8
SHE HOPES TO GOD that Robert Beasely is on top of his job. Her heart sinks into her stomach when Malc hands in his notice. His eyes are desperate when they meet hers.
‘There’s no going back now, Elle. And I blame you for it, you and your feelings.’
‘We’ll be okay, Malc, whatever happens.’
‘Oh yes, on the dole we’ll be bloody fine, won’t we?’
‘I’ve got my job, remember.’
‘Some good that’d do us.’
‘But didn’t you enjoy saying goodbye, Malc, after all those boring years? Was it a good feeling turning your back on them and walking out? I bet they never dreamed you’d ever do it.’
His expression is hard to define when he picks up the crossword to finish it, leans over to switch on the lamp and confesses, ‘It gave them the shock of their lives, and I suppose if nothing else comes of it I’ll always have that expression to remember on Willy Wyatt’s face. The bugger.’
And Ellie considers that moment as her first real dividend.
She understands how scared he is having to tackle something so new, and she had anticipated how hard he’d find it, learning to drive. It’s not so much the learning… after all, he’s travelled in enough cars throughout his life to be able to go through the motions. No, it’s not that, it’s having to buckle under to the instructor, to obey orders, to control the bursts of aggression which have become a natural defence against his inadequacy.
And four double lessons a week is quite an intense way to learn.
Ellie overhears him defending his decision to Dick and Dave. ‘What had I got to bloody lose—twenty-five more years lugging sacks about if I’m lucky. Of course I had to try.’
‘I’m surprised they picked somebody who couldn’t drive, what with the advert being for a salesman.’
‘Well, my face must have fitted. For once in my sodding life my face must have fitted, mustn’t it?’
‘Odd though,’ says Dave Legget, ‘when you come to think about it.’
‘Well, it’s best not to think about it, mate. It’s best not to think about anything. Perhaps my luck’s changed and if it has then it’s about bloody time.’
But Ellie can tell he is proud.
To begin with he slunk out for his driving lessons without speaking, closing the door quietly behind him as if trying to pretend he wasn’t really there, that the person sneaking out was not him. And he used to come home in a mess, angry and mean like a furious child wanting to sob over impossible homework.
‘It’ll come, Malc, it’ll come suddenly. You’ll see,’ she tried to console him.
‘And what do you bloody know about it?’
She rolled on her bedsocks, her head well down and that night he kept to the edge of the bed. He was afraid he’d never be able to do it. He never discussed the driving with Dick or Dave.
And then, gradually, he started looking forward to his lessons, ceased to refer to the friendly instructor as ‘the wanker’, and if it was Bob Tucker’s last job of the evening, Malc might ask him in for a drink. Ellie couldn’t remember the last time Malc had invited anyone new home. He despised and suspected strangers. She watched him, smiling over her knitting, and felt as she had when Mandy first learned to read, when Kev had been picked for the school cricket team. And once there was even a moment when she felt tears prick her eyes.
He was growing! Already he was growing!
Ellie was so excited she couldn’t keep it to herself and she rang Robert at the bank, singing success over the wires like a yellow canary suddenly uncaged. Robert was suitably impressed.
Mandy rang from Scotland after six o’clock and when she heard about the new job and the driving she said, ‘What’s got into Dad, then?’
‘Perhaps it’s the Malc menopause,’ said Ellie. ‘He’s been getting restless just lately.’
‘Well, you must be very pleased. After all these years at last he’s got off his backside.’
Yes, Ellie was pleased. She felt joyful and proud, as if she’d discovered a dusty old canvas, digging it out of the attic and holding it up to the light, seeing something beautiful there, and new.
Mandy plied for confidences. ‘What d’you think, Mum? Is this job going to work out for him or has he bitten off more than he can chew?’
How easy it is for the kids to criticise Malc from their safe, elevated positions. Malc, who has given up his own dreams so that they can realise theirs. How simple it is for Kevin to wrinkle his nose, and for Mandy to bestow her sympathy. Ellie had never asked for it, she’d never complained about their father. So part of the joy of all this, if it works, will be to see him regain their respect. Oh, it’s true he’d never done much in the past to earn it, if you could call bringing home a wage packet for twenty years doing nothing. Bringing up the kids had been her job and Ellie had been quite happy with that, but how often she’d wished he could have shown a little more interest.
