by John Maley
She told of how her son had been a drug addict since he was seventeen. Jeannie and her man had tried everything to get him off it. His da had begged him, gave him money, battered him, locked him in, disowned him, but nothing had worked. He was loyal only to the drugs. He had taken up with a lassie, Jade’s mammy, and they had hoped he’d change and settle down. But that wasn’t the end of it. The lassie was a junkie too. She had even stolen from Jeannie’s house to feed her habit. They had both served time for thieving and when they got out went straight back to the drugs.
Then the lassie had got pregnant. She said was coming off the drugs. Jeannie’s boy had said the same. Now they were going to have a wean they didn’t just have themselves to think about. The lassie’s sister had told Jeannie they were both still using but when Jeannie confronted them they denied it. They had got a council flat, on the seventeenth floor of a multi-storey block. The council had said they’d give them a lower down house when the baby was born.
The lassie gave birth to Jade in the November. She was under five pounds and a poor wee thing. The doctors had said she was born an addict too. Jeannie didn’t believe that. The lassie was adamant she’d never taken drugs during the pregnancy. It would’ve killed the wean if she had.
Jade was kept in hospital for four weeks before she was allowed home. Both her ma and daddy went on methadone programmes for a while. One night social workers had brought the baby to Jeannie’s house. Her ma had overdosed and Jeannie’s son was up at the hospital by her bedside. He gave Jeannie’s name to the social workers. Jeannie said, of course she would look after the baby. Her man had gone to their son’s house with the social workers to collect some of the baby’s things – the place was a tip.
After the social workers had finally gone, Jeannie watched over Jade as she slept. She shook with fear at the thought of the social workers being involved. She was terrified they would take Jade away and they’d never see her again. Her man had said they should keep her, him and Jeannie; their son was a junkie and his house wasn’t fit for pigs.
But they gave the wean back to her parents. They had said they were going straight. They cleaned up the house. Again, for a few months, things had seemed okay. Jeannie and her man did what they could to help. They baby-sat. They helped out financially, leaving themselves short. Then, one morning, when Jade was only just over a year old, they had the police at the door. Jade’s daddy had died of an overdose.
For the next few weeks Jade and her ma had stayed with Jeannie. The lassie said she was going to get clean and look after Jade. Jeannie said those weeks were hell and it was only the thought of the wean that kept her going. A few weeks after the funeral the lassie did a disappearing act. She turned up a month later to see Jade. Then she’d be off again. This was the pattern with her. Jeannie was worried she’d take Jade with her one of these times. Eventually they had heard Jade’s mammy was in prison. It was something to do with the drugs. She’d be inside for a few years. The social workers had helped them get interim custody of Jade. Jeannie and her man had talked of adopting Jade, if that was possible. It all depended upon what happened when her ma got out of prison. They didn’t want to cut the wean off completely from her mother. Jeannie had even travelled to Cornton Vale to see her but she didn’t have much to say for herself.
Jeannie sat with the photo in her hand. Joanie lit another cigarette. That was the story. The wean was as good as an orphan. Slowly, tears began to trickle down Jeannie’s face. Joanie held her hands in his.
‘She’s got you, darlin’,’ he said reassuringly, ‘and you’re worth yer weight in gold.’
He gave Jeannie a hanky and she wiped her face and blew her nose. She kept apologising. Joanie asked her what she had got Jade for her birthday. She had got her a doll, and a doll’s pram, and a Teletubby. Jade was mental for the Teletubbies.
‘They dae ma heid in,’ said Joanie.
He insisted on making another cup of tea for them. While he made the tea Jeannie went up to the toilet to sort her face. She left the photo of Jade lying on the bar. Joanie picked it up and looked at it again. It felt different from looking at it the first time, now that he knew the whole story. He looked at the photo. It’d bring a tear to a glass eye. He wrapped the photo in a ten-pound note he took from the pocket of his jeans and put it in Jeannie’s purse that lay beside her empty cup. He poured the tea. Jeannie was up in the toilet for a while. He thought maybe she was crying some more. He was going to go up and check on her and then thought the better of it.
