by Sue Townsend
Each had found their other half. Adele was going to be married to the future Prime Minister.
A month or so later they attended the coroners court together and found out that the young suicide was called Mohammed Karzai and that he had killed himself because his A-level grades were not good enough to get him into Sheffield University, where his parents were keen for him to study pharmacy.
As Edward and Adele left the court arm in arm, Adele had remarked, “How horribly ironic: poor dumb Mohammed topped himself in front of two of the cleverest people in Britain.”
♦
Police Constable Jack Sprat often wondered why he had been accepted into the police force at all; if there was a rigorous vetting procedure then Jack had somehow wriggled through it, and had landed what he thought was the best job in policing—that of guarding the door of Number Ten Downing Street.
He was the black sheep of a large extended family. None of whom had ever bought a video recorder from a shop.
When, at thirteen, he had announced to his family that he intended to study for eight GCSEs and would require ‘somewhere quiet to revise’ they were mystified. Neither his brother nor his sister had shown the slightest interest in examinations; both had left school at the earliest legal opportunity.
Trevor, his last stepfather, was a mildly successful career criminal. They now had a full set of saucepans. He made inquiries among his criminal friends as to where he could lay his hands on a desk, but after waiting a few weeks with no result he generously ordered a corner study centre, comprising a desk and bookshelves, from the furniture section of Littlewoods catalogue. It arrived by Parcel Force three weeks later in seventeen parts with an Allen key and seventy-five screws, wooden dowels and a tube of glue Sellotaped to one of the drawer fronts. As he watched his stepfather swear and fumble over the desk’s assembly, Jack had felt his heart beating with excitement. He couldn’t wait to place his books on the shelves and arrange his school folders in the pigeon-holes.
There was no room for the desk in the bedroom Jack shared with his acquisitive brother, Stuart, so the furniture in the small living room was moved around to accommodate his ambitions. The television was shifted from one corner, which necessitated rewiring and changing the aerial socket, and the three–piece suite was reconfigured, which meant that the dog’s basket had to be moved and placed under the kitchen table, where it stayed inconveniently for seven years until the dog died.
With the money he earned from his newspaper round, Jack bought himself a desk lamp from Boots and night after night, to the accompaniment of Coronation Street and other TV programmes, sat enclosed in a pool of yellow light.
Occasionally, during the advertisements, his mother would turn her head and look at Jack stooped over his desk and mutter to Trevor, “It’s not healthy for a lad of his age to be in at night.”
Occasionally, when Jack was at school in the day, Norma would surreptitiously pick up a folder, open it and read a few pages, moving her lips slightly as she did so. “The blood on Lady Macbeth’s hands is a symbol of the guilt she feels for murdering…” She would close the folder, feeling proud but wondering where she had gone wrong. Her other children seemed happy enough, so why was Jack concerning himself with blood and murder?
Once, at Sunday dinner, seated at the kitchen table with his feet on the dog’s back, Jack had tried to explain to his family that with exams he would be able to get ahead in the world and get a good job.
“Such as what?” said his stepfather, hacking at a piece of Yorkshire pudding.
Jack hesitated. The dog shifted beneath his feet. He pronged a few peas and lifted the fork to his lips. “I want to be a policeman,” he mumbled before swallowing.
There was silence, and then a huge burst of laughter. His sister, Yvonne, spluttered on a half-chewed piece of lamb and mint sauce.
His brother Stuart said, “You gotta be jokin’!”
Stuart had recently served five months in a young offenders’ centre, having been caught by security guards in a warehouse with a carrier bag full of Head & Shoulders shampoo.
Jack’s entire extended family were petty criminals. It was the family business. Almost every object in the house and most of the clothes on their backs had either been stolen or bought fraudulently with forged cheques. Jack’s shoes, the ones the dog was licking, had been thieved by a loving uncle from the back of a lorry parked in a motorway car park.
