by Carol Morley
‘Oh for Christ’s sake I’ll go and make some,’ Mum said, jumping to her feet.
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Auntie Jan said, getting to hers and blocking Mum’s way.
‘For crying out loud,’ Mum said. ‘Let me go.’
Auntie Jan sat down with a heavy sigh and Mum made her way to the kitchen. I heard the kettle boil and she came back with a glass measuring jug and poured the powdery brown lumps of gravy over Granddad’s food.
‘That better is it?’ Mum asked.
‘I din’t want it,’ said Granddad.
‘Oh for goodness sake, Arthur, don’t be so ungrateful,’ Granny shouted.
Auntie Barb scanned the room, darkly. She did the opposite of lighting up a room. ‘Could we just have a bit of peace? Please?’ she said.
All eyes settled on her. I imagined we were all thinking her comment was strange, seeing as she was the one that usually caused a fuss. She nudged her boyfriend.
‘See?’ she said.
‘Now, now, Barbara,’ Granny said.
Auntie Barb drained her glass of red wine and my stomach tensed. She was fifteen years younger than Mum and the complete opposite. Auntie Barb was slim with long, hennaed hair and was the only person in the family to have a degree, a Bachelor of Arts. She painted pictures of herself with one side of her face brown and the other side green. There was usually a spider plant or a cat somewhere in the background. I found it odd to think that she had passed an exam for her paintings.
‘I din’t want it,’ Granddad said.
He looked bewildered. I was sorry for Granddad. When he wasn’t working nights at the Hotpoint factory, he had his head under the bonnet of his Beetle, tinkering away at the rusty, old engine, trying for a quiet life. Since the accident, he didn’t even have his car any more.
One time when we made what my Mum had called a flying visit, Auntie Barb had locked herself in the bathroom with a kitchen knife. I’m not sure what had caused her to do this, but Granddad had put his head in his hands and I overheard him saying quietly, ‘If you’re going to do it, just get on with it will yer?’ It was funny that Auntie Barb, who had threatened to kill herself a few times, was still alive, and Dad, who had never screamed about doing it, had gone and really done it.
Mum waved a heaped fork of mash at Auntie Barb. ‘I put butter in this!’
Auntie Barb opened her mouth and I thought, this time she is going to scream, but she never got a chance. Rob spun his Frisbee-sized pizza aimlessly across the room. It flew through the air and landed on Granddad’s bald patch, flattening his paper crown and the few strands of hair he had. Strings of cheese and wet tomato paste patterned his stunned face.
‘What did I tell you?’ Auntie Barb said to her boyfriend, who obediently followed her as she stormed from the room.
‘Barb!’ said Granny, trying to get to her feet. ‘Barbara, come back!’
‘Don’t you dare go after her,’ Mum said.
Cigarettes were being lit in all directions. Mum wiped the pizza from Granddad’s face with his crown. Rob tapped a beat on the arm of the chair, acting as though nothing was happening.
Granny struggled to her feet. ‘I’m going to go and do myself in,’ she said. She hobbled out, still wearing her red paper crown, and I doubted that she would make it down the stairs to the front door, but she did.
‘Let her be,’ Auntie Jan said as the door banged shut below.
‘I’m going after her,’ said Martin. He ripped off his crown and raced down the stairs. Mum looked pleadingly around the room, until her eyes fixed on Greg.
‘Greg, go after them,’ she ordered.
‘Why should my boyfriend go?’ Susan shouted. ‘He’s not even family.’
‘It’s okay, I’ll go,’ Greg said, with relief. Susan insisted on going with him.
Auntie Jan’s crown floated off as she snatched up plates and whisked them away into the kitchen.
Auntie Barb flounced past, followed by her flaring red hair and her boyfriend, who carried her suitcase as well as his own. She made sure she slammed the door so hard when she left that the walls and floor of the flat shuddered.
‘She’s a selfish, self-centred so-and-so, that one,’ said Mum, who was sitting down, peering from under her crown and contemplating the glowing tip of her cigarette.
Auntie Jan buttoned up her daughters’ coats and took them to look for their brother and Granny.
Rob escaped to go and see his girlfriend.
