by Julia Bell
‘You know why he looks so bloody happy?’ my mother says when she sees me looking at it. ‘He was after my cousin Linda all through the reception. I should never have married him, Carmen.’
I stay in watching morning TV with Nana while Mum goes out to look at a flat. Nana watches lots of television. As soon as she gets up in the morning she puts it on. ‘It’s company,’ she says.
We watch Inch Loss Island while we wait for Trisha. In this morning’s episode Wendy, a contestant from Braintree, is crying because she misses her children. She’s only lost a few pounds despite the fact that she’s been on the island for a whole week and she’s sticking rigidly to the programme’s regime of nutritious, low-fat, calorie-counted meals.
The presenter’s lipgloss shimmers as she tells how Wendy got fat when she was pregnant and how she’s come to the island to get her figure back. ‘It’s probably water retention,’ she advises. ‘I expect the pounds will drop off next week.’
‘Poor dab,’ Nana says, cracking a Polo between her teeth. ‘Nothing worse than a miserable fatso.’
Grandad comes in and stands in front of the telly. ‘Pension day!’ he says, flicking his book like it’s raffle tickets. ‘What you watching, bird?’
‘Shhhh,’ Nana’s eyebrows furrow. Andrea from King’s Lynn has lost nearly a whole stone.
‘Women’s telly.’ Grandad tuts. ‘See you later.’
‘When the latch clicks Nana sighs. ‘He lives down the pub these days,’ she says, without taking her eyes off the screen. ‘You don’t want to get old you know bab, it isn’t half boring.’
Next day Mum is really hyper. The flat she saw yesterday was in the wrong bit of town. ‘Newtown, sweetheart, we don’t want to live there, we’d get robbed every ten seconds and God knows what else.’
She’s rung an old friend who’s got a flat we might be able to stay in. She’s put on lots of make-up and a tight dress to go and meet him. She looks like someone off the telly, her eyes sparkling, big gobs of gold jewellery on her ears. She hasn’t done herself up like this for months, not even for work, and she looks strange, unreal, like it might all drop off her at any moment.
‘It’s all right,’ she says, ‘I’m going to rescue you from all this bloody food.’ And she puts her arms wide to take in the whole of the house.
I look up from the TV and stare. All I can think is that she’s wearing too much lipstick.
There’s only racing and kids’ programmes on. We watch Sesame Street for a bit, because Nana likes Big Bird. ‘That’s what I am now,’ she says, ‘a big bird.’
I must look really miserable because her face softens. ‘Let’s do something this afternoon. What d’you reckon? Fancy a trip uptown with your nan?’
We go on the bus, and it seems to take ages, bumping down the Stratford Road. Everything’s a gaudy, grubby colour: curry houses, sari shops, butchers, grocers, video shops.
‘They chop dogs up and put them in the food round here,’ Nana says.
I look at a pasty carcass hanging in the window of a butcher’s. ‘Is that a dog?’
‘Eugh, don’t look.’ Nana shudders. ‘No, it’s a goat. That’s really disgusting, someone should complain.’
Further along the road, over the roundabout and down the last dip before town, the buildings get bigger, turn into ramshackle factories and warehouses. Car showrooms, tattoo parlours, a few dusty old pubs, Sparky’s piano shop. In the sun the city looks steely: all glinting glass and pale concrete.
We go to the Bull Ring to look round the shops. Nana says they’re going to pull it all down soon, build a more modern, posher shopping centre.
‘It’s a shame,’ she says. ‘It was beautiful when it was new.’
Everything is a quid, or two ninety-nine. She pulls me into Mark One.
‘You want anything, bab? My treat.’
Untidy rails of clothes are laid out on the cracked lino. There is a kind of gallery with underwear and shoes and menswear, and below, down the thin, slippery steps, a whole floor of ladies fashions. It smells of rubber and industrial glue and the assistants are hard and miserable in their red polyester overalls.
She pulls out a few things as we pass the rails. ‘What about these?’ She hands me a shiny blue dress and a black jumper made from the kind of cotton that bobbles when you wash it. I don’t want to try on clothes; they’ll only be too small or look crap.
‘I’d rather have sweets,’ I say.
