by Jo Brand
‘Well, I’ve done a test,’ said Martha.
‘Oh, I’d do another one — they don’t always work, you know,’ said Sarah.
‘Bollocks! Yes, they do,’ said Martha, sensing something in Sarah’s voice. ‘Don’t worry Sar. It is written that you will produce some little buggers. And Connie begat Sarah begat Nathan and Emily,’ she announced in biblical tones to the pub, whilst Sarah looked nonplussed and wondered if her friend had gone bonkers.
The three always met at the same pub, the King’s Head near the Oval cricket ground. It stood, Victorian, scarred and lonely, surrounded by 1950s estates, like the sole survivor of a bombing raid, and glowed at night like a dying ember amongst the harsher neon lights of a threatening, scarier age.
Martha set off for the pub at seven and was pleased to see it was raining. She felt safer in the rain. She assumed that burglars and rapists didn’t go out when it was raining because at heart, they were lazy, pathetic bastards who were reluctant to get wet.
Sarah was heading to the pub from a different direction. She hated the rain. It made her make-up run, her clothes look shite, and meant she turned up at places where potential husbands might be lurking looking bedraggled and unmarriageable. Martha, Flower and Sarah were all in their mid- to late-thirties and Sarah rather regretted the fact that she’d missed out on being a ladette because she was too old. Had she been able to run around drinking beer and swearing she thought that would have given her life so much more meaning.
Being six foot tall, the rain always hit Flower before everybody else and she would happily raise her head and let it run over the make-up-free zone that was her face. Sarah was appalled by Flower’s refusal to wear make-up. To her it was like going without pants. Flower hadn’t actually told Sarah she was knickerless too!
Although she didn’t like to admit it because people thought she was a balisy feminist, Martha was absolutely terrified of negotiating the rubbish-cluttered street round where she lived at night, because of the gangs of what would have been considered ten years ago, relatively young lads. Now, with the benefit of better diets, they were testosterone-soaked, huge, grown-up men in the bodies of fourteen year olds whose vocabulary of swearwords and sexist abuse was precisely targeted, if not vast. They could also smell fear, and its presence in their nostrils led them to track Martha along the road, trying to make her cry. It didn’t take much, given that her hormone content was running at about 97 per cent of her body mass, so even if someone shouted something as harmless as, ‘Up the duff!’ at her, she would be reduced to tears. And these were South London boys. They weren’t going to stop at something as Ealing Comedy as ‘Up the duff!’ Oh no. Poor old Martha was regaled with everything their poor starved imaginations could come up with, and with her head down, she marched on wishing that the cane was still used in school and that capital punishment existed for the extra special crime of calling someone ‘a fat slag’.
‘Fuck off!’ she retorted, wishing she didn’t sound quite so much like a language coach from Surrey.
Flower, because of her height, her bicycle and her socialworkeresque appearance, also suffered the harsh verbal slings and arrows of the public, but it tended to be. more amused banter than vitriolic abuse, until one day, a car full of lads had passed and one of them leaned out to pull her plait.
‘Oi!’ he shouted. ‘It’s a fucking giraffe on a bike!’
Flower had discovered in herself a rage she did not know she was capable of. She followed them to the next set of lights, pulled off their windscreen wipers and kicked the side of the car, oblivious to the fact that they could kill her if they wanted to. Lucky for her, they were more bemused than angry to see this angular girl lay into their car, and she escaped without injury.
Sarah, on the other hand, was the sort of person who got a bit miffed if some medieval sex offender on a building site didn’t comment on her appearance.
The unlikely trio of friends had met some ten years before at a charity Christmas function aiming to feed and water London’s homeless. Sarah had thought there might be some nice blokes there, Martha had thought there might be some horrible ones she could introduce to the Rev Brian, and Flower hadn’t fancied Christmas dinner at home. They were the last of the single hold-outs as all their separate groups of friends gradually met people, got married and moved to somewhere with fewer asthma-inducing agents in the air.