Even Jack’s first clothes—a layette consisting of vest, nappy, plastic pants, Babygro, cardigan and shawl—had been stolen in one daring expedition from a Mothercare shop by his auntie Marilyn.
Most nights Jack sat at his desk, with his back to the television, doing his homework. Occasionally, perhaps when the laughter of a studio audience became hysterical, he would turn round and look at the screen. His mother enjoyed these brief moments and tried to persuade him to put his pen down and join her on the sofa—sometimes she moved the ashtray and patted the seat next to her invitingly—but Jack knew that if he abandoned his studies he would be lost for ever and would become an invisible and expendable person like most of the people he knew.
On Friday nights a gloomy woman called Joan came to the house to style his mother’s hair into the platinum beehive she had worn since she was a precocious schoolgirl. Norma didn’t seem to notice that her face had suffered a flesh landslide, or that the blue eye-shadow and pale-pink lipstick were now inappropriate for a woman whose tired womb had long been replaced with oestrogen supplements. And her clothes! They were the stuff of nightmares.
It was partly due to his mother’s clothes that Jack had become a policeman. He remembered the annual parents’ day at the comprehensive school that he attended without fail every day. He had tried to prevent his mother from coming—telling her that she would get fed up waiting in a queue to talk to his boring teachers—but she had insisted, saying, “It’ll make a change to hear ‘em saying nice things about one of my kids.”—The elder Sprats had disgraced the Sprat name and Yvonne Sprat had accidentally set fire to the store room of the domestic-science unit by leaving a cigarette burning on the edge of a shelf.
Jack watched anxiously from the landing as Norma hovered in front of her crammed wardrobe.
He stopped breathing when she dragged a mock-ocelot jacket from a wire hanger, then breathed again when she threw it on to the bed saying, “I can’t get it buttoned since me tits got bigger.”
Eventually, after much trying on and discarding and consultation with his sister, she settled on a white plastic bomber jacket and matching short skirt, thus realising Jack’s worst fears.
They left the house together but Jack quickly outpaced her. At first she shouted at him to wait for her, but he couldn’t bring himself to walk alongside her. He was ashamed of her varicose veins stuffed into white stilettos, and the creak of the white plastic suit.
He burned with shame when they entered the school and were greeted by the headmaster. “Mrs Sprat, is it? You’ve got a good lad there, we’ve got great hopes for Jack.”
Jack could see the amused look in the headmaster’s eyes as the pompous git took in his mother’s appearance. The hanging flamingo earrings, the globs of mascara on the ends of her stubby eyelashes, the orange make-up, which stopped at her jawline, the tired breasts wobbling above the tie-dyed vest. When they walked into the assembly hall where the teachers sat behind tables talking to parents, Jack was convinced that every head in the hall turned to stare and laugh at his mother. He longed for respectability and he wanted it for her too.
When he saw a fat man who was waiting in a queue say, “Christ, look at that!” to a woman next to him, Jack felt a surge of anger sweep over him, and he put an arm across his mother’s white plastic shoulders. Why shouldn’t she wear flamingo earrings—they were beautiful birds.
∨ Number Ten ∧
THREE
It took Jack more than five hours to complete a journey that normally took two and a half. A lorry and trailer carrying potatoes from Hungary to Milto
n Keynes had jack-knifed and spilled its load, gridlocking two motorway systems, the M1 going north and the M25 both east and westbound.
Jack phoned his mother from the car but there was no reply. She’d grown nervous of answering the telephone since a series of desperate sales people had rung her day and night begging her to buy her electricity from the gas board and pay for her phone calls through the water board. She had thought they were playing a cruel joke on her.
It was one minute to midnight when Jack drew up outside his mother’s house, but he saw that every window blazed with light. His mother went in for 100-watt bulbs—it was no wonder, thought Jack, that she was always in debt to Powergen. Norma was still sitting up waiting for him. As he walked down the garden path he could see her silhouette through the thin curtains; she was sitting on the sofa watching Late Night Line-Up. She was an indiscriminate viewer. Tom Paulin’s big head filled the screen.
