by Paul Magrs
She turned to smile at Penny. ‘Good morning!’ she said loudly.
Penny was shrugging herself into her cardigan. She scowled. ‘You look gorgeous as usual, for this time in the morning.’
‘I’m a morning person.’
‘You never used to be.’ Penny made for the kitchen. ‘Can you turn the music down?’
Liz followed her. ‘As of this week, I am a morning person. I’m changing all the old things I don’t like. And wasting time being grumpy and looking a fright until eleven is the first thing to go.’
Penny tutted. ‘Thanks a lot.’
‘I wasn’t talking about you. You look lovely in the morning no matter how you feel because you’re so young. You couldn’t look horrible if you tried.’
Penny thought her mother was pushing the Julie Andrews routine a bit. She had already seen herself this morning and she looked a hag, no matter how young she was.
Liz banged the grill pan into the oven, cheerfully making toast. ‘I have to make more of an effort to be for ever young these days.’
Sometimes Penny thought Liz had what bordered on a mania to do with age and ageing. They had already talked at length about what ages Penny thought Fran, Jane, Frank, everyone round here was. It was as if Liz was always competing to look better for her age than everyone else.
‘Is that why you do your make-up with the Stones playing?’ Penny teased. ‘So that you’ll look as fresh as they do?’
‘Tell you what,’ Liz said, ‘I admire them for still going. They could look like skeletons and they’d still sound marvellous. It does me good to see people hanging in there.’ Penny was making coffee, sluicing the cafetiere under the tap. ‘I admire John Lennon for being dead. Before he could get too old. Before he could make a show of himself.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say!’
‘It’s true, though! People are embarrassing when they get old. He got out the right way.’
‘So I should just lie down and die now, then? Is that what you mean?’ Two red spots had appeared high on Liz’s dusted cheekbones.
‘Oh, get away, Mam! I’m talking about pop stars, how they should give up the ghost. Like Rod Stewart. Or Cliff Richard. Take off their long hair and underneath they’d just be like any other scraggy bloke of fifty. Like some old bloke off the bins.’ Still Liz was looking stung, taking the toast out from under the grill. The sides weren’t equally done and she had to scrape all the slices over the sink.
Penny tried to make it better. ‘I think you’re lovely for your age. You know that.’
‘Hm.’
‘And you’ve said the same thing about Cliff Richard’s turkey neck.’
‘Hm.’
‘It’s just like the whole world is full of people wanting to be teenagers. And most of the time I feel about sixty.’
Liz looked at her. She decided to abandon the toast. ‘Someone isn’t happy this morning.’
‘I’m all right.’ Flustered, Penny went to make the coffee. Her mother decided to have a dig back. ‘I know what it is. You’re in a narky mood because you found out that your pretty boy was queer.’
Penny was lighting a cigarette and managed to singe the ends of her fringe. ‘Why do you always bring everything back to sex?’
Liz raised both eyebrows and took her coffee. ‘I do not. I don’t care about it any more.’
‘Yeah. Right.’
‘You know best, Pen. Obviously you know it all.’
‘It’s like that joke yesterday. About keeping your fanny fresh. You enjoy that, don’t you?’
Her mother smirked. ‘What? What do I enjoy?’
‘Being embarrassing.’
This hit its mark. Liz lowered her eyes. Penny just wished she’d kept her trap shut.
At last Liz said, ‘So I’m an embarrassment to Lady Shite, am I?’
‘Vince called me that yesterday! Is that what I’m like?’ She was appalled.
‘We’re on about me here. Listen. Am I really an embarrassment to you?’ Liz’s fuchsia lips were set, grim. ‘You know you’re not. I didn’t mean it like that.’
Liz swung her legs round and jumped off her stool, shoving her almost untouched breakfast things into the sink. ‘No, you’ve got a lot to be embarrassed about. I’m not surprised. I’ve put you through too much.’
