Swallowing Grandma (10 page)

Cissie gasped dramatically. ‘He’s never asked you to marry him?’

‘Yeah. It was brilliant. I din’t have a clue. I was in t’ kitchen and he shouts, “Oh, just fetch my tool bag in here, will you?” So I carried it into t’ living room an’ he says, “Open it up for me.” ’ Ally was growing pinker. ‘So I said, “Do it yourself” – ’cause, to be honest with you, I have trouble bending right down – and he said, “No, go on, I’ve a surprise for you.” So I did, and there it was.’

‘How lovely,’ said Cissie warmly. ‘Is it a diamond?’

‘Yeah. And that’s white gold, not silver. He said he wanted summat a bit different.’ She stretched her hand out and tilted the ring experimentally. ‘We’ve not set a date yet, he’s waiting for his mother’s hip replacement.’

‘And how long have you been seeing him now?’

‘Only three months, I know, mad in’t it? But we’d been emailing since before Christmas.’ Ally winked at me. ‘I got him off th’ Internet, Webhearts it’s called. It’s dead easy, and there’s photos. You should give it a go, Katherine. There’s someone for everyone. You should get yourself logged on.’

You should try sticking your fingers down your throat, I thought.

‘I’m not interested in boys,’ I said.

‘She’s exams,’ said Cissie. She reached over and patted Ally’s hand. ‘Eeh, I am pleased for you, love. When is it his divorce comes through?’

I went home in a terrible temper. The sky was just clouds, and it started to rain as I got off the bus. I don’t know why I was so furious. What had Sad Ally’s life got to do with me?

‘Poll? Poll?’ I shouted from the porch. Silence. She must be round at Dogman’s. I stomped upstairs into the bathroom and locked the door. Then I threw myself on my knees, whacking the toilet seat up so it clapped against the cistern, and jabbed my fingers at the back of my mouth. A surge of relief came up along with the crumpet; anger and tension poured down the pan. I retched till my stomach hurt, then laid the side of my head on the edge of the bowl.

‘Get Dickie in to sit wi’ Poll if she’s mekkin’ a fuss about being left. They can watch the telly, he does a great running commentary,’ Cissie had said. I told her I’d think about it, which I would, endlessly; only I knew I’d reach the same conclusion every time. I was more likely to win the Bogle Stroll than walk into a nightclub on my own.

Another home improvement was under way when I came back downstairs. Poll had returned with Dogman and they were carrying a biggish cardboard box between them.

‘Careful now,’ said Dogman. ‘You don’t want to chip them.’

‘It’s not heavy but it’s awkward. There.’ Poll slid her end of the box onto the table, then spotted me. ‘Come and look. Dickie’s been busy.’

I edged over as Poll undid the flaps and drew out a two-foot garden gnome.

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘I know, aren’t they smashing? Look at this one, he’s sitting down. And this one’s got a hedgehog on his shoe.’

‘A squirrel. The mould didn’t tek so well there. If I can do some more, I’m going to flog them at car boots,’ said Dogman, stroking one of the gnome’s heads as though it were a newborn.

I picked one up gingerly. ‘Why has it got pock marks all over it? It looks like it’s got a disease.’

Poll tutted. ‘You’re allus finding fault, you are.’

‘Air bubbles. I’m working on that one. I maybe should have med the mixture with more water. If you put the paint on thick enough, it fills up a lot of the dents.’

I stood my gnome back up on the table, and saw that my palms had gone red. ‘God, have you seen this? The paint’s coming off. The paint’s dissolving, Dickie. What the hell did you use?’

Dogman looked upset. ‘They were out of a kit.’

‘Slap some varnish on, they’ll come up a treat,’ said Poll. ‘And don’t wipe it off on the sofa, Katherine; I saw that. Go and get a dishcloth.’

Poll was arranging the gnomes in a tableau when I came back from scrubbing my hands under the kitchen tap. ‘Don’t they look smart? That one favours Patrick Moore.’

‘Dickie,’ I said, ‘what did you make them out of? Because they’re very light.’

‘Plaster of Paris.’

‘So what’ll happen when it rains?’

‘I did wonder about that.’

‘Fantastic. What next, birdbaths carved out of soap? Chocolate sundials?’

‘Tek no notice of her, Dickie.’ Poll stood back to admire the overall effect. ‘They’re great. I shall put them in our back, near the fence. I bet next door’ll want one when they see them.’

‘It might be an idea to wait till I get them varnished,’ said Dickie, frowning.

‘Nonsense. They’ll be fine.’

