7 Miles Out

by Carol Morley

  She should have helped him more.

  There had been good times. His fingers running through her hair, whispering her name like it was the best in the world. And his lips to hers, the kisses that made everything all right again. She longed for the boy, the man, her husband. She blamed everyone and she blamed herself. She blamed him and she never had really believed in God but she hoped he was up there in heaven and she blamed God, who couldn’t possibly exist, for letting this happen.

  The future gapes at her and she’ll never feel ready. But she knows she has to carry on. For the sake of her children. She must go on, she will go on. She’s going on.

  drop, drip, drop

  ‘We won’t put Top Flat on the bell, we’ll call it the Studio Flat instead, it sounds more artistic,’ Mum said. ‘I’m going to paint the lounge a nice shade of orange. Nice and optimistic, orange.’

  Our new flat was the top floor of two houses joined together. There was a second set of stairs leading down to a mysterious, blocked-up door, which intrigued me. I often daydreamed that it was a door to another world.

  Susan’s boyfriend, Greg, had recently taken up photography and wanted to take my photograph in front of the ornate gates of the house nearby that we called The Mansion. He said it was an us and them photo, and I was the us. Greg had applied to go to college to study photography. He was having difficulty working out what he could do for the assignment that he’d been set for his interview.

  ‘I’ve to take a photo of what a raindrop feels like when it lands,’ he said, scratching his pointed chin thoughtfully. ‘Not what it looks like, mind you, that would be easy, but what it feels like.’

  *

  Mickey was my first new friend at the new school. She had jet black, short, wavy hair, dark intense eyes and the most bitten-down nails I’d ever seen. Her fingers were covered in warts, which I admired and wanted to catch.

  Mickey worked in the market cafe on Saturdays. The first time I visited Mickey’s house she made chips like an expert. She used a sharp little knife to shave the thinnest peels and chopped the potatoes into neat, even chunks. The pan of oil sizzled on the glowing electric ring.

  ‘Me mam won’t have gas in the house,’ she said. ‘The last house we lived in blew up.’

  She lowered the metal basket of chips into the pan. The yellow oil spluttered and spat freely into the air.

  ‘A gasman put a note on fire sayin’ do not use but it went and fell on floor. Me dad came home and never saw no note so he turned fire on. Bang! The whole house went up. It were a gas leak.’

  ‘How come he were all right?’

  ‘Me mam says the angels were with him that day. Sometimes she says that she wishes they hadn’t been.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘’Cause he…’ She trailed off.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes he leathers her,’ she whispered. ‘It’s when he gets pissed. She gets on his nerves.’

  Mickey lifted out the chips and tipped the basket and shared them between two plates. We drowned them in malt vinegar and shook on sparkling grains of salt. My dad had died from gas and Mickey’s dad was nearly killed by gas. I felt strangely happy. We were linked.

  ‘Stuff that in yer gob,’ Mickey said as she gave me her last chip. ‘An’ let’s go and watch telly. Me dad’s in there but he’ll be off out in a mo.’

  *

  I decided I was going to start a secret project. Whenever I met a dad I would observe him and take mental notes. I wanted to know what other dads were up to and what I was missing. But what I really wanted was to catch a glimpse of my dad in somebody else’s dad; in their gestures or expressions or their voice or looks. It was a sort of a way to get a bit of Dad back. I knew it would seem strange to everyone else in the world so I kept it quiet, but I was glad I’d thought of it.

  In the lounge, Mickey knelt in front of the television, turning the dial to change the channels. Mickey’s dad was sitting in his armchair staring at the TV and I began to study him for signs of ‘Dadness’. I noted the dark stubble on his chin, and thought of Dad’s shaving brush. I could only remember ever seeing him unshaven once, after one of his disappearing trips. I took in Mickey’s dad’s bloodshot eyes, his black hair that curled chaotically around his head and his moody expression, which was not the same as one of Dad’s moody expressions. Mickey’s dad looked up at me as he licked the edge of his cigarette paper and instead of looking away I smiled.

  ‘D’yer want a picture or what?’ he yelled.

  I thought of him hitting Mickey’s mum.