Penny knew then that she had to put a stop to this. It was a destructive mood, this one, and Penny knew it of old. It was a downward spiral. If Penny left her like this, Liz would stay at home today and think herself embarrassing and foolish until she found herself unable to go out. And nothing would talk her round.
‘Mam,’ Penny said, very decisively, making sure she had Liz’s attention. ‘You’ve never put me through too much. You really haven’t.’
Liz wouldn’t be easily talked round. ‘But the kids must say things at school.’
‘Not a word. They never realised. They don’t know. People accept things anyway. And you know that I can cope with anything. You’ve taught me that, Mam.’
Liz took two steps across the lino and hugged her. Penny sighed. Disaster averted. ‘You’re calling me Mam! You haven’t done that in… ages.’
Penny looked sheepish, gathered up in her mother’s broad embrace. ‘You’ve never claimed to be anything different.’ Her mother let her go. ‘You’re a smashing lass. Pen.’
She shrugged. ‘I know.’
‘There’s one thing I’ve got to tell you though, Pen.’
‘What?’
‘You’ve burned a bloody hole in my mohair with that fag of yours.’
FIVE
She tugged at her sleeves as she came downstairs. When she wasn’t bending her arms they didn’t look too short. Perhaps the jacket would be all right. It was smart enough for a club, anyway. It would do. It wasn’t as though they were all going to dress up to the nines. They were going for a quiet drink in a club, that’s what Jane had promised. That’s all Fran wanted to do. They weren’t going raving or anything. Her jacket was fine. The doorbell went on ringing.
Behind the misty glass of the front door she caught an impression of the squat form of Nesta from next door. Even through the frosted glass you could see the black roots in her self-bleached hair. Fran knew for a fact that Nesta had done her own bleaching with Domestos and a paintbrush. Nesta had told her so, proudly. She wasn’t going to pay a fortune to sit in a hairdresser’s window and look stupid. She’d do her own for next to nowt. When Fran opened the door Nesta gave her a loose grin and said, ‘I’ve brought you a pint back. Tony’s been given some money.’ She pressed the bottle on Fran, shouldering her way into the hall.
‘Thanks,’ mumbled Fran and followed her neighbour into the kitchen.
Nesta turned to eye the black velvet jacket. ‘Are you going out?’
This was what got on Fran’s nerves about Nesta. She came on like the doziest cow you’d ever meet. Everyone said she was intellectually subnormal. Jane had been in school with her. But when you got her on her own there often seemed something shrewder than that about Nesta. Conniving was the word, Fran thought. She’d perk up and stop being slow if she was going to get something out of it.
‘I’ve been trying my glad rags on. I haven’t dressed up in ages.’ Fran found herself being cagey. No one had invited Nesta to come out with them. No one had even considered it. They would have to buy her drinks all night and then she’d only be sick at the end of it. Like the time she’d thrown up on the nightie she was trying on at Jane’s Anne Summers do.
The black jacket made Nesta stop to think. At last she said, ‘Yes, they used to be quite fashionable, didn’t they?’ Fran looked blankly at her. She felt herself shrink inside the jacket. Oblivious, Nesta continued, ‘When they were in, I used to have one of every colour. Wine red, evergreen, tan, navy blue. You get them turning up in car-boot sales a lot. People chucking out their old clothes.’ Nesta was an expert on the car-booties.
I can’t let her get me down, Fran thought. I’m wearing this and that’s all there is to it
. I’ve got nothing else and she’s not exactly Selina Scott, is she? ‘Well, I think it still looks nice.’
Nesta made her way to the kettle. ‘But it makes you look fat.’
Fran marched neatly over and slapped Nesta’s hands away from the flex. ‘Right, that’s it! If you’re going to be rude like that you can bugger off home, Nesta. I’m not having you come in here to slag me off. I’ve given you milk every day this past week because you won’t do your own shopping. You needn’t come round here again.’
Nesta was shocked. Fran was never like this. She stood quite still, not used to this treatment. Fran controlled her breathing and carefully put down the half-empty kettle. Nesta’s brow crumpled. She said, ‘I’ll go, then. I might see you tomorrow.’ Then she hurried out the back door.
