by Julie Shaw
Josie let the front of the pram down and pushed the door open to let Christine through.
‘Not that I’ve heard,’ she said. ‘But then I wouldn’t know anyway. I’ve not seen much of Mam these past couple of weeks. But I know she’s been round your mam’s a bit, so maybe.’
There was nothing in her voice that seemed to suggest any different. But it was still there – a kind of niggle. No. It was guilt, that was what it was. She wished she could get her head together. Why the fuck should she feel guilty? If her mam was moping about, not looking after herself – well, that was up to her, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like she could put it all at Christine’s door. Fucking Mo. Still, the feeling persisted. That she should see if she was okay. But why? Another part of her fumed. It wasn’t like her mam gave a shit about how she was. How she was coping with Joey. If she was okay.
She tucked Joey’s pram blanket tighter round him, to help keep the bitter cold out. And she’d been down the Listers, so, like Nick said, she couldn’t be that ill. She should do like her mam did to her. Leave her to it.
‘Maybe just got the flu,’ she said to Josie.
‘Maybe,’ Josie agreed. ‘Anyway, come on, earth mother. Let’s get you down to this baby group, shall we? Notch up another brownie point or two.’ She smiled at Christine. ‘And, for God’s sake, at least try to look like you’re enjoying it this time, eh?’
As if there was anything to enjoy. That was the problem. There was no one there her age – obviously all had more sense. Just a clique – that was the word for it – of self-satisfied-looking mothers, all with fellas at home, probably, and nothing like the problems she had. And worse than that, they seemed determined to ignore her.
‘It’s fucking 1981!’ she wanted to scream, every time she intercepted one of those looks. Like she’d brought a bloody alien along with her. And it didn’t escape her notice either, how much Josie glared at everyone – on her behalf, probably. It wasn’t like she had anything in common with the women there either. She never went. Never had done. Probably’d never felt the need to. With the size of Josie’s family – there were, like, dozens of Hudsons – why would she ever bother herself hanging out with such a snobby crowd?
But what Carol Sloper said, Carol Sloper obviously got, and Josie was obviously dancing to her tune. ‘It’s for the baby,’ she’d told her. ‘And that’s what they need to see from you. That you’re thinking about that. Remembering to put Joey’s needs above your own.’
Still, she conceded, once they’d plonked Joey down on the big blue play mat with the other babies, at least it was a change of scenery, and the hot chocolate was free. And biscuits too – one of the grandmothers usually brought a couple of packets in. And it wasn’t like they were all quite so full of themselves. A couple had been friendly enough the last time. And it did occur to her that if she’d come on her own with Joey she might make more of an effort with them, and they with her.
She was just about to say so, when Josie tugged at her sleeve. ‘Oh, great,’ she hissed. ‘Look what the tide’s brought in.’
Christine glanced towards the entrance, where a large lady was backing in a double buggy. And leading with a backside familiar to most. It was Sylvia Harris, who lived a few doors from home. A few doors down from her mam’s house, she mentally corrected herself.
She’d come with two of her grandkids – a pair of over-excited toddlers – and once she’d freed them from their coats and left them to run amok among the various playthings, she wasted no time in coming over to look Joey over.
Christine stiffened at her approach, wondering what sort of greeting to expect. Sylvia and her mam had never seen eye to eye about anything. Even had the odd slanging match out on the street down the years. Would her enmity towards her mam turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing?
A bad thing. ‘So that’s him, is it?’ she said, placing a hand on Christine’s chair back while she looked across at Joey.
‘That’s my son, yes,’ Christine answered, feeling the cold air coming off Sylvia.
‘Black ’un, then,’ she added. ‘So it’s true, then?’
‘So what’s true?’ snapped Josie.
Christine wished she could have even a tenth of Josie’s front. Where did she get it? Twenty-two, and she’d talk on a level with anyone. Talk down to them even. Even old bags like Sylvia Harris.
But Sylvia Harris wasn’t to be deflected. ‘That he’s another bloody one,’ she said, tutting as she nodded in Joey’s direction.
‘Er, excuse me?’ Christine started. Josie placed a hand on her arm.
