by Paul Magrs
She sniffs and looks at this room in which she has lived for most of her life. Refurbished, redecorated, done up and dusted, yet it still makes her give a long, fed-up sigh. As if there’s only so far you can go, doing things up. “Something new, Andrew! Have you any idea how much I’ve wanted my life to turn into something new?”
I hug my baby to me. “Jep is something new.”
“Give him to me, hinny,” she says, putting out her hands. Her wide, chapped palms. Her fingers tremble as if she’s been putting off this moment, delaying her pleasure. She takes his weight — how expertly! She puts her face right up to his tiny, exotic one. His hands bat gently at her nose, her slack cheeks.
“He’s a beautiful bairn, our Andrew.” Her puzzled frown is also full of amusement. “You clever thing! However did you manage it?”
These are the things she will do. This is what she will say. Should I take Jep on a trip to South Shields, should we catch the train from Edinburgh, from Waverley Station, and ride it to the northeast, through that wild and empty landscape, this will be our reception.
I’m in the Scarlet Empress, thinking this all up. It’s a rainy Friday afternoon. The rain has taken everyone by surprise. I’ve made one cup of coffee last ages. Her from upstairs has taken Jep for a walk. She likes to walk him to Arthur’s Seat, up past the palace, to the foot of the crags. And that’s fine. At first I was resentful of the bond they’re forming, Jep and that woman upstairs. But he needs other people around him. We all do. So I let him go out with her and I get this time alone, to think and brood. Nanna Jean says brooding isn’t a thing you should do. You depress yourself. You should be like her, she said. Be up and about and busy, busy, busy.
A man with short, strawberry-blond hair has moved tables to come and sit by me. His legs are crossed, his coffee untouched. He holds Boyz magazine wide open and studies each page slowly as if there’s stocks and shares on it. Whenever I look up, he looks up and it’s an imploring look. When I look down I can feel his eyes still on me. I should go. I should go home. I look up and he looks up and he has absolutely no expression on his face.
If the woman from upstairs can take him on long, healthy walks, then so can I. Sandra walks my baby up to Arthur’s Seat. They walk up the crags to catch the air, to stretch their legs. The air is so bracing up there, she says. You see it come in off the sea. Cool, salty, endless air and all that light!
If she can walk my son up there, then so can I. If that is his favourite trip out, then I should do it too.
Little mite, does he even know who is taking him out?
Marched himself to the top of the hill, and marched it down again. Look at the crags. Cinder toffee, how long and high and regular they lie, across from the city! What a distance! I’m not used to walking. Down Queen Street, Princes Street, down Leith Walk. These days I’m not getting my exercise in. So now there’s Sandra telling me I ought to get out and about. Fill my lungs and the lungs of my son with air. Cheeky mare.
With the friends I’ve got, the people I’m meeting now, it’s all too often me listening, then going, “Oh yeah. Right. I knew that.” But I didn’t. I’m waiting to be told things. Even I know that walking up hills like this, so you can see the city stretched out, even I know this is good for you.
When I lived in Aycliffe I never walked anywhere. What else were the Road Ranger buses for? And where would you go, apart from down the precinct, the shops and the gym? There was nowhere. Aycliffe is surrounded for miles by farmland, fields and motorway. Fields yellow with rape, grey green with scrubby pasture, tarmac grey studded with the squashed purple carcasses of rabbits and starlings. In the middle of nowhere. There’s loads of space to walk in, but what do you look at? Where would you head to? I can’t see the point in walking with no object. I like to think there’s a shop or something at the other end of my journey. Something to view, to buy, to fetch back. That’s why I got sick of the gym. All that outlay and I wanted to see changes, changes, changes after every visit.
Up here there is so much to see.
The path goes up and up and it’s a ledge only a few yards wide. Rocks are scattered across it and there are posters warning that they drop easily. I am in peril. A man was killed quite recently, knocked and tumbled off this ledge. He plummeted into the wide, green flats of Holyrood Park far below.
