by Lisa Blower
‘Fine,’ I tell Grandad, ‘school’s fine,’ and carry on reading the book.
Shell Island
I squint in the sunshine at the dunes. I can’t remember why I used to beg to come here—sand in the sandwiches, sand in your eyes—most people my age are in Benidorm, Ibiza, Florida, Cornwall. ‘Where the fuck’s Barmouth?’ the girls snide. ‘Sounds like a shit-hole to me.’
I think about all those coral necklaces I used to buy them from the Shell Shop. Those little pebble egg-timers, the dead starfish and pieces of sponge I’d buy as bathroom trinkets. I wonder if anybody actually kept them. Why no one ever bought me presents back from Disneyland or sent me a postcard from St Ives. I wonder how they’re all getting on at Sixth Form College without me, whether any of them care for what it’s like to have a baby and let it go without even knowing whether it was a boy or girl. My nan said that way was for the best.
After their divorce, Mum remarried quickly. Registry office, pub grub, dress from Dorothy Perkins Petite section. We weren’t bridesmaids. It wasn’t that kind of wedding and we didn’t know most of the guests. Nan didn’t come either. They still weren’t speaking at the time. Mum had to give herself away. I said, ‘What about a friend? Don’t you have a friend who could do it?’ But after she slapped me across the face, I realised that Mum doesn’t have any friends. She finds a man and lives through him instead.
My step-dad is called Trevor. Trefor. She met him at the site pub the year after Dad left, but we know that’s not true. Trefor was always the one who did the odd jobs on the caravan. The handyman. Tasgmon. Trefor pays for everything with ten-pound notes, but he’s never got any change when the ice-cream van comes tinkling its bell round the estate.
I think about my dad back at home in his new flat. Turns out Jen never did feel the same way. He left anyway. Mum said, ‘It was an affair in the head.’ Dad said that wasn’t true. For a minute or two he was really in love. We see him every Saturday and then every Wednesday night. We stop over on bunk beds that he has in his bedroom and he sleeps on the sofa in the front room. When we’re not there he sleeps on bottom bunk. His feet hang over the end. The duvet covers him like a facecloth. He can only sleep on his side. He says he doesn’t mind. He just pretends that he’s sleeping in the bunk beds of Aunty Bobby’s caravan. ‘And I’ve always had a good night’s sleep up Barmouth,’ he says.
He makes sure we have a week in the caravan every year. He says it’s important for us to get a break. He comes round the house the night before we go to fill up Trefor’s Mini Metro at the Amoco. He leaves two Bounty bars in the glovebox and, sometimes, a Fry’s Chocolate Cream for Mum as if this is enough to woo her back. It isn’t and it doesn’t. And if he doesn’t put the petrol in, Mum and Trefor won’t take us. They say we can’t afford it.
My sister is up in the dunes sketching with gold crayons. Mum and Trefor are sat in a pair of deckchairs swigging from hipflasks, stroking hands. I go and check on Nan. She’s been sat in the passenger seat of Trefor’s Mini Metro for over an hour just staring out of the windscreen and clutching onto her handbag as if it were about to be snatched. She warns me every day—‘The world’s rotting. Never trust a man who can’t put a penny between his eyes’—and I measure the distance between Trefor’s eyes and wonder what they see in Mum.
I knock on the window and ask if she’s OK. She looks at me. For a moment she doesn’t know me and the grip on her handbag tightens. Then she remembers. She breaks out into a smile. She calls me by my sister’s name. I don’t correct her. It’s good that she remembers one of us. I ask her if she wants an ice cream. She fishes in her purse and pushes a fiver through the gap in the window. ‘Get your grandad a 99,’ she says. ‘I love to watch him licking raspberry ripple off his chin.’
I don’t tell her that Grandad’s been dead two years on Tuesday. I don’t take the fiver either. Mum says that death can do funny things to a woman. ‘She’ll be out the other side come Christmas,’ she says, coming towards the car. ‘Any longer than that and she’s just milking it for effect,’ and she feeds my nan a couple of aspirin and opens a flask of tea.
