Vincent stepped from around a corner and made me jump.
‘She’s not here,’ he said.
I knew who he was. Every year my parents dragged me and Agnes to church on Remembrance Sunday, where he’d be with his family. His oldest brother had been in the RAF and was lost somewhere over Germany. I always thought Vincent looked handsome in his suit.
‘She’s only six,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘When I was a bairn, I’d get up every tree, in every ditch. Bairns will be bairns. She’ll turn up.’
He was tall and muscular with thick black hair – no beard as yet – broad shoulders, and a pair of eyes I’ve never seen the like of since. The unearthliest of blues. When he turned them on me, all thoughts of Bernie vanished. I felt myself colour. What did it say in ‘Beguiling Femininity’ about ‘decorum’?
‘You’re Jean Healy from Loom Street,’ he said, coming closer.
So he knew my name.
He said, ‘You come up here much?’
‘Not since I was a girl. Do you?’
He toed the condoms with the tip of his boot. ‘Not really.’
A pigeon flapped in some high-up crack.
He said, ‘Do you like films?’
‘I love Audrey Hepburn,’ I said.
There was a scraping behind us. I thought it was a rat, but it wasn’t – it was Una, stepping out from shadows so black they seemed solid. Maybe I imagined it, but just for a second her eyes met Vincent’s and something passed between them. Then she walked outside, into the light.
Vincent watched her go, mouth set hard, but when he returned his attention to me, he was all smiles again. ‘So what about Saturday?’
My Mary Quant was magnificent, Stephan. I have a photo somewhere I wish I could find to send you. Vincent took me to the Ritzy to see ‘Paris When It Sizzles’ and Audrey was perfect, as usual. Afterwards, we went to the Labour Club. I’d only ever been as child and had pop, but that night I drank two halves of lager and lime. I felt so grown up.
So that was the start of us, the beginning of this family. Me and Vincent fast became an item and nobody saw Betty Stoker ever again.
Jean x
30/10/1991
Dear Stephan,
Sorry this has taken so long. I’ve been in and out of hospital. Starting to feel a bit better now, but I couldn’t write. Hope you understand.
My bowel ruptured. I woke up screaming the night it happened. They had to carry me out on a stretcher, the whole street gawking in their slippers and nighties. And despite the pain I was in, I was still reminded of the night twenty-five years ago, back on Loom Street, when they finally came for Talitha.
It was the blue lights that had drawn us into the street. Me and Mam watched from the front yard as they brought out Una’s mother slumped in a wheelchair like a penny for the guy.
‘Good riddance,’ said Mary Eastbourne from Number 8.
They put her in the ambulance and drove away. Everyone went indoors. I looked over at Una’s house. George and Talitha’s bedroom light was on and George was at the window, staring up the street in the direction of the ambulance. I should go over, I thought. I should see if he is OK. Una too, wherever she was. But then George turned the light out and the house went dark and I didn’t go over.
Can’t write anymore now. But there isn’t much left to tell. I hope I can finish. I hope you’re still there.
Jean x
17/11/1991
Dear Stephan,
I have donned my pinny once more. A Sunday roast: chicken with bacon across its back and a lemon up its jacksy. Yorkshires, stuffing, roasties, and proper gravy. Really push the boat out. Vincent fussed and buzzed: ‘You’re not up to it,’ ‘What if you scald yourself?’ As if I couldn’t do a roast in my sleep. I had to banish him from the kitchen, but he was right. I didn’t feel up to it. It was, however, the only way I could think of breaking the tension that’s been building for months now. And a stupid idea, as it turned out, because once the food was on the table, the tension was right there with it. Even worse than ever in fact, as we’d foolishly committed ourselves to at least an hour in close proximity in order to eat it. We scratched knives and forks around our plates in silence. I wasn’t hungry in the slightest (I can’t eat food like that anymore). Vincent held his cutlery in fists and watched Alan build a carrot dam to keep his gravy from his peas.
Vincent: ‘Stop messing with your food.’
Alan: ‘I don’t like carrots.’
‘Your Mam’s slaved over this. Eat.’
Alan weakened the dam with the end of his fork. Gravy began oozing through.
Me: ‘He doesn’t have to eat them if he doesn’t want to.’
Vincent threw his cutlery down and glared at Alan. ‘Things are going to be different round here after, you mark me.’
Me: ‘After what?’
I wonder if people round here would change their minds about Vincent if they could have seen his face then, the way realisation buckled into desolation. We finished the meal quickly, then Alan went upstairs and Vincent washed up. He closed the kitchen door behind him and banged the pots extra loud so I wouldn’t hear him cry.
Vincent’s love for me has always been unconflicted, unlike mine for him. Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that the main purpose of his love is to put my own discrepancies to shame. Whether this means I think too much or too little of myself, I can’t say. Please keep this in mind as you read on.
Just after my eighteenth birthday, Vincent drove me in his brother’s car to Guisborough forest for a picnic, where he got down on one knee. I said yes, of course, and for a while my view of the world became unfocused, like it was smeared with a layer of Vaseline.
