by Carol Morley
‘We’ve only got five pounds in the bank,’ Mum said.
‘Cremation would be a lot cheaper than burial,’ the neighbour whispered over my head. Her hot breath caught on my scalp.
‘I’m not wearing black. I refuse to wear black,’ Mum said to nobody in particular.
*
Mum came back from the shops and held up a navy blue dress and a matching clutch bag. I thought the bag was stylish and I opened and closed the silver clasp, which gave a satisfying snap.
I don’t know how I got there but I was staying at my best friend Bernice’s house for a week, as I was judged too young to go to the funeral, even though I was eleven. Nobody had told me where the funeral was but I’d overheard it was near where he did it and it would cost less to not have to bring the body home.
*
Bernice told me that our teacher Mrs Finzi had announced to the class that my father had died. Knowing that everyone knew, I sat down at my school desk and sucked my cheeks in for a greater half-orphan effect. I felt kind of special. I waited for the niceness of others to come my way.
But the day started like any other.
‘Positions!’ Mrs Finzi said.
Thirty-five of us trooped to the back of the class and lined up in dread. It was the same every morning. Mrs Finzi asked questions, one by one, and if we knew the answers we strained our hands into the air and if we were right we were allowed to sit down. The last one of us left who hadn’t answered a question, Mrs Finzi labelled Dunce of the Day.
Mrs Finzi surveyed us through her half-moon lenses. Her yellow hair curled high and wide. She wore giant dangly earrings, and bright shiny dresses like tents, and she was always dabbing perfume behind her ears and on her wrists, and telling us about her dear departed Italian husband. On the rare occasions when she wasn’t talking about him, she was confusing and boring us with the rules of cricket, her favourite game.
‘What is the name of the river that starts here in Stockport and ends in Liverpool?’ was the first question Mrs Finzi fired at us.
No hands shot up. It was news to us all that there was a river in our town. I’d never seen one. Mrs Finzi looked at us all with an expression of disbelief.
‘The river Mersey of course!’ she said. ‘Do none of you know that the shopping centre is built over it?’
We didn’t. But thinking about it, it was typical of our town to build a shopping centre over a river.
Mrs Finzi peered through the missing part of her glasses and scanned our faces, calculating her second question. ‘Another name for a walk-in kitchen cupboard?’
I knew this. My Grandma Westbourne had one. I stretched my arm up and waved my hand along with everyone else, but Mrs Finzi pointed at me first with her glossy pink fingernail.
‘Ann.’
I hesitated; even though I knew the answer, I was suspicious. It seemed too easy.
‘A larder?’
‘Correct. Be seated.’
I returned to my desk and took up looking like a half-orphan again – but then the letter came and wiped away my attempts to look like anything. It was written in misspelled capitals on yellow, black lined, paper, like it was shouting at me.
DEAR ANN, WE KNOW THAT YOURE DADS DEAD BUT NOW THAT HES DEAD WE HATE YOU EVEN MORE. YOURS SINCERELEY, JILLY AND THE GANG.
The letter punched me in the stomach and I felt sick. Even though it was against the rules to leave the class without permission, I scraped my chair back, left the letter on my desk and walked from the room into the empty corridor, which echoed with the sound of my footsteps. I hurried into the toilets and sat on a toilet seat. As horrible and strange as I felt, one thing was for sure – I wasn’t going to cry. I sat there for a long time, waiting for Mrs Finzi to come and find me, but she never did. I left the toilets when the school bell rang for break, slunk to the edges of the playground and sat on a wall, my eyes to the ground, no longer caring about whether I looked like a half-orphan or not.
Bernice came over and said that the letter had been passed around until Mrs Finzi had confiscated it and read it herself. After that she’d snatched Jilly’s prefect badge away from her in front of the class, slapped her thin calves and made her stand in the corner, her back to everyone, until break.
The rest of the day is a blur of reciting times tables, spelling out words, avoiding Jilly and waiting for Mrs Finzi to say something to me, which she never did. After school I gave Bernice the slip and wandered the streets until I decided to go back to the spot where I’d last seen Dad.
