by Paul Magrs
“School,” Jane said and felt a moment of guilt since, as a teacher’s helper-volunteer, she should be there too. She couldn’t face it. Spring was in the air. The sky was bluer than it had been for months. The tarmac was wet and sizzled with melted ice water, as if the sun was deliberately sucking it all back up. Jane wanted to be off round the shops. She was meeting her mam in Binn’s cafe, mercifully minus the one-legged stepfather.
Jane said, “What about Nesta having another bairn?”
“Eee, yes.” Big Sue bit her lip.
“I don’t think she looks after the others proper.”
Big Sue looked pained, as if she wasn’t the type to pick fault. “I think the thing with Nesta is that she’s subnormal.”
“You what?”
“Subnormal in the mental department. She was adopted, you know, by a lovely couple. Very clean, from over Faulkner Road way. And Nesta grew up like she is, quite different from them. I don’t know what they think about her. It just shows, it doesn’t matter how you get brung up, it’s all in your genes. I suppose.” Big Sue clutched her handbag under her bosom.
Jane thought about how Nesta’s daughter came running out of the house at eight every morning, seeing herself off to school. By all reports Nesta was still in bed at that time. She had Vicki, who was eight, and one who was little more than a baby, and Vicki had to get herself up and fed and deal with the baby as well. And if you saw Vicki...she was like a street urchin.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Jane, stepping half out of the bus shelter to watch for the bus, “if they got reported and social services came and took that new baby off them straight after it was born.”
Big Sue looked shocked. She tried to remember which fairy tale it was, when the wicked fairy takes the princess as soon as she’s born. The queen knows this will happen even as she gives birth. “Oh, that would be terrible!”
Where was this bus? They’d been waiting over twenty minutes here. “‘You worry about bairns being kept in a house like that,” Jane said. “It’s a kindness, I think, to report the parents. Look at Fred West and Rosemary West and the House of Horror. That was allowed to go on because people didn’t think to phone in. Nesta shouldn’t have been allowed to have any bairns.”
“Oh, now,” said Big Sue worriedly.
The bus had appeared at the bottom of Woodham Way, down by the private houses.
At the back of them there was the clang of a gate and Penny came running. She’s dressed up too warm for the weather, Big Sue thought. What a mess she looks! All them layers of candies and shirts! Pretty girl like that, spoiling herself! Penny was just in time for the bus, breathless as it drew to a halt before them. Jane gave her a tight smile and thought, Typical of a daughter of Liz to swan up to the bus exactly at the right moment. When the likes of me have to wait nearly an hour!
They got tickets and Jane turned to ask over her shoulder, “How’s the great romance?”
“The what?” Penny scowled. “Well. That’s over with.”
Jane hurried down the gangway to sit with Big Sue and tell her. They watched Penny find a seat near the front. Then, as the bus shunted off, it stopped abruptly to let on a latecomer. Mark Kelly was wearing a white T-shirt and tight blue jeans. He grinned at Penny and sat down with her and immediately they started chatting. From the back of the bus you couldn’t hear a word they said, but they looked thick as thieves.
The bus heaved off on its trip to Darlington. Big Sue and Jane turned in their seats to look at each other at precisely the same moment. Jane raised an eyebrow. “I never realised them two were friendly,” she said.
“They seem to be,” Big Sue said, her lips pursed.
“It was in Darlington that I had all of my tattoos done,” Mark said. They were heading up North Road, the long street that went into the town centre. It was the street Penny thought of as the exciting one: all pubs, cinemas, sex shops and taxidermists. “The shop was called Tattoo You and it’s still down here somewhere. I’ve never been back for years.”
Penny stared at the designs on his face. She hadn’t had a very clear look at him before, or dared to ask many questions about them. He’d brought the subject up today, so she felt free to ask. It took her mind off Craig. “How old were you when you first got done?”
He laughed. “Pardon?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Oh...I forget, really. But I reckon I was under the age you’re meant to be. I used to come on the bus with my best mate, Tony. It was all his idea. I was so scared the first time. You’ve no idea.”
