by Paul Magrs
Big Sue was telling her it was good to see her out and about again. She followed Elsie into Boots. “No more trouble with your Tom, then? He’s back to rights?”
Sighing, Elsie led the way up and down the medical counters. Sometimes it surprised her how Big Sue liked to tittle-tattle. She thought the woman was more religious than that. Her mind should be set on higher things.
“He’s never quite right,” Elsie said. “He’s never going to be all right, exactly.”
“Oh,” said Big Sue and they came to a standstill in front of a display of ‘Complementary Treatments’. Elsie looked as if she’d startled herself with her own candour. She went on.
“You see, I think what Tom’s spent his whole life suffering from is disappointment.” Elsie shrugged. “So it’s never going to be easy.” She picked up a box. “Look at these. Health bracelets. They’re meant to touch your pressure points and do you some good.”
“Yeah?” Big Sue hadn’t seen them before. Bangles in silver, copper and gold plate. “They’re expensive.”
“It says here it’s like acupuncture.”
“Is that what you’ve come in for?”
Elsie nodded. “For Tom to try. Fifteen quid isn’t much, really, if it will make a difference.”
“Will a man wear a bangle like this?”
“I could have it engraved, maybe.”
Big Sue examined the box. “Do they work for depression?”
Elsie said, “If they got on your pressure points for disappointment and depression, then we’d all be wearing bangles.”
“Remember charm bracelets?” said Big Sue. “I used to wear one that rattled, it was so full. I got sick of it in the end. I had a tiny glass box on it. It had an emergency five-pound note folded up inside.”
“That’s a good idea, that. In case you’re caught short.”
“I can’t remember if I ever pulled it out when I stopped wearing the bracelet. Are you buying that?”
“Why not? He’s got his birthday coming up.”
Full of gusto Elsie took on this new phase. She was taking care of her man’s body and mind, conscious of all his differences. It was like tending to him; a cautious botany. She was down the chemist’s, buying him pills to keep him pepped up, vitamins for his blood and joints, fish oils for his heart and bones. Even this silver health bangle to put on his wrist, to act upon his pressure points and keep him well.
Keep him well, pray God, keep him right in the head. And in one piece. Elsie’s man had been restored to her and she wasn’t about to let him go again.
Here, take this, she’d chivvy him earnestly and pop him a pill, a chewable something-or-other from over the counter at Boots. He would submit to this, to her nervy care. In his own way, Tom was glad to be back.
The cynical part of Elsie’s mind was telling her, Of course he’s glad, he knows which side his bread is buttered on. Your man is one who, in his time, has been among the lowest of the low. He’s drank, he’s lived on the streets of London, several times they’ve locked him in a mental home. He can see that past lives like those are something you can go back to. Any time, any day, you can wake up and you’ll be back the way things were. You should never lose sight of the bad old days, they’re never gone for good.
This was the awful side of Elsie, which tried to trip her up at every turn and whispered speculation at her: Does he really mean that? Is he laughing behind your back? What is he really trying to say? It was the voice that would suggest, rationally and quite out of the blue, that she throw herself down the stairs in the morning. Or in the path of a bus on Woodham Way.
The good part of Elsie — the part she hoped she listened to most — was saying she should count her lucky stars. Elsie at her most optimistic let herself think chances came round like the painted horses on a merry-go-round.
She wouldn’t let herself take Tom for granted. It became summer and she started to take pride in her garden again. She made her lawn neat as a billiard table. She would urge Tom to sit out in his deck chair; she rigged up a table for him and encouraged him to start drawing again. From their garden he could see all of Phoenix Court. Surely a man of his obvious, if neglected, talents could find a lot to divert him.
Pale, long-faced, tired-eyed Tom sat invalid-snug in his deck chair in those weeks of early summer. The sunlight gained strength and soon he asked Elsie to stop putting a tartan blanket over his shoulders when he sat outside.
