Hungry

by Grace Dent

Gran was the youngest of seven girls. At the turn of the century her dad was a publican running one of the most remote, godforsaken, spit-and-sawdust inns on the hills of Catlowdy. He was a drunk, by all accounts, among other things. But the drunk part was as far as me and Mam could ever decipher. Gran never specified what her dad’s other ills were, but we knew that all of her sisters – Sarah-Anne, Elsie, Francis, Jean, Nell and Beatrice – all packed a bag as soon as possible and went to Manitoba, Canada, on the strength of a small advert looking for farmhands in the back of the local gazette. Gone. None of them attempted, in any meaningful sense, to spend time with him again.

  Gran stayed behind. The Second World War was her escape. She began nursing, firstly in a fever hospital and then she worked with the troops, where she met my grandad.

  ‘Not even a small sherry?’ asks my dad, semi-baiting her.

  ‘I’ve never had a drop past my lips,’ Gran says as I pour her a glass of pop.

  ‘Why?’ I ask, again hoping for a fuller answer.

  ‘I’ve seen what it does,’ she says, then she purses her lips in a way that says this line of enquiry is shut.

  We’re sitting around our fake pine-cone and tinsel centrepiece, using plates we only get out once a year. I have just served the starter – yes, we have a starter. It’s supermarket-bought mini-smoked-salmon roulades, which I have served on chopped, undressed iceberg lettuce. It is thoroughly unlovable, but at the same time, I imagine, the type of thing Her Majesty the Queen is feasting on at Sandringham.

  Gran – never one to cushion anyone’s feelings – has pushed hers to the side of her plate. All this choice, all this new finickity food, left Gran aghast. For Gran, salmon came in tins; it was cooked, flaky, bony and grey around the edge. She had no time for slimy, semi-raw, smoked fish. She felt similarly about cheese. Soft cheese was unthinkable. Cheese should be orange, solid and served with crackers. You did not melt cheese. You did not buy it in a box marked Philadelphia and spread it on toast. Gran never warmed to ASDA. She didn’t want twenty choices of sausage, she wanted sausage that was good. She wanted to see the man accountable for the sausage. This is why she loved the little shops. When Gran bought bacon she wanted to see the whites of the eyes of the fella who’d dismembered the pig.

  ‘Have you heard from Liverpool this morning, George?’ Gran says.

  Dad’s side of the family were always simply called ‘Liverpool’. As if they were a scoring panel at Eurovision whom we might be going to live if the satellite link-up worked.

  ‘Yes, I gave ’em a tinkle on the phone this morning,’ my dad bats back. ‘They were just off to mass, but they send their regards.’

  Dad taught me that the key with small-talk is often to just give the person the answers they want to hear. He almost definitely had not called them at all.

  Likewise, Gran didn’t care about Liverpool. The Liverpool lot, to her mind, had several shortcomings. The main one being that they were Catholics. Gran’s views on Catholics were characteristically blunt: they bred like rabbits, drank like fish and weren’t to be trusted. They weren’t civilised folk like us Methodists.

  ‘Is there anymore graaaaaaaavy, precious?’ my dad shouts, wearing his gold cracker crown, just as my mother’s right arse cheek finally reaches her seat. The main course is much more to Gran’s liking. Turkey – however one tries – defies modernisation. No matter how one titivates it. It is dry, third-rate chicken that tastes oddly like fish.

  Dad’s waving the half-empty gravy boat. Mam puts down her own plate, which has barely enough on it to feed a Sindy doll. She’s too high on post-hob plating-up adrenaline to eat.

  ‘Yes, there’s more gravy,’ she says.

  Gravy is one of my mother’s superpowers. Give her some sort of fatty stock, tap water and a couple of spoons of Bisto browning and she will perform alchemy.

  Finally, Mam sits down with her plate. We’ve already begun to eat.

  ‘All the best,’ says Gran, holding up her glass of lemonade.

  ‘Ah yes, all the best,’ repeats Dad. David mutters something and clinks my glass. We are both wrestling a hangover after stealing a bottle of Warninks from the drinks’ cabinet and sinking it during Carols from Kings.

  No one says any other special Christmassy words.

  No one adds a special wish or reflection. No one really looks each other directly in the eye.

