The Queen of Bloody Everything

by Joanna Nadin

‘Is your mum a lesbian?’ asks Tom.

  Harry pulls a face. ‘No, silly, or how did she have Dido?’

  ‘But she did kiss Toni once,’ I whisper.

  Mrs Payne slips out of her seat. But I am enjoying commanding an audience for once, Brian and two of the Gibbs girls now rapt as well.

  ‘It was in bed. They weren’t wearing anything. I think they rubbed each other, too.’

  I made that bit up. I don’t know what you did, or for how long. All I know is that I woke alone, and when I padded down the landing and checked, Scooby-Doo-like, behind all the closed doors, it was Toni’s room I found you in, wrapped around her naked body, your hand between her legs, your lips against her neck.

  ‘Edie?’ I asked quietly. Then louder, because I needed a wee and the toilet was blocked, again. ‘Edie!’

  You shifted, and as you did, Toni kissed your hair and you moaned. Then you lazily opened your eyes and brought them into focus. And saw me.

  ‘Di?’

  Toni sat up and I saw her breasts, white and veined and pendulous. I was fascinated by breasts at that age; had seen at least five pairs, but yours were my favourite. I preferred them small and stiff, not these hanging mammaries that seemed so cow-like in their swaying.

  You pulled a T-shirt on, one of Chinese Clive’s, and pushed yourself up from the futon. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’

  I nodded solemnly and, still staring over my shoulder, allowed myself to be led from the room.

  That was six months before we left the squat. And a lifetime ago it seems now, yet still its ripples are felt in every corner of the pond. The beginnings of them fanning out that hot afternoon in June.

  ‘Are you a lesbian?’ asks Brian Payne.

  ‘No,’ I say decisively, and focus entirely on Tom. ‘And nor is Harry.’

  I feel a Clarks’ heel kick sharply at my shin.

  ‘What?’ I complain. ‘You’re not.’

  But I know what Harry’s protesting against. Not the declaration, but about letting slip that we’re so sure.

  And why are we so sure? Because, like a costume, like another character in the line of Cinderellas and Rapunzels we try out for size, we have played at being lesbian for an afternoon. We kissed, or rather Harry kissed me, in the bathroom at her house one Sunday after I first told her about Toni.

  ‘What do they do?’ she asked.

  ‘The same as with men,’ I said. ‘They put their tongues in each other’s mouths and wiggle them.’

  ‘Like this?’ asked Harry.

  I smelled the Rowntree’s Fruit Pastille she had lodged between her gums and upper lip as her face loomed towards mine, tasted blackcurrant on her tongue as it pushed fatly against my own. I listened for a few seconds to the wet, smacking sound, and pulled away.

  ‘Like that,’ I said quietly, wiping my mouth on the sleeve of one of her cardigans.

  ‘I don’t see why they’d do that,’ said Harry archly. ‘That was . . . boring.’

  And though I felt nothing move, heard no violins, I, aged six, was still wounded by the disappointment that I did not make a good lesbian lover.

  ‘Mrs Beecham from Pennings is a lesbian,’ declares Nicola Gibbs, knowledgeably. ‘Jason Stint says so.’

  ‘And she has hairy legs,’ adds her sister Donna, as if this is the trump card, the silver bullet.

  But Brian dismisses it as peripheral at best. ‘She’s married to Mr Beecham,’ he says. ‘So she can’t be one.’

  ‘Toni did sex with a man once too,’ I say. ‘So there. Also my Great-Aunt Nina was a lesbian and she had a child but it was already dead when it came out of her vagina.’

  I am triumphant for all of a single second, before the real queen appears, and lays down the law.

  ‘Dido Jones, that is enough.’

  I look up to see Angela in a tiara and gold maxi-dress, her jaw so set the muscles in her neck protrude bone-like and threatening.

  If it were anyone else I would argue my case – that it’s true, Toni did do sex with a man, and Great-Aunt Nina did have a dead baby and also a lesbian lover – but this is Angela, Mrs Trevelyan, the sort-of-stepmother I aim to please. And so I mumble a ‘Sorry’ and stare hard at my lap, and the cache of biscuits I have managed to purloin.

  ‘I thought you couldn’t come,’ she continues. ‘Your mother – ’ she spits the word out as if it is a pip – ‘said you don’t do this sort of thing.’

