The Yorkshire Pudding Club (9 page)

Dean came round the following night with a bottle of rubbish wine that still had the £1.99 price label on. Elizabeth had not expected him and did not want to see him but now he was here she was determined not to delay the Big Goodbye any longer. He was randy as hell and tried to kiss her on the mouth with yeasty, beery breath. Elizabeth did not kiss. She shook him off three times but he still kept trying it on.

‘Gerroff,’ she said, pushing him hard but he came back at her as if her reticence was exciting him.

‘Why should I? Why don’t you want to shag any more?’ he said, trying to kiss her neck and squeeze at her breasts.

‘Because I just don’t.’

‘That’s not an answer.’

‘Okay, try this one then–
Because I’m pregnant, that’s why!
’

She hadn’t meant to blurt it out like that, she just wanted him to stop. Stop he most certainly did. In fact, what she said sobered him up enough to drive a Sherman tank along a tightrope.

‘Jesus H Christ,’ he said, his face blanched with shock.

He slumped on her sofa and started scratching his head through his number three haircut.

‘What are you going to do about it?’ he said eventually.

‘I’m keeping it,’ she said, and her hand unconsciously curled round over her stomach as she heard her intentions aloud for the first time.

‘Jesus H Christ,’ he said again.

Words were gravitating to his head at an alarming pace: paternity, maintenance, CSA…Elizabeth just wished he would go; she did not want to see him again.

‘I don’t want it,’ he said, almost apologizing.

Elizabeth’s eyes rounded in shock. Stupidly, it hadn’t occurred to her that he might think it was his. She nearly laughed; the idea of having his baby was almost worse than the reality of having this one.

‘“I don’t want it”?’ she quoted him in disbelief. ‘It’s not yours to want!’

‘Eh?’ he said.

‘I said it’s not yours.’

‘Not mine?’ He got to his feet. ‘What do you mean, it’s not mine?’

‘I mean you’re safe. As in, “Who’s the daddy?” You aren’t!’

He didn’t want to be the daddy, but his testosterone levels reacted to this information with affront rather than relief.

‘Not mine? It’s not mine? Well, whose bloody sprog is it then?’

‘Dean, just go,’ she said, walking to the door to open it for him, but he gripped her arm and pulled her back roughly.

‘All this time you’ve been making me shove a johnny on and you’ve been shagging somebody else without one? You…’ He pulled his other hand back and it hovered trembling in the air.

‘Don’t you dare EVER try and hit me,’ said Elizabeth, with a force behind it that made her shake as she delivered it. He shoved her back against the wall instead of hitting her and snapped open one of the plastic carrier bags she kept stored behind the kitchen door.

‘You fucking slag,’ he said.

Her heart was booming and her hands moved to cover up her stomach as if to shield the baby’s ears from the shower of expletives he rained on her as he loaded up several carriers with his detritus: trainers, socks, his CDs that were spread all over the downstairs, all the while working his way through the Roget’s
Thesaurus
entry for ‘whore’.

‘Here, you can keep the Supertramp,’ he said, throwing the CD case at her.

The plastic corner of it caught the bone above her eye and she yelped in pain. By the time her hand had come to it to check for blood, it had already started to swell up to a small egg. Then something spiralled up inside her and she launched herself at him, tiny as she was.
No one hits me in this house
. In her Auntie Elsie’s house, she was safe, always had been and always would be.

He was quite a bit heavier than she was, but he was half-drunk and she had the advantage of surprise. She pushed him out onto the street, and the force of it propelled him forward right across to the houses at the other side, where he tripped and fell over the corsey edge, which bought her extra time to throw out his carrier bags after him and deadlock that big strong door behind her before he had the chance to get up. She heard him chuntering on outside for a bit, for the benefit of the neighbours, but he couldn’t touch her behind the door that had kept her safe from the evils of the world that lay outside it for twenty odd years. She would not let it in again.

She stood there, eye throbbing, lungs panting, as if she’d run a marathon, when he started banging on the door, those same chaotic feelings coursing through her as they were on that day long ago, when she ran away from home to her Auntie Elsie. Auntie Elsie, who had her every Tuesday for tea and gave her boiled ham and over-diluted orange juice and was strict and stern and was always telling her off about her manners and who told her to sit up straight and to pull her socks up. Auntie Elsie, whom she only visited because she had a huge Alsatian that was as soft as a black sheep. Auntie Elsie, whom she hated. Auntie Elsie, at whom she screamed that day to lock the big door behind her as she crawled into the dog-basket with Sam. To keep her dad away from her.