“Did Tony get tattoos?”
“He never did.”
“Was he scared?”
“I don’t think so. He never looked it. And he loved to watch it happen, loved to watch me get it done.’ Mark smiled. ‘It ended up with him designing my tattoos. He was a wonderful artist, you know, though he never did very well at art in school. They didn’t think much of what he did. But he’d make up things, work them out on paper. Then he would draw them on my skin in biro, the nights before we went to Tattoo You. The woman there —Marjorie, they called her — used to go over Tony’s lines and colour it all in.”
“Show me one he drew on you.” Mark lifted up his T-shirt sleeve to show his right shoulder. Underneath, reaching into his shaved armpit, he had a centipede in scarlet and gold, its legs twisted in all directions. Penny thought, What a thing to have crawling into your armpit! It was like an optical illusion because the insect jigsawed precisely with a bird on one side, some kind of eagle, and a furled orchid which went round to his chest. She could see only parts of these things down the short sleeve of his top.
“But why did you get so many?”
“I dunno. It’s like an addiction.” He thought. “But it’s also like balancing up. You get something on one arm, then you need the other one doing. One leg, and the other needs the same. With a clock on one tit, the other will need a balance. You spend all your time weighing yourself up, making it all balance…next thing you know, you’re on your way to being covered.”
“Right,” she said and could see how it happened. “I still don’t think it’s fair that this mate of yours, Tony, wasn’t brave enough to get any done.”
“That was just Tony.” Mark was about to add, “And besides, you don’t know what it’s like.” He stopped himself and the words froze in his throat. Penny had pulled up her many layers to reveal her taut, pale stomach. There she had a hummingbird, its fine green beak pointed at her navel. “I got this in Whitley Bay last year,” she said.
“Smart,” said Mark, leaning in to see.
“What’s he doing now?” Big Sue asked, hardly daring to look.
“I can’t see,’ said Jane. “But she’s lifting up her clothes and he’s bending to have a look at something.”
“This is disgraceful!” Big Sue fidgeted with the clasp on her handbag.
The bus swung round the last roundabout before the town centre. Jane was up on her feet, ready to get off. “I’m sure Elsie’s going to be pleased to hear about this. She thought a lot of that Penny.”
“Oh, you can’t interfere...” Big Sue began, but Jane had already set off for the front of the bus, where Penny was still exposing her belly for Mark.
Jane slipped past trying not to look.
Mark saw her and grinned, turning away from Penny. He was about to say something when he remembered what Fran had told him. Jane had it in for him.
Penny waited downstairs in the café while Mark went to the
loo. It was chintzy and genteel, full of pensioners. The waitress took her order and she said coffee for Mark, as he’d asked.
“Now, does he want milk, hot milk or cream?” asked the waitress worriedly.
“No idea,” said Penny.
“Let me think.” The waitress tapped her teeth with her pen. “He has hot milk, does Mark. Normally.” Then she was gone.
Penny sat thinking. She wished she’d asked Mark if he’d had his whole body tattooed. Perhaps th
e moment had already passed. Could you ask a question like that without blushing and seeming prurient? She had read somewhere that it was impossible to put a tattoo on the penis. Its poor tender shaft bruised the instant you started to apply that kind of pressure. The more she thought about it, the more she wanted to ask.
He reappeared and smiled, taking his place at the green marble-topped table. “Now,” he said. “Tell Uncle Mark all about it.”
She found that was exactly what she wanted to do. She started with New Year’s Eve and told him bit by bit how she’d ended up settling for Craig.
“Is that how you think of it?” Mark frowned. “That you’ve ‘settled for’ him?”
She thought. “I suppose I must.”
“You’re tying yourself down and you’re not even sure.” He sipped at his coffee, but it was still too hot. “Listen, I could tell you a thing or two about settling for things. Sometimes it seems like the best thing to do.” He stared at her and the effect was mesmerising. “And whatever you settle for, there’s always something to be salvaged out of the situation.”