Nana smiles at me. ‘Orright, bab, let’s go to the market first, eh? There’s someone I’d like you to meet.’
To get to the Bull Ring markets we have to go down cranky old escalators. Beneath us is a huge underground hall, full of stalls with orange plastic signs announcing the stallholders’ names in brown lettering. They sell everything: buttons, pet food, material, fresh fish, chickens, vegetables, books, T-shirts, leather jackets, eggs, shoes. The air smells strongly of fish and is filled with the noise of a constant hubbub of people shouting and talking. For a few seconds I am overwhelmed.
‘Where are we going?’ I ask, as Nana weaves her way in front of me through huddles of shoppers.
‘To see Lisa. She’s got a stall down here. You don’t remember her, do you?’
‘No.’
She looks at me and smiles. ‘You were only a little scrap of a thing when you left.’
Right at the back, tucked away in one of the corners, next to a haberdashery stall and a fruit and veg stall, is a booth: The Nail File. The window is jewelled with little bottles. Hundreds of colours and textures. Pinks, lime greens, pine greens, purples of every shade, electric blues, glittery blues, silvers, golds, bronzes. There are more colours than I know names for.
The woman behind the counter is tall, and her hair is so black it has a blue sheen to it. Eyeliner sweeps under her eyes like Cleopatra’s and her lipstick is a thick, shocking red.
‘Hiya, Mum,’ she says without looking up. ‘Won’t be a minute.’
She’s painting something, concentrating really hard so the skin furrows between her eyebrows.
‘You must be Carmen,’ she tells me.
‘How d’you know that?’
‘I have amazing powers of perception. You ask your mum. I told her she’d come back here and now she has.’
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, too nosy to be shy.
‘Ready-made extensions, then all I have to do is stick them on. There—’ she says, showing me a tiny scrap of nail with a Caribbean sunset painted on it.
‘It’s gorgeous,’ I say.
‘D’you remember me?’
I shake my head. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry. You were only a little babby when you left. Show us your hands.’
I look at Nana, but she’s off chatting with the man on the haberdashery stall. In Stitches it says on the sign.
‘You don’t bite them, that’s a good sign.’ She picks up a file with a long, ivory handle. ‘I’ll do you a quick once over, then you can tell me about your mum. Is she all right? I heard she’s been sick.’
Lisa files my nails with a deft, sawing movement. I don’t know what to say. Her nails are a shiny red and hard like plastic. ‘She’s all right,’ I say. ‘She’s got a new job.’
‘You got a boyfriend then? I bet you’ve got loads, pretty thing like you.’
She’s only being nice, I can tell, but I smile at her anyway. ‘I’m into Madonna,‘ I offer.
‘Are you now? Been around for a long while, her. You want a polish on that? I’ll do you one for free. Pick a colour. Or you could have a transfer if you like, I’ve got some really pretty purple ones, look, with glitter in.’ She shows me some purple stars. ‘They’d be good on a lilac background. What d’you reckon?’
‘All right,’ I say, not sure if I’m agreeing to something I’m not supposed to do.
She paints swiftly, accurately. Two strokes a nail. Then she sticks a purple star on each one and covers it with a quick brush of clear lacquer.
‘Oooh, there’s p
retty,’ Nana says. ‘Proper little Spice Girl. We better go soon, let Lisa get on.’
‘Hang on a minute, Mum, wait for them to dry.’
They talk about the Bull Ring, how it’s a shame it’s all coming down. But I’m not really listening; I’m admiring my nails. I wriggle them to make the glitter twinkle.
‘Come back and visit, won’t you?’ Lisa says when we leave. ‘Before they pull it all down? Tell your mum to come too.’
As we walk through the stalls to the escalators I hold my hands out in front of me; my fingers look magic, like wands with spells at the end of them.
Nana takes me to Druckers. On the ground floor, above the markets where there are no windows and no natural light. We sit at a table in the centre square, outside all the shops, next to a cluster of kiddie rides. There’s a splat of melted ice cream on the window of the Postman Pat van.
She buys me a hot chocolate with a big blob of cream on top and a slab of fudge cake. She gets a pot of tea for herself and a chunk of apple strudel.
‘I bought some for later,’ she says, holding up a white box. ‘Your mother’s looking rather peaky, bit of sugar’ll do her good.’
