The Lives of Women (21 page)

There is a stiffening in the air when I leave Mrs Ryan's house, a sense of returning snow. After more than an hour in her oven-warm sitting room, I need to cool down. And besides, I don't feel like going back into my father's house, closing then locking his front door behind me for another long night. I give Mrs Ryan a few seconds to lock herself into her house, then double back and begin towards the village.

The sixth of December – until Mrs Ryan wished me a happy birthday, I had forgotten what date we were at. For days Christmas trees have been showing in windows. There was a time around here when it was almost obscene for a tree to display itself until the week before Christmas Day. Even then, it had to confine itself modestly to a corner of a sitting room: a private pleasure for family and visitors. Now, it seems, the whole house gets tarted up, gardens included; shrubs spangle, doorways twinkle, house fronts are garnished with jewellery. On the gable end of one of the newer houses, a Santa Claus figure is scaling a rope-ladder.

The road is deserted. The stars in their heaven are made lesser by the brassier lights down here on the earth. The waning moon with its lopsided face looks like a stroke victim.

 

I come close to the village. Up ahead, two men are sitting on the window ledge of an empty shop that used to be the barber's where outdated pictures of men in quiffs and crew cuts sat in the window. Tonight the men sitting on the ledge are drinking cans of beer and I see now there is another one having a piss into the shop doorway – one hand on his dick, the other holding a can.
He is a few steps away from the lane that runs behind the village shops, but obviously prefers to use the doorway and have the streetlight highlight his aim. These are not kids nor do they appear to be homeless. These are grown men – almost middle-aged in fact.

I hang back and wait for the pisser to finish.

The night air is cluttered with smells from local fast food takeaways: tainted oil and stale spices. Monosodium glutamate. Indian, Chinese, old-fashioned chip shop. The pavement outside these shops is lightly sheened with grease. Carmel's shop is also along this parade – a cave of cheap sweets and processed food. She tried selling fruit for a while apparently and even had a go at a few vegetables, she told me, but in the end decided there was no call for such nonsense. Seven shops make up this village: the three takeaways, a bar, a turf accountant's where you can put on a bet all hours, even on Sunday, and finally a funeral parlour. For anyone interested in an early death with the minimum of effort, this village would be an ideal place to live.

The iron shutters are down on Carmel's shop. Above it, the light in her flat is on. And there she is, a large figure – or part of a large figure – in a window, dressing a very small artificial tree that she has carefully positioned for all to see.

I don't mean to call her Fat Carmel – even if she was the one who invited me to do so, maybe the second or third time I walked into her shop. She'd already told me about her mortgage troubles, her childhood in Wales, her brother's shingles, her ongoing battle with shoplifters and gypsies. Only then did she introduce herself.

‘My name is Carmel,' she said, ‘but feel free to call me Fat
Carmel, everybody else does you see on account of the other Carmel, the skinny one, who works in the chippie.'

‘Oh, I'm sure that's not true,' I mumbled.

 

For a moment I have a rush to the head and consider knocking on the door to Carmel's flat. Maybe it's the birthday blues, but I feel a need for company. And even if I don't pay much heed to what she's actually saying, I enjoy listening to her speak. Carmel can take a word and roll it around in her mouth like a big soft jelly sweet. Words such as ‘no-te
rrr
-iety' or ‘Rizzzzla' or even a whole collection of words – ‘and what do you think but didn't the little bugg
ar
have the box of chocolates stuffed down the back of his trowwwzers'.

In the end I decide I'm not up to the effort of knocking on her door, of climbing up the linoleum staircase, of walking into her gas-fired room and having to admire the little Christmas tree with its child-like decorations and then, five minutes in, having to deal with the inevitable onset of panic as I search, and then fail, to find a way out.

