by Paul Magrs
“Hm?’ I want to stay daydreaming, Elsie thought. The shop was overheated and it was empty, which was strange, because the January sale was on. She was enjoying being able to drift off in the relative quiet, buoyed on that dry, dusty air and the scent of washing powder and other people’s houses. Their shop had that particular smell, whatever the stock was. Elsie thought of it as a compound of the smells of all the homes in Aycliffe.
“Someone’s asking after you,” said Charlotte, and pointed to Penny, standing awkwardly new to the rack of blouses Charlotte had spent the morning arranging. She had put them in order of the colours of the rainbow. They shaded gradually from salmon to poison green. Penny was clutching a carrier of Red Spot groceries and she held a family box of cornflakes under one arm. Elsie hurried over and wanted to cuddle her or greet her fondly — do something nice, anyway — but there was something that held her back. She was never quite sure how to say hello. People could be funny about things like that and anyway, there was something about Penny that kept people at a distance. Elsie had forgotten that since she last saw Penny. A few days of fondness and absence had softened Penny’s edge.
The girl looked pale today, her hair unwashed, her legs bare and mottled with the cold. She wore those clumpy boots and what looked like a feller’s old duffel coat.
“Are you all right, pet?” Elsie asked, and made her smile. She was glad someone was asking after her, for a change, instead of her mam. For a week that was all they had said to her, friends, faces she knew, complete strangers: “How’s your mam doing, pet?” These days Liz and Penny were public property. Penny was nothing but the unconscious mother’s press agent. Just because they’d seen Liz lying out there on the ground, they thought they all deserved these constant updates. Penny imagined putting up messages on letter-headed paper like outside the gates at Buckingham Palace. She thought it was just bizarre that people who had never bothered with them before were suddenly wanting to beetle over to Bishop Auckland General to see Liz on her life support and connected to her drip. Were they just ghoulish? Was that the fascination? At least Elsie had the sense not to go asking about Liz again. There was nothing to tell her if she had; there’d been nothing to tell for days.
Penny said, “I thought it was about time I thanked your Craig for everything he did the other day.”
“Ah,” said Elsie, and bit her tongue. She thought, Let the lass take this at her own pace. Don’t jump in and spoil it. Her heart set up a mad tattoo because somehow she knew, she absolutely knew, that she was going to get what she wanted.
“Do you know where he is today?” The poor, washed-out girl hardly had any tone in her voice. It was like she could hardly be bothered to speak. Elsie was flushed in the face, as if she was the one being courted. “Oh, he’s...” Think! Elsie snapped at herself. “He’ll be at the gym, this time of day.” It was early afternoon, exactly the time that Craig and the lads would be doing weights in that place up the ramp, above the precinct. These days Elsie could be a little more certain about Craig’s whereabouts. All his movements and routines she found herself suddenly, wonderfully, privy to once more. This gave her a glow of pleasure too, that she was able to tell Penny without doubt where he was when she needed him. She felt she had got him back. As if he had been away, or ill, or living abroad, and then something went wrong — as it always did when you tried to break away from things — and here he was, returned to his mam. He was back in his room at Phoenix Court. Only last night they had enjoyed a full evening together watching telly, Findus Crispy Pancakes for tea, then helping each other take down the Christmas decorations. Almost wordlessly and working in complete, relaxed accord, mother and son had unhooked, refolded and boxed away the streamers and festoons of tinsel. They popped globes of painted glass into their yellowing cardboard boxes. Craig said, “Mam, they were mince Crispy Pancakes we had.”
“So?” she asked, ravelling up yards of fuchsia tinsel. She realised. “Shit! We’re both vegetarians now, aren’t we?”
That was a new thing too, as of the New Year. They were back together in the house, with no sign of Craig’s rough friends or her Tom acting mad about the place, and they had both given up eating meat. Mind, meat was everywhere, as Elsie was just finding out. On morning telly they were telling you it was in all sorts you never suspected. Fruit pastilles! Cheese! Polos! She couldn’t even bite Sellotape without thinking it was made from the skin of fish. When she used Sellotape at work she cut it deliberately with scissors. And the thought came to her: We live in a world made of meat! Which made her shudder. She remembered being told at school about Nazis making lampshades out of people and at the time she thought, What a thing to teach kids! She told her mam after school and her mam said, “What a thing to teach kids!” Elsie looked around, thinking, You don’t know what the world is made out of.
