For most of the years until I was sixteen, my mother had devoted herself to the care of a sick child. First it was me, until I went to senior school. Then I got abruptly better, by an act of will on my mother’s part. My high fevers ceased, or ceased to be noticed, or if they were noticed they stopped being interesting. My youngest brother, his struggles for breath and his night-time cough, were elected to my old place in the household’s economy. In my case I had been to school sporadically, but my brother didn’t go at all. He played by himself in the garden under a pewter sky, with the fugitive glitter of snow behind it. He lay on his daybed in the room with the television blaring, and turned the pages of a book. One evening we were watching the news when our whole room lit up with a sick white light, and a bolt of ball lightning ripped the lower limbs from the poplar tree and blew the glass from the window frame, whump, fist of God. The shards were strewed over his crocheted blanket, the dog howled, the rain blew into the wreckage of the room and the neighbours squeaked and gibbered in the streets.
A short time after this my mother answered an advertisement for a saleswoman on the fashion floor at Affleck & Brown, which was a small, cramped, old-fashioned department store in Manchester. She had to walk to the station and then travel by train, then walk again to Oldham Street. This was a wonder to me, because I thought she’d given up going out. To do the job she had to have white blouses and black skirts. She bought some at C & A, and this amazed me too, because in our house we got our clothes by less straightforward methods than purchase: by a process of transmogrification, whereby cardigans were unravelled and reappeared as woollen berets and collars were wrenched off to extend hems and what were armholes for the stout became leg holes for the lean. When I was seven I’d had my winter coats made out of two that had belonged to my godmother. Pockets, lapels, everything was miniaturised: except the buttons, which were the originals, and stood out like banqueting plates, or targets for an arrow on my pigeon chest.
My mother had been to school in an age when most people didn’t take exams, and she hadn’t much to put on her application form. But she got the job, and soon personal disasters began to overtake the people who had appointed her; with them out of the way, she was promoted first to deputy and then to manageress of her department. She developed an airy meringue of white-blonde hair, very tall shoes – not just high heels but little boosts under the soles – and an airy way of talking and gesturing; and she began to encourage her staff to lie about their ages, which seemed to suggest she was lying about her own. She came home late and quarrelsome, with something unlikely in her crocodile bag. It might be a bag of crinkle-cut chips, which tasted of grease and air, a pack of frozen beefburgers which, under the grill, bubbled up with oily spots the grey-yellow colour of a Manchester smog. In time the chip pan got banned, to save the paintwork and to make a class statement, but by then I was living up the road with my friend Anne Terese, and what the others got for rations was something I preferred not to think about.
When I was seventeen I was as unprepared for life as if I had spent my childhood on a mountainside minding goats. I was given to contemplation of nature, strolling about in the woods and fields. I was given to going to Stockport library and getting seven big books at a time about Latin American revolutions; waiting for an hour in the rain for the bus home, shifting the books at my feet and sometimes picking them up in expectation of a bus and cradling them in my arms, relishing their public dirt-edged pages, and the anticipation of finding inside them urgent notes from small-town obsessives: ‘NOT Guatemala!!!!’ pencilled in the margin, or rather incised into the page with a stub of graphite and the cedar’s ragged edge. In our house, too, we never had a pencil sharpener. If you wanted a point you went to my mother and she held the pencil in her fist and swiped chunks off it with the bread knife.
It wasn’t the fault of my education that I was so unworldly, because most of my contemporaries were normal, for their time and place and class. But they seemed to be made of a denser, plusher substance than myself. You could imagine them being women, and having upholstery and airing cupboards. There was air in the spaces between my bones, smoke between my ribs. Pavements hurt my feet. Salt sought out ulcers in my tongue. I was given to prodigious vomiting for no reason. I was cold when I woke up and I thought I would go on being it, always. So later, when I was twenty-four and I was offered a chance to migrate to the tropics, I seized on it because I thought now, now at least I will never be cold again.
