by Paul Magrs
“I’m sure I don’t!”
“Yes, you bloody well do. So don’t blame me if your Craig isn’t here to be mothered just now. I don’t know and I don’t care what he’s doing in Edinburgh. I hope the poor lad’s having the time of his life.” With that, Penny opened the door.
Elsie called out, chastened. “What was your news?”
“Are you sure you want to hear?”
Elsie looked around at Charlotte and the customers. They had heard everything. Elsie felt stripped bare. ‘You know me.” She held her chin up, trembling. “I don’t like not knowing.”
“My mam’s coming back to the land of the living.” Penny gave a wry smile. “Now tell me you’re not pleased.”
Nesta was hatching a plan. She wanted to leave Phoenix Court. She had set her sights on one of those Barratt houses they were building out of town. Red brick, three bedrooms, garage underneath. She had her new baby and now it was all change. She was wanting to go up in the world.
“They let them move in for a deposit of £99,” Elsie told Fran. “They’re practically chucking mortgages at anyone.”
Fran was ironing. “It’s a buyer’s market,” she said. She looked at Elsie helping herself to more tea, cutting another slice of Battenburg. Fran had thought that, with Jane abroad, she might get her afternoons to herself. But here was Elsie, glowing and chatty. She kept telling Fran the lurid stories of the restoration of her common-law marriage to Tom. “That devil had me up all night again!” she’d cackle. “He’s a wicked old thing!”
“I just hope,” Elsie was saying now, “that Nesta has counted the cost and knows how much she’ll end up having to pay.” Elsie pulled a face. “Semi-detached.”
Fran knew that Elsie was jealous, knowing that she’d never get out of her council house, where almost all her rent was paid for her. Really, she was here for life. If she did any paid work they’d take benefits off her and it wouldn’t be worth it. Elsie was dug in.
“I’m surprised they gave her a mortgage,’ Elsie said.
“Nesta never paid a penny poll tax, when that was the thing. Her Tony gets that Socialist Worker paper. Says he’s a socialist. They had bailiffs banging on their doors. Nesta said she was paying nothing, because it was against her principles.” She snorted. “Principles! The likes of them!”
“Well, you can’t blame her for wanting to better herself,” said Fran. “For wanting to get off this estate.”
“There’s nothing wrong with here!” Elsie said. “The people round here are the salt of the earth!”
“Are they?” Wearily Fran folded her pile of pillowcases. “You know yourself there are some right bloody horrors round here. The place is getting rougher and rougher. I’m telling you, if I could, I’d leave in a shot.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“I bloody would. I think the younger ones have got the right idea.” She looked at Elsie. “Any sign of your Craig coming back?”
“He’s still in Scotland. He says he might look for work there.”
“I can’t see it being any better there,” Fran said.
“I think he’s enjoying the big city. Poor lad! He hasn’t seen many places. He’ll like the bright lights. I suppose he’s like his dad that way.”
“Are you missing him?”
“It’s lucky Tom came back to me! Otherwise I’d be on my tod!” Elsie gave a bleak little laugh. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than being alone. Yet look how close she’d come to it recently.
There were two things Nesta knew for certain about the telly.
One was that on Beadle’s About people did zany things for camcorders on purpose. There weren’t as many silly-looking accidents in the world as Jeremy Beadle pretended. The world wasn’t as funny as that. The people who got on his show staged their own ludicrous disasters, just to get on the telly and pocket some cash. Good luck to them. But Nesta wasn’t taken in.
The other thing she knew for certain was that only men liked James Bond. Women liked real stories. Stories with real people and lives, not gadgets and guns.
She was sitting at Liz’s bedside with Big Sue and for the past hour they had been talking about what was on the telly. What was good, what was hopeless, and what should be taken off. It was their great point of contact. Recently the two of them had taken to visiting each other to watch telly together. They both liked the way the other interrupted and talked all the way through programmes. When they watched things alone it was this kind of ribald, deprecating commentary that they craved. Now, over Liz’s body, they were agreeing on last night’s Heartbeat. They thought the young policeman was lovely. And the music took you right back in time to the sixties.