Penny was saying, “Will they mind if I just go stomping into the gym? Don’t you have to be a member?”
Distractedly Elsie said, “I don’t think so, pet. People are glad of people calling in. Any time of day.” Yet really she had no idea. She was talking from her own experience of shop work. She had no idea of the clunk and grind of the gym, its grim camaraderie, its seclusion from the world.
When Craig worked out in the gym, all he heard of the outside world was the voices of his mates, MTV thumping out of sets above his head and, floating up from the precinct below, the chirpy, repetitive jingle of the Mr Blobby kiddies’ ride outside Red Spot.
In the small changing rooms downstairs, all it takes is one
person who stinks to come in and it’s awful. Everyone gets in and out fast anyway. You don’t hang around. Though I have a sauna on Sunday mornings. It opens all your pores, Mary says, she’s the manageress, and it lets the badness out. The steam is so good for you. What does it do? Tighten or loosen your skin? One of those things. I do that on Sunday mornings and every day, otherwise I concentrate on what’s underneath the skin. I work on the muscle, on making it all muscle, all that potential fat.
You have to isolate, Mary says, the manageress says. To make it work you have to isolate the bit you want to work on. She knows all about it, so I listen to her. The other lads would never listen. She tries to tell them, they laugh her off, she’s a canny lass and wouldn’t show them up by knowing much more than them. She knows when to leave well alone.
She slinks about the place in her shiny leotard thing. The crotch goes right up her bum when she’s working out and she wears it all day. We usually have a laugh about that, though I hope she doesn’t know what we’re laughing at. I think she’d be mortified. She works all day doing demonstrations on the gym equipment for the women, the lads who come in by themselves, and the older fellers. Anyone who will listen. Our lot wouldn’t take instruction, they know it all, and get on with it.
Like the Justice League of America, training on their satellite in space.
I listen, mind, to what Mary has to say and I think I benefit by it. I’ve come on better, stronger and more developed than the other lads. Just recently they’ve been commenting on it. I get those funny, rough compliments we make to each other: “Eh, Craig, man, your legs are getting massive” or “That’s some chest you’re getting on you.”
I do my workout like a routine now, that’s what it is, not much talking. The others take the piss a bit because I won’t go messing on with them, but what’s the point in that? We’re paying for this. It’s not just a social thing. In the back pocket of my shorts I’ve got my workout card that Mary made out for me. She did a list of fifteen different exercises in order and each, she promised, isolates and works on a different portion of my body. Put together, a full rotation of the exercises makes a comprehensive plan. An all-over body plan. She tailored it for me, even allowing for the slight weakness in my right leg. After the name of each of the fifteen exercises it says X20 and they’re how many reps I have to do. And I do that every day. Mary sees me come and go every day and seems pleased I keep to her plan. She takes a pride in my development. Stev
e took the card off me one day as I was putting it back in my pocket and he looked at it. Steve is bigger than me and although he only ever farts about in the gym, it’s like he hardly needs to pay any attention at all. He just keeps as big and as powerful as he is. “Look, lads,” he said. This was in the free-weights corner, so a few of the lads from our house were gathered round. “Look, his card’s written out by Mary’s own fair hand.” He gave it back to me with a laugh. “He’ll be wanking over that.”
This was quite recent. Something’s come between Steve and me. I’m not sure what it is, but he’s using every opportunity he can to take the piss, to turn the others against me. And they don’t take much turning. Maybe it’s because my mam’s feller’s a nutcase and everyone knows that now. Maybe they think I’ll turn out a nutter too and I end up wanting to tell them, But it’s not blood! He’s no blood relation of mine. Other times I think it’s my foot and the way you’ll catch them looking at it sometimes. It’s why I won’t sit about in places like the sauna for long, when they’re all about. Downtown once we saw an old woman, she was quite small but she had huge, swollen legs. She had that elephant disease and I could hear what the other lads were thinking, I thought I could sense them, itching to say that her legs were bloated up like my foot. That I must have an old woman’s disease. I knew that if I hadn’t been there, that’s what they would have been saying.
