by Nina Stibbe
Since their deaths Andy had lived with his much older brother, Tony, and his family, in a shack-style house behind the soap factory.
‘Tony is a chip off the old block,’ Andy told me. ‘You know, suspicious and worried all the time–he can’t help it.’
I never knew how to respond to bleak pronouncements of this kind but I did once ask if talking about his family was easy for him, knowing of my own unorthodox, riches-to-rags childhood: menace of a mother, homosexual father running off with a bloke from the Vogel factory, then the whole business crashing, and all those redundancies, and so forth. But he denied having any previous knowledge of me or my family, except that I had a grandmother in one of the posh bungalows who grew her own marrows and drove a Volkswagen.
Andy’s eccentric upbringing–the thing that made him seem unsuitable for me–was probably what made him the perfect companion. While most boys of his age liked to roam from pub to pub, guzzling Brew X1, and kicking empty boxes noisily along the street, fighting other boys, pulling fish out of the river for the hell of it, Andy just loved lounging around after a hot bath, watching telly, shouting at the news, listening to cassettes with the lights on and boiling up water for endless tea, coffee and Lemsip–making the most of all the hot water and electric light.
And though he was breezy about it, I imagined that being in the flat must surely have felt like coming home after a cold, rainy fortnight camping in Derbyshire–only it had been twenty-odd years. For me it seemed like the beginning of a love affair, a really nice one, but I tried to ignore that feeling.
My mother used to pop in between visits to her Snowdrop Laundry customers and dropping and collecting Danny from Curious Minds–though mostly to work on her book. For years she had been writing ‘Three-Quarter Sleeves’, which she called a novel but which was largely based on her emergence from girlhood to womanhood in the late 1950s. A time when, instead of advertising her wifeliness, she’d developed a taste for freedoms such as drinking coffee with ice cubes and showing her arms, and her parents had been at their wits’ end.
She’d sent a synopsis and sample chapter to her favourite publisher (Faber & Faber) and, one afternoon, showed me the reply she’d had from an editor there–Patience Tidy. The novel had been rejected.
Patience Tidy thanked my mother for her submission but added, There is a lot of this type of women’s writing around now, and suggested she might consider other genres, since she had such an intriguing voice.
‘Other genres indeed!’ said my mother. ‘Patience Tidy just wants to keep the whole of realism clear for her existing authors.’
‘She says you have an intriguing voice,’ I said.
My mother read me an excerpt of the book.
‘What do you think, Lizzie, honestly?’ she asked afterwards.
I told her I couldn’t agree with the editor. People would always want to read about a teacup overflowing into a saucer while a man looks distractedly at the meat on a woman’s forearm (in a tea room). I would, anyway. My mother might not have been a very good mother, laundry representative or wife but she was an avid reader and an intellectual and she knew, probably better than Patience Tidy (not meaning any disrespect), what women wanted to read.
‘Forget Faber and Faber,’ I said. ‘Try somewhere else.’
‘Well, maybe.’
But I knew she wouldn’t want to give up on her preferred publisher. She’d already written the acknowledgements, including, I’d like to thank my editor, Patience Tidy at Faber & Faber, for her thoughtful interventions, because she loved the name, and thought it’d be just her luck to end up with an editor called Dick.
My mother had always been a writer–of plays, poetry and letters to newspapers–but it had been more ideas than actuality. Now ambition was being matched by words written, and order imposed on chaos, and it was nice and very cheering, especially after years of seeing her sleep through whole days only to come wide awake just as everyone else (including the television) was retiring for the night. And the knowledge that she might appear, silhouetted, in my bedroom doorway, woozy but conscious, at 11 p.m., wanting company, forced me to invent a fake snore so unpleasant that she’d leave me alone and try my brother Jack, who was less strategic and kinder.