  ‘Dad don’t,’ Mickey said. She grabbed my hand and took me upstairs to her bedroom.

  We’d drawn maps of our bedrooms in Geography class and I’d been envious of Mickey’s map, which showed a dressing table, wardrobe, television and organ. Now I saw that the only things that were in Mickey’s room, that in reality she shared with her brother, were two single beds placed side by side, covered with tatty blankets.

  Mickey’s dad was different and rougher than Dad, and I decided that was because he drank too much. When he was drunk he called Mickey’s mother a ‘who-er’ and became violent. After a while Mickey’s mum got a court order banning him from coming near her. He still kept turning up at the house so she left him for good. She took Mickey to the other side of town and moved in with her mother, Mickey’s nan.

  *

  I made another friend at school who had a father I could study. Lucy. Everyone said she was the spitting image of Cleopatra because of her straight nose and shoulder-length black hair with a crimped fringe. She wore a badge with words so small you could only read them if you got really close: Piss Off. Lucy lived on a brand-new private housing estate where, instead of the pavements being lined with paving stones, they were made of black tarmac that got sticky when it was hot. There were no cracks in Lucy’s house. There was no peeling wallpaper revealing the old layers beneath, or stairs that led to blocked-up doors. Lucy’s house was new, neat and orderly, and smooth all over. Lucy’s mum even set the table for breakfast the night before.

  Lucy opened a drawer in her dad’s bedside table and showed me a packet of condoms. I had never seen any before and studied the packaging carefully. Lucy alerted me to the use-by date, which was very old.

  ‘It’s proof,’ she said. ‘They’ve not done it for years.’

  Lucy said that she’d heard children didn’t like to think of their parents having sex, but that she actually wanted hers to do it. She had a portable television in her bedroom and a subscription to Jackie magazine, but what she really wanted was for her parents to love each other, not just be together for the sake of her.

  Whenever I stayed for the weekend, Lucy’s father would drive me home in his shiny company car, and Lucy would come too. He always wore a suit and tie, and, according to Lucy, he never got drunk. The only thing he liked to do that scared her was to break the speed limit. I didn’t mind, but Lucy hated it and was always begging him to slow down. He always did eventually, with a deep chuckle that Lucy found embarrassing. Sitting in the back seat with Lucy I would position myself so that I could view a portion of her dad’s forehead in his rear-view mirror. I would frame the hairline of his greased-back, dark, short back and sides, his lined forehead, and pretend that it was my dad, not him, driving the car.

  The day Lucy’s dad drove me home without her, I fantasised that I was his daughter and we were going on an outing. He let me sit in the front passenger seat and I tugged and clunked my seatbelt as I watched him turn the ignition on, push down the handbrake and turn his steering wheel. I inhaled his smell of Old Spice and Vick’s Nasal Inhaler. He had terrible problems with his sinuses.

  He noticed a triangular iron burn on my arm and said he thought I was too young to iron, and I was pleased that he’d noticed. He stopped for petrol and came back with a Mars Bar for me. I wondered if he ever had moods, if he ever hit Lucy or her mum? For a minute I panicked that I had accepted the Mars Bar. What if he was going to drive me somewhere
and rape me?

  We drew up outside our flat. ‘All right, duck?’ he asked and I felt mean that I had believed that he could do bad things. I decided that he was the most normal dad I’d ever met and that the Mars Bar was probably a late birthday present. I had recently turned twelve after all.

  *

  Special music lessons became available at school. Mickey said she’d rather learn dancing than an instrument, and thought it was totally wrong that school didn’t offer dance lessons. But when Lucy signed up for clarinet, I did too. Our teacher, Mr Roberts, was hidden away at the end of a warren of small, cluttered music rooms. He said he was a retired orchestra saxophonist and was married with four daughters who had all left home. He told us to call him Bob.

  Bob demonstrated how to screw a clarinet together and how to moisten the sliver of reed before clamping it to the mouthpiece with the silver ligature. We followed, and put the reeds into our mouths and wetted them with our tongues as instructed. He soon had us blowing into the clarinet and getting a noise out of it.

