by Paul Magrs
“I’m glad,” I said.
“There are all sorts of connections round here.” Iris smiled. “I bet we don’t know the half of it. It was only in recent years I found out I had all these cousins in South Shields. All of them black. An aunt of ours married a man black as coal in 1900. They had dozens of children and they all stayed here. Imagine that! So when I found out, I looked them up and went round paying visits. Ever so clean. And they all looked like members of my family! Except all of mine, the white ones, were dead. All the same faces, all the same personalities, almost. Different names — and all of them a different colour.” She clicked her fingers. “Ha! What do you think of that?”
“Don’t confuse the boy,” Nanna Jean said huffily. “He doesn’t want to know about all that.”
“He’s a man!” Iris smiled gently and reached across the perfect tablecloth for her Embassy Milds. “He’s interested, aren’t you, pet?”
I beamed at her.
“The family stories have to go somewhere, Jean,” she said in a voice sounding as if she was falling asleep. “He’s the one who’s got to carry it all on, and give it to his own bairns.” She was becoming fainter.
“It’s a lot of nonsense,” Nanna Jean said, but kindly, trying not to hurt her feelings.
TEN
Penny found herself pushing Liz further to the back of her mind.
Every other day Penny went to the hospital. She listened to her mother’s bedside machines bleeping. Was she meant to talk to her? Liz showed no sign of change. She lay there, straight, her features strong and implacable. She was bathed in the lights of the displays that showed how she was getting on. Elsie said that she talked to her, chattered to her about all sorts. She couldn’t stop herself. She said that the other visitors did it too — all the women of Phoenix Court. She made Penny feel inadequate.
She would arrive in the late afternoon and sit down in the uncomfortable chair at Liz’s side. She’d have spent the whole bus trip through wintry fields thinking up things to tell her mam. And she’d sit down and there would be nothing. Suddenly she felt stupid. If she opened her mouth, the air would crack. Her voice was sucked away by the dull machines lining the room. She looked at Liz and thought about speaking, coming out with caring, cheering, supportive things, and it felt like talking to a plant.
Things were moving on with Craig. Andy called him ‘your
straight boyfriend’ and this gave Penny a warm glow. Was she proud of him? He came round to fix a problem they had with wiring. And then the toilet wouldn’t flush. He went in and sorted it, not in the least put off that the toilet was chockablock. He was very handy. In the Forsyths’ house across the road he had been an asset because somehow he knew how to do things. To make things, fix things, to sort them out, without really being aware of how he came by such knowledge. Craig just somehow knew. Penny adored this about him. She was used to living around people who relished their own haplessness. Andy would tut and wave his hands at problems like these, practical concerns. Liz would treat them with a derisory sneer. And because both were so set on behaving like ladies, both would call in a plumber or an electrician.
Craig, on the other hand, would stick his head into the source of the problem, ask for his tools and start to poke around. Once in January Andy tried to switch the telly on. It was just after he came back from his nanna Jean’s, his cold germs were ebbing and he spent whole days watching the telly. It had been left on stand-by all night and it wouldn’t come on properly for him. He was wanting to see something particular and Penny watched, almost cruelly fascinated, as he worked himself into a fit of pique, into stomping-up-and-down-the-room angry. She had noticed Andy becoming more temperamental recently. “Hostage to my hormones,” he snarled once, when she pointed this out. More than half-seriously she put his touchiness down to the gym, which he was now visiting daily.
Penny tried to turn the telly on. Andy flung himself down in an armchair. “You won’t be able to do it,” he snapped.
“Oh, where’s my lovely Andy that I used to know?” she sang mockingly, thumping the set. Trying the button again. Click. Click. It wasn’t working at all. The screen was stubbornly opaque. Recently she had found herself thinking that Andy wasn’t fun to live with any more. Now he went off into the kitchen, where she could hear him clatter, making a sandwich. Apricot stilton with whole-grain mustard. He ate these on the hour, every hour, in place of cigarettes. When he came back to the living room he said, through a mouthful of chewed sandwich, “Before you say anything, I’m feeding up my muscles. I’m still a growing boy.”
