by Paul Magrs
Do I know this place, though? Penny wondered when they moved in the thick of autumn. The first day she wandered around, trying to make it seem familiar. The pink asphalt of the play park rasped under her feet. The corner shop smelled inside of cheese and crisps and lager; not at all of Indian spices like the one she was used to. Everyone had their front-room windows open so you could hear the tellies blaring at night.
She wondered whether her mother felt she was taking a backward step, moving back to a council house and a town and a way of life she’d left nearly fifteen years ago. Liz turned red.
‘Of course it’s a backward step,’ she said. She was unpacking her chinaware from crumpled Northern Echos. ‘Do you think I want to do this?’
Later, painting the bathroom and laughing uproariously because they’d spattered the bath, the mirrors and the floorboards with hot-pink sploshes, Liz said, ‘It’s exciting to have somewhere new to do up, don’t you think? Sometimes I felt stifled in that old place. You could smell the oldness there.’
Penny smiled but she was keeping her mouth shut on the subject of the move and just helping out as best she could. The move was unavoidable. They had money troubles and they had lost their house. That was all there was to it. It was just them, mother and daughter by themselves, and there was no one they could rely on. Both of them had to muck in.
They managed the move well by themselves, bringing all their belongings in shifts down the A1 in Transit vans. They crammed everything into a house almost half the size of the one they were used to. ‘We’ll have to chuck loads of this old junk out,’ Liz fretted, throwing open yet one more cupboard in the old house, dismayed to see boxes of books and clothes and records that had gone undisturbed for years.
‘We can’t get rid of anything,’ Penny said. At seventeen she was in a phase of sentimentally rediscovering things. She had a craze on fishing out all Liz’s scratchy LPs from the sixties and seventies. To the mother the cupboards they had to clear were nothing but a headache. To the daughter they provided a nostalgic musical jamboree. Penny found herself yearning for times she couldn’t remember, and for times before she was born.
That summer was the one following Penny’s botched O levels and she spent it in a minor alcoholic daze to a soundtrack of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart. She wore an old suede coat of her mother’s. When she passed only three of her nine exams, Liz put it down to the threat of upheaval. They had been trying to sell the house in Durham since January, and revising in her room, Penny was continually disturbed by prospective buyers. But Liz wasn’t one to blame herself. The thing for Penny to do, she said, was resits.
Resits in Newton Aycliffe. Liz was sitting her own test there, too. She was trying to fit back in. Only she knew how much she had changed in the interim years. That’s exactly what the eighties were, she thought: interim years. And then she looked at Penny and thought, That poor bairn grew up in my interim years.
They took the little money they could make from the old house and, with all their old possessions in tow, set up camp in Phoenix Court. They were fired with determination: Liz to get to know the neighbours, to feel a part of it, and Penny to get her exams and two A levels on top, English and art. She wanted a decent job afterwards. For the first time she could see the sense in having money.
The comp across the Burn from them was a school not unlike the one in Durham city she was used to. At least that is what she told Liz. ‘It’s fine. It’s a nice place. And the sixth form is quite separate anyway, and they treat you properly, like grown-ups.’
Liz pursed her lips. She knew exactly what reputation the comp had in the town. And she knew that it was best not to be in the precinct at lunchtime when the kids from the comp were on their dinner hour. She could see that Penny was protecting her. It made her sick that her daughter felt she had to.
Having smoked her cigarette right down to the filter, Penny squelched it in the mud and plunged her hands deep in her cardigan pockets. Her back to the wind, she had to toss her head to keep the hair from her eyes as she surveyed the fire damage to the home-economics department. That was a subject she had always despised, back at the old school. When she started the comp at eleven she’d had terrible rows with the hag of a teacher who told her that her hands were dirty. Penny had been in tears by the end, denying it, and the teacher marched her to the sink to scrub them herself. The water was scalding. The school soap was globby, yellow, antiseptic. All the girls were laughing. ‘See! Your fingernails are black!’ the home-economics mistress shouted. ‘They’re always black!’ Penny was sobbing. ‘They’re already clean!’ And eventually the teacher had given up in disgust.
