‘Don’t give her sweets, Mum,’ Ian said.
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘No. We don’t give her sweets.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly. Just a wee sweetie, eh. She deserves a wee sweetie just like any other kid.’
Ian wondered why she didn’t just say ‘fuck you’. It would’ve been easier in a way if she had. Fuck you and your plans and your decisions that are different from mine. Fuck them. And fuck you for coming in here thinking I should respect them, because I don’t, I think they’re nonsense. As well as that I think you lot are all out of touch with normality. All children want a sweetie and what kind of grandmother would I be if I denied my wee granddaughter a sweetie? It’s you and Esther. You’re that stressed you can’t let your kids be at peace.
Why didn’t she just say it and be done with it?
She pulled open the drawer and picked out a bar of Highland Toffee and a Kinder Surprise. She didn’t hand them to Bonnie but placed them on top of the chest of drawers next to a framed picture of Stanley and the children at Butlin’s in 1973. She turned to Ian to see what he was going to do about it and he flushed before he spoke.
‘Mum,’ he said. ‘There’s a reason we don’t want the kids to have these things. It’s because we had four or five fillings each before we left primary school. And because our dad had his first heart attack at the age of fifty-two. So it’s not really a matter of whether Bonnie deserves a wee sweetie, because what she deserves much more, my daughter, is to not grow up with a mouthful of scabby teeth and then have heart disease at an age when healthy people are thinking about running a marathon. That’s my choice as a parent. Okay? Is that all right with you?’
‘Oh shut up, Ian. I’m not in the mood today.’
Bonnie emerged from the bedroom with the chocolate egg and Esther could see that Ian and their mother had already had an argument. She noticed the slow progress of Maureen’s befuddlement and a slight limp as she made her way to the kitchen counter and handed the plates to Jack. She wished she could just go and hug her mother and tell her this was a happy occasion but it was years too late. That’s what happens. She looked at Maureen as if she suddenly had a clear idea of her and took the plates herself from Jack. ‘I’ll help you, Jigger,’ she said.
‘This Parmesan’s smelly,’ Scott said.
‘Don’t say smelly, Scooter.’ That was Esther. She didn’t like the boys to use words like smelly or toilet. Something could smell strange or you might visit the loo, but smelly was definitely out of bounds and so was belly when you could say tummy.
‘It was all they had in Tesco’s,’ Maureen said.
‘You’re better buying it fresh,’ Scott said. He always got more sophisticated when his father wasn’t there. Esther considered it a sign of maturity or something, probably meaning he would cope better at university. They sat down. Maureen wasn’t eating what was on her plate. At times she thought she should have tried much harder to keep Stanley. Tried much harder to please him and make him happy. When it came to it, she let him go as if her disappointment in him – her sudden hatred – was simple confirmation that men weren’t worth a button. She liked to tell herself that everything would have been different with the children if she’d had a man in the house. Perhaps Stanley would’ve protected her against their need to be special all the time.
She lifted a fork. ‘I don’t know why you wanted Italian,’ she said. ‘Every time you have your lunch nowadays you’ve got to decide which country you’re going to.’
Esther looked at her mother and chewed her food a few times more than was necessary. ‘There’s certainly a lot more choice nowadays,’ she said.
‘You call it choice. I call it harassment,’ Maureen said. ‘It’s like the bloody Olympic Games in that Tesco’s. Italian. Chinese. They’ve got a whole bloody aisle of Polish stuff.’
‘Well, there’s a lot of them living here,’ Ian said.
‘Too many,’ replied Maureen.
‘I don’t know where we’d be without them. Half the building sites would be lying empty for a start. And taxi drivers. You couldn’t get a British guy to get out of his bed on a Saturday morning if the town was on fire. These Eastern Europeans will work all night.’
‘Taking jobs,’ Maureen said. ‘And bringing their giant jars of vegetables over here. And biscuits. It’s not even biscuits they eat. Those things are like bars of soap. You’d get bubbles in your mouth if you sat down to eat one with a cup of tea.’