  For the Dents, this is verging on touchy-feely. Decades later, when I reach media London, I will spend time with families who don’t eat until everyone at the table has performed a poem or given a tribute to a dead relative or performed a soliloquy from Shakespeare. I will always feel awkward, if not a little irate, around such naked show-offy emotion. We show our love in my family in smaller ways.

  ‘Good gravy, Grace,’ my dad says to my mam.

  ‘Yes, grand gravy, Grace,’ agrees Gran.

  Once the Christmas pudding has been microwaved in its plastic bowl and served with custard, there is a sense that Christmas has now peaked. A curiously post-coital sense of silliness sets in. What was all that about? All those weeks of rushing, plotting and panicking; who was the ritual for? For each other? For Jesus? Why do we bother with all this fuss? Yet here I am, writing this as a grown woman, knowing that while I have breath in my body, I will strive to make every Dent Christmas more or less exactly the same.

  Gran and Dad retreat to the living room where they sit side by side, gobs open, snoring through James Bond, which is inexplicably playing at ninety-eight decibels.

  Mam and me clear the table, sorting leftovers into piles for a turkey curry and bubble and squeak. A tap on the dining-room window heralds my mam’s best friend, Gail. She’s wearing her best Marshall Ward’s catalogue frock and bearing gifts: a packet of Embassy Reds, a bottle of Bacardi and some amazing tittle-tattle about other folks’ Christmas dinners.

  ‘Well,’ Gail says, gathering steam, ‘Heather’s lot aren’t even sitting down until five! She’s not even got her carrots peeled! They’re busy playing with the Scalextric.’

  ‘Well, five o’clock is too late,’ tuts my mother. ‘They’ll not want any teas later.’

  ‘’Ere, did I tell you her and Frank aren’t having turkey this year? They’re having roast topside of beef. He reckons he doesn’t like turkey!’

  ‘Well, that’s just peculiar, if you ask me,’ says my mother.

  ‘Well, he IS peculiar,’ says Gail.

  I love earwigging on Mam and her friends. And on Gran when she’s in full flow. It’s around now that I’m starting to scribble things down in jotters. Not just the things I want to remember, but the exact way it was actually said. I love the Cumbrian dialect and sing-song rhythm of the words. I love the mesh of titbits about local life; whose bloke’s done a runner, who’s as ‘fat as butter’, who’s a pisshead, who’s up the duff and who’s a lazy slattern who never washes her sheets.

  ‘Well, her youngest, Marcus, had a bust-up face from Black-eye Friday,’ Gail says. ‘Got clouted by one of the bouncers outside Cat’s Whiskers.’ Black-eye Friday is the last Friday before Christmas in Carlisle when the majority of factories and offices finish early and the workforce hit the pubs and clubs and get sloshed. The ensuing annual carnage – involving many fights – has been given its own unofficial nickname.

  Cat’s Whiskers nightclub on Black-eye Friday was not for the meek.

  ‘Terrible,’ tuts Mam. ‘What a way to be carrying on!’

  I bring Gail an ashtray. She mixes me a small, potent Bacardi and Pepsi, and slyly hands me an Embassy Red that I stuff quickly between my boobs to smoke later.

  I return to the kitchen, where I start stacking our fancy dishwasher. Obviously, I’m rinsing each plate under the tap first as it’s the Eighties and none of us trust this machine entirely. I’m listening to the Colorblind James Experience on John Peel’s Festive 50, which I’ve taped off Radio 1, as I stoop to fill the botto
m shelf with dinner plates.

  ‘… well, he’s been in a right mard for weeks anyway,’ I overhear Mam say.

  ‘He’s been in a mard since you set eyes on him in 1971,’ Gail says. ‘How can you tell the difference?’

  They both laugh.

  I put the forks and knives standing upright in the holder and take a large slurp of delicious, sweet Bacardi.

  They’re talking about Dad and his moodiness, although we all know it really isn’t that funny.

  And then Gail draws on a ciggie, exhales and says: ‘So has he had any more word from the girls? After that first letter?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Mam says. ‘Not since the one I saw. I can’t make head nor tail of him, though. He’s very subdued.’

  And then they remember that I’m next door in the kitchen and change the subject.

  I knock back the rest of the Bacardi.

  Who are these girls who have written my dad a letter?