But men didn’t do that much in those days, not the men round Nelson Street anyway, although he’d made Kev a fort, one Christmas, and done up a pram for Mandy. At weekends Malc had gone off with his mates to watch the football. And when they were little Mandy and Kev had been in bed by the time he got home nights, tired. He worked hard, and deserved to sit down in peace with his feet up in front of the telly. There was never much time in the mornings, what with Ellie having to get herself out, as well as the rest of them, iron the clean shirts and fix the packed lunches.
Ellie peers through the curtains, out into the gloom of the November night, disturbed by her daughter’s phone call and searching for the lights of the Driving School car. Over the years the house has grown cleaner, not, as you might expect, dirtier. And that was nothing to do with Ellie’s efforts. Making the area a smoke-free zone had made a big difference, although fires were never the same after that… you don’t get that same crackly, homely sound. And the bypass had diverted the heavy lorries two miles away. You can still hear them rumbling at night, but the windows no longer shake, flakes of plaster no longer fall from the ceiling and it is safer for children to play in the street when they get home from school.
Her own mother had had it much worse. In those days steam from the railway yard a block away used to yellow the windows and crisp up the curtains. You can still hear the goods trains clanking and buckling together on a still evening, but their shunting sounds are no longer so violent, just an electronic purr—deadlier, perhaps, like the dirt is probably deadlier, no longer the smutty kind you used to be able to see and wipe off, brush away in the dustpan, but cunning dirt, stealthy dirt; you wouldn’t know it was there unless you read about it in the papers.
So Ellie still cleans, on hands and knees with screwed-up eyes; she gets under beds and into cupboards on a Wednesday, trying to locate it. They used to say that the old soot was good for the garden, and Malc’s dad had certainly grown some lovely tomatoes.
At the end of the street is the stark red-brick of Nelson Street School. It has changed out of all recognition since she was a pupil there, and wore plimsolls summer and winter alike, but the sloping wire still strings the tops of the walls, and the two Victorian stone arches, GIRLS and BOYS, have never been taken down although the sexes aren’t separated any more. She’d wandered past it, idling by, pushing the pram with her two children in it, and stared up at the windows, wondering why their expressions had not changed. Why did they stare at her sullenly, balefully, like that? She was a mother now, and a married woman! She had in some small way succeeded, hadn’t she? In spite of all their predictions. But those windows always stared the same way, making her shiver. They never smiled.
Oh, dear Jesus, it would be so good to get away from here.
Is this Malc now? No, the searching headlights go past the house as if it is something else they are after. They cast themselves into the sky, peeping and seeking, but all they pick up is the looming shadow of Dwarfy Sugden, limping, pushing his laden barrow home.
Somebody ought to do something abou
t that man. Without thinking, Ellie expresses the opinion of everyone in Nelson Street and those who live in the surrounding neighbourhood as well. Disgusting. Pathetic. And even when you know who it is you can’t help being frightened to come upon Dwarfy if you’re out late at night.
Where’s Malc got to? Ellie sighs impatiently. There she’d been then, fourteen or fifteen, spindly thin, with a straight fringe, a tartan ribbon in her hair and a face like Connie Francis, from four doors down, a clean, respectable house, unlike Malc’s. She used to carry her pride and joy—a portable gramophone in a case—out into the street and play Baby Love over and over. She used to play ball up against the wall for hours, two balls, three balls, over her legs and under, and women used to huddle in the street in those days and cast beady eyes on the Freemans. Well, she was a drunk and he was a thief and was it any wonder the kids were like they were?
They were hardly ever at school, but watching from behind the coke heap for when the other kids came out.
She could tell Malcolm Freeman liked her. She used to walk in a certain way when she saw him and he hit her friends with the sharp little pieces of coke which he threw with such deadly accuracy, but he never hit her.
Gorbachev? U Thant? Well, they had never heard of people like that but if it was power you needed to turn you on then Malcolm Freeman had power.