My siblings put our mother’s sudden sobriety down to a bout of influenza she had in the spring of 1979 that had put her off spirits, and it may have been that, but I thought it was more to do with the acquisition of her new dog. Angelo was a smooth-haired, patchy, white-and-brown dog with only three legs and one working eye who, for a while, needed the constant care a drunk could never give.
My mother had found Angelo after he had been hit by a car on the Mayflower roundabout, just along from Curious Minds. No one had been there to claim him and he had no tag, so she scooped him up and rushed him along the London Road to Mr Swift’s veterinary surgery, and when asked by the vet nurse what name they should give him, she had suggested ‘Angelo’–it being her favourite name and the one she’d meant to call baby Danny. But on her way to the Leicester Royal Infirmary to give birth, she’d heard ‘Daniel’ by Elton John on the radio and it put Angelo out of her mind for a few weeks, by which time we’d all got used to him being Daniel, or Danny for short. So it was nice for her to have this naming opportunity.
Mr Swift the vet was an ex-lover of hers. Their relationship had ended when Mrs Swift had intervened and told him to choose between them. My mother had insisted that he remain with his wife but the wife had said, ‘No, it has to be Roger’s decision’ (his name being something along those lines). ‘He might prefer you, with all your animals and wacko children.’
‘No, he’s sure to prefer you,’ my mother said, ‘with your wacko tea towels and wacko Crimplene blouses,’ batting ‘wacko’ back at her, even though she’d never heard the word before and was unsure of its actual meaning.
Anyway, Mr Swift probably felt that remaining with assorted wacko blouses wasn’t so much of a worry as taking on a bunch of wacko children and he chose to stay with the wife, and though my mother had been glad really, she never missed an opportunity to dash over to his surgery with a sick animal–because of his kindness and in memory of all the wonderful sex they’d had.
‘Honestly, Lizzie, if he hadn’t had such bad breath I might have made a real play for him,’ she once told me. But this was all before Mr Holt–to whom she was more or less faithful, if you didn’t count jolly friendships and poem-sending.
A week or two later she’d popped back to Mr Swift’s surgery to find out what had become of Angelo the dog and was informed that he’d had to have a front leg amputated at the shoulder, and that because no one had come forward for him in spite of the half-dozen notices posted in the vicinity, he was now about to be sent to St Pippin’s Home for Pets near Market Harborough.
‘At the shoulder?’ my mother had cried, and the veterinary nurse had told her that dogs couldn’t be left with stumps, like human beings, ‘or else they lean on them and walk on them and the stump can’t take it’.
She had been about to leave when the nurse put her finger to her ear and said, ‘Listen, that’s him, he hasn’t stopped crying.’ My mother had cocked her head and heard the persistent two-note whine. ‘He’s going to need a saint,’ said the nurse, which might have been a strategic thing that they were trained to say in order to offload injured dogs. Anyway, it worked. My mother took him to live with her and Mr Holt, their wacko children, Sue the dog, and their cat–knowing he was going to be the hugest nuisance and burden and so grotty looking he’d put people off their lunches. She helped him learn to walk on his three legs and put butter on his pads so that after a walk he’d content himself with licking his three paws and not feel the pain in the phantom fourth. He went to work with my mother and everywhere else besides, and she would tell his story (‘He was at death’s door, but now he can run again’) to anyone who showed an interest and soon Angelo became my mother’s badge of decency, her Jiminy Cricket. Angelo was her good deed that would last for ever.
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And he was so visible.
‘Aren’t you a good person,’ people might say, and, ‘Golly, that’s so kind of you.’ She became addicted to the praise–like an actress or writer being constantly applauded. If Angelo wasn’t allowed somewhere, like Twycross Zoo, or the Fish & Quart, my mother would simply say, ‘Come along, Angelo, if you’re not wanted, I don’t want to be here either.’ And the zoo or the restaurant would have to watch him hobble away.
Being a sober person with a disabled dog to care for changed my mother creatively. It gave her time to write. She became expert at making up limericks really quickly, on the spot, such as:
There was a young lady from Tring,
who only wanted to sing,
the tragic thing was,
her husband got cross,
So she strangled the bastard with string.