Fran sat down at the pine table. She stroked the velvety material thoughtfully, running a fingertip around a cigarette burn on the forearm, one she hadn’t noticed before. She laughed softly.
Her eldest daughter Kerry had, only recently, told her off. ‘You’re a mess, Mam. The other kids’ mams are fashionable. Why don’t you get smartened up? Get your hair done?’
‘There’s more important things,’ Fran said. She had been too upset to say anything else. Kerry tutted and walked away.
Now, Fran caught her reflection in the kitchen mirror and grimaced to herself.
‘Who owns the taxidermist’s?’ Vince asked this following Andy down the stairs wrapped in a towel. His skin was cooling now, but still lobster pink from the hottest, hardest shower he had ever had. Andy had joined him and they’d fooled around some more in there. He hadn’t had so much sex in ages. Not in months. Feast or famine, that’s how it always was with him. With the odd little picnic on the way. Andy was the same, he said. They were making their way down to the kitchen at the back of the shop in search of tea, and the thought had just struck Vince that never had he asked who owned the place where Andy lived.
‘Oh… Some bloke. He’s not here much. The shop is hardly ever open.’
Andy’s voice came wafting up the hallway, part of the musty air. It was cold here, and dark, quite different to the cosy nest of Andy’s room. Strange truncated animals jutted out of the stair walls. Each of them grinned, tongues lolling, as if their heads had been rammed through the plasterboard and they were pleasantly stunned. Vince felt funny, stranded on the stairway, glancing sideways at a drooling fox as he asked, ‘Is there any tea?’
Andy reappeared. ‘Got it. Get back upstairs and get warm.’ He was in his red silk dressing gown.
‘Look at you, Noel Coward!’
‘Just get back and shut up.’ Andy gripped the creaking banister on his way up. It always amazed Vince, the number of outfits Andy had to dress up in. All his money went on clothes.
‘It feels good to be here again.’ Vince had an urge to have a poke around the taxidermist’s shop. ‘I don’t know why I stopped coming here.’
Andy reached him. ‘I don’t know either. You never said why.’
‘One of those things.’
‘I was starting to bore you?’
‘God, no! I thought… I should be looking for something else.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘You stopped scaring me. You weren’t strange any more. I let you drop for your own good. Because you weren’t making the same impression.’ Vince thought again, wanting to make it sound better. All he could add was, ‘Um.’
‘I think I see. You thought you had used me up.’
Vince was shivering badly now. His flesh was rough and white. He looked down earnestly into Andy’s foreshortened face, its eyes tilted upwards, full of cinematic menace. How could he have thought him no longer scary? ‘Yeah. And I was moving away. I was over on the other coast. Bloody miserable damp nasty Lancaster.’
‘You loved it there. Don’t pretend you didn’t.’
‘And how do you know that?’
‘You stayed there over four years. You never came here.’
‘It didn’t mean I was having a lovely time,’ Vince said. ‘It was just where I was. Where my life was.’
Andy hesitated. ‘Why didn’t you let me come over? To visit? I mean, I know trying to keep something going long-distance is difficult, but we could have just seen each other… gone out, or…’
They kissed greedily under the single beady eye of the fox. Tea bags dropped, one by one, onto the stair carpet.
Liz was having a marvellous time, trying on new frocks. In the only decent clothes shop in town she was kicking up a fuss.
‘No, I don’t want any assistance. Just give me the garments and let me decide for myself, thank you.’
‘But the limit is five, madam. You have eleven.’
‘And what if I buy the lot?’
‘Are you sure you don’t need another opinion?’
‘I’m wearing the things. I only need my opinion, thanks.’ With that she yanked the curtain shut. ‘You can count them when I come out. I’m not nicking anything.’
The sales assistant sighed and walked away. She stood idly at her counter with no one left to please. Occasionally, over the music, Liz could be heard laughing at herself as she tried various new combinations.
