by Paul Magrs
While Fran looked in the phone-messages book for the number she’d had to phone the previous year, she heard Elsie shouting out, “Where’s Craig? Where’s our Craig?”
The GP arrived just after the council Santa came round in his van to see everyone from Phoenix Court. Fran dashed out for two minutes to be with Frank and the bairns as the council Santa passed round Swizzel lollies. Across the road, at the Forsyths’ house, there was dance music blasting out, and Fran would have put money on it that Craig was over there. When Santa left she said she had to get back to Elsie, and would Frank put the bairns to bed?
He pulled a face. “It’s like when daft Nesta vanished, all over again,’ he said, his voice going high in anger. “You always get too involved.” Fran tutted at him, kissed the bairns, and went back to see Elsie.
The doctor was there, a dapper per little man in a dark suit, a sprig of mistletoe in his lapel and a twist of tinsel around the handle of his leather bag. In the kitchen he was insisting that Elsie stay at home and drink sugary tea. “Come and visit your husband on Boxing Day,” he said coaxingly, “and try to have a merry Christmas.”
Fran said, “I’m a neighbour.” The doctor looked up and nodded at her.
“He’s my common-law husband,’ said Elsie sulkily.
“Yes,” said the GP as he straightened up. “Well.” Then he headed out to the paramedics’ van which, now that Fran stared through the window after him, had Tom under red blankets in the back. He looked strapped down. Blokes in overalls were looking down at him and closing the back doors. Then they were all gone.
“Do you want to stop with us the night?” Fran asked Elsie. Around them the house seemed dark and cold. The decorations Elsie had put up — ludicrous, oversized reindeer from Bob’s Bargains Centre — seemed pitiful. “You can’t stop by yourself,” she added gently.
“I’ll wait for my Craig coming home,” Elsie said, gritting her teeth. “My lad will be home for Christmas. You better get back to your family.”
And that’s all the thanks I’ll get, Fran thought as she went for her coat. That Elsie’s a hard one.
Elsie surprised her then. “You’re a star, Fran,” she said, clutching her mug of tea. “Happy Christmas, pet.”
“I’ve brought you some tinnies to see the new year in,” she told him.
His face brightened as she pulled them out of her bag. She twisted her little finger on the plastic thing that held them together and sucked it when she gave him his gift.
“Ace,” he said.
“I thought they’d be the right thing.” She smiled. “And I didn’t think you’d be coming home to watch the New Year on telly with me.”
“Oh.” Now he looked pained. “We’re doing something here. Nothing much. Just a bit of booze. Sorry, Mam.”
She shrugged inside her winter coat. “I’ll let you off this time. I’m away out myself.”
“Yeah?” And look at him looking pleased, she thought. He looks like his natural dad. The same mouthful of flashing teeth. His neck strong like a china horse.
“It’s a party at number sixteen,” she said.
“Penny’s party?”
“Who?”
“Oh...she’s the lass whose house it was to start with,” he said. “Well, it was her mam’s, but her mam ran away and Penny invited her friends to live with her.”
“Oh yes.” Now Elsie remembered the stories Jane had told her about Liz, Penny’s mam, who disappeared with a bus driver. “Nice lass, is she, Penny?”
He glanced down. “She’s all right.” He twisted a can free and popped it open.
“Have you taken a shine to her?”
“Who, Penny?” He smirked, hating being caught out like this.
“I’ll have a look at her tonight,” Elsie said. “Have a word and see if I approve.”
He tutted.
“Nah,” she said. “That’d be good, that. A young lass with her own place. That’s what you want.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He shrugged, tossing his hair — that Gladiator hair, as Elsie now thought of it. “Look, mam, thanks for the booze.”
All of a sudden she felt dismissed. It was time to go back to her own life. He was already in his.
“I saw Tom today.”
“You went all the way up to Sedgefield on New Year’s Eve?”
“Someone has to.”
Craig looked down again. He had no intention of visiting his stepdad, and couldn’t bring himself to tell her yet. “How is he?”
