Common People

by Kit de Waal

  After six months, dad took a part-time job at what was then Chester College, as a night porter. The dole cheques stopped, and we were all managing on part-time money – both Mum’s and Dad’s, but there was a feeling of a new beginning. Hopefully, the ‘war’ was over. Dad had a smart blue uniform and a big set of keys. He was even trained in first aid and conflict de-escalation. He’d patrol the buildings and grounds with his torch a couple of nights a week, dealing with drunken, keyless trainee teachers, and on at least one occasion, chasing a black-clad cat burglar off the roof of the science block. Eventually Dad became full-time, and that was the rest of his working life: a little lame from the smoking, a little deaf from the production line, and a little battle-scarred from a war in which there was only ever going to be one winner.

  The Things We Ate

  Kit de Waal

  Broken biscuits from her factory bag with shards of dusty icing and a scratchy fight for the custard creams. Half a fig roll no one wanted. Toffee apples from her factory bag with sticky wooden sticks and brown paper stuck to the brown sugar, to the brown apple inside. Squashed potato crisps from her factory bag with little blue shakes of salt, split open and useless, which we opened anyway, like we’d bought them from new.

  White bread, old bread, West Indian bread with jewels of pork fat, soda bread from Nana’s Irish oven, brown bread at a posh girl’s house, mouldy bread with the mould cut out, butties, sarnies, toast, bread pudding black with treacle and sultanas, butter on the dry, burned crust.

  Sliceable, fry-able, pink and trembly Spam, steak and kidney pies cooked in a tin that opened with an exciting key. Tinned pork in see-through jelly. Red, molten corned-beef hash, sardines – skin, flesh and vertebrae – and six pigs’ trotters in lemony water, the lungs of a chicken, the neck of a lamb. Ribs.

  Johnny cakes sweet as biscuits sopping up the saltfish juice. Leaden lumps of dumplings, rice and rice again, and cold rice that turned to maggots in washing-up water, yam and sweet potato and Irish potato and old potato and baked potatoes, big as your face, their hot, leathery jackets full of beans and margarine. And chips! And chips! And chips! And red sauce when we had the money and vinegar when we didn’t.

  Our oven door left open for warmth and steam on the kitchen window and plates that never matched and spoons for everything and, once in a blue moon, blancmange and once a summer ice cream with Guinness, but cake every Christmas. The meticulous division of a golden egg in April.

  Pains in your belly on a Sunday when the gravy ran off the plate. Pains from Monday to Friday when it didn’t. And Saturday’s cauldron of St Kitts soup, dangerous bubbles, whole carrots, mysterious meat.

  And cocoa with sugar and unexpected, unaccountable heart-lifting chocolate shortbread biscuits after a winter’s night shift from a silent father who thought of his children on his long walk home.

  Night

  Elaine Williams

  Walking home through a city curled up in bed, the night chill cutting through my jacket and freezing my sweat-drenched T-shirt, anxiety kicked in. This wasn’t the first time that I’d broken the ‘home before midnight’ unofficial curfew. The Mexican standoff with my dad as I crept in the front door was becoming routine. He’d pounce out of the darkened hallway and suddenly the lights were on and the gloves were off.

  One night, he’d stood stern, in wait in the kitchen.

  ‘Wha’ time yuh call dis?’

  The kitchen lights glared, interrogation-ready.

  ‘Fram eight a clack yuh leave dis house, an’ a jus’ now you a come een?’

  Silence.

  Silence was my weapon of choice. It hadn’t started out that way. No; in the beginning, silence was something me and my siblings did because we valued our lives. In my late teens, however, I’d stumbled across its power accidentally, when I observed how much it riled my dad, especially when teamed up with a dead-eyed stare. It was like his kryptonite and, seemingly defenceless, he’d become incensed and yell at me to get out of his face, which would at least put some distance between me, him and the cussing.

  ‘Wheh yuh deh fram evening till now?’

  Silence.

  I wasn’t entirely sure if he wanted answers, but with my sixth sense on hyper-alert, I detected that his questions were not an invite to a father-daughter-how’s-your-day-been type of chit-chat.

  ‘Yuh nuh see yuh maddah ’ed need comb?’