  ‘She would,’ adds Mrs Payne, and, though it is unclear to whom or what she is referring, Angela nods vehemently.

  ‘Does she even know you’re here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I insist.

  But Angela looks doubtful, and again I decide to allow truth to slide in favour of fitting in.

  ‘I’d better go,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ says Angela. ‘You had better.’

  But as I slip off my small portion of chair, I hear the sound of my name being called, and not by you.

  As I turn unsteadily to its source, I hear the squeak of wooden chairs as twenty children do the same.

  ‘Is that her?’ asks Harry, barely disguising her delight. ‘Is that . . . Toni?’ Her name is uttered with hushed reverence, a detail that does not go unnoticed by Angela, who hisses a for heaven’s sake in a bid to defuse it.

  But there is no dampening the crowd’s delight, or parents’ disgust, as Toni, dressed in a ‘Fuck the Queen’ T-shirt and fishnets, appears before them, accompanied by two enormous black men, one also in fishnets, and a ponytailed would-be prince.

  ‘Hey, girlee,’ says one of the black men and grins, a smile that banishes my fear and guile with each bright white tooth.

  ‘Denzil!’ I say, and let myself be pulled up into his enormous arms and sweat-smell, before he drops me neatly down again. ‘This is Denzil,’ I say to no one in particular. ‘He’s not my dad after all. And this is Chinese Clive, because of the balls. And Maudsley Mick. Because of the mental hospital where he lived once.’

  Mick shrugs in vague affirmation.

  Angela’s mouth hangs open. Brian Payne’s mother’s clamps shut and she puts her arms around her son as if to protect him.

  ‘Come on then, Di.’ Toni smiles and takes my hand. ‘I thought we were going to have a party.’

  ‘Yeah, girlee, where’s the music?’ booms Denzil.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ I say, taking Toni in one hand, and Denzil in the other.

  ‘Can I come?’ Harry asks me desperately, then turns to her mother. ‘Can I?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ snaps Angela, then blanches. ‘It’s . . . this party isn’t done yet, there’s the costume prize and pass the parcel, and by then it will be time for a bath.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts.’

  ‘Butts are for sitting on,’ Mick offers.

  I laugh. ‘That’s American,’ I say. ‘Butt means bottom there.’

  Angela bristles. ‘I think we all know what it means, thank you.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ says Tom.

  ‘Nor did I,’ pipes up one of the Lawson twins.

  ‘Well, happy to be of service,’ Mick says.

  I flinch at that, a sentence I’ve heard him say before, and not in this context. I wonder if he’s going to try that later, in your dead-lady bed.

  Well, I’ll just have to stop him, I say to myself. Because I am the Queen of Bloody Everything.

  ‘Come on,’ I say, with renewed urgency – motivated both by Angela’s complete enragement and my own part-embarrassment, part-delight – and pull at Toni and Denzil. ‘I’ll show you where to go.’

  We must make a motley group, a circus almost, in this small, white town – a not-yet seven-year-old, a lesbian, two West Indians and a certified mental patient – and even then I sense it. But when I walk in the front door and see your worry and weariness lighten and lift, when later I watch you dance with Clive, and then Toni, whirling around the kitchen in each other’s arms like an unanchored carousel, when dark falls and I smell the sweetness of a fat cigarette, listen
to you all singing along to Toots and the Maytals, I feel a sudden rush of homesickness so acute I almost throw up the mint YoYo and raisin Club I hocked from the trestle table before I left.

  ‘Bed,’ you say, seeing my greenness even in the half-light.

  ‘I’m not tired,’ I lie.

  ‘She’s not tired,’ insists Toni. ‘Let her stay.’

  ‘She is tired,’ you counter. ‘And it’s grown-up time, now.’ And with that as your final word, you let Denzil pick me up and carry me up the seventeen stairs to bed, where, still fully clothed and with teeth unbrushed, I fall instantly and heavily asleep.

  I wake in the early hours of the morning, to the first sliver of sun seeping through unclosed curtains and the murmur of voices from below.

  I slip out of bed and across the landing, sit on the top step, legs dangling through the banisters. From here, though I cannot see what is going on, I can hear what is being said, and by whom.

  ‘This is home,’ I hear you tell someone.

  ‘I’m only saying it because I care about you.’ Toni, I think. Of course, Toni.

