by Paul Magrs
I knew a man—and don’t let this go any further—who would laugh like a drain whenever he came. He didn’t think it funny, the wrench and splash as he let go his load. It was just his natural response. Like a tickle. Like something had caught his fancy just right. I loved to hear him howl like that, and rock his whole body and curl up like a clam, and go so vulnerable, the very instant after stretching his furthest, pushing it hardest.
Such a relief. Such a release.
If I wanted to write about laughter, well then I’d be stuck.
You can tell a funny story in written words. But written words can be hi-jacked by just about anyone. Anyone can read them in a new tone of voice and kill them stone dead.
Just because something is funny now, doesn’t mean it always will be. In Victorian times death was the funniest thing around. It had them rolling in the aisles. Now we laugh about sex, about sauce, and death is taboo. How shocking they would find us, how shocking we find them.
See? I’m back to sex. Why do I link laughter with sex?
When our mother and father were together and still making love, it was my mother’s laughter we heard through the wall. Even above the jouncing of bedsprings, the plaintive grunts of our labouring dad. Of course we all three had our ears pressed up to the wallpaper. Above the radio dramatics of their humdrum copulation we’d get our mother’s raucous laughter. Sometimes derisory, other times complicitous, always full throttle. With her laughter she would egg his fucking on.
Timon, the boy who worked in the fish shop on the Golden Mile, he told me that he wanted to write the funniest stories in the world.
“But what’s funny?” I shrugged, slumped at his bar, sounding jaded as only the daughter of a great laugher can sound.
“Anything’s funny,” he smiled, shyly almost, prodding the fish in the hot yellow fat. “‘Almost anything’s funny.” Then he told me the story of the rival fish shops, one of whom had taken revenge by tossing a dead cat into the other’s deep fat fryer. The dead cat contaminated everything and put them out of business. I gave a hollow laugh and saw that Timon’s humour was the type that relished others’ misfortunes.
Then I pictured the dead, battered cat chasing dead, battered fish under gallons of oil.
“Tell me about your mother,” Timon would say again, because I had him intrigued. I shrugged.
It was about this time our mother was taken ill. I wandered out of a night to escape the density of air at home. Everyone sat round waiting. I was the youngest: I had to pretend I didn’t know what we were waiting for. Mostly I slipped out into the world my sisters had been preparing me for. I went to see Timon in the fish shop on the Golden Mile. He was a writer. His head was full of all the funny stories he would tell, given half a chance.
“You see all the world come by this place,” he’d say. “I could tell you a thing or two.” When I asked him to tell me, he’d shake his head. “You’ll have to get a bit older, honey.”
I never told my sisters I had a new friend. I had a new friend black as the sea when the illuminations come on. I had a new friend who knew funny, dirty stories and wanted a chance to write them down.
I told him about my family. About my eldest sister and her interest in him. He snorted. “Girls like that always want to know.”
“And do you...have a big one?”
“This from a child!” he exclaimed in mock horror. Then he smiled. “Like a horse,” and he gave the counter a brisk wipe down. “But don’t go telling your sister.” He glinted mischievously. “She’s a bit brassy, isn’t she?”
And I gasped, never having heard anyone criticize the way our Mandy looked, or the way she went on.
“The one I really want to know about,” said Timon in a slack moment near midnight, leaning across the counter and ruffling up the pile of ready newspaper. “Who I really want to know about, is your mother...one of the greatest laughers in the world.” He said it like she was famous, appreciating that, to me at sixteen, that’s exactly what she was.
Once she said, laughter is my gift to you. I can’t give you much in life besides what you already have. But laughter costs nothing. This was when we were very young.
She came to our school Christmas concert. We were at the same junior school she once went to and she arrived, peering round, full of nostalgia. The school hall smelled excitingly of cigarettes and cologne as we waited behind scenery to come out in cardboard masks and sheets and tinsel. We could see our mother, sitting near the front with our quiet father. They were listening to the headmaster’s speech, which he always gave and which, she said, he used to give when she was a girl. He was aiming jokes over the kids’ heads and trying to appeal to the parents. My mother realised only then that the jokes he told were quite blue.