My holiday job was secured before the interview; who, at Affleck & Brown, would have turned down the daughter of my ever-popular mother? But it was a formality: the mild personnel officer in his dun-coloured suit, in a back office so brown that I thought I had never seen the colour before, in every variety of tobacco spit and jaundice, every texture of Bakelite and Formica. Here I entered, fresh as 1970 in my little cotton shift, and here I was drawn backwards to the fifties, to the brown world of the National Insurance Card, and the yellowed notice from the Wages Council peeling from the distempered wall. Here I was wished luck and walked out on to the carpet, into the public world. ‘Draws your feet, this carpet,’ said a voice from between the rails.
It came from a shuddering white face, from wagging jowls, from a slow rolling mass of flesh, fiercely corseted inside a dress of stretched black polyester: corseted into the shape of a bulbous flower vase, and the skin with the murky sheen of carnation water two days old. Reek of armpits, rattling cough; these were my colleagues. life in the stores had destroyed them. They had chronic sniffles from the dust and bladder infections from the dirty lavatories. Their veins bulged through elastic stockings. They lived on £15 per week. They didn’t work on commission, so they never sold anything if they could help it. Their rheumy malice drove customers back to the escalators and down into the street.
The personnel officer set me to work in the department next to my mother. I was able to study her in action, wafting across the floor in whatever creation she was wearing that day; she was no longer in subfusc, but picked her garments from her own stock. She had developed a manner that was gracious, not to say condescending, combined with a tip-tilted flirtatiousness that she tried out on the wilting gays who were almost the only men in the store; she was liked by her staff – her girls, as she called them – for her prettiness and high spirits.
They didn’t seem, the girls, quite so decrepit as the ones who worked for my department, although I soon found out that they had a variety of intractable personal problems, which were meat and drink to my mother, which were in fact what she had instead of meat and drink, because now it was her role in life to stay a size 10, pretend she was a size 8, and so set an example to womankind. The girls had divorces, bad debts, vitamin deficiencies, premenstrual tension, and children with fits and deformities. Their houses were given to subsidence and collapse, floods and moulds, and it seemed to me that they specialised in obsolescent diseases such as smallpox or conditions such as scrapie that only a few morbid-minded people like me had heard of in those days. The worse off they were, the more disorderly and hopeless their lives, the more my mother doted on them. Even today, thirty years on, many of them keep in touch with her. ‘Mrs D rang,’ she will say. ‘The IRA have bombed her house again and her daughter’s been engulfed in a tidal wave, but she asked to be remembered to you.’ At Christmas, and on the occasions of her falsified birthdays, these girls would buy my mother coloured glass ornaments, and adjuncts to the good life, like soda siphons. They were inner-city women with flat Manchester voices, but my mother and the other department heads talked in peculiar purse-lipped ways designed not to let their vowels show.
I was not employed by the store itself, but by a ‘shop-in-shop’ called English Lady. There were women, tending to the elderly, who wanted what it offered: dress-and-coat ensembles that I called wedding uniforms, summer frocks and ‘separates’ in artificial fabrics and pastel shades, washable and easy-iron. In those days people still went out in April to buy a summer coat of pink showerproof poplin, o
r a light wool with a shadow check, and they bought blazers, boleros and blouses, and trouser ensembles with long tunic tops under which they wore stockings and suspenders, the bumps of the suspenders showing through the polyester. In winter English Lady specialised in camel coats, which their wearers dutifully renewed every few years, expecting exactly the same style and getting it. There were also – for the winter stock was coming in, long before I left for London – coats called llamas, which were an unhealthy silver-grey, and shaggy, like hair shirts turned out, but hair shirts with pockets. For the autumn also there were bristling tweeds, and lumpen stinking sheepskins which we chained to the rails, because English Lady feared for their safety. Herding them was heavy work; they exhaled with a grunt when they were touched, and jostled for Lebensraum, puffing out their bulk and testing their bonds inch by squeaky inch.
