Becoming Nancy

by Terry Ronald

  ‘Hello, David!’ Debbie says, stretching her hand out regally, like some sort of half-barmy fuchsia-crowned empress.

  ‘Hello again!’ I say.

  ‘You did good, David,’ she says, pointing at me. ‘Real good: got all that shit outta there, and now you can move on with your life.’

  ‘I guess!’ I shout over the noise of the hairdryers and the music, which I now recognize as the intro to ‘Fade Away And Radiate’. ‘I guess I did good.’

  ‘Listen, there will be other boys, other times: trust me. You got a whole lot of life to live, baby; now get out there and live it.’

  I pull up the front of my dryer and stand up as the tom-toms thump still, tall and proud amongst the billowing dry ice, gazing into the baroque gold mirror in front of me. My hair is a gargantuan, aquamarine, Jackie O, ratted and flipped bob. Turning slowly to Debbie, I ask, ‘With this hair?’

  Twenty-three

  Pod People

  It was a bit like a fucking madhouse today at twenty-two Chesterfield Street, especially given it was a Sunday and I’m quite thankful to have got out of there alive and come to work at the club. Yes, I have actually come to work behind the bar at the Lordship Lane Working Men’s Club tonight, and I’ve looked Marty Duncombe in the eye and smiled very sweetly, and I’ve said absolutely nothing. He did turn a peculiar salmony colour when I saw him, it has to be said, and he didn’t say very much, but then again it was only the day before yesterday that he was proudly standing in front of me with his trousers round his ankles in the beer cellar. I suppose I never really expected him to acknowledge the event, to be honest, and although the entire state of affairs is all a bit fucking weird, it has been that sort of day. I mean, for a start I’m fairly certain that my mum, and in particular my dad, have been replaced during the night by people or beings that look and sound very much like they do, but aren’t them! You know, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers – pod people, I think one would call them.

  During the last few weeks Kath has been very offish with me indeed – ever since parents’ evening – and that’s been painful, to be frank, because when the chips are down – and let’s face it, my chips have been well and truly down – a boy needs his mother. She’s not been mean, no, or especially angry – not at all – but our banter had disappeared, and her soft smile and swift wit had vanished along with it. I’d missed her. When I’d phoned her from Hamish’s late on Friday night after to all intents and purposes running away from home, you’d have thought she might have been somewhat distraught, but she was actually terribly cross with me.

  ‘What do you mean you’re in Brighton?’ she said. ‘How the bloody ’ell did you get there? Eddie, did you hear that, this little sod’s in Brighton! Well, you can come straight home tomorrow, son, do you hear? I’m not sure how many more surprises I can take off you, David. It’s been one thing after another lately …’

  Et cetera, et cetera …

  Today, though – and this is what I mean about pod people – she breezed in from somewhere or other with a huge plastic Arding & Hobbs bag and swooped towards me, beaming a smile.

  ‘Guess what’s in here?’ she cooed, as I leafed through my Smash Hits.

  ‘Well, I don’t imagine for one minute it’s the Crown jewels, Mother,’ I’d said, ‘but apart from that, I’m at a loss.’

  ‘It’s your First Act dress,’ she said excitedly. ‘Nancy’s First Act dress – all finished for the dress rehearsal this week.’

  ‘Oh!’

  She ceremoniously peeled it out of the bag, and I must say it was magnificent: emerald cheesecloth with a laced bodice in lemon satin.

  ‘And look at the eyelet detail around the bust,’ Mum whooped. ‘I’m a genius!’

  She held it up against me, and then she gave me a little hug. After she’d pulled away from me, she suddenly surged forth again and hugged me once more, this time more tightly, with her face against mine, and she wouldn’t let me go.

  ‘I don’t want you to run away,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I never want that.’

  Before I knew it, Eddie – who’d been down the road at my nan’s demolishing the old outside lavvy – had appeared at the kitchen door in filthy overalls, and it was the first time I’d clocked his face in weeks without ‘murder’ written across it.

  ‘Sit down at the table, David,’ he said seriously and without warning. ‘You an’ all, Kath.’

  And so we obeyed expectantly, Mum draping the dress over the back of one of the kitchen chairs. Dad sat down in between Mum and me, his hair covered in what looked like brick dust, and he clearly had something of great magnitude to impart as he was fiddling madly with the sovereign ring on his finger, and perspiring slightly.

