by Julia Bell
‘Is she eating?’
‘Stupid question,’ I say. ‘Next.’
He tells me that he knows it’s all a bit of a mess. ‘But it’s not your fault, you know that, love. No one’s cross with you.’
‘Can I come back with you?’ I say. ‘I hate it here.’
He says he understands it’s difficult but that I have to be grown up about things. ‘Your place is with your mother. Someone’s got to look after her.’
‘Don’t you like me any more?’ I ask. Tears prick behind my eyes. A little sob escapes that I try to stifle with a cough. I dig my fingernails into my hands.
‘Oh, of course I do. It’s just complicated. You’ll understand when you’re older. Everything will be all right, you’ll see.’ He gives me his card with his mobile number on it, tells me to call him any time. ‘Any time.’ Then he takes out a wad of notes. ‘Here, take this. Spend it on something nice. Get yourself a new pair of trainers.’
‘Mum won’t let me wear them,’ I say, miserably.
‘New trousers or something. I don’t know. Keep it secret, then you can spend it on what you like. You’re turning into a pretty girl now; you’ll be making friends here soon enough. Everything will be OK, you’ll see.’
‘Don’t say that!’ I say to him. ‘You don’t know fuck all.’
‘Carmen!’ He looks at me, shocked. ‘Don’t swear at me, please.’
I get out of the car. ‘I can do what the fuck I like. You’re not my dad.’
I look at him, expecting him to be cross, but his eyes are soft, watery. He looks like he’s trying not to cry.
‘You’re becoming just like your mother,’ he says.
‘And you can have your poxy money back.’ I throw the notes at the car, the wind catches them, sending them skitting across the pavement into the gutter.
As I open the door to the flats I hear an engine turning over, then finally pulling away. When I look behind me there’s an empty space where the car used to be as if he’s just vaporized. Upstairs, Mum’s door is shut and when I knock there’s a muffled ‘go away’. I lie on my bed and try so hard not to cry that my face feels hot and itchy.
The noise of the intercom buzzing makes my heart jump nearly out of my chest. For one moment my heart leaps. I think it might be Dad, changed his mind, come back to get me.
‘Lerrus in, love.’ It’s Billy’s gravelly voice.
When he appears at the door he looks better than he did this morning, cleaned, shaved, though he’s still wearing leathers and cowboy boots. He’s carrying a portable TV.
‘Just thought I’d drop by, see how you were settling in. Brought you a telly. Found it in Izzy’s round the corner, only cost a tenner. Works OK and everything.’
He bustles past me into the lounge. ‘Where’s your mother then?’ he asks.
‘Sleeping,’ I say.
He puts the telly on the floor in the lounge and starts to tune it in.
‘You can get one, two, three and four, but not five,’ he says. ‘Telly’s too crap for that. I said to your mum, mind, if she wants to get Digital I can sort that out for her on the cheap. More channels ’an that, it’s better, isn’t it?’
He chatters at me like this for quite a bit while he fiddles with the switches and bangs the side to get the picture to hold. I stand over him and watch.
‘There you go,’ he says, ‘no remote control though. You’ll have to get up to change channels.’ He looks up at me from the floor.
‘Thanks,’ I say, hoping that he won’t notice that my face is blotchy.
Billy smiles at me. ‘No problem, kiddo. I’ll just go and look in on your mum.’
He goes into her room without knocking. I can hear his trying-to-be-quiet voice rasping over the sound of the telly. When he comes out he shuts the door really gently and tiptoes back into the lounge.
‘Your mum’s a bit poorly,’ he says, as if I didn’t know that already. ‘What d’you reckon to coming over the restaurant for a bit? I said to her I’d feed you.’ He smiles at me awkwardly, showing his stained teeth. ‘Won’t bite you. Promise.’
I shrug. ‘Whatever,’ I say.
As we walk down the road to his silver BMW, Billy spies something in the gutter. ‘Finders keepers,’ he says, holding up a twenty-pound note. ‘Some joker will be sorry to lose that.’ He folds it up and slips it in his pocket.
His mobile phone goes, playing the tune to The Great Escape.
‘Orright? Lisa! You orright? Yeah . . . Nah, I’ve got Carmen with me. Yeah . . . Yeah . . . Yeah . . . yeahyeah orright orright, I know I know. See ya later.’ He flips it shut. ‘Great things. mobile phones. D’ya want one? I can get you one cheap.’