‘Sylvia, what Christine’s son is or isn’t is really none of your business,’ she pointed out.
‘Oh, I think he is,’ Sylvia responded. ‘Try telling my sister that, why don’t you? Help out, does he? Change the nappies? Lavish you with gifts?’
‘What?’ Christine said.
‘Well, it’s not like everyone doesn’t know already, is it? What line did he spin you, love? Or are you as wet as your mother?’
‘You know what?’ Josie said, putting a hand up. ‘Can we leave this, please, Sylvia? Whatever axe you or your sister have to grind with Lizzie, she’s not here, right? So just leave it. Christine’s brought Joey here for a bit of peace, not an interrogation.’
‘Oh, Joey, is it?’ she said. ‘That figures. No doubt he’ll end up being one as well.’
‘Jesus!’ Christine barked now. ‘What are you on about, Sylvia?’
Again, she felt Josie’s hand on her forearm. ‘Do us a favour, Sylvia, will you?’ she said again. ‘Just leave us alone?’
Christine had a moment of sudden clarity – one of her mam and Sylvia’s slanging matches having suddenly sprung into her mind. ‘Has your sister got a kid with Mo, then? Is that it?’
Sylvia Harris scowled. ‘Oh, yeah, like she’d be so fucking stupid, I don’t think. She got it flushed, love. Same as you’d have done if you’d had any sense. More than enough black bastards in this world already.’
Christine didn’t actively decide to slap her. It just seemed to happen. Though Josie’s arm, ever hovering, meant it didn’t quite connect.
‘Whoah, Chris! Pack it in! She’s not worth it. She really isn’t. Now will you just piss off, Sylvia!’ she snapped. ‘Seriously, get out of my fucking face!’
Sylvia Harris took a step back, but seemed not in the least abashed. Not remotely concerned by the ripple of oohs and ahs from across the hall. ‘Only too happy to,’ she said quietly, but with the edges of a smirk appearing around her lips. Like Josie’s mam’s, her mouth was coloured a violent shade of red. Christine thought how very much she’d like to punch it.
They didn’t stay long after that. Sylvia Harris, apparently not in the least concerned by what had happened, took up a position across the hall, with a couple of the other mothers, where she chatted away as if nothing had happened. Christine felt nauseous. Upset. Like Joey was some kind of pariah. Mo’s kid. A black kid. A joey.
‘Tell me,’ she’d kept on at Josie. ‘What’s she mean by that – a “joey”?’
Josie had been reluctant to tell her, and for good reason. Because now she’d finally got it out of her, it made her even more upset. It was slang for a drug-runner, apparently. An errand boy – a bloody errand boy – for dealers just like Mo.
‘Look, just forget about it!’ Josie told her. ‘It only means anything in their world, okay? And you’re not in that world. Joey’s not going to be in that world.’
Except she was. And she couldn’t get beyond that. She really couldn’t. She didn’t want to be, but she was. And she didn’t know how to escape from it. How to get Joey to a place where his name would mean nothing. Except what he called himself. ‘And what’s all that stuff about her sister?’ she wanted to know. ‘She was another one of his women too, was she?’
Josie opened her mouth to speak, but checked herself. ‘What?’ Christine said.
‘I was going to say “cast-offs”, but under the circumstances it seemed a bit insensi
tive …’
‘I don’t know why you’re worrying. They are the bloody circumstances. They –’
She stopped then, catching the tail end of a gesture she recognised. Or at least thought she recognised. Enough, at least, to convince her she needed to finish what she’d started, because the gesture was happening while Sylvia Harris held a monkey glove puppet in her hand. Christine leapt to her feet, pushed her chair back, and rounded the play mats, then marched straight up to a now startled Sylvia Harris.
‘You fucking racist cow,’ she said. ‘What the fuck has my little boy ever done to you?’ And this time, very gratifyingly, the slap connected.
‘Well that’s fucked that up,’ Josie said as they marched briskly back towards the flats. ‘That must be a first, mustn’t it? Being ordered out of a fucking toddler group!’
She burst out laughing then, and, despite the dregs of anger still eddying around inside her, Christine soon found herself laughing too.
