by Carol Morley
Peter worked at the McVitie’s factory and brought home boxes of reject biscuits for everyone to share. Valerie waited in every night hoping her married boyfriend would ring. Philip, who took my room, had an inherited eye condition that meant he would eventually go blind, and there was Celia, who worked for an insurance company and caught me snooping about her room.
‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ Celia shouted.
But I couldn’t really explain. I often looked through all their bedrooms, to try and get a feel for how other people lived. I wanted to tell her that I wanted to crawl inside of her, because that’s what I really wanted to do, to move into someone’s body and mind for a while, to see what they saw, to think what they thought, to try and compare and discover if my life was really strange or wrong. But that sounded really weird and I knew I was better off saying nothing at all.
‘I have every intention of putting a lock on my door,’ Celia said, though she never did.
Last to arrive was Barry, a civil servant from Northern Ireland, who said he was on a civil service scheme for workers to leave Northern Ireland for a year to get away from the Troubles and experience peace. Poor Barry. Of all the places he could have gone to, I pitied him being landed with Stockport. He seemed happy enough though. He was always whistling and cheerfully did the piles of washing-up that everyone else left.
I was eating a misshapen biscuit and watching the local news on the telly when I first heard of the Falklands. I considered myself a pacifist, but secretly I longed for a war. I had read the war poets at school and I knew about the pity of war, but there was still a part of me that wanted to live through conflict. Lots of lads in town had once had their hair shaved to be extras in Yanks, a film shot around our way. I had seen the film and it made me think that war had its good side. I wanted to hide in air-raid shelters and sing songs with neighbours and wave goodbye to the troops and make do and mend. I thought it would be fun to paint my legs with tea and draw black lines up the back to resemble stockings. We would have street parties to celebrate our victory.
The war seemed to happen elsewhere though. There were no aircraft overhead, no air-raid sirens, no bombs and no GIs bringing chewing gum from America, not that we needed any, we seemed to have plenty of our own stuck to the pavement. The togetherness I was hoping for never happened.
What was the point of a war if it never happened around where you lived? I wanted to see the sky lit up with a falling bomb. I wanted to discover how brave I could be and crawl through the rubble looking for survivors. I wanted to imagine Dad bravely fighting on the front – though he’d probably be old enough now to be in the Dad’s Army; but there didn’t seem to be one of those either.
‘Northern Ireland is staying neutral on the Falklands,’ Barry told me, which seemed sensible, seeing as it was a daft kind of war.
‘It all comes down to land ownership,’ Barry continued. ‘It’s nothing like the Second World War. Now that was a war that needed to be fought; it was a war to stop Hitler.’
But when men from both sides started dying in the Falklands I was ashamed that I had ever wished for it to happen. Some of the soldiers from the Cheshire Regiment had gone to my school. They were lost now, gone forever, they had no choices about life any more, or death. War really was closer to home than I’d thought.
*
I had finished my mock English Literature exam and was hiding from everyone in a toilet cubicle, deciding to wait until the crowds had died down to emerge. Once it sounded quiet, I came out to find Jilly waiting for me. I felt the slow creep of old fear and tried to snuff it out. I gripped my insides and the memory of that yellow letter at primary school. It was like a poem that I’d been made to learn off by heart.
‘I wanted to tell yer summat,’ she said.
She was about to mess with my head but at the same time as feeling ancient doom, I was also intrigued that after all this time she still had it in for me. Her face was the same, pretty and framed by her strawberry blond hair. Her chest was flat. I had changed so much. What I hadn’t changed myself with make-up and haircuts and hair dye, my body had finished for me. The only thing different about Jilly was that she was taller and not as cocky. She looked sheepishly down at the concrete floor like she had something to be ashamed about.
‘The thing is… I wanted to tell yer…’ she trailed off. ‘I thought yer should know…’
She looked down at her shoes.
‘Me sister’s husband…’ she said.
