by Carol Morley
I took the four kings from the pack and staggered them vertically in my hand, so that the top of each king popped out from behind another. I told my imaginary audience that the kings had arrived at a hotel and were going to stay in various rooms. I placed the kings face down on top of the remaining stack of cards, which I explained was the hotel. I slotted three of the kings into random floors of the pack. At this point my audience was only seeing the back of the card, but they would know that they were the kings I had previously shown them. I kept the final king on top of the stack. I informed my audience that after a good night’s sleep, the king of hearts on the top floor wanted everyone to join him at the top. I lifted him up and knocked three times on the pack. Turning the top cards one by one, all the kings had miraculously risen to the top of the deck again.
Dad had taught me this.
The trick was to hide three face cards behind the staggered kings when you showed the cards to the audience, so that the cards you slid into the deck were not the kings at all. They only seemed like they were.
*
Our next door neighbour, Rita, began to pop round on a daily basis. Rita was fat with lank greasy black hair, wore bright caftans and was always on the lookout for bacon. Her husband Duncan wouldn’t let her buy any, as he said it was too expensive.
Rita would sit on the floor with her legs open wide, her caftan tucked up high between her bare thighs, a plate of Mum’s crispy bacon between them, and talk nonstop as though she wasn’t used to it. She would sometimes confide in us about her love life with Duncan. We didn’t really want to hear, but we listened anyway.
‘I never wear knickers yer know,’ she told us. ‘Duncan won’t allow it.’ Her husband Duncan was slight and grey with a high, thin voice. I couldn’t imagine him laying down the law.
‘I’d love to lose a bit of weight but me boobs might get smaller and Duncan wouldn’t approve.’
*
I babysat for Rita and Duncan one night. Their daughter was named June, after the month she was conceived, nine years before and was already in bed when I got there, so I had a snoop around the house.
Duncan had turned one of the bedrooms into a library. Rita had warned me that he didn’t like anyone to touch the books but I pushed the door open, stepped inside and ran my fingers firmly across the leatherette spines and golden titles of the volumes. I took out Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and sat down on the large wicker chair placed in the centre of the room, feeling like I was about to appear on Jackanory.
I opened the stiff cover and began to read: My father’s family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Pip. I didn’t get any further. I heard banging from upstairs. Carefully, I put the book back, positioning it so it became exactly level with the other books.
I headed up the staircase to June’s bedroom. This part of the stairs was carpeted with brown cord, as, according to Duncan, there was no point continuing the plush maroon carpet up to a kid’s room, as visitors would never see it.
June was sitting up in bed. Her soggy eyes followed me as I entered the room and she kept banging her head hard against the wall. I asked her what she was doing but she carried on banging and didn’t reply for a while. Maybe she was weighing up if she could trust me or not.
‘It’s the only way I can stop it.’
‘What?’
She tapped her head with her fingers.
‘It’s like bricks hitting bruises inside me head.’
She began to cry. I sat on the edge of her bed. She rested her head on the pillow and I stroked her greasy hair, the only feature where she took after her mother.
‘Mum’s always on settee eating sweets when I get in from school. She makes me go down cellar and get pies out of freezer and put them in oven for our tea.’
‘What else does she make yer do?’
‘Everything. She don’t do nowt. And he’s not me real dad yer know so that’s why he goes around hating me.’
‘Where’s your real dad?’
‘I’m not sure, but I know he’ll come and get me one day.’
June closed her eyes and I carried on stroking her thin strands of hair. I watched her eyelids quiver as she fell into sleep. I decided that maybe there was something worse than having a dead dad and that would be to have Duncan as a stepdad.
*
Mum was flushed and girlish. She gestured at the back room with her hand. She tried to speak but spluttered with laughter and buried her face in the back of the settee to drown it out. She lifted her head up.
‘Mum, you’re drunk!’
She struggled to compose herself before she began to speak again.
‘She’s, you know…’
‘Who? What?’
‘You know!’
‘No, I don’t know.’
‘Rita… with Frank!’
Mum looked at the wall that separated us from the back guest room. I looked at the wall blankly.
‘They’re… you know… doing it,’ Mum whispered.
‘Doing it? Mum! That’s a really common thing to say!’ I was unsettled by this new version of my mother.
Mum’s hands cupped her face and I watched her cheeks get redder as she stifled her laughter. Maybe she didn’t care if things were common any more. Perhaps she was over all that kind of thing.
‘It’s not true, anyway,’ I said.
My bones ached with the thought of Rita and Frank together. Rita must have got him very drunk. Why would he go and do it with her?
Soon Rita burst in, plonked herself down on the armchair and flounced her caftan, flapping up a breeze.
‘Flippin’ heck, I can’t believe it, Brynn! I feel like I’m floating,’ she said.
‘You’ve covered in lovebites, Rita,’ I said, trying to bring her smashing to the ground.
Rita’s hand flew to her neck.
‘He’ll leather me!’