The King’s Head was its normal scruffy self, the sort of place where the last bloke to clean the ceiling had got nicotine poisoning. Martha liked its dingy corners, which hid her imperfections even in the daytime and, as she sat there nursing a mineral water and no fag, she speculated on the possible reasons for Sarah’s phone call. Given Sarah and her foibles, it had occurred to Martha that it might be due to a bad decision in a shoe shop in Covent Garden at the weekend, or perhaps a haircut that made her look three weeks older than she was, but there had been something about the call that suggested otherwise. She looked up to see Flower, flushed and wet, heading towards her.
‘Drink?’ said Flower.
‘No thanks,’ said Martha. ‘Just the one water always does me.’
Flower purchased some hideous concoction involving tomato juice, lime cordial and soda water, and sat down next to Martha.
‘Well, what do you reckon?’ she said.
‘I expect it’s something to do with Billy,’ said Martha, who had only met the man a few times and had taken an instant dislike to him; even with her limited knowledge of psychiatry, she had pronounced him to have a personality disorder.
‘Multiple personality disorder?’ Flower had enquired, having watched a film once about some woman in America who had loads of personalities.
‘A “no personality” disorder from what I can see,’ said Martha.
‘Man-hater,’ teased Flower, which caused Martha to launch into her usual speech about why being a feminist didn’t mean you had to hate all men, accompanied by Flower slumping ever lower under the table with the whites of her eyes showing and a slight trail of dribble coming from the corner of her mouth, until Martha eventually noticed and shut up.
Then Sarah was blown in through the door looking almost human compared to her usual immaculate self. Sarah was one of those people who could wear a white suit in a coal mine and come out looking exactly as she did when she went in, as opposed to Martha, who seemed to attract flying lumps of curry onto her clothes wherever she went. Sarah, it seemed, had seriously let herself go, an indication that a huge crisis was occurring. To Martha and Flower’s horror, she hadn’t even put on any make-up, a disaster to rank in Sarah’s book along with pet bereavement.
Flower had already got Sarah her bottle of fizzy lemon mixed with vodka and called something like ‘Tropical Shag’, a drink in Martha’s opinion that was responsible for more teenage pregnancies and venereal diseases than anything else. Still, Martha couldn’t talk. She, at the great age of thirty-seven, wasn’t exactly setting a good example to local spinsters.
‘So,’ said Flower, ‘what’s the matter, Sarah?’
A tear began to make its way out of their friend’s left eye and down her unmade-up cheek.
‘It’s Billy,’ she said in a weary voice especially reserved for telling Flower and Martha that her latest relationship had failed in some oh-so-predictable way again.
‘Has he finished with you, disappeared without trace, stolen your watch or sat on the cat when he was pissed?’ enquired Martha, recalling Sarah’s last four relationships and hoping to lift the gloom somewhat.
‘He’s hit me,’ said Sarah.
Martha and Flower were stunned. Neither of them had expected this. True, they both treated poor Sarah’s increasingly desperate search for a man and subsequent failure as a bit of a joke, but they hadn’t prepared for this eventuality and there followed a very long pause.
Finally, at exactly the same time, Martha said, ‘The bastard,’ and Flower said, ‘Are you all right?’ Sarah responded to the question. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m all right ph
ysically. He didn’t hit me very hard, but I’m not all right up here.’ She pointed to her head.
Flower, who unfortunately for her had done a bit of supply teaching and had had to wise up very quickly at a local comprehensive, not having realised that if fourteen-year-old boys were bored, they had wanking competitions in class, remembered a study she had read in which teenage boys said it was perfectly all right to hit girls if they nagged you and went into overdrive.
‘Have you called the pigs?’ she asked, an enquiry which because of its seventies’ protest angle made Martha laugh very inappropriately.
‘Flower,’ she said, ‘you can’t call them pigs any more. That’s so… so… Greenham Common.’
Flower looked at her with irritation. ‘I don’t think now’s the time to discuss my use of language,’ she said and turned again to Sarah. ‘Have you called… them?’
‘God, no,’ said Sarah. ‘That would be well over the top.’
‘What about Rape Crisis?’ continued Flower.
‘Flower,’ said Martha, ‘I’m all in favour of these organisations in their rightful role, but Rape Crisis — that would be bonkers!’