  ‘Right,’ he said, over the distant clatter of Moira rejigging the shoe cupboard in the hall. ‘I’ve got sommin’ to say.’

  Mum and me afforded one another quick sideways glances and then looked back at Eddie, who was rapping on the glass top of the table anxiously.

  ‘David, in the last couple of weeks you’ve stolen money off me, played hooky from school, stayed out half the night and then run away to Christ knows where, and come home ’ere Saturday morning lookin’ like you’ve just done ten rounds with Henry Cooper.’

  ‘Dad, I’m really—’

  ‘Wait!’ Eddie said. ‘Now, I’m not ’appy about any of this, and I don’t really understand what the fuck it is you’re goin’ through, or why it is you’ve chosen the path you seem to ’ave chosen, but you have to promise us, and I mean promise us, son, that you won’t do a runner like that again – whatever ‘appens.’

  They both fixed stares on me then, and I shuffled fretfully in my chair.

  ‘I won’t.’

  Then Eddie let out a chuckle, but it was a vague, faraway chuckle, and he said, ‘When you phoned us Friday night from Brighton, Dave … I hadn’t even noticed you weren’t here. I hadn’t even noticed that me own son was missing, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘We hadn’t,’ Mum said, and she looked down. ‘I felt terrible.’

  ‘Oh.’

  With some hesitancy, Eddie lifted up a dust-caked hand and touched my face, which was now spectacularly black and blue, and he tutted and shook his head.

  ‘You come to your mum and me from now on,’ he said. ‘Do you ’ear? It doesn’t matter what it is, you come to us.’

  Then he put his hand on my arm. I wasn’t used to him actually touching me.

  ‘I don’t really understand all this gay stuff: gay pride, whatever, I don’t fucking know. When I was a teenager if you were a queer you were a queer and that was that. And there was some decent ones an’ all, don’t get me wrong, and some hard nuts too. Reggie Kray, apparently: he was one. Anyway, you’re basically a good kid, David, and that’s the main thing. And no little bastard thug is gonna do this to my boy again, whatever he is.’

  And I sat there in a stunned sort of quiet, the pair of them staring at me peculiarly, Mum nodding and smiling. Then they both got up and went about the rest of their afternoon as if nothing had been said. Pod people, I tell you!

  At around four thirty there were more fun and games to be had when the doorbell went and I galloped down the stairs to answer it, thinking, nay hoping, it might be Frances – I’d left three ludicrously repentant messages for her with her mother, which seemed to have fallen on deaf ears – but it wasn’t her at all, it was the bloody police.

  ‘Oh, hello!’ I said, taking in the two men on the porch, one in uniform and the other not.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  The plain-clothed and taller of the two men was reedy with bulging eyes, and didn’t look especially jovial.

  ‘Might I find Miss Moira Doyle here?’ he enquired politely, and I nodded.

  ‘You might,’ I said. ‘Why, what’s she done?’

  And I actually started to giggle.

  ‘Can we come in?’ the one in uniform said affably. He was actually very handsome, with a lovely square jaw and sandy five o’clock shadow.
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  ‘Yes,’ I said, now ever so slightly alarmed. ‘Come in.’

  And into the passage they came, stopping halfway down it outside the lounge door. Mum and Dad were on the scene in seconds – they’d been upstairs having one of their Sunday afternoon ‘lie-downs’, and Dad could evidently spot a copper’s voice from two floors up.

  ‘What’s the matter, mate?’ he said to the nice-looking one.

  ‘He’s looking for Moira,’ I announced. ‘She was in the shoe cupboard earlier.’

  ‘Hiding, was she?’ the taller policeman barked.

  ‘No,’ Mum said, buttoning up her blouse, ‘pairing up the flip-flops. Why?’

  Then Moira herself materialized from the lounge with a chamois leather, her eyes narrowed, cheeks ablaze with colour, and she stood with her hands defiantly on her hips and tossed her head back, sending her wig slightly skew-whiff.

  ‘I’m Moira Doyle,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I’m fully alert to that fact,’ the taller man smiled smugly. ‘And what are you doing at this particular address?’

  ‘I’m cleaning,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m the cleaner.’