I spent ages combing out Rita’s bites like I’d learnt to do years before, remembering Helen and her pet rat, and the first and only time I’d been drunk, as I scraped the comb back and forth, so that the lovebites began to look like a natural rash. While I did this, Rita told me how she had gone all the way with Frank.
‘He’s a smashing lover, I can tell you that for nowt.’
After that I always avoided Frank. I no longer wanted him as my part-time dad.
*
Most of the guests were difficult to imagine as Dad types. Brian stayed for two nights and settled his bill, not with money – he didn’t have any – but by painting Mum a large, glossy, orange sign with a yellow dandelion on it. He stuck it in the front garden on a large wooden stick. It stayed there until the council ordered it to be removed after complaints from neighbours. There was Horace, who hadn’t paid a penny since the day he arrived. Mum said she was giving him the benefit of the doubt, but when his social security cheque finally came through, he just vanished without giving her any of it. Two plain-clothes policemen turned up looking for him, though they didn’t say exactly why. I showed them Horace’s room, which they searched. When they lifted his mattress, they found Mum’s missing kitchen knives on top of a stack of porn magazines, which made me think I should maybe have a lock on my bedroom door. Mum didn’t seem to take any of it seriously though, and laughed when she discovered where her knives had gone. She said she had no idea Horace was such a loony.
A proper lunatic did, in fact, stay in my room. Maybe he wasn’t an actual lunatic, but he was definitely a schizophrenic. When he turned up, Mum made me give up my bedroom for him, as she had too many bookings. So I slept in the lounge with her, pondering over the life of the man who slept in my bed.
His name was Winston, and we knew he was a schizophrenic because his wife told us. ‘It’s just a temporary arrangement. I’m looking to buy us a house in another area,’ she said. ‘He’s near his doctors here so it’s better he doesn’t come house-hunting with me. Winston won’t be any troubl
e, he’s drugged up to here,’ she said, tapping her frazzled forehead.
When Winston’s wife visited him, I would sit outside my bedroom door and listen. They didn’t really have conversations, they had long silences, but even the silences fascinated me. I imagined the two of them sitting on my single bed holding hands.
Once I did hear them having a long conversation or, rather, she was talking a lot, about their children. She kept saying that she was sorry. So sorry. And I heard sobbing sounds, but I didn’t know which one of them the sounds came from. She didn’t come back to see him after that. All I could think about was his kids, and whether they would ever see him again and what it must be like to have a schizophrenic as a father. Mum had to contact social services eventually, as Winston’s bill was no longer being paid.
‘I guess she just couldn’t take it any more,’ Mum said. ‘He was too much of a burden. It’s hard living with a burden like that.’
I wondered if she was thinking of Dad, and if he had been a burden too. I was beginning to realise there were different kinds of mental problems. There was the visible kind and the invisible. Nobody could have guessed from looking at Dad what went on inside his head. He seemed perfectly normal from the outside. Perhaps it would have been better if he had looked on the outside like how he felt inside. It might have saved him. I would have looked at him and known then. Everybody would. He wouldn’t have got a job, he wouldn’t have had that car. If he was anything on the out side like he was on the inside he would have been put into intensive care or drugged up to the eyeballs, and watched over. At least he would have had a chance at life.
A van turned up and took Winston away. I wasn’t there; Mum told me. But I imagined him leaving, his dark suit containing the vastness of his body. As he slowly descended the stairs with his heavy treads, I saw him focusing on something that nobody else could see, a nugget of life that still continued, somewhere in his brain, a memory of childhood, of running through a field of yellow corn, trying to catch up with the end of a rainbow.
brynn
There’d been so many jobs over the years she can’t remember them all. She liked the one where she worked in a pub in Offerton. ‘Hurry up please! It’s time!’ It had decent customers and she rode to work on a bicycle. What ever became of that bike? She can’t remember. Where do things go? Where does time go?
Sometimes she feels a little guilty that her work meant that Ann especially was always getting foisted on people when she was little. In an emergency once, she even left her with the lollipop lady – though Ann loved being in her house and never stopped talking about the lollipop lady’s counter in the kitchen, where she had sat on a stool and eaten her soup. She had let Ann enjoy talking about the counter, even though she herself thought that kitchen counters were very common.
She remembers the sharp face of the childminder Ann used to go to when she was three. Once, Ann woke up crying in the night and talked about being pushed onto a bed. When she tried to get to the bottom of it the childminder admitted that in the afternoons she went to bed for a sleep with all the kids, squeezed into her double bed. She finally stopped Ann going there when someone from work saw her in Stockport Market with all the other children the childminder looked after, all tied together with a rope, supposedly to keep them from straying.
There are some right characters out there, she thinks, smiling to herself. She ponders on the different types that have come and stayed at the guesthouse. If Ronald had been around he’d never’ve been up to running a place like this, that’s for sure. He would have hated having people all around him, he would have seen it as a major aggravation. Sometimes she does too, but it comes with the job and somehow it keeps her going.
what branches grow?
‘I’m a socialist,’ I said.