“And there was!” Penny burst out. “There is! When he wants to be, Craig can be a lovely bloke. He’d do anything for you, for me. I felt…protected.”
“Did you need protecting?”
She shrugged. “Not really.” Then she added, “But it was nice anyway. And I liked feeling part of a normal family, just for a bit.”
“There’s no such thing,” Mark said sadly. “I hate to tell you, but there’s no such thing as a normal family.”
“Don’t patronise me, Mark.”
He laughed. He was twice her age, he supposed. Almost, anyway. Really, he had every right to patronise her.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll pretend, for argument’s sake, that life with Craig and Elsie could be like normal family life.”
Now she snickered. “Well, maybe not. But don’t you know what I mean? Don’t you hanker after a bit of ordinariness?”
“I don’t know any more,” he said. “I really don’t know what I want any more.”
Penny was silent for a few minutes. They blew on their coffee and started to drink, stuck in their private thoughts. What he’d said sounded so bleak. She hoped she wouldn’t end up like him. And it seemed awful to think that.
Penny said, “When I think, what made it impossible to be with Craig was the way he fixed our telly.”
“Hm?” A smile played on Mark’s face. The thought struck her that they were both enjoying this conversation more than they’d like to admit.
“He was so methodical and dry. He took it all to pieces and hoovered all the parts —”
“He hoovered your telly?”
“Then he put it back together and it was mended.”
“That’s amazing!”
“Yeah, but how can I shag a bloke who thinks like that? I’d have much more respect for someone who got in a flap and chucked the bits around, or who made it blow up or who...I don’t know…wanted to read instead.” She stopped and laughed at herself.
Mark shook his head, tutting. “Fancy hoovering the telly!”
“Don’t you see what I mean?”
He grinned. “Craig sounds like a handy feller to have around.”
“But can you imagine having sex with him?”
“You’d be watching for that nozzle coming your way...listening for the hum as his Hoover bag inflates...”
“Oh, shut up,” she said, with a grimace. “The sex was all right.”
“Only all right?” he asked mischievously.
“Sometimes it was smashing.”
“Good,” said Mark simply.
Talking like this reminded Penny of the night before. It reminded her that when she had returned home and told Andy — diffident, quiet, worried-looking Andy — all about it, she had become furious with Craig. When she stamped off to bed, all she could think was that Craig went down on her only because he was mad and thought that he could become infected somehow by her fanny juices. That he would get access to what he called her superpowers. That was all he wanted out of me, Penny thought glumly.
She shook these thoughts away and said to Mark, “Craig couldn’t tell me anything about myself. He liked my mystery, he said. Some fucking mystery.”
Mark pulled a face. “Did you like his mystery?”
“It sounds awful, but I think I knew everything about Craig the first time I met him.”
“He’s that superficial, is he?”
“I don’t mean that exactly.” She felt hateful. “
“You’re right. You sound awful.” Mark shrugged. “Maybe you’re not the right person to see into Craig’s depths. He’s certainly not going to see yours.”
She wanted to thank him for that. He looked at her straight on and she was discomfited. She said, was starting to feel guilty about him. “How do I tell him all this? I have to finish with him, don’t I?”
Mark smiled and tipped the rest of the coffee down his throat.
Jane didn’t have much to do in Darlington. Really, it was for
the run out that she went. She had to be back in Aycliffe for three, to meet Peter at the school. They liked you to be there to pick up your kids, what with funny people wandering round. In the past year school security had improved tenfold. Dunblane.
So Jane had time enough for a pot of tea with her mam in Binns. Rose said she was off soon to Tunisia with her newish husband.
“I don’t know where you find the energy...or the money.”
“Neither do I!” Rose laughed. She looked like a jolly person, Jane thought, gloomily twiddling the plastic carnation from the table’s centrepiece. My mother’s a jolly person, jiggling her breasts under her mohair jumper, tucking into cream cakes in Binns cafeteria. How could I have come from her?
