‘Why don’t we discuss it in the back shop?’
‘No,’ he says, with his eyes on the door, as if he’s going to shout for help from the passing foot traffic. ‘There’s nothing to talk about. She’s welcome back, and if she’s not coming she should tell me herself.’
I turn to leave and he breathes out, like a bust football.
‘Tell her...’ he says. I turn back. He looks as if he doesn’t know what he wants to tell her, or if he does, he doesn’t want to tell me. ‘Just tell her to let me know...’
And she does. And thankfully it’s by letter, cause I don’t want her going in and finding out I’d been there. I was looking after Millie while she hauled herself back into town to see if she can get her old, old job back, when the door goes. I’m on the phone to her mobile while she stands outside the shop, working up her confidence. I can just see her, polishing her shoes against the calf of her other leg the way she does when she’s nervous. ‘Look,’ I say, ‘you’re a strong confident woman,’ because I’ve been reading those waiting room magazines again, ‘you’re inpowered.’
‘Empowered. Who’s at the door?’
‘I’m not a fucking clairvoyant. They can wait a minute. I’m trying to give you confidence because, God knows why, you need it. You’re the cleverest person I know. That might not be saying much but we both know you’re a lot better than selling bits of ribbon or whatever it is you do down there.’ As I’m saying this I’m walking down the hall. There’s a pause on her side – I know she’s touched. ‘Look, if you come out in half an hour’s time and you’re still on the bru then you’re no worse off than you are now.’
‘It might be Dad.’
I open the door and there are the two toothpaste adverts I waited on to leave the shop before I went in. Both are staring round with the curiosity of a puppy. One opens her mouth about to speak.
‘Who is it?’
‘Got to go,’ I say, and jab the phone. I look behind them into the landing in case he’s with them too. But he isn’t.
‘We’re looking for Gina.’
‘You’d better come in.’
So they clip clop into the living room in their designer shoes and give this the once over too. One of them gives the same bit of carpet a nudge with her foot that Gina did when she talked about the chance of happiness. In a way it’s a bit insulting. They’ve got the same kind of curiosity David Attenborough probably has visiting a flock of chimps or something. Gina said they’re nice but dim and looking at them I agree, or ‘concur’ as they said on the Crown Court rerun the other day. Both their hair is so shiny it looks like fibre optic or something and I realise what it is – money. It’s what Gina told me about. It’s not just expensive shampoo, it’s years of vegetables and stuff like that that I know I should eat instead of Pot Noodles and the like, but can’t be bothered.
‘I like your top,’ one of them says. And all of a sudden I like her. ‘Gabby,’ she says, holding out her hand. And so does the other one, and I like her too even though I didn’t want to like either of them. I don’t remember meeting new girls and shaking their hands. You felt as if they’d learned this stuff on the hockey pitch or something and there was something fresh-airy about them.
‘Mind if I smake?’
‘What?’
‘Smake.’ The way she says it rhymes with ‘cake’. I must have looked blank till she pulled out a packet of fags.
‘Flash the ash.’
‘What?’
‘Hand them round. Let’s all have a smake.’
So we all took the coffee table, in other words the crate, out on to the balcony and sat on that and had a pally fag. I don’t know if it was the afternoon light or what but the other one, Naomi, was exactly the colour I’ve been aiming for in the past forty sessions. I put my arm against hers.
‘TANerife. I can get you a discount.’ I didn’t say how. ‘Where’d you get yours?’
‘Verbier.’ I ran my mind over all the tan stands around town and couldn’t come up with it.
‘Where’s that?’
‘Swiss Alps.’
‘Fuck.’ I could imagine her and the big-dicked ski instructor. Sauna sex. Chocolates. Fondue. The fucking lot. Suddenly draining wee Tam’s pods in the back room of TANerife lost some of its glamour. ‘You know, by rights I should hate the two of you from the off.’
‘Why?’ They’re dismayed.
‘Cause you’re both everything Gina said you were.’
‘But we like Gina.’
‘Gina likes you.’
‘Where is she?’
‘At an interview.’