Because it had been funny. Especially when the slap dislodged Sylvia Harris’s false teeth and, rather than slide them back, she’d popped them out and handed them to her friend.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite so hilarious,’ Josie said. ‘Oh my God, I cannot wait to tell them all in the Bull. I couldn’t believe it!’
They stopped at the corner of St Luke’s, where they would part ways, and, looking ahead towards the flats, her laughter disappeared again almost as soon as it had started. Carol Sloper. It was her ‘suggestion’ that Josie take her to the group in the first place. ‘Oh, shit, Jose,’ she said. ‘D’you think I’m going to get reported?’
‘To Carol Sloper?’ Josie said, obviously reading her mind. She shook her head firmly. But also, to Christine’s mind, a little too quickly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would they even know who she is? It was me she suggested it to, wasn’t it?’
‘Ordered,’ Christine corrected.
‘Okay, ordered. But that’s between her and us, isn’t it? Nothing to do with the women that run that place. Besides,’ she added, leaning into the pram to give Joey a farewell kiss. ‘Even if they did, by some chance, speak to her, or it got to her some other way, I’d be right there defending you, okay? There’s laws against being racist – making racist gestures and that – aren’t there? So she hasn’t got a leg to stand on. And all you did was slap her. The rest was just bloody fuss. She could play for the first bloody division at football, that one.’
‘You think so? You think I’m all right?’
‘I know so,’ Josie reassured her. ‘But you’ll see. It won’t even come to that. No. forget it. We’ll go back next week and it’ll all be forgotten. They all know the old trout only got what she deserved.’
Christine tried to keep telling herself that as she bumped the pram back up to the flat. But she cursed herself for rising to it. How was that going to help Joey? It wasn’t as if the likes of Sylvia Harris would stop being racist because of it. Of hating her poor innocent Joey just because of him being brown. Because of him being Mo’s.
Whatever she deserved, Joey deserved so much better.
Chapter 15
Nicky tried to focus on the TV screen. He wondered where he was. There was a man. A grinning man. Some sort of commotion in the background. Shapes and colours. Lots of laughter. Altogether too much brightness. A sudden wave of nausea made saliva flood his mouth.
He looked away, and then back. It was Noel fucking Edmunds. Which – he groped for comprehension – meant it must now be Saturday. How’d he get from Friday lunchtime to Saturday so quickly? Or, on the other hand, he decided, how’d he get there so slowly? The mushrooms. Just the thought made his gorge rise again. He needed to be sick and, like, now.
He staggered up from the futon and grabbed the door jamb to steady himself. He’d never really got to know Smiffy, the girl from the fifth floor. An ex of Brian’s – who naturally didn’t have a good word to say about her – she’d always been completely off his radar. But with Brian out of the picture, and Chrissy seeming to like her, she’d started coming round the flat quite a lot.
And it was yesterday – yes, the details were beginning to come back to him – that she’d brought round the bag of magic mushrooms. Which she’d cooked, and they’d eaten from a spoon, washed down with vodka. And very soon … yes, the mushrooms were now coming back to him. Though more importantly, right now, coming up.
He retched till he was emptied out and covered in beads of sweat. And would cheerfully have stayed there, on his knees on the bathmat, but for the incessant banging on the door. ‘Nicky, is that you in there?’ It was Christine. Who else did she think it would be? ‘Hurry up, mate!’ she whined. ‘I need a piss!’
‘Give me a minute,’ Nicky shouted back. ‘I’m throwing me fucking guts up. You and your friend’s magic frigging mushrooms!’
He heard her laughing outside the door, sounding completely A-OK, and wondered why the fuck she wasn’t feeling as rough as he was. And she clearly wasn’t, because once he’d wiped his face and washed his mouth out under the cold tap he trudged into the kitchen, every move sending daggers through his head, to find her busy at the stove, making porridge for the baby, like she was Mrs fucking Beeton or something.
He went straight to the mess on the tiny patch of worktop, and rummaged in search of aspirin. ‘I don’t know how you’re so chipper,’ he said. ‘My head’s fucking splitting!’
