by Paul Magrs
“When you die, do you want burying or cremating?”
She asked me this again and again. I didn’t want to say anything because I thought it was morbid and it would give them nightmares. Eventually, I was ironing, and she asked me once too often.
“Look, Joanne,” I snapped, “when I drop you can bloody well eat me if you like.”
Her jaw dropped in delight. But behind her, Andrew was horrified. Then he wailed and wailed and we couldn’t get him to stop for hours.
In those days Andrew would always be standing just behind Joanne. He shuffled round after her like she had him on a string. They were like that till she left school, at fifteen. She went to work, learned how to be a receptionist. She’s been in hotels, motels, the equestrian centre.
Andrew did O-levels and went on to do his As but he finished early and just stayed home. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do them. He’s got the brains. More brains than anyone I know. More than anyone round here. I reckon it was the competition that got to him. It was all competition and he’s not that that sort. He’s too good for that. He doesn’t have to compete, Andrew.
I take me tea and curl me fingers about the mug. It’s warming. April and it’s freezing out; still looking like snow.
Eric won’t turn the shop’s heating up beyond the legal requirement. Have it too warm, he says, and we’ll have every dosser, every scruffy old bastard in off the streets, keeping warm. He’s probably right but I still curse him when I’m freezin’ me tits off on me pins.
I blow on the tea and take another drag.
“I wish you’d try again, Mam,” says Andrew.
He’s got an almost girlish voice. A soothing sound, chalk drawing on soft stone. I can’t be angry or irritated with him. Not often, anyway. His voice broke early when he still looking like a little boy. One morning he came downstairs and said something and the sound shocked us both. We both thought it was his dad asking for clean socks, although I don’t suppose Andrew even remembers his dad. Since then, he’s changed that booming voice, made hisel’ softer, on purpose.
“Try again?” I asked. But I know what he’s on about.
“The patches.”
“Bugger them.”
“You could get used to them.”
“Oh, yeh.”
“They say they work.”
“So do fags. Those bloody things don’t cost any less and when you pull them off they hurt.”
“But I don’t want you to die, Mam.”
“I won’t die.”
“Yes, you will.”
“Look, man, Andrew, will you stop interfering? It was all right saying this when you were five, but you’re twentybloody-four now, pet! Look, I won’t die.”
He looks at me. We sip our tea for a bit. Then he starts up again, flinching as if he thinks I’m gonna smack him one.
“I don’t want you to die early. I don’t want you to die before you can say you’ve had a nice time. I don’t want you to die thinking it’s all been hard work. I want it to get better for you first.”
Sometimes...
Sometimes he can say the nicest things. And that’s the pay-off with having sensitive sons.
And maybe some time soon I’ve give the patches another whirl, just for Andrew. It might make me live longer. I might get to see Andrew’s children, my grandchildren. When they come along. I can change my habits. Showbiz stars do. That Roseanne lost loads of weight. They printed a photo of a pile of pats of lard, the equivalent of all she lost. She says she feels much better on it. I don’t know if she smokes, though.
The next thing for me usually at that time of night is wondering what we should have for tea. I’ve never liked cooking much and by the time I get in on nights I can’t really be bothered.
I remember frying up chips for the kids, winter nights after school. These were the years before oven chips, which only started in 1980. My home-made chips were always either too limp or too hard. A pale yellow and they sat in puddles of grease on your plate. The kids ate them slowly, dutifully, doused in tomato sauce which separated out into floating red blobs in the cooling fat. Like I imagine blood cells to look. Or a lava lamp working.
I wished then that I could cook better for the bairns and I wished that I could learn. But who is there to teach you? On a limited budget, not much time. Where do you go for perfect chips? And I’d sit and watch the bairns be good, forcing every last bit down. Then one night Joanne got a burnt one stuck in her throat and great fat tears came rolling down. Her face was all puffed up.
“I’m sorry, Mam. This is horrible. I can’t eat it.”
And she looked so ugly and sad that I started crying too.
The 1980s began with oven chips being invented and we’d wrap them in newspaper to make them taste even more real. Also in the eighties there were other things, making mams’ jobs easier. Pot Noodles—they came along and you could pretend, in your own front room, that you were camping out on some adventurous holiday somewhere.
