by Carol Morley
She turned to me and faintly smiled across the clutter of voices.
‘Better be getting on!’ she said.
brynn
She thinks of herself as heartbroken, but that sounds like something from one of those romantic paperbacks and it’s nothing like that.
She remembers after she’d learnt to drive she got a job that came with a minivan, delivering catalogue goods. One time she wondered if he really was playing table tennis quite so much after work, and so she followed him. She saw him open the door for the other woman to get into his car and she drove behind them until they stopped at a hotel. They’d only ever stayed in a hotel for one night on their honeymoon and here he was willy-nilly going to one with a common-looking woman. And where the hell did the money come from? It had to come from somewhere and if that woman was paying for it that was disgusting.
When she saw them come out of the hotel she wanted to press her horn hard and for a long time, but she didn’t. She did think of ramming the minivan into them both and then she thought of driving off and never stopping and leaving everyone behind. She decided then and there that she would leave him, that she was going to end the marriage and walk off, and he’d be landed with the kids to slave over. She was twenty-eight years old and she was going to show him that she wasn’t going to be taken for a ride any more. She’d had it.
The woman he’d chosen wasn’t even beautiful or pretty or attractive. Her neck was stringy and she was too tall for a woman. Her clothes were ill-fitting and the wrong colour. Back then she thought he had broken her heart. She never realised that her heart was only fractured and that one day it would be properly broken – so much so that it could never be mended and it would be impossible to ever take him back again.
always another one
I had never expected to see Mickey again, but one day she suddenly appeared – back from Morecambe – and the warts from her fingers had vanished. I made no mention of the scabies that she had given me before she left, as I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the chances of her sliding her hand between my legs again.
‘There were nowt to do. I just kept on sleepin’,’ she said when I asked about Morecambe.
This surprised me, as everyone knew Morecambe had slot machines and funfairs. Mickey’s mum was still there, living with her good-looking TV salesman boyfriend, but was due to come back soon. Meanwhile Mickey was living with her nan.
‘Does that mean you’ll be charging off to Brinnington at all hours?’ Mum said, when I told her Mickey had come back. Brinnington was under a mile away but Mum saw it as another world that wasn’t as good as ours because it was full of council houses. We lived in a boarding house and I had free school meals, so as far as I could see we weren’t any different to the people in Brinnington. I reckoned my mother looked down on them because people in Brinny seemed to say what they really thought, unlike Mum.
*
Mickey unfolded a camp bed and put it next to hers when I stayed over. The image of sharing her bed crumbled and I felt desperate but bold. I needed to feel her hand reach out for me. She flung an old blanket over her bed and a new looking blanket over my bed.
‘Remember that other time?’ I asked.
‘What time?’ she said, vaguely.
Did she really not remember? Or was she embarrassed? Maybe she wanted to forget about it. Or perhaps she secretly hoped it would happen again? She turned the light off, and the spill of streetlight cast an orange glow over the room. I stood awkwardly and watched her strip to her underwear, and thought of her soft skin rubbing against mine, her wandering hand waking me in the night.
I gulped air. ‘Could I get in with yer?’ I said.
Mickey was quiet and frozen. She got under her covers and rolled to the edge of the wall, out of reach, and only the cold silence pressed against me. I stayed in my clothes, got under the blanket on my camp bed and felt the chill.
*
At five in the morning Mickey’s alarm clock shrilled into the darkness. She was back doing an early shift at her old job at the cafe. She scrambled out from the end of her bed and pulled her clothes on and left. I climbed into her warm bed, thinking about her, wishing that I could melt into her skin without her realising.
When I was leaving, Mickey’s nan pressed some coins into my hand. ‘There yer go, some spends,’ she said. I refused as it didn’t seem right, what with Mickey slaving away at work and Mum thinking that we were better than Brinnington people.
‘Don’t go looking a gift horse in the mouth,’ said her nan, as though she knew what I was thinking.