  ‘Of a Sunday?’ the man said. ‘That’s a tad outlandish, isn’t it?’

  Moira stepped forward and Eddie flanked her like a bodyguard.

  ‘I can’t do me shift tomorrow like I usually do,’ Moira sneered at the man. ‘I’ve got some other business to attend to.’

  ‘Like what?’ the handsome copper said softly.

  ‘Dentist,’ Moira spat, and then she apparently noticed his strong jaw, and the chunky bulge in his trousers that I, too, had made a mental note of only seconds earlier.

  ‘Dentist,’ she said again, only this time in a voice that sounded as though it might have come from Marilyn Monroe’s slightly more slutty auntie.

  ‘Dentist, is it, love?’ the tall policeman said, chuckling. ‘Not selling speed outside Dog Kennel Road School like you were seen doing twice last week, then?’

  ‘What?’

  My mother’s voice almost burst my eardrum.

  ‘Don’t be so fuckin’ ridiculous, she’s our cleaner!’

  ‘You got any proof?’ Eddie demanded.

  But Moira just stood there with her mouth wide open, and the next thing you know it was ‘You have the right to remain silent’ and ‘Would you mind popping on these handcuffs, please, love?’

  Out-and-out pandemonium ensued next. Chrissy burst through the porch door, barely able to breathe and in buckets of tears, announcing that pretty much the same fate had befallen Squirrel at the bottom of our road just now as they walked home from the Wimpy. The tall policeman nodded gravely, as if he might know something about this, and then he and his much sexier counterpart led a dazed Moira out of our front door in handcuffs.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Mum was screeching over Chrissy’s ear-splitting and inconsolable lament. ‘I can’t understand what you’re saying, Chrissy, calm down!’

  But she was plainly hysterical, so I slapped her like they do on Crossroads, and that seemed to do the trick.

  ‘What do you mean, Squirrel’s been arrested?’ Mum asked confusedly, while Chrissy held her hand up to her cheek in a sudden, stunned silence. ‘Moira’s been arrested an’ all – what’s goin’ on? Is everybody being arrested?’

  I watched as Dad chased Benny Hill-style after Moira and the two policemen down the front path, and then I turned back to Chrissy, who had slid down the passage wall and was slumped hopelessly on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. Mum knelt down next to her and brushed the sweaty hair out of her mascara-smeared eyes, and then Chrissy began to cry all over again, her sobs soft and sharp.

  ‘He’s been nicked, Mum,’ she said. ‘He’s been selling drugs, him and Moira – outside schools, for fuck’s sake!’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes!’ I hollered. ‘It all makes sense now – I knew there was something funny going on with them two. Fuck me! Why didn’t I figure it out?’

  To be honest I think I was just thrilled and relieved to have another drama taking some of the attention away from me!

  ‘What do you mean, selling drugs with Moira?’

  Mum is completely incredulous.

  ‘I didn’t know they even bloody knew one another.’

  ‘They used to live on the same estate,’ Chrissy sniffed. ‘That’s all I fucking know.’

  Mum put her hand up to her mouth in utter disbelief, and then she closed her eyes and shook her head slowly.

  ‘Oh, Chrissy! Christ al-bastard-mighty,’ she said. ‘Are you tellin’ me that our cleaner’s actually been dealing drugs to kids? D’you know – I knew I should ’ave gone to an agency.’

  I sat down beside Chrissy and put my arm around her, drawing her to me – it was the brotherly thing to do, I felt.

  ‘I knew he was bad news, love,’ I said as compassionately as I possibly could, but she turned on me like a snake.

  ‘Oh, fuck off, you!’ she spat at me. ‘What the fuck do you care, anyway? You think everything’s about you, you do – you make me sick!’

  And she screamed the word ‘sick’ so loudly, and banged the floor so hard, that Mum’s Elvis clock came away from the wall above us and smashed against the stair banister.

  By the time Eddie arrives at the club tonight I’m busy bottling up, and he virtually falls against the snug bar. He looks done in.

  ‘Give me a Scotch, Davey, for fuck’s sake,’ he says, rolling his eyes to the heavens.

  Marty and Denise come tearing out of the office when they hear his voice.

  ‘Jesus Christ, mate,’ Marty says. ‘You look bloody awful.’