All three women sat in Janey’s big spacious farmhouse kitchen with a Saturday-morning fruit tea and biscuit
untouched on the table in front of them. All three of them pregnant. Janey’s mouth was open more than Helen’s was at the news Elizabeth had just delivered, but only just.

After all these years and all those men, the daft cow gets caught on now, Janey was thinking, her head unconsciously moving from side to side. At this age, and her with no job, and no man.

Helen said nothing; she just sat there stunned into silence.

‘I’m keeping it, before you ask,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Oh, Elizabeth, have you thought this through?’ said Helen.

‘Just a bit,’ said Elizabeth with a hard laugh. ‘I thought about…getting shut, even booked an appointment, but I couldn’t do it in the end.’

The inevitable question came from Janey.

‘What about that Dean? What’s he said?’

‘It’s not Dean’s.’

‘Eh?’

‘Pardon?’

‘You don’t know the bloke,’ Elizabeth said, heading off the questions before the big flow started. ‘I was supposed to meet Dean at that party at New Year,’ she went on, not looking directly at either of them. ‘He didn’t turn up and I was angry and drank too much and things just went too far with someone. I’m not proud of it, but it happened and I don’t really want to talk about it because it’s done now. I can’t even remember what he looks like, and he was from somewhere down south anyway so there’s not much chance
of tracing him even if there was any point in me doing that, which there isn’t. Okay?’

She exhaled and it felt like an extra big full stop on the speech. Janey nodded although something about the story didn’t fit but she said no more then because Elizabeth looked so little and pale and she noticed that her friend’s eye was swollen and purple, when she nudged her long fringe out of her eyes.

‘What happened to your eye?’

‘Oh, er…Dean threw his Supertramp CD at me,’ she said, half-laughing. ‘It was an accident.’

‘Eh? How can it be an accident if he threw it at you?’ Janey said, puffing up with anger on her friend’s behalf.

‘He threw it at me intending to miss. I think,’ Elizabeth said.

‘Bastard!’ said Janey.

‘I never liked him!’ said Helen.

‘Neither did I,’ said Elizabeth.

‘So why on earth didn’t you tell him to bugger off before now?’

‘I dunno. You know how thick I am where blokes are concerned.’

The other two did not need to acknowledge that. For an intelligent woman, Elizabeth would have failed her Key Stage One in Men.

‘He’s gone now though,’ Elizabeth added.

‘Good riddance. I never liked him either,’ said Janey.

‘You never liked any of the fellas I went with.’

‘I liked one of them,’ said Janey. Elizabeth didn’t need to ask her which one that was. ‘Are you
sure
it isn’t that Dean’s?’

‘One hundred per cent positive.’

‘Well! I don’t know what to say, which is a first,’ said Janey, shaking her head.

‘Look, Janey, it was a horrible, stupid accident. I didn’t for one minute think I could have got pregnant, otherwise I’d have gone for the morning-after pill. I can’t understand it–I didn’t even miss my period last month,’ said Elizabeth.

‘What? You had a full period?’

‘Well, looking back it was a lot lighter than usual.’

‘It was probably just your body letting go of some old blood,’ said Helen.

Janey was less intellectual and groaned, ‘Oh, you stupid daft cow! Well, at least that explains why you were so agitated and told old Laurence to stick his job; your hormones must have been all to cock.’ She sounded cross and exasperated but bounced over and gave Elizabeth a hug, even though her friend didn’t want one and pulled back in that ‘gerroff’ way of hers.

‘How will you manage?’ Janey went on.

‘I don’t know, I just will,’ Elizabeth said. ‘If sixteen-year-olds on the dole with rent to pay manage, then I’m bloody sure I will.’

‘Yes, if anyone can, you can,’ said Helen, with a wide, supportive smile.

‘Yes, well, that’s not in question,’ said Janey, who had always felt sorry for Elizabeth being left alone at eighteen whilst she’d had a full complement of lovely family members looking out for her.

‘I’ve managed so far by myself,’ said Elizabeth.

‘And us two will be here for you, won’t we?’ Janey
said to Helen, who nodded her agreement and smiled, with a friendly sort of envy at her tall red-haired friend.

Janey was already filling out, her chest bumping out of her blouse, her cheeks pink and glowing like a country maid’s. In stark contrast, Helen was pale and drawn; she had lost weight and her breasts looked smaller, if anything. Her hair was lank, even though she had only washed it the previous night, and her face was dotted with pimples–retribution, she supposed, for having such beautifully clear skin all the way through her teenage years. She didn’t care though, for when Simon was moody and quiet or interrogating her about what she had eaten and how much she weighed, she would curl up with her Miriam Stoppard book and read how her baby was growing every day, even if those days were full of bleeding gums and nausea and spots and grease. Each one brought her closer to her baby being born, and that thought alone could make her cope with anything. Except that it made her miss her father, more than ever.