“I don’t know very much about Tunisia,’ said Jane.
“Apparently it’s extremely hot,” Rose said. “Ethan’s been before. He went most places with the navy.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll come back all bronze and lovely for the spring.”
“Lovely.” Rose stopped talking about her holiday and fixed her daughter with a stare. “So what is the problem?”
“There’s nothing.”
“Oh, come on.” Rose let out an irritable sigh. “You could be pleased for me. I’m having a life at last. Don’t I deserve one?”
“Of course you do. I—”
“You look narked.”
“Maybe I am.”
“It doesn’t do to get jealous, Jane.” Rose reached for her Regals. “Especially not of your old mam.”
Jane snapped, “I just wonder when it’s all gunna come to me. I want my luck to change. I want my life to be different. I’m not even thirty and it’s like it’s all over.”
“It’s not over!” Rose smiled. “Look how young you are.”
“Oh, I’ve said that to mesel’ for years, Mam. But I never do anything different. Nothing’s gunna change now.”
“Look at my life!” Rose spread her massive hands in a gesture of wonderment. “My life changed overnight when I met Ethan! And I was over fifty!” The look on her face said it all: she believed that everything could change for the better in a flash. “You need someone to come along and transform you. That’s all.”
“But that’s your life,” said Jane, wishing she’d never started this conversation now. It was making her feel worse than ever. “That applies to you, not me.”
Rose frowned. “Why should you be any different to me? You’re my daughter, for goodness’ sake!”
“I’m not like you, Mam.”
“No harm in that!”
Jane struggled with this. “You’re...more fun than me. You’re larger than life. People notice you more. Of course someone was bound to come along and want to change your life. I’m...I feel twisted up.”
“Nonsense.” Rose took hold of Jane’s hands. “You’re still mine. I’ve watched you, these past couple of years, sink into yourself like thi
s. You hardly feel you’ve got any worth left, do you?”
Dumbly Jane agreed.
“All the fight’s gone out of you, Jane. Fight I put there. I’m scared to say it, but it’s like you’ve no self-respect.”
Jane bridled. “I bloody have!”
“No ego, then. You won’t fight for yourself, speak up for yourself. You’re absorbed in other people’s goings-on.”
Jane fiddled for one of her mother’s cigarettes. “I don’t know what’s happened to me.”
Rose stared and thought, I don’t know either, love. And I don’t know what comes next for you. Your mother’s a dab hand at making the best of things. Slapping on the make-up, putting on the glad rags. I wouldn’t know how to face the world as you do. Your life looks pinched and mean. How did you get like that? She took Jane’s free hand in both of hers. “Come to the desert with me.”
All the way home on the bus Jane thought about going to the desert. She had never been abroad. Imagine her and Peter on the golden sands in a place she’d never thought about before. She could relax into the care of Rose and Ethan, maybe even enjoy their company. For however long the holiday lasted she wouldn’t have to be the grown-up. Rose and Ethan knew all the procedures. They knew how to travel abroad and how to do it in style. Jane needed their help. She wouldn’t have a clue where to queue with her passport and tickets, how to travel on a plane.
They had the money for it, too. They could afford to treat Jane and Peter. He would miss some weeks at school, but it was worth it, surely. He would have some exciting tales to tell his pals and his teacher. He was such a quiet kid. He’d wow them all with his tales from the desert.
Jane saw herself packing two cases, one for him, one for her, with shorts and tops, new underwear, bikini, sun dresses, sun block, and how many novels might she need for a fortnight? Fourteen days in the sun with nothing else to do but read her books.
She thought about this all the way to Aycliffe. She got off the bus at Humphrey Close, just by Peter’s school. When he came down the drive he looked upset. Something had happened today but, as usual, he wouldn’t tell her anything. It was swimming day and she assumed it had to do with that. As they walked home across the Burn, she considered telling him the plan. But I won’t, not yet. Just in case it doesn’t come off. There was nothing worse than raising a kid’s hopes and letting them spoil.
