by Ajay Close
‘First I’ve heard of it,’ my husband said.
‘Stevie reckons it’ll widen the demographic. Cheeky young thruster takes on the Grand Old Man. You never know, might get your missus watching again.’
‘Oh I always watch Midweek Round-Up.’
‘They tried a two-hander before I took over,’ Frankie said, ‘it didn’t work.’
Two old farts in pastel Pringle sweaters. Frankie had been the young thruster then. I could tell he was remembering the taste of priapic contempt. Frankie and Scott: it sounded better that way round, which was something. I tried to see them as a viewer would, or rather, the station controller’s idea of a viewer. What Frankie didn’t know about the game wasn’t worth knowing, but he couldn’t deliver the skinny on the striker and the bulimic weather girl, or tell you what the team was worth in sponsorship if you counted the cars, the suits, the double glazing, the probiotic yoghurt and the butch cosmetics. It would be easy enough to find out, but could he bring himself to do it? Scott was the type who would care about these things. He was still young enough to covet a silver Ferrari and lust after glamour models. He wasn’t stupid, even on two minutes’ acquaintance I could see that, but he could get inside the empty head of Kevin Ferguson or Jojo Damer and feel thoroughly at home
‘I see you with more of a reporter’s role,’ Frankie said.
I took the basket to the checkout.
The youth behind the till had served me dozens of times: a gentle boy with greasy hair falling into his faraway eyes, one hand reaching across to boost the volume on the boom box while the other rang up my shopping. The purchases I had made from him in the past had been accomplished heedlessly, my thoughts following their own course, his trained on the monotony of the task in hand, but recently I had started noticing youths his age. The sort of boys who could have been my sons and yet were old enough. His eyes were on the till and the foodstuffs he was arranging in the bag, root vegetables at the bottom, the bruisable apples and tomatoes on top. I knew he knew I was looking.
‘Six forty-six.’
I put the coins in his grimy palm, then took one of the fives back, to replace it with a discoloured penny. His skin was warm to the touch, soft under its layer of dirt. We both looked at the money. I had given him the exact sum, the cash drawer was open, but the game – if that’s what it was – was not over. He sifted through the coins, picking out one of the ten-pence pieces, leaving me with no choice but to put out my hand and have him press it into my palm.
‘When you’ve finished, there’s a queue of us wanting served.’
My head whipped round, looking for Frankie. (Still halfway down the shop, chatting to Johann.)
Scott was greatly amused by my reaction. He set his basket on the counter. ‘By the way, if you watch Midweek Round-Up, I’m a one-legged black lesbian.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
His white teeth flashed in a smile. ‘Tune in next week. You’ll find out.’
Turning away to collect Frankie, I stubbed my toe on a crate of blackened bananas reduced for quick sale. Last week they’d been ripe, next week they’d be rotten. For now they were still sweet, with a winy aftertaste.
Misdial
My mobile rang.
‘Hi,’ I said.
‘Hello?’ Not Lilias’s usual telephone voice.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Very well thank you. How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘I’ve not caught you at a bad moment, have I?’
‘No.’
‘So… what are you up to?’
A suspicion struck me. ‘You do know who I am?’
There was a pause. ‘It’s not a terribly good connection.’
The line was crystal-clear.
‘I’ll give you a clue, you’ve known me all my life.’
She laughed. ‘I’m sorry, darling, you must think I’m awful. I meant to dial Julia. I just couldn’t think… If you’d rung me I’d’ve known straightaway.’
‘So you do know—?’
More laughter. She understood why it was funny. I felt lightened, almost giddy, to be sharing the joke.
‘You can hang up and call her, it’s OK.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. I’m glad to have a chance to talk to you. I tried you the other night, in fact. Thought I’d rung the barracks and got through to the company sergeant major.’
‘That would be Margo.’
‘She said you’d gone up to bed. I’d have asked her to call you down but I was worried it was after lights-out. I wouldn’t want you to forfeit any privileges.’
I was standing outside the village shop. The postman drove past. I waved.
Lilias’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Is she there?’
‘No, I’m not at the farm.’