She stared at him. And it was true. She hadn’t noticed how much extra weight he was carrying. Today he wore his cropped black T-shirt. It said Grrr in glittery golden letters. A little bit of stomach was coming out from under it, above his extra-tight jeans. Though he bragged about how much he was working out, how much extra he was devouring daily during and between meals, she knew how prissy and mortified he would be if she drew attention to his increased size. Filled out, she decided would be the phrase she would use if asked. She would work to make it sound very attractive.
“I can’t get the telly to come on,” she said.
“See,” he tutted. “My programme’s finished anyway.”
“Mine isn’t.”
Andy rolled his eyes. She had become a fan of Home and Away.
She phoned Elsie’s house and asked if Craig could come round to look at the telly — before half past one.
They watched through the living-room blinds as he came across the kids’ play park. He carried his metal toolbox under one arm and dragged his bad leg in the snow.
“The cold must make it worse,” said Andy.
She looked at him, checking that he wasn’t being cruel. His face was thoughtful and composed. “Have you shagged him yet?”
“Andy, you’re so blunt.”
“Well, have you?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her and she laughed.
“I’m not telling you what he was like.”
“Suit yourself.”
“You always want to know that stuff,” she said accusingly. “What people are like. It’s like you can draw up a big chart and point out their best features, their special skills.”
“Well,” he said. “So you can.”
“Like the decathlon.”
“I take it he’s rubbish, then.”
“No, he’s —” She pursed her lips. “He’s lovely, actually.”
Then Craig was there. He brought in with him the smoky, ginny, dog-smelly atmosphere of Elsie’s house as he installed himself on the living-room carpet. After saying cursory hellos to Andy and Penny and giving Penny a chaste kiss on the lips, he applied himself to the proper task.
Penny took herself off to catch the bus to hospital. She warned them that she wanted to watch the second showing of Home and Away when she returned.
Craig unfolded the dark, cluttered compartments of his toolbox. Andy stayed to watch him work. He was careful and precise and something about his application and the way you could see one thought after another chase across his forehead kept Andy watching. His hands were scarred, dirty and skilled. Their nails were stumpy and nibbled. He wore thick white socks and trainers with a kangaroo motif. Soon he had the whole TV in pieces and scattered across the carpet.
“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Andy, wanting to draw his attention away for a moment.
Craig looked round briefly. “Not at all.” He smiled. His teeth were very even. “It can’t be that difficult.”
He asked for the Hoover. Andy jumped up — oh, far too eagerly, he scolded himself — to fetch it from the hail cupboard and banged his funny bone getting it out.
Then he sat enthralled as Craig wielded the attachments and set about hoovering each and every part of the TV’s innards.
“Will that do any good?” Andy breathed.
“Dust gets everywhere,” Craig grunted. “It causes problems.”
When he w
as satisfied the bits were clean, he told Andy to put the Hoover away. It took him another hour to reconstruct all the parts.
“Amazing,” Andy said, once the telly was back in one piece.
Craig held up a single golden screw. It was tiny. “I couldn’t find a place for this bit,” he said sadly and went to put it on the fireplace.
He switched the telly on. The picture appeared like a dream.
“Huh,” said Penny, when she arrived just in time for Home and Away. Andy and Craig were drinking cans of lager in celebration. “Maybe you should get up to the hospital,” she said. “Take Liz to bits and give her a good hoovering.”
ELEVEN
On the table beside the hospital bed someone had left a box of Quality Street. What would Liz want with chocolates? Probably they were left over from someone’s Christmas. They stood among the few flowers that visitors had brought.
Fran sighed and looked around the room. Funny that Liz had a room to herself. They must think it serious. For a month she hadn’t so much as blinked. Fran found that she couldn’t say anything to Liz. She couldn’t talk to a body like this. It didn’t seem right.