‘But we don’t want her to leave!’ It was a chorus. A chorus of people who’ve had pretty much what they’ve wanted their whole lives just by saying so. It’s what I’d have said if I’d been them. And suddenly I thought – there by the grace of God, as those shrivelled old women teachers used to say. It’s not their fault they’re airheads without any real knowledge of the world, like me, graduate of the school of hard knocks and all that. Just because they haven’t had my advantages, it’s not their fault they’re sitting there wearing three hundred quids’ worth of clothes apiece without a thought in their heads. So I get my stash out and roll us a titanic, super-jumbo, Olympic torch spliff and time just seems to melt and before I know it the front door goes and she’s standing there like the angel of death, shouting through the fog at me about being the worst negligent babysitter with no sense of responsibility, doped in charge of a kid, blah blah. The full boonah. ‘Keep your hair on,’ I say, and explain how Millie woke up and Ruth came up and pleaded, pleaded to take her out in the pram, and I thought it might settle her. ‘And,’ I say, picking up my mobile and pointing at it, laying on the sarcasm like marzipan, ‘we agreed to keep in touch with one another in case anything happened, with this little gadget you may have heard of called a telephonic device.’ And that shuts her up long enough to take stock till she says ‘And what if she needs you? What are you going to do, like this?’ But she doesn’t wait for the reply I don’t have because she’s distracted by her new pals being there. They’re both past the point of noticing she’s back and are wearing that skunked-out thousand yard stare apiece.
‘Girls. Girls.’ She sounds like that posh teacher in that film about Edinburgh schoolgirls. She even claps her hands and looks at me, accusing like, as if I’ve corrupted them or something. And I say, ‘Nobody asked them to smoke.’ And the one with the Alps tan says, ‘You did.’ And then I remember that I forgot to ask them not to say anything about me being to the shop. I don’t think I’ve got anything to worry about because Gina’s got them to their feet. She knows she’s not getting any conversation tonight and I think her worry is getting them home safe. ‘It’s not a war zone,’ I say, ‘they found their own way here.’
‘And then they found you.’
‘Thanks for the smake,’ says one.
‘See you at the shop again,’ says the other.
‘Shop!’ says Gina. ‘What fucking shop? What have you done?’
And I explain. And she’s so grateful she burst into tears. Well, actually, I burst into tears. And Gabby manages to miss the couch and the linoleum and every other thing that wouldn’t matter a fuck and throw up on top of the telly. The only thing that works. And it’s pretty liquid. There’s a slow drip, drip and Ruth barges in with the pram, timed like one of those crap ITV sitcoms that depends on stupid coincidences. And I say to Gina, ‘These posh girls – fucking amateurs.’
But there was one good thing that came out of it. The telly was well and truly gubbed, with Gabby’s puke getting in the electricity or whatever. Two days later a titanic, super-jumbo, flat-screen, surround-sound televisual experience arrives at Gina’s door. I know, cause I watch the progress from van to panting floor-by-floor delivery. So does half the block, their only employment guessing who the lucky bastard is who’s getting it. I lean over the stairwell to all these faces looking up, like the view backwards from a cockpit when the plane’s climbing ve
rtical to avoid a mountain through the mist. ‘Mind your own business!’ I shout. The heads disappear. I want to lay down a marker there’s nothing happening to this telly.
There are two guys to install it. My stuff and Gina’s is all plug and play – previously unplug and steal. I breeze in behind the boys, ignoring the fact that she doesn’t like me for a week. ‘Ignore me if you want,’ I say, ‘but you can’t be such a cow to stop me from watching this. Wee Tam’s got one. You can watch Ben-Hur and it’s as if you’re in the chariot.’
I open the card that comes with it. ‘Gabby’s apologised,’ I say.
‘Help yourself,’ she says.
‘Still. Nice of her to pay,’ I say, ignoring the insult.
‘She didn’t pay anything.’
‘You could have fooled me.’