  ‘Well, stop,’ you spit.

  ‘Stop caring?’

  ‘No. Just . . . We’ll be fine. We always have been.’

  ‘I know, I know. I just wish . . . I wish you weren’t so far away.’

  ‘Is that all you wish?’ you ask.

  ‘Don’t. That’s not fair and you know it.’

  You change the subject, or slant it, anyway. ‘Are you with anyone?’

  I don’t know what Toni answers – a nod or a shake of the head. But when she asks you the same you say, ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Sometimes you’re with someone?’

  ‘Sometimes I think he wants to be with me.’

  ‘Who?’ Toni asks.

  Who? I think. Because this is the first time I have heard of a fancy man, a handsome prince, since Maudsley Mick drove off in his white van. I hope it’s not him again, hope he hasn’t been sneaking here while I am at school.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. No one important.’

  The voices stop then, leave a gap, a wide chasm into which I pitch a cough that I have struggled and failed to keep down. The soft hum from the front room solidifies into a tense silence.

  ‘Dido?’

  ‘I’m going,’ I say. And thump back to bed.

  The next time I wake it is late, and I slope downstairs still sleep-heavy and damp with sweat to steal into your sofa bed. But the cushions are bare, the only trace of a body the well-worn hollow left by your foetal curl and a wine stain on the arm. Panicked, I double back and clatter up the stairs, not caring who hears me now, prise open your door, praying there won’t be a replay of the scene in the squat – of any scene at the squat – Toni, or Mick or any of them. But you are face down, one arm flung out of the bed and dangling so that your chewed nails brush the floorboards. And you are alone.

  The attic is empty too, the van and its occupants long gone down the M11, the only sign that we were ever more than two a binful of empty Guinness cans, a belated birthday card for you on the mantelpiece, and a toilet seat left up. And all the relief and disappointment of the Day After – after a birthday, after Christmas, after a one-night stand – washes over me like so much thin, cold soup.

  I won’t see Toni again for seven years, Mick and the others for more than twenty. But I know now, of course, who you were talking about that night, and why.

  Why didn’t you tell me, Edie? Why did you let me wonder for so long, lost in an imagination you knew was both vivid and desperate? The mind is a dangerous thing, Edie. Because we can conjure up demons and dragons and devils in disguise. But worse than that, we can imagine angels. And God, Edie, I conjured such a creature for your suitor. So gilded and beautiful, so perfectly cut to slot into our strange lives and make them fit, make us family.

  No wonder I didn’t see him for who he was.

  But then, I suppose, no wonder you hoped to hide him.

  Heidi

  March 1978

  Toni’s here now. All pink hair and patchouli, still, at sixty-five. She arrived at stupid o’clock this morning, alone. Left Susie without even a note. But then, you knew she would, didn’t you? You knew she’d drop everything and come running like she always does when she’s called – like a dog or a half-witted child. I see it in her because I see it in me; in the way I answer Harry’s cries for help, crisis after crisis. The time she got her thumb stuck in her mother’s en suite tap, despite being banned from the bathroom; the time she woke up still drunk in Denny Stevens’ bed in a village in the middle of nowhere and I, the white knight, the fool, had to wake you so we could gallop into the night to rescue her; the time she . . . no, that one I’ll save for later.

  And why do we come running? Because you, you are the bright stars, of course, and our worlds turn for you.

  Within months of our arrival I have beaten off Tina Fraser with her Girls’ World head and eight Barbie dolls, and Melanie Best who has a parakeet and hair that skirts her buttocks, to secure my place as Harry’s chief sidekick. My tactics are nothing more complicated than proximity and persistence, whereas the reasons for my pursuit are both manifold and eclectic: her perpetual scrubbed shininess, like a Coke-dipped penny or a polished silver spoon; her confidence in all subjects, from Olympic gymnastic placings, to whose daddy earns the most; her wardrobe of cellophane-new skirts and blouses, bought straight from the Ladybird shop rather than second- or third-hand from Roundabout next door; and, of course, Tom. By now Harry has tired of his being older and therefore better, which plays to my advantage in securing her precious attention and time. But where I try to lure him into our games, she slams doors in his face and tells him to bugger off round Michael Nelson’s, which he does eventually, gliding down the road on his Chopper like a skinny-limbed, shrunken version of CHiPs, leaving Harry and me to our childish games.