‘If I could put all my thirty-five years of knowledge in your fourteen-year-old head then you’d be a very clever little girl, that’s what you’d be,’ our head of year, Moonface, told me. Everybody called him Moonface because his face was round and cratered with acne scars and always seemed to be looming over us.
He looked down at my pink Jelly Baby sandals and fluorescent green ankle socks and sneered.
‘What’s this all about?’ he asked, pointing at them.
‘It’s different,’ I said, regretting what an unoriginal statement I’d made.
‘Different?’ he snorted.
‘I’m not interested in being like other people,’ I said, feeling lame.
‘That’s rich,’ he said. ‘If you were actually a true socialist you wouldn’t give a flying hoot that you were like other people. In fact, you’d want to be.’
He brought his pent-up face too close to mine. I thought of Dad and his rage that seemed to come from nowhere.
‘What do you say to that, hey?’
Moonface had a reputation for making girl pupils cry. Little did he know I hadn’t cried for years and had no intention of doing so again, so he had no chance.
‘Cat got your tongue?’ he said.
He lifted the bow of the large, purple ribbon tied around my spiky hair.
‘And what’s this when it’s at home?’ he asked.
‘A ribbon.’
‘Don’t go being sarcastic with me.’
‘I wasn’t being sarky. I was stating a fact.’
‘Get it off. Now.’
I unravelled the ribbon. After that, Moonface ordered me to report to the deputy headmistress, Mrs Myers, each morning before the start of school so she could check what I was wearing. I knew Mrs Myers, as I was in her Personal and Social Development class. She talked about the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or venereal disease with equal passion, which shocked the entire class, considering her granny-like appearance. She was open to any kind of discussion, including rumours over whether Moonface was having an affair with the Art teacher. Much to the disbelief of my class, she exposed that this affair had indeed occurred, but was over, and that our head of year was back with his wife and children. I began to wonder if all fathers have affairs and, one way or another, leave their children.
The only teacher I admired was Mrs Pegg, my English teacher. She was strict and terrifying, but I found it a relief that she could control the unruly pupils that larked about the corridors and classrooms, vying for attention. I once saw her slap a disruptive lad across the face in the cloakrooms and wanted to cheer. We all worked hard in her class to reach her high standards. When she told Mum at parents’ evening that I was university material and that she would love to have me as a daughter, despite the fact that I dyed my hair, I felt like the chosen one. Because of Mrs Pegg, English was my favourite subject and I preferred reading to anything else. I became a regular at second-hand bookshops, preferring them to libraries as I could keep the books forever and write my name in the front and make notes in the margins.
Mrs Myers must have heard that I was doing well in English because she soon stopped bothering with what I was wearing and asked me what I was reading instead.
‘Where are we this week then?’
‘Jude the Obscure,’ I told her.
‘Ah, I see,’ she said, smiling. ‘Read all you can!’
*
I didn’t seem to thrive in my other classes though. In History the teacher returned my essay on the industrial revolution without a grade or any comments. I knew it was good, so that didn’t seem right. After class I asked her why.
‘Perhaps you could take some time to consider why the authors you copied have the opinions they do and have a think about why they think the way they do,’ she said slowly, as though I was daft.
‘But I didn’t even look at a book! I just went off what we did in class. These are my ideas, honest Miss! Honest!’
I was mortified and could see she thought I was lying.
‘I’m a socialist,’ I said. ‘I have left-wing leanings.’
‘Oh,’ she said, without listening or looking at me. ‘I see.’
*
A series of Careers classes we
re given by Mr Twill, the Woodwork teacher.
‘It’s important to have clean nails when you go to an interview,’ Mr Twill said.
I looked down at my broken fingernails, with the lines of dirt beneath them that only seemed to come clean when kneading pastry in Cookery class, and I wondered what age Dad had left school. I figured it was fourteen, because that was when people used to leave in the olden days, but I realised I didn’t know for certain, and I didn’t know if Dad had any qualifications either.
Mr Twill’s dreary voice mentioned army training for the boys and secretarial courses for the girls. I thought of being asked what I wanted to do when I was a kid and telling people I wanted to be a scientist. I thought of all the types of jobs in the world and I realised that the kind of jobs Mum and Dad did were never the kind I heard people saying they wanted when they grew up. Our Maths teacher had recently told us we were the lucky generation, as our futures would be composed of leisure lifestyles, where we would all be paid handsomely for doing part-time jobs.
‘And finally, just a last thought,’ Mr Twill said, pausing for a while to torture us. Beneath his desk I noted, curiously, the ankle suspenders that held up his brown socks. ‘If you work hard at your exams you might get a job. It’s unlikely to be a job you want, but you might get a job.’
beat their wings
Mum spotted the clairvoyant’s notice in the classified advertisements of the local paper, below the Under a Fiver section. He wanted a room to use one afternoon a week, as he was based in Oldham and some of his regular customers came from Stockport and found it quite a trek. Mum arranged for him to come round and look over our back room, which was the TV and dining room for the guests, and mostly unused in the daytime.