The head called out raffle prizes. Everyone had donated tins from the back of their cupboards and the school secretary had done them up like hampers in red cellophane with bows. Mam said, when she was at school there, she always wanted to win a hamper, but they never did. And then, when she was a grown up, her number suddenly came up. Two little ducks, twenty-two. Starting to laugh, she stood up and said, “But I never win anything!” What we won was quite a small hamper. Just a box with tins of butter beans and custard, nothing very Christmassy in it.
She went up to the front to fetch it off the headmaster and he was still trying to make the parents laugh. Mam was wearing a tight old dress with no arms and she kissed him smack on the forehead. Afterwards she wished that she hadn’t bothered...his forehead was shiny with sweat. But his eyes nearly came out of his head and everyone laughed, so it was all right.
In those days my mother was huge. She was never really fat...just solid through and through. When she started to lose that size she started to lose her humour. When she grasped the headmaster on the school stage it looked as if she could just squeeze him up. She hated losing that strength.
Her laugh. It came out of her like a force of nature. Me and my sisters used to love to start her off. It was like a reward to hear her go on and on, to start as a rumble somewhere deep inside, then to hear it catch fire and send her helpless, send her shrieking. She laughed until the tears rolled down and for us at least it was the most infectious laugh in the world. We aided and abetted that laugh. We coaxed it out and fanned its progress with laughter of our own. We’d sit her in cafes and wait for someone across the room to give a chuckle or a sudden guffaw and our mother would start. She couldn’t help herself.
“You’re like witches,” our father would say, hounded out of his own house. “This is what it must be like to be with a coven of witches.”
Our mother thought he should get out more, have more fun. She made him take her out, down the Big Club, as they called it, one Friday night. They had a blue comic on. Dad blushed the whole time. Our mother would laugh at anything that had to do with bodily functions, as she called them. The blue comic that night knew he was onto a good thing, with our mother at one of the front tables. She shamed our dad.
The comic got her up on the stage and she kept on laughing, clutching her knees. He locked her in a shiny black cabinet and the idea was that he’d shove swords through, like a magician. You could still hear our mother, muffled inside, and this the audience loved. And then she went too far and lost control. The blue comic drew attention to the pee spreading out from under the black box. She’d warned him before she’d stepped inside, “I’ll lose control of myself,” she’d said, as if putting her on the stage made her capable of anything. The blue comic dodged her pool of pee and shouted, only half-joking, that she’d electrocute him if it touched his mike cable.
Our mother came back that night and woke my sisters and me and told us all what had gone on. How she peed herself laughing on the stage. Dad was in the bedroom doorway. He’d had a few and bravely said, “Have you no shame?”
Mam stood and towered over him. “You want to get yourself a sense of fun. What do you fellas do, anyway? You go to the gents and widdle all over the floor. I’ve seen it. It�
��s only pee.”
He grunted. “When have you seen the inside of the gents?”
She ignored him.
Nothing more was said that night, and all the laughing stopped. At breakfast time the next day Mam was down in the mouth, and it was up to us to bring her round. It always was. But it wasn’t difficult to start her going again. People will laugh at anything if they really want to. You just have to let go.
I used to talk to Timon until his shift ended and then we would walk each other home. He lived alone, not that far from our flat. That year the illuminations down our stretch of the shore were all about toys. From the streetlamps we passed were hung teddy bears, ringletted dolls, aliens, giant ray guns.
Timon told me what he envied most about me was my family. “There you are, going back to your full flat, all your sisters about you. And I’m going back to my lonely, cold place.”
And if that wasn’t a hint to be asked back to our kitchen for a mug of tea and a plate of sausage sandwiches, I don’t know what was. I’d already told him this was the way we would all meet up at the end of the night. Whoever was in first got the frying pan on. Usually it was Linda and I’d come in to find her snipping off sausage links with her pinking shears. I asked Timon back for some supper. He agreed in a rush and I thought, you bugger.... you only want to see my sisters. I was convinced he wanted a more mature me.
