And the brochure is so nicely done, with none of those garish colours and Bible-thin pages and cheap-looking women posing half-nude. It’s like the paper they use for upmarket newspaper magazines. Stylish.
‘It’s the shutters that people are clamouring for now,’ says Malc to A. P. Murphy, who has driven round to Nelson Street with the car. It is a black jeep, a Cherokee—huge. Ellie went out and almost cried when she saw it, with its rugged wheels and silver hubcaps. A crowd of neighbourhood children were gathered round it, exclaiming.
She’d been scared to meet Murphy and Ramon. She’d been nervous about them coming to the house, but out in the street, admiring Malc’s new car, had been time enough to get used to them. You couldn’t be timid with them, and they didn’t ask for respect, either. They clapped her on the back when they saw her and shouted ‘Hey!’ and ‘Well!’ Ellie could see why Malc liked them. She couldn’t remember a time when she’d seen him quite so easy with anyone… or anyone quite so easy with him.
‘So it’s mail order now, nationwide,’ says Ramon. He’s surely too plump for his age, but he carries his fatness well, uses it wealthily, covers it flamboyantly. No one could call him flabby or sissy. It is a hard kind of largeness, thinks Ellie, because everything about him is large… his blue eyes, his nose, his mouth—he smokes large cigars, and he’d look silly thin.
Murphy looks like a dark, lean lumberjack. He wears jeans and boots and padded tartan shirts, and a gold wrist watch drips off his wrist. He is a lumberjack with smooth hands. They sip tea in Ellie’s carefully-clean kitchen. She’s washed the curtains, had the cooker out and wiped the grease off the sides of it.
These high-flying young men spray excitement and energy. They have come with large presents for everyone. They admire her ancient Christmas tree and she’s disguised the broken branch with tinsel. They don’t know for sure if she’s the one injecting the money into Canonwaits; they’ve been told by Robert that it is ‘a wellwisher, and someone with Malcolm’s future at heart’, but they must suspect it is her.
To Ellie’s undying relief they give nothing away.
‘Does this mean that Malc’s going to have to work away from home?’
‘Certainly not, he’s already too indispensable to us here,’ shouts Ramon, a teaspoon disappearing into his mighty hand, ‘and we’ve taken on part-time reps up and down the island.’
How on earth does Malc take this compliment? Ellie glances over but he is too engrossed in sales talk with the lean-limbed Murphy, so she doubts he’s even heard. Perhaps he doesn’t need to hear? He seems to have gone on to another level: he’s not in the dungeon any more, knocking his head against rocks, he’s floated up into the open air. He’s been there ever since he was invited to his first ‘meeting’.
‘I’m late because I’ve been at a meeting,’ is what Malc said when he came in with the news. Well, that was extraordinary in itself because over all the years he’d been with Watt & Wyatt he’d cursed like hell if he’d had to stay just five minutes over. And then there were meetings every week, and sometimes he and Murphy and Ramon went to eat at the Bunch of Grapes in town. And his tea got burnt.
‘You might try and let me know,’ said Ellie mildly.
‘How can I let you know, love, when we haven’t got a phone? And anyway, I’m too busy to be bothering with that sort of nonsense. Good God, d’you want me to get on or don’t you?’
‘Well, of course I do Malc,’ and Ellie smiled inwardly, and her heart glowed from the inside out, a tinfoil steak in the sandwich bar microwave with two great aching crusts around it.
He leaves his mac at home now. She’s wondered whether to move it off the hallstand but thinks that might be tempting fate. He wears a suit—it was the first thing Murphy and Ramon insisted on. ‘It’s a question of image,’ they told him. ‘You are Canonwaits now, you are our flagship.’ And they made him go to Lendels to buy it. They even went with him.
At the time, in a funny sort of a way, Ellie had felt jealous about that, and she thinks she’d have chosen a black one, not brown, but the brown does suit him.
He’s wearing it now, and he hasn’t loosened his tie.
Murphy and Ramon stay longer than she expected. Ellie moves into the lounge and whispers to Mandy, ‘I hope they don’t expect food. I didn’t think about feeding them. I thought they were only coming to deliver the jeep and they’d go when they’d finished their cup of tea.’