‘But she’s had you electronically tagged?’
We got the giggles again.
‘She’s about four times the size of Rosa Klebb,’ I said, ‘if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘All the more to be frightened of, my dear.’
A fragment from my childhood came back to me. ‘She looks a bit like that woman who ran the digs in Sheffield.’
‘Mrs Gerritetten,’ Lilias supplied, in her most gracious RP.
This time my laughter came out as a snort. Encouraged, she dropped into a Yorkshire accent. ‘If you think I’m wasting good food because you’re not hungry you’ve got another think comin’. Geritetten, now, or you’ll feel the rough end of my tongue.’
I was ten years old again, in that brick-built terrace with the smell of the budgie’s cage and the television on all day.
‘I was terrified of her,’ I said.
‘You weren’t the only one, darling.’
‘What − you?’ This was a new take on the past: Lilias daunted by one of the little people.
‘She was completely insane, darling. You must remember. Furious about everything, and so thrilled to be furious. One felt obliged to offend her as a matter of courtesy. The way she treated her poor son, positively frothing at the mouth, then she’d talk to that revolting bird with a voice like honey.’
‘There must have been somewhere else we could have stayed?’
‘Oh, probably. But by the time I realised how barking mad she was, she’d done for me. I barely had the smeddum to get out to rehearsals.’
Margo’s friend Alison passed me on her way into the shop. I echoed her hi.
‘What was that?’
‘Just someone I know. I’m in the village.’
I regretted letting this slip. Telephoning in the street belonged to the same category of taboo as eating, smoking and singing there.
‘I should let you go, darling.’
She always said this when she wanted me off the phone, but this time I thought I detected genuine regret.
‘Make sure you get Julia this time.’
We laughed again, not because it was still funny, just for another snatch of shared laughter.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘it’s been nice talking to you like this.’
Out of the blue, she meant. Without the mutual entrenchment we went in for when we knew we were going to speak.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘it’s been nice.’
1972
Summer’s long swansong is over. Rosehips and brambles crush under Lili’s shoes when she takes her evening stroll down Halfhorn Lane. There are dewy cobwebs in the hedgerows, toadstools like teacakes buttered-side-down in the fields. The rowan berries glow electrically bright. Mrs S says it means an icy winter. Her son rolls his eyes.
With the harvest finished, he has more time to loiter indoors. His mother makes chutney. There’s plenty of work for a second pair of hands, peeling apples, stoning damsons. It’s helpful to have something to do when he is around. He drinks stewed tea with his feet up on the table (one sock is navy, the other brown), waiting for his mother to flick him with the dish towel. If she doesn’t, he’ll take out his cigarette papers, or belch,
or prise the dirt from under his fingernails with the point of the chopping knife until Mrs S looks up from her pan and roars. It’s obvious they both enjoy the game, while Lili sits between them, chopping fruit, glancing from the mother’s broken capillaries to the sooty pigment of the son. She is becoming an observer, the sort of woman who can assume invisibility at will, withdrawing from the surface of her skin to the watery cave where the incubus is growing. Her Edinburgh friends think of her as vivacious, all quickfire aperçus and breathless laughter, but now she has the trick of it, she finds this torpor strangely addictive. The sluggish flow of her thickened blood. The slow, open-mouthed pant of her breathing.
One evening she phones Oliver at the flat. What’s the point of cutting herself off when Brod has no intention of keeping his promise? And anyway, her disappearance has only fuelled the gossip. ‘Are you preggers, darling?’ ‘Olly, what sort of girl do you think I am?’ There’s a pile of post for her. He opens it while she waits on the line. The most recent letter is from the casting director who turned her down for Please, Sir! He’s offering a day’s filming at Elstree.
The wardrobe in Mrs S’s bedroom has a full-length mirror. She has to force herself to look. The cameras add at least ten pounds. She could be playing the same scenes as Nyree Dawn Porter, who weighs all of seven-and-a-half stones. But it’s money, and it’ll keep her face out there until she’s ready to come back. Her legs are still good, thank God. She can wear a roll-on girdle under the white lab coat.