‘I don’t know why I bother, I really don’t,’ Mum said and went to tackle the washing-up.
I was left with Granddad. He prodded his pipe with a wire cleaner and I wondered what him and Dad used to talk about, if anything. He glanced over at me but I knew that he had no idea who I was, as he couldn’t see properly.
‘Turn telly up would yer,’ he said.
*
Boxing Day arrived and nobody seemed to have the energy to create another scene. Granny had been discovered alive and had been given a few large Martinis to calm her nerves.
Rob and Greg turned up to take Martin to see the football match.
‘Can I come?’ I asked.
‘It’s a boy thing,’ Rob replied.
After they left I went back to bed and lifted the blankets over my head. I catalogued all the wrongs against me, and there were many. I never went anywhere. I never did anything. Mum hadn’t got me a Christmas present. Rob didn’t care about me and the proof was he’d bought me a Scalextric, and although I pretended I liked racing cars around the figure-of-eight track, I knew he hadn’t thought about me when he bought it. Granny and Granddad had given me an address book that I knew only cost seventeen pence because Granny hadn’t even bothered rubbing out the price in the front. And football was not just for boys. I had been to a match.
Dad once took me to see Manchester City.
And they had won as well.
Rob usually went with him, but I nagged Dad for ages to take me and eventually he did. Rob wasn’t pleased that I took his place.
*
Dad held my hand and guided me through the crowds into the Maine Road stadium. His hand was firm around mine and I felt in seventh heaven to be part of his world. He even allowed me to pick where I wanted to go. I chose to stand near the front of the barrier, to be close to the pitch.
‘Fucking right.’
‘Fucking dead right.’
I glanced at Dad to see what he thought of the swearing but I couldn’t tell; his face was set in concentration and he seemed miles away. The swearing men asked Dad a question about the game and I was proud when he gave the answer without any fuss that they’d been swearing.
Doyle, Bell, Clements, Summerbee, names were uttered into the air like they were gods. Come on City. The roar as our men ran onto the pitch. My team. Sky blue and white. The kick-off. The ball in play. Men around me talking over the game: kick, dribble, free kick, corner, penalty, time-wasting.
A triumphant roar as City scored, a communal wail of despair as our enemy equalised.
Dad had led me away before the game ended to avoid us getting mixed up in the crowds. Outside the walls, as Dad hurried me through the deserted turnstiles, the crowd exploded. Dad listened for a second and told me that City had scored and were last-minute winners. I jumped up and down on the spot to celebrate and to show Dad that I wasn’t upset I’d missed the winning goal and that I was worthy of bringing to a football match. He had smiled and I had crossed my fingers in the hope he’d bring me to another game.
*
Under the cover of my blanket I began to wonder if my brother was still jealous that Dad had taken me and not him to that match. I realised that nobody could have got away with leaving people out and shouting and arguing at Christmas if Dad was around. I sat up and began to fold a sheet of origami paper. I tried to remember the bird that Dad had showed me. He’d told me he had learnt to make it as a boy, from a Rupert Bear annual, and I realised it was one of the few things I knew about his childhood. I creased the
sheet, scoring lines, bending corners. I repeated steps and varied the folds. It had always amazed me that a piece of paper could turn into a bird that flapped its wings when you pulled the tail. But I couldn’t do it. The red paper floated away from my grasp. Nausea rippled through me and I was sick over the side of the bed.
Vomiting took all of us that day, apart from Rob.
‘It was that damn frozen turkey,’ Mum said, cursing the fact that absent Auntie Barb and her vegan boyfriend were immune from sickness. She handed out buckets and bowls and wet dishcloths, before dashing to the kitchen sink to throw up.
*
Christmas was over. The house emptied out and Mum sank onto the settee and dwelt on where it had all gone wrong. The faint tangy odour of sick hung about until we finally discovered a dried, pale pool of it under the armchair.
heart of light
On the phone I asked Rob why he’d sent me a Best wishes for your retirement card for my fourteenth birthday. ‘It’s ’cause when I phone up you never seem to be doing anything,’ he said. ‘It’s only a joke.’
