by Susan Lewis
It doesn’t hurt, or anything, what they do to me, but if you ask me, that’s why it came back, because we all know what radium does to you, don’t we? It’s in the bloody papers all the time, what’ll happen to us all if Russia drops their bomb, so I’m damned if I know why they use the same stuff to try and cure you. I should never have let them do it. If I hadn’t I swear this wouldn’t be happening. Anyway, no point going on about it, is there? It’s there and that’s that. We just have to get rid of it now.
The bloke next to me is lighting up, so I think I will too. Just put one out, but never mind, Eddie’s not here to get on at me, is he? Thank God we haven’t had any more humdingers over it like the one we had at Whitsun. That was terrible, that. I don’t even like thinking about it now, the way we carried on, yelling and screaming, brawling like heathens. He’s never hit me before in his life, but he did that night. Clobbered me right round the bloody earhole he did, though I can’t say I didn’t deserve it for all I did to him. Honest to God, I could have murdered him that night, but he was bloody asking for it, stubbing my fag out like that up the Shant, in front of everyone, then walking out with my kids. Showed me up good and proper he did.
Then it all erupted again later, after the kids went to bed. He came in the room while I was having a smoke, took one look at my fag and started doing his bloody nut. So there we was one minute not speaking, and the next we’re going at it hammer and bleeding tongs.
Fancy breaking up the kids’ toys, the way we did. There was no need of that, and I’ll be the first to admit I felt ashamed of meself after. But at the time we was beyond caring. To be honest, if our Susan hadn’t come in when she did I dread to think what we’d have done. I reckon he’d have thrown that telly. He was mad enough, I could see that, and I was ready to go for the poker to beat his bloody brains in. What a pair. What a bloody pair.
Our poor Susan. She should never have had to see anything like that. Must have frightened her to death. Well, I could see that it had, but I was too bloody angry to stop. The only way to end it was for me to walk out, so I did, but I should have taken her with me. She’d have known then that I was up our mam’s, and she wouldn’t have led our Gary on a wild goose chase all over Staple Hill looking for me. Course, she wouldn’t have wanted to stay up our mam’s without knowing what her precious father was up to, so I wouldn’t have had the time to calm down that I needed. I don’t like admitting this, but there was moments during those couple of days when I considered never going back. I don’t know what good it would have done, running away, but I didn’t half feel like it, because let me tell you, it’s bloody hard having to cope with them all while I’m going through this. Not that I’m feeling sorry for meself, you understand. It’s them I feel sorry for, because I’m scared out me wits half the time, and that don’t do any of them any good, does it? And I can’t tell them I’m scared or it’ll frighten them too.
Anyway, enough about all that. That’s why I’m out tonight, to forget all about it and have a good time. I had a choc ice during the interval and a little chat with the woman in front who works as a cleaner here, she said. I wonder how much she gets an hour. Wouldn’t be worth me applying though, by the time I pulled out for the bus fares, there wouldn’t be anything left. I’m still of a mind to get meself a part-time job though, when all this is over and Gary starts school.
The film’s just finishing now and I’m blowed if I don’t fancy Rex Harrison, who I’ve never been all that partial to before. Bloody lovely ending it is, her turning into a proper lady like that. Let’s hope we have the same success with our Susan.
You can hear all the seats thumping up as the audience starts making their way into the aisles. You can tell we’ve all enjoyed it, because we’ve got soppy great smiles all over our faces. Not for long though, because trying to get out of this place is turning into a right bloody fiasco. You’ve never seen so many people in your life, and we’re moving like bloody snails. Someone should shout fire, that’d put a bit of vim in their step. Ouch! Some stupid swine has just trod on my foot, now someone else is jostling me about while he tries to put on his coat, the silly sod.
‘Can’t you wait till you get outside?’ I say.
‘Sorry Mrs,’ he answers and puts his coat back over his arm. Good bloody job.
As we go out the doors into the foyer I’m being squeezed within an inch of me life. Then everyone comes to a stop and we’re jammed up against each other like sodding sardines. I can see Bob and Flo across the other side. Flo waves, so I give her a wink and shout at the top of me best Audrey Hepburn voice, ‘Come on, move your bloomin’ arses.’