You didn’t do well at school in those days, and how bad you were was just a matter of extremes. It wasn’t that Ellie hadn’t tried. She’d always felt happier trying to please and she’d been meandering along somewhere in the middle when she’d moved up into Miss Bacon’s class—4A.
She’d fallen in love with Miss Bacon, it was as simple as that. She flirted with Malcolm, and knew that he liked her, but secretly she thought boys were disgusting. Even now, at forty and looking back, she knows it was love—the thought of it still gives her a pang. It was a pure and noble kind of love that asked for nothing in return but a smile and a word of praise. And yet it consumed her, it burned her up so that she couldn’t wait to get to school in the morning, and she deliberately arrived late at the beginning of term so she could get a front desk. For the first time in her life she really cared about what she sounded like and looked like, and she remembered feeling ashamed because she came from Nelson Street.
Miss Bacon wore a sheepskin coat and arrived every morning in a little blue Mini. She wore her hair in a pageboy and carried a shoulder bag.
Ellie ditched her best friend, Muriel, because Miss Bacon said she was insolent. Ellie wouldn’t let her mother cut her hair, but insisted they pay for her to go to Shirley’s down Marley Road for a pageboy. And the worst thing was that she couldn’t tell anyone about it because nobody else seemed to share her admiration. They were all at the ‘feeling’ stage with boys—apart from Susan Mitchell who went all the way. So she kept a secret diary, wrote poems, saved up to buy sad records and drew hearts with only her own initials on the arrow, the second set mysteriously missing.
Ellie smiles. What a little prig she must have looked, sitting up straight in her desk with that worshipping smile on her face, just itching to put her hand up.
No wonder Miss Bacon couldn’t stand her. She wasn’t interested in goody goodies who were prepared to stay behind and tidy the classroom. She was here to study difficult children and there were plenty of those in 4A. It took Ellie a couple of terms to realise this, writhing in agony as she did so. The holidays were almost too painful to bear and her schoolwork improved astonishingly.
Ellie wasn’t clever enough to make an impression in that way; she’d been wasting time trying, and there was only one other. By the time she grasped the true situation it was almost too late. She’d be fifteen next year and moving up… if she passed the end of term exams. She couldn’t bear to be parted from Miss Bacon. She would fail them, and what’s more…
What sort of passion had driven her? What sort of passion could drive a child to do something so alien to her nature? Looking back on the incident… this small event that had mapped out her life for ever after, Ellie can’t help but imagine… and this is the strangest thing… that in some peculiar way she had been manipulated. As if she had no will of her own—but why would Miss Bacon do that? There was nothing in it for her… nothing at all! Ellie can feel the same sense of dry, unblinking-eyed terror now as she’d felt when she’d crept between those empty desks, approaching Miss Bacon’s shoulder bag. She’d been shocked to discover it was plastic. Should she take the scissors, the purse, or the keys? Ellie groaned. It would have to be the purse. She jumped as a door banged shut in the wind. She rushed out into the playground, almost sobbing with fear and excitement. She’d notice her now, she’d have to notice her now!
Back at her desk and sitting to attention, the window cord rattled in the breeze and the taste of ink was in her mouth. Miss Bacon went to her bag twice, once for a pen, when she strapped it shut again, and the second time for her handkerchief. On neither occasion did she notice the missing purse. The afternoon dragged on. They were meant to be copying notes, but Ellie copied nothing, just complicated squiggles, patterns of feeling in heavy black.
Ellie knew that the third time Miss Bacon would make her discovery. And she did. She lifted her face into a superior, surprised expression and swept the classroom with one of her cool glances, gazing at all the drooping heads, at all the writing children who’d stopped so suddenly, pens poised.
She said, ‘Someone’s been into my bag and taken my purse.’
All heads went up, because even for Nelson Street School this was serious.
Ellie looked down. She was the only one who looked down, desperate to make herself noticed.
Miss Bacon said, ‘I shall wait for ten minutes after school, to give the culprit one chance. If they do not come forward then, I shall have no option but to go to the headmaster, and the police will be informed. Now think about that, and get on with your work.’
