Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (18 page)

Doug laid down the rules for us staying in his flat. First was no swearing. Second, we weren't to speak to anyone else who lived in the building; he gave my miniskirt a stare. ‘Especially you, Janie, yer no' a kid any more.' Third was that we were never to put our hands down behind the sofa cushions.

‘Why would we put our hands down the inside of yer minging sofa? I bet you've been down the back of it ages ago for the coppers anyway.'

‘Never mind why. Just dinnae, alright? It's fer yer own good; there's probably dirty needles an' all sorts down there.'

The house would have been gorgeous, it was right over the road from the sea, tall and white, just round the corner from the Royal Hotel.

‘Charles Dickens wrote
David Copperfield
there.' Doug gave a proud nod towards it as though he had maybe sharpened his pencils for him. But there were stained mattresses piled outside the flat, kids had tagged the front of the house with blue spray paint and the rest of the outside had dirty brown water marks. Royal it was not.

Doug's bedsit was almost as small as the Tango Mobile and smelt only a bit better. I couldn't understand how all six foot two of him could stand it, it was smaller than my bedroom back in Coatbridge. Ma looked around and I could see doubts and worries tugging away at her stiff smile.

‘This'll be fine, just fer a few days, till we find our own place, won't it?'

I kept my face blank and watched Ma's smile fight against the muscles in her face that said this was another hopeless move, sea breeze or no sea breeze.

‘Aye, Ma, course. You'll find us a place, you always have.'

The next day, a Monday, Ma reported her family allowance book lost, got a crisis loan and we had a walk around town.

There was a marketplace full of flabby, grey-skinned stallholders, looking as rancid and soft as the fruit and veg they were selling, and a whole row of stands, queues at all of them, selling newspaper cones of chips topped with a greasy dollop of mayonnaise. In fact, there were chip stands everywhere in Yarmouth, and doughnut stands. Pubs, pawn and betting shops. Ways to spend your money and then dodgy ways of finding a bit more.

We went to the beach and Tiny had a paddle and though we couldn't afford a ride we walked around the Pleasure Beach and Ma gave us a pound for the 2p machines in the arcades. I gave Tiny my cup of 2ps and watched from behind a fruit machine as Ma sat on a bench outside, eyes closed and face turned to the sky, a half-smoked rolly in her hand, almost a smile on her face.

On the seafront, white GTIs raced up and down, competing against the grabber machines playing ‘Clementine' by blasting jungle or drum and bass from the boots of their cars. It made your cheeks vibrate if you stood too close.

We walked along the beach, around the blankets covered with crisp bags,
Sun
newspapers and slabs of blubbery pink skin in too-tight costumes. Ma shook her short hair in the wind. ‘I love the smell of the sea, Janie, reminds me of being a kid again.'

‘Me too.'

My arm was up to put round her shoulder but then Tiny was pulling her off by the hand, towards the slow bent-over outline of donkeys far up the beach. I watched them run-slip through the hot sand ahead of me and all the tourists' heads turn as Tiny shouted high enough to fetch stray dogs. ‘Donkeeeey! It's my donkeeey!'

Ma turned to roll her eyes at me. ‘Tiny, yer yanking my arm off! An' they're tae share, yeh can't have one to yerself.'

That night I lay with Ma and Tiny in the bed, Doug was on the two-seater sofa with his legs swinging over the arm, and heard girls screaming, couples calling each other cunts and the occasional puker. I heard GTIs racing up and down the seafront and the mechanical ‘Oh my darling' of the grabber machines. It might have been cheap and tacky, maybe a bit pathetic around the edges, but Tiny had her da, Ma had a sea breeze, and me, I couldn't wait to get out there, and push my face into the colour and chaos of Great Yarmouth.

*

Ma had found us a place by the end of the next day and Doug wasn't sorry to see us go, though when he hugged Ma his hand slid down to her arse.

Our new place, a few streets behind the seafront, was a B&B but not for tourists, just for long-term lodgers, with nice regular housing benefits thank you very much. I'd never thought of us as reliable. We had two rooms, a bedroom with two beds, and another room with a sofa where we put the telly. We could never get good reception on the telly even though Ma was a dab hand with a bent coat hanger. We shared a kitchen and bathroom and were told, ‘never leave your toilet paper in there, it'll grow legs' by Mrs Pritchet, the bulldog-faced landlady with huge knockers.