Steve says to me as we’re getting changed, “That lass you’ve got hanging around you — that’s the daughter of the woman you punched out, isn’t it?”
Steve is staring at his own full-length reflection, hoisting up his arms, flexing them like wings, watching the stretching of his pecs. He’s dripping wet from the shower and he’s pulled on his pants without drying properly.
“Penny’s not hanging around me,” I go and, as I say it, I realise that’s exactly what she’s doing. She came to see me today, as I worked out.
“I want to say thank you,” Penny said, walking up to me as I sat on the pec machine. You have your arms spread out either side over bars like James Dean and I was kind of trapped there as she said her piece. I couldn’t shrug like I wanted to or look cool like that. Actually, she looked minging, her eyes all bloodshot, with these awful bags under them. She was dressed like a mess too. I was hoping the other lads hadn’t seen her visiting me like this, but they had, it turns out.
“Canny bird you’ve got there,” Steve says with a smirk, pulling on his shirt, and it irritates me, the way he won’t put on deodorant or dry his back. I hate the smell of sweat in this tiny wooden room. It smells like the pie shop down the precinct.
Penny said, “It’s because of you that my mam’s still alive.” And I gulped.
Now Steve is pulling a face at me. He mocks Penny’s voice, does it like bad acting, “It’s because of you that my mam’s still alive.” He comes closer. “Are you gunna tell her it was you who punched her mother out?”
She was waiting for him down in the precinct. She would never put it like that, God knows, but she thought, if he comes by after the gym, then we’ll bump into each other. And that’s all right.
Penny spent some time looking in the other charity shops, not Elsie’s. There were ten in the town, out of only about thirty shops in all. She was always up for bargains and she remembered fights with her mam. Liz had always refused to dress her daughter in anybody’s castoffs. Liz couldn’t bear the thought of it but as soon as Penny was of an age to buy her own things, she was straight down the second-hand shops. And the things she would come back with. Even Penny had to laugh now at the thought of those bargains. Bargains she had picked up and worn, almost out of defiance — as if defiance could make these clothes stylish. At thirteen she was dressing in old women’s things, willing them back into fashion. But those particular shapeless black dresses, those exact flowery polyester blouses, never came back. Penny wore them layered, like a bag lady. When she turned vegetarian and cooked each night, tossing all her sliced and diced vegetables, her herbs and her spices into a wok, Liz had said, “You know, you’ve started to cook how you dress. Shove everything on at once and hope for the best.” At the time Penny had thought this acute and dreadful. Her mother was never anything less than fastidious.
Nowadays Penny was free to heap as many old castoffs on her back as she liked. She could block out her mother’s old horror of second-hand clothes, the thought that someone might have died in them. She could go round dressed in old men’s clothes if she liked and no one would object, no one would bat an eyelid. Going round the drab shops this afternoon, she thought about making herself into a real fright — Stig of the Dump — and visiting Bishop General, sitting by Liz’s bed. Hair stuck all over the place, odd socks, lumpy old jumper and yesterday’s pants on. She could imagine Liz’s eyes flying open: “A daughter of mine visiting her mother like this!”
She sat on a bench under a tree in the middle of the precinct. It was freezing. She couldn’t pretend she was just passing the time of day. She had to admit, at least to herself, that she was watching out for Craig. She lit a cigarette and her eyes scanned the walkway and ramp leading up to Completely Fit. The Mr Blobby theme going on and on outside Red Spot was driving her mad.
Then he was coming out of Stevens the newsagents, the Northern Echo rolled under his arm. He was in tracksuit bottoms, lurching towards her on his bad foot across the slippery flagstones. It was pattering on to snow, hard, dry flakes that wouldn’t melt on your skin when they landed there. He was grinning and that made his hobbled progress even more pathetic to her. Penny had forgotten that his limp was so bad.
