7 Miles Out

by Carol Morley

  She swung her dart at the board. It missed and sank into the glossy door. She fired another, which hit the board at a severe angle and hovered there for a few seconds before falling. On her third try she miraculously hit the bullseye. This perked her up and she drunkenly gathered a set of darts and slammed them sideways into my hand. She shouted encouragement as I threw them. Shelley took her turn and soon we were all playing happily and everything seemed almost normal. But Shelley’s mum went one tin of lager too far because soon she was armed with a vast supply of union jack tailed darts that she hurled around the room.

  ‘Sorry,’ Shelley said as we each ducked behind a chair.

  ‘One hundred and fucking eighty,’ Shelley’s mum screamed.

  Meeting Shelley’s mum made me glad that my mum hadn’t turned to drink and that she often did have a job.

  *

  Drac was stocky and dark, and told me that in all likelihood she took after her father but she wasn’t sure, as she had never seen a photograph of him. In any case, she was the total opposite of her mother, who was blond, slim and delicate. Drac was two years old when her father had walked out and she couldn’t remember anything about him. Even so, she told me that one day she was going to find him and whatever he was like to live with, it was going to be a lot better than putting up with her mother’s string of pathetic boyfriends. Her mum was currently going out with a man who was fitting the bathroom with tongue-and-groove pine, but taking his time about it.

  When I turned thirteen, Drac gave me a present in two parts. First, she pierced my right ear. She used an ice cube to freeze my lobe and the sewing needle made a loud pop that frightened us both as it forced its way through the flesh of my ear. She wiped the blood away, took her own stud out and pushed it into my new hole. For the second part she took me into her bathroom, with the half finished tongue-and-groove, and dyed my hair black in the sink. We waited for the dye to take, but when she washed it off we discovered my hair had turned purple, which was even better in our eyes. She arranged my hair with wet soap into spikes.

  At home I stroked Tiger and tried to bury the dread of waiting for Mum’s reaction to my altered state when she got home from her new office job. I hoped she would react the same way she had when I bought my pink patent stilettos. Maybe the fact I only had one ear pierced would make it less common than having both ears pierced. I was wrong about that.

  ‘You look like a prostitute,’ she said.

  ‘Prostitutes don’t look like this.’

  ‘And you’d know all about that?’

  Mum sank into the settee and a faraway look came into her eyes.

  ‘I didn’t learn a four letter word till I got married,’ she said.

  Mum often seemed to say things that came out of nowhere. I turned the stud in my ear and she looked at me and laughed so long and hard that tears sprang from the corners of her eyes, and Tiger ran under the settee. I watched her for a while and then left her to it while I made her some tea. When I came back she had stopped laughing and eyed me cautiously from behind the waft of steam rising from the mug I handed her.

  I wondered if she was going to mention my image again, but she just told me to fetch some money from her purse and go to the shop for a sliced loaf. On the way I passed Drac outside the chippy and we sat in a shop doorway while she ate her chips.

  I dragged the fifty pence from my mum’s purse along my lips. I liked the cold metallic feel of it. I slipped the coin into my mouth and used my tongue to rattle it against my teeth. It tasted of copper and earth. It drove away all my hunger pangs. I would try it all the time and perhaps I should tell Mum about it to help her lose weight.

  ‘Don’t go swallowin’ it,’ Drac said.

  I snatched the coin from my mouth. ‘Like I’d go and do that.’

  ‘Wanna come back to mine?’ Drac asked.

  I nodded, it was something to do and I’d get Mum’s loaf later. She was on a diet, after all.

  I sat between Drac and her mother on the settee in front of the telly. I wasn’t watching. I was edging the coin onto my lips and distracted by thoughts of Dad who had once let me eat pie and chips out of newspaper wrapping. The coin flipped inside my mouth and I lost it. The fifty pence wedged in my throat.

  Then I was on the floor, writhing, a hand clutching at my throat, my hand. I knew it was me, yet nothing seemed to belong to me. Only what I was thinking.

  What a way to die.

  I saw Drac and her mother, soft focus in the wet mist of forced watery eyes. They were giggling. They thought I was joking. And then a range of quick expressions overtook Drac’s mum’s face. She stood up.