‘And people frequently do.’ She gives off one of those sighs she always does, the ‘God grant me patience’ ones, as if she’s trying to explain algebra to a dog. ‘Even if it came out of her wages she didn’t pay for it. Things don’t cost what you give for them, they cost what you give up to get them. She didn’t give up anything. She meant well but it wouldn’t occur to her to sacrifice a thing.’
‘Sorry, I fell asleep at the beginning of the economical lecture. Look, are we watching this or not? Let’s get Ruth up.’
So I called Ruth and told her to pick up some Garibaldis and Coconut Creams and beer and a movie at Davinder’s on her way back from her shift. ‘Nothing serious,’ I said, ‘no explosions or that. Just slush.’ So she came up with Beaches, ‘cause I already had it downstairs, and we sat in a sea of crumbs and howled. Well I howled, and Ruth did the discreet turn away thing and pretends to be scratching her cheek or something while she wiped her eyes. And I looked at them and said, ‘You are the wind beneath my wings.’ I waited till Ruth went downstairs before I said anything.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘You always cry at Beaches.’
‘Maybe I’m just not in the mood.’
But I knew her better than that. There’s nothing better than a good cry. Well there is, but a good cry’s almost up there with that too. It’s the valve in the pressure cooker, the bursting boil. It stops sad things building up.
‘I defy anyone to sit dry-eyed through that and say they’re not holding something back.’
‘I’m not holding something back.’
Then she fetched Millie, even though she was asleep, and took her through to sleep with her. Adrift. Again.
She went back to her old new job but something was wrong, and I don’t think it was just boredom with what she was doing. She knew I knew, and tried to avoid talking about it about as much as anyone around me can avoid talking about anything I want to talk about. Aside from Millie, me and Ruth, in that order, she didn’t seem to take any enjoyment out of anything. She never wanted to go out. I said, ‘I said it before and I’ll say it again – he was just a man. It was just a job. Move on.’ She said she had moved on, but I don’t think she had. She’d made the fatal mistake of letting someone else’s view of her become her view of herself. She said she hadn’t. But I could see it. I told her as much. ‘Imagine if I did the same,’ I said. ‘Here’s me, a healthy girl with healthy appetites and a healthy tan. So – I might not have done so well at school or read many books, or any books really, and my career might not have taken off yet. So what? If I thought of me the way those bastards,’ pointing out the balcony at the world, ‘thought of me, I’d have myself convinced I’m an overweight orange dole tart. And how stupid is that? You’re not what he thought. Who gave him the right?’
‘I did.’
‘Then you’re stupid. You’re special. Even more important, you’re special to me.’
But some kind of mood descended on her, like one of those times before it rains when you feel the clouds are pressing down on the air. And it didn’t break. And one time I got her on her own for two hours, and got two drinks down her, she said she was ‘only going through the motions’, whatever that meant. Motion is life. Death is the big stop.
It’s one afternoon. Nice light outside. I’m half watching the telly, Columbo or Murder She Wrote or Ironside or Quincy or who cares what. Ruth’s at work. I hear her upstairs, moving about, and that sets me easy in my mind because I feel more comfortable with the thought of the little family above me. I’m dozing. And then I’m awake and I hear a noise. It sounds like it’s outside the building and it take me a minute to realise it’s coming from upstairs. It’s regular, almost mechanical, but I know right away it’s not coming out a machine. It’s a kind of chant, but there’s something terrible about it. I burst out the front door and burst into hers. Millie’s door’s open and she’s not there. I run into the living room. She’s sitting, with her on her lap on the balcony, rocking, making this terrible high drone that wavers as she leans forward and back. The only thing I can compare it to is those women in the news, African probably, headscarves, after a war, or a famine, or both, kneeling over a lump in a shroud, wailing something, a high warble that sounds like pure distilled grief. It’s the worst noise I ever heard and I hope I never hear it again.
It was truly – fucking – terrible.