93 Sharrow Lane
I live with a boy who likes a drink, likes the ladies, comes back to me when he’s skint. I spread holiday brochures on the bed, count out my copper collection labelled ‘holiday’, and check what’s left on my Visa. We watch Ceefax on the telly, holiday hotspots and last minute deals. ‘We could go to Malta,’ I say. ‘Or stretch to Ibiza. How much have you got left on your Visa?’
He reaches for a can and says, ‘Put your bikini on. I want to see you in a bikini.’
I do because I can’t stop loving him and I want to be loved by someone like him.
Mum calls me later and tells me the caravan’s free. I can have it first week of August and the forecast is good. ‘But for God’s sake take your sister,’ she instructs. ‘I’m up to here with her feminist crap!’
My sister’s just finished her A levels. She’s off to London to study Fine Art. She’s just come back from Paris. One of her teachers paid for her to go. She’s come home swooning. Manon this and Manon that. She says it’s like they’ve met before in another life.
My boyfriend tells me he doesn’t want to go to Barmouth. He doesn’t know where it is but it sounds shit and he doesn’t want to go with my lezzer of a sister either, and while we’re at it, I’m done with you too. This is going nowhere. You are going nowhere.
‘You’re dumping me?’ and I collapse on the bed panting, I can’t get my breath, and he shrugs and says, ‘Perhaps, it depends,’ and starts to untie my bikini strings.
By the time we get to Barmouth, my sister’s full of cold, and I’m single with cystitis. It rains all week. It hammers down on the caravan roof. I sit on the toilet sobbing and rolling fleas between my fingers, breaking their backs one by one.
We go to all the old places: Shell Island, Swallow Falls, the prize bingo. We eat Cup a Soups, mash up Bounty bars in black cherry yoghurt and huddle under the parasol to smoke. A caravan window opens across the way. ‘I remember you two,’ she says. ‘Always a smile, always excited to be here, now look at you both,’ and she shakes her head and snaps the window shut.
The next night, we take a table in the site pub as far away from the fruit machines as we can get and still Charmaine hunts us out. She totters over in leopard-skin and says, ‘Divorce didn’t buy you Majorca then?’ and asks if we took a wrong turn at the airport. ‘You two still coming to this squat?’ she says, and she’s either drunk or she’s bored, we still can’t work her out, and she starts to quiz Looby about her purple-rimmed glasses and pink and blonde hair, and then guffaws into her Cinzano, ‘Lesbian.’
Looby stands up to correct her. ‘Actually, it’s Louisa,’ she snaps. ‘And I’d rather live as I want than be like you living for man after man, because really Charmaine, you should charge for it,’ but by this point, she’s looking at me.
We go back to the caravan in silence. I open the door, open a can of lager, offer one to my sister and she says no, come on, we’re done here, we’re done, and then she adds, ‘You need to sort yourself out now, because you know what you are, don’t you? You’re turning into Mum.’
She asks me to drive her home then. I refuse. So she calls a cab, catches the train and heads off to university with the clothes on her back and not a care in the world.
The Prize Bingo
I call Mum from the payphone in the amusement arcade. ‘I’m going to come home,’ I tell her. ‘I need somewhere to clear my head.’
She says now’s not such a good time. She’s taken in a lodger. Step-Dad’s a prick. Divorces are expensive. ‘You’ll like Alan,’ she says. Got a dry-cleaning business apparently, stops Monday to Thursday night in my old bedroom and when he’s not overloading her washer with his work shirts, he keeps on at her about a double bed. ‘That’s a thought,’ she says. ‘He could have mine.’
I put the phone down knowing that Alan doesn’t sleep in the back bedroom any more. I call my
dad. He lodges with a farmer now, the one who bought the land from Aunty Bobby before she died. He lives in an old bubble caravan in their backyard that reeks of pig-swill and chicken shit. He sounds just as sad on the phone. I tell him that old Mr Evans has stuck a note to the caravan door. That he’s offered to tow the caravan off site for scrap but it’ll cost. Says he’s no place on his site for a caravan that rusty, and before I leave, he tapers ticker tape around the awning, its navy blue letters warning—Dangerous—to anyone who thinks it’s not static. My dad tuts on the other end of the phone. ‘What shall I do?’ I ask.