  ‘She’s turning blue!’

  I was dying. I was the closest to Dad I could be. And I hoped I would die but Drac’s mum’s expression was so stricken it made me laugh and at that moment the coin slipped down my throat. I sat up and recovered my breath. Drac watched me with awe.

  ‘What do we do now?’ Drac’s mum asked.

  ‘She’d better go to hospital,’ said Drac.

  I was disappointed I was still alive and worried about not being able to buy Mum’s loaf. I hoped Drac’s mum would give me some money to go and buy it. Instead she phoned my mum. I wondered if Drac’s mum and mine would become friends and go to the pub together. I was desperate for Mum to have friends but whenever she did make one they never lasted long.

  Drac’s mum spoke to mine, who sent Susan over to pick me up from Drac’s house to take me to casualty. My sister and I caught the bus to the hospital where I was X-rayed. The X-ray was shown to anyone passing. There it was, a big, blank, white, seven-sided shape, between ribs and shadowy organs that I didn’t know the name of. Everyone that saw the X-ray looked at it, looked at me and laughed. I was admitted to a ward.

  ‘Hello Miss Moneybox,’ said the nurse on duty.

  Annoyed, I realised that I was going to hear these comments all the time and even though I was thirteen years old they had placed me on the children’s ward and had given me a horrible nightdress to wear that emphasised my giant bust.

  *

  The buzzing of the hospital lights kept me awake that night, so I lay in the crisp, cool bed and began to think about Granny Hughes, my mum’s mother, and wondered what Dad must have been thinking on our visit to see her in hospital, about a year before Dad died. The hospital was in North Wales where Granny lived, but nowhere close to where she lived. I said the place name over and over under my breath. Denbigh. The hospital looked like a boarding school in my sister’s Bunty magazines, where The Four Marys went.

  Nobody had told me why Granny was in hospital and I knew it was not something to ask about, but I had expected to see her in bed on a ward with other patients. Instead, she had been in a big room where other people of all ages sat in upright chairs dressed in everyday clothes. Granny sat in a chair with a cigarette jammed in the corner of her mouth. A teasing length of ash hung from it and I anticipated the fall. Granny was a chain smoker and though she was fussy about the way she dressed, wearing charity shop smart skirt suits, I could always find a cigarette burn somewhere on her clothes.

  Granny said that we’d all just missed Arthur, my granddad, who had left to get back to his work shift and that she was looking forward to getting back to waitressing and to normal. Her ash fell into a dry heap on her skirt and my attention shifted to Dad. He sat on the edge of his seat with his eyes to the floor. It was like he had an invisible dressmaker stitching the skin on his face with a needle and thread. His cheek kept twitching and his eyelid wouldn’t stop flickering.

  ‘Go get Mum some ciggies,’ Mum had said to him.

  Dad stood up and brushed down his trousers.

  ‘Oh, he is a love,’ Granny said.

  Granny dipped her chin and fluttered her eyelashes at Dad. In a couple of wide strides he was gone from the room. Granny and Mum started to whisper so I couldn’t hear. I looked around and saw a piano. I skipped over and lifted the shiny wooden lid and began to play. I had never had a lesson but I tinkle
d the stretch of black and white keys anyway, and imagined I was a proper pianist giving a concert. I was lost in the fantasy when a man in a white coat came over to me with a kind smile on his face. He told me that he was awfully sorry, but I needed to stop. I was disturbing the patients.

  I looked around and saw a girl a few years older than my sister, in a red velvet smock dress with her wrists bandaged and her face fixed in surprise. There was a man with sideburns who looked a bit like Dad, his hands clutching the wooden arms of his chair, his knuckles white and his head rocking forward and back. Finally, I cottoned on. I was in a loony bin. Granny was mental. I went back over and perched on the wooden arm of Granny’s seat and looked at her carefully for signs of madness. Granny coughed and took another suck on her cigarette. She exhaled with a sigh.

  ‘I hate the Welsh,’ Granny said.

  ‘But you’re Welsh, Granny!’