What was it? What did her sister’s husband have to do with me? I felt like I was watching an episode of Coronation Street unfold.
Jilly watched herself knock the metal tips of her scuffed granny shoes together, like she was Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz trying to get out of Kansas. Or trying to get back there. I waited.
She looked at me and took an intake of breath and quickly exhaled her words.
‘Yer see, I thought yer should know, me brother-in-law done what your dad did in ’is car.’
‘In his car?’ I repeated, realising I sounded moronic and posh, which was the last thing I wanted to seem in front of Jilly. Luckily, she didn’t appear to notice. I wondered how she knew how Dad had actually died. Who had told her?
‘Me sister wanted a divorce but Tim couldn’t cope or summat like that. She’s dead upset, obviously.’
It was a connection after all this time but it all seemed too late. Jilly’s bad news wasn’t my news.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, uselessly.
‘I just thought yer should know, that’s all,’ Jilly said.
She fiddled with her gold ear stud and watched me. The words slowly formed on my lips.
‘How did yer know how me dad died?’
Jilly released the ball of her earring.
‘It were in local paper – me sister saw it at the time.’
I’d not seen it in the paper, and hearing it now felt like I had just found out about Dad dying all over again. I felt humiliated and my cheeks reddened. I rushed into a toilet cubicle and bolted the door.
I heard Jilly scuffling her feet on the other side of the door and imagined thrusting her head down a dirty toilet and pulling the chain.
She knocked on the door.
‘All right?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine ta.’
‘Well I better be getting off… See yer then.’
I sat on the toilet and put my hands out in front of me. They were trembling. I placed them underneath my thighs and sat on them. Dad had died five years ago. Why did it only seem like yesterday? It was so long ago – why had I not got over it? I was different then. He wouldn’t recognise me if he came back, that child he knew was gone – inside and out. He would be disappointed and he’d think I was common. I knew that for sure. I only existed like I did because he did not. If someone cut me open and sawed through any one of my bones they would find a ring, like the rings trees had to show their age, but my ring would be thick and black and mark the time Dad had gone and disappeared.
For years, Jilly had felt like the enemy. Someone who went through life sneering at people, with nothing in her heart. But now she and I were even because someone close to her had done what Dad did. Now she knew how it felt to have no answers. But it was all too late.
I thought about her yellow letter. The words linked to Dad and to everything bad I had ever felt. I knew that I would never forget it for the rest of my life. It was crawling around inside of me, ready to bite. It bit me in my dreams and in my waking hours, and it followed me everywhere. All the letters did. Dad’s suicide letter, with its photocopied creases and folds, his last words – even though they made no mention of me. The letter Mum had told me that the Granddad I had never met had written to Dad asking to see him. The letter for me, from Grandma Westbourne, for when I was married. Did these letters explain anything? Would Grandma’s letter provide an explanation for everything, for what she had done to Dad? I knew somehow that I would never see that letter, that I would never get married and have chi
ldren, that I was never going to be able to live my life like that.
I opened my eyes and focused on the graffiti scrawled on the door in front of me. Amongst the swear words and leery rhymes, it was mostly names, a stab at telling the world that they had existed. Under the peeling yellowing paint, there were other names being called. There were other names under there, a whole history.
brynn
The newspaper cutting from the Stockport Advertiser is yellowed with age, almost brittle, as she unfolds it now. She remembers cutting it out, thinking of all the people who had seen it, who knew her business, and how ashamed she had been. She reads it again:
LOCAL MAN - INQUEST
A Stockport man, who was found in his car with a length of rubber pipe running from the exhaust pipe into the vehicle, died of carbon monoxide poisoning, an inquest held at Slough Guildhall Coroner’s Court heard. Ronald Westbourne, 40, of Oak Grove, Heaton Moor, who was married with three children, was discovered in a secluded lane by a passing couple walking their dog. A letter found in the car, said the coroner, was of a private nature but ‘convinced me that he was suffering from acute depression.’ The inquest heard that Mr Westbourne had a history of depression and that at the time of his death the balance of his mind was disturbed.