Jeannie came back. She had obviously been doing a power of crying.
‘I hope you wurnae makin’ a mess up there. You’ve jist cleaned the bloody place.’
They both laughed. Jeannie sat down and brought her tea to her lips. She noticed the photo was missing and panicked.
‘It’s okay. It’s in yer purse.
I put it in yer purse.’
Jeannie fumbled in her purse for the photo. She found the tenner.
‘Just tae get somethin’ nice for the lassie.’
Jeannie put the money on the bar.
‘I can’t take that. You cannae afford that, son.’
Joanie was determined.
‘Keep it. And buy wee Jade somethin’ nice.’
Jeannie thanked him and put the money back in her purse. She finished her tea and then said she’d better be going. She thanked Joanie again and then left. Joanie cleaned the cups. He looked at the clock. It was eleven thirty and a long day in Delilah’s stretched out in front of him, like an ugly boyfriend at bedtime. He thought of the stories we tell ourselves and each other, to break our hearts and mend them.
Queen of People’s Hearts
‘Where are they?’
Rodney looked as if he was just about to explode with rage. His face had taken on a strange, imperious quality. He stood motionless at the bedroom door and glared at Matt, who was lying across the bed, trying to recover from a late night’s clubbing.
‘Where are what?’
Matt was too tired to argue. He knew what was missing.
‘My fucking Diana stamps that’s what!’
Rodney seemed to be trembling and Matt realised that some kind of appeasement was required. He knew he should never have used the Diana stamps. Circumstances had conspired against him. He had decided to write some letters that were owed to people – his mother, for one. She had refused to speak to Matt since he had told her – ‘announced’, as she put it – that he was gay and was moving in with Rodney. They hadn’t spoken in a year but Matt had it on good authority that she was beginning to get used to the idea of having a homo son. His sister was on the case. He had written his mother a chatty letter saying how things were going with him and Roddy, making it all sound as matter-of-fact and devil-may-care as possible. He dwelt mostly on his new job working in the university library. Moderation was the letter’s primary virtue but he had closed with a tantalising ‘Speak to you soon’ which, he considered, might have been a bit presumptuous. So that was the letter to his mother.
The next person he needed to write to was his friend Suzy. She had moved through to Edinburgh to live with a woman twice her age. Suzy was twenty-seven and her girlfriend was fifty-four. When Suzy had first told Matt about her she had built up to this matter slowly.
‘She’s older than me,’ she had said, shyly.
‘How much older?’ asked Matt.
‘Several decades,’ Suzy replied, enigmatically.
Matt had immediately imagined a tufty beard and continence pads. But he had subsequently met Suzy’s woman, who turned out to be a warm, vibrant, sassy, sexy virago.
‘Her hair is silver,’ said Suzy, decidedly, ‘but her heart is gold.’
Matt had been through to see them a lot when they first moved to Edinburgh. He was single at the time and Suzy was his confidant. He could tell her about his one-night stands, his unrequited loves, his loneliness, and she would nod benignly and say all the right things. No one was more delighted than Suzy when Matt met Rodney.
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��Now I won’t see you for dust,’ she had said, as she dropped him off for the train at Waverley. Matt was determined to keep in touch with Suzy. She was, after all, his best pal. They phoned often but they wrote too. They enjoyed receiving letters from each other. Nothing beat receiving a warm, funny letter from a friend.
Matt also had to write to a CD club who had been demanding money with menaces from him. He had been a member of CD Sonic for a year and bought around thirty CDs from them by mail order, which was probably twenty more than he could afford. He had decided to cancel his subscription after the year but they kept hounding him, claiming he owed them money. He wrote them a firm letter saying that his subscription was now annulled and that he had paid them all the money (he had bank statements to prove this) and that any further correspondence from them would be treated as harassment. Matt hoped this would do the trick. All of these letters he had written in one sitting, punctuated by cups of coffee. He drank too much of the stuff.