Everyone laughs and would you believe, it starts us moving again, spilling out onto Union Street where the Saturday night rush is turning the place into Piccadilly bloody Circus.
I go back to Bob and Flo’s where Eddie’s been looking after the kids. They’re all in bed now, so we have a nice glass of port and a chat, before Eddie and I get in the car to go home. We’ll come back tomorrow to pick up the kids, rather than wake them up now. I don’t like leaving them really, but they’ll be all right with Flo. She’s as good as gold, she is. Always liked her, ever since Bob first brought her home. Another Taffy, like the rest of them, but I wouldn’t hold that against her.
No rows tonight, I hope. At least Eddie didn’t say anything about me having a glass of port. I don’t know why he should, because the doctor never said I couldn’t have a drink. I suppose with all the pills I’m taking, I probably shouldn’t, but what harm’s the odd one or two going to do? Bloody pills, if I had a pound for every one I took I’d be rich by now. Instead I’m blowing up like a sodding balloon, and it’s not as though I was ever a skinny minnie before. It’s the steroids they say. That’s what happens. You get all built up like a bloody wrestler, then they give you radium to turn you weak as a jelly. Don’t make any sense, do it? Or it don’t to me.
No sooner do I get into bed than I’m fast asleep. Course I didn’t know that till this morning, did I, when I woke up. Can’t believe I went out like that. It’s not as though I was feeling tired before, or not that I realised. But here it is, twenty past seven in the morning and Eddie’s lying flat on his back, still in dreamland. Might as well go downstairs and make us a nice cup of tea before he gets up. I can have a quick fag too.
Eddie went to see Tyldesley last week about the stomach aches he’s been getting. I didn’t know anything about them until he told me he was going to be late home that night, because he was calling in the doctor’s. Silly sod kept it from me because he didn’t want me to worry. Well, I’m hardly going to worry about an upset stomach, am I? Just as long as that’s all it is, which apparently it is. A good dose of Milk of Magnesia or a Beecham’s powder will soon sort him out, the doctor told him, so he’s been taking one or the other all week.
It’s the Beecham’s powder that he got wrong. It’s not for stomach ache, is it, it’s for colds and flu, so that’s how I know there’s nothing wrong with him, and now I reckon he went to see Tyldesley to talk about me. I can’t help wondering what Tyldesley said, but even if I asked I bet Eddie wouldn’t tell me, and anyway, I don’t want to know. I don’t ask Michaels about anything either. What’s the point? They never tell you anything anyway, and if you start reading about it in books you’ll have yourself dead, buried and doing seven rounds of purgatory before you get past A for Acne. I should know, I tried it with one of the books Eddie brought home from the library. It didn’t take much more than an hour before I was ready to be carted off to the loony bin. I played merry hell with him after, I did, bringing that sort of morbid stuff into the house.
‘There’s no point trying to work it out ourselves,’ I told him. ‘We don’t know anything, so we have to let Michaels do his job and get on with our lives the way we always have.’
‘But if you learn a bit about it,’ he said, ‘it might help you to fight it.’
‘I’m fighting it well enough, thank you very much,’ I told him. ‘And I don’t need any book
s to help me.’
And that was that. He took the book away and I haven’t seen another one on the subject since. No, the less you know, the less you’ve got to worry about, is what I say.
Our holiday in Dawlish is all booked up now. Bob and Flo aren’t coming, which is a shame, because we had a good laugh with them in Cornwall, a few years back. Our mam’s coming though, and Alwyn, our Gordon’s girl. Being the oldest of seven I expect it’ll be nice for her to have a few less children to put up with for a week. She’ll be fourteen in August, same month as our Susan’s nine and Gary’s five. God, the time flies, don’t it? It don’t seem five minutes since Gary was born, and now here he is, on the verge of starting school already.
