Shadows & Tall Trees (18 page)

D
oes he like to hear her talk about Manchester in the days when she was young, and fit enough to do what young girls did? He seems to. Sometimes, when she talks, she drifts away a little. It’s as if she’s transported herself back to the Pendulum or the Twisted Wheel or all-dayers at the Merry-go-Round. Back then her lungs were pinker, more elastic. She could suck deep the air that carried the oxygen to send her careering around those sprung dance floors like something electrified. “They called me ‘Place’,” she tells him, “because I was all over it.” Her name, though, her real name, is Peggy. Billy calls her Peg.

Now she finds it hard to get out of her chair. Walking from one room to another brings on a panic that threatens to fill her up completely. Her mouth is constantly open. Her shoulders are hunched from years of fighting for breath. There are some good days, but mostly bad.

Peggy doesn’t see Billy as often as she’d like. She won’t drive because lorries induce panic attacks when they overtake her (50, inside lane). She won’t go on the trains or the buses because she doesn’t want to suffer an incident; she doesn’t want to die going blue in the face while a bunch of strangers stare down at her. But she loves Billy as if she had given birth to him. His mother, Jill, isn’t around much (a young woman, still got it, and wants to enjoy it while she can. . . party, work do, weekend away. . . you don’t mind, do you? You wouldn’t begrudge me, would you? I mean. . . let’s be frank, we don’t know how many more opportunities Billy will have to. . . well, I don’t need to spell it out, do I?) and leans on Peggy a lot to provide childcare. She doesn’t need to say the things she does, but she says them anyway, as if that will persuade her to spend more time with her grandson. She doesn’t seem to hear when Peggy tells her she’d be happy to spend all day with him, every day with him. It’s no hardship.

Except, it is. Peggy’s husband, George, died three years ago. She’s had to have a bed made in her living room now, so perilous are the stairs for her. She shuttles between the tiny kitchen and the living room, to all intents and purposes a ground floor flat while the upstairs gathers dust. Terry, her son-in-law, installed a tiny cubicle shower in the far corner of the kitchen, under the stairs, spending most of his time swearing and sweating and eyeing her violently as if to say
I wouldn’t have to be here if only you’d do what your name suggests
. She has to sit down in order to use the shower. Not because she runs out of puff but because she’ll bang her head on the rose if she doesn’t. When Billy comes to stay, as he has done today (girls’ afternoon in Liverpool, shopping and cocktails and then a nightclub. . . I’ll try not be late to pick him up tomorrow) he has the bed; she goes to sleep in her armchair, the armchair George claimed for his own. She can still smell the oil from his scalp on the headrest.

Each time Billy comes to stay she’s momentarily broadsided by the look of him. He seems different. Bigger, more energetic. Sometimes she gets this funny feeling that it’s not the same boy. Sometimes he’s surly or rude. Sometimes he’s a little reserved. Sometimes he marches straight into the kitchen and helps himself to what’s in the biscuit barrel. He can never sit still, even when they watch morning cartoons together after breakfast. She gets tired and breathy just watching him fidget. He’s like his dad in that respect. Or maybe his dad just doesn’t like being here. Terry’s always first out of the door when it’s decided they’ll leave, car keys jangling from his finger. Claustrophobia, he says. He doesn’t like being crammed into a tiny living room with so many people. It doesn’t stop him getting in a small plane on his annual jaunt to Magaluf with his golf pals, though, does it?

“What do you want to do, Billy? I’ve got a jigsaw puzzle somewhere. Or there’s these colouring books you left last time.”

“I’ve been inside so long, Peg. I want to go out.”

“Don’t your mum and dad take you out?”

A shake of the head. He’s always got the pilchard lip on him. He used to laugh a lot when he was a baby.

“What did you do yesterday?”

“Mum and Dad stayed in bed because they had overhangs.”

“Who got your breakfast?”

“Me. I can get my own breakfast.”

“But Billy, you’re only six. How do you reach the bowls? Do you never have a cooked breakfast?”

“I had lollipops.”

She feels anger move through her but it’s strangely languorous, like the torpor that comes when she puts a sleeping pill under her tongue. She no longer gets a proper rage on her as she used to. It’s far too taxing.