I vowed to do something. What that something was I wasn’t sure about. I considered tracking Mickey down in Morecambe, but didn’t have a clue where to start. Both Lucy and Helen were going steady, so only had time for their boyfriends. Shelley had become less interesting to me once she stopped talking about her dad and Drac wasn’t allowed out for a while because she’d been caught shoplifting. I looked around for someone else to do things with.
I settled on Debby, who I began to talk to in the dinner queue. She was in my year, but in another tutor group, and I was drawn to the dark shadows under her eyes that hinted at something interesting. She told me she liked my hair and wished that her mum would let her dye hers. She showed me the five white strands that had sprouted overnight in her thick, black wedges of hair.
‘Me dad’s not been same since his nervous breakdown,’ Debby said. ‘And neither have I.’
When I asked Debby what a nervous breakdown looked like she said that she didn’t know, as she was nowhere near her dad when it happened.
‘All I heard was that he started giving ten-pound notes away on street,’ she said.
My dad wouldn’t have done that. He never had any spare cash for one thing, and he never seemed to mix with people. Dad’s behaviour had always seemed ordinary at the time. He got annoyed sometimes and shouted or lashed out with his hand, but that was like any dad. It was normal. I knew it probably wasn’t normal that he sometimes never came home – his jacket missing from where it usually hung over the side of the armchair, rattling with small change. But I got used to Dad disappearing. He would be gone for days and when he came back he was quiet and he always stayed in bed for a day or two. But he never raved or raged or appeared to have a breakdown. Perhaps he did all that somewhere else. When I once told Dad that something got on my nerves, he had frowned and said solemnly that I shouldn’t have nerves at my age.
‘Are nerves real or are they just summat in your head?’ I asked Debby.
‘I think they’re a bit of both,’ she replied.
When Debby’s dad was twenty-seven years old, a fortune-teller read his palm.
‘She went and told him that summat terrible was going to happen to him when he were forty,’ Debby said.
When her dad neared that age he began to feel really anxious and he ended up having his nervous breakdown.
‘So was it destiny, do yer reckon? Or did he have the breakdown ’cause he were worried that summat was going to happen?’ I asked.
‘I don’t like to think about it.’
Debby lived with her mum and dad. Even though they were divorced, her mum couldn’t bear to see her ex-husband fend for himself. Although he didn’t smile, he didn’t look miserable. He was just a big, slow lump with a sticky-looking pink mouth peeping out from his scraggy yellow beard. It was hard to imagine him lecturing about English in a university, which was his old job.
‘Will he ever recover?’ I asked Debby.
She shrugged. ‘He might do and then again he might not.’
‘At least he’s got a chance of getting better,’ I said.
*
Debby asked me to go and see Heart of Light, a local Christian New Wave band who were on a tour of schools and scheduled to play at ours. At first I resisted, I didn’t believe in religion, but thinking I had to do something so as not to appear retired, I agreed to tag along.
As well as Grandma Westbourne’s Methodism that didn’t seem to do Dad any good, it was the Religious Education classes at school that made me realise I didn’t believe in religion. We would spend a whole class discussing whether it was acceptable for a biker Sikh to keep his turban on rather than wearing a motorcycle helmet, even though it was the law. My opinion was that if he was willing to risk his life then it was up to him. After a few lessons it seemed to me that most religions ended up leaving nothing up to anybody, they were merely a form of control. So I was not in favour of religion and I was not looking forward to seeing the band.
To prepare for the gig I put on ivory foundation and brushed my cheeks with a line of red blusher and, underneath that, a line of white powder, which was supposed to give the illusion of cheekbones, according to my recall of Lucy’s Jackie magazine. I edged my eyes with blue kohl, with lines extending like wings to the sides, and coloured my eyebrows in matching blue. On top of this, to set it all, I used translucent powder. I put on a slit pencil skirt, stilettos and my red cagoule. I was ready for anything.
*
‘They’re brilliant!’ Debby screamed. The music was so obvious and unoriginal I knew I should leave, but the band didn’t deserve that sort of statement. I hung about at the back of the hall making sure people could see I was looking down my powdered nose at the whole stupid thing.