What about the balance of her own mind? Would electric shock treatments give her some kind of relief? It had never helped him though, so it’s probably a ridiculous idea. She decides she no longer wants to keep the newspaper cutting. She folds it into a tiny square, holds it tight in her hand and feels the sharp edges dig into her palm. But she doesn’t let go.
da da da
‘I spent a whole hour driving around looking for you,’ said my Geography teacher, Mrs Green. She had trapped me in the corridor on the way to my English Literature exam, furious that I had not turned up for my Geography exam. ‘If you’d taken it, Ann, you may well have managed a grade-one CSE,’ she said. I didn’t tell her that I looked down on CSEs as qualifications and therefore they meant nothing to me. I merely shrugged. In return, she was enraged by my apparent lack of interest.
‘Don’t you want to make something of yourself?’ Mrs Green asked.
‘I want to make hats,’ I told her. ‘I want to be a famous milliner.’
The hat idea had only come to me a few days before. I had no real concept of what making hats involved, or if you really could get famous making them.
‘Well I suppose you would be following in Stockport history, as it was once a hat manufacturing town of great repute,’ Mrs Green said. ‘Even so, without qualifications you’ll have a tough time getting anywhere, young lady.’
*
Something happened in Manchester at this time that made school, teachers and exams fade completely into the background. The Haçienda nightclub opened for the first time. It was named after the Spanish word for home. It became mine.
The Haçienda was a vast, industrial-styled space that was often underpopulated, but downstairs was a small cocktail bar named the Gay Traitor, apparently after the British spy Anthony Blunt. This was where everyone congregated for warmth. In the first week it opened I started off drinking Pernod and black, and by the end of the week I was drinking whisky. I hadn’t drunk for four years, and I wondered why not, because it made me confident, strong and witty. It also gave me the urge to sleep with almost every person I spoke to.
At the end of the second week of my regular attendance at the Haçienda, fuelled by whisky, I met a lad who described me as ‘very excitable’, and I decided he would be the one I would lose my virginity to. I made it impossible for him to decline and he left the club with me clasped to his side, staggering like a three-legged race back towards Hulme Crescents, where he lived. He talked of streets in the sky and how every block of flats in Hulme was named after an architect.
The thrill of booze is that you get black holes; whole pieces of a puzzle go missing. The bits I remember of that night are disjointed but strong. Fragments of conversation and places and feelings. I remember an underpass with walls covered in graffiti, which looked too neat.
‘I bet if this were a play on telly you’d say it weren’t what real graffiti looked like,’ I said to the lad. I’m not sure if he replied.
I was in a bedroom stretched out on a mattress on the floor.
‘Don’t wanna get you pregnant,’ I remember he said, opening a drawer and taking out a condom.
My dress was pushed up to my thighs and then he was on top of me, pumping away. Through his window I counted the lighted squares of windows outside and there were a lot, probably because hardly anyone in Hulme had a job to get up for.
My first time with a boy. I closed my eyes and wondered if his body inside mine would make me understand him or other people. Was he thinking? I didn’t think so. He seemed like an animal, thrusting motion into me. I thought that this was how life came about. If it wasn’t for the condom I could have had a baby, a little life of my own. The possibility of something growing inside and taking me over, the strange thought of that. A dull pain, a dull ache in my head, between my legs, I wondered if there was any booze anywhere, another drink.
He rolled from me and lit a cigarette and blew out smoke into the chilly air. I held his soft cock in my hand. I kept reminding myself that this was an important moment, and I should have something to remember it by, something solid. Later, when he was looking around for something to drink, I looked at his sheets, hoping to find virgin blood. I wanted to cut it from the sheet and keep it forever, but there wasn’t any blood and I felt cheated.
The next day when we woke up he put his fingers inside of me and measured me up. He told me his name was Jay.