  ‘Now let me show you how to do the fingering,’ he said.

  At home I practised every day till my lips were numb and I noticed drops of spit spilling out from the bell of the clarinet and hoped that Bob would never notice that I dribbled while I played.

  Bob introduced a way of improving our technique.

  ‘Okay, Ann, if Lucy plays a note wrong I’ll slap you on the bum and then you’ll slap her on her bum. And if Ann plays a note wrong, Lucy, then I’ll slap you and you’ll slap Ann. Okay?’

  We vaguely agreed but couldn’t bring ourselves to look at each other. I tightened my grip on my clarinet and wished I were somewhere else.

  ‘Let’s have a little run-through,’ Bob said. ‘Now pretend, Ann, that you have just played a note wrong.’

  He smacked Lucy.

  ‘Go on, Lucy. Slap Ann. On the bum.’

  Lucy hit me on my lower back. Bob sighed.

  ‘Let’s see if you can show the way, Ann. Lucy has just played a note wrong.’

  I slapped Lucy gently in the right place. We both winced. I hoped she could see I thought it was a really weird thing to do.

  ‘Well done girls!’ Bob said.

  We quickly improved.

  Neither of us wanted to play a note wrong, though it was unavoidable. I’m not exactly sure why we went along with Bob and his method. When we asked a girl who attended Bob’s lessons on her own if he was ever funny with her she looked at us blankly. We decided it must be something about the two of us – Lucy and me. So the day she was off school with a bad cold I decided that it was unlikely that Bob would do anything silly if I was by myself. To my relief, when I arrived in class, he definitely didn’t seem at all interested that I was on my own. I relaxed and played the piece I had been practising for weeks. It was a blues piece, my favourite kind of style. And I played it perfectly.

  When I finished, Bob clapped. I turned and smiled at him, wishing it could always be this way.

  ‘Should I play it again?’ I asked. I was eager to.

  ‘I’m sure there’s something else we could do,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think?’

  He stroked my long hair and my fingers jammed down on the cold silver keys of my clarinet and my smile slipped. Bob shrugged and grinned.

  ‘Go on then, once more,’ he said.

  I played but I couldn’t concentrate. I could hear Bob fumbling with something behind me. Nervous and distracted I played a section wrong. I waited for Bob to slap me. He didn’t. A strange feeling came over me and I picked up my bag and clarinet case and walked out without looking back.

  *

  Lucy lit her cigarette with a match and inhaled it deeply into her lungs. She passed it to me.

  ‘Make sure yer don’t dew arse it.’

  She was always having a go at me for making the end of her cigarette wet. I sucked in my lips to dry them out. We had been smoking for a few weeks. The first one had made me retch and I couldn’t understand how anyone smoked but Dad had so I wanted to. After trying a couple of cigarettes, they didn’t taste bad at all.

  I took a dry, shallow drag and exhaled. ‘I’m not doing clarinet any more,’ I said, passing the cigarette back to her.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s boring.’

  By the way Lucy looked at me I knew she realised something. She blew a few precise smoke rings, which she had mastered quickly, unlike me, and we watched them hover in the air, impressed by their perfect roundness, a grown-up version of soap bubbles.

  ‘Well, I’m not going neither,’ Lucy said, stubbing the cigarette out, palming the short dimp to finish later.

  That weekend I visited a hair salon and told the hairdresser I wanted my hair cut short and spiky. I went through a mental list of what I had learnt about other people’s dads and felt a stab of disappointment that I wasn’t really finding much out at all and whatever I had discovered wasn’t leading me to understand Dad. Long lengths of my hair fell to the floor and I thought of how Samson had lost all his strength when his hair was cut, but not me. I was better off without it. My mind began to wander, and I ended up thinking about Greg’s photography project and about what a raindrop would feel like when it hit the ground.

  moment’s surrender

  ‘If yer ever want to find me stepdad, just try looking in bookies or pub,’ Helen moaned.