‘What do I do first then?’ asked Elizabeth, over more tea. ‘Do I have to ring the doctors?’

‘Yes,’ Janey and Helen said together.

‘You’ll start antenatal classes straight away, I would have thought, and the midwife will tell you all about which benefits you’ll be due—’ Helen continued before she was rudely interrupted.

‘Benefits my backside! I’ll be up and working as soon as I can,’ said Elizabeth indignantly. ‘I’m not
sitting on my arse sponging off the state and watching flaming
Trisha
. I’m off to see some agencies on Monday in Leeds.’

However much of a mess the rest of her life was, at least there would be no complications in getting a job for a hardworking woman with experience. Or so, in her naivety, she thought.

During the large family celebratory meal they held for her, Janey smiled for everyone’s benefit and tried to be happy about being pregnant, really she did. She forced thoughts to the forefront of her mind of how much George had wanted this to happen and how fate had eventually intervened and made it so. Everyone was thrilled about it–her mum and dad were over the moon, so were her in-laws Joyce and Cyril, who were never away from the house with either fruit, knitting patterns or pans full of homemade soups and stews to keep up her strength. At the rate they were fortifying her, she could have gone for a WWF title by the end of her first trimester. She knew she should be adoring this attention and revelling in the fact that her husband was treating her even more like a queen than he usually did, but all she wanted to do was sit and cry. It was nothing to do with her hormones, but plain and simple resentment that in fulfilling everyone else’s dream, she was losing grip of her own. The guilt she carried for feeling like that told her she must truly be a selfish, self-centred bitch, which only fuelled the tears more.
Elizabeth set off early on the Monday morning, parked her bright yellow Old Faithful at the train station, and headed off for the familiarity of Leeds with the company of a glossy mag and a bag of Midget Gems. It felt good to be back in the echoey city train station, even if it was the usual three-mile hike to the ticket barriers. She loved the buzz of Leeds with its beautiful old architecture, impressive new architecture, big bookshops, old-fashioned arcades, large hip designer houses and tiny Jewish jeweller shops happily cohabiting in the bustling centre. For once, she enjoyed taking things at a slower pace and dodging the rush of executives locked on course for their offices. She had plenty of time to kill before her first appointment and called into a small Italian coffee-shop for a minty coffee whirled with cream, which was more like a pudding, and a toasted, heavily buttered ciabatta. Out of the window, she watched the world of power suits and laptop cases go by without her.

The door to Golden Door Recruitment was old, peeling and a very ill shade of brown, and was squeezed in between a large card shop and a downmarket men’s clothes store. The office itself was at the top of three flights of stairs, which Elizabeth climbed to find a surprisingly large, but empty, reception area at the top. Distressed wooden furniture, bald rugs and once-trendy PVC chairs spewing yellow foam from various splits had been placed there to create an ambience of shabby-chic, alas achieving all of the former and none of the latter.

Elizabeth allowed herself to be greeted and seated
by a woman sporting shoulder-pads sized somewhere in between Joan Crawford’s and a Chicago Bear’s, and was given a form to complete with all her personal details whilst she waited until ‘Frances’, who was running late, could see her. It would only take a few minutes, Joan Bear said, returning to her desk where she tapped efficiently away at a keyboard, leaving Elizabeth scribbling on top of a badly polished glass table patterned with dried-up coffee mug rings.

A good half an hour and a selection of thrilling magazine articles such as
We only had three teeth between us, but we fell in love
later, just when Elizabeth was about to lose the will to live, Frances emerged from the office with her name on it, smiling and pouring apologies. She looked about twelve and as if she had been at her mother’s make-up bag. Underneath the three-inch thickness of her Judith Chalmers shade of foundation, the weaselly arrogant look was more than reminiscent of Julia, and a sparking current of instant dislike arced between them. Frances showed Elizabeth into a well-equipped hi-tech office, took her place behind a computer-topped desk and drank the remnants of her coffee before making a three-minute intense study of Elizabeth’s ‘résumé’, not that it said all that much.

‘Ah, you’ve just worked at the one place, that’s fantastic. Why’s that?’

‘I liked it,’ said Elizabeth, which she did until Eyebrow Man and Bow-Legged Troll came along.

‘So what made you leave then?’

‘I felt it was finally time for a change.’