Over the years, Ian had come to accept her complaints as a kind of sickness, a complete resistance to the idea of forward movement, and he only blew up when it seemed directly to affect his own child. Esther, on the other hand, had an obvious pact with Scott and Jack, to be themselves no matter what Maureen said or did, but Esther could get nervous. She knew, for instance, that her mother would find it difficult when she began a story about the cocktails they had every weekend at tea time.
‘Cocktails,’ Maureen said. ‘You all think you’re film stars and this is Scotland, not bloody New York.’
‘Dad made me a mojito,’ Jack said.
‘A mosquito?’ said Maureen.
‘There was hardly anything in it,’ Esther said.
‘Well, if you want to get them started on drink that early, it’s up to you. I’m just telling you it’s the slippery slope.’
‘It was just a bit of fun, Mum.’
‘That’s how it started with your brother.’
‘Let’s not go there,’ Ian said.
‘Take it from me,’ Maureen said. ‘Giving drink to young men is not a wise move. Alexander was at it far too young. And your father, the great man, was giving him pints of lager when the boy was about fifteen years old. Somebody saw him down the street the other day with a bottle of vodka in a plastic bag. The middle of the afternoon when all the men are at their work. Vodka! I was mortified.’
Esther looked at Ian. She knew it was going to be like this. She knew she would be sharing looks with her brother, rolling her eyes at the dawning of impossibility over the lunch table. She sipped her fizzy water and saw that her mother would never change and that the healthiest prospect was just to love her as she was. And that’s how she played it. She mustn’t be brutalised by her mother’s frustrations and she counselled herself always to seek new ways to think well of her. Love is hard work and you don’t get anywhere just by feeding your resentments. She thought she could steal a little goodness back just by stopping to remember how lovely her mother had been to the woman next door. She once read a paper that said if you love someone then you’re always ready to let them start again.
Maybe they’d like the ice-cream, thought Maureen. People always cheer up when it comes to the sweet. ‘I’m sorry I’m not very good at these things,’ she said suddenly to them all at the table. Ian and Esther smiled and said everything was great and both of them seemed relieved to see her relax enough to say what she’d said. Sometimes you just have to accept that the people you care about are different from you, thought Maureen, but walking to the kitchen she realised she had a tear in her eye. The visit wouldn’t last for ever and neither would her nice memories of Stanley, but there it was. As she opened the fridge she knew she’d never have chosen anyone else, even as the chill of the icebox softly caressed her hand.
ARIEL
Luke walked from the car and skipped over a puddle and smiled for no reason at the windows of the building. He looked along the seafront to where the prom disappeared into the thick of Ardrossan and took out a cigarette. The car ferry was halfway out and the seagulls wafted it on, before banking away like bombers and heading up to Largs. In the morning the coast always looked as if it was drying out, as if each town was in recovery from the bad weather and the night’s racket. Feeling for his lighter he found his wallet and took out the picture of 5 Platoon up against a wall at the barracks in Salisbury. The major’s eyes seemed fixed on something miles away.
It was the second time Luke had discovered Anne in the laundry room and this
time she sat facing the machine with the suds splashing up on the glass. He stood at the door watching her and noticed a smile, the smile she had developed long ago, an expression that he couldn’t read. After a moment, she sighed. ‘I like to wash and iron a man’s shirt,’ she said.
‘That’s not very feminist,’ he joked.
She looked up. ‘I had a job in New York.’
Luke went over and put his hand on her shoulder. She held a box of Ariel washing capsules in her lap and something in her attitude suggested she understood how to cope around a washing machine. She took a tissue from her sleeve and rubbed her nose with it, then she turned it over and used the clean side to wipe her eyes. Luke watched her and thought only an old person would do that. He would know he was getting old when he used both sides of a tissue. ‘You used to come here before the war,’ she said.
He paused.
‘I did. It’s your grandson, Luke.’