Jay was a handsome university drop-out with a strong jawline and jet black, wavy hair. He’d given up his architecture degree, preferring the Haçienda to studying. We began to see each other and, because he was on the dole and broke most of the time, he seemed to owe money to everyone he knew, crossing roads and hiding in dark corners to avoid them. I spent most of my time thinking about Jay. I was always thinking about places we could do it, and how I would do it to him. I had graduated from laying flat as an envelope underneath him, to a variety of positions. One extended night Jay had seven orgasms and he notched each one into his wooden headboard with a penknife.
Jay said that we should have sex in the bath, that it was the greatest thing in the world. The problem was that he shared the bathroom with other people and it was hard to ever get much time in my bathroom at home, what with all the tenants. So we never did try it. We had sex where we could though – in his bed, in my bed, outside and, once, in the Haçienda, on the balcony that jutted out over the cocktail bar.
Jay taught me the rules of cricket and told me that Samuel Beckett had said that in cricket the whole of life was played out. I thought back to my teacher Mrs Finzi in junior school and how much she had loved cricket, and I tried to work out how cricket rules applied to life. I listened to the game on the radio and noted down the results on a special score sheet Jay kept. Maiden over, wrong-footed, all-rounder, follow through, innings, sticky wicket, leg bye, dead ball, fast bowling, the run-up, run out, slider, back foot, point of release.
After we had been seeing each other a couple of months, I assumed that what I had with Jay was real, a relationship to keep hold of. I told him with a hopeful smile that he’d most definitely bowled me over and I asked him if I could move in with him, but he shifted about uneasily before he came up with an answer.
‘It was a good innings while it lasted, but I’m just a tease, remember?’
And that was that, we were over and, to use one of his crass cricket expressions, I was stumped.
*
School was over too and the prosecution against Mum for my truanting had taken too long to go through the system and was dropped. Mum got us both new jobs working for an international market research company.
Our first assignment was referred to as ‘in the field’. I thought a better name would have been ‘in the street�
�� as that was where we had to stop people. Armed with a clipboard and sheets of questionnaires, I approached strangers and asked them to come up to a room with me to try out a new kind of dissolving aspirin. In return they would get a free Mars Bar.
When we reached our target, the supervisor bought us all cream cakes. We sat around the room and I listened to the talk of nappies and teething and children’s illnesses – wondering why it was only women who did this kind of job. Mum joined in and I wondered if this was it, this was my life.
‘Ann had to have grommets in her ears when she was little,’ Mum said. ‘She was as deaf as a post before that. It’s an issue of catarrh.’
When she talked like this, Mum made our life together sound normal, when it was anything but in my mind. I always thought that the only time things had ever felt normal to me was when Dad was alive. But I knew that life hadn’t been normal then either. I was mistaking being a conventional family for being normal. Gripping the edge of my plastic clipboard, I bowed it in my hands. Mum was eating a cake, and I watched critically as she licked the cream from around her lips. I was not eating cake. I did not want to get fat like her.
My brother had recently interviewed Martin Fry, the lead singer from ABC, and he had said that the most important thing you needed to get you where you wanted to be was the power of the imagination. I decided I had no imagination. After all, why else was I in a dead-end job in Stockport pushing aspirins onto unwitting passers-by?
Maybe I was destined to work in a factory for the rest of my life or, as my mum lamely joked, maybe I would end up behind the counter at Woolworth’s. I wasn’t much good at anything. Not school, not music. I didn’t know how to play an instrument properly and I was definitely too old to learn. When I had been going out with Janis and she had told me to write, I had been too scared to show myself up, unable to express all the thoughts and feelings that raged inside of me like poison arrows. I was useless; so how on earth was I going to get away from all this? It was dawning on me that just because you wanted something to happen, it was not necessarily going to, even if you spent large parts of your life imagining it, as Martin Fry suggested. I was stuck.