I by-pass the turn for the village, carry on to the end, following the pavement on its loop until it turns and I'm on the opposite side of the road. My life is a continuous series of loops. The valley, the river walk, the thoughts in my head. Loop after loop. Twenty-five minutes it takes to walk this particular one – from the rear of the Esso station at this end, all the way up to the motorway wall. We are cut off on both ends. The only way out by car anyway is through the village. You can walk by the narrow laneway at the side
of the Esso of course, or via the side steps that lead to the motorway bridge. Otherwise – I don't know, you could always go into Arlows' land, scramble down the hill towards Hoxtons' bridge, dive into the river and swim across to the other side, to freedom. A little extreme of course for a woman of my age, and highly unlikely. Still, it's a nice thought to carry around in my head on this crisp winter's night at the start of my fiftieth year.

 

The silence. I can hear my own pulse, my brain ticking over, my tapping footprints. The local bar comes into sight and I stop to consider it – heavy wooden double door; broad windows filled with amber light. I imagine for a moment going inside and finding a quiet corner. There would be convivial background noise – chatter, gurgles, glass-clinks, laughter. Time disappearing down a hole. There would also be neighbours and I can imagine, even now, that a woman on her own would stand out in a place like this. And there would be whispers – even if they only existed inside my own head, I would still hear them. I'm about to forget the whole thing and then I remember the small back lounge.

On a long ago summer's evening, I stood in the doorway of it and tried to be invisible while Rachel tried to deal with her mother. Rachel was crying, the young barman near to tears too. The only one who appeared to be unmoved was Mrs Shillman and this struck me as odd, considering she was the only one disgracing herself. She was berating the barman because he'd phoned the house and asked that someone come and collect her. She was too drunk to walk, was what he'd said, never mind drive the car home.

‘I'm sorry,' the barman was saying to Rachel, ‘I thought your father was in, I saw the embassy car earlier, you see, drive by with him in the back while I was—'

‘No,' Rachel said, ‘you couldn't have. He's not home yet, I don't know where he is.'

‘But I saw the car coming back a few minutes later. Just the driver. And he wasn't in it. I was lifting the kegs out you see and—'

‘No.' Rachel sniffled. ‘No. You couldn't have.'

Mrs Shillman at the side, waving a cigarette around like a baton.

‘Are you deaf? She just said you couldn't have seen him! Now give me my keys. Give. Me. My. Fucking. Keys. And let me tell you, I'll be writing a letter of complaint tomorrow. Dragging my daughter into a public house at this hour of the night.'

‘But I thought… I was sure…' the barman began again and then just gave up.

The cigarette flew out of her hand across the room, landing close to my feet. I picked it up and brought it back to her. I'm not sure she even recognised me.

Rachel promising: ‘Let's just go. Come on, let's just go home. I won't tell. I promise I won't tell, if you'll just come home with me now. I promise…'

Between us, we lugged her home, making several stops, Rachel crying all the way; Mrs Shillman, joining in halfway up the road, through her tears, kept saying: ‘I'm so. I'm just so. Oh God, I'm so…'

And where was my mother, I wonder now. Why was she not there, as she usually was, floundering around in the background?

*

But the back lounge itself, I remember it as a compact room – cracked leather seats, a gold-faced grandfather clock. There was a stone fireplace filled with dried flowers. On a winter's night, it would hold a bright fire. Nobody really went into it – an old man or two. Sometimes a few women from the pitch and putt club. I check my pockets and am almost beside myself with joy when I find enough there for a drink or maybe even two.

I push open the door and immediately regret it.

It's like I've stepped into some sort of a barn. A barn pretending to be a pub – like one of those places you see in an airport. A big curved counter: two lone men sitting a few stools apart. Another one, strolling out of the gents, makes his way to a different part of the counter, comes down on his stool like a cowboy coming down on his saddle. All around are vacant tables, steps leading up to platforms, everywhere visible. Not a shadow or corner to mope inside. A few men standing and staring up at a football match on a screen the size of a small cinema. I'm holding the door open; the barman is looking at me. Two of the men at the bar have turned their heads – the third one, the cowboy, stays as he is and stares down into his pint.

I step inside, begin walking, chin at an angle as if looking for someone who is waiting for me. Then I see the ladies' toilets and duck inside. A few minutes later and I'm out on the road again.