Here there was a black oblong of scorched earth. Not for the first time Penny said a silent thank you to whoever did this and prevented her having to resit HE. Oddly, four or five burned cookers stood among the wreckage. They looked like rotting stumps of teeth.
The town clock bonged out nine o’clock from the far side of the field and Penny stirred herself to go in. Actually, she was keen this morning. Young Mr Northspoon was starting them on Forster.
Her first morning there had been grim. The lino in the sixth-form common room was dirty yellow and fleshy and it put her off. She never told Liz but that first afternoon she skived off down the park. The skiving could easily become a regular thing for her again. In Durham she had routinely sloped off, but with more shops to go round there had been less chance of walking into her mam. Penny loved the indoor market there, freezing cold, backing on to the river, reeking of damp, dead pheasants and old books.
In Aycliffe there was the park or the new covered-over bit of the precinct. That was where Nobles Amusements was and, although she hated fruit machines, she found herself going on them again and again. The air was smoky and everyone else was over sixty. The music was the cheesiest she had ever heard and by the end of September she was thinking she must find somewhere nicer to skive to. Next door there was a cafe run by Christians where they sold arts and crafts: wreaths and baskets of dried fruit and flowers. She couldn’t bear it in there, she found. Everyone smiling.
She was at a bit of a loss really. The lessons she skived didn’t worry her much and, somehow, she managed to get work in and no one bothered her. She slipped through, she thought. The bits about the sixth form she liked so far were: having a locker she could fill up, having full run of the art rooms when she liked, and being able to slip in and out of school whenever she fancied.
The only lessons she was always there for were English. They were a group of six and they had two teachers. They began with Mrs Bell who, in their first few weeks, rattled them through selected highlights from Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy. But a few weeks into term there was a new member of staff. In their very first lesson together, in a tangerine-coloured room at the top of the school, he declared he was losing his teaching virginity with them. Joanne, sitting next to Penny, gasped. She said afterwards that the new teacher thought he was being risque. But Joanne was just snotty, Penny thought, because she lived in Heighington, a bijou village out of town. Penny didn’t think Mr Northspoon was trying to be risque. She thought he was marvellous.
That first lesson seemed to evolve quite naturally and easily into a class discussion in which they all pulled their chairs round in a circle and talked about their first-ever snog.
Mr Northspoon was in a sharp black suit with a beautiful shirt. He had his legs crossed and listened patiently to all their stories and had them all laughing, tapping one hand continuously on the air as if he was dying for a cigarette.
Alison Bradley fled and Mr Northspoon said it was probably because she was sweet sixteen and never been kissed. Penny thought he was out of order, especially since she knew Alison was pregnant, but there was still something enthralling about Mr Northspoon. He was young and auburn-haired, he had this great floppy fringe… and he set his head in his hands to listen and gestured eloquently and sometimes wildly and he laughed, he laughed loud and infectiously.
What she remembered m
ost was that he even told them a little about his own first snog. For the first time he looked sheepish and talked vaguely about rolling around under hedges down the Burn. It turned out that he had grown up here in this town, too. He talked about how, on this day of his first snog down the Burn, right near here, some boy was torturing sticklebacks he’d caught with a net in the stream. He was nailing them to a tree trunk and watching them squirm themselves dead. Mr Northspoon said he stood by this boy and watched him do that, on the day of his first-ever kiss.
And Penny suddenly found herself telling the most embarrassing story ever. With her friend Deborah Watts in her bedroom back in the old house. She was ten. Debs had said, ‘You don’t even know how to snog.’ And Penny went, ‘Yeah, I do. Course I do.’ Deborah’s speculative eye roved Penny’s room and lighted on her Girl’s World. A ghastly life-sized plastic bust of a Barbie doll with all this hair you were meant to do up in styles of your choice and a face for scrawling make-up on. Deborah went, ‘Go on. Snog your Girl’s World.’ Penny had done so, and this is what she told the class. The others sniggered appreciatively and a little uneasily, but Mr Northspoon had been delighted. That was the note he had ended their first lesson on. But before they went he gave them each a soft-back copy of A Room with a View, which he said was the most wonderful book ever about somebody’s first snog.