Jack knocked on the door and shouted through the letter-box. Eventually he heard her telling Peter, her old budgerigar, that, “Our Jack’s come to see us, Pete.”
When the door opened Jack didn’t recognise his mother at first. He had never in his life seen her without make-up. Even in hospital, after the mugging, she had managed to put on lipstick. (Though only one eye had been beautified with blue eye-shadow and mascara, the other eye being swollen and closed.) Now, a week since being discharged, she didn’t have her teeth in and her hair had lost its colour and its bouffant height and hung like sad white string around her bruised and sunken face. This was not his mother; it was the skeleton of his mother. She was like a page torn from Gray’s Anatomy. The young man who stole her pension had taken her flesh and blood with him when he ran away with her shopping bag and purse.
“Hello, Mam. You’re looking good,” Jack said. It was automatic; she set great store by her appearance.
She said, “I’ve kept you some dinner,” and led the way down the narrow hall to the kitchen.
The Sprat family did not go in for kissing or any other affectionate gestures.
Peter was standing disconsolately on the floor of his cage, ankle-deep in seed husks and his own droppings. His blue feathers looked dull and frayed.
Jack put his finger through the bars and said, “Cheer up, Pete, your mam’s on the mend, all she needs to do is get her hair done.” Pete was often the conduit by which Jack communicated with his mother.
Norma said, “I’m too frightened to go out the hairdresser’s, Pete.”
Peter hopped on to his little trapeze and stared gloomily into the small mirror that dangled in front of it.
“He’s a mardy bugger lately,” she said to Jack, then she opened the oven door and took out a plate covered by another, inverted, plate. Steam rose when she removed the top plate and revealed his dinner. “Your favourite,” she said.
Jack looked at the bluish strips of breast of lamb, the dried-up carrots, peas and mashed potatoes that were stuck to the bottom plate. Jack said to the bird, “If I could find the cruel bastard that hurt our mam I think I’d kill him, Pete.”
He forced himself to eat most of his vile dinner. He knew that she hated cooking and had never been any good at it. And he forgave her for forgetting that he had been vegetarian for more than thirty years, and that it was Stuart, his dead brother, who had been particularly fond of the fat on breast of lamb.
Norma sat and watched Jack eat. She noticed the lines around his eyes and the two deep ridges that now connected his nose to his mouth…
♦
As a prelude to going to bed, Norma covered Peter’s cage with a piece of fabric made of polyester cotton and printed in a sunflower pattern. Peter continued to move around inside his darkened cage. Jack spoke sternly to the unseen bird. “Settle down!” he ordered.
He switched off the kitchen light and as he climbed the stairs towards the box room where he would sleep the night he wondered why he had spoken so harshly to the little bird.
He slept badly in the cheap pine bed with the bargain-price mattress; a slight callus on his foot kept catching on the non-iron nylon sheets that his mother preferred.
At some time during the long night he stretched out a hand to check his travelling alarm clock and knocked a pottery donkey off the bedside table. He heard it fall and shatter on the uncarpeted floor next to the bed.
When he next woke it was morning and he lay for a while looking at the miniature donkeys surrounding him. They were decorated in every conceivable pattern, some floral, some realistic, some with panniers, others pulling little carts. Many wore hats, two sported ponchos, one carried the message ‘A present from the Lavender Fields of Norfolk’ and still had a few dried-up stalks sticking up from a hole in its back.
It had made buying Christmas and birthday presents for his mother easy; there was always donkey stuff in the shops at a price kids could afford.
When he got up he dressed quickly, putting on the Marks & Spencer casuals that lately he never felt quite himself in.
He could not get over the feeling that he was an impostor—only pretending to be like other men.