I stood there and thought about how Mum had asked me on the day Dad disappeared whether he’d driven straight up the road or turned left or right after he’d left me. It seemed so important to her. If he had turned left and not right, would it have made a difference? Would he have come back to us?
Bernice and Wendy found me standing in the road.
‘We’ve been lookin’ all over,’ Wendy complained.
Bernice aimed her slit-angry eyes at me. Wendy folded her fat arms and looked me up and down.
‘Me mam leathered me ’cause I were supposed to look after yer,’ she said.
‘Soz,’ I said, even though I wasn’t sorry, and glad that her mum had hit her.
‘I don’t wanna be yer best friend any more,’ Bernice said, in a matter-of-fact way.
They stood arm in arm, all cosy and full of themselves, on a mild summer night – like a photograph I wish had never been taken and that I had never seen.
I threw myself onto the road and battered my fists on the tarmac or the asphalt or whatever that rough road surface is. I don’t know what I was shouting, but I was screaming something into the dust and grit of the road, and whatever it was, it was about Dad.
All I wanted was to be swallowed up into that road and vanish, but it wasn’t happening, so there was nothing to do but to stand up, light-headed, dizzy and probably looking gormless. Bernice and Wendy hung in front of me like exclamation marks, gawping at me as though I was barmy. I wondered if perhaps I was. As we stood on the side of the pavement, a car turned the corner and I watched in a daze as it drove over the spot where moments before I had been sprawled out – the final place I’d ever seen Dad.
*
When Mum came back from the funeral she never mentioned anything about the ceremony to me and I had no idea what to ask, or how to go about asking. The funeral was a complete blank, another mystery to add to the list I was keeping and the clues I was trying to hunt for.
I found a letter of condolence that Mrs Finzi had written to Mum, but no matter how many times I read it, it made no mention of me; it was just from one widow to another.
The last couple of weeks of school dragged on with Jilly and her gang sending me snide looks, but nothing else. Bernice and Wendy skipped rope in unison in the playground and I made a new friend from another class. She said she didn’t have any friends because she was fat and her sister was a schizophrenic. She explained in detail what schizophrenia meant and how it could creep up on you, but that you always found out if you had it properly when you were exactly seventeen. It seemed a long way off, but the thought of voices in my head preyed on my mind, and I couldn’t quite shake off imagining what they would sound like if they ever did come.
on margate sands
Mum was attempting to sing Summer Holiday and her tuneless voice was making me cringe. Her singing trailed off and she looked at me hopefully. ‘Come on, Ann.’ I was never going to join in. I was not in the mood for it, and anyway, the words of the the song were about us all going on holiday. How could two of us make an all? We weren’t all going on a holiday, we were both going on a holiday, and that just didn’t have the same ring to it.
It seemed strange to be making the coach trip with just Mum. Rob and Susan were old enough and lucky enough not to have to come. Mum was wearing me out with her fake cheerfulness and I wondered how much longer I could take it. When she smiled at me I couldn’t find the energy to smile back, so I spent most of the journey looking out of the win
dow at the passing traffic.
Our annual family holiday had always been a fortnight’s stay with Grandma Westbourne, Dad’s mum. We never went on holiday to my mum’s parents, Granddad and Granny Hughes, even though they lived near the sea too, because they didn’t have the space.
Finally I glanced at Mum and saw that her face was crumpled and sad. I felt guilty, so this time I began to sing. ‘There were ten in a bed and the little one said, roll over, roll over…’
Mum slowly and quietly joined in. ‘So they all rolled over and one fell out…’
*
We arrived at Grandma’s semi-detached house with the neatly paved front garden. As Mum knocked on the door of the house that Dad had been born and brought up in, I decided I would explore every inch of it for the clues that must be all over the place.
Grandma took ages to answer. She limped because of some never-talked-about and mysterious childhood illness, which meant she never moved very far. It was just as well, as Grandma didn’t approve of people going places. She thought people should stay where God put them, that the world would be a better place for it. When she finally opened the door she was wearing a homemade flowery nylon housecoat, which wasn’t a surprise, as she always wore one.