The cake is gorgeous, all gooey and chocolatey. To save my nails I have to hold the fork between my finger and thumb which makes it really difficult to eat.
Nana tuts when she looks at me. ‘You’ve got it all over your face, love,’ she says, spitting on a napkin and scrubbing my face with it.
I look at her lips, her lipstick is running into the lines round her mouth, her cheeks are sagging into pouches that hang off her jaw. Her hair is like a cloud; a puff of wispy grey hair stuck solid with hairspray. Mum says that Nana was a stunner when she was younger.
‘Nana?’
‘Yes, child?’
‘You got any photos of before, when you were younger?’
‘What you want to see them for? I don’t like to look at them now,’ she sighs. ‘Once you lose your looks everything goes to the dogs.’
But she gets them out when we get back. Big, plastic-coated family albums with ‘Treasured Memories’ in gold on the cover. There are lots of my mother when she was a kid. Yellowy snapshots of her toddling on the beach, Nana in flowery dresses, her hair piled on top of her head in a beehive.
‘That was in Great Yarmouth,’ she says, pointing to a photo of herself in a blue satin minidress. ‘I loved that holiday. Went out dancing every night. I made that dress an’ all. Used to sew all my own clothes.’ She runs her hands across the bulge of her belly.
Next to it there’s a photo of Grandad leaning on a motorbike, fag in his hand, his hair flicked into a quiff like Elvis.
‘Handsome once, wasn’t he?’
Later there are photos of Nana and Grandad outside the house – ‘That’s what it looked like when we bought it, before he grew that bloody forest out there,’ – and of my mother at fourteen in a pair of flares, hands on her hips, sticking her tongue out at the camera. ‘Had some flesh on her then,’ Nana says. ‘Before all this dieting nonsense. Accused me of trying to make her fat, she did. Lisa blames herself but it weren’t her fault. It was your mother. She never knew when to stop.’
She tells me that when they were girls, when my mum wasn’t much older than me, they both went on a diet. That Lisa gave it up after a few months. ‘She’s like me, she likes her sweets too much. But your mum, she just got thinner and thinner. We didn’t know what to do. It was driving us all mad. She got it into her head that she was fat—’ she shakes her head ‘—she was thin as a stick. She’s been funny about it ever since.’ She turns the page of the book. ‘Look at her there.’
It’s a blurry snapshot that doesn’t really look like Mum. She’s holding a baby – me, I suppose – and bending backwards under the weight. She’s so thin that there hardly seems to be any body there at all, just bones and clothes.
Nana puts her hand on my head, strokes my hair. ‘Mind you don’t listen to any of her nonsense, Carmen. I won’t have you turning out like that.’
‘I won’t,’ I say, looking at Mum. It makes me feel sick to see her like that.
At the back of the last book there is a little square photo, like the kind you get in photo-booths. The girl in the picture has spiky blue hair, eyeliner, black lipstick and a safety pin in her ear. Her expression makes her look like she’s growling.
‘Who’s that?’
Nana looks over my shoulder and sighs. ‘That,’ she says, ‘was our Lisa when she was seventeen.’
5
Mum doesn’t like my nails. ‘Too showy,’ she says when she sees them. ‘That was always her problem.’
Nana has unboxed the Druckers cakes and put them on a plate in front of us. I make a great dent in the soft wedge of sponge with my fork. Cream oozes out at the sides like shaving foam.
‘We can’t eat this,’ Mum hisses at me. She unfolds a napkin. ‘I’ll wrap it up for later.’
I stop the fork halfway to my mouth, loaded with the rich, sticky, chocolate cake. Mum wrinkles her nose like it’s something disgusting. Nana is coming back up the corridor. I put the fork down and scrape the rest of the cake reluctantly into the napkin. I’ve only had two mouthfuls.
‘Give,’ Mum says, snatching the parcel from me and stuffing it in her handbag.
‘Finished already?’ Nana sits down next to me. ‘You want more?’
‘Enough,’ Mum says. ‘We’ve been getting fat staying with you.’ She prods her own arm with her finger. ‘See? Fat.’
‘That’s skin, Maria.’
Mum pulls another cigarette from her packet.