For the rest of the summer, Ma and Tiny went to the beach every day with a packed lunch in a bread bag and towels rolled under their arms and came back smelling of sea and scorched pavements and I got a job as a waitress and came back stinking of ketchup, my hands sticky with raspberry sauce and Fanta.

I got £1.50 an hour at the seafront cafe and my only job was to serve up the kiddies' meals. The place was pure filth; there was grease there that would survive a nuclear blast. I felt guilty letting the kids eat the food until I apologised to one too many fat mas with signet rings and frizzy perms who stubbed their fags on the plates and didn't tip.

I worked sixty-hour weeks. The owner, Marco, who had a grey ponytail and a belly that hung over his chef's checks, would ask me to get things from the bottom shelf, and even though I didn't fancy him I'd keep my knees straight so he could get a good look up my skirt. I liked the job and I knew how to keep it. It was spilt-shift, and during the break I'd go to the other waitresses' digs and smoke a spliff, or we'd go to a dark bar and they'd buy me halves of Foster's and lime. They all called me ‘baby caner', but it was just a laugh.

When I got my first small brown envelope, chunky with soft fivers, my heart thumped inside my throat.

I bought a make-up set for Ma and a box of Milk Tray. Tiny wanted to go to the Sea Life Centre and we stroked the stingrays' rippling bodies, felt starfish pucker on our palms, made ourselves sick on Pick 'n' Mix. I got Tiny a furry dolphin, took her home, and went and spent the rest of my wages buying rounds with the waitresses in the pub. I drank snakebite and black and puked pure neon pink on a car bonnet. One of them had to drag me home and explain to Ma. She stripped my rancid-smelling dress off and took a cold flannel to my face,

‘Like mother like daughter, eh? Still, I'm glad you've some pals.'

Ma got a job too, cash in hand, cleaning at a hotel, and Tiny went with her and dusted the telly screens for 10p a room. At home, Tiny built up silver towers around her knees and asked when she'd have enough to buy a donkey.

Ma came home each morning in her pink tabard with a treat; cream cakes, a few scratchcards, maybe a
Woman's Own
. She loved it, you could tell, tucking into that custard doughnut and cup of tea bought with money she earned herself. Even if she kept saying how being in work made her ‘nerves' worse.

‘But I'm getting there, Janie. Earning my own cash for the first time in years nerves or no'.'

I always took Tiny for a donkey ride and a McDonald's when I got my wages and the rest went on clothes; orange Lycra flares with a chain belt, white miniskirts, lime-green belly tops. I couldn't afford contact lenses and I had no tits but at least I had a flat belly, a nice wee arse and the clothes to show them off in. I got myself a gold chain, hoop earrings so heavy they stretched the skin of my lobes, and transformed myself, better or worse, into a ‘proper Yarco'. I didn't sound like everyone else but at least I looked it.

When the summer season was finished so was our money. Yarmouth emptied out like the morning after a heavy party, and all that was left was a few fag-end-filled empty cans, and the dossers who'd got too wankered to get themselves home again.

*

Ma said Caister High School was the best of a bad bunch even if you did have to catch a bus to get there. I was nervous, begged not to go, but it was easy being the new girl at the start of a new year. Especially a new girl whose ma would buy booze for her and her mates, who'd smoked dope in Glasgow and who had bought her own school uniform from New Look.

I elbowed myself into a group of girls who had space because one of them had started hanging about with the cooler kids in the summer. They still felt a bit jilted though and you could tell they didn't think I was much of a replacement.

We didn't smoke fags and didn't have a dealer. We just shared bottles of cider that my ma bought for us on Friday nights, before going to the roller rink at the Winter Gardens. They were goody-two-shoes, at least at first, but that suited me fine.

I was good at Drama. All you had to do was remember a feeling: being so scared that your blood turned icy (Tony, the Germans); being angry enough that your bones burned up and crumbled to ash (Doug, Ma); loving someone enough to want to stretch your own skin over them to carry them safely inside you (Tiny, Ma, Uncle Frankie).

I was good at English too. We read
Catcher in the Rye
and Sylvia Plath because Mr Price said we were the smartest kids and if we didn't read them now we might not get through our teens alive and we laughed and he joined in and then stopped and said, ‘Seriously.' All the girls wanted to shag Mr Price even though he was shorter than most of us in our heels and had a dusty ridge of dandruff on his collar most days.

