by Helen Walsh
The hockey girl slips into my thoughts again and I try to shake her from my hair with a scrag of the towel. I dip into the drawer and pull out a notepad and pen.
Dad,
Sorry I let you down today. I’ll make it up. love,
Millie.
It reads thoughtless and selfish. Superficial. Careless.
But it reads true. At least it reads true.
Jamie
The first thing that flips through my mind when I pull up is that she’s stood us up. On purpose like. The house is devoid of any sign of light or life. I sound the horn a couple of times and next door’s curtain spasms slightly exposing for a few seconds a vested torso. Then the room falls dark. A few seconds later, a couple of faces materialise at the window. One significantly larger than the other. That’s classic curtain twitching that la! Haven’t seen that sort of thing since I was a kid. Nosy fucken cunts. Wait ’til I tell lil’ Millie.
I call her mobie. It just rings out.
The next thing to enter my head is that she’s fallen asleep, which if the truth be known, would not be the first time. I call the house. No answer. The clock on the dashboard reads 5.54. I’ll give her ’til 6.10, then I’m off.
6.05 and still no sign of the little newt. I try both numbers again. No avail. I go knock on the door. No joy. I gets back in the car and skims through the sports pages of the Echo. The Shite are still three points above us. More rumours that we’re selling Heskey.
6.07. I start the engine. If the truth be told, I was a tad relieved when I pulled up and found the house in darkness, but only in a spineless sense. My stomach’s pure been in knots all afternoon about seeing Millie, but now I s’pose, I’m more fucken frustrated than anything. I just want to get to the bottom of it all, you know. Want things back the way they were.
I wait a further two minutes then check the screen of my mobie for any sign of a missed call. Blank. With the tiniest tremors of anger spilling into my throat, I slam the car into first and glance into my mirror with the intention of doing one. But a couple of hundred yards behind us, I see a red dot bobbing up and down. I fix my eyes to it and I can tell by the period of delay between its rise and fall, that it is Millie. Smoking urgently. At 6.08, her face is pressed against the condensation of the glass. A wide-mouthed pout and slightly sheepish eyes. And fuck, I’ve missed the little waif. She slides into the car, dragging the thick odour of beer and fags with her.
‘You started already?’
‘No!’ she splutters, kite writhing into a scowl, ‘You’re early. I thought you were coming at 6.00.’
I tap my finger against the clock on the dashboard.
‘That’ll be that clock in the Rose of Mossley,’ I say, ‘It’s a good fifteen minutes slow that.’
She lobs us another scowl which quickly melts into an expansive grin when she realises she’s been well and truly sussed.
‘Only had a half, you know.’
I give her cheek an affectionate squeeze. She looks striking in a cream mohair jumper, skin-tight jeans and no make-up. She’s lost a few inches of her hair too, a neat bob that falls level with her chin. It’s softened the kite up a little, taken away that gaunt constitution.
At first, we’re just speaking in snatches of desultory conversation, second or third date material with someone you’ve clicked with but are not yet at ease with – How’s Billy? How’s your Dad? Have you seen Sean recently? Did you hear about the lads who done over the bookies on Aigburth Road? And other mundane shite that doesn’t really lead anywhere but gives us an insight nevertheless into what’s going on in her head. For example, while she is mad for gossip pertaining to Sean, Liam and our kid, she completely shuns any conversatory inlet that might lead to the subject of Anne Marie or the wedding. She pure does not want to hear about it. Like when she asks us what I done over the weekend and I say I’ve been looking for a pad for the Missus and that, she fucks off on some mad tangent. ‘Did you know there’s been a twenty per cent increase in diagnosed cases of gornorrhoea and syphilis on Merseyside?’ And by the time we reach the last set of traffic lights on Speke Boulevard, we’ve exhausted the possibilities of airbrushed conversation and a thick silence creeps over us. She sits there, gazing out of the window, swooshing air from one cheek to another, trying to appear all nonchalant and that. Her knee’s a dead give-away though. Rattling like fuck. Pure nervous body lingo that. And I’m not feeling that different myself if the truth be known. My head’s whirring madly and my throats choked with a thousand and one words, all refusing to organise themselves into sentences. Eventually, she spots the Echo on the floor, flicks on the dashboard light and plunges herself into the front page, and for a while the silence acquires a purpose.