I could tell she was livid with me. Those gnomes were being planted or she’d die in the attempt.

I prayed for rain, and when it hadn’t come by 9 p.m., I filled a watering can and went off to imitate a monsoon. Poll finally found me in the dark, dousing the gnomes.

‘Look at that,’ I pointed gleefully at their melting heads. ‘They’ve lost some weight, haven’t they?’

‘You know your trouble?’ she said. ‘You can’t bear anybody else to succeed at something. It always has to be you on top. You’re seriously disturbed, you are.’

*

She installed me in the front bedroom in the middle of a lot of dark pre-war furniture. I never want to see another lozenge motif as long as I live. Roger’s books were everywhere and I was growing fatter by the day.

‘There’ll be more space when he goes off to Sheffield. He’ll be tekkin’ all his clothes and papers with him,’ said the Poll-woman. ‘I suggest you stay here and rest up for now. There’s nowt to go out for, and it’s piddling down anyway. Get yourself settled.’

‘I’ve got to go to school,’ I said. ‘I think I’ve got exams. Have I got exams?’

‘Put your feet up, I’ll bring you some Ovaltine. Roger gets through a tin a week.’

‘I need my books. I’ve got to revise.’

‘Look,’ said Poll, ‘you’ve missed ’em. Th’ exams are finished. You weren’t fit to do ’em. It’s no good crying, that chapter’s over. Do you tek sugar, or not?’

When Roger came back from town he’d bought me a bunch of pinks.

‘That’s bad luck, that is,’ said Poll.

Roger laughed in her face. ‘How are pinks bad luck? You’re soft, Mum.’

‘Pink’s for a girl,’ she said darkly. I swear she looked more pregnant than me.

Vince sat at the dinner table and studied the coaching inn on his place mat. He had thin cheeks and comb-over hair, Brylcreemed down.

‘Is your dad a mute?’ I asked Roger that night, after Poll and Vince had gone up.

‘No. He’s just lost the will to live,’ said Roger.

‘You won’t leave me here, with them, will you?’ I said.

‘We’ve got to think in the long term now,’ he said, which was ironic really as he only had another seven months to live.

‘I’m going to get a summer job,’ I announced to Poll across the bed we were making.

‘Ooh, hark at her,’ said Poll, even though there was nobody else in the house.

‘Well, I need some money, and you’ve none to spare, so I don’t see any alternative.’

I snatched the sheet out of her hands viciously and pulled her off balance. She toppled forwards onto the mattress, swearing.

‘Oops, sorry,’ I chirped. ‘I thought you had hold of it. Are you all right?’

‘No thanks to you.’ She struggled to her feet again and glared. ‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you did that on purpose. I don’t know what’s got into you recently; you used to be so meek and mild. Bad blood coming out. What sort of a job had you in mind?’

‘Whatever I can get, after the exams have finished. Secretary, maybe.’

‘You can’t type.’

‘Shop assistant.’

‘You’d never manage. All them strangers, you’d have a fit. You’ve to look people in the eye when you serve ’em.’

I took in a good breath and let it out again, slowly. ‘There’s girls at school have got jobs selling tickets in a booth. You just sit there, take the money and hand over the ticket. It’s a piece of cake. You’d be able to sit there with a book, read all day if you wanted to.’ I thought I could cope with that.

‘What sort of tickets?’

‘Charity. Registered, all legit. You don’t get much for it but it’s cash in hand, the girls say.’

Poll pulled a face. ‘Oh aye, and think how vulnerable you’d be. In a booth on your own; you’d be a sitting duck for all kinds of funny characters. You attract that sort, you know you do. You’d have hooked yourself a stalker before you could say
Prime Suspect
.’

One of these days, one of these days Poll’ll say to me, Oh, that’s a good idea, I agree. Then I’ll faint dead away. In fact I’ll be in a coma for weeks and they’ll have to play tapes of Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry to bring me round.

I stood up straight while I rammed a pillow down into a clean pillowcase. ‘I’m going to have to do
something
, at
some
point. In three weeks the exams’ll be over. Then what am I going to do with my life?’

Poll opened her mouth to speak and I waited. ‘You’ve years yet—’ she began, but suddenly there was a terrible squeak of pain down by her feet. ‘Oh, hell fire,’ she gasped, ‘I’ve trod on Winston.’

I crawled across the mattress and hoiked him up. He weighs nothing these days.

‘Did I tread on your paw? Eeh, poor love, are y’ awreet?’ Poll stroked his yellowing head tenderly while I lifted one paw for inspection after another. There didn’t seem to be any damage. ‘He were in among t’ dirty sheets. He mustn’t have seen me. Poor thing.’ She put her hand under his chin and lifted his muzzle. ‘Oh, see his little face, his eyes are all glazed.’