Before he left the room he picked up the pieces of broken donkey and saw that it was one that Stuart had made in a pottery class at one young offenders’ prison he’d been sent to for possession of marijuana. Jack wrapped the pieces in his handkerchief and went downstairs to look for glue. He would have to mend it—the prison donkey was the only present Stuart had ever given Norma, and she often said that in a fire all she’d rescue would be Peter and our Stuart’s donkey.
Jack cleaned the kitchen sink with a rusty Brillo pad while he waited for the skyscraper-shaped kettle to boil. He heard Peter moving around on the floor of the darkened cage as he made tea, which he took through into the front room overlooking the street. The house opposite, where he had once been sent to borrow a saucepan, had been boarded up and a smashed-up caravan had come to rest in its front garden. Schoolchildren walked by shouting affectionate obscenities to each other. They were bent under the weight of huge rucksacks; they looked like foot soldiers walking through the ruins of a fallen city.
The lavatory flushed upstairs but this was not followed by the reassuring sound of water running in the washbasin—his mother thought that germs were good for you, and said that there was more illness around since people had started taking daily baths and showers. She laughed in Jack’s face when he found food in her fridge long past its sell-by date and told awful stories about cheese heaving with maggots.
Once the children had turned the corner the street was deserted. A few cars passed but to Jack’s mind it seemed unnaturally quiet.
Years ago, in the same street on the day that he had left home to go to Hendon Police College, he had stood on the doorstep for ten minutes waiting for a taxi to take him to the railway station and had been surprised by how many people had passed by and wished him well. Small children had been playing in their front gardens and cars were being mended at the kerbside. In those days, Jack remembered, old women wrapped themselves in overalls and leaned on their gates to give and receive news.
When his mother came into the room Jack asked her where everybody was.
“Nobody goes out these days,” she said, coming to stand next to him at the window. “I don’t even nip next door now and I’ve stopped putting me washing out on the line. One of those bad lads come over the fence last week and stole that garden chair you brought me.”
Jack said, “I’ll build you a higher fence and get you another chair.”
“No, don’t bother with the chair,” Norma said irritably. “They’d only pinch it again, and anyway the sun never shines in England nowadays.”
They went through into the kitchen and Norma tutted when she saw that Peter’s cage was still shrouded in the sunflower cloth.
There was no food in the house that Jack could bring himself to eat. And unpaid bills had been stuffed behind the tea caddy on the end of the draining board. The whole house needed cleaning, airing and restocking with necessities; even Pe
ter’s food bowl was devoid of seed and an empty packet of Trill had been put back into the cupboard next to the jars of mouldy jams and pickles. Jack had been hoping to return to London that evening to enjoy his second day of leave—he had planned to go to the Tate Modern, to see for himself what everyone was going on about—but he realised now that he would have to stay another night and sort his mother out. He cleared a space on the kitchen table and began to make a list.
♦
Ring locksmith
Clean cage
Asda—food
Find a cleaner
Post office—collect pension
Bank—arrange Direct Debits
Find Yvonne?
♦
He then took out his chequebook and paid his mother’s bills.
Norma said, “I hate not having any money. Why did Trev have to die?”
Jack said, “He shouldn’t have been on a church roof in the dark.”
Jack had been secretly relieved to hear of his stepfather’s death. It was one less criminal in the family. And Trevor’s conviction rate had been a source of embarrassment to him. Several times in his career he suspected that the living Trevor had held him back from promotion.
Norma went into a reverie about Trevor’s funeral. “I never seen a church so packed, there were hundreds spilling out into the churchyard. People were pushed up against the gravestones, weren’t they, Jack? The vicar said some lovely things about Trev.”
Jack remembered sitting in the church only feet away from his stepfather’s ornate coffin, wondering how the trainee vicar would cope with Trevor’s notorious criminality and the unfortunate circumstances of his accidental death. But the dog-collared fool had called Trevor ‘a colourful character’ and had glorified Trevor’s lead-thieving activities by referring to him as a pioneer who had been recycling long before it became fashionable.