Somehow Penny had found out that his name was Vincent and that he was generally called Vince. It was the kind of fact that slipped into one ear and simply stayed there. She thought it was an old-fashioned name, like something out of the fifties.
On her way to his class that morning she dropped her tutor group’s register off at the secretary’s office as asked. She bumped into him down there, slipping blithely through the dark corridors, through the press of small bodies. He was in a purple jacket today, rubbing shoulders with everyone, giving genial shoves when necessary, heading in her direction. He’s more like one of us, Penny thought as they walked straight up to the secretary’s door together. He grinned and gave a little ‘after you’ nod, clutching his Room with a View to his chest.
Penny knocked briskly and led the way into the typing pool. Before she knew it, she was asking him, ‘How did you get to be called Vince?’
The secretary was scowling at them. She was wearing ski pants and always looked as if she was trying really hard not to pee.
‘It’s my dad,’ Vince said. ‘He’s a teddy boy. He thought it was a teddy-boy name. He still is one.’
‘This town’s still in the fifties,’ Penny said.
Then her teacher was talking to the secretary, asking after redirected post. The secretary was still scowling, but less when she talked to him. Penny left the register on the desk and went.
Throughout that lesson, as they talked through the Florence chapters of the novel and Vince tried to explain what Mr Emerson was getting at when he took Lucy aside by the Giotto frescoes and gave her a good talking-to, Penny was still mulling things over. She was surprised Vince had gone telling her about his father. Another barrier had gone down: he was just another bloke in a typical Aycliffe house. Penny knew he lived just by the school. One night last week she had left school by the wrong exit, following him. She went to the shop for fags and saw Vince duck through the crowds of kids, looking not much different to the other sixth-formers, and hurry across the grass, through the garages, and up a back gulley into the yard of a terraced house. He lived in the old part of town. Penny saw.
For him breaktimes were murder. The others sat round tables and grumbled and smoked and drank foul coffee. The staff room was across from the sixth-form room and their music shook through the walls: the Smiths. He felt reincarnated, somehow having got it wrong, snapping his Kit-Kat with a twinge of spite. Shreds of chocolate fell on his immaculate white trousers. Looking up, he saw Mrs Bell at the coffee machine, stressed, jabbing all the buttons. Snatching up her cup, she actually muttered ‘Thank you’ to the machine. She came over and plonked herself down by him.
The others were caught up in a discussion about admin.
He was off in a doze, thinking about Mr Emerson by the Giotto frescoes. It was Denholm Elliot he saw, as in the film. Gently the old man set his voice booming in the cavernous spaces and told Lucy plainly that the things of the universe just don’t fit together. That their awkwardness causes world-sorrow, and that all you can do is unpack your sorrows from your old kit bag and… what was it he suggested? Lay them out in the sunshine. Oddly the sun was coming through the clouds at that point, tepid and yellow. The music through the thin walls was ‘This Charming Man’: Morrissey on about how he’d go out tonight if he had a stitch to wear.
The geography teacher handed round pictures of his new baby. He was the thinnest person Vince had ever seen. He wondered vaguely how he could have the strength to squeeze anything life-producing from himself. Beside him and looking burlier than ever in a red tracksuit, the PE teacher was scowling. When Vince had been working his way up through the years here, ten or more years ago, that bastard had made his life a misery. Since the beginning of this term they hadn’t exchanged a word. It would come. Vince realised the PE teacher was actually scowling at Mrs Bell. She was lighting her second cigarette of the mid-morning break.
In solidarity he lit his own, reaching into his bag and pulling out the black Sobranies, just for effect.