‘Because it’s Sat-ur-day,’ Christine said, as if explaining to a baby. ‘And me, you and our Joey are off Christmas shopping, aren’t we? You know, I was thinking. It’s the first time in my life I’ve actually done that. You know, as in have a proper amount of money to go out on a proper shopping spree.’ She beamed at him. ‘I feel all grown-up, all of a sudden!’
‘Yeah, proper grown-up. Getting in hock with the club cheque woman. Welcome to the world, eh?’
‘Oh, but it’s Christmas. We’ve got to make it special for Joey, haven’t we?’
Despite the axes in his head, Nicky couldn’t help but smile at her, even if the idea of traipsing round town was just about the last thing he felt up to doing. This was a gift, after all, this first probation-fucking-officer-clear-the-shit-up-free Saturday. The first in weeks when he’d not had to get up in the dark to go and do his ‘bounden civic duty’. A proper stroke of luck, the guy being ill. Hence the mushrooms. The business of not having to give a fuck. Of going off fuck knew where – Christine had turned into a duck at some point, hadn’t she? – and experiencing something unlike anything before it; a something, he was now beginning to realise, that, for all that it had been pretty damned amazing, still seemed to hover round the edges of his consciousness, in a distinctly unsettling way.
Didn’t they say that? That mushrooms could cause terrible paranoia? He finally found a blister pack of Aspro, and ate two straight from the packet. His main paranoia was that he must be getting past it. How come his sister was bouncing round like Tigger?
‘Because I went easy,’ she told him, when he asked her again.
‘Not that easy,’ he snorted. ‘You were fucking mental for a bit, you were.’
‘Not that mental,’ she corrected him. And then the penny dropped.
‘You’ve done some coke this morning, haven’t you?’ he said.
‘Just a bit,’ she said, grinning. ‘And mind the nappy bucket. I had to pee in it. Now go and get yourself dressed while I sort Joey out. Half an hour, right?’ She made a little shooing motion with her free hand. ‘And I’m timing you from now!’
Feeling guilty was a new thing, and Nicky wasn’t sure he liked it. Feeling guilty about his little sister even more so. It wasn’t quite how he’d planned it, Chrissie hoovering up coke the way she seemed to. No, it wasn’t like she was going to the dogs or anything – far as he could tell, she was perfectly functional. There was just this constant niggle in his mind that it wasn’t quite panning out. He was supposed to have been putting her and the baby up for a couple of weeks, that was all. Doing his bit – a
nd he had no axe to grind about that, the poor cow. But that was all he’d expected. To help her out when she needed it. To step in when their useless bitch of a so-called mother kicked her out.
Yet here they were, months down the line, and the pair of them even had their names on the bloody tenancy! Which he knew wasn’t Chrissie’s fault. He knew how much she wanted her own place. Or had wanted. And that was the real crux of the matter. She didn’t seem to bang on about that any more. She’d adjusted to the life he and Brian liked living. Which was no way good, and he felt the guilt about that crowding out any justification he could come up with.
He kept down the bile that was threatening to come up while he threw some clothes on, taking care to drag a brush through his rat-tails – he really needed to see about getting his hair cut – and finding the least bogging of his shirts to throw on. No, it would be good to get out; might help soften the downer Chrissie was soon going to be suffering; give her a bit of boost that didn’t involve shoving chemicals into her body. Which, fuck knew, she deserved, after everything.
She was already out on the landing when he was done, blowing raspberries at a chuckling Joey. Her own hair hung down in front of her, lank, he saw, and stringy. And she looked painfully thin, wasted – even to his habituated eye. But for all that, little Joey was okay. She’d not done half bad, he decided. Had a lot to be proud of. Drugs or no, she was a far better mother than their own had been, for starters. He felt a pang of sadness. Because she actually loved her kid.
He shook his head to clear it – try and clear the strange tendrils of impending doom away. ‘Hey, you know what, sis?’ he said.
‘Oooh, you look quite respectable!’ she said, turning.
‘Your hair,’ he said, shutting the flat door. ‘Why don’t we treat you to a hairdo?’
She grinned at him. ‘Ooh – a hairdo!’ she parroted.
‘Well, whatever you call it. A cut and blow job.’