 

The moon has gone in now; the houses have darkened. It has turned deathly cold. Back on the loop, I keep walking until I end up at the motorway wall.

I climb the steps to the bridge. Steel platform clanging under my feet. Steel cage over my head. I stop halfway and look down on the motorway. Flat tops of cars pass beneath me. Resting on the decline at the side of a slip road, a pile of dumped black plastic sacks glisten in the lights like a colony of seals. Something catches my eye. I look up and am startled – what is that, anyhow? What? Actually it is me. Or rather an imprint of me, pasted large and black against a big motorway sign. A cut-out shape thrown into relief by the headlamps of speeding cars. I am huge. I am huge and visible to every driver and any passenger who happens to be travelling in any one of those cars. The lapels of my coat, the bracket of my elbows, the outline of the top knot I'd forgotten I tied into my hair earlier on. They don't have my face nor my age; won't know if I'm pretty or plain; clever or stupid. But they have my existence. For some reason I am fortified by this: the fact of my huge existence silhouetted on a sign high above the motorway. Happy birthday to me.

 

I come back down the steps of the bridge and begin retracing my steps. Before I realise it, I've gone past Mrs Ryan's house and then past my father's house, have turned into the cul-de-sac and am walking around its horseshoe-shaped pavement. And now here I am, after all these years, standing outside the Shillman house, my hand on the gate.

I can't say I feel anything. Maybe a vague sense of embarrassment in case anyone should look out from one of the neighbouring houses and see me standing here. Otherwise, I am fine.

In any case, it hardly seems like the Shillman house: the old windows have been replaced, the porch has been removed and a new set of steps lead up to the front door – also new. The house is almost ready for reoccupation. It seems smaller than I remember, smaller and insignificant. It is, after all, just another bland suburban house, like any one of a million.

I look at the garden. The driveway has been cobble-locked. The lawn on one side smothered with pebbles. The side entrance door has not yet been replaced: I can see lengths of pipe lying on top of one another and then disappearing into the black gape that leads through to the back garden and around to the back of the house. I imagine going in, crossing the back garden to the shed, pushing the door to, seeing the haversack there, slumped in the corner.

I push the gate open and step inside.

 

10

Summer Past

August

HER MOTHER SAYS, ‘SHE'S
not your only friend, Elaine. You are not her nurse, you know. And you need to broaden your horizons, you need to mix more with…'

‘With what?'

‘You know, people who are not… well, people who don't need to be… Oh now, you know what I mean. First it was Jilly, and now it's…'

‘No, I don't know what you mean actually.'

‘Looked after. That's it. Ted Hanley's mother has just had a stroke, you know. Mrs Hanley will have to visit most days. It's a good hour's drive away. Agatha won't want to go with her. She'll expect you to be available to her…'

‘She can come over here.'

‘Here? Oh no, I don't think so. I couldn't take that responsibility.'

‘Why not, for God's sake?'

‘Martha Shillman thinks you hide behind her, you know. That she's a cover up for your shyness.'

‘Martha Shillman should mind her own business!'

‘All I'm saying is there are other girls in the neighbourhood. You have Rachel. And there's Brenda Caudwell, for example – she has the door worn out knocking on it. She'd be glad to be your friend.'

‘Oh God – Brendie bloody Caudwell!'

‘There's Patty, she's a little older of course, a little well-up for my liking but…'

‘And there's Agatha.'

‘Yes and Agatha, of course. I'm not for a minute suggesting you drop her. But you know, you should really go to that tennis camp next week.'

‘I don't like tennis.'

‘You like it in school.'

‘I'm gone off it.'

‘Now you're being ridiculous. You won't go because Agatha can't go. Am I right?'

‘No!'

‘While the rest of them – Patty and Rachel and, yes, even Brendie Caudwell – will be there. Serena will be driving them. And collecting them too, if they want, although I'm sure they'll be staying late most evenings. Even some of the boys are going, Paul and that tall lad – what's his name, you know the one with no mother? Jonathan, that's it. Meeting new people. Making more friends. Going to the dance at the end of the week. They'll all be there… everyone, in fact, except you.'