* * *
There were all these arrangements to be made. How can someone who never got to reading age cause so much paperwork? Ruth was a star. I did everything I could but I felt as if I was living under water, not least cause I couldn’t stop crying. Stuff happened in slow motion, till it didn’t. Gina’s dad was totally useless. I prized him away from his drink one night to try and get information on her mum. I was holding the back of his hair and I thought that if I let him go, his head will hit the table. We had no way of finding her. It was Ruth’s suggestion. I didn’t see the point. She was as useless last time as he was now. Would she even want her here? I didn’t think so. Gina wasn’t really there to consult. From not sounding like a machine she became one. She was totally wooden. I cried enough for the both of us because she didn’t cry at all. Or talk. Or eat – unless we made an issue of it. I could tell that in her mind she was away in that lifeboat. Adrift. With her.
We had a Humanist ceremony. The poor bastard did his best but what are you going to do? If it had been religious he could at least have said something about Heaven and stuff, all meeting up again. I think of Heaven, if I think of it at all, as a dingy waiting room, at the train station or the ferry terminal, where you meet all your old pals. You all squeal when you recognise one another again, cause it will only be the ones you want there. And then you go on out to a supernatural knees up. I don’t know if there’s a God, but if there is I don’t think he’ll begrudge me this fantasy. I’m not doing anyone any harm when you look at other religious fantasies that are out there. But this ceremony just seemed to say we should all be nice to one another. Fair play to him, and I don’t doubt she’d have grown into the kind of woman who’d get his approval, but she didn’t even get to the age where she got the chance to be nice to anyone. When we talked about it in front of her beforehand Gina stopped being a statue for two minutes. I said we should go for the full regalia, priests, ministers, whatever. She looked at me and asked me if I believed in a God who took her. That was the first time I ever felt there was nothing I could say that would get through.
And then she stopped being wooden – when we weren’t looking. We were taking turns at being with her during the day and I was sleeping with her at night. And then she was gone. Just like that. I went rabid, tearing through her things for clues, trying to work out what she took, as if that would give me a clue to anything. Ruth looked worse than I’d ever seen her – which is saying something. We trawled every place we could think of she might be, and then we did it again. I thought her dad was useless before. He was even worse now. The talk in the scheme is that he fell to bits when Gina’s mum left him. Personally I always found her a bit common.
We went through the same routine as last time, where I held his hair to s
top his face hitting the table. It wasn’t just that he escaped from his life into the bottle, he was now abandoning hers for the same hole. I could forgive him for the past bits of her life he ruined. But not this. I let go. I mobilised all those guys, I suppose you could call them boyfriends, to look and ask. If there was a rock in Glasgow she couldn’t have hidden under it. Nothing. Fuck all. Ruth even suggested phoning the police. ‘I’ve got a better idea,’ I said. Wee Tam’s either a mason, or he’s got a pal who’s a mason, or he’s got a pal who’s... and so it goes. None of them admit to it. I explained it to Tam. The masons is heaving with police. Tam walks into the pub this night with this specimen. Six two. Farm boy hands.
‘Plain clothes,’ Tam says.
‘Not so plain,’ I say.
‘Not plain clothes,’ he says, ‘off duty.’ So I give him the once over and fill in the details. ‘Has she been reported missing?’ he asks.
‘I’m telling you,’ I say.
‘Maybe she’s just gone,’ he says.
‘Well fuck me, Sherlock. Two years’ training for that. Glad to see all our tax was well spent.’
‘Let me see what I can do,’ he says, turning away. And I just knew it was the brush off, and he was losing interest and he’d be stone cold after a pint. The same way I knew I had to do something to keep his attention on this.
‘No,’ I said, ‘let me see what you can do.’
And I did. And he did. And in other circumstances I probably would have anyway, so I didn’t feel as if I was cheapening myself or anything. All in a good cause, like putting nicked money in boxes in poppy week. I don’t know what I expected – posters on lamp posts or what – but something. Two weeks later I’m crossing the zebra and I see him stopped in the squad car with a woman police officer. I tap the window. It rolls down on his sneer. I ask him what’s happening. ‘What d’ y’ expect,’ he says, ‘top billing on Crimewatch?’ He’s showing off to her.
‘So what’s the total of your efforts?’ I say.
Four New Words for Love Page 17