For a long time he stared at the cartridge paper Elsie had taped to his worn drawing board. He remembered how he used to love taping down the paper. Unrolling a creamy sheet, stretching it out; the muted squawk of the masking tape when he ripped off four strips to stick down the paper’s corners. In a studied, ritualistic way Elsie aped the way she had seen Tom do it, and that touched his heart as she fussed about. Her elbows jabbed into his stringy body as she worked, and he put up with it. He tasted her scent on the warm air, of talcum powder and dry sweat.
It was a week or so before he took up his pencils and started to draw Phoenix Court. The cars, the houses, the play-park climbing frame, the sapling trees and the people passing by. “Why don’t you start drawing me again?” Elsie suggested, bringing him out a pot of tea on a tray. But he didn’t draw Elsie again. He concentrated on the square box houses with their roofs of isosceles triangles. He perfected them in crisp isometric projection and his drawings were clean, almost clinical, and each of them similar to the last. Outside each house, he’d put a small figure. Just a few lines, the finest of sketches. Elsie pointed out they looked like the free toy in a box of cornflakes. He ignored her and did his figures with eloquent dashes, as from a Chinese brush. Each one, you could tell who it was meant to be. Somehow Tom always caught them. Elsie saw how he would grab up his pencil as a neighbour came in sight for a few seconds. He got them with a minimum of perfect strokes. “The way you all flit around,” he said, “I’ve got to be quick.”
When he said this, Elsie had worn herself out shopping. “Some of us have to flit around,” she said. “We have to keep ourselves busy.” Then she wished she hadn’t snapped like this, and she praised his neat stack of drawings. They lay in the grass and she sat beside Tom, both of them laughing as she went through the pile. Here was Nesta, slump-shouldered, glaring at the ground. This one Fran, galloping in slippers, looking for a misplaced child. Penny slopping artistically about, Big Sue hugging her handbag to her bosom.
“Can I show everyone these drawings?” she asked him.
Tom shrugged and smiled. She could tell he was pleased.
Things were getting better. They didn’t talk about the things that pained them. They never forced themselves to have difficult scenes. In the evenings they listened to their records and saw no one. They took equal turns at playing songs for each other. A dialogue in their favourite tunes. Elsie dug out Shirley Bassey. As August came she realised that her song of the moment was ‘As Long As He Needs Me’. Tom had rediscovered his westerns LP. For Elsie he played `The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’. The waw-waw-waw part, the bit that sounded like being out on the prairie, thrilled her. It was August and they left all the doors and windows open, as did the rest of Phoenix Court. It was a sticky month, bringing everyone out of doors, moving slowly, reluctant to talk and stir each other up.
Elsie and Tom kept themselves apart, as they preferred now. They stayed away from anyone they might row with. Penny was someone they hardly saw at all. This hurt Elsie who, during the spring, had found herself very attached to the girl. But people don’t always turn out the way you expect. When Elsie caught a glimpse of Penny now, across the way or round the shops, Penny seemed self-absorbed and different. Elsie couldn’t imagine having anything to do with her. Penny didn’t even seem to come from the same place.
It was Craig’s absence that hurt Elsie most. For long stretches of the summer months they hardly saw him. His mother feared that, now he was apart from Penny, he’d go off the rails again. She thought he was too suggestible and the signs were not good. The wors
t thing was when they bumped into him, one night in August, at Nesta’s fire.
Unlike many others round there, Nesta had never held a party. She went to everyone else’s but she never returned the favour. It was no more than anyone expected. This was the woman who went borrowing milk and bread and eggs round the doors and never brought anything back. And it wasn’t as though everyone was dying to get inside her house to see what it was like. Half the women in the street wouldn’t be seen dead inside Nesta’s house.
Chez Dixon things were changing. Something was happening to Nesta. Some would have said it was hormones, some would have said it was genes. Some might have said it was conscience, she’d realised that she was bringing up three little bairns in a home that wasn’t a nice one. Most of the ladies of the Court, however, decided that Nesta was pulling up her bootstraps because of her new bairn, Keanu, born early that summer. By August Nesta was spring-cleaning madly.