Customers were scarce that summer. Once the morning dusting was over and we had done the day’s updates on varicose veins, there was a desert of time to be got through: days of stupefying heat, thirst and boredom, with no air, no natural light, only a dim fluorescence above which gave a corpse-tint to the freshest skins. Sometimes as I stood I thought furiously about the French Revolution, which had come to preoccupy me. Sometimes my mother tripped across the carpet, fluttering her fingers at me, smiling upon her workforce.
My own boss was called Daphne. She wore goggle-sized fashion specs with coloured rims, behind which swam void pale eyes. In theory she and my mother were friends, but I soon realised, with a sense of shock, that among her peers my mother was a target for envy, and would have been secretly sabotaged if the other bosses had been bright enough to think how to do it. Daphne worked me relentlessly during those summer weeks, finding for me tasks that no one had done in years: cleaning in the stockrooms that were mice-ridden and thick with dust, boxing up great consignments of wire hangers which leapt from their bundles to claw at my arms like rats breaking out of a pet shop. The north-west was filthy in those days, and the rooms behind the scenes at Affleck & Brown were a dark and secret aspect of the filth. The feet-drawing carpets, the thick polythene in which the clothes came swathed, the neglected warp and weft of those garments that failed to sell and were bastilled in distant stockrooms: all these attracted a nap of sticky fluff which magnetised the particles of the Manchester atmosphere, which coated the hands and streaked the face, so that I must often have looked less like a ‘junior sales’ than a scab in a pit strike, my eyes travelling suspiciously when I surfaced, my hands contaminated, held away from my body in a gesture designed both to placate and ward off.
Sometimes, behind some packed rail draped in yellowing calico, behind some pile of boxes whose labels were faded to illegibility, I could sense a movement, a kind of shifting of feet, a murmur: ‘Mrs Solomons?’ I would call. ‘Mrs Segal?’ No answer: just the whispered exhalation of worsted and mohair: the deep intestinal creak of suede and leather: the faint squeal of unoiled metal wheels. Perhaps it was Daphne, spying on me? But sometimes at five thirty when the fitting rooms had to be cleared, I would come across a closed curtain at the end of a row, and I would turn and walk away without pulling it back, afflicted by sudden shyness or by fear of seeing something that I shouldn’t see. It is easy to imagine that hanging fabric is bulked out by flesh, or that stitch and seam rehearse, after hours, a human shape without bones.
My colleagues, breathing over me the faint minted aroma of their indigestion remedies, received me with unbounded kindness. My pallor attracted their tuttutting sanction, and caused them to recommend the red meat that never passed their own lips. Perhaps my remoteness alarmed them, as I stood entranced among the edge-to-edge jackets; and then I would snap back and sell something, which alarmed them too. I liked the challenge of suiting the garments to the women who wanted them, of making a fit, of gratifying harmless desire. I liked tearing off the tickets from the frocks as they were sold, and looping a carrier bag considerately around an arthritic wrist. Sometimes the elderly customers would try to give me tips, which upset me. ‘I don’t come often now,’ said one twisted, gracious old person. ‘But when I do come, I always give.’
At the end of each working day my mother and I winced arm in arm to Piccadilly station, up the hill from Market Street, past the hot cafés stewing with grease and the NHS clinic that was always advertising for people to step in and donate blood. (I stepped in as soon as I was eighteen, but they turned me around and stepped me straight back out again.) It seemed to me that my job amounted to standing up for a living, and that no one should have to do it: standing hour after hour, standing when there was no customer in sight, standing in the fuggy heat from nine in the morning till five thirty at night with an hour for lunch in which you sprang out of the building and walked, gulping in the air. You stood long after your feet throbbed and your calves ached, and the ache wasn’t gone by next morning when the standing started again. Maybe my mother was better off than me, because she had a tiny shelf of an office to sit in, a chair to perch on. But then she had her shoes, much more pernicious than my small suede sandals; her whole existence was much more high.