‘Warm some sausage rolls up, Mum. What else have you got? No, you stay in here and open your prezzie, I’ll move them out of the kitchen and see what I can do.’
Is it warm enough in here for the visitors? Should she ask Kev to build up the fire? She’s a little bit embarrassed to be sitting on her sofa opening her present with Murphy drooping over the fireplace which is too small for him—he’s going to knock those cards off the mantelpiece in a minute—and Ramon filling Malcolm’s chair, making himself hugely at home. Malc comes to sit beside her and he smells of aftershave. She puts a smile on her face, ready. These two young men know nothing about her so how can they have chosen anything suitable? She can tell it’s been done up by a shop—ordinary people don’t wrap things like this.
It’s in a box. It’s a telephone… Her heart sinks, how can she tell them they’re not connected? It’s not an ordinary telephone, either. It’s a gold one, the kind that you see in film stars’ bedrooms, and it isn’t cheap… she knows the price of these telephones.
‘Well, what can I say,’ she tells them. ‘It’s really lovely but you shouldn’t have!’
Malc leans over and kisses her, just a peck on the cheek, and then he reaches over and takes her hand! She smoothes down her skirt with the other although there are no creases in it. ‘The day after Boxing Day we’re being wired up,’ Malc says, still close, ‘and then I won’t have any excuse not to ring you when I’m going to be late. The jeep has a phone in it, too.’
There are tears in her eyes when she thanks them again, not because of the golden phone but because of the thought and the kiss and Malc’s hand and the way he is smelling tonight. The lights on the Christmas tree blur before her eyes, the star on top could be real. And Mandy, unflustered by getting the tea, has been given a burgundy-coloured cashmere sweater and Kev a briefcase. They are all glutted by receiving, and Murphy and Ramon are cool with the giving. What’s Malc got?
It is a cravat. Ellie smiles to herself—he’ll never wear it. But he loosens his tie and stands before the mirror, puts it on and laughs at the look of himself. And yet he likes it! Has he lost weight, was he always so tall? Ellie can tell that he likes it! She should have got presents for Murphy and Ramon, Malc should have warned her. She says so. And she should have bought something special for a meal.
Ellie flushes.
This is Christmas Eve, a Sunday this year. Normally Malc would be down at the pub and she’d be fussing in the kitchen making preparations for tomorrow. Wait till she tells Di and Margot about this! Wait till she tells Robert! How she wishes that Robert was here to see it.
She can’t wait for everyone to leave so she can go and sit in that Cherokee, quietly by herself. Feel it and sniff it.
The atmosphere in here is warm and relaxed. Ellie can tell that Murphy and Ramon like her. She doesn’t know quite what she did right, but she’s passed the test she set herself. She hasn’t let Malc down, and nor has Mandy because look at that table with the flaps out! Mandy’s got a knack of making a table look enticing no matter what’s on it—where did she find those little red flowers?—and Kev’s chatting away there to Murphy about golf as if the two have known each other for years. It wouldn’t be possible for Malc to start showing off and being crude because, somehow, Murphy and Ramon are just not that kind of people. They wouldn’t really know how to respond, they’d think he was joking or something. She feels a rush of gratitude towards Robert Beasely—he could not have chosen two more suitable people, no, not even if he’d spent years searching.
This must have been meant, thinks Ellie.
‘To redwood shutters,’ shouts Ramon, raising his glass.
‘To redwood shutters,’ they all reply, searching for their own drinks in the mess of cheese straws.
‘Yes, they are nice, aren’t they,’ she finds herself telling Ramon about Mandy and Kev, speaking about them as if they’re not there, but she’s always praised them in front of other people. Normally this habit of hers drives Malc mad. He used to say, ‘They’re both big-headed enough, and pleased with themselves already. They don’t need you sticking your oar in.’
But Ellie’s always known how important it is to make a big deal of the kids and the detrimental effects of the opposite approach on a growing child. All that nonsense people talk about showing off… let them show off… give them something to show off about! From the very beginning she’d been determined to give her children self-confidence, and if a mother couldn’t do it who could? So despite Malc’s annoyance she’d taught them to read and write before they started school, she’d sellotaped flash-cards up all over the house, she’d read them stories and when they’d watched telly she’d watched with them, so they could talk it over afterwards.