Thing I still can’t get my head round is where the fuck this has all come from and more to the point, what the fuck it is? There’s no trace of animosity in her kite like there was a few weeks back. That’s for deffo. Quite the opposite if the truth be known. There’s almost a hint of vulnerability. A sadness about her. And para as it may seem, I get the feeling that I am in someway deemed the cause of that sadness. I s’pose the key to any kind of revelation lies in the tinfoil parcel in the dashboard. Should just stop fannying around and drop the bastards now. It’s fucken aaaayges since we done a tablet together and that’s clearly what’s needed. A few hours of pure drug-fucked divulgence. Still, can’t help thinking that this is a tiny waste of the most pleasurable drug known to man. Like I say, I only limit myself to one or two a year and my philosophy has always been that you should use a tablet to make a good time better not a bad time bearable.
It’s just gone 6.45 and we’re still trapped in the thick of rush hour. Traffic flow across Runcorn Bridge has almost come to a standstill. And I’m in the wrong lane for the M56, and no cunt’ll let us in. A mini bus is crawling along side to our left. Auld’ns on a night out somewhere. All sour twisted mouths. Miserable as fuck. I try and grab the attention of the driver, but he’s goosing about with the wing mirror. I fucken hate being stuck in traffic by the way. It pure burns my head out. I would rather’ve taken a fifteen-mile deviation then be stuck in this bollocks. I sigh heavily. Millie throws us an empathetic look, then snaps the light off and hurls the paper onto the back seat.
‘Have you seen that over there?’ she says suddenly, pointing beyond the opposite side of the bridge.
‘What?’
‘That? Look! My God, what the fuck is it?’
I twist my neck round and narrow my eyes to slits.
‘What? In the Mersey d’you mean?’
‘Yeah, a few metres from the left bank.’
‘Can’t see a thing. It’s pitch fucken black. What am I s’posed to be looking for by the way?’
‘This,’ she says, in a low blunt whisper.
Millie has removed her top and is flicking her tongue at the aul’ gadgies on the bus. A woman with a blue rinse and a mouth stretched into a perfectly formed O clamps her hand over her husband’s eyes. The pair of them are pure mortified.
‘JESUS CHRIST Millie? What the bleeding hell are you playing at? You’ll give em both a heart attack!’
She sucks hard on a finger and commences rubbing her left nipple.
‘There’s cameras all down here. Get it back on now.’
I reach round and grab the paper from the back seat and lob it over her tits. She shrugs it off and there is a bit of a struggle as I try to snatch her jumper from the floor. My elbow hits the horn. The bus crawls forward.
Everyone is staring. A blur of horrified kites and waggling fingers. And as if this isn’t enough, she frees herself from the seatbelt and manoeuvres her body, so her breasts are pressed right up against the window.
I look away, twisting my neck right over my shoulder so it is nearly snapped from its socket and shield my kite with a forearm. The traffic in our lane inches forward. I linger back amidst an onslaught of blasting horns and wait for an opening in the next lane. No cunt’ll let us in. I have two options. Equally harrowing. St
ay put for a while, let the bus move out of sight and deal with the road rage from the drivers behind, or carry on moving forward alongside the bus and risk headlining tomorrows Echo. You can just see it now. Pensioner dies in Indecent Exposure Shock. Anne Marie would fucken murder us. I stay put.
‘Show’s fucken over now. Stop fannying about and get your top back on. Or I’m coming off at the next exit.’