Now there’s a thing. The palace is here, just below me, square, black and grey, fenced in with beautiful, tall iron gates. Eagles, lions. Only a matter of yards away are blocks of council flats, square and dark, 1970s. Who’d have thought they’d be so close? When she stays here and she pulls her bedroom curtains at night, can the Queen see into the lit windows of the flats? Can they look out of their flat windows and see what the royals have on their washing line?
I’m sitting for a rest on the bleached grass. Someone’s left a hooded top behind. It’s all right, doesn’t smell. I tie it round my waist, the way they all do now.
Then I see that Jep has crawled onto the narrow pathway. I’m about to yell, to pull him back, but something makes me pause and watch.
It’s so warm he’s naked, overheating in just his native plush. He squints into the sun and I think, He’s mine. His felted ears twitch. My own hands feel sore at the sight of his young footpads and fists on the rough ground.
I remember what Sandra told me in all her know-how. (But what does she know about bringing up babies? How would she know anything?) She said you aren’t to cosset them or pull them back from things. You aren’t to make them neurotic by fretting over their every move. She would say I have to let Jep set his own challenges, conquer his own apprehensions. Find his own way. So I hang back. Watch him on the yellow pathway, scratching in the dirt, then slowly hoist himself onto his hind legs. He staggers and swaggers and, with the same self-absorbed look he always has, he takes his first few steps alone. Up here, at this height, way above the city of his birth.
TWENTY-ONE
They told Jane to keep the music down. A nurse put her head round the door to Liz’s room and asked nicely. Jane felt foolish and quickly unplugged her tape player. She stashed it in her bag and flushed red as the nurse fussed around Liz, smiled and left.
Somewhere Jane had read that coma patients reacted to music. Jane had played Tina Turner’s ‘You’re Simply the Best’ six times, full blast, these past three visits. She thought it ought to be Liz’s favourite song, she thought she’d once heard it round Liz’s house. Now she felt she’d been doing it for nothing. Or that the nurses assumed she was playing music for her own entertainment. But she wasn’t — Jane was here out of the goodness of her heart. She had better things to do than sit in Bishop General. She had a journey to prepare for.
Her suitcases had been packed for a month. She kept taking things out, washing and ironing them again, folding them with calm precision. She kept thinking of other things she and Peter would need when they went to visit the desert. When she thought about it her heart would give a jump of thrilled fear inside her chest. She had to get passports. Fran helped her. The forms were quite complicated.
“I hate doing forms for anything,” she said, sitting in the photo cubicle in Red Spot supermarket. Flash!
“These aren’t too bad,” Fran told her, waiting outside the curtain. Flash!
“I hope I don’t look horrible in these pictures!” Jane tried to make herself laugh, to smile naturally. Flash!
“Everyone looks horrible in these little pictures.”
“Have you got a passport, Fran?”
“Never needed one.”
Flash!
In her photos Jane came out blurred. Too busy chatting away.
“You look animated. Full of life.”
“Like a gobby bitch. I look like when they blur out someone’s face on the news to protect them.”
They stood with the sticky strip of pictures held out between them.
“Look at these ones,” said Fran suddenly, reaching into her purse. It was her and Frank, ten years ago, squashed into an orange-curtai
ned booth, grinning and red-faced.
“You look like little bairns!” Jane gasped.
“Did you and Peter’s dad ever have pictures like this together?”
Now they were in the queue for lottery tickets. Jane was blowing on her pictures. “Did we hell! He once wanted to take...like, mucky photos of me. I told him where to get off. He wasn’t taking pictures of my arse. I know that woman in Boots photo counter. She’d see it was me.”
“It’s nice having pictures, though,” said Fran.
“Not that sort.”
In Liz’s hospital room, Jane was looking at her passport photos again. She compared her blurry, unformed self with Liz, who was so still and perfect. I’m jealous of a woman who’s half-dead, she thought. No wonder I need a holiday.
Then she took out Leaves and Angels and started to read aloud at Chapter Forty-Two. Romance novels were something she and Liz shared a passion for. This was the new one by Iris Makepeace and it was all right. Not too much sex. A bit was all right, but nothing that rubbed your nose in it. Jane would have been embarrassed reading anything too sexy in a hospital.