How does Jill allow herself to be like this? Peggy never treated her like this when Jill was Billy’s age. She wasn’t brought up to be so. . . unmotherly. They had fresh fruit and vegetables always. Peggy never opened a tin that contained anything that came out of the ground. Jill was out rain or shine. She had scabs on her knees up until she was a tween. A right tomboy, she was.

He wants to go out.

“Okay,” Peggy says. “Okay.”

“Where are we going, Peg?” Billy asks, once they’ve struggled on board the bus. A man stands up to allow her to sit and she’s momentarily put out by that; he must be ten years her senior, but she sits anyway, and Billy stands in front of her, his left nostril encrusted with pale green gunk, every button on his coat missing.

“We’re going to the Land of Far Beyond,” she says. “Or is it Upside-downville? Or is it Shaddertown? I forget.”

“Oh, Peg,” he admonishes, but he’s smiling. Being here on the bus, with its peculiar smell of diesel and damp and worsted coats reminds her of trips out with Jill, over twenty years ago. Condensation on the windows. Every bump and gear change felt through the bones of your arse. They went ice-skating in Altrincham. Afterwards they’d drink hot chocolate and compare bruises. Peggy’s lung capacity hovers around the twenty per cent mark now. She might be able to get one ice skate on but that would be enough to finish her off for the afternoon.

When it comes, it feels as though there are fingers, too thin and hard to be real, gripping her shoulders and bending her backwards. It’s how she imagines it must have been for Christ on the cross. Hyperexpansion of the chest muscles and lungs. An inability to expand. The shallowing of air. Should have stayed in and watched
Balamory
. Should have had an easy day. Teach him how to play Old Maid. Get him to read to her.
Owl Babies. We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.
Sometimes she dreams of being chased, something clawing at her from the darkness, something trying to grab hold of her and get the job done properly. She tries to sand down the edges of her fear with hopes that it might be George reaching out for her, but how could it be, when the hands are tipped with such ghastly, denuded fingers?

The bus stops outside the library and they get off. What breath she can muster churns from her mouth in a frantic grey torrent, as if it is aghast at what it has experienced inside her lungs. Each breath she takes feels shallower than the one before.

“Right, come on,” she says, and she likes the way Billy’s ears prick up. She’s got her voice on. The voice that must not be disobeyed. She’ll try to be full of vim and verve for him. For her Billy. She won’t show him her grey, failing side though it seems to be winning these days.
Death, coming up on the rails.

Where did that come from? She suffocates the thought before it can bloom in her mind.

She smoked for fifty years, every single day. Never less than twenty cigarettes between rising and retiring. She started when she was twelve years old. When she couldn’t cadge money for fags or pinch them out of Mum’s handbag, she’d roll brown paper into tight tubes and smoke that. She liked the way Marlene Dietrich looked when she smoked. Peg copied the hairstyle, and did her make-up the same. The cupid bow lips. Smoky eye shadow. George used to call her Lili, after the famous song. He might even sing it to her if he’d had one too many pale ales.

My love for you renews my might

I’m warm again, my pack is light

It’s you, Lili Marlene

It’s you, Lili Marlene.

All trampled over by crow’s feet now.
Here I stand at the milestone of my days
. And she doesn’t wear lippy any more because it bleeds into these smoker’s lines around her mouth.

Fifty years of purse and drag. The French inhale. Oh, yes, very sexy. Brown lungs, gummy with tar. The oral habit. The daily sound of the death rattle in a woman clinging on.

She doesn’t bother suggesting it any more, an afternoon with her daughter and Billy, and Terry if he has to, maybe to the park for ice cream and playground rides, or a bus into town for lunch and the pictures. “What’s the point in us all being here?” Jill asks. “It defeats the object.”

Peggy won’t challenge or cajole. She’s tired and, yes, afraid of Jill’s reaction. The bared teeth and the spittle; the implication that this is her job, her duty. Billy had been staying with Peggy and George when he took his first wobbly steps across the lounge. Jill had been funny with her for weeks after that, as if she’d been cheated of something she could have shared with her Instagram friends and her Facebookers and her Twitter followers.
OMFG!!! Billy took his 1st steps 2day!!! Totes amazeballs!!! LOL!!! #bigboy #yummymummy #awesomesauce

They have to pause as they walk south-west to the edge of St Peter’s Square. They have to pause again before crossing the road to the entrance of the Midland hotel. It’s a journey she wouldn’t have thought twice about when she was young. A journey coped with in seconds. Once she walked from Glossop to Bolton after she missed a night bus home. It took her eight hours. They got off this bus quarter of an hour ago.