“Back to the sixties,” said Liz. They both jumped.
They stared at her. She was quite still.
“She spoke!” said Big Sue.
“She said ‘Back to the sixties!’” said Nesta.
“Fetch a nurse!” said Big Sue, starting up out of her chair.
Nesta was on her way.
TWENTY-FOUR
This was what she liked: getting some wellies on, wrapping herself up against the weather. Tying on a headscarf, plodging over fields. The matted yellow grass of the fields between Chilton and Ferryhill. When she could, Fran took the day to walk over the land between the small villages. This was how she visited her mother and brothers. No kids clinging round her, no shopping to be done. When she could, she dressed up like the Queen when she walks her corgis, and she would stride all the way to her mother’s big house.
It was Fran’s time to think. And the things that occur to you when you let them! Bubbling up from somewhere. She thought this morning that it would soon be the end of the year. The leaves were turning to orange paste on the paths. She was treading them into black mud. She had her first thoughts of Christmas. She could smell woodsmoke on the air. Funny to have the build-up to Christmas and no Jane around, going on about her present-buying. This Christmas Jane would still be in Tunisia. Eating turkey in the desert, she’d said and laughed.
Fran stopped to stare at the sky. Swifts. The trees were shrugging off thick pullovers. They stood half out of them. It did her good every time she walked out like this, to see how close she lived to the country. Newton Aycliffe was an illusion. It only looked urban. You could walk off the edge of the estate, through the trees, and then you were in the middle of a blond, green, leafy nowhere. The sky was huge. Aycliffe came from Aclea, a clearing in an oak wood. She’d been told that by her father. The old village of Aclea, a thousand years old, lay underneath Aycliffe town centre, which had lasted only fifty years. They had roots here, after all.
It was Fran’s father who had taken the time to tell her things like this. Her mother, meanwhile, was all for her boys. Her strong two boys who would grow up to protect her. The mother taught her boys to care for horses. They were like Gypsies, her father said. That was where her mother came from, from Gypsies, he said, with a scowl, one morning walk they took. The brothers and mother thundered by, leaving the father and daughter to amble and talk. You come from Gypsy stock, he told his daughter sadly. Then her mother won the pools and bought the big house outside Ferryhill, bought stables, more horses. Father died of a brain tumour. He was gone in a flash. Fran was in her late twenties, working in an office, and she hardly felt she’d seen him go.
When computers took over offices, Fran never updated her skills. That was how she ended up cleaning.
If I wanted, she thought, walking on, I could imagine that everything leaves me behind in the end. She couldn’t bear to think of her children going. Yet the eldest had a boyfriend already. She was making noises of complaint. The restless, triumphant sounds of a child wanting to escape. Fran didn’t want her children held in thrall to her. She hated going to visit her mother and brothers. Apart from the walk to her mother’s house, these days were a chore. They taunted her subtly and made her feel stupid and wasted. She didn’t want her kids to feel like that, dreading coming to see her. Resenting the binds.
My life, she thought, is very ordinary. When she went to her mother’s she had to explain it. She felt compelled to talk it through, to justify it. Even when her mother didn’t seem interested and Fran had to work to get herself noticed, she still felt the need to explain away the organisation and decisions in her life.
They thought she had thrown her life away, living with a ginger-haired man on a council estate. She’d given her life to four brats and a drinking man. Look how free her two brothers were! They were in their thirties and went everywhere on horseback. They lived with their mother in a house they’d bought for nothing and they could please themselves. To Fran it seemed that they lived on a different scale to her. Their lives were bigger than hers.
When she arrived it was lunchtime. Her mam was ladling out thick orange stew for her two boys. They both had newspapers out.