Once, when we had my second husband, we did go on an adventurous holiday, to a caravan in Robin Hood’s Bay, and we took twenty-four Pot Noodles with us, one each for each of the nights, trying every flavour. The front of the caravan was all windows and at teatime we’d leave the canvas blinds open to watch the sun set behind the cliffs and some nights we’d be eating Chinese, or Indian, or Mexican.
We never had pizzas until 1986. It seems like forever. Suddenly the local free papers had adverts for deliveries. You’d wait an hour after phoning on the spur of the moment. Then some lad would arrive on his bike, carrying the boxes up to your door, grinning in his leather rider’s gear with his helmet on top of your boxes. Golden rounds of flabby garlic bread, cans of pop and lettuce leaves in tin-foil dishes. A treat we routinely surprised ourselves with every Friday night, coinciding with Dynasty.
For a while everyone was in padded shoulders, we all had clumpy jewellery, and the men rolled up the sleeves on their shiny suit jackets.
The eighties were the twins’ teens, my forties, and between us we managed to shovel on the weight. My husband then sold second-hand cars and by God, he was a big feller. I’ll tell you about this some other time, but it was on that holiday to Robin Hood’s Bay that we lost him. Swimming in the bay he went bobbing out away into the North Sea, never came back. It was terrifying and horrible, but somehow peaceful, too, to watch him, just like floating away. Like a whale put back out of captivity. That was about the time we all started going green. So we never finished our holiday properly—our first since 1976 (That gorgeous summer! I remember Lake Ullswater rimmed with cracked, parched mud, us eating breakfast, boiled eggs dipped in salt in the heat)—and we never finished all our Pot Noodles off. Had to bring them back with us. They’re still in the cupboard somewhere.
These days the twins both cook and, as I say, we’re all green now, aren’t we? Healthy eating is the watchword round here and they’re trying to convince me, but it seems a faff-on to me. I couldn’t come in from work to clart on with garlicky things and what have you—salads. I’m too old to change all of my dog’s tricks. I piled on the pounds in the eighties and I reckon they’re here to stay for the nineties. Mind, the twins have shed their puppy fat. They did when they were about nineteen. They try not to, but I catch them sometimes, turning up their noses when I bake big cakes or rustle up a nice fry-up for tea. They’ll neither of them eat baked potatoes or cheese on toast or crisps or Mars bars at midnight any more.
So it’s a surprise when I start to think about what to cook for tea and I go through on my way to the loo and, in the dining room, I see that it’s all been taken care of.
Behind me, in the kitchen, I hear Andrew snigger softly. Pleased with himself at my gasp of surprise.
He’s put on a lovely spread. He must have spent the whole day baking.
And I forgot! It had clear gone out of my head.
Tonight’s the night of me soiree.
Andrew hasn’t forgotten and he comes into the dining room to see me staring at
his handiwork. He puts his arms around me and gives me a big hug, saying, “The water’s on, so you can have a bath and get yourself ready. I’ll bring you a gin and tonic. You’ve an hour or two yet before your guests arrive.”
My guests! How could I have forgotten?
Tonight’s the night I play lady of the mansion.
And our Andrew has done us proud.
What really snags me breath and makes me think, Ah, bless his heart, is that he’s done everything like I used to do it for their birthday parties when they were small. Cupcakes in pink and brown icing, chocolate fingers, bread buns in half with red salmon forked neatly on, and some with my own special blend of tomato and egg, mashed together to a delicate rose colour. And half grapefruits, stuck all over with cocktail sticks—four bristle on plates all round the centrepiece—and on each stick there’s pickles and pineapple and frankfurter bits, cubes of cheddar. The centrepiece is a Victoria sponge, oozing a livid mix of strawberry jam and cream. Its top is soft with sprinkled icing sugar.
And nowhere to be seen—not even on the sideboard where he’s set out the cans of lager, the bottles, bowls of nuts and crisps and three fresh, shiny ashtrays—nowhere is there any of their healthy food. There’s nothing here that me or any of me friends and neighbours won’t know how to eat or what to call.