  1990

  In the second-floor café in Binns Department Store in Carlisle, I’m sat with my friends Darren (Carlisle’s biggest Smiths fan) and Caroline (with blonde hair and all the petticoats), making a lukewarm hot chocolate with squirty cream last almost two and a half hours. Binns is the most glamorous store in Cumbria. It has an Estée Lauder concession and a homeware section where you can buy a Denby Pottery gravy boat or a Moulinex potato ricer. On the second floor, follow the whiff of chips and there is a restaurant where mams and aunties come to rest their feet mid-shop and eat scones and jam. Although annoyingly for customers and staff, the best tables near the window are perpetually commandeered by us: a band of teenage goths, hippies, fledgling ravers, Morrissey devotees, Stone Roses boys and the occasional off-duty soccer hooligan who reckons himself a hardman but secretly loves talking about Pink Floyd with the pretty indie girls.

  Every town and city up and down the United Kingdom had a café like this in the Eighties; a place teens had taken to their heart. But while the Binns café was pivotal to our social lives, we in turn were disastrous for its profits.

  I was its worst sort of regular customer, making a hot chocolate last as long as a three-course meal before inevitably stealing the cup. In my bedroom at home I had a growing haul of thieved Binns saucers, plates and ashtrays.

  ‘So how does it feel,’ Darren says, ‘to set yourself up as our very own Oscar Wilde?’

  ‘Oh shurrup,’ I say, a bit distracted.

  I am not really myself.

  As I lick cream off the teaspoon and push it into my handbag, Darren is teasing me about my second appearance in the NME letters page. Swells has chosen me for print again, this time defending The Cure’s Robert Smith. OK, not the whole letter this time, more a snippet. As I’d affixed a stamp to the envelope and pushed it into the post box, I knew even then it wasn’t one of the best things I’d written.

  But I’ve had other things on my mind.

  I cannot claim that the news that my father has two other daughters has come as a complete shock.

  Shocked isn’t the word. Even if the way I found out was quite shocking.

  This morning, Saturday, at around six, my dad walked into my bedroom when I was half asleep. He leaned into the bed, kissed my head and said, ‘All right, precious, I dunno if Mam’s told you what’s going on, but I need to go and see Jackie and Tina.’

  He kissed me again on the forehead, then got into his van and drove off down the M6 motorway to Liverpool to make amends with his other kids. The ones he left behind in the Sixties.

  I sat up in bed and rubbed sleep from my eyes.

  I definitely did not cry. Or go and find my mam.

  I sat in bed for a few hours watching The Chart Show on ITV, hoping for a rewind on the Happy Mondays on the indie chart. Teenagers in the Eighties were very outwardly undramatic. We’d not been primed yet by a steady diet of American TV drama and reality shows to emit neat soundbites about our feelings. We did not expect hugs when we left or entered rooms, let alone feel that our issues needed to be heard or seen.

  And as I say: this news was shocking but not entirely a shock.

  After all, during my attempt to win the Brownie matchbox game seven years before, I’d found that black-and-white photo while rifling through my father’s bedside drawer.

  I shouldn’t have been in that drawer anyway.

  I wasn’t supposed to rifle in drawers.

  The photo was of two girls, standing by a countryside gate on a ramblers’ path. Smiling. On a day out. Just like the sort of days out my family went on, if Mam could ever prise Dad out of his chair.

  I’d stared at that photo for a long time.

  I did not know those little girls.

  They could, I’d tried to reason, be the Canadian side of our family. But Dad had no affection whatsoever for Mam’s relatives. For a tiny family, we were certainly a pile of divisions.

  Maybe, I’d thought, they were kids that belonged to one of Dad’s army friends and he’d kept them just to be polite. They didn’t mean anything.

  I’d puzzled over the two girls’ faces for a minute or so, and then put the photo back in the drawer. Then I’d pretended I’d not seen it. Children’s minds are slippery, pragmatic things. We come fresh from the box, hellbent on self-preservation. Dad’s other kids were always there in a sense; they were a puzzle for me to solve. But being small and distracted by the magic of Noel Edmonds’ Multi-Coloured Swap Shop or a bag of pink sugar prawns, or Adam Ant and Diana Dors doing the ‘Prince Charming’ dance, it took me a few years to focus properly.