  Helen was the only other punk at my school, so it made sense we should be friends. Waxy pale, with white hair and colourless eyelashes and eyebrows, she had a white rat called Captain that she kept in a cage at the end of her bed. He was compensation for being an only child and for her Real Dad not living with her. Real Dad would occasionally drop in unannounced. He smuggled us into the pictures to see X-rated films and we’d sit on the back row and I was always conscious of his leg against mine and his hand drifting towards my knee.

  ‘My dad fancies you,’ Helen said, matter of factly. She didn’t seem bothered. I thought about being fancied by other people’s dads and felt a bit sick. I pressed it to the bottom of my mind.

  Helen drew her curtains against the night sky and stood at the end of her bed, showing me how Captain could run along her arm. The more I saw Captain and Helen together, the more they resembled each other, down to the sharp angles of their top front teeth.

  ‘Rats need touching,’ Helen said, stroking Captain. ‘He goes dead sad if he ain’t petted.’

  ‘Do rats live for a long time?’ I asked.

  ‘Years if yer stroke them enough.’

  I took off my new patent leather, pink stilettos. Mum had sent me out to buy sensible school shoes but I’d bought the stilettos instead. I had been afraid of her reaction, but she only tilted her head back and laughed when she saw them. It was like nothing got to her any more. She never reacted how she was supposed to.

  My back to Helen, I pulled off my silver-threaded black jumper, and quickly replaced it with a nightie that Helen had given me. I turned around and pulled out my chewing gum like elastic, stretching it to test how far it could go. Helen looked me up and down.

  ‘Me mam says she used to have a figure like yours,’ she said.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that I had a figure. Helen put Captain back into his cage and together we kicked down into the cool sheets of her bed. I took the gum out of my mouth and held the soggy lump in front of me.

  ‘Stick yer chuddy on headboard,’ Helen said. ‘I always do.’

  I thumbed it flat against the board and said my silent prayer, the same one I said every night. I prayed I would dream about Dad.

  *

  In the morning I woke up to the dull thought that I had slept through the night without dreams. Helen was already awake next to me with Captain under her nightdress.

  ‘Did yer have any dreams?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Captain was stuck up a dead tall tree, but I managed to fly up an’ rescue him.’

  ‘I didn’t dream at all,’ I said, feeling cheated.

  ‘Me dad
says that if yer don’t dream then you’re dead. He says that we have dreams every night but they don’t stay with us.’

  Had I been dreaming of Dad all this time? I turned to the headboard to retrieve my gum. It wasn’t there.

  ‘It’s gone and fell into yer hair,’ Helen said, laughing.

  She put Captain away and tried to pick out the gum, but when that failed she used a hairdryer to try and melt it out. The heat spread the gum and it stuck to even more hair. Helen got a pair of scissors and cut a patch of gummy hair down to the roots. She held a hand mirror to the back of my head and another mirror in front and I saw the puddle shapes of baldness. I liked it. It was punk.

  *

  ‘So you’ve bothered to come back?’ Mum said when I returned from Helen’s house. ‘Twelve years old and gadding about. It wasn’t like that in my day.’

  She was definitely reacting now.

  She took an angry bite of the cheese sandwich clutched in her hand. Mum was usually on some kind of diet, eating Nimble or Slimcea bread, Ayds chocolates and Limmits biscuits and drinking the sharp lemon drink PLJ, but now, without even trying, the pounds had fallen away. I was happy that something good had come out of her becoming a widow and Mum was pleased that she had lost weight.

  I sat down on the settee next to her and angled my head awkwardly towards the flickering television so she wouldn’t see my bald patch. She hadn’t been happy when I’d had my long hair cut, even though I had given her a thick lock of hair to keep, so it was unlikely she’d be happy now.

  Tiger sat on the top of the telly, his favourite place. His tail swiped the television screen like a windscreen wiper and blocked our view. I wished it was a Monday or a Wednesday, when Coronation Street was on. It was Mum’s favourite programme and I had watched it ever since I could remember. Mum once told me in front of Dad that Grandma Westbourne had been horrified when Dad moved Up North, as she assumed it was just like Coronation Street. Grandma thought the North was made up of gossipy women airing their dirty laundry in public. Dad had said that in his view his mother wasn’t far wrong.