“Are you all right, Peg?” Billy asks. The line has gone from his forehead, what she calls, in private, his Terry line.

“I’m dandy,” she says. “I’m right as rain.” For some reason, she thinks of her own grandma, Agnes, many, many years dead. Peggy used to sit on her knee, staring up at her bewrinkled, bewhiskered face and ask her how old she was.

“I’m as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth,” she would say. Peggy never understood where this crypticism came from, this bizarre compulsion to not answer the question directly. It’s an age thing, she thinks. It’s a way to keep the mind chugging along.

Jill likes dumping Billy on her because she knows they won’t go outside. She probably thinks they’re in now, watching TV, eating chocolate, playing cars. Well buttocks, bums and arse to you, my love. Jill’s argument now is stranger danger. “Our Maddy. Poor Jamie. I won’t say goodbye to Billy as he’s led away on some blurry CCTV footage while you huff and puff to keep up. We’re not the only ones who keep our kids inside. We’re not bad parents.”

You’re not parents
. But she has to bite her lip. She has to nod. This is nowadays, isn’t it? Because back when Peggy was young you could leave your front door open and not expect to be raped by some itinerant stranger. It was all fields back then. It was pop in and out and latch-key kids. Pedophilia wasn’t invented until 1966, was it?

The guide at the entrance to the Midland Hotel has a face as long as Leung’s takeaway menu. Peggy and Billy stand on the damp pavement while he consults his clipboard. There’s nothing clipped to it. He notices this and drops his arm, displays a pained expression, or is it a cheated expression? Peggy doesn’t know him well enough to gauge. She doesn’t know him at all, although he reminds her of a bus conductor who used to collect fares on buses she took when she was at school. He spoke in deliberate Spoonerisms.
Pears fleas
, he’d say, his fingerless gloved fingers poised above the ticket machine dial.
Yank thue. Stext nop, Saguley Banatorium
.

“Name?”

“Meggy. . . Peggy McGill. And Billy McGill.”

“Peggy short for?”

“No. Peggy McGill.”

“No. Is Peggy an abbreviation?”

“No, lad. It’s a name.”

He consults his clipboard. He straightens his arm.

“Well, it doesn’t matter. We’re not oversubscribed. How old is your son?”

“I don’t have a son. I have a daughter. She’s twenty-six going on five.”

“It’s just that some of this tour will be me talking about things and it might go over his head. Nazis and that.”

“It’ll go over mine as well, then. I wouldn’t worry.”

Soon there’s a group of half a dozen standing in the damp, wearing variously disappointed faces.

“I’m Clive,” says the guide, consulting his clipboard. “I’ll be showing you around the forgotten chambers of Mancunium today. I hope you brought stout shoes and a torch.”

Peggy stares at her flats. At least Billy is wearing his boots.

“Have you got a torch on you?” she asks. “Don’t boys carry things like that around with them all the time?”

“I’ve got a light on my bike,” Billy says.

“Never mind, look. Everyone else has got one. We’ll stick close.”

The guide talks for a while about the hotel, how it would have been Hitler’s north-west nexus of operations had the Nazis successfully invaded Britain. German bomber pilots were expressly forbidden to release their payloads anywhere near the hotel for fear of damaging it. The guide’s voice is the endless gritting cycle of a cement mixer. Billy fidgets. The cold is clinging to the ends of Peggy’s fingers like a needy child. What has all this talk of architecture and Nazi plans, and Rolls meeting Royce, and the Beatles being thrown out because they didn’t adhere to the dress code. . . what has all this got to do with the tour? Underground Manchester. As Jill might say,
this is not doin wot it sez on the tin dot co dot uk LOL!!!

Eventually it’s time to move off. It’s a little way to the entrance to the tunnels, explains the guard, reminding them that they have signed waivers that abrogates the tour company from all responsibility should someone be mown down by any vehicle, including a bicycle. Somebody says something about litigious culture. Someone else says something about the nanny state. Billy, in a too-loud voice, tells Peggy that this morning he did a poo that looked like Uncle Derek’s moustache.