The fourth letter wasn’t a letter at all. It was a birthday card to his pal George, who lived in London. George wasn’t really Matt’s pal. He was a guy Matt had fallen in love with. George had strung him along for a while then made it clear there was no way they were going to get it together. Matt knew he shouldn’t have anything more to do with George but they sent each other Christmas and birthday cards. Matt couldn’t help keeping in touch with him.
Having written four letters the question was now how to get them posted. Matt knew from experience that if he didn’t post letters right away, they lay in drawers or were carried around in his jacket pockets until they were too crumpled and torn to post. He knew he couldn’t leave these letters lying around. He had to post them right there and then.
First Matt looked in his wallet, as he normally kept stamps in there. He had been relieved to find a little stamp book inside. When he opened it there were no stamps. He couldn’t work out how he’d have kept just the empty cardboard, unless some of the stamps had fallen out. He checked in amongst the notes but there was no sign of a stamp. Matt decided then to go to the drawer where they kept bills, passports, and stationery. He worked his way through everything and still could not find a stamp. He then thought about going to the newsagents to buy some. He dropped the idea in favour of looking in Rodney’s jackets. Rodney was at the theatre with a friend. Matt opened the wardrobe door and started dipping into Rodney’s pockets. He found a packet of Clorets, two cinema tickets, four hankies, five theatre tickets, about fifteen pounds and, at last, four stamps. A strip of four first-class stamps. Matt took them over to the kitchen table where he had been writing the letters. He looked at the stamps that he held in his right hand. They were Diana commemorative stamps. Each stamp was a different head-and-shoulders shot of the late Princess. A purple border framed all four. In the left-hand corner was the number 26 denoting the price of the stamp. In the right-hand corner was a small silhouette of the Queen, in purple. At the bottom of the stamps, in white on the purple border, were the numerals 1961-1997.
The first picture was a really elegant one. Diana was wearing an off-the-shoulder black dress and a pearl choker with what looked like a black brooch-like centrepiece. Her hair was as short as he had ever seen it. Her eyes and lips looked heavily made up. Although she was smiling, Matt thought she looked a little aloof. The second image was more homely. Her hair was bigger and fuller. She was wearing pearl earrings (only one was visible). She had a blue dress with lapels trimmed with white. Diana looked more natural and at ease in this shot. The third stamp had a regal image of Diana wearing a crown. She had pearl drop earrings (quelle surprise); a very ornate looking crew neck dress with what looked like paisley pattern stitched with pearls. Again, she looked more heavily made up in this photo, and a little older. There were bags under her beautiful eyes. The final picture looked like it had been taken outdoors. Whilst the previous images looked very much studio bound, the final image looked like it was a natural shot. The background looked like grass and trees, although it was out of focus so you couldn’t really tell. Diana was looking to her right, her head lowered slightly. She was wearing a hound’s-tooth jacket with padded shoulders. Or it might have been a dress. Matt guessed it was part of a suit. She looked essentially herself in this photo, sort of shy and charming and sweet. Her eyes were carefully delineated by eye pencil. This was his favourite, Matt decided. He had been surprised to find the stamps, as he was aware of some kind of controversy over whether the stamps were to appear at all.
Matt tore off one of the stamps, licked it, and stuck it on the envelope addressed to his mother. Then he hesitated for a minute. What would Rodney say about him using his stamps? Matt dismissed the thought. He could always buy more stamps. He tore off the second stamp and stuck it on the envelope addressed to CD Sonic. The one with the crown he stuck on the letter to Suzy. The final one, his favourite, he stuck on the envelope addressed to George. He kissed that envelope. Then he went and got his jacket and keys and grabbed the letters. There was a post box just around the corner of the street.
Matt had gone out later that night with his pal Benny and got pissed in Delilah’s. While they were there they had overheard some guys talking about Diana. One of them said he was running in the Flora margarine marathon, with all proceeds going to the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund. This guy said that he would never get over her death, which, he added, was no fucking accident. No, he said, an order had gone out that Diana must be silenced forever. And that order, he added ominously, came from the top. Another guy said that the night after Diana’s death, his Auntie Fanny had woken up to find the spectral form of Diana standing at the foot of her bed, loving arms outstretched. She had written down her story and sent it to a man who was compiling a book, Diana: Ghost of Love, all about spooky visions of Diana. The third guy in the group said that he had come to terms with Diana’s passing, but that he would never get over the death of Dodi, with whom he’d fallen in love since first seeing his photo in Hello! magazine. Matt turned to Benny and shook his head. He thought the whole thing was way over the top.