  And the reasons she lets me win?

  There is only one.

  You.

  In my head, in the idle afternoons spent lolling on the squat sofa watching blurry films on Toni’s black-and-white portable, I’d conjured for myself a long-lost twin sister, a straight-out-of-Parent-Trap double who would mirror me in looks and deeds. And then my mother and her father would meet again and fall as desperately in love as they’d been when they made us.

  It sounds pathetic as I say it out loud, in the truest sense of that word. And ironic, given all that has happened. But back then my hope was unbounded, my imagination wild, and I pictured the two of us duetting on Stevie Wonder songs, me on my recorder, she on guitar. Maybe, better, she’d be blind, too, and I could be her guide, her eyes, her link to the world: essential; indispensable.

  But I have to stop fooling myself when I find Harry. I know full well that I am as far from the Hayley Mills mould as she is thrown straight from it. She is skinnymalink thin and graceful with it, where I am puppy-fat and fumbling; pitch-perfect where I am always half a tone and several beats out; ruthlessly ambitious where I am willing, always willing, to follow.

  We are as unlike as a pea and a peppercorn. But we have two things in common: an unwavering belief that we are destined for a world with flares and flashbulbs, and a profound disappointment in our own mothers. For, just as I covet Angela, her precision, her rules, her glorious, tedious normality, Harry wants you. She wants to eat olives for breakfast, because why not? you say. She wants to paint henna on her hands and feet and kohl her eyes to look like Mata Hari, even on a school day. She wants a mother who collects her in the playground dressed in a silk slip and Afghan coat and carrying a handful of sweet and sticky halva she’s been handed under the counter by Mr Morris in the wholefoods shop. Not the mother I am eyeing with the frown and a sliced-up apple.

  And so we are bound together, not so much by our past or our present, but by our dreamed-of future, by desire.

  Our Top Five Favourite Things to Do, in ascending order, are:

  1. Running a shop. With Harry’s cash register and Post Office play
money, we set up a stall at our front gate, selling everything from windfall apples to single playing cards. Once, we rig up a makeshift tent – pegging a ticking-striped bed sheet to the boughs of the cherry tree – and hang a sign declaring that fortunes will be told for ten pence. But our only visitors are the cat feeder lady – Mrs Lovejoy – who buys a bag of bruised apples for five pence, and Mr Messenger’s dog Titus, who runs into the tent and pees on the sheet enthusiastically and copiously.

  2. Making potions. This is an activity barred from Harry’s house for a list of reasons so long and complicated that we barely bother to register a single one, instead running into your kitchen, where no cupboard is out of bounds, no bottle too precious or its contents too toxic. There, in an orange washing-up bowl that also doubles for foot baths, pet frogs and vomit, we concoct a groundbreaking amalgam of Jif, ketchup and the winey dregs of all the glasses that we find on shelves and bedside tables, imagining it will either dissolve a witch, or at the very least make stains disappear as effectively as Persil, thus winning us a slot on a TV commercial, which we have also written and practised until we are word-perfect and camera-ready.

  3. Roller-skating. Ideally, we would be wearing ice skates and sequinned leotards and performing double axels and spirals like John Curry or Dorothy Hamill. But the closest rink is forty miles away and in a town that Harry’s mother, for some reason, refuses even to name. So instead we substitute wheels for blades and take turns clattering up and down the bumpy tarmac, all the while imagining the roar of the crowd as we each score perfect sixes. Sometimes we sneak flowers from the gardens – ours is easier, as the likelihood of you noticing anything missing or misplaced is minimal – then stand on a bucket podium making our thank yous and taking our bows.

  4. Playing Cinderella. We have tried Heidi, Sleeping Beauty and even, in a rare moment of anthropomorphism, The Wind in the Willows, but neither of us wanted to play Toad, and so again and again we return to this classic, dressing up in Great-Aunt Nina’s cast-offs, and your clung-onto costumes, complete with feather boas and, once, a coconut bra. It is not hard to guess who takes the title role. But I am content to play the Prince. After all, it is me who does the rescuing, and I get to wear a fez, which has an allure of its own. Sometimes we persuade Tom to play, and so he takes my part, relegating me to the Ugly Sisters, and forcing a pair of Tiny Tears dolls into redundancy. None of us see the inherent impossibility of their union. After all, who wouldn’t want to marry Harry?