“All right. He wants to come home already. Says he’s fine again.”
“He’s not, though, is he?”
“I’m not sure.” She hugged her carrier bag, with its freight of gin and cigarettes.
“Mam, man…he hits you.”
“Oh…”
“He’s done it before and he’ll do it again.”
She seem to take a deep breath. She wanted to yell upstairs to Craig’s pal Steve and get him to bring that funny fag back. She wanted to inhale spice again. “Oh, let’s not go on about him now eh? I want a holiday from my life. Is that all right, pet? You can have one. You’re having one all the time aren’t you?”
He shrugged. She grinned at him and touched his elbow. “No, that’s great, Craig. I think it’s great. Have a nice time. But I want a holiday too. Tonight I don’t want to be thinking about what to do about Tom.”
“I wasn’t the one bringing him up.”
“I know you weren’t,” she agreed. “But anyway. Listen, in going.”
“Thanks for the tinnies.”
“Happy New Year, pet.”
He opened the door for her. “Ay. Same to you, Mam.”
TWO
It was the year when they ate almost nothing but cornflakes. It was open house round number sixteen Phoenix Court and people came and went, throughout the year. To each new arrival, the fresh faces passing through, the old lags would say, “You’ll soon be eating cornflakes for breakfast, dinner and tea. And there’ll always be crises in the middle of the night, and you’ll sit in your dressing gowns, eating cornflakes.”
No matter whose turn it was shopping at Red Spot in the town centre, they always came back with a family-size box. They were cheap and they were homely. “Well,” Penny said, “what more can you expect? That’s just what I am!” It was Penny who started the craze off in the first place. Last winter, when it was just her and Andy, she began the tradition of cornflakes at midnight. Gradually the house filled with strange faces, and they all wound up sitting there with breakfast bowls, crunching away.
My house, my traditions, she thought proudly on New Year’s Eve. She had been making pizza for the party and the kitchen was full of steam and the comforting aroma of tomato sauce bubbling on the hob. The surfaces were dusted heavily with flour and the lopped-off corners of dough. There was a bottle of wine open already, and the carpet had flour trampled into it. Penny quietly poured herself some wine and gave a silent toast: “To our house.” She tipped the glass and relished the bitterness of the wine. A year of having everyone around her.
Penny’s mother had walked out a year ago. She had run away with her new boyfriend Cliff, a bus driver, shocking the street. How could she leave her daughter, a girl not even out of her teens? The women of Phoenix Court were scandalised, but they knew how wayward and glamorous Penny’s mother, was. They knew she didn’t fit in, she be a part of the normal life they had in this street. Of course she had to go exploring romantic pastures new, swarthy, sexy boyfriend in tow. Word had it he’d her whisked her away on a stolen double-decker bus that was meant to be headed for Newcastle. Good luck to her, most of the ladies of the Court had concluded.
They could also see how resourceful Penny was. She’d had a year alone, and even had a feller living in with her. That young bloke Andy, a skinny, rather pretty boy from Darlington. They were all up to that these days, having their boyfriends living in with them. Everyone was glad young Penny had some protection. For a while there was that other lad, Vince, but he was g
one now. He was a teacher up at the comprehensive, so that proved everything was above board and moral. A teacher. For the summer there had been a whole load of students round there, down from Durham, cramming into the three-bedroomed council house. There’d been some noise, but nothing like what came from the Forsyths’ house directly across the road. Now, though, come New Year’s Eve, number sixteen was empty apart from Penny and her best friend Andy. They were throwing the house open for a party.
What a year! Penny thought. She’d liked having the students in. Her best friends among that lot were what they called trusties, which meant they wore dreads and tie-dye and smelled of wool. The smoked joints all day long and went from one music festival to another in a camper van borrowed from one of their mothers. They were all quite well off.