And she was also able to concentrate, to write methodically and for longish periods of time without falling asleep. She changed as a human being, seeming to understand, all of a sudden, that people were tired at night, sometimes exhausted, and didn’t always want to stay up talking, or looking for poems in old books or for descriptions of certain men in Jane Austen. And she now knew how important it was not to run out of milk or bread or honey. The only downside to her new zeal being that she felt everyone (including me) should be working on a novel and, if we weren’t, we should be reading or rereading the classics, such as Silas Marner or Lolly Willowes–and if not, we were missing out. She was like a Christian who wasn’t happy just loving Jesus but wanted everyone else to love Jesus too, or a drunk wanting to be surrounded by other drunks, or women in high heels wanting others to be similarly crippled, or people dwelling on nuclear war wanting to make others worry too, and so on.
Returning to the letter from Faber & Faber, another difference was my mother’s acceptance of Patience Tidy’s idea, and after only the mildest, tiny tantrum and some name-calling, she took it as a compliment and a challenge.
‘OK, then,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you want, Patience.’
And she stopped writing about herself and her mother and started instead an exciting feminist sci-fi thriller. Not only that, she was going to introduce a dental theme–inspired by my new job–and its title would be ‘Winter Green’. I was perturbed to hear this, it being the name of my boss, and protested quite neurotically but she said it was only a working title and not to worry, and anyway, there was no copyright on names. And nothing that awful was going to happen, not in a realism sense anyway. Probably. Although there was going to be at least one death and lots of outdoor sex.
‘Let’s see how that goes down with Patience Tidy,’ she said, and eventually asked, ‘Anyway, how are you? What have you been up to?’
I told her I was on the brink of entering a loving relationship with Andy and she said he had seemed a very nice person and suggested I go to see Dr Gurley about birth control.
And then I told her that Andy was a Nicolello and she said, ‘Nicolello, do I know them?’
And I said, ‘The Flintstones.’
And she said, ‘Oh, Christ, not those people who lived in that encampment behind Granny’s house, whose parents had the letter in the Mercury?’
‘Yes, them.’
Tammy wasn’t pregnant yet but JP was keen that optimum conditions for conception should be constantly maintained and he was suspicious of her tight trousers, Jazzercise classes and red-wine consumption.
‘Look, Jape,’ said Tammy, ‘if jazz dancing and drinking wine were a problem there’d be no babies in Italy, France, Spain or New Orleans.’
One day, one of the instructors from the Jazzercise classes came in for his six-monthly check-up and JP grilled him. The instructor was unfazed and gave out some impressive statistics about the number of women who didn’t have heart attacks who might have had them had they not been committed to Jazzercise. And how many felt really alive who’d previously been dead inside, and so forth. This only exacerbated JP’s anxieties and, afterwards, he had a word with me.
‘Go with her, will you, nurse?’ he said. ‘Make sure she’s not overdoing it.’
Jazzercise was fun, I must admit, even though I was the only one in tracksuit bottoms. Tammy was very good at it and really looked the part in her leotard and neckerchief.
Ann-Sofie from the Lunch Box was there and Jossy Turner, wife of Bill, as well as the girl from the Raj Restaurant, whose name was Pritiben–Priti for short. It didn’t look as though Tammy was overdoing it, though she was doing some incredibly high kicks.
The second session went less well but only because Tammy accidentally kicked Priti in the mouth and almost knocked her out, so we finished early to walk her home just to be on the safe side. As we walked along, Tammy pretended to be interested in Priti’s life, partly out of guilt and partly, I suppose, to prevent her slipping into a coma. Thus, we discovered that she was studying for A levels and was hoping for a place at a London university the following autumn. Just like my brother, I thought, but didn’t say.
Tammy was surprised. ‘But I thought you worked on Patel’s housewares stall on the market–didn’t I buy a salad spinner from you last week?’ she asked.