She just sits there defiant, pure wallowing in the aggro she’s causing. The driver behind starts doing big mad wanker signs at a hundred miles an hour. I’m losing my patience. Quickly. With Millie, but more with the cunt behind. Finally, a gap opens up in the next lane, between a truck and a red Corsa. I nudge my way in and the woman in the Corsa pulls a spastic face. I ignore her. I am just pure relieved that the truck in front has dwarfed us from sight. Those faces la. Those poor aul’ dears.
By the time I recover from the ordeal, Millie has slipped her top back on and has returned to swooshing air between her cheeks.
‘What the fuck’s all that about then?’
She shrugs her shoulders, snorts, then goes:
‘I smiled at that old couple and they just fucking blanked me.’
‘Probably blind as, for Christ’s sake!’
‘Then they wouldn’t have seen nothing would they?’
Takes us a while to see the funny side of it but once we’re over the bridge and picking up speed on the slip way which feeds into the M56, I can’t help but laugh to myself. Fucken face on that blue rinse la!
By the time we’re deep in the heart of hillbilly land, Millie has tired of larking about and I’ve taken control of the conversation, steering it towards more serious stuff.
‘So, how’s your course going and all that?’ I ask, conscious that I’m stumbling into another discursive no man’s land. She responds with another teenage shrug of the shoulders. I glance sideways at her and try to read her thought processes from the tilt of her head and jut of her lips.
‘How’s that lil’ noggin of yours coping with all the stress of your final year?’
‘Okay, I s’pose.’
‘You were a fucken nightmare when you were doing your A-levels you know. I can trace the origins of this receding hairline all the way back to that spring.’
‘I know,’ she smiles, ‘But I was a nightmare cos I actually wanted to make the grades. I wanted to get into Uni.’
‘And now the novelty’s worn off?’
She frowns and shakes her head.
‘Oh Jamie, come on hon, don’t let’s go down that road again.’
I try to let the subject drift but I can’t help myself.
‘I’m not, I won’t. It’s just that it’s so fucken gutless Millie, to be giving up when you’re this close to the end. You just don’t know how easy you’ve got it, you…’
‘Jamie, you just said you wouldn’t? Why are you trying to ruin tonight?’
There’s anger in her voice now and I’m wishing I’d kept my big daft trap shut.
‘Soz babes.’
I squeeze her shoulder-all slim and fragile. She sighs, crosses her legs and uncrosses them.
‘You’re not even wide of the beam though Jamie. You’re way way way off course. I mean, I shouldn’t have to justify myself – not to my best mate, but if you must know I shouldn’t even be at Liverpool. I shouldn’t be on this course. What I wanted to do… what I should be doing…’
She hesitates, snorts.
‘What I should be doing is sociology.’
‘Study of the mind and that?’
‘No!’ She tuts. ‘That’s psychology.’
I raise an eyebrow and grin, let her know I’m just winding her up and that.
‘I mean most of it’s theory tripe taught by conceited old cunts who can’t be arsed doing their research. Just lock themselves up in their fusty chambers, gobbling up huge sums of grant money and regurgitating other people’s work. Gets to me that. But there’s some, you know, who are so fucking passionate, so fucking brilliant at what they do. There’s this one fella, right, who’s spent sixteen years studying the habits of doggers. You should see his thesis. It’s staggering.’
‘Sounds like a weird cunt to us.’
She elbows us affectionately.
‘So why didn’t you do that then?’ I go.
‘Dad.’
‘What, he wanted you to pick somet more academic?’
‘No! It’s Dad’s subject at Liverpool isn’t it? That’s what he lectures in, criminology.’
‘Well then. Sounds perfect to me. A blueprint for success – help with your homework, sneak previews of exams and that.’
‘Yeah and Dad keeping tracks on every thing I do. He’s bad enough as it is now. Anyway, it’s not called homework anymore, it’s called assignments.’
I flick the top of her thigh.
‘Well, there must be somewhere else you could’ve done it?’
‘Manchester has a good criminology department.’
‘So why didn’t you go there? There’d be no shortage of scum to study.’
‘Dad.’