‘I know who you are. You’re the one with the flat in Glasgow and the uniform.’
‘You’re doing your washing.’
She inclined her head to look at him. ‘You’re the one with the imagination,’ she said. ‘A boy and a half. And why shouldn’t we take pictures of a pile of old dishes if that’s what we want to do?’
‘No reason,’ he said.
‘Exactly. There’s beauty in it …’
‘Yes.’
‘Art.’
‘I agree. There’s an art to telling the truth.’
‘That’s what the boys used to say – Harry and the boys. That was the style, I don’t mind telling you. Get out of the studio!’
‘Test your theories outside.’
‘I’ve met you before,’ she said. ‘And you’re quite right. No doubt about it. Go outside and see the people who have their hands in the sink.’
‘You’re talking about photography?’
‘Everyday things,’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll tell you something,’ she said, tapping the box in her lap and sniffing. ‘When I lived up in Glasgow there was heaps of washing to be done. Heaps. I think there were a hundred rooms in that house and a hundred chests of drawers in every room. It was a very big house. And I was quite young to be carrying all that washing up the stairs.’
‘You came from America.’
‘I came from Canada. Then America. Then Glasgow.’
‘Glasgow must have been some place in those days,’ he said. ‘Remember those Annan pictures we saw of the tenements?’
She paused to catch her thoughts. She smiled. ‘They were ghosts,’ she said, ‘those Annan kids.’
‘But you understood the pictures – the light.’
She turned and waved a playful finger. ‘So did you, Sonny Jim. That’s the darkroom for you. That’s why you’re number one.’
Luke had gathered from his mother and from the warden that they were going to move Anne out. They said she couldn’t manage any more and even the Memory Club wasn’t helping, though she still had bursts of clarity. It was time to place her in better care, they said, and Anne wasn’t really absorbing this information so they would be better just cracking on. There were a lot of things to box up. It was hard, too sad. The books and the photographic stuff would need a van to themselves. Luke was talking to the people in Canada about her photographs and various papers and they put him on to a person at McMaster University, a nice woman with an Irish name, who was going to be in charge of whatever they did.
‘I’m happy, Luke,’ Anne said. She just said it. He lowered his head and thought of Scullion and the boy in Bad Kichan, and he found himself exhaling slowly as he took Anne’s hand. When she said she was happy it gave him the final push he needed to announce the excursion and defend her against whatever doubts. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ he said. ‘You and me. I’ve got a new car. We’re going to pack some things and go to Blackpool. You always used to talk to me about it, remember, the lights and the trams and all that?’
‘Blackpool,’ she said.
‘We’re going to go and see the Illuminations.’
‘Nice, that. Will we take the train?’
Glasgow Central to Preston. And Harry would be waiting for me, if he could get away. Or it didn’t matter if you had to manage by yourself. Work is work. You wouldn’t believe the concentration. Masking is a technique whereby you hold back some of the light from one or two areas by placing a mask on the printing paper itself. It will affect the image you see and the reality you observe.
She asked again: ‘The train?’
‘I have a car,’ Luke said. ‘Now, listen. I’m going to work it all out and we’re going together. You and me.’
‘We’ll pack some things.’
‘We will so, Gran.’
‘We’ll pack some things and there’s always lots to do in Blackpool.’
Luke had phoned his mother. ‘There’s a flat,’ she said. ‘Part of a flat or a room, anyway, and you’ll find the number in her address book. She never wanted me to know about it. It’s hers, the flat. And it doesn’t matter any more. Just go. It’s a lovely idea.’
‘It’s tomorrow they’re coming, right?’ Luke asked.
‘Tomorrow, yes. Monday,’ said Alice.
‘We’ll go tomorrow, then.’
‘You want me to come along?’
‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but just drive over here and help the cleaners once we’ve gone. I’ll spirit her away.’
‘All right,’ Alice said. ‘God bless.’