I’ve had a letter back from our Maurice. He says he’s definitely coming this Christmas, so I better break it to Eddie, just in case Maurice wants to stay with us. We don’t have a lot of room, but he can always have Gary’s bed, which is a bit bigger than Susan’s, and Gary can sleep in with us. Our Jacqueline, my niece, stayed with us for a couple of nights last week. She’s nineteen going on twenty, and married to a right bleeding sod of a bloke who’s been hitting her around and carrying on with some trollop behind her back. Poor cow. She’s in a terrible state. She’s staying with our mam now, her own mam, our Ivy, can’t have her, because the bloke Ivy’s married to isn’t Jacqueline’s father and he don’t want her there. If you want to know what I think, I think Jacqueline’ll end up going back to the swine she’s married to. If it was me I’d just wring his bloody neck and be done with it, but that’s me.
Fat as a bloody house I’m getting now. Look at me there in the mirror, face all bloated, arms and legs looking like overstuffed sausages. I don’t know how many different corsets I’ve tried, to help me get into me clothes, but I’ve still got me waistbands held together with safety pins and buttons popping off me blouse. I’ve had to start wearing Eddie’s shirts just to be decent, and I’m borrowing some jumpers off our mam till I can wear me own again. That day can’t dawn soon enough for me. Still, at least me lopsidedness don’t show any more. It’s all hidden by big baggy clothes. What I wouldn’t give though, to be sliding into those Mary Quant dresses all the models are wearing, poker straight, halfway up their thighs and lovely long white boots. I’ve never been thin enough for any of it really, and if you ask me it’s not strictly decent to have your hemline halfway up to your ass. They’ve only got to tilt over an inch and you can see next week’s washing. Disgusting it is, really, but they look nice in the magazines. Our Susan’s on all the time about having a mini dress, but I don’t think I should let her, not at her age. She’s too young to be getting into all that fashion malarkey. Time enough when she’s older.
Eddie’s gone up Bob’s to fetch them now, while I sit here on the back doorstep, smoking a fag. I’ll go in and finish the breakfast dishes in a minute, I was just feeling like a bit of a sit-down. I should get out there later and polish up that front step. Haven’t done it all week and it’s starting to look a bit dingy. Time the council painted it, if you ask me. I’ll tell the rent man when he comes next Monday. Time it was all done round here, the windows, doors, bars and garden gates. I swear, if I didn’t keep on, it’d never get done.
I hope no-one’s looking, because I’ve just lit one fag off another. Well, what’s the harm? I can smoke it now, or ten minutes from now, it all goes down the same way, don’t it? Our Susan told me off the other day. I could hardly believe me ears, uppity little madam that she is.
‘Mum, you shouldn’t smoke, it’s bad for you,’ she said, and if that’s not her father speaking, I don’t know who it is.
Funny, because it’s usually me she sounds like in spite of how close she is to Eddie. That’s the strangest part of being a mother, looking at this little human being and seeing bits of yourself. Not that I’m always proud of what I see, mind you, far from it sometimes, because she’s got some lip on her that’s too much like me own for me to feel comfortable hearing it, but there are other times when I swear I can be thinking a thought one minute, and hearing it coming out of her mouth the next. It makes Eddie laugh, because he always seems to know when it’s happened. He says that’s part of why he loves her so much, that she’s her mother’s daughter. He’s a soppy sod, he is.
Here she comes, skipping up the garden path, hair in plaits, socks round her ankles and not a pair of glasses in sight. Can’t blame her for leaving them off, though, they look awful, and if they’re making her see any better then we’ve yet to find any sign of it. Two years she’s been wearing them, and no improvement to that left eye of hers yet. Perfect vision in the right, all fuzzed up in the left. Just like me.
‘What are you doing sitting here, Mum?’ she says, skipping across the grass towards me.
I wish I could think of an answer, but I don’t rightly know what I’m doing here when I’ve still got the washing-up to finish, and plenty of housework waiting to be done.
‘What about your school report?’ I ask her.
That’s taken the skip out of her step. I didn’t say anything yesterday when she brought it home, because we were taking her up Bob’s, but if she was hoping I’d forgotten, she had another think coming.
‘You were sixth in the class at the end of last term,’ I say. ‘This term you’re twenty-sixth.’