‘Carmen,’ she says, looking straight at me. ‘Go and get your things, there’s a good girl.’
When I get back downstairs they are arguing.
‘I don’t know why you still won’t see her. After all this time. Your own flesh and blood.’
‘She was the one who stopped talking to me. I don’t know what you were thinking of, taking Carmen down there, anyway. I don’t want her getting ideas.’
Nana unfolds one of the napkins. It’s a fancy one with Vienna Patisserie written in curly script. She puts it on the table, starts flattening the creases with the side of her hand.
‘And you think that leaving Brian is a good idea, do you?’
The car is outside, half on the pavement like she parked it in a hurry.
‘Honestly, that woman,’ Mum says as she slides into the driving seat. Checking her face in the mirror, she wipes a smudge of lipstick from her top lip. ‘If she had her way, we’d all be like elephants.’
I look at her and try to imagine what she was like before she had me. Her hair is long now, and wispy, usually pinned or tied up at the back. She dyes it a reddish-brown that says ‘glossy radiance’ on the bottle. She is smaller than the podgy girl in the photos.
‘Mum,’ I ask, ‘what were you like when you lived here?’
She turns away from the mirror to look at me. ‘A mess,’ she says. ‘And things were very different then. Weren’t the opportunities that there are now. I never wanted to end up with what they’ve got.’ She stabs her finger at the hedge. ‘I mean, bless her, I know she’s my mother but she’s never had ambition. She’d be happy to see me get fat and work in Boots.’
‘Wouldn’t you be happy to see me work in Boots?’
‘No, I wouldn’t.’ She turns the key in the ignition. ‘You’re lucky you are,’ she says. ‘Whole world of opportunity out there for your generation. You’ve got to grab it before you get old, before it’s too late.’
Mum has found us a flat on the eighteenth floor of a tower block on the edge of the city centre. Sublet from someone called Billy; Mum tells me he’s an old friend.
‘You always know who your real friends are in a crisis,’ she says.
‘I didn’t know there was a crisis.’ I say, looking at the tower of flats that stretches up above us.
‘Don’t you get smart with me, madam.’
‘There’s broken windows,’ I say, pointing to so
me windows higher up that are boarded over.
‘They’re doing them up, Carmen. This is prime property nowadays. Anyway, it’s only temporary. Till I find somewhere we can buy. It’ll be fun, like camping. What d’you reckon?’
‘Suppose,’ I say.
‘You could sound a bit more enthusiastic.’
The lift is panelled with sheets of bubbled metal that bulge like the eyes of a fly. ‘God, I look a mess,’ Mum says, peering at her distorted reflection. The light is dingy and the floor is spotted with blots of chewing gum. I wrinkle my nose; it smells of pee.
‘Cost a fortune, these flats,’ she says, as we get out on floor eighteen. ‘With all the redevelopment. They’re going to do them up, Billy says, turn them into penthouses.’ As if that explains everything.
We’re number 128. With a metal door and a lock that you have to turn four times to open. The cream paint is chipped and the flap of the letter box is missing so you can see a square of pink carpet through the gap.
‘Oooh, look at that view,’ she says, as I follow her into the living room.
I have to hold my breath because the height makes me dizzy. The city spreads out underneath us, so far below that it looks like a toy town. The floor feels unsteady under my feet.
‘I don’t like it.’
‘What d’you mean you don’t like it? How can you not like it? Look at the view. You can see twenty miles from here. You’ll get used to it.’ She puts her hands on the glass, presses herself against it. ‘This is where I should have been all along, Carmen. It’s why I got depressed. I need to live, to be in the thick of it all.’ She purses her lips and does a sort of slinky dance. ‘I never wanted to settle down and have ki—’ she stops herself, bites her lip. ‘Never mind.’
I pretend not to notice.
Birmingham goes on for miles and miles. All the land up to the horizon is filled with buildings and roads. I don’t want to stand too close to the window. I’m scared I might fall off.
‘Look,’ she says, pointing. ‘Over there, that’s where the Power House used to be. We used to go there on nights out. Billy’s band did a gig there once. But that was about as far as it went.’ She laughs. ‘Birmingham wasn’t very sophisticated in those days. Not like now. You know things have changed so much in the last ten years, it’s amazing.’