The assistant concentrated on straightening the racks and picking bits of fluff off the carpet. Then Fran appeared with all her kids in tow. She asked the assistant to watch Lyndsey and Jeff and, like Liz, waved her assistance away, disappearing into a cubicle of her own with the maximum five garments.
She held them to herself, watching her reflection in solitary confinement. Sighing deeply, she examined them against her, one after another. As yet she didn’t dare look at the prices. Someone on the bus had said this place was meant to be good value. It was the first time Fran had been. It was a seconds shop, but she couldn’t see much wrong with the stuff. Maybe she could afford something… just something not too…
Fran was caught by the chuckling in the next cubicle. Then a familiar voice went, ‘Oh, dear! You couldn’t get away with that.’ At first Fran thought the voice was talking to her. She thought it was the voice of her conscience. And then she recognised it, and realised it was a voice speaking to itself. ‘Liz?’ she asked.
‘Yes? Hello?’
‘It’s Fran. Are you getting something for tonight, as well?’
‘Hello, Fran. Yes, I am. And I look a slut at the moment, so forgive me if I don’t pop through to see you.’
‘I’m getting something for myself.’ Fran ruffled through the items, rejecting the slutty skirts, the gold and black dress. ‘Something new.’
‘Good on you. What sort of thing?’ Liz’s voice became muffled as she struggled out of one skirt into the next.
‘I don’t know what sort of place we’re going to.’
‘Me neither. It’s all Jane’s doing. We should have asked her.’
‘It’ll be some kind of pick-up joint.’
‘But I’ve already discarded the slutty stuff.’
‘Is that how we should be then? Slutty?’ Fran was enjoying herself now. She shrugged off her anorak and unbuttoned her blouse. ‘Are you going out on the pull, Liz?’
‘If I’ve nothing better to do. But Darlington is full of creeps.’
Fran started to concentrate. Her mam always said she had lovely taste in clothes, when she put her mind to it. Suddenly it seemed important that she prove she hadn’t let it go. ‘We need something plain and classy.’
‘Not sluttish.’
‘No, classic, alluring…’
‘Hm. Alluring like… an old movie star sort of thing…’
‘Aye, no frills… sort of plain…’
‘Tarty.’
‘Slutty.’
‘Tarty it is.’
‘What does it mean when you say you’ve got a talent for something, anyway?’ Penny was asking earnestly. ‘I mean, really. I could be talented in millions of things.’
She was sitting in a poky office with her careers consultant, a small man who seemed to be made entirely f
rom plastic. A fleshy, rubbery plastic partly melted. They were sitting by the radiator and discussing Penny’s vocation.
Shrugging good-naturedly, he set about stuffing his pipe with tobacco. His other subject, besides careers, was photography, for which he coaxed girls of all ages into modelling the various hats he collected. The school couldn’t afford photography equipment, so his small department was scrupulously self-financed. A blind eye was turned. As Penny spoke he examined a new hat someone had brought him from a Blue Peter bring-and-buy sale.
‘So we can’t find one thing that I excel in, or that I really want to do. So what? Does that mean I have to compromise and do the same old thing as everyone else? Does it really?’ What she wanted to tell him was that she was cleverer than that. She knew she was. But she had no way of measuring that. She had no way of showing it. These were frustrating times. Penny felt got at on two sides: by the implacable rationality of the careers master, and by the secret and sure burgeoning of her own dark talents. She knew they were there, but not what they were useful for.
Her careers consultant took a long drag at his pipe and slowly set the lime-green hat on his own head at a jaunty angle.
‘You see, Penny,’ he began at last in a quavering tone, ‘everyone must be good at doing something. Why, I once knew a boy who, like you, seemed stuck for a vocation in life.
Penny was thinking about typewriters. ‘I’m like a shift key!’
‘Pardon?’
‘The shift key on a typewriter that makes the upper-case letters available — that’s what I’m like. It’s exactly how I think about things: on a different level.’
