In the early days, he didn’t follow her into the house. He seemed nervous about who might be in there. As they turned at the corner of the street he would say, “Nick bin in?”
She would say no, and he’d say, “Just as well, never know where you are wiv Nick, if you see Nick you walk the other way, you hear? You don’t try any of your tricks round Nick, or he’ll upend you, he’ll slap you on the soles of your feet till your teeth drop out.” Then he would brighten up: “What about Aitkenside, you seen Aitkenside?”
She’d say, “Dunno, what’s his other name? Dunno who you mean.”
He’d say, “Much you don’t, oh, very likely. Pikey Pete been round?”
“I told you,” she said, “I don’t know who your friends are or what they’re called.”
But Morris sneered at this. “Not know Pete? The whole country knows him. Wherever there is dealing in dogs they know Pete.”
“I don’t deal in dogs.” She remembered the grown-up coldness of her voice.
“Oh, pardon me, I’m sure! You don’t deal with any of my mates, is it? You don’t deal with ’em in any way, shape, or form, is it?” He grumbled under his breath. “You’re not your mother’s daughter, I suppose. Not know Pete? Wherever there is dealing in horses, they know Pete.”
When he got to the front gate, he would say, “Emmie not moved that old bath yet?”
She’d say, “Have you known my mum a long time?”
He’d say, “I’ll say I have. Known Emmie Cheetham? I’ll say I have. Know everybody, me. I know Donnie. I know Pete. Emmie Cheetham? I’ll say I have.”
One day she said, “Morris, are you my dad?”
And he said “Dad, me, that’s a good one! Did she say so?”
“I think MacArthur’s my dad.”
“MacArthur!” he said. He stopped. She stopped too, and looked into his face. He had turned grey: greyer than usual. His voice came out wobbly. “You can stand there, and say that name?”
“Why not?”
“Cool as a bloody cucumber,” Morris said. He spoke to the air, as if he were talking to an audience. “Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouf.”
They staggered along the street, a pace or two, Morris’s hand clamped on her arm. She saw Lee and Catherine going by on the other side of the road. She waved to them to rescue her but they made vomity faces at her and walked on. She didn’t know if they could see Morris or not. Under his breath he was muttering.
“MacArthur, she says! Cool as you like.” He stopped and propped himself against the wall with his free hand, his bent fingers spread out. He had a tattoo of a snake running down his arm; now its head, darting across the back of his hand, seemed to gulp, and pulse out its tongue. Morris too made a vomity face and retched.
She was afraid of what might come out of his mouth, so she concentrated on his hand, planted against the brick.
“Speak the name of MacArthur!” He mimicked her voice. “I think he’s my dad. Suppose he is? Is that how you treat a dad? Is it? Got to hand it to her, she has some cheek, that girl.”
“How?” she said. “How did I treat him?”
The head pulsed, the snake’s tongue flicked out between his spread fingers. “I’ll tell you something about that bugger,” he said. “I’ll tell you something you don’t know. MacArthur owes me money. And so if I ever see MacArthur in this neck of the woods, I’ll saw him off at the bloody knees. Let the bloody bastard venture, just let him. I’ll poke out his other eye.”
“Has MacArthur only one eye?”
“Oh, tee-bloody-hee,” Morris said. “Still, girl, you got paid out. You got a lesson, eh? They taught you what a blade could do.”
“I hope you’re not,” she said. “I hope you’re not my dad. I like you worst of anybody. I don’t want you anywhere near me. You stink of fags and beer.”
“I bin near you,” Morris said. “We all have.”
COLETTE: But after that, when Morris came along, you must have known that other people couldn’t see him, I mean you must have realized that you had psychic powers.
ALISON: You see, I was ignorant. I didn’t know what a spirit guide was. Until I met Mrs. Etchells, I had no idea—
COLETTE: We’re going to go into that, aren’t we? Mrs. Etchells?
ALISON: When?
COLETTE: Tonight, if you’ve got the stamina.
ALISON: Can we eat first?
(click)
Pity Colette, who had to transcribe all this. “When you’re talking about Gloria,” she said, “I never know if she’s alive or dead.”
“No,” Al said. “Nor me.”