As Grandma shuffled aside to let us in, I saw the Methodist church collection box in its usual position, ready for donations. We crossed the polished wooden floor that smelt of hard work, into the back room, where we all stood awkwardly.
‘So you’re here,’ Grandma said.
‘Well, yes,’ Mum said. Her face looked pinched.
Grandma’s brown and grey solid waves of hair were fixed in a side parting. She never wore make-up and I realised that I had never seen her look any different. Her son had died and still she looked the same. It seemed all wrong. I wanted her to be wearing something black and to know if she’d gone to Dad’s funeral. She smiled at me, a sort of half-sad smile that made me squirm.
‘Looking forward to your holiday, Ann?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
She put her hand in the pocket of her housecoat and pulled out ten pence and gave it to me.
‘Ta, Grandma. Thank you.’
I slipped the coin into the pocket of my jeans. Grandma limped into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
The back room was the same as it had ever been. The two armchairs, the rug, the lampshade, the table and chairs, the small bow-fronted glass television, they were all in place and still dark brown. The coal fire that I’d never seen burning because we only ever went in the summer looked like it always did. The treadle sewing machine was in the corner, ready for action. I had hoped to see a photograph of Dad when he was a little boy, but there was not a picture of anybody anywhere in the house – apart from Jesus.
‘I saw Freddie Starr was on at the Winter Gardens – I thought I’d take Ann,’ Mum shouted through to the kitchen.
Grandma eventually appeared in the doorway.
‘You can’t take her to see that man, Brynn.’ She lowered her voice. ‘He tells blue jokes. It’s been in the newspaper.’
Mum barked a laugh. Grandma tightened her lips.
I went outside to investigate the back garden. The runner beans were still there, climbing loyally up their sticks. Everything seemed normal: the dark green bushes, the pale pink roses, the apple tree, the patch of sheared lawn. Was this exactly how it had been when Dad was growing up? Did he eat the apples off the tree? Or string the runner beans? Maybe he even picked a rose? I tried to imagine Dad as the same age as me. I circled the garden and wished I could meet the ghost of my dad as a boy, even though I knew that was pretty much impossible; this wasn’t some cosy story for children.
Through the back window I saw Mum and Grandma in the kitchen. Mum was yelling at Grandma, who was just looking at her. I decided Mum was probably shouting about Freddie Starr.
*
Mum didn’t try to be cheerful as we walked to the seafront, and I tried to think of things to say to make her happy, but nothing felt right. When we got to the beach I paddled in the sea, thinking about how Dad had never finished teaching me how to swim. He once told me to put my backside down and I’ve never forgotten that he said that. It’s hard to work out why some words that people say stick in your head, yet other words that are probably much more significant just vanish.
I listened to the laughter between a nearby father and son. Had Dad been taught to swim in this sea by his father? I tried to remember what Dad sounded like when he laughed, but I’m not sure he ever did – not in front of me anyway.
Mum, who I had never seen swimming, sat hunched on the towel spread out on the sand. She glanced around her before lifting the sleeves of her navy blue funeral dress, exposing her scabby skin to the sun. I had always judged her moods by her psoriasis and today it looked the worst it had ever been, like raw, flaking, miniature maps of nowhere.
*
Later on, I lay in the double bed listening to the garbled sound of Mum shouting downstairs, though I never heard Grandma shouting back. Maybe it was because she was a Christian and was turning the other cheek. Christ hung on the wall opposite and I stared him out until I couldn’t take his pleading eyes any more.
Mum burst in, turned the light off and got under the blankets next to me without undressing. On her side, her back to me, she sobbed and went through her own earthquake. I rested my hand on her shaking shoulder, hot and fleshy, and she talked in a tumble and I couldn’t make out most of what she said but some things were clear and I stored them up. She talked about how Grandma had made Dad like he was and that she’d turned him against his own father who had upped and left when he was a boy. She said Dad had got a letter from his father asking to see him, but he hadn’t gone and his father had died and soon after Dad had his first blackout. Eventually she ran out of words, and her body became cold and clammy and still.