  ‘Awful bloody people,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why we bothered to come back.’

  Mum turned the gold band of her wedding ring. Granny looked at me and put on a smile.

  ‘I wanted to be a teacher but my father didn’t do with women working. You know I was engaged to a lovely Welsh boy…’

  ‘You hate Welsh people Granny!’

  ‘He was different, he had beautiful blue eyes but I went and ran away anyway.’

  ‘Not now, hey Mum.’

  Granny seemed not to hear.

  ‘I got a job as a scullery maid in Manchester and one day I was in Salford Park on my day off and this nice-looking lad cycled past. He stopped, turned around and came back and stopped in front of me.’ She winked at me. ‘That was your granddad.’

  Granny took a long drag of her cigarette before it slipped from her fingers and fell onto her skirt.

  ‘Be careful, for God’s sake,’ Mum said.

  Granny calmly picked it up and used it to light another cigarette. Mum shook her head with disapproval as Granny dropped the old cigarette onto the floor and snuffed it out with the heel of her shoe.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, Brynn,’ Granny said, frowning. ‘That’s no way to look at your own mother.’

  ‘Yer were saying how yer met Granddad,’ I reminded her, eager to hear the rest of the story. Granny exhaled smoke from her new cigarette, and her expression softened.

  ‘Before you knew it we were getting married. I gave the engagement ring from the Welsh boy to the cook. But the other week at work this man came in.’

  I pictured Granny in Little Chef, wearing her waitress uniform, scurrying about and flirting with the male customers.

  ‘I’d seen his car draw up and it was a Jaguar or it could have been a Rolls Royce it had one of those silver things on the bonnet, but he had this wonderful pure wool coat on and he came to the counter and he looked at me and said “Do you know the Hughes of Anglesey?” and I said, “I am one of the Hughes,” and then he said, “Send my regards to Rose,” and I said, “But that’s me,” and it turned out that he was the Welsh boy with the lovely blue eyes. The very one that I was engaged to be married to nearly forty years ago and he said to me, he said, “So come on Rose, where’s my ring?” and I just couldn’t believe it.’

  Granny exhaled a dreamy cloud of smoke straight into Mum’s face.

  ‘Mum! Please.’

  ‘He’d done well for himself. His own company and all that. He was so overjoyed to see me it was lovely and he bought me a big box of chocolates from behind the counter and he’d even lived in America! He’d been very happily married and he’d got three children.’

  Mum sighed and Granny looked at her.

  ‘I’m the one that should be worn out, Brynn, not you.’

  Mum bit her lower lip as though she was trying not to say something. Granny looked back at me.

  ‘His wife had passed away and…’

  She smiled one of her faraway smiles.

  ‘He wanted me back! Can you believe it? At my age! He wanted to be with me after all these years. I said to him, I said in no uncertain terms, I’ve been with Arthur for nearly forty years, we’ve had five children, I can’t possibly leave him now.’

  Mum looked worried as Dad reappeared, clutching two packs of Embassy. His eyes were glazed, as if he wasn’t able to see anything properly, and his hand rubbed the lines on his forehead as though he had a headache.

  *

  Dad let Mum drive on the way home. I curled up on the back seat and breathed in the stale upholstery and pretended to go to sleep so they wouldn’t know I was eavesdropping.

  ‘Well it’s a bit much the judge putting her in that place. For Christ’s sake. Denbigh Asylum! Just for pinching some bars of chocolate,’ Mum said.

  ‘There’s more to it than meets the eye,’ Dad said, clicking his lighter.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Mum replied.

  I hadn’t known then that Dad had spent time in places like Granny was in. Visiting Granny must have brought it all back to him. Neither of them spoke again. At least, I think that was the case because after a while I really did drift into sleep.

  *

  I woke up and for a moment wondered if I had imagined Granny smoking all those cigarettes in the hospital. Had it really been allowed? Within seconds the thought passed as I was drawn into the routine of the ward.

  ‘How often do you have bowel movements?’ asked Matron.

  ‘A few times a day,’ I replied. Pleased that I knew a bowel movement had something to do with going to the toilet.

  ‘Are you sure about that?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded, hoping I was normal.