  My mum was sitting at the kitchen table looking cuddly and super-bright in her plus-sized shocking-pink quilted dressing gown. Damn! In my rush to get out of the house, I’d forgotten to do her hair for bed. My dad had helped her with her nightclothes, but her hair was my job. She propped her left elbow on the table, rested her chin in the palm of her left hand and stared at me, slightly smiling and intrigued, and I was terrified that she could tell what I’d been up to.

  When I was twelve, during the six-week summer holidays, she’d had a massive stroke that resulted in paralysis down the right side of her body. She lost the use of her right arm and leg, and her speech was severely affected. The stroke turned our family upside down because it diminished my mum’s reign as the undisputed head of our house and demanded that she needed looking after. Despite her disability, you didn’t mess with Mum. The wisdom ‘never judge a book by its cover’ could’ve been learned with her in mind.

  I tried my hardest to focus and control the comb, but my brain was hashish-bleary and my hands had turned to jelly… or was it Mum’s hair that had turned rubbery?... Feeling exposed by my parents’ gaze, my inner struggle to appear normal became increasingly desperate. My stomach churned and threatened to release an explosion of random alcoholic beverages topped with blackcurrant cordial. My thoughts raced: ‘Why are the lights so bright? Why’s he still in the kitchen? Is he watching me? Did I just talk out loud? When did Mummy’s hair become so amazing?’ My focus flashed to Dad’s makeshift mousetrap, positioned on the linoleum floor at the foot of the cooker. This was the nightly invite to supper that our resident mice looked forward to. Every morning, the morsel of cheese or bread or cracker or boiled dumpling was gone, a signature scattering of droppings neatly arranged – a ‘thank you for supper’ note – the trap still in place and the mice missing. Every night my dad would get out the contraption from the cellar shelf and painstakingly set his bait.

  ‘A wha’ yuh a do?!’ he erupted, unimpressed by my haircare effort. His outburst snapped me back into the room and out of my code of silence. I quickly mumbled, ‘I’m plaiting Mummy’s hair.’ Or that’s what I thought I was doing, but it was probably more patting and prodding than plaiting ’cause Mum kept grunting and wincing and turning her head to shoot me disapproving looks.

  Dad slowed his pace and reduced his decibels to a menacing whisper.

  ‘Humph! Yuh tink me nuh know seh yuh a tek drugs?’

  His monosyllables were like abracadabra and in a flash, I was sober. Images of hot knives and poppers and microdots and dancing to Talking Heads’ ‘Road to Nowhere’. How the hell did he know?! This was a life-and-death situation. I switched into mortal-combat mode – summoning up my most intense death stare.

  ‘Wha’ yuh a look pan mi fah?’ He snarled and inched towards me.

  My secret weapon didn’t seem to be having the usual effect.

  ‘Yuh mussie wan’ mi… humph!’

  He paused and fixed his killer gaze on me.

  Help! System malfunction… something wasn’t working.

  ‘Yuh know wha’ one mine tell me fi do?’ he seethed, and inched towards me some more.

  No. But whatever it was, from the look in his eyes I knew it wasn’t good. It was never entirely clear just how many minds my dad had, but my one and only mind prayed that all his others were skilled mediators and were standing on guard ready to stop his crazy-ass mind from making him do something we’d all regret.

  ‘Come out!’ He ordered me out of the kitchen.

  ‘Mum–my’s – hair…’ I stammered. By now, I’d ditched my dead-eyed stare; the new look wa
s wide-eyed terror.

  He took a clear step. ‘Mi seh come out!!!’

  Instinctively I knew that wasn’t the time to test the ‘bark worse than bite’ hypothesis. I parked the pink comb skew-whiff in Mum’s hair and backed out of the kitchen.

  The rush of a passing car swiped the kitchen scene from my memory and jolted me into my present solitary walk home.

  With each step, my music-drugs-alcohol high ebbed and waned. The sounds and twinkle from the main road gradually faded, leaving only echoes of the excitement of the town centre. Side-splitting laughter with Shaye (not her real name), both of us saddled with teenage self-consciousness, wanting the world to notice how hilarious we were and see what a good time we were having.

  We were roughly the same age, eighteen. Shaye was rootless; a white working-class girl from a side of the city that I knew nothing about, except the deprivation and that it was not an area that black people in 1980s Sheffield really needed to visit. I was a black girl born and raised by the generation of Caribbean parents who arrived in the fifties and sixties, and soon discovered that England was the ‘bitch’ that Linton later said it was.