*
In the morning when I got up, Mum pulled the pillow over her head. Downstairs, I found Grandma at her sewing machine, threading the needle with her bent, arthritic hand. Her brown eyes were magnified and cartoonish behind her glasses. I sat at the table laid for breakfast.
‘Help yourself, Ann,’ she said, without looking up.
Grandma clawed the dark fabric under the needle and locked it into place. Her foot pressed the treadle and the clatter began. She stopped and pulled out the joined-up pieces and cut the cotton thread with her scissors, which I was never allowed to use.
‘Do you ever make men’s suits, Grandma?’ I asked, wondering if she had ever made clothes for my dad.
‘I’m a dressmaker, not a tailor,’ she snapped. She hated people getting things wrong.
I lifted the mush of milk and cornflakes into my mouth and let it dissolve and seep into the gaps between my teeth before I swallowed.
‘Where’s your mother?’ Grandma asked.
‘Still sleeping. She’s not feeling very well,’ I said, not wanting her to think Mum was doing something wrong by having a lie-in.
Grandma burst into a new seam. A shaft of sunlight showed up stray grey hairs trying to escape her head. Mum had said that Grandma had made Dad like he was. I concentrated on hating her, as I tried to figure out how exactly she had made Dad like he was.
She never called her neighbours by their first names, they were always Mrs This and Mr That, and they called her Mrs Westbourne. I decided that meant that nobody wanted to be her real friend. She was stingy, too. One Christmas all she sent me was some folded-up scraps of material. Had Grandma’s meanness made Dad like he was?
And we were banned from the front room, arranged as a bedroom, with a single bed and a dressing table, always ready to take in a chorus girl from the Winter Gardens. ‘I only take in ladies, non-smokers and abstainers. I make sure everything’s above board,’ Grandma often said of her lodgers, who she sometimes referred to, with a sigh, as ‘dramatic theatricals’.
Had Grandma taken in ‘dramatic theatricals’ when Dad was growing up? I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t ima
gine him ever having fun with Grandma. She seemed to look down on the idea of fun. When I turned on the TV for Marc Bolan’s show, she watched him sing for a few moments, winced and then said he was unsavoury and probably had nits.
Sat hunched over her sewing machine, Grandma turned around and gave me a crooked smile, the glint of a dressmaking pin held between her even, white false teeth. She pulled the silver pin from her mouth and pushed it into a miniature cushion, then took off her glasses and folded them carefully into the pocket of her housecoat. She creaked from her stool and padded over towards me in her spongy slippers. Beside me was the storage bench and she opened the lid and pulled out a silky, red dress. It was sleeveless with a drop waist and it smacked of glamour. She dangled it in front of me.
‘Did yer make it, Grandma?’
‘It’s my wedding dress.’
As she held it against her short stout body I realised that Grandma had been thin once and, if it was possible, taller. Why hadn’t she got married in white?
‘It was white but I dyed it,’ she said, answering my silent question. She shook with strange laughter and her eyes became glossy. I watched her uneasily. She didn’t explain why she had dyed the dress red but I reckoned she did it after her husband, the grandfather I had never met, ‘upped and left’, as my mum had told me last night.
The door swung open and Mum came into the room, a sour smell clinging to her. Grandma stopped laughing.
‘I was just showing Ann this,’ Grandma said, sensible again, folding the dress back into storage.
‘Were you now?’ Mum said, darkly, plonking herself down at the table. She scratched her scalp and I winced as scraps of pale, thin scabs fell from her hair into my cereal bowl. I looked away, looked at the dead television, into its blank screen, and saw Mum and Grandma and me reflected there.
I tried to tell jokes to lift the mood, but looking back there was only one joke that I remember knowing and it was unlikely to get anyone falling off their seats. I stood in front of the fireplace and faced my glum audience.