Money was short so she went without but Ellie was used to that. ‘They’ve got to have what the others have got, Malc. They mustn’t feel inferior.’ And he plodded home from work, grumbling as usual when he saw new socks or vests or toys that she’d bought second-hand.
‘Look at you gel, you’re exhausted,’ he used to say sometimes. ‘Give yourself a break. There’s more to life than the kids, you can’t go back and live your life through them!’
She’d laughed at him, knowing how jealous he was—a naughty, jealous little boy, and Di and Margot, who weren’t like that with theirs, encouraged her when she flagged. ‘You do what feels right,’ said Di, ‘never mind him.’
What a wrench it had been when she’d had to go back to work.
She’d conquered her fear of Nelson Street School—she’d had to, for their sakes. If she couldn’t be there in person she’d damn well stamp her determination on the place. She’d forced herself to go to every open day and parents’ day and lecture, she made herself known there, she put herself up for the PTA. Never mind that every time she pushed through those heavy swing doors she died a little inside, never mind that she had to buy barley sugars to keep her mouth wet or that she stuttered every time she had to confront the headmaster.
Very often she was worn out after a day’s work, but still she’d drive herself on in order to take Mandy and Kev on outings, to the park to sail boats on the lake, to the zoo or the cinema, and sometimes they’d buy fish and chips on the way home. She insisted they had a bath every night—‘it’s only half an hour for the immersion’—and in the winter the fire’s back boiler heated the water anyway.
‘You’re never in,’ moaned Malc.
‘Your tea’s always in the oven,’ she told him brightly, ‘and who’d want to be in, anyway, with the place never feeling like ours.’
‘Mum and Dad don’t interfere,’ he said gloomily.
‘No, they don’t interfere but they’re always there, and they’re not the most glowing of adult example!’
‘Mum can’t help it.’
‘I know she can’t help it, Malc, but that doesn’t mean to say I feel happy with the kids being around her.’
Lilian Freeman was a tiny, fairy-like woman with eyes the colour of pale pain, two watery pools with ripple-wrinkles coming off them. Poor Lilian. Actually Ellie always got on very well with Malc’s mum, once she’d grown used to her little ways, once she gave up hiding the bottles, marking them, and striving to cure her. She was, as Arthur said, incurable. Too far gone. Something should have been done much earlier but there were no help groups or phone numbers flashed up on the telly for boozers then. For days she’d be perfectly all right, a sweet woman really, very good at telling stories and she loved reading, and then, for no obvious reason, it’d start. She’d go. Her eyes went first and the rest of her dissipated body followed, sort of flowed away after her, treading on the hem of herself. Once, Ellie, furious and dismayed at the lack of concern, had marched Lil up to the doctor’s and refused to leave until something was done. And her mother-in-law had been taken away, locked up until she dried out. Ellie had gone to visit and been unable to bear it. She’d signed the forms straight away and taken her out, brought her all the way home on the bus, propping her up with her knee to stop her sliding off the seat and on to the floor as you would with a wayward umbrella.
She should have been firmer. She should have followed the doctor’s advice and realised that you had to be cruel to be kind, but if Lilian needed a place to go to escape from reality, then who was Ellie to take it away? How could she, Ellie, insist that Lil confront the reality that was Arthur, that was two of her sons shut up for life, that was Nelson Street and no way out of it? What right had Ellie to pull down the veil from anyone else’s eyes?
She missed Lil desperately when she died, even more in a way than she missed her own mother.
‘They always loved school,’ she tells Ramon now, proudly. ‘Unlike me, I detested it. Well, I wasn’t too bright and in those days they treated children very differently.’
‘It looks like a terrible place,’ says Ramon. She’s not surprised that he noticed it… it dominates one end of Nelson Street in the way the Arcade does the other.