‘What about a refuge of some sort?’ said Flower, leading Sarah and Martha to believe she really had lost it big time.
‘Shall we all calm down,’ said Martha. ‘Come on, Sar. Tell us what happened.’
‘Well,’ said Sarah, ‘last night I was working late and when I got in about nine, Billy was watching telly and drinking beer, and he was in a really foul mood. When I asked him how he was, he just ignored me, so I asked him again and he told me to shut up.
Had he been studying at the Academy of the Reverend Brian? Martha wondered.
Sarah continued, ‘Well, I went into the kitchen to make some food and called out to him to see if he wanted any, at which point he came storming into the kitchen telling me to leave him alone, to shut the fuck up, hadn’t he told me enough times already, was I a fucking moron …
At this point she began to cry again, and Flower, who was nearest, put her arm round her, somewhat awkwardly it has to be said, for despite the fact that Flower’s mum and dad were good, old-school hippies, they’d been quite uncomfortable about the whole physical thing.
‘So, then what happened?’ said Martha who, subconsciously, had started to treat the incident as an omnibus version of a soap opera. Flower threw her a look which said, ‘Can’t you be more sensitive?’ and Martha lowered her eyes demurely.
‘I said to Billy, “I don’t know what I’ve done, but I’m sorry”,’ said Sarah, ‘and then he hit me round the face and walked out.’
‘So what did you do then?’ said Flower.
‘Went to the toilet,’ said Sarah, who was very regular and faithful in her reporting of the incident.
‘And then?’ said Flower.
‘I watched telly, cried and went to bed,’ replied Sarah. ‘He came back in about midnight and—’
‘Oh, I bet he was all over you, wasn’t he,’ interrupted Martha, ‘saying how sorry he was, how he couldn’t believe what he’d done, he’d never done it before, he’d never do it again, he loves you, he was so ashamed, he’d get help, he couldn’t understand how it had happened…’
‘Well, no,’ said Sarah. ‘He got into bed and went to sleep.’
‘Yeh, but you’re going to throw the wanker out today, aren’t you?’ said Martha.
Sarah’s mobile rang. It was one of those ring tones you can buy from a magazine that is supposed to sound like a violent rap song, but in reality sounds like the tuneless musical accompaniment to some toy from the Early Learning Centre, so you find yourself humming ‘Fuck the L.A.P.D’ like a drama-school desperado on Playbus who hasn’t moved onto grown-up stuff.
Martha could tell it was Billy calling, because poor old Sarah blushed and tried to sound businesslike and strict with him, when in fact Martha could tell that she desperately wanted to pretend the whole thing had never happened. After the call finished, Sarah, rather embarrassed, said, ‘I’ve got to be going.’
Comments like ‘Got to make his tea for him, have you?’ or ‘Does he need comforting, poor little bastard?’ lay unsaid on Martha and Flower’s lips, and they nodded semi-sympathetically. They’d both been there, not with violence, but with moody men who made them feel like pieces of shite, and felt that they should cover up to their friends and pretend they weren’t that bad. Sarah was walking home now, wishing she had never mentioned ‘the incident’ to Martha and Flower. It would make life so much easier not being torn between Seemingly Proud Woman Who Doesn’t Take Any Shit From Men In An Unacknowledged Yet Fundamentally Feminist Way and … Woman Who Loves Bloke So Much She Puts Up With Unspeakable Acts Of Abuse.
Martha and Flower sat morosely in the pub.
‘She’ll tell us if she wants some help, won’t she?’ said Flower. ‘I get the feeling she doesn’t want us to interfere. Maybe we should just keep an eye on things from a distance.’
Martha, who had been about to suggest they went round to Sarah’s flat mob-handed, dragged Billy out, tortured him and left him for the crows to peck out his eyes, was somewhat taken aback.
‘Do you want another of those weird drinks?’ she said.