  He does as well. Still in his overalls, and now filthy with the sweat-smeared brick dust of my nan’s partially demolished outside khazi, Dad looks fit to drop.

  ‘I’ve been at the fuckin’ cop shop all afternoon trying to find out what’s goin’ on with Moira and get ’er a solicitor,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, I know, Davey told us,’ Denise says, relieving Dad of his already empty whisky glass and refilling it with a double. ‘What is going on with her? Did she do it?’

  She was relishing the scandal of it.

  ‘Looks like it,’ Dad says, defeated. ‘I managed to get five minutes with Squirrel – silly little bastard – and he came clean to me and his mum about what they’d been up to – cried his eyes out.’

  ‘Your Chrissy’s fella?’ Marty says, surprised. ‘I always thought he was a lovely little chap.’

  Yes, I bet you did, Marty.

  ‘What’s gonna happen to them, Dad?’ I say. ‘Will they go to prison?’

  ‘I don’t know, David, do I?’ he says, wiping dust away from his mouth before he downs another drink. ‘Squirrel’s only fifteen, so they might go easier on him, but Moira’s been providin’ him with bloody pills to sell to his mates – boys at your school, especially. Christ knows where she’s been getting ’em from. She says they’re fuckin’ slimming pills.’

  Then he leans on the bar and puts his dirty face into his even dirtier hands.

  ‘What a bloody weekend,’ he sighs. ‘Get me another Scotch will ya, Denise?’

  What a very strange day it’s been.

  The club is extra quiet tonight, probably after all the frenzied excitement of last night’s darts trophy presentation dinner dance, and after it’s all cleared out at a quarter to eleven Eddie is still here, propping up the bar. He’s at least washed his face now, but twelve or thirteen whiskies along, he’s not looking too clever; in fact, it’s a wonder he’s still standing.

  ‘Have you eaten, Dad?’ I ask him.

  ‘Nah!’ he mumbles. ‘I’m not ‘ungry: I’ll ’ave another drink, though.’

  Marty has also been knocking them back, and he’s standing next to Dad on the other side of the bar with his red tracksuit top unzipped to the waist, showing off his neat, hairy chest. The two of them have been getting right up my nose for the last hour – putting the world to rights, as they saw it: what a marvellous b
loody job Mrs Thatcher is doing, and what was the point of women being liberated when they spent most of their free time looking through catalogues at saucepans. It was only a matter of time, it seemed, before Dad drunkenly trotted out the subject of my sexuality, and as I furnish him with his umpteenth whisky of the night, he grabs my wrist and turns to Marty, pie-eyed.

  ‘I don’t care if my boy is gay, Marty,’ he slurs. ‘It don’t make no fuckin’ difference to me, mate, I’ve seen it all before.’

  Oh God, no!

  ‘I was inside for receiving stolen goods, ye know, Marty – four months,’ Dad shouts, pointing at Marty, and then falling forward against him.

  ‘I know you was, mate,’ an equally pissed Marty says. ‘I know!’

  ‘You see all fuckin’ sorts in there, mate – trust me – all sorts.’

  ‘I’ll bet,’ Marty says, swaying. ‘I bet you fuckin’ do!’

  ‘You never know what two geezers will get up to when there’s not a bird around for months on end,’ Eddie says, and I watch as Marty’s jaw drops farcically.

  ‘I’m tellin’ ya!’ Dad says.

  I laugh out loud as I wipe down the bar, wondering if anyone I’d ever clapped eyes on was truly and completely straight, and then I turn to Marty, who is looking on in quiet terror. So I wink at him and pour myself a double Baileys.

  On the way home from the club I feel a little bit otherworldly as I pass the Co-op, and I’m not really sure whether I’m experiencing the end of something or the beginning of it. It’s as if the whole world has changed again in one single weekend. Tomorrow, for sure, I would have to face up to school and all the bloody work I’ve missed, and Frances, and to Mr Lord and Jason Lancaster, and, perhaps scariest of all, to myself. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I suppose, looking at it one way, at least I don’t really need to be afraid of Jason any more, do I? And Mr Lord has done his worst now, surely. In fact, after parents’ evening, everyone in the entire school knows full well I’m a fucking fairy, so what else is there to say or do about it? Perhaps that’s what’s scaring me, though. Perhaps now all the exhilarating drama of it is played out I just have to get on with it.