  And then the phone calls from Parsi to Dad had begun. I now realise he had been acting as a go-between.

  I thought about the clues that had led me here. Dad’s daughters had been there in a thousand awkward silences whenever I’d asked about the past. They were there in bitten lips and half-overheard adult mutterings. They were there in the faces of my Catholic Scouse grandparents, who, being against divorce, treated us kids like an unpleasant smell.

  They were there in my dad’s embrace when sometimes, out of nowhere, he’d seem taken by emotion and would drag my tiny face against his rough soldier stubble and say, ‘Oh come here, precious, you’re my only little girl.’

  Which I realised now actually meant: ‘The only little girl I have left, because I have mislaid not one, but two others to date.’

  As I sat on the edge of the bed, counting out coins for the 68 bus up town, I already felt slightly sorry for my dad. I was already making excuses.

  Over the coming years, whenever I would talk of my dad’s life, people would reply with their own family skeletons, and then they’d bring me their own excuses too. They’d tell me of double lives or mams who disappeared overnight. And of grandads who left to fight in wars and forgot to go home, then got married again bigamously to prettier, younger women in warmer countries. They’d tell me of babies left on church doorsteps, or small children signed over to council care, with the original parents shuffling away without a trace. My dad’s charade in the Sixties was not a highly unusual state of affairs. In the ‘good old days’ people would, could and did just disappear. It’s less painful for us if we cling to the idea that our elders did these things for reasons that went with the era: out of shame or because of religion or poverty or some other very difficult set of circumstances. We don’t want to think it was down to pure selfishness. Or that sometimes, in the ‘good old days’, people were just absolute arseholes.

  In the Binns café, interrupted by the arrival of the occasional toasted teacake, we’re discussing Johnny Marr from The Smiths making electronic music with Barney from New Order. It still seems weird to us, but it’s what lots of indie folk are doing now, making music full of bleeps and synths and stuff you can dance to. Some of my indie-worshipping friends are making excursions to a club in Manchester called The Haçienda, which is dead hard to get into but once inside I hear it’s li
ke some sort of Shangri-La where everyone is friendly and no one drinks alcohol. This intrigues me.

  Talking about music and telly and popstars and making my friends laugh with my thoughts is when I come alive. Almost all other times I feel swivel-eyed with teenage hormones. Carlisle is small and claustrophobic and full of people who care how you look and dress, and I’m sick to the back teeth of worrying what ‘they’ think. Whoever they are. They, according to all of our mams, are a shadowy group of ever-observant souls who are perpetually on the edge of ‘having a field day’ about the length of our skirts or our haircuts. Over the past twelve months I have been going on the train by myself to London to see Bob. I sit for seven hours, ten minutes – in the smoking carriage, where all the best people sit – to spend time with him and his girlfriend, Vron. They’re both twenty-five and squatting in Manor House. Mam agrees to this as I am supposed to be sightseeing – Nelson’s Column, the Houses of Parliament and so on – but instead, aged fifteen, I just tag along with their London life. We go to the Sir George Robey pub in Seven Sisters for a night called ClubDog, where they play Iggy Pop and The Cult, and to The Catacombs in Manor House. We go to Heaven on a Saturday with Bob and Vron’s gay friends and eat food on Sundays in Hare Krishna cafés. I become accustomed to being woken by their pets – liberated laboratory rats – nibbling my feet.

  During this time Bob has kept a tactful silence about his stepdad, although he admits he once met the little girls in the photos. He buys a broadsheet newspaper called the Guardian. It’s not like anything I’ve ever read in our house before. I love to read the Weekend magazine, where a woman called Julie Burchill with big hair has the front-page column every week to write about almost anything: her love life, the Gaza Strip, the royal family. Then, the following week, the letters page is chock full of people absolutely pigging furious at her. Or – and this happens too – they’re madly in love with her. No half measures. She is a name that provokes a reaction. She is seen by everyone and she is making an impact. I want to make an impact like this too. I entirely gloss over how it must feel to be hated and focus on how it must feel to be so loved. I love this idea of being so loved. Being loved like this must be like the gates of heaven flying open and being constantly bathed in a celestial shimmer. How can you possibly feel pain, or sadness, or that your dad is completely not the person he pretended to be for the whole of your childhood, when you walk into a room and they all know your name?