‘Yeah, well, can half understand where he’s coming from. He’s a true Red you know, aul’ Jerry. Right down to the…’
‘It’s just, I couldn’t leave him could I?’ she interjects, ‘Not after Mum…’
She trails off and turns away into the silhouetted landscape racing past the window. I’m lost for words. Should’ve seen that coming a mile off.
A silence ensues, separating us again.
We drop the eckies, half an hour before we reach Llangollen. There’s fuck all to do up there by the way – a decrepit town full of crap boutiques, stuffy tea-rooms and a couple of arcades jammed with libidinous townies but if you take the A524 and follow it right up into the Snowdonia mountain range there’s this pub overlooking a lake – all leather couches and log fires and badgers’ heads strewn around the walls, tons of draft beers and a juke box full of aul’ classics from the likes of New Order and Numan.
Passing through the geographic depression of Llangollen and nothing has changed. It’s fucken aayyges since I last come up here. Going back a good eight or nine years I reckon, and the only embellishments are an Indian restaurant, a couple of five-a-side soccer courts, a Yates’ Wine Lodge and the Spa has matured into a mini Somerfields. Me, Sean and a few of the lads used to come up here of a Friday for the pure and simple reason of getting laid. As with most hillbilly towns, the crumpet have all done the rounds with the locals three times over by the time they hit fifteen and are just gagging for a bit of the exotic. Scousers, Mancs, Wools. Anything but fucken hillbillies. Proper goers as well if the truth be told, the local skirt. Like fucken battery hens let loose on a hillside. Aye, there were that bit too much for us, in fairness. Unnerved us they did. Sixteen-year-olds with glaring white faces and tight perms flecked with the cheap gold of bottled peroxide, demanding anal and gangbangs. Too much la, too fucken much.
We snake higher and higher towards the Snowdonia mountain range, which lunges towards us at the turn of a bend, then shrinks back into the sky at the turn of another. Like someone’s waving a magnifying glass in front of my eyes. Suddenly a cobalt blue light dazzles out of nowhere. Filth. I pull over. A sweat breaks my forehead. A Volvo estate blares past at ferocious speed, knowing every curve and jut of the road. My heart bangs dementedly. I’ve never been in any serious trouble with the law and that but I always get a sweat on at the sight of filth. Even when I spot them at the match or walking through the city of a night, I always feel like there’s gonna be aggro and that. You hear about it all the time though don’t you? About ordinary innocent folk like myself, just walking along, minding us own business and then next minute we’re slammed up in a cell being accused of all sorts. Drug dealing, necrophilia, armed robbery … I pull off again and I see that Millie is sniggering out of the window, reading us like a book.
Just as the road threatens to fade into a footpath, a badly lit sign for ‘Good food, good ale and a warm welcome’ swings u
s sharply into a long winding drive which slices right through the thick of the forest and delivers us straight to The King’s Head. It’s not changed one bit – right from the cast-iron boot scraper outside the door to the smell of pine leaves and carbon that hangs in the air. It’s pure mind blowing, the view from up here. You can see right into the crux of the valley, right down to the lake which is pure glowing in the electric blue hue of the night. You can tell by the colour on that sky that’s it’s gonna be a fuck of a full moon as well. Wish I’d brought my camera. Pure National Geographic material that is. I tell you, if someone blindfolded you and brought you up here, there’s no way you’d know you was in Britain. Canada or Russia or somet. In fact, I’m half expecting to see a bear lumbering towards us. We stand in the car park for a while, in silence, just gazing, soaking it all in, sharing a cigarette and in the midst of all this natural euphoria, it dawns on us that the tablets have shown no signs of life. Not even a glimmer. In all honesty, I’d’ve been just as made up to’ve gotten slowly soaked on a few pints of local ale, followed by some tasty pub nosh – gammon and egg or scampi and chips and that, but if it turns out we’ve been ripped off, it will pure destroy my evening. It’s unlikely that Sean would’ve been handling duff gear though. He picks up in bulk, and no one’s stupid enough to try and fuck the Flynns over. Mind you, with the Yems and that taking over Granby…