Because gone are the days when I could leave it with him. I was sixteen when he got laid off at the colliery, eighteen when he had his breakdown and came out of it a crumpled crisp packet of a man, muscles disintegrated into the flat tyres and tired clutch pedals of the dead Triumph he clung onto for dear life and nostalgia and which now sits rusting in Aunty Bobby’s backyard, part of the chicken coop and overrun with dead flies. He wears a pair of glum tatty eyes that only light up when he sees my mother, and his hands shake from the drink. He blames twenty years down the coalface but lift-shaft maintenance has still not made it onto the compensation lists. He says things like, ‘if you don’t put money into it, it’ll die’, and ‘there’s never any future if you’ve had your power cut’. I tell my dad I have nowhere to go. I tell him that I’ve got lost and surely he understands.
‘I’m not making it up Dinas Mawddwy,’ I say.
He offers me the left settee bunk of his caravan.
The pips run out before I decide.
In the end I call Nan. She’s ninety-two now. She says I can have the camp bed. She’ll put it up for me behind the settee. I cry when I see it. She says, ‘That bed’s only temporary so look at it and be determined.’ And she gives me a fiver and tells me to go and get us fish and chips. The batter makes her sick and they’re old potatoes, gone in the water. ‘Nothing’s like it used to be,’ she complains. I tell her that Barmouth’s not like it used to be either, that the caravan is on its last legs. Old Evans wants it towed off site. She scolds me for being ungrateful. ‘Do you know what I’d give to go to Barmouth right now?’ she says.
I don’t tell her what I’ve done to the caravan. How I blame Barmouth for so much. That I’m awaiting the police to charge me with attempted arson. That I’m long past caring whether I serve time or not. That only Charmaine knows that I was trying to go down with it. How she later saves my bacon in court.
‘Don’t you want to see the world?’ I ask my nan.
‘But I have my world right here,’ she says, and I’ll never forget that look on her face: the same as it was when Mum found her in the armchair, drifted off to sleep with just a fiver in her purse.
75 Kielder Square
The council found us a two-bed flat and we’ve sold the car for peanuts. My daughter has just turned eight. She thinks sharing her bedroom with Grandma is fun.
Mum’s at the door – eighty-one now, keys lost again, chocolate round her mouth, Morrison’s carrier bag full of sun lotion.
‘What have you been doing?’ I shriek. ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been worried sick, about to call the police.’
I make her tea. Her hands are frozen and her feet have swelled. ‘What have you been doing?’ Mum asks me. ‘Don’t you go to work?’
I tell her again. Redundant, last October, both of us let go one after the other and we lost the house, negative equity, awful time with the bailiffs, so humiliating on the front lawn. He’s gone to his mother’s to think.
‘You’ll want this fiver, then,’ she says. ‘Your dad will never forgive me otherwise.’
I don’t know what she’s talking about. I tell her, ‘You don’t owe me £5 and you don’t have any money.’ And then because the doctors tell you to do so, I add, ‘Dad’s dead, Mum, so it doesn’t matter.’
Mum looks crestfallen. She thought he was washing up.
‘No, Mum. He’s not washing up.’
She takes four bottles of sun lotion out of the carrier bag and tells me they’re for the holiday box. I hand her tea and tell her there is no holiday box; no holiday either.
‘I do,’ she says, perking up. ‘I owe you £5,’ and she starts reminiscing.
I let her. You’re supposed to. It makes her feel well, and I sit next to her and listen. It’s an old favourite. The one about the holiday in Barmouth and how we ate at the Smuggler’s Rest and didn’t have enough for the bill. She doesn’t remember where she’s just been or that she and my nan kept up a stony silence for getting on three years after that; how that £12 could’ve been cited in my parents’ divorce proceedings the humiliation was that raw, but she still remembers that she owes me a fiver.
Mum takes out her purse and fumbles through the compartments. I take the purse off her, she’s all fingers and thumbs, and I notice that it’s more photograph album than purse. I take out the photographs and lay them on the table. We laugh at them together. We’re all on Barmouth beach, the sky is inky-black, the sea is raging yet we look so alive.
‘Those holidays were lovely,’ Mum says. ‘I wouldn’t change them for the world.’