‘After twenty-two years? Interesting!’ Frances said, in a
Yeah right!
tone of voice. She studied her client for a hard few seconds, referred to the sheet again and said, ‘What was your leaving salary again?’

‘Nineteen thousand, two hundred.’

‘Oh!’ Which was obviously Frances talk for, ‘You’ll be lucky to match that’. ‘And are you looking for temporary or permanent work?’

‘Either, but I’ll mention it anyway: I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh!’ Frances sighed as in ‘Dear, dear me’. ‘Well, let’s have a look anyway. You never know.’ She pressed a few buttons on her computer and looked hard into the screen, muttering away absently.

‘Data-inputter, shiftwork, eleven thousand five hundred, suit school leaver…oh, maybe not…ha ha–administrator for busy office, blah blah…seven thirty to six but you do finish at half past three on a Friday. Oh, sorry, that’s in York. Where do you live again? Bradford, was it? Sorry, Barnsley…fantastic. Here’s one–Halifax, wages clerk. Did you say you did wages? Fifteen thousand with BUPA pro rata…oh no, they’re looking for someone with SAGE. Let’s see Temporary…Here we are…
flick, flick
…oh maybe not. No…no…’

The phone rang. Frances picked it up. ‘Hello? Yes…yes…Oh, she’ll have to wait…Well, it’s not my fault she got sacked, is it, so fob her off till the morning. Tell her we’ll get back to her…Yeah, I am with someone…Okay.
Ciao
.’ She tutted. ‘Some people!’ she said, with an impatient click of her tongue. ‘Now, where’s my pen? Oh God, where have I put it? Oh, what am I?’

‘A gormless bimbo?’
Elizabeth answered to herself. She would have laughed but it would have made a very hollow sound. This was useless; she felt it in the pit of her stomach like a big heavy ball. This was not going to be as easy as she had thought; the market seemed geared for youth and blank canvas rather than age and experience.

‘I’m sure there’ll be something, eventually,’ said Frances in a tone that doubted it very much. ‘What was your typing speed again?’ she asked, but Elizabeth could have sworn she wasn’t really listening.

‘Seven hundred words per minute,’ she tested her. She was past caring.

‘Mmmm. Fantastic.’ Frances was staring hard at the screen. She could have been playing
Grand Theft Auto
for all Elizabeth knew.

‘And what qualifications did you say you had again?’

‘Fifteen O levels, seven A levels and a degree in Japanese.’

‘Ooh now, Japanese is very business commercial. I think if you leave it with us we will sort you out in no time.’

Christ, get me out of here!

As if Frances read her thoughts, she stood, swept her eyes curiously down to her client’s midriff and held out her hand to give a very thin, limp handshake that gave Elizabeth the shivers.

‘Well, it’s been fantastic to meet you, Lizzie…’

Elizabeth bristled. She hated anyone calling her that, although the diminutive version of Frances’s name–Fanny–seemed to fit her well enough.

‘…Here’s my card and don’t you worry, we’ll be in touch as soon as we can. All right?’

‘Fantastic,’ said Elizabeth, stretching her mouth into a long line of rictus insincerity. By the time she had reached the dysentery-brown door, Frances’s business card was an eighty-one-piece jigsaw.

Outside, the clouds were casting an ominous grey light over everything and the sky looked as depressed as Elizabeth felt. In the city she knew so well, she suddenly felt lost, vulnerable, almost agoraphobic as the space seemed thick and oppressive. A wave of nausea engulfed her at the same time as a ravenously hungry sensation, and she could not tell if it was baby or anxiety. What she did know for definite was that she just could not face traipsing off to Branways Office Temps and Angels of the North, repeating this hopeless rigmarole; not today anyway. She was on the scrapheap at thirty-eight and now she just wanted some magic to teleport her home to find herself in front of the fire, with a packet of Gypsy Creams, some bilberry tea and Cleef curled up on her knee. If she hurried, she could catch the next train back, pick up the car from the car park and be at home in an hour. A big soggy snowflake landing squarely on her nose confirmed that this was the most sensible thing to do, so she headed back to the train station sharpish.

She boarded the busy train and moved down in search of a seat, although all three carriages were full, so she paused by a young man whose haversack was planted on the window seat next to him. Any other time she would have had no hesitation in asking him
to shift it, and a few years ago she would have rammed it up his backside for daring to be so bloody rude when people were standing. She was tired and weak, though, and not up for a fight, and she just wanted someone to notice that she was pregnant and needed a seat, but unless they had X-ray specs, that was going to be a no-no. She thought she had cracked it when the bloke behind her politely asked Haversack Man to move it, but only so he could slide his own carcass onto the seat. Chivalry was dead, it was official, and she was forced to stand in stiff and stoic British silence for twenty minutes before collapsing wearily into a vacant seat for the last ten.

