat cross-legged and on the other Walshy hugged his knees and rocked to the music. It made him look disturbed.
‘This tent reminds me of being at the circus,’ said Roz.
Gemma smirked. ‘Does that make us the entertainment, then? The Amazing Boozing Students. Hmm. I think I’d want my money back.’
‘I’d pay to see you in a spangly leotard,’ said Roz, winking at her.
This flirty banter was a new thing. I couldn’t tell whether it annoyed Gemma or not.
‘All three of you,’ said Walshy, ‘in sequined bikinis, on horseback. With feathered headbands. Yeah, I’d put my hand in my pocket for that.’
‘In your dreams,’ I said.
‘You often are,’ he said.
Roz snorted.
I thought, I wonder where we’ll be in ten years’ time. I wonder if we’ll look back at this day, the Day of the Yurt, and what we’ll remember from it. If we remember it at all. Perhaps we’d be too grown-up to bother with such nonsense. After all, we’d be completely different people by then, wouldn’t we?
Or maybe not. Walshy already liked to talk about the city pad he was going to have, and the car he’d drive, and probably he was right because his dad would sort these things out for him. His dad would get him a rep’s job in a good firm, and Walshy would wear a suit to work and have a succession of girlfriends who looked like models. Walsh at thirty would simply be an extension of the way he was now.
Roz maintained she was going to marry Gareth and go and live in a cottage on the Welsh coast, in amongst those rocks she’d spent three years studying. And I could see her, grown chunky – Gareth was running to fat already – and red-cheeked
and windblown. Her hallway would be full of wellies and kagoules. ‘What’ll you do with your Geology degree?’ I’d asked her once. ‘Stuff the degree,’ she said. ‘I wanna keep chickens and goats.’ You know, it goes through me when I hear students dismiss their courses like that.
I glanced across at Gemma; imagined a European city street lined with nineteenth-century apartment blocks, Gemma leaning out of an upper-storey window showing her bare tanned arms. Sleek as a cat, she’d be, and entirely content, chatting to locals as she did her daily shop, and drinking weird foreign brews. I knew her mum had plans for her to travel. There was a placement for her at an international school, if she wanted. Right now Roz was draping a daisy chain on her head, a tribute she accepted without a word or movement.
And where will you be in ten years’ time, Charlotte?
I let my head fall back, followed with my gaze the lines of roof struts to where they met in the centre of the yurt. Such regular straightness, lifting to such a neat point. That was why they had vaulting in church roofs, to raise your thoughts beyond the here and now. We all need to stop and look upwards sometimes. I tried hard to focus on the future, to visualise what lay in store. Except when I’ve played at this before, I can only think of Will, and only as he is now, aged two. It’s as if a blackout curtain drops down in front of me. Nan’s friends like to nod at Will and go, ‘Eeh, they’re not young for long. He’ll be grown and gone before you know it.’ But I can’t even imagine my son a little bit older, not even starting Reception class. The thing about children is they feel so much rooted in the present. The concept of a twelve-year-old Will seemed ludicrous.
Right now, everything seemed ludicrous. Like the degree: I travelled up to York and I sat with my books and I wrote my essays and went to lectures and my marks were good and on the surface everything was ticking along. I’d heard Martin calling me one of the most conscientious students he’d ever taught. The truth was, though, motherhood had broken my brain. There were some days when I couldn’t remember the words for things, when I read the same paragraph ten times and it still didn’t go in, when grasping the simplest idea felt like trying to shift a boulder with a stick. My concentration kept dipping, failing; I was incapable of making decisions. I didn’t know what I wanted any more.
