No Wonder I Take a Drink

by Laura Marney

  No Wonder I Take a Drink was voted by the public in The List magazine poll as one of the Top 20 Scottish books of all time.

  “A gently humorous take on an incomer’s life in the West Highlands.” – The Guardian

  “Laura Marney is one of Scotland’s best-kept literary secrets. This is a biting laugh-out-loud satire which is never crueller than life. Marney’s unlikely heroine meets life head-on and lives on in the reader’s imagination long after the book is finished. An energetic, edgy book with wide appeal.” – Louise Welsh, author of The Cutting Room

  “The pacing has an engaging confidence, a comic brio which, as readers soon see, comes from completely inhabiting her narrator’s character… Her jokes are seldom laboured, almost always rooted in character or language. And either way, she’s a natural comedy writer.” – The Scotsman

  “The word on Laura Marney is that she’s Scotland’s best-kept literary secret, and for once, the goods live up to the fanfare. [No Wonder I Take a Drink] is a sparkling black comedy with guaranteed out-loud laughs. Marney displays a natural flair for storytelling and her wartsand-all characters ring true.” – York Evening Press

  “Laura Marney writes about strong characters who are utterly believable and all too human. She consistently examines their experiences, relationships and foibles with insight, compassion and a rollicking, earthy humour, which makes for great reading. If you suffer from giggle incontinence, beware!” – Zoe Strachan, author of Negative Space

  “Biting wit, brilliant characterisation and hilarious antics – whether you are 16 or 60, you’ll be rocking in your chair.” – Scottish Daily Record

  “Marney’s book is consistently engaging and hits all the right notes.” – The Glasgow Herald

  NO WONDER

  I TAKE A DRINK

  Laura Marney

  For Ellen Doyle.

  And for Holly Marney and Max Marney

  who gave me permission.

  Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Coming soon

  Reading group questions

  No wonder I wrote No Wonder…

  The importance of setting and sense of place in No Wonder I Take a Drink

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Laura Marney

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  My lasting memory of Mum is of her standing leaning against her bed, wearing her good pearls, nicely turned out in a peach blouse and lemon cardi, bare naked from the waist down. She was threatening to sign herself out of the hospice for the third time that week. Anticipating this I had sneaked her in a half bottle of vodka. We both knew it would probably finish her off but that’s the way she wanted it. She died three nights later. Before she died and after I’d helped her put her drawers on and poured her a watered-down vodka and coke, she nearly told me something.

  I could see she was struggling and I suppose I should have been more patient or just told her to bloody well spit it out, but at the time I was too busy noticing that my mother had no pubic hair. I couldn’t believe that, at age sixty-eight, she would take the trouble to give herself a shaven haven. Where would she have got hold of a razor? And besides, her hands shook most of the time.

  At first I thought it was just another of her rants about the Health Service, actually a thinly disguised rant about her own health, but her tone was different, not angry, she seemed frightened. She closed her eyes and shook her head vigorously, the way she did when we argued. And then she went strange. She started rocking back and forth, moaning and shuddering.

  ‘Your dad says I should…’

  She was scaring me with her amateur dramatics so I decided to nip it in the bud.

  ‘Dad’s dead, Mum, he died four years ago.’

  Slowly she opened her eyes and showed me a thin aggressive smile. In the two years that Mum had lived with me, before she finally agreed to the hospice, our relationship had blossomed. Stuck in the flat in each other’s company twenty-four hours a day, we flowed through the peaks and troughs of each other’s moods. This intimacy had not brought the tolerance and understanding I had expected it would, but it did give us the ability to have a right good fight and not be embarrassed.

  ‘I know he’s dead you eejit, only too well, I’m not senile, and it’s four and a half years, actually.’

  ‘Sorry. You said he says.’

  ‘Yes, he says,’ she spat, and then she was off on one, ‘I meant says. He might have said to you Trisha, but he says to me, okay?

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’m about to pop my clogs and you’re pulling me up about grammar!’ She was shouting now.

  ‘Okay! Sorry!’ I was shouting too.

  We both sulked for a while. As usual, I was the first to give in.

  ‘So what is it that Dad always ‘says’ then?’

  I could see she was swithering whether to fall back in with me or not.

  ‘He always says wash behind your ears…’

  ‘Or totties will grow there,’ I finished for her.

  ‘He says be true to your teeth…’

  ‘Or they’ll be false to you.’

  We were becoming a double act.

  ‘He knows, he understands. He says I’ve to explain to you.’

  ‘Explain what, Mum?’

  ‘He says to tell you that young women can be daft sometimes.’

  ‘Okay Mum.’

  I was nearly forty. Nobody except Mum thought of me as a young woman.

  ‘Try to understand.’

  I knew it was a bad idea to smile so I held it in.

  ‘Okay Mum.’

  ‘He says give your mother another vodka.’

  ‘Okay!’

  ‘He says d’you think she’s daft and can’t tell it’s watered down?’