Her head goes down.
‘It says you’re not paying attention in class, and you could try harder. It makes me ashamed of you to read things like that. What kind of example’s it going to set for Gary when he starts school in September?’
‘I don’t know,’ she mumbles.
‘Yes you do.’
‘Not very good,’ she says.
‘Not very good at all. Now, we were going to take you up Kingswood this afternoon to buy a new swimming costume to take on holiday, but it’s only people who do well at school that get new swimming costumes so you can’t have one now, can you?’
‘No,’ she says in a whisper.
I know she’s got her heart set on one with a little white pleated skirt attached, but she has to learn. Hard work gets its own rewards. So if she doesn’t work, she won’t get what she wants.
‘What’s going on here?’ Eddie says, coming round the corner of the house with Gary.
‘I’m just having a word with madam, about her school report,’ I tell him.
‘Ah, yes,’ he says. ‘Not what we expected of you, my love. You can do better than that, now can’t you?’
She nods.
‘Not paying attention in class isn’t going to get you very far.’
‘I told her she can’t have a new swimming costume now,’ I say. ‘Only girls with good reports can have new swimming costumes.’
‘Can I have one?’ Gary pipes up.
‘If you’re a good boy.’
‘I’m a good boy.’
‘That’s what you think. Now come on in and give me a hand with the washing-up, the pair of you.’
To be honest, I’ve never felt less like doing it in my life. Given half a chance I’d go straight back to bed, but that would just be giving in and I’m not going to do that. No bloody way am I going to do that.
Susan
We’re on holiday now, in Dawlish, Devon, England, Europe, The World, The Universe. We’ve rented a chalet on a site that’s not too far from the sea, with a very nice clubhouse and lots of swings and sliders and things. It’s my birthday today. I’m nine. Mum and Dad gave me a swimming costume with a little white pleated skirt stitched onto it, but I can’t wear it yet, because it’s raining. I’ve had other things too, a packet of Spangles from Gary that he bought with his own money, some play lipstick and a mirror from Gran and a join-the-dots book from my cousin Alwyn. It’s her birthday next week. She’ll be fourteen, and she’s going out with the pop singer Billy J. Kramer. She’s got a picture of him that he gave her, of him sitting on his motorbike. She’s even been on it, she told me, but her mum and dad don’t know so I have to keep it a secret.
Our chalet’s the
same as the one we had last year, all made of wood with a nice little balcony in front that’s a part of it, and a long pot of flowers hanging from the railings. There are two bedrooms inside, at the back, one with a big double bed where me and Alwyn sleep, and a little bed along the bottom for Gary, and another room where Mum and Dad sleep. Gran sleeps on the bed-settee in the living room, which is where the kitchen is too. The toilets and showers aren’t very far away, and the water tap is just outside the next chalet so it’s easy carrying it back. Some of the chalets have water in their taps, but we haven’t got one of those.
I put my birthday cards up this morning, and I’m wearing my badge that says ‘I am 9.’ We’re going over to the clubhouse later where Jim, who’s in charge of the games, says we’ll do something special to celebrate. (I wonder if they’ll give me the bumps – if they do, I hope they don’t slam me on the ground like some of the children did at school and it wasn’t even my birthday.)
Us kids are playing old maid with Gran at the moment, while Mum has a lie-down and Dad goes over the shop to get us something for dinner. It’s good that Mum’s headaches are getting better, so she doesn’t have to go to the hospital this week, but she’s got a bit of one this morning, which is why she’s not playing cards. She shouted at Dad earlier and he shouted back, then Gran shouted at them and I told them all off.
‘It’s my birthday, you mustn’t quarrel,’ I said, and that made them shut up. Honestly, grown-ups, sometimes they’re worse than children.
It’s being cooped up in here, thanks to the bloody weather, that makes us so irritable. It’s better when we can go to the beach, or play on the swings, but we like playing cards. I’ve got the old maid at the moment, so I’ve poked it up a bit to try and make Gran take it when she has to choose one from me. She’s not very good at cards, Gran, she always loses.