“But it worries me. I need to get it straight—for the book.”
“I’m telling you what I know.”
Was she? Or was she leaving things out? Sparing Colette’s feelings in some way, or testing her memory?
“These awful blokes,” Colette said, “all these fiends from Aldershot. I keep losing track of their names. Make me a list.”
Alison took a sheet of paper and wrote FIENDS FROM ALDERSHOT. “Let’s see … Donnie Aitkenside,” she said.
“The one who said he’d beat up your teacher?”
“Yes … well, and rape her, I think he was going to rape her too. There was MacArthur. Morris reckoned MacArthur was worse than most, but I dunno. There was Keith Capstick, that pulled the dog off me. And I thought he was my dad because he did that. But was he? I dunno.”
When she talks about them, Colette thought, she slips away somewhere: to a childhood country, where diction is slipshod. She said, “Al, are you writing this down?”
“You can see I’m not.”
“You wander off the point. Just make the list.”
Al sucked her pen. “There was this Pikey character, who was a horse dealer. I think he had relatives, cousins, up and down the country, you used to hear him talk about them, they might have come by but I don’t really know. And somebody called Bob Fox?”
“Don’t ask me! Get it on paper! What did he do, Bob Fox?”
“He tapped on the window. At my mum’s house. He did it to make you jump.”
“What else? He must have done something else?”
“Dunno. Don’t think he did. Then there was Nick, of course. The one with the empty matchbox, in the kitchen. Oh, wait, I remember now. Oh God, yes. I know where I saw him before. We had to go and collect him from the cop shop. They’d picked him up on the street, falling-down drunk. But they didn’t want to charge him, they just let him sober up, then they wanted rid of him because he’d put slime on the cell walls.”
“Slime?”
“And they didn’t want a heavy cleaning job. He was just lying there sliming everything, you see. He didn’t want to come out, so my mum had to go down and get him. They said—the police—they’d found her phone number in his wallet, so they sent a car to fetch her in, then she had to go down the cells. The desk sergeant said, a woman’s touch, tee-hee. He was being sarcastic. He said, he’ll be able to go now, won’t he, now he’s got his bike? My mum said, watch your lip, Little Boy Blue, or I’ll fatten it for you. He said, leave that kid here, you can’t take her down the cells. And my mum said, what, leave her here, so you can bloody touch her up? So she took me down to get Nick.”
Colette felt faint. “I wish I’d never started this,” she said.
“He came out on the street and he shouted, can’t I get drunk, same as anybody? My mum was trying to calm him down. She says, come back to our house.”
“And did he?”
“I expect. Look, Col, it was a long time ago.”
Colette wanted to ask, what kind of slime was it, on the cell walls? But then again, she didn’t want to ask.
COLETTE: Okay, so it’s eleven-thirty.
ALISON: P.M., that is.
COLETTE:—and we’re about to resume—
ALISON:—as I’ve now had a bottle of Crozes-Hermitage and feel able to continue reminiscing about my teenage years—
COLETTE: Al!
ALISON:—whereas
Colette has had a Slimline Tonic and on the basis of this feels she has the courage to switch on the machine.
COLETTE: My uncle used to tickle me.
ALISON: You mean, your dad?
COLETTE: Yes, come to think of it. My dad. It wasn’t ordinary tickling … .
ALISON: It’s all right, take your time.
COLETTE: I mean it was aggressive, stabbing at you with a finger—a man’s finger, you know, it’s as thick as that—and I was little, and he knew it hurt me. Oh, God, and Gav used to do it. His idea of a joke. Maybe that’s why I went and married him. It seemed familiar.
ALISON: Sounds classic to me, marrying a man with the same sense of humour as your father. I hear about it all the time.
COLETTE: I didn’t laugh when he did it. It was more—you know, convulsing. As if I were having a fit.
ALISON: That must have been a pretty sight.
COLETTE: He stabbed into me with his finger, between my thin little ribs. It was like—it really was—the way he’d come at me, sticking it out … . Oh, I don’t think I can say it.
ALISON: It’s not like you to be coy.
COLETTE: As if he was rehearsing me.
ALISON: Giving you a practice for your later life. (pause) I suppose that’s what dads are for. Here, do you want a tissue?