‘It’s the people inside it that make a place terrible,’ she tells him, remembering with shame her ignoble exit, caught screwing Malc in the central heating shed. And her mother’s face, with her voice rising to a scream behind it, ‘A thief and a whore! It’s that Malcolm Freeman, isn’t it? To have anything at all to do with that family is to court disaster. Everyone knows that, Ellie, so why not you, that’s what I want to know!’
‘Malcolm’s not like the rest of them,’ she’d whined.
‘I had hopes for you and I’ll not deny it,’ screamed Freda Thwait, Ellie’s mother.
But Ellie hadn’t known that. Oh, she’d never known that. What with Freda always so busy and everything.
‘Going round with those two unpleasant creatures…’
‘Now you’re moaning about my friends!’
‘Friends? Those two!’ Freda Thwait screwed her finger to her forehead. ‘They’re daft in the head, the Peters sisters. They’re missing up there! I’ve seen you, skulking in the playground, whispering, drooping about with those two weirdos. Where is your pride, Ellie? What has happened to your pride?’
But Ellie felt strangely comfortable with Fern and Blanche Peters. She was an outsider, as they were. And anyway, Muriel wouldn’t have her back after she ditched her while trying to ingratiate herself with Miss Bacon. Ellie wasn’t exactly a friend of the Peters sisters, because they didn’t have friends in that way. She wanted to explain to Freda but it was too hard to put into words.
Freda Thwait said, ‘And now you’ve gone and let me down.’
‘I never had to fear that they’d let me down,’ she tells Ramon, watching the paperchains waft in the heat and sipping the first of the Emva Cream. They’ll be able to save the petrol coupons and get free glasses now, like Dave Legget does. Funny how easy it is to forget that she is a millionaire. She wonders when it will really sink in. ‘I always knew they’d do well and they have.’ She smiles up at Mandy who sits on the arm of the sofa. Mandy is on one side, Malc on the other, and Kev is still jawing with Murphy.
‘Malcolm has talked a lot about them,’ says Ramon. The house smells richly of dusty coke and his lovely cigar. He pats his lips and puffs out smoke rings, and there is cigar ash in Ellie’s hearth, a step up from Malc’s roll-ups. Is he just saying that to please her, or could it be true? She’s never heard Malc doing anything but mocking the kids in that meaning-to-be-joking kind of way.
‘Yes, mam,’ says Ramon, Malcolm’s new boss. ‘He’s always bragging about his kids but that’s nothing to what he says about you.’
‘Would you think me terribly rude if I just stepped outside and to
ok another look at that jeep?’ says Ellie, not caring if they mind or not but hurrying out through the door before it all gets too much for her.
‘Keep your eyes open for the Skinner kids while you’re there,’ shouts Malc after the closing door. And she hears him explaining to Ramon and Murphy, ‘Nothing’s safe when you’ve got families like that on the loose, when there’s wild kids like that about.’
But Ellie is alone with the jeep in the darkness. She is thankful for that, and of the terrible Skinners there is no sign.
11
THEY HAVE BUILT THE Arcade on a mound, like they built the Catholic Cathedral. Ellie struggles towards the doors, still bloated and puffing from Christmas. She hasn’t felt completely well since Christmas Eve when she drank too much and somehow, although she didn’t particularly want to, she had foolishly continued to do so. The wind nips at her heels and blows the tops of the dwarf conifers that have been planted in paving spaces, at regular intervals, beside the iron girders.
They pulled down a tenement to make space for this shopping precinct, and the dust that she’d had to contend with at home during those months of demolition was quite incredible. It got in the food, it got in the beds, an evil-smelling, foul-tasting dust that carried with it something of the despair of the garbage-strewn stairways and the endless, graffiti-covered landings. Ellie had taken up the carpets, then, and tried to bang some of the gloom out of them.
From the tenement dust had surfaced the Skinners, lock stock and every last barrel, motorbikes, prams, broken-down freezers, the lot. They have spread out from the boundaries of number forty-two into the road outside with their ancient sofas and discarded pieces of mouldy carpet. Once the council had to send a skip in order to clear the area. They are the despair of Nelson Street. They are the despair of everyone, and Ellie feels that while the Skinners are there that tenement block has never truly gone.
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