THE DIFFERENCE
Luke was sitting out by the exotic plants that everybody called the jungle. His gran was having a nap and he wanted to arrange things. He hadn’t spoken to Flannigan in a while and was out of touch with the boys and hadn’t said anything about his visit to Scullion in Birmingham. ‘So what about it, Flange?’ he said on the phone. ‘Do you think your fucken heap-of-shit car will make it out of Liverpool?’
‘What you doing?’
‘I’ll be in Blackpool.’
‘Don’t sweat it, lad. I’ll be zooming past all the horror-pigs on the road to get to the land of Kiss Me Quick. Just hit me up with the time and the place.’
They hadn’t talked about the tour or the tribunal or any of the stuff that was in the papers. It just wasn’t part of their training to pore over things. ‘Shit happens’ was the other motto, but, at the end of the call, the young private altered his tone and there was a pause.
‘What is it?’ Luke asked.
‘I dunno, man. Flashbacks. She said I woke up shouting in the night and like fucken crying and shit.’
‘And did you?’
‘I did, yeah. It was like I was losing my nut. My head just full of Scullion, man, the boss lying there ripped to fuck. Remember his eyes?’
‘Go on.’
‘Blood, sir. His eyes were full of blood. Fucken leg blown off and blood pouring down the fucker’s cheeks.’
‘Aye,’ Luke said. ‘It was messy.’
‘That’s the difference,’ Flannigan said. ‘You’re out. I’m nineteen. What the fuck am I going to do if I don’t have the army?’
Luke didn’t know what to say. He didn’t yet know how to talk about the visit to Selly Oak or how to share the details of his own flashbacks. When he came into Lochranza Court that afternoon he had been spooked right away by a Remembrance Day appeal box sitting in reception. And when he was telling Anne about the night he went out on the town, the night he drank too much, her voice rallied and she said what he’d heard older people say to boys with hangovers, ‘Hell mend you.’
‘What, Gran?’ He shivered. He’d thought she had said ‘Helmand you.’
‘I better go, Flange.’
‘You stayed so long, sir. Why did you stay so long in the army if you hated it that much?’
He wondered, as he often did, whether he should tell the truth or reach for something he half-believed. He had never really lived in a world where things could be said, but he said it now, in a lowered voice, as if
posting an old letter he’d never got round to sending. ‘I kept thinking I’d meet my dad and we’d change the world.’ Luke wondered if Flannigan was just far too young to believe it, but it didn’t matter, he’d said what he’d said and the kid went on to something else.
‘It didn’t feel real, being in Afghan,’ he said. ‘It was so fucken hot all the time.’
‘I know it’s a loser thing to say,’ Luke said, ‘but I stopped believing in it, Flange. I was never like that in Iraq.’
‘Other people believe in it, sir. We just do our job.’
Luke paused to take that in. ‘I hope I haven’t embarrassed you, mate.’
‘Don’t be daft, sir.’
‘Okay. I’ll buzz you from Blackpool.’
‘Roger that,’ Flannigan said.
Luke was sitting on the wall looking at the plants when the two boys came up. ‘Is that the new iPhone?’ Scott asked. Luke’s phone was sitting beside him.
‘Yep. Top of the range.’
‘Aw, man. I want that, like, so badly.’ Luke knew they must be the grandsons of Anne’s nice friend Maureen. It was weird for him to think that they weren’t much younger than most of the guys in his section. The two boys spoke very easily: one of them said he wanted to be a DJ and the other said he’d study medicine if he could get in.
‘I’d never join the army,’ Jack said. ‘No offence.’
They spoke about phones and laptops and sounded very keen on cool things. ‘Wait here,’ Luke said, after a second’s hesitation. ‘Just wait here a minute. I’ll be right back.’ He went out to the car park, opened the boot and lifted out a black bag of stuff and brought it back to the boys. They opened it and gasped: two Xboxes, all the wires, handsets, mouthpieces, manuals, and a jumble of Nintendos and games.
The Illuminations Page 19