That Penny was a bit forward, asking him things all the time. Still, it showed that he wasn’t coming across as standoffish. The business about Aycliffe being stuck in the fifties was sharp of her, too. He could remember his own moment of realising that an abnormal number of houses in this town had Elvis memorabilia on the walls. Elvis clocks and mirrors all mixed up with crucifixes and Cliff Richard calendars. When he eventually got away, it turned out that the rest of life, the small part of the world he’d seen, wasn’t all like that. What he wanted to tell Penny now was how circumscribed her world was. How this town would do her no good. How it had two faiths, Elvis Presley and God Almighty. While she was here it would always be under a dead king and an absent father.
Her father had been an insomniac. All night he would sit up in the kitchen and use the endless hours to catch up on the washing. He liked to pretend he was in a launderette. For the company, he said. You could pretend that the most fascinating people were there, or were just about to walk in. Those are places filled with dead time and so it wasn’t time you could think of as wasted. When she thought back, Penny remembered Dad often talking about wasting your time, wasting your life. He said that was the only real crime.
When she was small and couldn’t sleep, Penny would slip downstairs and wordlessly come to sit beside him. She would bring a book and read, or they would both watch the washer. Before she grew sleepy and mesmerised, they might strike up a conversation out of the blue, as strangers might. In this way Penny’s father was, he explained, teaching her how to deal with all the ordinary strangers in the wider world.
Once when she was nine she came down and found him in his coat and shoes, watching the washing. She spoke to him straight away.
‘I feel strange, Dad.’
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I thought it was too quiet in here tonight.’ He rubbed thoughtfully at his beard. ‘Maybe you could use the machine at the far end. I think I noticed somebody emptying it a minute ago.’
Penny wasn’t up to pretending that night. ‘I feel really strange.’ She sat down and spread her fingers, fat, squashy fingers that could break her dad’s heart to look at them. Her black fingernails made his insides twinge whenever he saw her hands. Penny was staring at her damaged fingernails now as if they were to blame for how she felt. Her dad took off his anorak and put it around her shoulders.
‘How strange?’ he asked.
‘Sort of tingly. Tingling.’
‘Oh.’'
At this moment the machine’s cycle stopped and there was silence. He felt for the stacked ten-penny pieces they kept on the bench and pretended to feed more into the washer, thinking. These coins they sav
ed, usually, to spend on boxes of After Eight mints. They had a craze for these and ate them all through the night, talking and dipping their hands into the snug emerald boxes, pulling the mints out of envelopes, writing messages to each other and leaving them about the house in the black slips of paper. They loved getting these tokens from each other, stowed like litter all about the place, on scraps of paper, sticky with smears of peppermint cream. ‘Tingling?’ he said.
She took a deep breath and used a word she had learned only recently in a Susan Cooper novel. ‘I think I’ve had a premonition.’
‘Oh?’ He made it sound like the most natural thing in the world, popping an After Eight into his mouth.
Penny nodded grimly. ‘I can see that I’m going to be something big.’
He said, ‘What you’ve got is growing pains.’
‘It was a premonition. It’s more than being tall.’
‘What then?’
‘A guru or something.’
He was impressed. He gave her a big hug.
When Penny was twelve she once had to go outside to their Ford Capri to find him. In the dark street he was pretending to be stuck in a traffic jam. That was more dead time he could cheerfully waste. She climbed into the passenger seat and watched him mime bored exasperation. Then he turned to her with a worried look.
‘You haven’t locked us out, have you, Pen?’
She jangled the keys.
‘Is it the tingling again?’
She nodded. ‘I’m having another premonition. It’s bigger than just being a guru, I think.’ She looked out of the window, down the street. Through the black trees you could only just see the cathedral, lit up gold and green on its hill. She always thought of it as the colour of frankincense and myrrh. ‘Dad,’ she went on. ‘When you were a kid, did you ever think that you might be the Messiah?’