The book was about travelling abroad, to Africa, for a romance. It made her feet itch to think of it. Listening to her own voice tell the story, it seemed as if she wasn’t reading at all. When she finished she said goodbye to Liz and left for a coffee.
She knew that Tom was the next visitor in. He had put himself on the Liz rota, though Jane knew that he didn’t know Liz at all. Funny old bloke. Jane felt a bit sorry for him — beaten up in front of everyone by his own stepson. They said he was a bit daft.
She bumped into him in the waiting room.
“You’re Jane, aren’t you?” Tom asked. “You know Elsie.”
Jane nodded. “There’s no change in Liz. It’s a bit boring in there.”
He looked like a shabby old gent, someone who had seen better days. “It gets me out of the house, visiting,” he said. “Otherwise it’s the same four walls.”
Jane smiled and hurried on her way. Funny to hear him talking like a woman. But what sort of a man would live with Elsie, anyway? It would have to be someone pliable, who would listen to all the old rubbish Elsie came out with. Jane could take Elsie only in small doses. For some reason Elsie supposed that made them best buddies. If only the old woman would see that it meant nothing, that Jane, out of politeness, would spend the time of day with almost anyone who asked for it.
Jane hated the way Elsie sometimes swanned about, thinking herself a great social success. It was ridiculous. That night of Nesta’s burning her belongings, the night that had seen Tom knocked almost unconscious by the bad lads from over the way, Elsie had thought she was a drama queen. She swore vengeance and damnation on the heads of the perpetrators. She tagged along, shouting her mouth off, as the men hauled Tom home to check him over and see he was all right. Elsie was too busy being self-righteous to do anything but gabble on. But Jane didn’t hear her call her own son names. As far as Jane could see, Craig had been the worst one. He’d held Tom still for the other one to kick him. Craig was the worst of the bunch.
Once back in Phoenix Court, Jane walked straight into Penny. “Well, you had a narrow escape, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“From that Craig lad. Now we’ve all seen what a vicious pig he is.”
“I don’t want to talk about this, Jane.”
“Did he ever hit you, Penny?”
“Jane, stop it! I’m not seeing him now. It’s all history.”
“He’s still a vicious pig. I’ve just seen Tom, visiting your mam. He looks like a scared old man.”
“What’s Tom doing visiting my mam?”
Jane tutted. “Just doing his neighbourly duty, that’s all.”
“I’ve never liked the look of him,” Penny said.
Tom was an expert in visiting people. His mum had taught him how you went round houses that weren’t your own, and how you put people at their ease. Then and now he felt safer in other people’s houses than his own.
Here he was settling himself in a chair by Liz. He sat quite still and stared at her. He clasped his knees.
When he ran the Rainbow Club he visited people’s houses with Elsie. They went to see anyone — Elsie’s friends and friends of friends. He knew they weren’t always welcome. He knew that often they were forcing their company on people. Sometimes Elsie complained, “Why are we going to see people we hardly know? Sometimes can’t we stay at home?”
Tom would say grimly, “We’re spreading the word.”
It was a crude way of putting it, of course. But he didn’t think it hurt, going into homes and bringing up the subject of the divine. At one time he would have simply said ‘God’, but now he preferred to say ‘the divine’. Just mentioning the spiritual life would keep it alive. Some of these people round here never gave it a moment’s thought. Besides, at that time he never liked spending nights indoors with Elsie. What were those nights? Catchphrase, Strike It Lucky, The Ruth Rendell Mystery.
“It reminds you that we live in a world with other people,” he would tell Elsie. “That we are social beings.”
Here they would go, traipsing the dark tarmac of the estates, past the lit windows. How much you could see inside! Each window was a busy screen. Elsie, following Tom into other people’s rooms, was enthralled.
Those days and nights were over, though. Tom felt safer indoors, even if it meant watching ITV with Elsie. See how contented she looked, in of a night, tucked up on the settee, drinking.