Fran let herself in and they barely nodded. Her mother had done up her kitchen like a country farmhouse. Everything was green. She’d bought copper pots and pans — or picked them up somewhere. The boys did house-clearance work round here and sometimes they picked up treasure. She watched their thick red hands ripping up bread, turning pages, thinking that they had the golden touch.
“There’s some lunch,” her mother said. She was in a pinny with the sexy, naked body of a woman on the front. Her hair had been permed again and it was a shocking blue. Fran went to kiss her mother’s proffered cheek and murmured something about it making her look very youthful.
Her mother gave a shout of pleasure and fiddled with one of her clumpy golden earrings. “Hear that, boys? She says I’m looking youthful.”
One of the dark-haired brothers spoke without looking up from his paper. “She must be after borrowing money again.”
“Are you?”
“No!”
“Hey,” said her mother, reaching for a plate, stirring the copper pot some more. “One of your neighbours is in the paper. They’ve done a story about her in the Northern Echo.” She jabbed one of the boys in the back. “Find the page. Show her.”
“Who is it?”
Her brother sighed and laid out the page. A full-page spread. ‘fight for life’, it said. There was a picture of Liz, unconscious. Tubes. Eyes closed. Someone had put her wig on her for the photographer.
“They say she’s making a miraculous recovery,” Fran’s mother said.
“They reckon,” said Fran, feeling cross that she hadn’t seen this spread first. She peered at the columns of print. Quotes from Big Sue and Nesta. Even, at the bottom, a smaller photo of the pair of them, looking concerned and heartbroken, outside the hospital. Their looks said, “Our friend’s in there.” Fran was piqued. Though she didn’t really want to be in the paper, it would have been nice to be told.
“She’s started saying things in her sleep,” said her mother.
“It isn’t really sleep.”
They sat down to eat. “Messages from beyond!” her mother cackled. “I wonder if we can tune her in to your father! See what the old bugger has to say for himself!”
One of the boys looked over his paper, tutted, rolled his eyes. There’d been no love lost between father and sons.
“Get our lottery numbers checked,” said the other brother. “They say people half in, half out of life get the second sight. You should ask her. It could be us!” He snorted.
Fran was feeling more uncomfortable than when they criticised her personal life.
“She’s very beautiful,” said the other brother. “She looks serene and beautiful. She’s like something out of a legend.”
His mother gave him a strange, appraising look. “Yes,” she said. “Do you know her well, Fran? Are you still visiting?”
Fran nodded.
“Well,” said her mother sardonically. “Fancy our Fran knowing a living legend in the flesh.”
Fran stared at the picture of Liz. She was thinking of her brilliance, the way she could catch your eye without even trying. Glamour, Fran’s father told her once, wasn’t just being made up, pretty and sophisticated. It wasn’t just a film-star thing. It was a witchy spell that women pass across your eyes to draw you into their influence. You fall under them and their power, and you never even know it.
He said that was what her Gypsy mother had done to him. She’d taken hold of his soul, imprisoned it within the thick, crazed glass of her crystal ball. She’d never let him go until he cracked. He warned his daughter against glamour. She had listened.
Fran stared at her brothers and her mother as they went on to talk quietly, half articulately, about other things. About riding out to Barnard Castle. Selling bits of junk from dead people’s houses to the greedy antique dealers. They were making plans, chuckling and hoarding. I haven’t got anything to do with them, Fran thought, and had a pang of missing her father, dead seventeen years.
“I’m going home,” Fran said, after lunch. No coffee. “I’m walking back.”
“You’ve hardly been here,” her mother said.
The thing about being under spells, her father said, is that you never know. You wake up one morning years after, and see that your life and your most crucial decisions have been made up while you were living half-asleep.
TWENTY-FIVE
I took my knitting with me. But as soon as Tom opened his mouth, I knew I wouldn’t get any done. He was compelling. Like he always was.
He said, “I want you there, Elsie. Even if all you’re doing is knitting, you are still by my side, giving me strength. I need your strength when I work with Liz.” Even though I wasn’t sure what he meant by ‘work’, I went to support him.
