Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (11 page)

She'd started sounding like her batteries were running down. One day I saw her crumple the old newspaper in her hand and throw it across the park with a savage arm. I lowered my own arm frightened for the picture I was holding.

‘Are yeh upset, Ma?'

‘No, Janie.' She was biting at the side of her thumbnail. ‘I'm just bored. I'm just bored tae fuckin' hell an' it's a bad week.'

I thought good and bad weeks were about money. And that the bad weeks were when it rained and there was only bread and marge sandwiches and a jam jar of milk for our picnics that we ate in the shopping centre. There was no lolly treat for afters and for dinner we only had Smash or packet noodles with a tin of tuna; one at a time because the kettle in our room was the size of a doll's kettle.

I kept asking if we were really poor and Ma would say, ‘We're fine. Will yeh stop asking that?' and she always looked so angry that after a while I did.

On good weeks there was Strawberry Angel Delight after the noodles or Smash and we'd take turns whisking the powder and milk with a fork. Sometimes it took all the way through
Crossroads
and
Wogan
to get it thick enough but it tasted so good I didn't mind eating it with a stinging, achey arm.

A good week meant a trip to the swimming baths where we would line up with other mas and kids holding fat towel sausages under their arms, goggles hanging from their necks.

‘Now if anyone asks yeh, yer five.'

‘But, Ma! I'm SIX.' I held my right hand and an extra thumb up to make sure she understood and the queue went quiet. Ma rolled her eyes and stared at the floor and I jutted my chin out, stood tall and dared anyone to tell me I wasn't six.

Bad weeks were called bad by Ma but for me they were worth no jam in the sandwiches or Angel Delight puddings. They were even worth Ma's silences that made my belly hurt, because rainy weeks meant the library.

Running to sit at the little plastic chairs I felt the library's warm, still air push inside me to slow my thumping heart and the second-hand-shop smell snake up my nostrils, winding itself snug around my insides. When I opened the books, and I could open as many as I liked because it cost us nothing, the pictures lay on my eyes like oil on water and the dancing letters settled on my tongue with the smell and the taste of black-jack sweeties. While Ma bit at her lips, ripped at her cuticles and read old magazines, I was learning how stories could make me feel safe.

*

In August, after five weeks at Mrs Sleathes', Ma found us a new place to live.

‘It's a B&B but not like this. It's going tae be like lots of people living together.' Even with her sick-looking bald eyes she looked happy. ‘An' there's a garden.'

Afterwards I felt a hard twist of guilt at all the things I hadn't noticed while I had my face in books and bowls of Angel Delight. I hadn't noticed the gaping space at the back of her jeans when she bent over or the way her hands shook when she turned the page of the newspaper. I looked but didn't really see the endless counting out of her purse or the panicked snap as she closed it again.

The day she told me about us moving seemed like a good day for it because I'd wondered if we'd ever be skint enough for me to tell her and I was afraid to ask if we already were.

She held the twenty-pound notes in her fingers and I grinned, squeezing my Glowless Worm to my chest.

‘Where did yeh get this from, Janie? An' I want the truth.'

Her voice was low and I thought she must be really surprised and laughed. ‘From Frankie. It was a secret fer when we need it an' now we're moving we'll need it to buy furniture! He told me not tae tell yeh. Until we were skint.'

Ma's face went pale and she bit her top lip with her bottom teeth, pushed me on the bed and pulled down my shorts as far as they'd go.

‘You never, ever lie tae me. Do. Yeh. Understand? Never, ever!'

With each word she brought her palm stinging down on my lower back and I screamed and tried to explain, through the snot and tears and shock, that it wasn't a lie, it was just a secret.

*

We left Mrs Sleathes really early that Sunday, earlier than lockout or breakfast; as early as the birds woke up. Ma said we had to be quiet, especially outside Bob's room, it was a game. I tiptoed holding giggles in my chest, through the soft darkness of the landing and out into the pink-streaked dawn.

Our new place was called Burton House B&B but it didn't have a sign outside which was one of the reasons Ma liked it. It was on a street just off a traffic-filled road that led all the way to the city. The road was squeezed tight with off-licences, betting shops and kebab houses, and I never found out where the road would lead if you slithered far enough away from town. The furthest down we ever got was the ‘park' that was really a square of tree-lined grass with a lonely, tall slide in the centre.