“When I was little,” Fran told Elsie, who sat on the other side of Liz, “and my auntie Anne was dying in hospital, I got told off for chatting to her. I got my ear clipped for chattering away. I was only trying to cheer her up.”
Elsie gave a tight smile. Fran wanted to explain that this was why she couldn’t talk to Liz now. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to. In fact, she’d give anything for a proper chat with Liz, even one-sided. But now she felt inhibited. Not least by Elsie, who for the past hour had been untwisting boiled sweets from their wrappers and sucking them contemplatively. Suddenly everything about Elsie was annoying Fran, even down to her green sweatshirt with the cartoon lamb appliqued to its front. Elsie was talking to Liz with the ease of someone well used to not expecting replies.
“It gave me pause for thought.” Elsie smiled vaguely to herself. “I mean, obviously I don’t mind, but it did make me think. He’s still my own little lad, isn’t he? And there he is, running around with a woman, inviting her to stay over for the night — in my house!”
Fran wondered if she should be hearing any of this.
“I’m sure you don’t mind me telling you like this, Liz,” Elsie confided as she scooped a heap of sweet wrappers and brushed them into the bin at her feet. “But it’s my job, I think, to keep you up to date. The fact is, your lovely daughter and my son Craig are very definitely an item. Already she feels quite the little daughter-in-law. She’s stayed over at our house three nights this last week. And I thought it would be weird, you know, my son bringing back a woman to sleep in his boyhood bedroom. But it isn’t. It’s company. Your daughter is lovely company, Liz. I’m sure you’re proud of her. She’s washed up, helped me with the breakfast things, she’s a sunny smile about the place. She’s a tonic to me, to tell you the truth.”
Fran thought the irises under closed lids shifted. The eyes would fly open. But Liz stayed silent.
“What I would have given for a daughter like that!” Elsie said. “You need a good daughter for your old age. Daughters are good to you.”
Fran thought, What’s that poor girl doing to herself? That Penny, they reckoned she had all the good prospects. She could go off and have a college education, a career, anything she wanted. It would be no effort at all for her to get off this town. Fran couldn’t imagine such a thing for herself. How would you set about leaving? But the likes of Penny, she would have no trouble, setting up a better life elsewhere. There she was, though, by all accounts lumbering herself with Elsie’s son. Did Fran have anything against Craig in particular? True, he had separated himself from the rough gang of lads over the road. He had stopped running around with them at night, causing trouble. He’d moved back to his mam’s house and seemed to have turned over a new leaf. But what were his aims in life? What was he going to do? If Fran had been a different sort, a better woman, she would take Penny aside and have a word with her. She would explain a thing or two. About what it’s like to tie yourself down and deliberately ignore the other, more complicated options. Fran wasn’t one for interfering, though. She didn’t instigate events; she mopped up afterwards.
Elsie was looking at her. She had run out of things to say.
“Shall we let her rest?” she asked. And Fran felt a twinge of sadness. Elsie looked so pleased with herself. Pleased at taking over another woman’s promising daughter.
“I’m parched,” Elsie said, and they went to the canteen.
Elsie asked, “What do you know about scabies, Fran?”
“Well, nothing. Not a lot. It’s like nits, I think, isn’t it?”
Elsie shrugged and looked about. “I don’t know. I wish I did know. Who do you ask about things like that?”
The canteen was mostly empty, apart from a boy of twelve, hugging a toddler to his shoulder, waiting for his mam, who had been in the ladies’ a full half-hour. The twelve-year-old looked anxious, as if preparing to ask one of the women at the canteen counter for help. The canteen women put chips on plates with small golden shovels like those in McDonald’s. The tea came in the smallest of aluminium pots, which made it taste metallic, Fran thought. These trips out to Bishop to see Liz were becoming routine; they were always rounded off with a pot of tea in this bleak canteen.
“You don’t think you’ve got scabies, do you?” asked Fran, prompting.
“I’m itching like crazy,” said Elsie, her lips pursed in self-disgust. “It started off and it was just our Craig. When he moved back from that rough house of lads.”