There were moments during that long afternoon when Ellie caught flashing glimpses of the thing she had done and longed somehow to obliterate herself completely; there were others when she quite literally quivered with excitement. When chalk squeaked on the board it was in direct answer to the state of her own charged nerves.
The bell rang and everyone trailed noisily out, except Ellie, who sat there blushing from her head to her toes. Would Miss Bacon leave the desk and come down to stand beside her? Or would she have to confess from here, across all that chalky space? She’d heard her teacher’s voice turn soft for other people… never her… would her voice turn soft for her now? Soft and interested?
‘Well, Ellie?’
Ellie dared not look up. ‘I took your purse, Miss Bacon.’
‘Right, then. Well, you’d better come along with me and explain yourself directly to the headmaster.’
Footsteps down a long, long passage… the last walk of a child. Does everyone remember their own last walk?
And when she’d come out later, much later, under the arch that said GIRLS,when she’d crept out across the empty playground, lonely, humiliated, confused and lost, Malc was there. He’d heard what had happened and he’d been waiting for her in his old position beside the coke pile.
She’d been crying. Her body juddered with every breath.
Miss Bacon’s words as she packed up and left her in Mr Wilkins’ study—‘I never trusted that child, I always considered her sly’—rang like the wildest peal of bells, like the loudest clamour she’d ever heard in her ears. She thought she’d never get them out of her head and that her heart would go on breaking like this for ever.
What’s more, she’d failed her exams and Miss Bacon was leaving—she’d only signed on for a year. The world was bleak, the world was cold; any future Ellie had ever imagined had got all smudged up and kind of toppled over.
Steeped in the deepest misery she had ever known she told Malcolm, ‘I’ve got to go to the copshop. I’ve got to tell Mum and have her take me down there.’
But even this grimmest of prospect
s hadn’t really reached her.
‘Go on, you’ll only get a warning. You don’t want to get yourself all steamed up about that,’ he said, ‘but you should never have owned up. Surely you’re not so sodding stupid as to go and nick something and then go and own up?’
They’d been born and grown up four doors away from each other, but as far as Ellie can remember that was the first time she’d actually spoken to him.
9
THE DAYS TIGHTEN UP and darken into mid-winter. They drive through lanes full of tired and empty trees.
‘Malc is quite impressed by the fact that Ramon and Murphy are American,’ Ellie tells Robert Beasely at their December meeting in the Red Fox. ‘I think it’s thrown him a bit, since he’s always admired Americans. And I suspect he’s a little bit out of his depth.’
‘I heard they took him out for lunch,’ says Robert, peeling a prawn and licking his fingers.
‘They asked me to go, too, but Malc wouldn’t let me.’
Robert raises his eyebrows slightly before squeezing a lemon into the finger-bowl. ‘I’d feel far happier about this if you were finding something worthwhile to do, too, not just sitting back and waiting for Malcolm. What about your ego, Ellie, doesn’t yours need boosting?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ and Ellie smiles happily at him as she wrestles messily with the tail of a prawn. ‘I’ve always been a contented sort of person,’ and she gives a little laugh, ‘happy with my lot.’ But she has to admit to him how difficult she is finding Christmas shopping this year, ‘Knowing I could buy them anything they wanted. It’s hard to walk by the glitzy stuff and stick to the market.’ Christmas is going to be special this year because Mandy is coming home, just for a few days as she has to be back in Scotland for the New Year. It will probably be the last time they all spend Christmas together; it might be the last Christmas they spend at number nine Nelson Street. If Ellie had used some of her money to buy a grand house she knows the children would come home more often. That’s how life works, with more space there is more to do, more room for tolerance and goodwill. In the Nelson Street house they’re a bit cramped up. ‘I know Mandy would like us to go back with her to spend the New Year in Scotland,’ continues Ellie, ‘but to be frank, Robert, she knows how Malc would perform once he found himself in a snooty hotel surrounded by what he considers to be the world’s privileged few. And she can’t risk her job, well, obviously she’s not going to do that.’
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