Debby’s face shone and I knew it was mean of me to spoil her enthusiasm, but I did anyway. I arched my blue eyebrow. ‘I’m sorry to break this to yer Debby, but they’re really shite.’
Between terrible songs, the singer raised his arms to the ceiling.
‘Jesus is the true rock star of our times,’ he cried.
I grimaced and rolled my eyes. This was just a church sermon in disguise. The singer was trying to be cool but he wasn’t at all. He ripped his black T-shirt off and revealed a hairless slender torso.
‘In’t he fit?’ Debby swooned.
It was true. I had to admit he was. He was not far off looking like Bowie. His porcelain face was full of angles. He had divine cheekbones.
The heavy bass caught in my chest. It pounded my insides and I had to remind myself not to sway to the awful music. The singer carved his musical sermon into the ears of the crowd. Not mine, not my ears.
‘The truth.’
‘Sinners.’
‘Our saviour.’
Suddenly I felt as though I was surrounded by thousands of people, which was impossible.
‘Hope.’
Drum roll.
‘Grace.’
Drum roll.
‘The light.’
The words stabbed at me and began to make some kind of sense. But how could they? I saw Debby’s expression and laughed, but felt spellbound too.
‘Come and give yourself to Jesus!’ the singer implored.
A woman smiled joyfully at me.
‘Jesus wants you!’ she said.
This wasn’t happening.
‘Open your heart to Jesus!’
‘Come all ye sinners!’
A hand pushed me forwards. I felt light-headed and faint.
‘Salvation.’
‘Faith.’
‘Solace.’
‘Truth.’
‘Children of God! Accept Jesus Christ as your saviour and be born again!’
I didn’t remember fighting my way to the front, but I was there, pressed against the stage, my heart pounding in my chest. I raised my arms and reached for the singer.
‘Hallelujah! Jesus is with you.’
He bent down and t
ouched my cheek. An electric current rushed through my body. He was heaven sent.
‘Jesus!’ I cried. ‘Jesus!’
Debby said my conversion happened so quickly she didn’t see it coming but she made sure she followed and gave herself to Jesus too.
*
Every Sunday I attended church with Debby. It was not a normal church with stained glass windows and hard, wooden pews. It was a terraced house in Edgeley. According to some of the congregation, God was not impressed with what churches looked like, which made me wonder why anyone bothered to make most of them so grand.
We crammed into the knocked-through lounge and dining room. We were the youngest there. Everyone else was about twenty or even as old as thirty. We sat cross-legged on the floor and learnt new songs, accompanied by an acoustic guitar and a tambourine.
‘Jesus is the saviour that I want to know
Heaven is the kingdom where I want to go
A saviour such as he, a sinner such as me
He came to save from the grave.’
Once the service finished, everybody circulated the room, smiling and hugging each other. I was disappointed that the singer from Heart of Light wasn’t around. I would have liked to have hugged him for a long time. Apparently he was busy touring, according to Phil the acoustic guitar player – he did have God’s work to do, after all.
If it wasn’t raining after the service we all marched to the park to play Frisbee. I wondered if passers-by knew that we were a congregation of Christians but decided that they probably thought we were a big happy family instead. At least, I hoped they did.
One Sunday I got to church late as my bus had broken down.
‘It was the devil himself trying to stop yer,’ Phil told me.
‘He will not drag me down to hell,’ I replied.
‘Jesus is going to use yer to spread his word,’ Phil said, smiling.
I decided he was absolutely right. Even Phil, who had been a drug addict until he was saved, was capable of preaching God’s word.
Under my bed was the Bible Phil had given me. I’d hidden it as I didn’t want Mum knowing that I had been saved, as I thought she might start worrying about me. Every night I opened the Bible at a random page and read whatever my eyes fell upon. It seemed even tax collectors and whores could get into heaven as long as they believed in God. But could people who committed suicide get into heaven? It appeared to be a sin against God and I wasn’t sure that they could. I wanted to ask Phil about it, but I found it too hard to bring the question up. I hoped Dad was not burning in some eternal flame. If only he had been saved maybe it would have made all the difference. Either he would be alive or, if he had gone and died, at least he would be in Heaven.