I show the pictures to my daughter when she comes in from school. I listen to Mum tell my daughter how lucky she was. Then she returns everything to her purse and removes £5. I look at it shaking in her hand. It means as much to me now as it did back then.
No. It means more.
She gives it to my daughter. Tells her, ‘I know it’s not much but we give you what we can,’ and not to spend it on chocolate. So I drink my tea and watch my daughter cuddle up against her, ask if she’ll tell her the story about the two little girls: one who had a posh pram and one who had a rusty one and what happened when the wheel fell off and rolled into the pond.
As Mum talks I look at my sister’s painting on the wall. It’s called ‘Plank’, dedicated to me, given to me for my fortieth birthday. Aside of it is another painting, ‘Barmouth’, a grubby-looking block of brown and raffia she’s told me to sell. ‘It’ll get you back on your feet,’ she says. ‘And it’s not as if it’s a triumph.’ ‘Barmouth’ is worth over thirty thousand pounds.
My mother’s voice drifts back into earshot. ‘So, you see, we all start off in a pram. It’s only when we see what the other girls have that we want what they have and that’s when things get rusty.’
I realise what I’d like to see more than anything in the world. I head towards the phone to finally make that call.
Pot Luck
WHAT CAN I GET YOU, duck? Sausage? Egg? Cup of tea? Don’t worry. You’re here now, so you can stop looking at the floor. I welcome all lids that don’t fit and spouts that don’t pour. Who told you about me? Though you look familiar, duck. Like I know you. Who’s your mother? Does she live on Werrington Road? It’s the eyes, you see. I never forget a pair of eyes and you’ve big eyes, duck. They give you away. I hope you don’t mind me saying that, but eyes like yours are sad stories. You tell them whether you like it or not.
Come and get warm. That’s it. You need some sugar in that tea—you’re skin and bone—but I haven’t got any. Food bank was that busy last week you forget what you need. Do I not get to choose? Can I not get some of that? What am I supposed to do with kidney beans? Her from number 9 chinning about the veg again: I’d rather frozen if you’ve got it, duck. Those carrots last month went black. I said to her, ‘Next time you chuck stuff out chuck them to me. I can make meals out of onions.’ She says, ‘Well give us a fiver then and I’ll see what’s on the turn.’ Course, some faces don’t want you to see them. Make out like they don’t know you when they sat aside of you in school. Others turn up with a couple of shopping trucks, next door’s baby, and barefaced cheek. It’s like there’s a war on, rationing all over again. My mother would say, ‘If there’s men in the world there’ll always be wars.’ And my father would go, ‘Hester. As long as there’s women there’ll be men and dunna forget that it only took one woman to bring down a lifetime of men.’ And off he�
�d go again: there was a time when you couldn’t eat a meal in any decency without the potters from Stoke. Pride of every dinner table we were till those slow boats from China promised cheap, cheap, cheap. Can’t grow a bloody teapot for toffee any more. Four thousand kilns gone later and it’s gone that dark over Bill’s mother’s you realise just how much daylight those kilns let in.
Saw everything through sad eyes did my father. Said they’d pulled the plug on Stoke while the likes of Manchester got rewired. ‘Bright lasses want bright lights,’ he’d say. But that was emigration as far as mother was concerned. Daughters should stay at home.
Have a sausage. Go on. It’s on me. How long have you been like this? Sorry, that’s your business. But I probably did. I probably knew your mother. Was she a redhead with glasses too big for her face? I used to know a lot of people round here but there’s that many faces with their heads down now you don’t get to know anyone like you used to. Dumping ground this road. Watched a sorry business only the other week. You’d think they’d have done it without fuss, but no. Blue flashing lights, three from the Social, kiddies crying—Mama, Mama—Ukraine, someone says. Next stop Dover. Some disused factory they’ll get held in before they’re shipped back. Makes you wonder. It’s got to be bad where they’re from to want to sneak in here. Blimey, is it dinnertime already? Hello, Benny. You’re looking brighter. Had yourself a bit of sleep have you? It’s sausage today, duck. Few mushrooms. No, that’s fine. Fifty pence is grand. Just don’t give all that butty to your dog. Me? Oh you know me, Benny, still waiting on the knee and our Keeley to call but you get ill if you dwell, don’t you? You take care now. Ta-ra.