Not that Matt had been completely unmoved by the death of the Queen of People’s Hearts. He’d been as shocked as anybody and thought it was a downer. He found it depressing that someone so rich, attractive and ever present, was suddenly gone. Matt had lost his father the year before and the whole Diana tragedy had brought back all the pain. He remembered that week after her death. Rodney was inconsolable. In fact, he was a pathetic drama queen. Matt felt he couldn’t bear the saturation coverage and vowed not to watch the funeral. He was plagued by feelings of mortality.
‘If you truly love me,’ Rodney had whimpered through a hanky, ‘you’ll be there for me.’ He was referring to the televised funeral. Matt had backed down and agreed to watch the funeral with Rodney. He ended up sobbing on the carpet at the sheer fucking tragic majesty of it all.
Matt looked up at Rodney’s pained face. He knew he was in trouble. Big trouble.
‘I used them.’
‘You what?’
Rodney fixed Matt with a cold, haughty look. Matt got up and sat on the bed. He couldn’t look at Rodney.
‘I used your stamps. I’ll buy ye new ones okay?’
Rodney went to speak and was lost for words momentarily. He stuck his hands in the air.
‘You’ll buy me new ones? And what if you can’t buy me new ones? What if they’re sold out?’
Matt looked at his bare feet.
‘I’ll get some okay?’
‘Why did you have to use the whole four?’
‘Because I had four letters to post.’
‘Smart arse. You could’ve at least left me a note. It would’ve been common courtesy.’
Matt looked up at Rodney now and had to smile.
‘And I don’t know what’s so fuckin’ funny!’
‘I’ll get you some new stamps on Monday okay?’
Rodney gave an indignant, exasperated sigh and walked out of the room. Matt could hear him banging about in the
kitchen. Then he came back into the bedroom.
‘What were all these letters you were writing anyway? Are you doing a correspondence course? Found yerself a coupla pen pals?’
‘Rodney, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill.’
Rodney turned away again, then around again. He put his hand up to his face and shook his head.
‘Those weren’t any old fuckin’ stamps, Matt. They’re called commemorative stamps. They’re meant to commemorate Diana. They’re – they’re mementoes.’
Matt thought they had done all this. Diana had been dead nearly six months now. He thought all the hysteria had died away. He wondered if there was something else wrong with Rodney and he was using the stamps to create some kind of row to let off a bit of steam. Matt had begun to hate the whole business of icons. Rodney stood rigid for a moment.
‘It’s the lack of respect, the disrespect,’ he said, tearfully.
Matt looked sadly at Rodney.
‘If I could bring her back,’ he said softly, ‘I would.’
Matt got fifty minutes for lunch but that Monday it took him one hour and twenty minutes to get the replacement stamps. He had to go to three different post offices and get a taxi back to work. The boss gave him a verbal warning for being half an hour late. But he had got the stamps. They were folded in his shirt pocket. The pocket had a button and Matt made sure it was fastened. Periodically, in stolen moments, he would check the stamps were still there, take them out and look at them. He had also bought a card with a pussycat on the front. Inside was the word ‘Sorry’.
On the way home Matt sat in the back seat on the top deck of the bus. He took out the stamps. It was the same sequence. Matt wondered if these were the only four, or perhaps four in a series. He looked at them carefully, the elegant one with the black dress and pearl choker, the one with the pale blue dress and bigger hair, the HRH one, and Matt’s favourite, Diana looking down and to her right. Matt wondered who she was looking at, smiling at, oblivious of death. He looked up at the people on the bus, oblivious too, it seemed, of the certainty of their own deaths. He carefully folded the stamps and returned them to his shirt pocket. He put his left hand up to the pocket and held it there. He felt his heart beating.