The summer had been an idyllic one, as far as Penny was concerned. They seemed to spend three months on pink candlewick bedspreads on the hillock of grass outside her house. Her new friends played in the play park and ran tearing about the place with all the little kids. The mothers from round there looked on disapprovingly for a while as Adele and Alan and Marsha, with their southern accents and scruffy clothes, helped the bairns to the top of the climbing frame, restrung the tyre swing for them and showed them how to roller-blade. Penny watched almost proudly as her crusty friends became an unofficial play scheme. The older girls had crushes on Sven, the blond Swedish boy. He had one of those crystal-clear accents like someone out of Abba. Penny read novels, one after another — she read fifty that summer — and admired the fresh-scrubbedness of him. Sven was pink and golden and tall, but he was a microbiologist.
The only times away from the park and the kids and the sun on Phoenix Court was when they took Adele’s mother’s camper van to the music festivals. They vanished for weekends at a time. Penny went with them only once, to Glastonbury, which was nice enough, but she couldn’t bear the toilet arrangements. She loved her tan, though, which seemed at its height at Glastonbury. She was the colour of Linda McCartney vegetarian sausages. So was Andy. Andy! Who’d been a Goth in his youth, he claimed.
Penny fetched out a pile of breakfast bowls, ready for the buffet. Was she really going to have cornflakes as part of the buffet? It was true that she found them comforting. They were one of her favourite things. But there was a danger that, when they came trooping in with their cans of lager and bottles of spirits, in their glad rags and ready to party, all her neighbours from Phoenix Court might think she was odd. Maybe she could just say that she expected the party to go on until breakfast-time.
There were noises of banging about upstairs. Andy was getting ready, having a clothes crisis. She hoped he was all right now. Earlier this afternoon Fran from over the way had been round. Fran was in her forties and careworn. Frumpy, Penny’s mother might have called her in an uncharitable moment. She came to see if they wanted any help preparing the party. Penny thought that was good of her, especially since she was always busy with all her kids. She reminded Penny of the old woman in the shoe. Fran had been particularly pleased last summer that Penny’s and student friends had taken to looking after the children.
With Andy there this afternoon, Fran had made the easy mistake of asking if Vince was coming back for the party.
Andy’s face had fallen. He said something about never knowing what Vince was up to, and disappeared upstairs. Penny hadn’t seen him again all afternoon. He stayed in the narrow bedroom that he and Vince had shared for six months.
Fran looked as if she knew she’d hurt him, but wasn’t sure how.
Penny said, “They were very close. Vince just ran off in August and he’s never been in touch with Andy at all.”
“Oh,” said Fran. She went back to blowing up the balloons. “I thought it was something like that.”
Ever since Vince had gone, Penny had been working hard at keeping his name out of things. She hid the fairly regular cards that came addressed only to her. She fretted at night about whether to keep Andy up to date with Vince’s doings, his new teaching job, his whereabouts. Andy pretended that he didn’t care and hardly mentioned his lover’s name. All that autumn he was angry.
Vince had made his announcement about his new teaching job on Penny’s birthday. This was in August, and he had commandeered the crusties’ camper van to take the household on a day trip to Lake Windermere. It was a drizzly, grey day. As Adele drove them over the Pennines, the others sat in the back laughing and drinking Montezuma.
Penny loved her birthdays because her mother had always put on a good show for her. It was the best day in the year. This was her first one without Liz, but her house-mates — Vince especially — tried to make it up to her. News from Liz and her beau came irregularly. They sent back jaunty notes from the seaside resorts they were visiting, one after another, stitching a ragged hem around the country. Andy said to Penny, “She’s gone all devil-may care,” his eyes wide with envy. Penny pointed out that Liz was always like that, and Cliff, the bus driver, only made her worse.