‘No thank you,’ I say, primly. ‘Mum says they give you cancer.’ I think of the picture that she showed me in a magazine once, a girl with a cancer around her ear big as a cabbage.
‘Do everything your mum says, do you?’
He smirks and ruffles my hair. I wonder what Dad would say if he saw Billy. He might let me go home with him then.
We drive around for ages. Billy’s got a few errands to run. He parks up outside a big warehouse. ‘I won’t be a sec,’ he says, grabbing a scruffy Adidas bag off the back seat.
I sit in the dark, trying not to get scared. The road is empty apart from a few cars and the occasional bus that comes chugging up the long hill out of town. In the glove compartment I find lighters, a few tapes, a mobile-phone charger. I rummage for sweets but there’s only scrunched-up Burger King wrappers and ticket stubs from the football.
He taps on the window, making me jump. ‘Having a good nosy? You’re just like your mother.’
Quickly, I push the flap of the compartment shut.
‘Sorry,’ I mumble. But he laughs.
I try not to look at him as he gets in the car. He sits down with a sigh, his breath dark with cigarettes. I pull my denim jacket across my chest, wriggle my toes in my sandals so the blisters don’t show. He could be taking me anywhere.
The room looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in months. There’s things everywhere: records, CDs, videos, cigarette packets, ashtrays, empty cans of Coke and Tennents Extra, vodka bottles. The carpet’s covered in shreds of tobacco and ripped Rizla packets.
He’s ordered takeaway pizzas and burgers and chips from Zaff’s using his mobile. He said he couldn’t be arsed to drive back to the restaurant. ‘Same old shit wherever you buy it.’ His flat is just out of town in a place I’ve not been before, Balsall Heath. It’s a whole upstairs of an old Victorian house.
I sit on the edge of the sofa with the plate on my knees.
‘What ‘m ah thinking? I’ll get you a knife and fork.’
He pulls the coffee table towards us, wiping the mess on to the floor. ‘Sorry ‘bout the mess, we had a bit of a sesh last night. Bit different to what you’re used to this, isn’t it? What was your house like before?’
Clean, I think, looking at the carpet. ‘Nice,’ I say to him.
‘What? Not any more than that? Just nice?’
I look away from him and dig into my plate, starting with the burgers which are cold by now. ‘Thank you for the food,’ I say.
‘’S all right. Your mother’s a good friend of mine.’
He eats really quickly. Shovelling the food in, swallowing, before it’s chewed properly. His mobile goes, he answers it, still chewing on a bit of pizza.
‘Orright? Naaah, mate, sorry I’m a bit tied up right now . . .’ He looks at his watch. ‘Nother coupla hours? Yeah. No, not now, I’ve got someone here like.’ He laughs, spitting crumbs on the carpet. ‘No, not like that. Yeah, yeah, see ya later.’ He puts the phone on the table and switches it off. ‘Bastard things.’
A stereo takes up nearly the whole of one corner, a stack of black boxes with little lights and knobs. There are loads of speakers spread out around the room. Behind it a guitar and an amplifier.
‘Used to be in a band when I knew your mother,’ Billy informs me. He gets up. ‘I’ll show ya something now.’ He
flips through a pile of records. ‘Here y’a,’ he says, handing me a record.
Distress it says in metallic blue zig-zag writing over the top of a black-and-white photograph of a group of punks. I don’t recognize him at first, he looks so young. Like someone I could go to school with.
‘Is that you?’ I ask, pointing to the boy in the middle, his hair cut in a short crop, a shirt and a skinny tie half undone round his neck.
‘Handsome, wasn’t I?’
On the back there’s a collage of photos, badges, tickets, posters. One badge says SPEED FREAK, another EVERYBODY’S WEIRD.
‘Those are the songs,’ he says. ‘Clever, isn’t it? Lisa did it. There’s your mum, look.’ He points to a photo of two girls. ‘And Lisa.’ They’re both done up all goth, lots of big hoops in their ears. ‘Inseparable they were. Your mum thought the world of Lisa back then. Bet she never told you that.’
It gives me a funny feeling to look at it and I give the record back to him.