I’M SITTING IN ME BATH WITH A GIN AND A COCKTAIL STICK OF NIBBLES. Pink foam riding up over me nipples and I’m easing away all the aches and pains. I’ve got Tamla Motown playing out all around me. Our Joanne’s a whizz with owt electrical and we’ve got four stereo speakers in the top corners of the room. At the time she put them in, standing on a chair with a screwdriver, I kept fretting because I thought it might be dangerous with all the steam. Like we’d all be getting shocks in the bath. But as it is, it’s safe and bloody marvellous. I love to lie there, soaking in me bubble oil with Marvin and Tammi. The world is just a great big onion.
I’ve got a range of different bubble oils. Christmas presents last year, Boots’ Natural Selection, from Andrew. Little bottles inside a wickerwork hippo. Tonight I’m in Fruits of the Forest and it’s lovely.
I need to relax tonight. Have I mentioned yet the reason I’m having me soiree?
God, I can’t believe I forgot all about it! Lucky our Andrew’s not daft.
Ay, the reason I’m having me mates round tonight. Wey, they’re not all mates. Some of them are just neighbours.
You see, I’m not going to all the trouble and expense of playing the glamorous hostess just for the fun of it.
This night’s Wednesday night and it’s Wednesday nights Elsie and Tom come round.
I’M FLICKING THROUGH ME FROCKS, HEAD STUCK IN ME WARDROBE.
Time’s running out and I’m fucked if I can found owt decent to wear.
I’ll slather mesel’ in Tendre Poison and wear me heels and it’s funny when you do that for a party in your own house. You stand taller and it’s kind of formal and everything in your own rooms looks a bit different.
Wednesday nights Elsie and Tom come round after the Rainbow Gang finishes. Tom runs the Gang for the kids in the Methodist Church on the next estate. He looks like Dracula and he’s had some trouble with his nerves, breakdowns and that, but Elsie says he was an architect when he was younger, before she knew him, but they laid him off. She’s out of work with him.
They’re not married and they come round menacing people. They’ve got God and they tell you the same stuff again and again, sitting there from six to twelve at night. I can’t just chuck them out, like Joanne says I should. They don’t mean anyone any harm and they’re not malicious people. They’re just daft. And they’re company, even, sometimes, when Joanne is out at night, and Andrew is upstairs, reading and that. Bloody boring company, mind.
A couple of months ago, Tom flipped. In the middle of their Rainbow Gang he was meant to be umpiring a game of indoor rounders, but he’d gone missing. Else was worried. She can’t handle sixty of them scruffy bairns all by hersel’, so she sent them all off on a kind of treasure hunt, looking for Mr. Tom. One of the scruffiest—”I patted him on the head and I could feel the nits squirming under me hand!”—found Mr. Tom in a cupboard. He was crouching by himself in the dark. Elsie had to phone the Casualty blokes to come and talk him out.
Next time she came to see me it was alone. She was dead upset, so I was embarrassed because I’d been pretending I wasn’t in that night. I’d turned all the lights off and the telly, kept quiet and waited for her to go away. I’d forgotten to lock the back door and she just came in! I felt like I’d been rumbled. I just said I’d had a migraine and had had to switch everything off, lie down.
She told me all about Tom. He was in that big place past Spennymoor, three bus rides away, and she was visiting him every afternoon, even though the doctors had asked her not to. They probably felt the same as I did about her knocking on the door. She bangs like a kid—bang bang bang bang bang. Demanding attention for a scraped knee or sweets or summat. Not an adult’s knocking at all. Adults knock little tunes on doors. They don’t sound desperate.
Tom was in this place, a big old mansion in its own grounds with deer and that. Pretty, but they don’t put you in there for nowt. Elsie was saying to me, “It’s not a place for, you know...mental cases. Mind you, there’s a bloke in the bed next to Tom who thinks he’s Jesus.”
They let him out after a couple of months. I reckon they realised it was her they should have put in there instead. Bad depression, he was supposed to have had, really bad depression. I’ve known more depressed people these past twenty years or so than I dunno what. As soon as they invented a word for it, bang—everyone had it. I suppose they invented the word about the same time they invented the pills for it. And most people I know have the pills handy. For either calming you down or pepping you up. No bugger’s in the bloody middle. Nobody floats easily between.