It seemed as if Liz was never coming back. Vince took Penny’s birthday plans into his own hands. Although he would never say it, he felt responsible for her. He was her friend, and Andy’s boyfriend, he lived in her house, but he was also her sixth-form English teacher. On the way to Windermere he watched her and took note of a certain strain as she laughed and drank tequila. It was as if she felt pressed into having a good time. She was enjoying herself for the sake of her friends. The house-mates, Vince knew, spent a fair deal of time speculating more or less wildly about Penny’s mother. Neighbours gave them a few juicy titbits. They knew she had run off with a man. But there was also funny talk about her going off for a sex-change operation. Others said that she had already had it, that Penny’s mam had once been Penny’s dad. None of her house guests ever dared to ask Penny outright. The others suspected that Andy and Vince, as her closest friends, knew the full story, but they were loyal to her. Actually, Vince didn’t know the details, but he knew that Andy did. Andy and Penny had become very close in the last few months. The conversations they had shared, and their dual role looking after the house and all its comings and goings, seemed, although he didn’t want this, to drive a wedge between him and Andy.
Andy was settled here, now, with Penny and the others. Vince was a latecomer. He was out of place. He felt too prim for the cheerful mess and mucking in of the house on Phoenix Court. When he left his father’s house, up by the school, moving out in desperation, it had at first seemed the perfect answer. He and Andy were doing all right. But they all preyed on his nerves, sitting about doing nothing, playing easy-listening music as loud as it would go, eating cornflakes and leaving towels on the floor. For months he gritted his teeth and at least over the summer he had less to do. But Vince knew he couldn’t stay there for the winter term.
In August, when they sat on the pebbled shore at Bowness and threw chips for the grubby swans that came romping out of the shallows towards them, Vince was going through all this. He didn’t mean to break the news that day, spoiling the already jeopardised birthday, but Penny had a way of tuning into things, even things she would rather not hear, and broadcasting them.
“I wish we could have brought you somewhere nicer,” he told her. They were all sitting in a row on the damp wooden breakwater. Andy sat on the other side of Marsha, Sven and Alan. He was picking scabs of mildew off the wood. The others were laughing at a fat teenager struggling at the end of the jetty to get himself into his kayak. When he sat down, he looked wedged inside, and there was something sticking up at the opposite end of the boat, making him appear to have six-foot legs.
Penny told Vince that she’d always loved it here. She remembered her dad bringing her to stay at the youth hostel when she was a kid. He’d been disgusted because they made them do chores to pay for their keep. He thought he was on holiday. And he thought the people who were staying there with them looked unkempt.
That afternoon they walked some distance around the lake’s edge. They spent half an hour in
a chintzy café, hidden between trees, where Andy upset a milk jug and laughed louder and longer than the others. “I’m a bundle of nerves today!” he told the waitress as she wordlessly mopped the oil cloth for him.
Later their party crossed a wide field and climbed a series of rotting fences and dry-stone walls to get to a private beach. Vince led them straight to the most secluded and gentlest spot by the edge of the lake and the others were content to squander the rest of the birthday afternoon there.
Trudging through the matted grass to the lakeside, Penny hooked up with Andy and asked him what the matter was. As usual he couldn’t put it into words. He felt like something awful was happening, he said, but he couldn’t be sure. Penny laughed and said that there was always something awful happening somewhere in the world, you could bank on it. Andy said, “No, I mean, to me. I feel like you do having a tooth taken out with a freezing injection.”
“Oh,” said Penny.
Vince was striding ahead, leading Sven and the others to the quiet shore, briskly in control and jollying them along, just like a teacher, she thought. He sounded hard and bright. It sounds like he’s made his mind up about something. She kept an eye on Andy and he looked exactly like someone who had been put in his place. But not a cross word has been said all day, she thought. It was typical of Andy and Vince to have a row without exchanging a single word.
The wind and rain abated, but it was still cool. While they played unselfconsciously on the shore, they kept their coats on. Vince smiled and hissed something to Penny about wishing it was warmer, wanting to see Sven strip off and splash about in the lake. He had carried out this flirtation with Sven for several months, but they all knew it was a joke. Ever since the day Vince had been interrupted in the bath by Sven letting himself in for a pee, nonchalantly carrying on a conversation with the mortified Vince. But, Vince had confided later, the Swede had the most beautiful penis he had ever seen. And no, he couldn’t say why. Andy had looked miffed at the time, but surely Vince’s attentions to the bluff, resolutely straight Sven couldn’t be narking him today? She knew there was more to this.