‘We only ever did that record and a few gigs down the Barrel Organ, but we were good when we were around. Our drummer worked with UB40 after. I’d play it fer ya but my decks’re cabbaged. Lisa and Mar— sorry, your mum, were our number-one fans.’
He presses a button on the remote control, reggae booms through the speakers. He nods his head to the lazy beat.
‘C’mon finish up, you haven’t eaten all yer tea.’
‘I’m full,’ I say, lying back on the sofa.
‘You don’t want any ice cream?’
I shake my head and squash my lips together. I look at my feet; they’re dirty, black sooty streaks across my toes.
‘You don’t say much, do you?’
He gets up and tidies up a bit, shaking out a black bin bag and filling it with cans, bottles, the rest of my food. ‘I tell ya, we throw away so much food in the restaurant. It’s criminal. I need a dog I do.’ He lights a fag, jigs about a bit to the music. ‘When I was your age I was a skinny little runt. Footie. That was all I cared about. What you into then? Boy bands? Trainers? PlayStation? I dunno, what are kids into these days? I’m out of touch.’
I shrug. I wish he’d put the telly on and shut up. He rubs his stomach awkwardly. ‘Well. Look. If you don’t mind, I’m just going to get changed. Here, you watch the telly.’
I know that really he’s gone to smoke some weed. I can smell it coming out of his room when I go to the toilet. In my old school the boys smoked it all the time, in lunch breaks down the bottom of the playing fields, rolled up in crappy little joints. When the police came round school to give us an anti-drugs talk, Jason Myers rolled a fake one and threw it at the policeman halfway through his speech. We all thought he would get into trouble but the policeman just picked it up and looked at it and said that no one was going to get very high if they rolled joints like they were Tampax wrappers.
When he comes back, his eyes are red and half-closed. He sinks into the sofa next to me. ‘I tell ya,’ he says. ‘I’m saving up. I’m gonna get off out of here one of these days. Get a bar in Spain. Just imagine it, always sunshine, sea views, cheap beer, cheap fags. Not fair is it, work?’
Later, outside the doors of our block, he digs in the back pocket of his trousers.
‘Here y’a,’ he says, giving me the twenty-pound note he found in the gutter. ‘Buy yerself summat nice with that.’
When Mum answers the buzzer he touches me lightly on the shoulders. ‘I won’t come in, I’ve got things to do. See you soon, eh?’ I watch him go back to his car, the street lights reflecting off his leather trousers as he walks.
‘Didn’t he want to come up for a drink?’ Mum asks. She’s up now, all the lights on. She’s cleaning the kitchen, scrubbing the floor with Ajax. ‘I wanted to tell him that he should have got someone in. This place is filthy.’
She wipes a wisp of hair from her eyes and stands up. I can tell that it makes her dizzy because she has to cling on to the units and her eyes roll back in her head. She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m so glad we’re here though. Aren’t you? Things are really looking up for us now. Was Billy all right? Did you get on?’
I think about the picture of her and Lisa, the record and Billy’s flat. It’s like she’s a different person all of a sudden and not my mother at all. ‘’S all right,’ I say, shrugging.
She sighs. ‘Sweetheart, sometimes I wonder if you’ve got any personality at all.’
8
The night before she’s supposed to start work, she’s up all night. Pacing the flat, writing letters, flipping through magazines. I fall asleep to the sound of her Pete Tong Essential Mix on repeat, the bass line thudding into the carpet.
She wakes me at six. I’m supposed to be spending the day with Nana and I’m going over on the bus on my own. Mum said she’d drive me but she hasn’t got a new car sorted out yet.
‘I’m so nervous,’ she says. ‘I can feel my heart going.’ She puts her hand on her chest. ‘Bird in a cage.’
She follows me round the flat while I get dressed, babbling on to me about how excited she is, about how she’s going to make it work for her, about how this time next year she’ll be a real success story. ‘You better believe it, girlfriend,’ she says in a silly voice.
‘I believe you,’ I say.
On the way to Nana’s I get lost. I get off at the right bus stop but turn down the wrong street. All the roads look the same, miles of bungalows and low, squat semis with big puffballs of privet outside.
Privet, Keep Out. I put that on my door once when I was younger. Dad laughed at my spelling and said not to worry, that maybe I’d turn out to be good at maths or something.