So I took it. I didn’t want to seem rude. On the bus on the way home I rubbed the cool coins between my palms and thought how kind Mickey’s nan was and how my mum had it all wrong about people from Brinny.
Mickey didn’t invite me over again. She never did talk to me about what I had asked her, and no rumours began at school, so she didn’t go telling anyone else either. It was a secret, but not an exciting one, between us – it was just something that had never happened. I decided I had to look elsewhere for a girl that wouldn’t refuse.
*
I went to gigs as much as I could, catching the 192 bus into Manchester to a basement club called Rafters, where the doorman would let me in for free. This is where I met Laura. She was twenty-one and drove a red Mini. She gave me a lift home in it the first time I met her. I put my hand on her knee and she didn’t push it away.
‘I’m a feminist,’ she told me.
‘What’s that?’
‘I believe in women’s liberation.’
‘Oh, like women’s lib?’
I checked to see if she was wearing a bra. She wasn’t.
I told her about all the things I believed in.
‘That’s socialism,’ she said.
We both leant over the handbrake and necked for ages, and then I went home and looked up socialism in the dictionary.
It was Laura who introduced me properly to the clitoris. She worked for a feminist fanzine and nestled within the pages was a photograph of a vagina that named all the parts. I was alarmed but intrigued to discover that the vagina was only one of the names for what lay beneath my triangle of hair: Clitoris, Mons Pubis, Labium Majora, Labium Minora, Urethra. There were so many things that I hadn’t really thought about. Had the tampon illustration I’d followed shown all these things? It hadn’t shown the clitoris, I was sure of that.
‘The clit’s only use is for pleasure.’ Laura smiled. ‘Isn’t that amazing?’
Laura visited the Lesbian and Gay Advice Centre to find out about the age of consent for lesbians, seeing as I was only fourteen. They told her there were no rules for females, as, when the laws of homosexuality were being made, Queen Victoria couldn’t understand what two women would do together. The worker at the centre told Laura that seeing as she was twenty-one and I was fourteen there might be issues of corruption of a minor, but Laura said that was unlikely as I was as up for it as she was. We decided we were officially going out together.
*
When I ran into Mickey in Mersey Square, I resisted the urge to tell her that I was going out with a girl who was twenty-one.
‘I’m on the way to visit me nan in hospital,’ Mickey said.
‘What’s a matter?’
‘Women’s business. Down there.’
I tried not to think of what that could mean, or which part it actually applied to.
‘Will yer come with us, Ann?’
‘There’s nothing to properly worry about is there?’ I asked, hoping that this was the case.
‘They say they do the op all the time,’ Mickey said in a thin, shaky voice.
‘There you go. Sounds routine to me. I’m on me way somewhere.’ I was going to Laura’s house. We were going to have sex for the first time.
‘Please, Ann, I’m just feeling dead panicked about it,’ Mickey said.
‘I can’t. Soz. I’ll come next week.’
Mickey turned around and headed to the bus station. I watche
d her shrink into the distance and wondered whether I should go with her after all.
‘It’ll be all right,’ I shouted instead, though I wasn’t sure if she heard me or not.
*
Laura lived in a shared house and when I arrived she guided me into the lounge to meet her housemates. Thet were sitting on the wooden floorboards, gathered around a saucepan of stew, made with what they told me was textured vegetable protein. They assumed I was there to join in the meal, so I sat on the floor, dreading that if it tasted anything like it looked, I was going to be poisoned. I was used to eating toast, boiled eggs, fish and chips, salt and vinegar crisps and school dinners, and the look of this food made me nauseous. I pushed it around my plate, trying to understand the animated conversation going on around me, which a man introduced to me as John was at the centre of.
John was peering intensely at Laura through his round, thick, wire-rimmed glasses.
‘Employment is just exploitation,’ he said.
‘You’re always going on about class oppression but you never mention the women,’ Laura said. ‘Let’s face it, they’re far more oppressed than any man. Not just at work but –’
‘Come on Laura, the origins of women’s oppression are class-ridden,’ John said.
‘I think it would suit all men if women had their babies and cooked their dinners.’