Some nights, maybe twice in the week, there were problems with the trains. Once there was an hour’s delay. Hunger made us buoyant: talking gaily of the many catastrophes that had beset my mother’s girls that day, we nibbled at a green apple she had produced from her bag, turn and turn about. We were not angry or guilty about being late because there was nothing we could do, and our mood was innocent, blithe, until we found ourselves penned up in the hall of our little house with my stepfather snarling. Our giggling stopped: what I have often remarked as brutal is the side of the human hand, tensed, wedge-like, ready to strike like an axe. Something then occurred. I’m not clear what it was. It isn’t true that if you’re very angry it gives you strength. If you’re very angry it gives you a swimming head and limbs weak at the joints, but you do it anyway, a thing you’ve never done before, you speak the curse, you move, you pin against the wall, you say a certain death formula and what you say you mean; the effect is in proportion to the shock, as if the Meek had got out from the Sermon on the Mount and raked the crossroads with machine-gun fire.
After this, for a while, I left home. My mother and I parted every evening at the end of our road. She was more in sorrow than in anger, but sometimes she was in anger; I realise now that my intervention had interrupted some marital game of hers. When we drew near the end of our day’s journey she’d stop chattering about the girls, and she’d move – reluctantly, I often felt – into some remote sniffy territory, putting deliberate distance between us. I would labour on up the hill to where I’d moved in with Anne Terese. She was now alone in the family house. Her parents had parted that summer, and perhaps they hadn’t got the hang of it; instead of one going and one staying, both of them had walked out. We didn’t compare our families much; we tried on the clothes in the wardrobes, and rearranged the furniture. The house was a peculiar one, prefabricated, contingent but homely, with a stove in the sitting room, and a deep enamel sink, and none of the appliances, like fridges, that people took for granted in the year 1970.
Anne Terese was working for the summer at a factory that made rubber-soled slippers. The work was hard, but every part of her body was hard and efficient too. In the evening, while I sagged feebly on a kitchen chair, she breaded cutlets, and sliced tomato and cucumber on to a glass dish. She made a Polish cake that was heavy with eggs and ripe cherries. At dusk we sat on the porch, in the faint blown scent of old rose. Hope, fine as cobwebs, draped our bare arms and floated across our shoulders, each strand shivering with twilit blue. When the moon rose we moved indoors to our beds, still sleepily murmuring. Anne Terese thought six children would suit her. I thought it would be good if I could stop vomiting.
Sometimes, as I wandered the floor at English Lady, I’d pretend that I was a supervisor at a refugee camp and that the frocks were the inhabitants. When I packed one and threw its ticket into a box I said to myself that I’d resettled it.
Each day began and ended with the count. You took a piece of paper and ruled it into columns for the different types of stock, so that you didn’t get the two-pieces mixed up with the dress and jackets, even though they were two pieces also. You had to make categories for the garments that had no name, like the bifurcated items that head office had sent several seasons ago; made of hairy grey-blue tweed, they were some kind of flying suit perhaps, of a kind to be worn by Biggles’s nanny. When the sales came around, Daphne would always reduce them, but they remained on the rails, their stiff arms thrust out and their legs wrapped around their necks to keep them from trailing on the carpet.
When you had made your categories you went between the rails and counted, and it was always wrong. You would then patrol the floor looking for English Ladies that had tucked themselves in among the Eastex or Windsmoor. You would haul them back by their necks and thrust them on the rails. But, while it was easy to see why the count should be wrong after the working day, it was less easy to understand why the stock should move around at night. ‘Spooks,’ I said robustly. I thought they must come down from the third-floor bedding (the sheeted dead) and try on our garments, hissing with spooky excitement, and sliding their phantom limbs into legs and sleeves.
I passed the summer so, in talking to tramps in Piccadilly Gardens; in buying ripe strawberries from the barrows for my lunch; in cooling my forehead against the gunmetal grille of the door of the goods lift. When Daphne castigated me for this failing and that, I would sigh will-do-better, but later I would aim secret kicks at the flying suits, and torture them by wrapping their legs more tightly around their necks and knotting them behind the hanger. To Daphne’s face, I was compliance itself. I didn’t want my mother to incur even more rancid female hatred, that would snarl invisible about her trim ankles, snag her kitten heels when I was long gone, and marching through London streets.
The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories Page 116