She takes the sleeper down to London. The director hates her on sight. Robert Vaughn is sweet to her, but the scenes they play together are a disaster. Four months since her last job. When she opens her mouth she sounds like an amateur. The shame of it like acid in her blood. The journey back to Scotland takes for ever. The train breaks down. An hour’s wait in Perth for the bus. When she arrives at the farm, the kitchen windows are steamy. Mother and son are sitting at the table.
‘It was definitely her.’
He shrugs. ‘Be embarrassing if it wasn’t.’
His mother’s voice shrills. ‘She was seen in broad daylight.’
‘Aye, well.’
‘There’s only one reason folk go to twenty-eight Skinner Street.’
He looks up and spots her standing in the doorway.
Without moving from her chair Mrs S becomes bustling, slathering butter on an up-ended loaf. ‘Still raining is it? For goodness sake. The bottom field’ll be into a bog. Come away in and have a heat at the Rayburn, get yourself dried off.’
The room is so warm the butter is melting in its dish. Twelve jam tarts are cooling on a wire tray. Before his mother can tell him not to, he takes one. The jam burns his mouth, and he spits it out.
His mother’s look says serves you right. She drops into the chivvying tone she uses to address him. ‘Make yourself useful, dry a couple of plates.’
He stands up. Lili can smell the last cigarette he smoked, along with a trace of tractor fuel.
She takes off her raincoat. The kettle is boiling. While he dries the dishes, she makes the tea. Although neither glances at the other, she feels the pull of his gravitational field. They barely speak to each other, his mother has taken to prompting him to say good morning, but there is no moment of the day when their bodies are not in dialogue.
‘Will you look at those socks,’ Mrs S grumbles, ‘not even a year old—’
All three of them glance down at his big toe poking through the knit.
‘But never mind, Ma’ll mend them. More fool Ma.’
‘You know you like doing it,’ he says.
Even as he teases his mother, Lili feels his attention fixed on her. They stand fifteen inches apart, she at the Rayburn, he by the sink. After so many years spent trying to please, she is surprised to find his dislike a relief. Knowing nothing she does will make any difference: he needs to find everything about her so inimical that what he did must have been right. His stockinged foot taps her ankle. A warning. With every second that passes their proximity grows more conspicuous. He passes his mother a jar of peanut butter. Lili fills the teapot and returns to the table.
Mrs S makes him a sandwich, rapping his hand with the blunt side of the bread knife as he reaches to take it. ‘Wait, will you.’ He waits until it has been cut in half, and the two halves put on a plate. Watching him chew, Lili can taste the way peanut butter is never quite as peanutty as it promises to be, the way it cleaves to the roof of his mouth.
His mother brushes the crumbs from the table into her cupped hand, then straightens with sudden purpose. ‘I’ll need to ask you to leave.’
Lili laughs, though it’s hardly a situation to be improved by laughter. ‘Can I ask why?’
‘Rhoda Spiers saw you walking in that place. You know fine well what I’m talking about.’
Damn Rhoda Spiers, whoever she is. Not that there is anyone to blame but herself. What was she thinking of, wearing that coat? In Edinburgh, she has had women approach her on the street to run covetous fingers over the red leather. That day in Glasgow it drew a different kind of attention. Instant infamy. Even before she passed through the door of twenty-eight Skinner Street.
‘Nothing to say for yourself?’ Mrs S sounds disappointed. ‘I don’t know how you’ve got the nerve to stand there—’
Jake is watching this – watching Lili – with the look he might give an unexploded bomb.
‘It might not be against the law any more, but it’s still murder in my book.’
Lili opens her mouth to defend herself. Across the other side of the table, in his mother’s blindspot, he moves his head in a quick, curt shake. He is afraid she will give him away. And why not, she thinks? Half an hour earlier and Rhoda Spiers would have seen your son walking his ex-girlfriend in there.
Instead she says, ‘Do you mean the abortion clinic?’
She glances from mother to son. He dislikes her all the more for being able to say the words aloud, not caring what Rhoda Spiers thinks, or the minister, or the sweetie wives in the village shop. The notoriety he dreads is nothing to her. His purlieu is her back of beyond. And anyway, her shame was redeemed by that last-minute change of heart.