He still had the need to visit, even if he didn’t want to walk the streets. So he came here. Liz would fulfil this need.
“Well, Liz,” he said, “I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, but I’ve put myself on your rota. Elsie reckons they’ve got it so there’s almost always someone with you. And I’m glad to help out. Will you listen to me nicely? I’ll watch over you, if you listen to me.”
Tom thought he might pray. It was worth a try. Quite formally, like a child, he steepled his fingers. But he couldn’t do it. His palms refused to go together. It felt like the tug of repulsion you get off two magnets held the wrong way. He couldn’t bring himself to talk to God. He chuckled bitterly. “I’ll have to talk to just you, then, Liz.”
He said, “Elsie tells me we could have been family.” If Craig had stuck with Penny, they might have been in-laws, that was what Elsie had said. Tom sighed, irritated by her plans. All these pretend-family ideas. Where was the blood link there? Craig was by no means his son. He’d never felt like that to Tom and now they all knew how Craig felt about it. Tom winced. Craig marrying Penny wouldn’t make Tom kin to Liz. Tom felt about as related to…this chair as he did this woman. Yet look at how Elsie pushed and pulled at these relationships, to get them to come true. As if being related was the most important thing in the world. Tom knew there was more to it than that.
I started visiting people as early as I can remember. My mum took me round all the houses. And this was the country, it was different to here. It was up hill and down dale to all the houses. We were tramping over fields and through stiles and it was a struggle when the snow was up to our knees. “We weren’t all living in each other’s pockets. Not then.
Mum used to go round with her friend Sally. Plain Sally, with a worn, chapped face, her hair in pigtails. She followed Mum round faithfully and she believed, like Mum, that they were spreading the word. What were they telling people?
What they believed in their hearts the word to be. A childish version of what they heard and what they read. Father Dobbs used to laugh at them but he said, “Their hearts are in the right places, those lasses, they won’t do any harm.” Good, simple-hearted faith, he called it. Mum and her friend Sally were both a little in love with the handsome father. Mum passed me into his care and tutelage when I came to an age to learn properly what faith was about. She loved to see me go with him and to surpass the things she knew. She loved to hear me spout my learning and I was only a child, I used to
love showing off.
Father Dobbs was a marvel. It was he who discovered I could draw. I drew Jesus for him, and all the disciples, and Mum wanted a drawing, and so did Sally, and so did everyone who lived nearabouts.
There was a ritual to a visit in those days. I remember the patterns and routines around those houses. I’d be given a glass of milk and a biscuit perhaps and listen to all the talk. Sally would be telling them the friend she had in Jesus and I could see them look at her thinking, A nice girl like that, what a shame she’ll never get a man. Everyone had a front parlour for visitors to sit in. They listened patiently to the two girls and their simple-hearted faith. When they found that I could draw, Mum and Sally wasted no time in using my talents in the cause. I was to make myself useful and so I did, I sat with my drawing book and childishly sketched our hosts as they sat there, flattered and excited. I would draw them meeting Jesus in heaven; I had Jesus down pat. Usually I did it all in pencil, but sometimes they wanted themselves painted, to make it more real.
My mother was beautiful, you would believe anything she said simply because she was so beautiful. She didn’t need cleverness or a plain friend helping her out. She didn’t even need her son, drawing Jesus and the neighbours, to make those neighbours listen. When she talked about happiness her face glowed like clean china.
Father Dobbs went to London. He never came back to us. He made it plain that he didn’t like the drawings of Jesus and the neighbours. Mum had made me draw him with Jesus, shaking him by the hand. Father Dobbs wasn’t pleased and it was one of the few times he scolded me.
Mum died very young. Her faith never left her. Sally took me in. When I was fifteen, Sally was forty-five and you might say we became lovers. She was tender-hearted and curious. I was lonely and I didn’t know what was what. This plain woman, growing hefty and old before her time, was almost more innocent than I was. She took me to bed and it was all a disaster, of course. We had no clue. I went to London, looking for Father Dobbs.