‘That’s part-time, only until I finish school.’
‘Gosh, I just love spinning that salad spinner.’
Priti seemed alarmed to hear this and advised her to use it with care, and certainly not to spin it just for fun–they’d had a couple of them returned, broken. Tammy thanked her for the tip but assured her she wouldn’t dream of spinning it just for fun, which was obviously untrue. No one spun a salad spinner just for salad. We dropped Priti outside the Raj Restaurant and Tammy told her she must come to the surgery to have JP look at the tooth–an upper incisor that stood proud of her arch and would have taken the brunt of Tammy’s kick.
A couple of days later, she appeared in the waiting room wanting to make an appointment as per Tammy’s suggestion and Tammy squeezed her in the following day between a family of four and a man known for lateness.
‘So you’ve had a blow to the mouth, have you?’ said JP the next day, making it sound as if she’d been in some kind of ruffian-type punch-up.
‘Yes. A kick in the teeth,’ said Priti, not sounding at all like a ruffian.
‘It happened at Jazzercise class,’ I added. ‘Tammy kicked her by accident.’
‘Well, I think this tooth might flare up and need root filling,’ said JP. ‘And I’m sorry but since you’re not one of my patients I can’t offer you treatment on the NHS.’
Priti looked surprised. ‘Oh, why not?’ she asked, albeit politely.
‘You are presenting with a mouth injury that might need extensive treatment, and I don’t provide that on the National Health except for my existing patients.’ He dropped his probe and mirror into the sink with a loud clang. ‘I suggest you go up to the Family Practitioners Association who will give you a list of NHS dentists.’
In the waiting room I apologized and reiterated the information about the Family Practitioners Association. Priti was bemused but philosophical.
‘Do you fancy coming up to watch some telly later?’ I asked.
She said she couldn’t–she had a hundred tea towels to fold and press. I told her to bring them along, and I’d help her.
‘That wouldn’t work,’ she said and left.
I could really imagine Priti in London. In my head I saw her and my brother Jack, laughing together on a rain-drenched, tree-lined London street, books under their arms, dashing into a white concrete building for coffee and going to a piano recital or joining the Fabians. Jack was the type and Priti might well be too for all I knew. I felt a stab of envy. I should be looking forward to laughing in rain-streaked concrete coffee bars as well but I was stuck researching the best sex positions for conception for my senior colleague, and sex-proof hair.
9. Angelo
When my mother next came round to collect Danny she had Angelo the dog under one arm.
‘You can’t bring him i
n,’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Angelo can’t come into the flat,’ I said, petting him. ‘I’m sorry, but Tammy’s allergic to dog hair.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said my mother. ‘It’s your flat now.’
‘JP goes up there sometimes,’ I explained.
‘What for?’
‘The bathroom.’
‘What’s he doing in your bathroom?’ asked my mother, aghast.
‘Going to the toilet.’
‘For crying out loud, Lizzie,’ she said, barging in through the door, ‘you live here now and they can’t suddenly announce a dog ban, especially if the dentist’s shitting in your toilet.’
‘They haven’t suddenly announced it, they said so from the start.’
‘Said what?’
‘No dogs or cats.’
‘You can’t live in a place with a dog ban,’ she said. ‘What about Angelo?’
‘Well, I know but…’
‘It’s fucking ridiculous,’ she said, and marched up the stairs followed by Angelo, who was remarkably good at getting up the stairs for a three-legged dog (though not down again).
My mother soon started leaving Angelo with me whenever she went to the theatre or to have a shame-counselling session with Abe. And though I objected to start with because it was flouting the rules, in reality I was glad. I began to love his calm serenity. He’d get as close to me as possible without being actually on me and would lie down quietly, in a circular position, while I watched Dallas or did a face pack. Imagine Qizong Zhang’s Dog Beneath Bamboo–that’s just what Angelo looked like. Not that I knew that at the time–I’m adding with hindsight.