  We’d met at a Sheffield Youth Theatre summer scheme. The gravitational pull of our misfit spirits towards the familiar was the magnet that drew us to each other. We talked very little about our home lives. I knew there was a stepdad and violence; she knew I had a sick mother and a strict dad. And that was enough. Our friendship wasn’t about sharing our real lives, quite the opposite. It functioned as a breathing space in which we reinvented shinier versions of ourselves. She’d told me about the Crucible Youth Theatre; I joined and discovered an alternative universe of drama, drugs, writing, acting, troubled teens and post-punk/new wave music.

  Before the youth theatre, my nights out were little more than a flying visit to city-centre clubs bursting with good-looking people in good-looking clothes, flattering disco lights and championship-standard dancers, or heaving house parties that everybody, including my brothers, were allowed to be a part of. I’d have to leave just as the DJ was settling in. And the songs that I loved went unheard by me, and dance moves that my school friends and I had practised were rarely showcased, because my Timex (borrowed from Mum) said it was time to go. I’d make some lame excuse and leave; shamed, but knowing that I ran the risk of a life sentence under house arrest if I got home late.

  At eighteen years old, I stopped asking my dad’s permission to go out.

  It was my gap year before leaving for Essex University, where I’d got a place to study English and linguistics. I was the first one in my family to go to university and my parents were proud, but they still didn’t cut me any slack. I was the youngest of ten, and my siblings were spread out – New York, Birmingham and across Sheffield. They’d come and stay and help to ease the pressure between me and Dad, but their visits would end.

  The instant I discovered youth theatre, I knew I’d found my place and I was willing to do all-out battle for my liberty.

  It was Thursday night, and under the surface of West Street, the Limit nightclub had been host to the usual seemingly incongruent mass of goths, punks, rockabillies and townies, with the occasional natty dread on the sidelines, and us. Dressed in variations of regulation black, the crowd blended into the black-painted interior, which camouflaged dilated pupils sent spinning by the chemical explosion of poppers; teeth grinding, powered by speed; and eyes reddened by cheap booze, hashish and sensimilla. The basement air hung thick with the cloying smell of subterranean debauchery and the DJ locked his dials to one setting only – loud.

  A defiant downbeat signalled The Clash’s ‘Bankrobber’. Difference temporarily disappeared. We peeled our feet off the beer-sticky floor, unified in this anthem for the recalcitrant. Heartened by our mandate, the DJ delivered a bittersweet cocktail of heavy, laboured sounds – a mix that vaporised the early-eighties gloom from our recession-rocked city.

  ‘Gi’ us a toke.’ Shaye nudged my arm with her elbow.

  ‘You’ve just ’ad some.’ I dismissed her and dragged on the menthol-cigarette-and-black-hash spliff.

  ‘Gi’ us a toke’, she persisted and made a grab for it. I was too quick.

  ‘Move!’ I swatted her hand away.

  ‘Gi’ us a toke!’ She tried to snatch it again.

  ‘Gerroff, yuh knob ’ed!’ I pushed her away and we tussled for the spliff, laughing our heads off. Suddenly, the distinct rumble of thunder, the sound of heavy rain, a shimmering continuous hi-hat, soft sparkling piano and the lazy drawl of Jim Morrison, ‘Riders on the Storm’.

  ‘Ooohhh, I love this one!!!’ we screamed hysterically and pushed each other to the dance floor to amble, flop, nod and shuffle our way through the Doors.

  This way of moving to music was a radical departure from the disco, soul and dub, bump, slide, spin, kick, dip, skank, encoded in my DNA. When me and my school friends danced, our moves were slick, polished, in sync with the rhythm; a cornucopia of steps. In the underground world of the Limit, steps were nowhere to be seen. The dancing was alien, but the dense melancholic cacophony hooked me. Songs and sounds had always been integral to my life – disco, soul, reggae, country and western, two-tone Northern soul, pop, dub; I loved it all. And when the DJ played, nothing mattered but the golden moment I was in.