COLETTE: Let’s get back on track. You need an early night, you’ve got a client phoning for tarot before her breakfast meeting. Mrs. Etchells, you were going to fill me in about Mrs. Etchells.
ALISON: You see, I got to the point where I wanted money of my own. I thought, if I saved up, I could get on the train at Ash Vale and just go somewhere, I wouldn’t have minded where. So, the way it was, Mrs. Etchells got me started. You see, one day I was leaning on her front hedge, bawling my eyes out, because Nicky Scott and Catherine and them—because these girls, my friends, at least they were supposed to be my friends—
COLETTE: Yes?
ALISON: They’d been calling me spastic all afternoon, because in English I’d had this—sort of incident. It was Morris really started it off; he’d come in halfway through English and said, oh, William bloody Shakespeare is it? Bloody Bill Wagstaffe, Bill Crankshaft, I know that cove, he’s dead, he is, or so he claims, and he owes me a fiver. We were doing Romeo and Juliet and he said, I seen that Juliet, she’s dead, and she’s no better than she should be, a right slapper let me tell you. So then I knew he was lying, because Juliet’s a fictional character. But at first, you see, I believed him about things. I didn’t know what to believe.
COLETTE: Yes, and?
ALISON: So then he squashed up in the chair next to me, because Nicky Scott and Catherine and all that lot, they weren’t bothering with me and they were leaving me to sit on my own. He put his hand on my knee—above my knee, really, squeezing—and I couldn’t help it, I squealed out. And he was saying, I’ll tell you another thing about that Juliet—her mother was at it before she was out of ankle socks, she was no slouch on the couch. Remind you of home, does it, remind you of home sweet home? And he started pulling my skirt up. And I was trying to pull it down and push his hands away, I was slapping at him but it didn’t do any good. And Mr. Naysmith said to me, excuse me for intruding on your private reverie, but I don’t think I have your undivided attention, Alison. Just then I couldn’t stand it and it all came out in a rush, I was crying and swearing and shouting “piss off, you perv,” and “bugger off back where you came from.” So Mr. Naysmith looking like thunder came belting down the class towards me, and I shout, keep your filthy pervvy hands to yourself. And he got hold of me by the back of my neck. Well, they did. In those days. At my school, anyway. They weren’t allowed to cane you but they used to get hold of you in a painful way. And he dragged me off to the headmaster … . So I got suspended. Excluded, they call it now. For making accusations against Mr. Naysmith. You see, I was wailing, he was pulling up my skirt, he was pulling up my skirt. And in those days they didn’t have sexual abuse, so nobody believed me, whereas these days nobody would believe him.
COLETTE: So how does this fit in with Mrs. Etchells?
ALISON: What?
COLETTE: You said you were leaning on her hedge crying.
ALISON: Yes, that’s it, because they’d been tormenting me you see. I didn’t care about getting suspended—it was a relief really—they said they’d be calling my mum in but I knew they wouldn’t because the headmaster was too frightened of her. Anyway, Mrs. Etchells spotted me and she came running out, she said leave off, girls, why ever are you tormenting poor Alison like that? And I was surprised that she knew my name.
COLETTE: And who was Mrs. Etchells? I mean I know she taught you all you know—you’ve said so several times—but, you know, who was she?
ALISON: My gran, or so she said.
COLETTE: What?
(click)
COLETTE: This is Colette, resuming the session at twelve-thirty. Alison, you were telling us about your reunion with your grandmother.
ALISON: Yes, but it wasn’t like that, good God, it wasn’t like This Is Your Life, and your gran walks in smiling through her bloody tears. I don’t know why you put these questions on the tape, Colette. I’ve just told you how it was.