Tom looked a lot better and more cheerful the next Wednesday he came round here. Elsie was wary about him, as if he was gonna freak any moment, and she kept jumping up to use the bog.
“Me bladder’s back,” she said. “All inflamed. I’ve got to dash back and forth all night these days. I know you’ve just had your settee recovered.”
I was bloody horrified. Woman of her age! She’s fifty if she’s a day. Though she’s got that scraggy ginger hair of hers in bunches like a bloody schoolgirl. I reckon that’s for Tom. I reckon he must be kinky or summat.
He was brighter than he’s been for months, holding out the posters the kids had coloured in that night at his Rainbow Gang.
“That little Jeff,” he chuckled, shaking his head. “Look! Poor little thing’s gone and coloured carefully between all the lines. But he’s done the whole thing in brown!” He tutted. “By, some of the kids round here are underprivileged. They’ve not half got narrow horizons.”
Now that little Jeff he was on about is from over the way from me. He belongs to Fran, a friend of mine, but I wasn’t going to say anything.
Elsie beamed at Tom. “Tom’s bringing colour back into all their lives.” A thought struck her. “Is that why he called it the Rainbow Gang? Hee hee hee hee!” That stupid bloody laugh of hers.
I was looking at the posters. Tom the ex-draughtsman had designed them. A loaf of bread and some writing. I asked what it said.
Tom sighed. “It’s meant to say, ‘I am the People’s Bread.’ But my ‘I’ came out too elaborate, like. Now it looks like it says, ‘Jam the People’s Bread.’”
“Hee hee hee!” went Elsie again, but I could see Tom didn’t think it was funny. his eyes were hard and that was scary, I thought.
“Silly bugger!” Elsie slurped her tea.
“Elsie,” he warned.
He’d stopped her swearing, smoking, drinking. These past few years since she’s known Tom and the peace Jesus brings her she’s been a different person and very different Elsie to the one I remember. And I remember Elsie from 1976, when my first husband worked down the icing-sugar factory with her husband
and she worked in the canteen. There was nowt pious about Elsie then because 90 per cent of the time she was a prossy and pissed out of her head. That’s why sometimes it gets me back up to hear about My Lord this and My Lord that and My Lord the other from Elsie. They’re not even married, the pair of them. Yet they wouldn’t hurt a soul. It’s just that sometimes I can’t face another night sitting hour after hour, listening to their same old crap. So, like tonight, I decide to put something right in their bloody path. I decide to throw me glad rags on.
These’ll do.
FIRST OFF IT’S FRAN AND JANE AND DAFT NESTA TURNING UP, ON THE dot of six o’clock. Fran wants to help with any sandwich-making or table-laying. Jane makes a beeline for our Andrew, who talks to her politely and takes the ladies’ coats, and Nesta starts helping hersel’ to the cider.
The lasses are all dead glad to be here for the night. It takes a lot of planning for them to get away from their kids. Luckily nearby we’ve got Liz’s old house. She was a neighbour who moved away, but her way-out daughter Penny has set up a kind of squat for all her weirdo friends. Penny’s good with the bairns, so odd nights like this, their squat becomes a creche. It’s ever so handy, really, and I’d had a look in—even though I‘ve got no young bairns—and I must admit, for a squat it’s immaculate inside.
Fran’s having trouble with her husband who’s drinking still and she’s telling us all about it as she looks for something to be of help with. But I’m distracted ’cause there’s banging at the back door again. I yell to Andrew to put some music on the hi-fi and then there’s more guests arriving—the Wrights. They’re a dirty, smelly family from by the garage but, as I say, it takes all sorts and this is a party and they’re friendly enough. Then it’s the Kellys from over the flats, back of us. Jane was reckoning on they were heading for divorce and she had her beady eye on the husband, Mark. He’s a skinhead, tattooed head to foot, arse to elbow, by all accounts. Jane doesn’t have a man. She went a bit doolally last summer and ended up doing a nude fan dance on her roof on Saturday morning, but she’s all right now. I dunno how she climbed up there without owt on.