When she got off the train at Barnsley, it was like walking into a snow globe. Fat flakes were coming dizzily down and she huddled into the little warmth her entirely weather-inappropriate suity-type jacket offered. She dashed across the road to the car park to where her bright yellow car, customized with the outline of a big pink flower painted over the back, was waiting for her. Quickly opening up the door, she climbed gratefully inside and stuck the key in the ignition. The engine turned over, shuddered a bit and then died. The second turn resulted in a cough and a click and nothing else. Elizabeth had that cold sweaty panicking thing that reduces one to ‘What do I do? I know nothing about cars!’ level, and then she noticed that the button for her lights was turned to ‘on’. She had never,
ever
left her lights on before.

‘Please, not today of all days!’ she cried mournfully aloud to herself.

She ferreted through her bag for her AA card, only to remember that she had left it in her ‘ordinary’ bag, as opposed to this ‘smart interview’ one, along with her mobile phone apparently. She sat back, her numb hands on the steering wheel, feeling hopeless, hope-less, tired, pathetic and angry at her own stupidity.
Stupid, dozy, stupid, stupid hormones!
She was never disorganized, never forgot anything.
Is this what pregnancy hormones made you into–a stupid, pathetic, stupid jelly?

She hadn’t cried in years and suddenly here she was, starting to blub yet again, the rate of tears accelerating as she watched the snow fill up the windscreen, making her feel like she was being buried alive. Then a thought hopped into her mind, to kick her whilst she was down, that there was no one at home to say, ‘Where’s Elizabeth? She should be home by now. I’m getting worried so I think I’ll go out looking for her.’ No one. How long could she sit there before someone came for her, she wondered. Cleef wouldn’t even miss her, only his tea. He was a cat and would just go and find another house and be as fed and as warm and not give her a second thought, just like he had not given Helen a second thought when she had given him away.

Elizabeth did not have a job, she had bog-all prospects of getting another one, and inside her was growing an alien that she could not find it in herself to get rid of, but did not really want. She twisted the key again and again and again in an angry frenzy.

‘Start, you bastard thing!’ she cried, and when that didn’t work, ‘Please, nice car, start for me,
pleeeease
…’

Then someone knocked on her window and opened her car door.

‘You okay?’

It was
him
. John Silkstone. He had turned up like Clint Eastwood did when a town was in trouble. Thinking back, he always had been the human equivalent of a Swiss Army knife.

‘Won’t it start?’ he asked.

Her throat was too constricted to answer. She just shook her head and stared at him with huge, watery, grey eyes. She felt the indignity of her situation deeply. She had seen him twice in seven years–once dressed like a tramp, and now trying to drown a steering wheel with a good eye and a black one. He was the only one who had ever seen her cry.

‘I don’t know! Come on!’ he urged.

‘No, it’s all right. I can manage.’ Why on earth did I say that? she thought, when it was blatantly obvious that she couldn’t. Not that he was having any of it, anyway.

‘You don’t change, do you, Independent Mary? Come on, shift yourself!’

He pulled her out of the car by her sleeve and led her unresisting, like a child, to a Land Rover nearby with an engine purring, as hers should have been. Then again, he wasn’t a dozy pregnant beggar who left his lights on. He stripped off his coat behind her and plonked it on her shoulders and she almost buckled under the weight of it.

‘Good job you’re still driving the same car, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I knew that daft pink flower would come in handy one day–remember?’

She remembered. He had been with her when she had bought it at the garage. She had taken him along to suss it out because she had trusted him in all things. She had fallen in love with the crazy Battenburg colours and he’d laughed and said, ‘Trust a woman! But at least you’ll be easy to spot in a crowd!’ Then he had disappeared inside to press buttons and levers and rev up the engine and then get underneath to inspect the chassis.

‘Here, give us your keys and get in.’

She opened her mouth to say something brave but her weary body overrode it and, instead, she climbed into his passenger seat to find the heater was on full blast and it was lovely and cosy. The radio was on but the wipers were not and the snow-rain slashing against the windows gave only a blurred image of what was going on across the car park. The tears popping out of her eyes did not help; it appeared there was a washer off in her ducts.

Minutes later, the driver’s door opened, letting in a fearsome reminder of the freezing outside world, and big John Silkstone in a thick checked lumberjack shirt clambered in and blew some life back into his hands.