About a month before the wedding, out of the blue, I got a phone call from Una. I was to meet her at the well, but she wouldn’t say why. I almost didn’t go but curiosity got the better of me. It was dusk when I arrived. On the other side of the estate the lights in the new high-rise blocks were going on. The buildings glowed like cruise ships and I thought about Una’s trapped riveter, beating on the inside of that hull forever.
Una sat cross-legged over the well, smoking. ‘I didn’t think you’d come.’
‘Where’ve you been?’
She blew smoke. ‘Around.’
Crickets chirped in the nettles. Una looked down through the grille into the darkness. Was she whispering something? I didn’t care, didn’t have time for this. ‘You called me, Una.’
‘My mother’s dead,’ she said.
I’d almost forgotten about Talitha. ‘How?’
‘She did her wrists with a bit of mirror when they weren’t watching.’
A sprong too far. I tried to go to Una but she waved me away. ‘I just wanted to tell you I’m leaving.’
‘Where to?’
She shrugged and dropped the glowing end of her cigarette down the well.
‘You’ve been saying this for years, Una. Where to?’
‘I’ve been telling you for years.’
A bat swooped. I shuddered to think how many there were in the waterworks, dangling from that water tower, unfurling their rawhide wings. I said, ‘It’s alright to live in dreamland when you’re a lass, but we’re not lasses anymore.’
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I hear congratulations are in order. When’s the date?’
‘Una, I’m sorry about your mam, but you don’t have to go. Come back with me.’ Even as I said the words, I wasn’t sure I meant them.
‘Don’t marry him,’ she said.
I tried and failed to keep my mouth shut. ‘And why’s that?’
Una popped her elbow.
‘God, I haven’t even seen you for about a year and now you creep out the woodwork and start with…no, I’m sorry, but you don’t have the right.’
She looked up at the
darkening mass of the waterworks. ‘I know what people say I did in there.’
From a long way off, I could hear mothers calling their children for tea. A recent thing. For a long time after Betty Stoker, children had been kept indoors.
‘I need to know if you believe them,’ she said.
‘What does it matter?’
‘Because if you do believe, you might be capable of understanding.’
‘Stop playing games, Una. Understanding what?’
‘Me.’
Images Sally Peterson had put in my head: the huddle of grunting, sighing men. The rasp of soles on raw cement. I said, ‘I’ve known you all my life. It was just gossip.’
She nodded slowly. ‘Right,’ she said.
‘I’ve got to get back.’ I started walking away.
‘It was me,’ she said, climbing off the grille. ‘I rang the hospital for them to take her away.’
I stopped. ‘Talitha needed help.’
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘but what if that’s not why I did it?’
The older we had got, the harder it had become for me to respond to the things Una said, and it finally happened: I had absolutely nothing to say.
Una’s voice cracked. ‘The same thing in her is in me. I can feel it. Growing.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Come with me.’
‘Una, I’m getting married.’
‘You’re my sister. You’re the only family I have.’ She was close enough now for me to see her tears. All those years and I’d never once seen her cry. She held something out to me, and in the dark I was slow to recognise it. A feather.
‘I’ve already got a family,’ I said.
The Earth turned from the last of the light. Una said, ‘We saw you on the riverbank. We saw what you were doing.’
I walked away, ‘I’ve got to get back, sorry.’
‘Me and Peg, we saw.’
‘I’ve got to go.’
I didn’t turn back. It was a few days before I understood the feather.
And that, Stephan, was the last time I ever saw her. I think. Not long after I got married, they finally came for George, and a new family moved into 1 Loom Street. They were, according to Mam, very nice and respectable (unlike the family living there today). I never knew what became of Mr Cruickshank. It was easier not to think about him, so I didn’t.
Before I go, I want to say thank you. I’ve always regretted giving up writing, so this has been important. All these years, I suppose I hadn’t quite known how to say what I never quite knew I wanted to say. But I also want to apologise. The more I wrote, the more I realised the impossibility of helping you understand Una. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe we aren’t supposed to?
If you don’t hear from me again, look after yourself.
Your friend,
Jean X
23/11/1991
Stephan,
Something’s been chewing at me since my last letter, and I can’t rest until I’ve said one more thing.
Did I believe what Una was implying about herself and the waterworks? From the choice she offered me, did I choose correctly? Have the years proven me to be the cowardly fool I’ve always suspected she thought me to be?
I’d like to answer these questions by saying this: in a minute my son is coming in with the tea tray to read me the last of ‘Zoya’ by Danielle Steel, and at that moment all of the above – all of my letters to you, in fact – will mean absolutely nothing.
This time it really is goodbye.
X
31/12/1991
Stephan,
I’ve been trying to find the strength to write. Not sure how long I’ve got left, so if I don’t now I never will. Sorry my handwriting is a state. It’s taken me all day to persuade Vincent to go over his brother’s to see in the New Year. He didn’t want to leave me, but as you know, I can be a twisty mare. Alan didn’t go. He’s in his room.
I know you only ever wanted to know about Una, and I ended up hijacking our letters more and more, but there’s something else I need to say. I’ve got nobody else I can tell and the thought of being buried with it is unbearable.