“I’m an orphan,” he told me and I realised then that he was younger than I thought. There was a spring in his step on the last bit of our journey. He was heartened by the thought of going home to our real family.
“You have to understand, though,” I said, “about our mam being ill. She’ll be in bed, or she’ll be under a duvet on the settee and she probably won’t be bothered with visitors.”
“I’ll creep in like a mouse and be very polite,” he said. “I’m quite respectable, you know.” He plucked at his T shirt, sniffing. “But I smell of fish and chips.”
Soon as we got in I knew something was different. The telly was on, but there were no voices to complement it. Our mother had recently got herself a video and she would sit up into the early hours of most mornings and watch old monster movies. Whenever she was watching you’d hear her own ribald commentary. She was working her way through the lifework of Godzilla and, as I came down the passageway with Timon, I could hear Tokyo being once more ripped apart and stomped on. But I couldn’t hear Mam’s derisory cackles. At once I felt scared, thinking she’d been taken bad. There was a strange black coat on the rack in the hall and I thought it might be the doctor’s.
We pushed into the living room and it was full of silent faces. They were bathed blue from the Godzilla movie and, for want of anything better to do, they had fixed their gazes on the screen.
My mother was sitting up on the orange settee, with the blue patterned duvet pulled over her legs. She sat stiffly and painfully and she was flanked either side by Mandy and Linda. How normal they looked, each with a best cup and saucer on their knees, staring at the visitors. The best tea service was laid out on the coffee table, even the elaborate, fragile pot. “These are the oldest and best possessions I have,” Mam had said, time and again, fingering their gold trim, their crimson flowers. “Break a single piece and you’ll never be forgiven.”
Timon looked at me. This wasn’t the free and easy, chatty, raucous, smokily aromatic suppertime he’d been led to expect from us. I was too busy staring at Mam’s visitors to help Timon out. He stood beside me as I stared and stared at the neatly-dressed couple on the dining room chairs, which had been pulled out especially for them.
It was dad, in a dark suit and tie, with a young wife who had her hair cut in a black bob. You could tell she was a severe-looking person, but here she wasn’t so sure of herself. They had two very small babies in yellow hanging around their feet. Dad’s new family.
Then I realised that everyone was staring at Timon and me. I burst out to Dad, “Well, we don’t want you back now.”
“Wendy!” Mam said, and the strange woman and Dad—how much like newly-weds they looked, all dolled up—squirmed on their wooden chairs.
“I’ve not really come back, Wendy love,” he said, hardly looking at me properly. “Look how you’ve grown up!” he said, with a feckless sigh.
Timon spoke up then, telling me he’d just go on home if it would be easier. “No,” I said. “Everyone, this is my best friend. He’s called Timon.”
In that full, still living room, he really did smell of fish and chips.
I asked Dad, “Why did you never want to see us? Why didn’t you want anything to do with us?”
“Wendy, I did...” he said, and then he stopped himself.
“Are these your new babies?” I asked. They were roaming around the carpet like little creatures. He nodded.
That was when Mandy’s patience went and she stormed out of the room and into the kitchen.
I followed her in.
She decided to fry sausages. Clang went the pan on the gas ring. Poor Timon, I left him in the living room. Later he said it was all right, because they all fell quiet again. They went back to watching Destroy All Monsters and first one, then the other yellow-suited baby climbed into his lap. Kids loved Timon.
“I don’t want Dad here,” Mandy growled. She couldn’t find Linda’s pinking shears and she tried to pull the sausages apart instead. I fetched her a knife. “What makes him think he can swan back in, years later, with his lovely new wife and kids?”
“Did you think his wife was lovely?” I asked.