My mates weren't in my class, it was mostly squares and geeks, so I answered questions and stayed behind after the bell to catch up on coursework. All over again I loved the sweet, bitter liquorice of new words, like at that first library in Canterbury, and even more I loved Mr Price's shining eyes as I talked about Holden's loneliness or Sylvia taking the piss out of herself in
The Bell Jar
; I felt like he was looking through my skin.

I tried to talk to the girls about it but they rolled their eyes at each other and told me to shut it. I laughed. ‘Well, anyway, I think Price's going to shag one of the girls in the class before the end of the year; he keeps going on about how he's getting divorced.'

We spent the rest of the lunchtime, arms linked, walking endless circles around the field guessing who it would be. They never mentioned me, they even thought it might be Fat Beth. I thought about Sylvia, how she felt invisible, and then I thought about ‘phonies', and then I stopped thinking because I needed to help them decide where Price and Fat Beth might do the dirty deed.

*

Jenny was the one with the tits, Kate was the stunner with Timotei hair and big blue eyes, and me and Emma were just the other blondes or, if you wanted to be brutal, Specky and Fatty. That was our gang: Tits, Stunner, Specky and Fatty. It wasn't that much fun being Specky but at least I wasn't Fatty.

Jenny and Kate got boyfriends and things turned. The lads lived at a B&B near the seafront. Jenny's boyfriend was twenty-eight, Kate's twenty-five. They claimed they were just hanging around till the summer when they could get jobs, but the B&B was full of blokes like them, with Tupac and Pamela Anderson posters on the grey walls of their rooms, empty lager cans and dirty socks by the dirtier mattresses and not much else to fill the space.

Reggie, Jenny's boyfriend, had a tape player so we'd all pile into his room, hand over our pocket money to get booze, get hammered listening to Coolio and then get off with each other.

Me or Emma usually got stuck with Mark, who was so lazy he'd only go with the girl on top, or Quiet Danny who never wanted anything more than a hand-job, even then with his eyes squeezed shut the whole time, rocking back and forward. I got first pick and Emma got whoever was left. That's another reason why it was better to be Specky than Fatty.

When the lads had enough for a pint we'd go up King Street and the lads would get us into the Brunswick or Club 151. After we'd bought a drink – because the bouncers watched to see if you would – we'd minesweep for the rest of night, and that was fine except for the occasional soggy fag end at the bottom of a bottle that stung the back of your throat.

Me and Emma would race. See how many blokes we could get off with, opening our legs and wiggling our arses against their legs to the music. I usually won, I took my glasses off when we went to clubs. It didn't matter that I couldn't see, the blokes were all the same; warm, blurry shapes, dry-humping me under the disco lights.

*

I was hammered, absolutely paralytic. I'd sat for ages on the toilet, with my dress pulled up to my waist, thong dangling from one of my heels, and just stared at the plywood doors trying to read the biro graffiti.

Jenny had got a twenty from her dad because he was maybe having an affair and we'd had two bottles of own-brand vodka between us. Emma didn't hang around with us any more.

I was in the toilets on the middle floor. That was where all the pervy old blokes sat, dribbling into their pints of John Smith's with their tongues hanging out.

It was a shit New Year's Eve. Mark was getting off with someone else and at midnight I'd ended up kissing a sweaty fat bloke who breathed through his mouth. Jenny and Kate were dancing with their boyfriends and I'd been wandering around for ages, pretending to look for my mates, having my arse grabbed by the oldies.

I pulled up my knicks and stumbled out. There was a fight outside where the band would play but there wasn't a band tonight. The crowd seemed to be enjoying the fight more anyway. The bouncer looked at me and I bombed it down to the basement before he could ask for ID. They always waited until you'd spent a few quid before they chucked you out.

I'd never been down there before, to ‘The Crypt'. Reggie said it was for freaks and remedials. The walls, painted black, shined with the heat off bodies and spilled drinks. Everyone was dancing to Blur wearing skinny T-shirts and Adidas Gazelle trainers. They mostly had the same short floppy hair. The only difference was the lads had jeans and the girls had miniskirts. They were all bouncing, pulling ‘ironic' faces at each other, arms framed around their faces, while the goths sipped their drinks and watched from the edges through eyes slitty with eyeliner, waiting for one of their shouty songs to come on.