‘When did I ever say anything like that?’ John said.
‘I didn’t mean you.’
‘You’re always twisting what I say.’
John lapsed into showy silence, while Laura began to stack the plates noisily. I stood up with mine, but Laura gestured for me to sit down again.
‘Relax,’ she said, then looked at my full plate. ‘Didn’t you like it?’
‘I just weren’t that hungry,’ I lied, adding, with what I hoped was a seductive smile, ‘I’ve got other things on my mind.’
Laura didn’t seem to notice my smile or my words. She looked over at John instead.
‘You know that the word family comes from the Latin and it means slaves,’ Laura said to him. ‘It means slaves that belong to one man.’
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.
Together, they stepped into the hallway with the plates. I listened to the sound of their argument trailing away as they got to the kitchen. The remaining housemates picked up the discussion about oppression, repression, the workers and the ruling class. I shut out their words, which meant nothing to me, and instead began to daydream about having sex with Laura. The endless conversation kept interfering with my thoughts, and even though I felt awkward leaving the room with everyone watching me, I went to look for the real thing instead.
But she wasn’t in the kitchen. I went out into the hallway and climbed the stairs. When I got to the top, there was a room opposite, the door was ajar and I heard Laura. I pushed the door open wider and there she was, her naked back to me, astride John, also naked. Under the stark overhead bulb she was swaying back and forth, riding him like a horse. She was going quite fast and his glasses were flung to the floor. He stared blindly in my direction. I watched briefly, feeling the injustice of the situation and feeling overwhelming misery, before going back to the lounge.
I sat back down with the others, who all at once seemed so much older than I was. No one talked to me and I felt like I didn’t belong. I picked at a splinter of floorboard and thought that if Dad hadn’t done what he did, I would not be here, I wouldn’t be in this situation. It was his fault. Then I felt guilty I’d even thought like that. This situation was entirely my fault and it was cowardly of me to blame him. I looked around at the housemates, wondering if I could blame one of them instead.
‘Is she up there with John?’ a housemate asked.
I nodded.
‘They used to go out,’ she said.
That was news to me. I thought Laura was a lesbian and not only that, I thought she was my girlfriend. The housemate came and sat next to me and in the midst of my confusion it occurred to me that her bust was very small considering how fat she was. Not wanting her to think I was in the least bothered that she was fat or Laura was with John, I stroked her pink blotchy arm. She looked down at my hand and then at me.
‘Should we go to bed?’ I asked.
She grinned, took my hand and led me up to her room.
She was twenty-four and a teacher, and, as she turned on her bedside lamp and took her clothes off, she seemed untroubled by her dimpled body and the white stretch marks that tracked her flesh like opened-up dress seams. She helped me take my clothes off, and I felt shy.
Early the next morning I crept from the room and down the stairs. The house was drowsy and still and I didn’t want to interrupt it. I pulled the door lightly shut behind me and stepped into an outside world that didn’t seem quite right. It was as though I was on a film set and if I pushed against any one of the houses or trees that I walked by, I would find they were made out of wood and paint.
Later that day Laura phoned me. I stood in the hall, twisting the curly payphone cord around my finger.
‘I’m sorry about John,’ she said. ‘I never meant for you to think you and I were monogamous. The thing is, I don’t know how to tell you this…’
‘Go on,’ I said, knowing something bad was coming.
‘I’ve got back together with him.’
‘Ta, then,’ I said, putting the receiver down on her.
I looked up monogamous in the dictionary and wrote down the definition in my notebook. One day I intended to make use of the words I was collecting. The only thing that I had managed to write so far though didn’t amount to much and was about school. Brash youths hard faced and hard fisted drag their dreary feet on the hard floors. I needed to expand my vocabulary. I glanced through some of the words that I had recently collected: Slattern: Untidy or slovenly woman. Heinous: Atrocious. Chimera: Wild Scheme. Pluvial: Caused by rain. Snicker: Laugh slyly. Vortex: Whirling motion. Perturb: Throw into disquiet.