“You’re still around,” he said, coming in close.
She hissed out her smoke. She’d done her bit and said thanks already. Now she could afford to be cool with him. They didn’t like you to gush. At least, not at first.
“It’s a bit miserable, back at home,” she admitted and blew her cool by shivering.
“How about some tea?” he asked. “Have the Health people closed down the Copper Kettle yet?”
They looked across the town centre and saw that the café was still open. It had been given a month to sort out its hygiene problems or it would be forced to shut down. Its loyal customers kept on going. They had organised a petition to save their town’s only café and it said they would organise a sit-in if the Health people tried to shut it.
“All right,” Penny said.
At this point in the afternoon Craig often went for some tea at the Copper Kettle. Today was when he bought 2000 AD, a British comic he had been collecting for years. It was folded up inside his newspaper like a dirty magazine. He followed Penny to the café, deciding to forgo his usual hour or so alone with his comic.
NINE
When I woke up the first morning, it was with a terrible pain in my gut. For a few minutes it stabbed and just held in there. I sat up in bed and I couldn’t move, I sat there shocked by the pain. It went off like someone throwing a switch and then Nanna Jean knocked and came in with a tray.
“Lemsip for the invalid,” she announced, plonking the tray on my knees. It had two cups and saucers on it, one of Lemsip, one of black tea. I looked down at the clear green and the clear orange, bits swirling round in both, and neither looked inviting. The nice thing about Nanna Jean, though, is that she always serves tea in the best china, whatever the time of day. I remember when I lived with her in my teens, when she started going out nights again, she’d come back tipsy from dancing and still make tea in china cups at four in the morning. She and her cronies sat round her kitchen table, cackling and tapping their ash into a spare white saucer. I’d watch from the stairs sometimes, loving the homely smell of the smoke.
When I told her about the pain, she surprised me.
“Aah, you get all sorts of pains when you’re growing up.”
And I didn’t remind her that I was twenty-four, that all my growing had been done, that this pain must signify something else, something new besides simple growth. I let it drop.
She still lives i
n the same place she always did, and I find that reassuring. When I think, it’s the single thing in all my life that has stayed the same. Nanna Jean lives in Hyde Street, a terrace of dark turn-of-the-century houses on a gentle hill in South Shields. When my dad worked in Shields town hail for a year during the sixties, he used to go round Nanna Jean’s in his dinner hour. Ham and a bit of salad. He said Nanna Jean never talked to him much, just gave him his dinner and watched him eat it, weighing him up.
Nanna Jean had this cat, Lucky, who used to slink about the place. Not a hair on it, Mam said. A few bits of fluff on its back. She and all her sisters used to hate that cat. It used to wobble about all over the place, and perch on the antimacassars. She made Dad take it away one day when Nanna Jean was out, down the spiritualists’ church. He got rid of Lucky and it was his first act as a member of our family. He moved into the front parlour and then I came along and we all muddled in together. Auntie Olly lived under the stairs, behind a green curtain. She had a bed like a bunk on a ship and she was nearly seven feet tall. Up on the top floor lived Auntie Jane and her Brian and our Steve, but you never saw them.
Nanna Jean was a proper old lady. Mam always said it was something to do with her generation. Always going about in those long coats, clumpy shoes, fruit on their hats, and their handbags held under their bosoms, arms folded.
I remember Mam saying that Nanna jean was a funny woman. Repressed. Like many of her age and class, she couldn’t quite deal with the world of the sixties. This world that came to claim her children. They started staying out all night in clubs like the Chelsea Cat. When I was tiny, Nanna Jean was this imposing presence all in black, often under a duvet in her armchair. She seemed a real old woman, but she must have been only about fifty when I was little. And all through the sixties and seventies she was blind. It happened very suddenly, just before her husband died, in 1960. She was working in the scullery, doing something to kippers, when he called her from the parlour, where he was watching the telly. “Come and look at this, Jean! It’s like real life! They’re talking like real people on here!”