A week or so later, Martha emerged from the reeking lift and walked heavily towards her front door. Martha always felt relieved when she finally got into her flat after work. At the moment she was a waitress in a club in Soho, some twelve steps down the social ladder from the Geography teacher her dad had hoped she would be. Getting around was an assault course for Martha, not only because she was frightened, but because she was hypersensitive to the comments of everyone she passed on her way. It was more to do with the fear of abuse rather than the reality. The combination of the Rev Brian as a father, an overactive imagination, and a life spent watching rather too many films .in which women got stabbed, burned, slashed, decapitated, strangled, garrotted, de-entrailed and generally not treated very respectfully, had given her an ultra-developed sense of vulnerability. She was the one at whom the presenter’s reassuring comments were aimed at the end of crime programmes and on whom, like most other anxious people, they had absolutely no effect whatsoever.
Therefore, a knock at the door past seven o’clock at night in Martha’s block didn’t bode well. It was unlikely to be someone selling organic vegetables or a Jehovah’s Witness, who risked crucifixion if they ventured onto the estate. Martha thought that the organic vegetable-seller would have stood up to the test of crucifixion much more steadfastly because they were healthy and full of stamina, whereas the poor old Jehovah’s Witness wouldn’t even have been able to have a blood transfusion.
But somehow the apologetic tap at the door wasn’t menacing and although Martha put the chain across, she opened the door with some confidence.
It was a shock. Her mother, Pat, was standing there, having made it alive and proud through the middle of a South London estate with a terrible reputation. She, who couldn’t even manage a night’s sleep in the tiny Suffolk village without a light on and a cheese knife under the pillow. Somehow, this intrepid woman had made it past some scary, scary obstacles, not least the gang of McDonald’s-fuelled, ill-educated hecklers.
‘Mum,’ Martha managed to say, with as little panic and surprise as possible in her voice. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I’ve left your father,’ said Pat, as triumphantly as a timid, sixty-one-year-old vicar’s wife could manage, ‘and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.’
‘What about Mary in Sevenoaks?’ said Martha automatically, thinking less than fondly of her bad-tempered sister married to a shrunken, spotty collection of bones and skin minus a personality.
‘Oh, Mary would just send me straight back,’ said her mother, ‘and she can’t make a decent cup of tea.’ (Vicars’ wives’ lives are punctuated with many very bad cups of tea.) ‘By the way, what’s an “effing minger”?’
‘Never mind,’ said Martha, touched that her mother still couldn’t manage the
‘F’ word, and taking her very small case from her. ‘Come in.’
She could sense Pat’s fragile good spirits sliding out of her body as she came into the flat. Yes, it was grim. Yes, it was neglected, and thanks to a curry last night, yes it smelled. Martha didn’t believe in covering up smells with commercially produced different smells. After all, there’s nothing worse than going into a toilet impregnated with some entrail-shifting floral scent. Martha suddenly foresaw an evening, nay a week, full of horror, as she tried to entertain her poor mother while Pat made up her mind about her future. Martha almost found herself wishing that her mum had stayed with the Rev.
She knew, first of all, she would have to put up with a bout of spring cleaning in which her mother would do a passable impression of someone with St Vitus’s Dance, accompanied by minute questioning of the validity of every single item in the bathroom cabinet, a thorough excavation of her washing basket, and a laundry session the like of which had not been seen since Flower’s netball team all got diarrhoea after a night out at a local Italian and Flower brought their kit round because the washing machine in the squat had a sculpture of some pants in it.
‘Sit down, Mum,’ said Martha, ‘and tell me what’s happened.’ Martha had an eye on the clock, because one of her favourite programmes was on in five minutes.
‘Turn the television off, dear,’ said her mother.
Martha turned the sound down, but continued to sneak a look at the screen, and when the titles of the programme came up and her mother had only got as far as the incident outside the bathroom this very morning, when the Rev Brian, according to him, driven insane by her quiet incessant knocking, had appeared at the door, dignity dispensed with, various bits of himself flailing around, and landed a blow on her arm with a wet flannel, she found herself ever so slightly irritated.
‘Oh, that’s awful,’ Martha said every few seconds while her mother continued the sorry tale, waltzing through what sounded like a comedy row conducted in every room of the house, before the dénouement in the garden with the woman next door threatening to call her husband and her mother’s eventual flight from the vicarage with the vengeful words of the Rev Brian ringing in her ears. ‘Don’t come back here until you can stop behaving like a mouse!’