  She held out a curved stainless steel bowl and I caught my reflected purple spikes and the reek of disinfectant.

  ‘When you go, go in this and give it a nurse afterwards. She’ll search through it.’

  I was never going to let anybody do that. It was humiliating for me and for them. Matron hurried off before I had a chance to tell her that I’d made a mistake about going a few times a day.

  ‘How old are yer?’ asked the mother of the toddler who slept opposite me.

  ‘Thirteen,’ I told her.

  ‘You’ve got big tits for your age,’ she said.

  Like she had the right to talk to me. I hated her. It proved that everyone on the ward was not only talking about the hilarious incident of me swallowing fifty pence and my purple hair, but that they were also noticing the size of my chest.

  Mum appeared in the ward and I wanted to disappear. She was wearing the funeral dress again, a tail of navy blue cotton fluttered from the hem and led to the ladder at the side of her tights. I felt awful, but I wanted her gone before she had properly arrived.

  Mum sat down on the plastic chair next to my bed.

  ‘You’ll be the death of me,’ she said, not unkindly.

  ‘Sorry Mum.’

  I smiled at the mother of the clubfoot boy who sat with a long sigh on the chair between my bed and her son’s. Her dyed auburn hair matched her eyeshadow and lipstick. She caught Mum’s eye.

  ‘How yer doing? I’m knackered, I really am,’ she said.

  ‘I’m fine thank you very much,’ Mum replied in a clipped voice, looking away.

  Mum probably thought knackered was a swear word. Here was a moment when she could have made a friend, but she was snobby instead. Why did she have to see every single thing as common? I sank a little further into my pillow. I had nothing to say to Mum. I wondered what she was doing without me, but I didn’t ask, and she didn’t say. It was strange to see her not at home but in the world, with other people around her.

  ‘Yer don’t need to visit,’ I said. ‘I’m fine here. And it’s two bus rides and all that.’

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Mum said.

  *

  Outside of visiting hours, Matron allowed us to get out of bed and sit around the ward. I escaped to the bathroom, happy to be on my own away from all the children. A nurse came in and sniffed the air. ‘I thought yer was smokin’,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve given
up,’ I told her.

  She smiled. She wore foundation and powder but I could still see her scar. The scar was long and deep and ran noisily from the tip of her chin, along her cheek, to the side of her eye and to her forehead. Though I tried to pretend I hadn’t noticed it, she was probably used to everyone staring.

  ‘Every scar has a story yer know,’ she said.

  She glanced at the upside-down watch pinned to her chest and began to tell me hers. Her scar was to do with a boy she had arranged to meet after his Sunday football match eight years before.

  ‘It were our first date and I got off bus and I looked across road and I saw him running about. It’s a funny thing really, but I knew then and there that he were the lad for me, I really did. There were summat about him.

  ‘I honest to God looked before I crossed that road. This car came out of nowhere. I couldn’t get out of way. It hit me and I were spinning in air dead slow like slow-motion at the pictures, and I hit his bonnet and I smashed his windscreen and I don’t remember nowt after that. They told me he drove off and left me on road.’

  ‘Bastard!’ I said.

  ‘The funny thing was, the lad I were on way to meet saw an ambulance and he just knew it were me. He just knew.’

  The nurse touched her scar with the tip of her finger and smiled sweetly.

  ‘I nearly died. My dad refused to leave my side. He went and lost his job over it – they weren’t very sympathetic – but he just wouldn’t leave. Apparently he were in tears the whole time I were in a coma.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. The idea of being in a coma, of being alive but kind of dead at the same time and being watched over by a distraught father, appealed to me.

  ‘It turned out driver drove off ’cause he was on way home from some family party. His wife and daughter were in car with him.’

  ‘Yer kidding?’

  ‘The thing was, everyone reckoned he’d been drinking and so he didn’t want to go and do a breathaliser thing. He were quite well to do if yer want to know. He turned up later at the hospital. He came to say he were sorry and offered to buy us a fur coat.’

  ‘A fur coat?’

  ‘No joke. I told him to go and get knotted. I told him where he could stick his blooming fur coat.’