*
The weekend was over and had not been what I’d expected. I met Mickey crossing the school playing field.
‘How’s yer nan?’ I asked.
‘Dead,’ Mickey said in a flat voice as though she wasn’t bothered. She began to chew the edges of her thumbnail.
‘But I thought…’
‘There were complications at hospital. I knew in me bones summat would happen. They’re investigating.’
It was so hard to find the right words to say. Saying sorry just didn’t seem enough. A vision of Mickey’s nan came into my mind, a plain, solid woman. Mickey had once told me that her nan’s favourite thing was to stretch out on top of her bed naked to dry off after a bath, and we had laughed at the disturbing image of her nan without clothes on. Now it seemed cruel to have laughed. Why hadn’t I gone to the hospital with Mickey? I thought of her nan pressing the coins into my hands.
‘She were dead kind,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ Mickey said, ‘I wish I hadn’t been so tight with her now. Before she went in the hospital we had an argument about summat or other, I can’t even remember what it were now, and I nicked her glasses and she were chasing me down street to get ’em back. I remember looking behind and she was right out of breath.’
Mickey scraped the raw pad of her nail through her front teeth.
‘Is your mam back from Morecambe?’ I asked.
‘She doesn’t want to leave her boyfriend – he’s moved into video players and cameras now, but I’m not going back there. I’ve gone into care,’ she said. ‘It’s not that bad to tell yer truth. Me mam bought me loads of clothes and whatnot. I’ve got more things than ever. It’s a right laugh really.’
But I could see her eyes were watery. ‘Bloody wind always blowin’ grit,’ she said.
a new start
‘I’m going to buy this place off Shirley,’ Mum announced as I came through the front door and dropped my school bag to the floor. ‘I’m going to call it Dandelion Guest House. She’s leaving th
e furniture and I’ll get continental quilts from the Co-op for all the beds.’
‘But where’ll the money come from?’ I asked.
‘Rob’s guaranteeing a bank loan.’
My head spun with the thought of the boarding house being ours thanks to my brother. I couldn’t quite picture it. Mum combed her fingers through her perm.
‘Six pounds a night for bed, breakfast and evening meal! We’ll be rolling in it before you know it! And you’ll have your own room.’
Mum made a shopping trip to the Co-op and bought everything we needed on hire purchase. She tracked down and bought a visitors’ book for the guests to sign and took out an advert in the local paper, which, with a dash of pride, she cut out to keep.
For the first time in months I had my own room and I lay on my bed and listened to the sound of my own breathing. Mum, not wanting to take up a bedroom that could be let, slept on the settee in the lounge. We waited for the payphone in the hall to ring and for our first booking.
Soon our house was full of men.
*
‘Do you know what this road is known as?’ Frank asked. We were standing at the doorstep on a cold autumnal evening, watching a police car speed by.
‘The A6?’ I said.
‘It’s known as the spine of England,’ he told me. ‘It’s the longest road we’ve got.’
It was the same main road that Dad had driven me down the last day I was with him. I squinted my eyes to try and see a flash of Dad driving by with me in the passenger seat, sucking the ends of my hair into points.
‘You okay?’ Frank asked.
I widened my eyes. I didn’t want to appear abnormal in front of him. Not Frank. He was not like the other men that stayed. They were all labourers in dirty overalls, whereas Frank wore a suit and tie. He had soft hands and long fingers with clean, oval nails. He was an engineer, preparing plans for a future road.
‘He gets a proper hotel allowance, you know,’ Mum said. ‘But Frank prefers to lodge with us because it’s more homely.’
Frank stayed weekdays and headed home at weekends, back to his wife and children. I wondered enviously what they all did together when he got home, but I never asked. In my head, Frank was sort of my dad on weekdays, and that meant we should do things together. Dad had taught me to play cards and so I bought a new pack so I could play with Frank. Every time I saw him I wanted to ask if we could play gin rummy, but never did. What if he said no? I couldn’t stand the thought.