‘I did walk in, you’re right, but then I walked out again. I was desperate. I saw the address on a lavatory wall…’
Here come the tears, bang on cue. Pitilessly he watches her weep. He knows she is lying. Not about the turmoil – that was real enough – but about its resolution, her sudden flash of moral conviction. She doesn’t know why she couldn’t do away with the child inside her. It might have been the disinfectant-and-sour-milk smell of the clinic curdling in the back of her throat, or the hideous carpet, or the yellow stain on the empty chair, or arriving early and being made to wait, having to sit there with a boy who smelled of cows while his girlfriend sobbed on the other side of the door. Or none of these reasons. The most significant decision of her life seems the whim of a moment, as random as tossing a coin. Is he any different? In that instant it seemed to him easier to see the thing through, and to her, easier to mutter an excuse and bolt for the street, but who knows how it would have gone another day? They tossed the coin and neither knows who called the winning side. That’s what binds them, and divides them: the fact that it’s still not finished. She fills the idle hours with all kinds of fantasies. Sometimes he holds her baby and weeps bitter, restorative tears. Sometimes she is the one who walked through the door while his girlfriend ran away. Sometimes the child she is carrying is his.
Mrs S hands her a tea towel from the rail across the Rayburn. ‘Wheesht, wheesht now, don’t be getting yourself into a state.’
The warm cloth smells of week-old gravy.
Mrs S shrieks.
The opened oven door brings an almighty smell of charred sugar and an engulfing wave of heat. Jake’s upper lip shows a light film of sweat. He really thought she’d tell on him, and now the danger is past he feels not gratitude, or obligation, but a need to redress the balance of power. Their eyes lock. The possibility
hangs in the heat shimmer, closer than ever, and it has been close for weeks now. They both know it’s coming. Inevitability has made its deferral, too, a pleasure, but the time for waiting is over. All that remains is for one of them to decide. No need for words, she’ll see it in his eyes, or he’ll see it in hers. How hard can it be, to think I want this, to embrace your mirror image, your backwards self?
‘Just caught it in time.’ His mother turns around, offering the well-fired fruit cake for inspection, and finds she is addressing an empty room.
Kilt
You spend ten years with someone. You know chocolate gives him spots, and donuts make him fart, and he snores less with his arms above the duvet. You know the voice he uses to answer when he’s not listening. You can predict which women he’ll look at on the street. And then one day you catch a glimpse of the stranger he is when he’s away from you, the man other women see all the time.
I nearly didn’t bother to watch Midweek Round-Up, but I’d read the newspaper and finished my book, so when Margo went to bed I picked up the remote.
I wasn’t surprised to find Scott anchoring the show from Glasgow. That was how it worked in television, by the time you heard the rumour it was a done deal. The cameras were kind to one man in fifty, I was glad to see that Scott was among the forty-nine. Introducing the report from ‘sunny Sicily’, he pulled the same smirk I’d seen in the shop.
The film opened with a long shot of a traffic-choked street. Palermo was in the sticky grip of the same unseasonal heat wave as Scotland. Sunlight bounced off car bonnets with a headachy glare. A black-swathed crone fanned herself in a doorway. Frankie’s voice-over spoke of the ravages of Mediterranean sun on pasty celtic skin and withdrawal symptoms caused by a lack of Irn Bru and fish suppers. Despite this, the Tartan Army was doing Scotland proud. Cut to the inside of a bus, the locals smiling at a strap-hanging diplomat with a saltire painted across his face. His pal lifted a Jimmy wig and scratched. Two young women boarded. A third Scotsman stood to offer them his seat. The camera made the most of him, starting at his boots, moving up over the furry calves, the pleated kilt, the hair on his bare chest, those muscled shoulders. I saw him through the eyes of the women on the bus: a courteous savage in a skirt that was far from sissy. At last the camera reached his face. I waited in vain for the raised eyebrow that would say blame the director. As far as I knew, the first and last time he’d worn a kilt had been at our wedding.