With the baby in a papoose she stood in her garden and shouted out instructions to her husband and the two young daughters. And out they came carrying old rubbish: duff furniture, dirty clothes, rubbishy old toys. Everything looked as if it came from a car-boot sale, and most of it probably had. Nesta used to spend Sunday mornings rummaging up and down the rows of cars parked at the equestrian centre, but now that was all over. No more cluttering up their home. She had to learn new habits. And everything with pointed corners and sharp bits had to go, as well: she had a tiny son to protect.
Keanu watched all this from his mother’s back, as she told the rest of her dazed family to build a stack of all their old stuff on the common ground at the back of the Court. A bonfire was inexpertly heaped and humped in the middle of the sun-dried grass. A curiously unsettling, pathetic bonfire, too, being composed of such ordinary things. Dolls’ heads and lampshades stuck out, piles of old books and catalogues, the wound, frayed coils of curtains and used clothes. Word went round that Nesta would torch it all, one particular Monday night after it got dark. She had a certain sense of drama. The rest of the street conferred; they’d be out there to watch. Nesta’s voluntary, purging house-fire was the closest she’d get to throwing a party.
Watching from her top window, Elsie saw Nesta set a torch to the unstable pyramid of her belongings. Elsie was sipping a very strong gin and tonic.
In the room behind her, Tom would glug back his in sharp mouthfuls as he dressed. He was going to some effort to dress tonight, for seeing the neighbours again. Elsie’s heart warmed; she was returning him to the community.
Friday night she had come home with a bottle of gin. When she’d bought it, Judith at the shop had asked once again if she was back on the drink, even with Tom home. Elsie had answered her gruffly. Bringing booze back into the house was her test. She wanted to drink and Tom could lump it. He was dependent on her now and he couldn’t kick up the kind of fuss that he used to. At last she could have her own way. Maybe everything she wanted. In full view of Tom she unpacked the Friday-night shopping on the kitchen benches and there was the bottle of gin. No tonic, no lemon, just the booze. And Tom hadn’t said a word. He’d taken two glasses from the cupboard and they’d settled in for a night of serious drinking. Saturday and Sunday had been the same. Sitting across from each other, trying out only the most companionable of conversations, drinking steadily through bottle after bottle. Her housekeeping money was vanishing.
Maybe Tom was drinking only because it was time to see the neighbours again. Well, whatever it takes to see you through. Elsie had reached that conclusion once again. Life takes a lot of nerve, and whatever can give you nerve is all right.
Tom clung to her arm like an agoraphobe all the way across the street. But when other people bustled around them, when they entered the gathering crowd, he straightened up, let go of her arm, smiled and started to murmur hellos. Elsie was proud.
Here was the fire in full spate.
The street stood back in a ring and held their breath, watching Nesta’s family’s unwanted things turn black, turn incandescent, crumble into nothing. Plastic flayed off like skin and whirled into the updraught. They watched MFI flat-pack cabinets burst apart and shudder into useless pieces. There were pops and crashes from inside the burning pyramid. The neighbours looked at Nesta, standing with her arm round her husband (who still wore his anorak in spite of the heat) and her kids clustered about her. She had the satisfied smirk of things going according to plan.
Everyone thought about burning their own stuff.
“Why keep anything at all?” Fran asked her husband. “Half the stuff we’ve got is knacked and unmendable. We should do what Nesta’s done.”
“She’ll get into bother off the council, having a fire so near the houses,” Frank said. “You won’t get a chance to burn your stuff here.”
“I wonder if she goes out and buys all new things.” Fran had started to think about getting shot of the accumulated junk of her cupboards and drawers. After four kids, the house was chockablock. Imagine having her kitchen drawers to herself again! Neatness and room.
“But it’s like she can’t live with her past, her old things,” said Penny to Mark. “She’s deluding herself.”
“It’s worth a try,” he said. “Are your eyeballs itching with the heat? Mine are.”
“I love going through all my mam’s old things,” Penny said. “Records and clothes and that. Nesta won’t have anything to pass on to her kids.”
Nesta’s kids looked awed by the flames.
Elsie was saying to Tom, “Look at that filthy old mattress they’ve got. That should have been burned years ago.”
“Leave them be, Elsie,” he said and she thought she could hear in his tone that old authority.
Then the lads from over the street were there, their shapes hazy and threatening through the flames.