Burton House was a twenty-minute grown-up walk or thirty minutes my walk from town. The morning we left Mrs Sleathes' we walked the fifteen minutes to town and Ma stopped at the bus stop.

‘Hold on, Janie, I've a stitch.' She set the suitcase down and squeezed her side. After a few minutes she looked at the empty road and then the bakery. ‘Alright, we can wait fer the bus tae come or hoof it an yeh can use the bus fare for an iced bun fer breakfast.'

I arrived at Burton House, as at so many places, smiling from behind the sticky crust of my last meal.

Ma said the manager, Majid, was Indian and warned me I shouldn't say anything about him being a different colour or talking different. I wondered what colour he would be and was sad when I saw he just had a bit of a suntan.

‘I like yer hat, Mr Majid. I've a crayon that same colour.' I bent my head to my lunch box to show him.

‘Just Majid is fine.' He raised his slim hands and straightened the red turban then carried on up the stairs.

We were five floors up, the ‘penthouse' Majid said with a gentle laugh, and then saw Ma's face and said more seriously but with the same gentle voice, ‘I've made sure it's a nice one for you and your little girl, a bit of space and privacy for our new family.'

The roof slanted down from the ceiling with two small square windows; there was a single bed, a table with two chairs on each side and a big double bed pushed against the back wall. At the foot of the single bed there was a big wardrobe. Even if everything did look a bit squeezed in, I didn't need to count my steps to see it was twice the size of our last room though I felt a pop of grief at the loss of our bunk beds and the packets of doll-sized food. Ma nodded.

‘This is great. Thanks a mill, Majid.'

‘Good, I'm glad you like it. Do you want me to show you the kitchen and garden?'

But Ma was already pulling the suitcase over to the wardrobe and I had turned away to set things out on my little bed, the ceiling a few inches above me.

‘Well, maybe later. You know where I am if you need anything at all.'

After he'd gone Ma kept walking around, opening and closing the wardrobe and bouncing on the mattress like it might be a
Blue Peter
room, all glued together from washing-up bottles, cereal packets and egg cartons. She kept pinning questions on me without waiting for the answer.

‘Do yeh like it, Janie? It's big, isn't it? I bet yeh can't wait tae see the garden?'

I stopped trying to answer her and lined all my crayons on top of my lunch-box and stood my umbrella against the bed and when I did turn round again Ma was lying, knees pulled up to her belly, on the bed.

‘Ma?'

She kept her eyes closed and pulled her knees up a little more. ‘Ma's going tae have a sleep now, Janie. You play fer a while.'

She still had on her thick grey socks and I rolled them over her heels and then pulled them off her hot feet. I laid them, bloated and warm, on the bottom of the bed.

I did some drawing, made up a story with my Glowless Worm where I caught him stealing crayons in his battery pouch and gave him a whispered but ferocious telling-off and spongy spanking until my iced-bun-fullness disappeared.

Ma was still snoring gently, fully clothed, and when I looked at her still face and naked eyelids, gently quivering with dreams, I climbed onto the bed and tucked my knees into the crook of hers and pushed my face into the warm damp of her T-shirt.

When we woke up, the same sweet smell of sleep on the hair plastered to our foreheads and pillow creases on our cheeks, the two windows were black and the house below us still and silent.

*

Ma hid herself in our room during August, as though having been forced out every day at Mrs Sleathes' made her stubbornly stay inside at Burton House, though some days that room, right at the top of the house, was like an oven. She started taking lots of ‘sleeps'.

‘Yer ma's having a sleep now. You go play.' She promised that she wasn't sick, ‘No' the way yer thinking of, Janie.'

At the end of the day when the air in the room was thick and sweet and I'd milked my imagination dry for games, Ma would stand, tuck her nightie into the waistband of her jeans and throw a jumper over the top and take me to the park with the slide. She'd sit staring at nothing on the bottom until my swooping feet bashed into her and I'd shout, ‘Ma, I can't slide with you there!'