  I changed the subject, complimenting her on her shampoo and set. Since she’d been ill we bickered freely. At the beginning I bit my tongue and let her away with it. I didn’t want her dying on me after a fall out. She took full advantage of her position but it was no fun for either of us and I think she was relieved when I began to argue back. Now, as time ran out, I was in a sticky position. I hated wasting time on pointless arguments but I couldn’t give in too easily. Elsie was a bad-tempered old git towards the end.

  *

  I’d rehearsed in my head the deathbed scene loads of times. She would tell me to look after Steven. She would say she loved me, that she was proud of me. She’d only said it twice before, once when her mother died and then again when Dad died. In a sick way I was looking forward to it. I would tell her I loved her, it wasn’t a big deal for me to say it, I told Steven I loved him practically every time I saw him but I’d only ever told Mum twice. Tit for tat.

  The night she went I sat with her, in what, for t
he last three weeks, had been Mum’s room. There was a coffee table and two big easy chairs on either side, next to the window looking on to the garden. All around the room Mum had put her photos of Dad and me and Steven and the plants she’d been encouraged to bring. I brought her a bowl of green grapes and tangerines which she hadn’t touched, and there was a telly and a CD player. It was never going to be featured in a lifestyle magazine but it was homely and it suited Elsie.

  That night the room looked the same but different. It was the same except her photos had been put on the bedside table beside her where she could see them. Someone had programmed a loop of cheesy New Age music in the CD. A morphine drip was rigged and the bed was jacked up to its full height. It made it easy for the staff to work around her, and when the time came, easier for the nurses to roll her old body on to a trolley and off to the mortuary. The time was coming. Within a few hours the room would be cleaned and cleared, ready to become another terminally ill patient’s home from home.

  I sat holding her hand for a couple of hours and tried to read Woman’s Own while she slid in and out of consciousness. Reading was making me sleepy so I gave up and took a tangerine from the fruit bowl. It looked okay when I lifted it but it fell apart in my hand. White mould covered the underside, I’d only bought it three days ago along with the vodka but the stifling heat of the hospice had turned it to rotten mush.

  A couple of times she looked as if she was away. Twice her chest stopped and then started again, sighing a heavy death rattle. I was on my own with her most of the time. About two o’clock she started talking, gibbering in a panicky voice, she shouted ‘Hughie!’ my dad’s name, a few times. I called the nurse but she said it was just the effect of the pain relief, nothing to be distressed about. Three times Mum said, ‘it’s best all round,’ in between making gurgly noises at the back of her throat.

  ‘Mum, shhh now, it’s okay.’

  She started again but it was the same kind of thing.

  ‘It’s as well to let it lie, isn’t it? Hughie? Isn’t it?’

  Every word was an effort for her. I was raging. Two years she’d had to sort things out and now, when she only had a few minutes left with me, she was talking in riddles. I should have got to the bottom of it the other day and then we wouldn’t be having all this palaver now. I just wanted her not to fret, to be at peace.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mum, whatever it is, I’ll sort it, I promise.’

  She was gripping my hand tightly and when she spoke she spat the words. I tried to ignore the spittle which dribbled between our intertwined hands.

  ‘No!’ she gasped. For a second it looked as though she was about to leap out the bed. ‘Over my dead body!’

  She managed a smile and caught my eye to see if I’d got the joke. I was a bit shocked but I smiled my recognition. She quietened down again for a while and got her breath back. I went back to Woman’s Own. An hour later a faint movement caught my eye. Mum was weakly flapping her hand, beckoning to me to her. I had no idea how long she’d been trying to attract my attention. As I bent over to catch her last words she whispered, ‘Turn that bloody music off.’

  *

  Steven came to the funeral and looked really smart. His dad came too which I thought was a nice gesture seeing as he and my mother hated each other’s guts. She would have been proud of Steven though, as proud as I was. He was desperate to be a pall bearer as I knew he would be. Mum had said no, worried that he’d drop her. In the end I let him, it was his granny and he had a right. All Mum’s pals were amazed, ‘is that your boy? What age is he now? Fifteen? God, look at the height of him! Fifteen and nearly six feet. He’s a lovely big lad so he is.’

  Mum’s older sister was the living breathing spit of her. They were almost exactly the same height and build. Auntie Nettie had the same hair and the same way of holding her hands across her middle as Mum. They didn’t start out that way but as they’d gotten older the two sisters, Elsie and Nettie, had grown more and more alike. Sometimes when Nettie had been round seeing Mum I was hard pushed to tell one from the other. But while they were physically nearly identical, their personalities were completely different. Okay, Mum was a bit cratchety, but she’d been ill, she wasn’t always like that. Nettie was. A more self-centred old woman you wouldn’t wish to meet.