I have to walk back the way I came and down another road until I can see the mess of greenery that now half hides Nana’s house. The wispy fern tips are stretching up towards the roof.
Nana’s persuaded Grandad to get Sky Digital. She’s watching Classic Coronation Street on Granada Plus. ‘It’s the really good episodes with Pat Phoenix in,’ she says, rushing back to the TV. She shows me the remote control, a keypad with tens of tiny buttons. ‘You can send email with that,’ she says. ‘Your lifetime will be amazing you know, Carmen.’
She asks me how Mum’s getting on. I tell her that I’ve met Billy.
‘Have you now?’ She raises her eyebrows. ‘Your mother used to be really soft on him.’
‘He’s renting us the flat,’ I tell her.
‘Thought as much,’ Nana mutters under her breath before changing the subject. ‘There’s scones on the side in the kitchen. Help yourself. I bought them for you.’
Nana’s house is stuffy in the heat. Because of the bushes there’s no breeze, and though it’s cooler than outside it’s humid and manky, and smells like gone-off milk.
I put the light on in the kitchen; it’s like twilight otherwise. Bags of cakes are heaped up on the side: scones, slab cakes, bread puddings, jam tarts. I take a couple of scones and a piece of bread pudding into the lounge.
‘Ooh, give us a bit of that,’ Nana says, stretching across and digging her fingers into the moist, fruity mush and breaking off a chunk for herself. ‘Mmm.’ some of it falls on to her dress and she doesn’t even notice.
I look at the mess on my plate and suddenly I don’t feel very hungry. I eat it anyway because there’s nothing else to do.
After we’ve worked our way through the cakes and a few more advert breaks, Nana starts talking about lunch. ‘I think we should have chips for a special treat. What d’you think?’
I look at my nails; there’s only one little fleck of purple left.
‘Can I see Lisa?’ I ask.
Nana sighs. ‘If I were fitter, love, I’d take you into town like that –’ she clicks her fingers ‘– but it’s my knees, they’re playing up today. The chip shop’s about as far as it goes these days.’
Really, it’s because Agatha Christie films are on the classic cinema channel all afternoon.
She sends me out to get chips. It’s boiling out. A proper summer day. La
st year me and Janice spent the whole holidays outside her house getting suntans, or down the park smoking fags while we rubbed in our sun cream. Mum told me off when she saw I’d burned my neck. ‘Silly girl, you’ll get skin cancer.’
At the chip shop I think, I could just get the bus uptown, go and see Lisa and then come back, I bet Nan would never notice. I grasp the fifty pences until they mark my hand. I daren’t. I get double portions of chips and two pieces of cod and an extra battered sausage for Nan.
‘Ugly family, aren’t we?’ Mum says. She’s picked up one of Nan’s photos and she’s studying it closely. It’s one with Nana and Grandad and Lisa and Mum outside the house in Stirchley where Mum grew up. Lisa is leaning sulkily against the wall, hiding under her fringe, and Mum is grinning, her front teeth missing. ‘Look at my double chin,’ she says and puts the photo back with a sneer.
‘Come on then, madam.’ She swings a new set of car keys round her finger. She’s bought a second-hand VW Golf. ‘I’ll take you for a test drive.’
‘You sure you won’t stay for tea?’ Nana comes out of the kitchen with a tray of tea and cakes.
‘Mum, I told you, we don’t have time. You’ll be drinking that by yourself.’ She bustles me out of the door but tells Nana that she’ll have to look after me for the rest of the week. Nana thinks this is great.
‘Falcon Crest day on Carlton tomorrow,’ she shouts after me like it’s something I’ll be pleased to know.
Janice sends a letter on Friends Forever notepaper. Dad must have given her our address.
Hiya Babe. She’s miserable, Karl’s dumped her and taken his mobile back. I miss you. Everything’s boring here. What’s the talent like in Birmingham????!!!! Can I come and visit? Are you going to school down there?
She’s left her number at the top of the letter, but when I give her a ring no one answers.
I start a letter back, drawing nail shapes round the top and filling them in with swirly designs. Dear Janice, Birmingham’s great, I write.
I tell her to forget about Karl and come and visit. That we can go shopping and get our nails done. Then it all comes out in a rush of words, all about Mum and Dad: how I can’t go back to Yorkshire, how Mum is being a cow, how I hate her, how I want to run away.