On the way home I'd run into the chip shop and ask for a bag of crispies and the red-faced woman behind the counter would scoop all the broken pieces of batter from the bottom of the trays for me for free.

Mondays was the only day Ma took off her nightie and we went to the post office for our dole cheque, joining the queue outside. The queue looked just the same in Canterbury as it did in Aberdeen. Always a long queue, before the post office even opened, as if waiting another fifteen minutes with an empty purse and larder would be fifteen minutes too long.

After the post office, Ma would drop me at the library and I'd read until she came back empty-eyed, weighed down with more than just our week's shopping.

One Monday she told me I could take three books home. I stared at her wide-eyed, wondering if she was really sick after all.

‘No, Ma, it's a
library
. Yeh stay here an' be quiet and read them. It's stealing.'

‘Janie, I filled out the forms an' we've a card now so it's fine. Just choose yer three books and hurry up before the chips thaw.'

I wasn't sure it was fine but I chose three
Twinkle
annuals, 1975, 1978 and 1979, and spent the rest of the week telling the duvet bump of Ma what Nurse Nancy was doing in her dollies' hospital.

The next Monday while unpacking the shopping Ma pulled out a yellow-and-white teddy bear and a little furry mouse. The teddy's white patches were dusty and the fur was matted in places where I imagined a drip of juice or sucked sweetie dropped from an excited mouth. The mouse's plastic whiskers had been chewed at the end as well but I liked them more for being a bit sad and scruffy; they were better patients for a dollies' hospital.

‘Deary me injured whiskers! You need some medicine, Mr Squeak!'

After our busy days of sleeping and nursing we went down to the kitchen to have dinner. We always tried to walk quietly because when she heard our footsteps on the stairs Cathy, from the second floor, would come down and smoke at the table and talk all about her family, her twelve steps and her little boy, ‘maybe seven now', who lived with his nana.

She said it was good to have another mother around who understood, though Ma didn't ever seem that friendly while she stirred a pot of boiling water or stood to one side from the fat spitting from our fish fingers.

One night I was looking in the cutlery drawer for a surgical tool to take out Mr Squeak's tonsils, while Cathy, her thin hair pulled back in a face-stretching ponytail, puffed on her fag.

‘I'm going for a visit soon –' her boy lived in London – ‘and I was thinking since I've been clean for a few months and you've got Janie here now the social services might think about letting him come here for a visit. What do you reckon, Iris?'

Ma turned holding the spatula in her hand. ‘I reckon that if you mention me or Janie tae yer probation, social or any other worker, I'll stick this where the sun doesn't shine. Followed by that.' She pointed to the whisk I was holding.

Cathy raised her arms. ‘Alright, Jesus! I get it.' She stopped and looked at Ma. ‘Iris, is everything OK? You look . . . well, like I used to look like before, well, you know, before. You're not using?'

‘No I am bloody not!' Ma looked over at me then turned back to Cathy. ‘I mean, no offence, Cathy, but where would I find the cash? I had to skip my Monday drink this week tae buy her a few cheap toys. No, I'm just tired. Yeh wouldnae believe the last few months.'

Cathy stubbed out her fag and kicked out the chair in front of her. ‘Then dish out and sit down, I've nothing but time.'

Ma shrugged and slapped my hamburgers over the waiting toast and I cut them into ever smaller triangles as Cathy's stringy ponytail swished in anger or sympathy and Ma stumbled through the last two months.

*

I was turned to the wall pulling woodchips through the wallpaper and dropping them down the side of the bed; I imagined Ma finding a little mountain of discarded chips under there, the freckled wallpaper giving the game away, but I'd already decided I'd say that a beastie had done it. And then the room went black, a dark so sudden and thick I felt I was being drowned.

‘Ma! Ma!'

The wind buffered against the roof, shook the skylights; there was a groan from the bed.

‘Fuck. It's alright, Janie, it's just a power cut. Feel yer way over here an' get in.'

But even laying next to my ma the darkness lay on me heavy as wet sand and the angry wind made my limbs twitch.

‘Janie, stop it.'

‘But I cannae sleep, cause, cause I need a pee.'