He didn’t look particularly bothered to me but I left her to her fussing. I straightened the pillows, finished tucking the sheets in both sides, and pulled the duvet and bedspread up on my own while Poll sat in the Lloyd Loom chair nursing the dog on her lap. They’d have made a good study for one of those collector’s plates,
The Faithful Pal: see the fine detail of the matted sheepskin slipper, admire the workmanship needed to capture the tiny bobbles on the inside-out cardigan
. After a while she raised her head and said, ‘He’s gettin’ owd.’

‘Right,’ I said. We were both thinking about Winston dying, and I didn’t want to. ‘I’ll make some dinner, shall I? Will that gala pie be all right still, or does it want binning?’

She left Winston on the bed and came down after me. While I was cutting slices of pie with the huge sharp knife she came into the kitchen and slapped her hand down on the worktop next to me.

‘Here,’ she said ungraciously. ‘If it’s that big a deal. Of course, we may not be able to heat the house this winter.’

Like bollocks we won’t, I thought, unrolling the five-pound notes. Thirty quid! ‘Thanks,’ I muttered. It was probably my child benefit anyway.

‘I say, I don’t know what you want it for. You’ve everything here. Young ’uns today, they expect everything on a plate. My best blouse when I was little was med out of a pair of bloomers my mother never wore. Pink silk. And very smart it was too. I never had a dress as a girl that didn’t have a flaw somewhere in t’material.’

One quick thrust with the knife and we’d have had an instant end to all these stories of wartime hardship. I could wipe the blade on the Bailey’s tea towel and carry on cutting pie. No jury in the land would convict me.

*

By September, I felt like a whale.

‘Ger away. You’ve a long way to go yet,’ said Poll, Job’s Comforter in tracksuit bottoms. ‘It gets so’s you can barely move. And if you go overdue, like I did wi’ Roger, well. I can’t tell you. It’s terrible, that last six week.’

Late that night Roger took me outside to get cool. We perched on the low front wall, me facing the house opposite and him side-on with his back against the gatepost. You could barely see the stars. I was looking for Orion.

‘Hey,’ I said, I thought he’d be pleased with this, ‘I’ve just noticed something. If I look straight at that tiny star to the left of Orion’s belt, I can’t see it. It disappears. But if I turn my head and squint at it out of the corner of my eye, it comes back again. It’s magic. Is it magic? A magic star?’

He was using a pair of nail scissors to unpick a badge from the knee of his jeans. ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘It’s to do with the receptors in your eyes.’ The badge was coming away, thread by thread. ‘The ones at the corner of your eye are better at distinguishing variations in light, the ones in the middle work best at picking up colour. So if you want to see something faint but monochrome, you look sideways at it.’

‘That’s fascinating,’ I said.

‘It’s only science,’ he said. The badge peeled off completely and he threw it over his shoulder into Poll’s rose bushes. ‘I’m going Tuesday. You do know, don’t you?’

I nodded.

‘Are you coming with us?’

For a second I thought he was asking me to go and live with him in Sheffield. Hope leapt up inside me like a spurt of blood.

‘Vince is driving over to help me unpack. You can come up in the Metro with me, and go back with him in the Manta.’ He said ‘the Metro’ like it was the most sacred phrase in the English language. Vince had taken him to see it on his birthday, at the start of August, put the deposit down, and they’d picked it up from the garage on Results day.

‘I don’t know if I want to or not,’ I whimpered, the tears starting.

‘For God’s sake, don’t lay this guilt on me now,’ he shouted, throwing up his hands in a way I’d seen Poll do.

With a tremendous effort of will, I stopped crying. ‘I’m all right. I’m fine. Shall I take out those loose threads for you?’ There was the ghost of a rectangle fringed with orange cotton across his kneecap.

He shrugged. I leaned across and began to pinch out the threads one by one.

‘Don’t get in a state, though,’ he said when he saw I’d got myself under control. I tried to smile. ‘Because we need to look after this baby.’

Notice he didn’t say anything about looking after me.

After Vince and I came back, that Tuesday, I fled upstairs to Roger’s room to have a good weep. But the door was locked, and I could hear Poll sobbing her little shrew heart out behind it.

*

So I took the money sharpish, and went off to Bolton to spend it on normal-girl clothes. Half at the back of my mind, and slimmer than a shadow on a cloudy day, was the idea that maybe, if I found the right outfit, I would go to Donna’s do.