  And now Nettie was in her element. Before we went in to the church she was all business, bossing the undertakers about, drilling Bob, Steven and me on funeral protocol. As Mum’s only sister and self-appointed Chief Mourner, she formed us into an orderly line and positioned herself at the front. Once we were inside she fell apart and became a bit of an embarrassment, wailing and howling and generally drawing attention to herself. She actually swooned and had to be supported on more than one occasion. What with all the crying and the faces she was pulling, her make-up was half way down her face, not a good look for a woman in her seventies. As the four of us sat in the front pew I looked down and saw Steven holding Nettie’s hand and squeezing it tight. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to comfort her or shut her up but I appreciated him trying to help.

  It must be said that Bob didn’t let me down either. Even though people knew we’d split up, he did his bit as the devoted husband. He didn’t overdo it though. As we walked out the church Bob put his arm around Steven and his hand at my elbow. I let him use my elbow as a rudder to guide us through the mourners. Bob’s hair, once a flamboyant red, had paled to a golden blond. He’d kept in shape and the dark suit did his athletic frame justice. I was grateful that he’d made the effort. Auntie Nettie, wanting to spin out the lamenting a wee while longer, insisted we stand and shake hands with everyone coming out. Nettie would release them from her embrace only after she’d left oily deposits of Max Factor’s Honey Blush on the shoulders of all the men’s black suits.

  At the cemetery there were a few folk I didn’t recognise but I asked the minister to invite everyone to the hotel. Mum had insisted on steak pie; she’d had the baker on standby for weeks. After sherry and steak pie and a few vodkas Auntie Nettie announced, without consulting me, that everyone was invited back to the house. I asked Bob if he would come, not because I wanted him to, but because I wanted Steven to come home with me. I knew Steven would come if Bob agreed.

  ‘Nah,’ said Bob. ‘But you go if you like,’ he told Steven, ‘I can pick you up later.’

  ‘Steven?’ I tried to keep the pleading out of my voice.

  ‘Mum, is it okay if I don’t come?’ Steven had on this pained expression that made him look the double of his dad. The expression said, ‘I’d love to but I really can’t be arsed.’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said casually. Steven had been so great all day I didn’t want to spoil things. ‘You’ll be wanting to get back for some of Helga’s lovely pickled herring and gravel axe, although why you’d want to eat gravel I do not understand.’

  ‘Nice one Trish,’ Bob smirked on his way past, ‘it’s gravlax.’

  ‘Stick it up your arse,’ I snarled.

  Nettie organised the funeral party quickly, arranging who was taking who and piling them into cars. They got to the house before me. It was embarrassing, the house was a cowp. With visiting the hospice every day for the last three weeks I had let any notion of housework go to hell. Luckily there was plenty of drink in the house. I simply kept going round filling everyone’s glasses so they wouldn’t notice the mess. Auntie Nettie, from a higher social station than most of Mum’s friends, or so she considered herself, tried to dissuade them from getting the karaoke machine out.

  ‘I hardly think it’s appropriate,’ she said a few times but, knowing her of old, Mum’s mates blanked her. To annoy her and to save me having to entertain everyone, I went and got it out. We hadn’t had it out for months. One of her conditions of moving in with me was that Mum was allowed to keep up her regular monthly karaoke nights but towards the end she wasn’t fit for it anymore. They made room and while they watched I put the plug in the socket and switched the machine on.

  ‘I’m s
orry,’ I said, ‘I think it’s chanked, nothing’s happening.’

  Auntie Nettie smirked but one of Mum’s friend’s husband’s came to the rescue.

  ‘Have you checked the plug?’

  ‘No, but I will,’ I told him.

  ‘Get me a screwdriver and I’ll do it, it’s probably just needing a new fuse.’

  I was getting ice for someone so I showed him into the kitchen. He humphed the machine into the kitchen with him where he had a good rummage in the cupboard under the microwave before he found the screwdriver and a packet of fuses. While I was hitting the icetray off the edge of the sink I could hear Isa, Madge and the rest of them start a communal version of ‘Hive Full of Honey’ as a tribute to Mum.

  I’ve got two wonderful arms

  I’ve got two wonderful lips

  I’m over twenty-one and I’m free!

  Years before karaoke machines were invented that had been her party piece. ‘We don’t need the machine!’ I heard someone shout. I turned round and smiled an apology at Isa’s husband. He smiled too but he carried on fixing the plug.

  Oh I’ve got a hive full of honey

  For the right kind of honey bee.

  I wasn’t keen to talk to him, I’d been talking to people all day and anyway I couldn’t remember his name. I remembered shaking his hand as we left the church but not what his name was.

  ‘Harry,’ he said in a wheezy voice, as if he could read my mind. I nodded hello and continued battering hell out of the icetray.

  ‘If you run it under the cold tap for a wee minute then it should come out easier,’ he suggested.

  Again I nodded, I knew it would, but I was getting some kind of satisfaction from smashing away at the sink.

  I’m not the glamorous type

  But I’m the amorous type

  You’ll love the way I fit on your knee!

  I could hardly hear the women singing above the racket I was making.