COLETTE: Oh, for the fifteenth bloody time, it’s to have a record—
ALISON: All right, all right, but let me tell it my way, will you? She took me in and made me beans on toast. And do you know it was the first time I ever—I mean, my mum used to get distracted, so the beans and the toast came separate, you’d have your beans at five o’clock and then she’d look at you about ten past and she’d say, oh, you didn’t get your toast yet, did you? You know when you go to a café, like on the motorway, and they have those big laminated menus with pictures of the food on? I used to wonder what for, I mean, why do they do that, the food doesn’t look like that when it comes, it’s all huge and colored in the menus but in real life it’s all shrunken up and sick-coloured. Well, the reason they do that—this is what I think—is to help people like my mum, because they don’t know what food goes with what. When she’d got some man staying over, one she liked, she’d say, oh, I’m making a big Sunday, by which she meant a big Sunday lunch, but when it came he’d be, what’s this, Emmie? I mean, chicken and cauliflower, with white sauce out of a packet.
COLETTE: And mash?
ALISON: No, that would be later, that would come along at teatime. And she’d go to the corner and get curry—that was her idea of making lunch—she’d say, what you complaining about, I paid for it myself, didn’t I?
COLETTE: I really don’t want to interrupt your flow …
ALISON: So that’s why they have the pictures, to stop people like my mum ordering a fried egg with their chicken. And make sure they assemble all the bits of their meal at the same time.
COLETTE: And Mrs. Etchells—
ALISON: Made me beans on toast. Which made her a winner in my eyes, I mean I was always hungry then, I think that’s why I’m big now.
COLETTE: Just leaving that issue aside for the moment—
ALISON: She said, come in dear; sit down, tell me all about it. So I did. Because I had nobody to confide in. And I cried a lot, and it all came pouring out. Tehera. Lee. Mr. Naysmith. Morris. Everything.
COLETTE: And what did she say?
ALISON: Well, the thing was she seemed to understand. She just sat there nodding. When I’d finished she said, you see, like grandmother like granddaughter. I said, what? It’s descended to you, she said, my gift, missing out Derek, probably because he was a man. I said, who’s Derek, she said, my son Derek. Your dad, darling; well, he could be anyway.”
COLETTE: She only said, could be?
ALISON: All I thought was, thank God, so it wasn’t Morris. I said, so, if Derek’s my dad, and you’re my nan, why isn’t my name Etchells? She said, because he ran off before your mam could waltz him down the aisle. Not that I blame him there. I said, it’s surprising I wasn’t drawn to you. She said, you was, in a manner of speaking, because you was alway
s leaning against my hedge with your young friends. And today, she said, I reckon that today you see, something drew you. You were in trouble, so you came to your nan.
COLETTE: That’s quite sad, really. You mean she’d been living down the road all the time?
ALISON: She said she didn’t like to interfere. She said, your mam minds her own business, and of course the whole neighbourhood knows what that business is—which was no surprise to me, you know, because I’d understood for quite some time why when a bloke went out he put a tenner on the sideboard.
COLETTE: And so, you and Mrs. Etchells, did you become close at this point?
ALISON: I used to go and do little errands for her. Carrying her shopping, because her knees were bad. Running for fags for her, not that she smoked like my mum. I always called her Mrs. Etchells, I didn’t like to start calling her Nan, I wasn’t sure if I ought. I asked my mother about Derek, and she just laughed. She said, she’s not on that old story again, is she? Bloody cloud-cuckoo land.
COLETTE: So she didn’t actually confirm it? Or deny it?
ALISON: No. She threw the salt pot at me. So … end of that conversation. The way Mrs. Etchells told it, Derek and my mum were going to get married, but he took off after he found out what she was like (laughter). Probably (laughter) probably she whizzed him up some of her tandoori prawns with tinned spaghetti. Oh God, she has no idea at all about nutrition, that woman. No idea of what constitutes a balanced meal.
COLETTE: Yes, can we get on to how you came to turn professional?
ALISON: When I got towards school-leaving, Mrs. Etchells said it’s time we had a talk, she said, there’s advantages and disadvantages to the life—
COLETTE: And did she say what they were, in her opinion?
ALISON: She said, why not use your God-given talent? But then she said, you come in for a great deal of name-calling and disbelief, and I can’t pretend that your colleagues in the profession are going to welcome you with open arms—which indeed I did find to be the case, as you know yourself, Colette, to your cost, because you know what they were like when I introduced you as my assistant. She said, of course, you could try to act as if you were normal, and I said I’d give it a try, though it never worked at school. I got a job in a chemist in Farnborough. Temporary sales assistant. It was more temporary than they meant, of course.
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