“She’s stuck-up looking,” Mandy snapped, furiously lighting the glass with the unreliable clicky thing. The small kitchen filled up with pungent, unlit gas. Then it lit. “Dad would think stuck-up was lovely. He always wanted to better himself. Mam and us weren’t good enough for him.”
“Don’t say that!”
“It’s true. Weasly little bastard.” She sniffed as the pan began to hiss. “He’s only come back because somehow he’s found out that she’s dying.”
I froze. Someone had said it at last. I might have known it would be Mandy. Mandy with no respect for silences, convention, other people’s hesitances. I took in a sigh of, I suppose, relief. “He knows she’s going to die,” I repeated, to get the taste of his knowledge and her death in my mouth. The taste of burning sausage was there too as Mandy angrily swished them about in the pan, unsticking their undersides. “Cheap meat,” she cursed.
“It’s cancer-cancer-cancer,” she sang. “That’s what we’ve all not been saying.”
I knew my face was white. I asked her and kept my voice straight, “How did he find out?”
“This whole country’s smaller than you think, Wendy. Word travels. There are so many connections. If you want to know anything, all you have to do is put your head down in the right place.”
“What’s he come back for?”
“It can’t be her money.”
“Then what?”
“I think he’s come for you, Wendy. You’re the youngest. You’re the one who still needs seeing to.” She looked at the burnt pan, swore, and emptied it into the pedal bin. The pedal was broken and she was faffing on with the bag inside while I digested the thought of being taken off somewhere by my dad and his new family.
“Mandy, I’d rather die.”
“That’s hardly very fucking tasteful,” she said, straightening up. “And who’s that black fella you’ve dragged home?”
I shrugged. “Works in the fish shop. You’ve seen him before.”
Her eyes bugged out. “That’s him? What are you doing with him?”
“He’s my best friend.”
I sat at the kitchen table. Mam’s Cats calendar she’d bought off the Salvation Army was lying open. Whole weeks had been ticked, crossed and circled in a variety of felt tip colours. Someone’s cryptic system of marking off time. “Mandy,” I said. “I can’t leave here. They can’t take me, can they?”
Mandy sat opposite me and, taking both my hands, said the best t
hing she ever said to me. “Nobody can make you do what you don’t want to.”
Mandy would come here and play these machines, though she never knew the rules. Some of the others who came to play knew you had to—well, look at the words on the lit-up buttons—hold, stick, nudge, all that. Even the pensioners, the old girls coming out with a handbag full of pennies and hope in their hearts knew the rules for gambling on the machines. Mandy would come down here and she just wouldn’t know. What was more, she didn’t care. If I’m going to win, I’m going to win, and no amount of holding-sticking-nudging will help me anyhow. When she came down after midnight, full of hell, full of temper, going hell-for-leather on the one-armed bandits, those at the machines either side of her would look worried. She’d be slamming in the coins and yanking on the bandit’s arm and making the cherries, bells and stars thunder so violently round and round. And if she won she wouldn’t stop even to count up her winnings.
At home the middle sister Linda would be stuck for things to do. She sat beside her mother and watched whatever was on. House of Dracula in black and white and not very scary. She felt a daring leap of disgust in herself. Her mother was so feeble, the scary films she watched weren’t scary. And then disgust at herself: her mother’s helpless face and how she lapped those tame horrors up. Past midnight they watched Dracula chase Frankenstein chase the Wolfman.
“I always loved the Wolfman,” her mother sighed at last. “He could never help himself.” She looked at her plumpest daughter and said, “Why did I always fall for fellas who couldn’t help themselves?”
Linda saw then how much flesh had dropped off her mother. How haggard she looked, even though she was made up with all the free samples Linda’s new job could fetch home.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” her mother asked.
Mandy went on pushing coins into machines. Used all her twos and moved onto fives. These were the coins she had saved over years, saved them in biscuit tins and hidden them under bunk beds. Not even touched them when things got tight. Carried them when they moved from home to home. Tonight she’d brought them to the arcades on the prom and she’d brought them in a suitcase, heaving it along behind her, scuffing the leather.