“Our Craig,” said Elsie. “He’s back with that lot.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Steve was shouting across the small crowd. “Are you burning witches?” His mates all laughed, Craig with them. “You can take your pick out of all the bloody witches round here.”
“Just ignore them,” came Nesta’s voice. She lit a sparkler for Vicki, her eldest.
“Is this your stuff?” Steve asked Nesta, coming round to see her.
Nesta gazed up at him. She looked stupid and defiant and Fran thought, Good luck to you, pet.
“Is that stuff from inside your house?” Steve laughed. “You must come from a fucking pigsty.”
“Eh, look,” said Frank, weighing in. “Just you lot leave them alone.” He saw then that all of the gang from the Forsythe house were out, gathered around the fire.
“We should burn some of these witches,” one of Steve’s mates suggested.
“I’m going to talk to them,” Tom told Elsie.
“Tom, you’re only just back on your feet,” Elsie began. Her throat was dry with soot and gin.
“You boys think you can carry on how you want,” Tom said.
“Oh, it’s him,” said Steve. “What do you want?”
“I want you all to go home.” Tom was standing his ground. “I want you to stop hanging around like you do, scaring people. I want things to change around here.”
“Things aren’t gunna change,” said Steve.
Craig was there. Elsie stared at him. She willed him to talk, to stand up for her Tom.
“You’re just boys. You need something better than scaring old women.”
“Hark at fucking Gandhi.”
“You used to be at my Rainbow Club, Steve. Years ago. I remember. What about God?”
Steve laughed, and his mates followed. “We only went to your crappy club for the cheap sweets and that. You know that.”
“Something rotten has happened to you all.”
“Maybe.” Steve grinned, tossing his hair. “But you’re the one who’s crackers.”
Tom’s face went dark. “What?”
“I said, you’re the fucking loony.”
Tom flew at him with both
hands outstretched. He caught Steve off guard and knocked him down in the dirt, yards from the fire. He seemed to claw at his throat. Everyone pulled back and Steve was howling to get him off him. Craig was first onto them. He grasped his stepfather by the armpits and wrenched him up off the boy.
Before anyone could do anything else, Steve was kicking Tom in the guts while Craig held him hard. He got a few good kicks in before Mark, Tony and Frank could intervene. They got Tom away and Steve fell back on the grass, feeling his throat, which was ripped and bleeding. Over these few months Tom had let his fingernails grow.
Mark shouted at the lads, “Why don’t you lot fuck off home? You’ve done it again, you little bastards! You’ve done it all again.”
Elsie stood in shock beside Tom, who lay curled, clutching his stomach. She found her voice and yelled at Craig, over the noise of the fire and everyone else. “Tom is like your dad! He’s almost your dad! And look what you do!”
Craig was as angry and shocked as she was. He was turning, with the other lads, to go back to the Forsyths’ house. “He was never my dad. Not that old cunt. He’s poisoned you, Mam, and you can’t see.”
Elsie watched them go.
Fran took her arms. “Elsie...do you want the coppers?”
“No,” she said. “No coppers.” She said it like ticking the ‘no publicity’ box on a pools coupon.
TWENTY
I know it’s probably impossible, the whole time I’m doing it. But I’ve got to try. Can’t have him like this. How can I keep him still, though? How on earth do you make a baby lie still? So I put off doing it because it’s too difficult.
Until he wakes me in the middle of one particular night. It’s the fourth time that night he’s cried for me and I’m dead on my feet. He needs feeding. My feet thud heavily on worn carpets. I’m almost back asleep again when I go to the kitchen and feel about in the fridge. There’s one sliver of chicken breast left. It’s pale and wet, like an eyeless fish. I rock on my heels, almost passing out in the kitchen. I’m not used to living here yet, up in this flat. The streetlight is looking straight in the curtainless windows, like something off War of the Worlds. Down in the alleyway there’s a road sweeper droning away. They keep this city immaculate. In the night its centre is almost silent. You’d think I was the only one alive, standing here, clutching a ribbon of chicken meat in one hand. You’d think there was only me and my baby alive.