  The B52s ‘Rock Lobster’ was our cue to scream again and jostle our way back to the dance floor. Then on came Pulp, eye-level with the crowd on the dance-floor-turned-stage. Blue lights, dry ice and Jarvis Cocker’s soaring live vocals. We joined in with the few words we knew, oblivious that his small-town yearnings, written for our ears only, would one day scale the heights of the national pop charts. As he sang, we sipped Pernod and black from scratched plastic beakers and got tipsy on life and music.

  Bursting from the flood of cheap booze, we ushered each other down the grimy corridor to the girls’ toilets where puddles of piss, stray loo roll, cast-off condoms, soggy roaches, fag butts and vomit formed a rancid obstacle course. We took turns holding shut the cubicle door with a foot, as a catch, angled under the narrow gap, to prevent our hands from touching anything.

  ‘Uuuugh! Get a fucking room!’ We hurled our usual heckles at whichever messy couple was panting and moaning from behind one of the broken doors.

  ‘Fuck you.’ The grunted reply brought our well-rehearsed chorus of ‘No thanks!’ ‘In your dreams!’

  And then we turned our attention to the male goths clustered around the mirrors. We entertained ourselves with gibes and wisecracks while they pouted and touched up sweat-smeared make-up, and solemnly preened their big hair.

  The musical spell had been all-powerful, and by the time we left, the dance-floor carnage was being cleared. I’d never stayed so late before and my dad’s mantra – ‘Nevah be di las’ fi leave di pahtee’ – felt like an omen ’cause when the lights went up it was ugly; and there was no fun being swept out with the debris.

  A lonesome meow pulled me back to the present. The pleas for food and warmth softly ricocheted off walls and cars and melted into the night air. I strode on, unmoved; the cat would have to find another after-hours companion.

  I wasn’t sure what time it was, but empty milk bottles stood on front doorsteps and houses were all fast asleep. The Limit had long closed, Shaye was on her way home in the opposite direction to mine, and I was in serious trouble. I prayed that I could get inside without a front-doorstep scene. Being shouted at indoors was manageable, being cussed on the doorstep in full view of friends and neighbours was breath-stoppingly shameful.

  My walk took me deeper into the hush of residential streets. The bite of my heels on concrete caught my ear and sounded overly loud. I tried to reduce the weight of my footsteps, but gave up because the effort slowed me down. Tack, tack, tack, tock, I counted my steps, then got distracted by the moon, the ringing in my ears, snatches of song lyrics, what I was gonna say to my dad and thoughts about how worried my mum would be. Immersed in this internal whirr of mental chatter, buzzing and piercing
footsteps, I arrived home.

  All lights in the house were off. My heart beat an irregular rhythm as I slid my key into the lock. I prayed that dad’s rant wouldn’t go on too long. I couldn’t wait for the night’s memories to take me off to sleep.

  I turned my key. It stopped, resisted. Confused I tried again. The key refused to budge. My head started to throb and I longed for the central heating.

  My first knock was phrased as an apology. When this got no response, I grew bolder. It felt like the clanging metal letterbox would wake up the entire street and the thought of everyone hearing my pathetic knocking made me stop.

  I’d lived in our house in Nether Edge all my life. My family was friendly with the neighbours, a mix of migrants from across the Caribbean, Ireland, Italy and Pakistan, with a sprinkle from Africa, India and Poland. I’d been to school with some of them, and one of my best friends lived a few doors away. I felt exposed. And in my chemically heightened reality, under the watchful eyes of the all-seeing net curtains, everything became a threat. A dog idling past our front gate enjoying its night-time stroll was a rabid beast prowling for human blood. A man on the other side of the road, wobbling his way home, was a burglar or potential attacker. I ducked and crouched behind the bins and, holding my breath, peeped through the hedges watching his every wobble and listening until his footsteps had completely disappeared. It was all too much. Fed up and exhausted, I sobbed. Hot tears comforted cold cheeks, but the heat quickly faded. All I wanted was sleep. I thought about going to Shaye’s; she’d left home and was renting a room in a shared house not that far from mine, but it was too embarrassing. And it was late night. Walking home was one thing, but walking away from home, on my own, at that time of night… I wasn’t that brave.

  Time dragged. My legs ached from crouching. Finally, desperate and unable to cope any longer, I decided to leave the street-lit stage of our front doorstep and seek respite at the back of our house.