Knitting relaxes me. It takes on a life of its own. When they get going the needles rattle and whirr, and it seems as if they’re working me, instead of the other way round. Hospital bedsides are a good place to go knitting. You can chew up all the empty hours. Sitting by Liz I went through ball after ball.
I was making baby things. I said they were for a friend. Sexless yellow things, booties and little dresses. Only I knew who they were really for. I was embarrassed. When Craig and Penny were together and living round mine, those few, brief weeks, this was my — what do you call it? —subterfuge. I said I was stocking up with baby clothes for a friend of mine. And all the time I meant them. I was imagining a Christmas birth for their child. I was hastening them on with my needles. Grandmothers have to dream like this.
That’s all gone now. Here I am, still making the stupid things. I can’t seem to stop. They’re perfect.
I have the beginning of new booties on my lap as Tom begins to talk. He’s taking over from Nesta. Nesta has warmed Liz up. She’s drawn her out into her half-trance. Now Tom can talk with her. Work with her.
What nonsense has Nesta been pouring into Liz’s head? If what Tom says is right, then Liz can understand everything Nesta has been saying. They have a link.
I asked her, “Nesta, what did you say to her? What did you tell Liz to make her talk?”
That was last night. Tom insisted we went round to Nesta’s house. He had seen the piece in the paper. He wanted to know what gift the woman had, that she could speak with the afflicted like this. Tom was very eager. If I didn’t know better I’d say he was covetous of Nesta’s gift.
What all the women say is right. Even after the bonfire Nesta’s house is a pigsty inside. It’s like she never lifts a finger. The windows were filthy, brown with dirt, inside and out. In the living room where she invited us to sit on her manky old settee, I counted six half-emptied bottles of Coca-Cola. She was friendlier and chirpier than usual, glowing from her exposure in the paper. Already a clipping was in a flowery frame on top of the telly.
Tom repeated my question. “Why was it you, do you think, Nesta, that Liz responded to? What did you say?”
Nesta looked him up and down. She knew she had power here. She could see how keen Tom was. She seemed to decide to help, and thought hard. “I was just talking…with Big Sue, the first time it happened. We were just talking about the telly and tha
t.”
Tom nodded, steepling his fingers under his chin. He looked like he was going to pray. That was how he carried on when he was religious. A great shadow would come over his face. His nose all hooked and his mouth grim. He has got that religious look back and it makes me wonder if that means God’s coming back into our lives. I hope not. We’ve been getting on so well these past few weeks.
“The telly?” he asked.
Nodding sagely, Nesta said, “We realised that she likes it when we talk about stuff on the telly.” She sat right back in her armchair, looking composed and pleased with herself. She looked like she was in a documentary. “We were talking about Heartbeat — you know, with Nick Berry —and she joined in. She said something to us and that’s when they were sure that she was coming back to proper life.”
“Do you think you are responsible for Liz coming back?” Tom asked.
“Oh, no,” said Nesta, full of meekness. “But I think I’ve done my bit to help.”
Tom nodded. He seemed to struggle with an important idea until he told her, “There is a bridge between this life and another. Liz was crossing that bridge. I think you have called out to her in a loud and friendly voice. And I think she has heard you, Nesta.”
“Good!” said Nesta.
“Her spirit has given pause for thought on its journey. She is caught on the bridge and can be coaxed either way. If she wants to, she can come back, by following your voice. You have shown her a way. Given her spirit the chance to decide.”
Nesta smiled. “She must like the sound of my voice!”
I spent as long — longer! — by Liz’s bedside as Nesta. I spent more hours there than anyone else. I talked to that woman about everything under the sun. I opened up my heart. I was unstinting.
And who does she choose? Whose gormless, mumbling, irritating voice does her spirit decide to listen to?
Nesta Dixon. Gob on her like a foghorn. Never talks a word of sense. Isn’t that just the way of it? It’s like I told that snotty Penny. Her and her mam. They think they’re too good to speak to me.