Me and Vincent married in June 1967, and moved onto Vivienne Avenue. Back then it was almost unheard of to get a house on the estate without children, but Vincent said he knew someone at the council. It was my first inkling that perhaps things were not entirely kosher with my new husband, but the prospect of my own home meant I stifled curiosity. Then, not long after, Vincent was given twelve months for handling stolen vehicles. A fit up, he claimed, though the evidence seemed convincing enough.
Once he was in prison, his family swarmed me. His mother Doris would come round and sit night after night, playing endless games of Patience. Eddie and Curley, his two surviving brothers, dropped in almost every day to force greasy wads of money on me. I told them I was working full time at Littlefairs. I didn’t need their money.
‘But why slave away?’ Curley would say. ‘Maybe you should wrap in?’
Eddie: ‘We saw you in town the other day, talking to some fella. Work pal, is he?’
They would nose around while they chatted, opening cupboards and drawers. Eddie would keep me talking while Curley ‘nipped to the loo,’ but I could tell from where the ceiling creaked that he wasn’t spending a penny.
Vincent had put them up to it, of course.
Then, a couple of days before Vincent was due to be released, I was doing the washing up and found myself saying her name for the first time in years: ‘Una.’ What if I’d gone with her that night at the well? Would I now be smoking little French cigarettes in some Parisian loft? Would I be in the arms of some dark-eyed lover? Would oiseaus one day have nested on my bronze crown?
I lay on the settee, dozed off, and found myself in fog. The riverbank was the same as when I was a girl. The reeds, the thick black mud between my toes, all the same. Only my naked body had changed. I worked my way down to the softly lapping river and waded in as far as my knees. I couldn’t see a thing.
Something moved out in the water.
‘Una?’ I said.
Nothing. I listened – Splash.
‘…Peg?’
I had just enough time to see her shape – whoever she was – break the river’s surface before I woke up.
I was aroused. I ran my hands over my body and static crackled. Something was strange. According to the carriage clock on the mantelpiece, it wasn’t even noon, yet the room was dim. I looked out of the window at the greenish-black clouds piling up in the sky, and it crossed my mind I’d somehow brought the riverbank with me back into reality.
The library van drove past my window and parked at the end of the street. I didn’t make a conscious decision, I just left the house. In the van, I browsed the shelves like the girl with a crush I’d once been. Henry’s eyes followed me the whole time as he joked with the children and stamped their books. The swallows on his hands flexed as if beating their wings. His hair was still ducks-arsed, but greying at the temples.
He leaned out of the door as the first drops of rain rattled across the roof. ‘Come on kids. Best you be off afore it really comes down.’
When the last child had left, I handed him ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’
‘I never finished this,’ I said.
He smiled slowly.
Thunder cracked open the sky as Henry closed the doors, burying us alive in books.
The Day of the Dark: the worst storm in living memory. I don’t how long it raged, but when I finally emerged, bins and trees and debris lay scattered across the road. Windows shattered, entire rooftops ripped off. Fist-sized hailstones bobbed in the gutters. Henry’s van looked as if it had been machine-gunned. I went home and we never spoke again.
Vincent got out of prison two days later. Nine months after that, Alan wa
s born.
I’ve never told anyone this.
*
It’s later than I thought. I can hear voices in the street. This time it really is goodbye, Stephan. I’m going to call Alan now and see out the year with him. I think there’s still time. Like I said at the start, the last moments are always the most exciting.
Happy New Year,
X
THIS
ACID
LIFE
Jim Clarke of Hessle Rise
I
If you’re from around here, he won’t require introduction. But for the rest of you, a vignette: watch as he pitches through the darkening street – his right hand throttling his crutch, the dead spider of his left swinging in the wind; that gurgle in his chest like a clogged sink. Peek through your fingers as his momentum takes him too-fast around the corner and – whallop – into the girl.
She’s barely three years old, gawps up at him with whatever blue, E-numbered glop she’s been eating smeared around her mouth. For one febrile moment neither party moves but then, around his smashed head, the wind whips the straggles of his remaining hair into a mindless swarm and the girl howls. He staggers into a nearby lamppost, almost pole-axing the poor child with his tumbling crutch.
Mother scoops up child. By the looks of her, she’s only in her early twenties.
He closes his eyes.
‘Freak,’ she hisses, pushing her mewling daughter into her breasts as she kicks his crutch further away. She steps into the road to give him the widest of berths. ‘You’re fucking cracked.’
The lamppost smells like urine, and only when he’s sure they’re gone does he open his eyes. His useless left hand dangles hopelessly in the wind. His crutch in the gutter a long, long way away.
So perhaps you know of him, but what is his name? While you may be aware of the many cruel sobriquets that followed like carrion birds in his wake – The Freak was one; Rocky another (a reference not to the Stallone franchise, but rather Eric Stoltz in the film Mask) – what of the name bestowed upon him by his mother? You don’t know? Well, today this wrong will be righted. Today his true name shall be known, and that name is Jim.
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