“Ah,” said Fran. “You think it’s come from there.”
Fran’s heart was thudding crossly. The idea of Craig and Elsie passing scabies on to the whole street! It was like living in a slum. How did you catch scabies? Was it in the air, or skin on skin? Could it be through brushed contact of sleeves or leaving your coat hung up in someone’s hall? Unreasonable anger welled up in her throat as she watched Elsie pour herself a second cup of tea from the metal pot.
“I saw a bit on the telly about it once,” said Elsie. “And, like nits, they said it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Fran leaned in closer. “Isn’t it more like crabs?”
Elsie blanched. Her own worst itching came around her pubic hair and just above. The doughy white folds of her stomach were red and inflamed with the itch. She had been like this for the past few weeks. This discomfort was something she’d grown used to. She clenched her teeth against it. Her inner wrists and ankles seethed and tiny boils had poked up under the surface of the skin. She was covered in a poor person’s rash. And this morning Penny had said in a loud, appalled voice: “What’s this I’ve got all over me?” She’d forced Elsie to look at the inflamed skin of her wrists and stomach. Shame-faced Elsie looked and didn’t dare tell Penny: Well, I think our Craig’s given you a kind of rash. So what was she to do? Find an answer, a cure?
“You want to get down the chemist’s,” said Fran. “It can’t be very comfortable, or healthy.” She sat back in her seat thinking: or clean. “They’ll know what to do about it.”
“You’re right,” said Elsie and it seemed possible, somehow, that this could be dealt with. The worst thing with itching, she wanted to tell Fran, was that you could never be sure it was really there. Even if you had a red, sore rash to show, it didn’t prove much. Even that could be — what did they call it? — psychosomatic.
They were standing up to go. “It’s funny what you can catch, isn’t it?” she said, as they left the last of the clean-smelling corridors.
Then she set about begging Fran to come with her to visit Tom. After the last, disastrous visit there was no way she was going alone.
“It’ll only be an hour or so,” Elsie said. “You’ll be back for the kids being home. I can’t go up there by myself.”
Fran gave in. They crossed the road outside the hospital to catch the bus that went to Sedgefield. What am I doing?
Fran thought. She didn’t want to get caught up in the lives of Elsie and Tom any more than this. Yet here she was, on the bus to Sedgefield. Elsie sat beside her trying to chat brightly. Fran stared at the fields, on which the old, crusted snow was starting at last to thaw. She was only too aware of the press of Elsie’s overcoat and the rest of her clothes against her.
When you live together all the time, there are a million things to do. You neglect each other, that’s what Tom’s said before, and I suppose that’s true. We never made the time to sort things out. We had so much to do! I like my house nice and he was good with his hands. Paint this, Tom! Sand this down! Put this new unit up! And he was good, he was, he was meant to be an architect and so he was always good with things about the house.
What he hated, though, and this was the hard bit, what he hated most was the way I would let Craig get away with things. When Craig would take to his room and stay there, Tom would get at me and say I’d brought him up funny. He hadn’t turned out right. I’d go round the house, doing my chores, and Tom would follow me round, telling me all this about my son. How I had spoiled him for the rest of the world.
Once, when Craig was out — when he first started hanging about with that gang of his — I found Tom poking about under the boy’s bed. Hundreds of comics were pushed over all the carpet. I said, “But Tom, what are you looking for?” And he looked up furious to be disturbed like this.
“It isn’t fair,” Tom would rant at me, “that I have to paint the hallway, do all this, be the master of this house, and that son of yours doesn’t have to do a stroke of work.”
So Tom would remind me that Craig wasn’t his and that would make me ache inside. At mealtimes we would eat round the kitchen table and the two of them wouldn’t speak a word. It would set all my nerves on edge. I could hardly eat. I’d jump up halfway through my dinner and have to throw it in the bucket. I’d put on the radio to drown out their silence as they ate. TFM, where they play the hits of the seventies.
