Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (22 page)

‘I didn't ask yeh to sacrifice anything an' it doesnae need tae be yer whole life. Yer not even old for God's sake! Go out an' have some life and fun and stop using us as yer excuse cause yer too scared.'

‘I'm allowed to go out an' have some fun, am I? Oh, well, thank you, Janie. How generous! Are yeh finished using me then? You ungrateful little fuck. Yer nothin' but a slapper even after all I did tae bring yeh up decent.'

‘Yeh don't own me an' yeh can't keep me here because I won't make the same mistakes as you.'

‘Yeh already are an' I gave yeh the best start I could, even though I was almost as young as you are now.'

Spit landed on my face, and I felt tears rising, blood surged through my arms willing me to slap her; just one hard slap to watch her flabby body crumple onto the sofa in shock.

‘Oh aye, Ma, thanks fer that great start. What with all the homeless hostels an' council estates an' moonlit fuckin' flits it's no wonder I'm turning out so well. Oh aye! An' let's not forget yer drinking, an' crying, an' sleeping all the time. Thanks so much for my ideal childhood. It was really worth the sacrifice. You should have left me in the care home or with Da's wife.'

She gripped my wrists, pushed me against the wall and used her weight to pin me there. I was shaking and my legs felt floppy under me, like strips of paper. Tiny ran two steps and grabbed Ma's arm. ‘Stop it, stop fighting.'

But we were in too deep to pay attention to Tiny's thin arms trying to push us apart.

‘Bitch. Yeh're not my daughter, do yeh hear me? Yeh fuckin' nasty, spiteful little bitch.'

She slammed me against the wall with every word. All three of us moved, tangled in each other, the Russian dolls turned into a three-headed monster.

‘I hate yeh. Get off me.'

I pushed Ma off and she turned to the kitchen slamming the door behind her. I went to the sofa, took some breaths to get rid of the white static I could see and wiped the snot from my lips while Tiny stared at me, her belly of puppy fat shaking under her Spice Girls T-shirt.

‘I hate you both!'

‘Tiny, stay out of it.'

‘Why do yeh have to ruin everything and argue all the time?' She ran from the living room and I heard the thump of her feet on the stairs and a door slam. Poor Tiny.

‘I'm getting out of here.' There was no one to hear but saying it made it real. I stood on shaky feet, found my trainers and started looking for my purse. I could her Ma throwing things out of the kitchen cupboards then she threw the kitchen door wide and came in with her old red handbag.

I looked at her face, tight and frantic.

‘Leave me alone, I'm going out. Just leave me alone.'

The words tumbled out but she already had my wrist and pulled my face to hers. ‘You're going nowhere!'

I snatched my hand away, my heart was thumping, a hysterical trapped kid, and I started pulling up sofa cushions and moving empty crisp bags to find my purse. Ma put her hand in the bag and brought out a photo of me.

‘What's this then, eh? If I'm such a bad mother?' It was me on a birthday morning in rag curlers and vest and pants, a party tooter in my mouth. Ma crumpled it and threw it at me as I moved around the room.

‘An' this, bitch! What's this then?' The only baby picture Ma had of me, naked on a changing mat with orange flowers. She ripped it into small squares, threw them at me and they fluttered to the floor pathetically.

I moved to the kitchen and she followed. I felt like my windpipe was crushed or something was lodged there, stopping me from shouting back. She pulled out more photos. ‘An this! An this? An this! Yeh little fuck!'

She pushed them up into my face and ripped them in half. She could barely breathe between her screamed words.

‘Leave me alone.'

I saw my purse under an Asda bag, grabbed it and ran for the door, pulling my coat off the bottom stairs. The last words I heard before the door slammed were, ‘Yer no daughter of mine, yeh ungrateful little cunt.'

I ran into the street and the cold air, but I only got a few doors down before I knelt and puked into the gutter and for some reason the only thing on my mind was the Tango Mobile and its last painful lurch along the sunny seafront a year and a half ago.

It burned at me like I'd been at my scalp with peroxide. The house was stale, choked with fag ash and empty words from the telly. I felt sick all the time. It didn't seem to matter if I starved myself or ate so much I almost choked. I had some bad, black days but mostly it was just a tugging in my stomach and a cold, flat feeling as though I was watching all this on ITV after the watershed.

Ma wouldn't listen and Tiny sat at the edges of it all watching us with sharp, disapproving eyes, building towers of coins on the carpet, knocking them down to start again and see if she had enough for a donkey.

I kept trying to tell Ma I'd go to college and get my GCSEs, or I'd travel, maybe work abroad, I wasn't going to spend my life living for a two-month summer season and self-medicating with the cheapest booze to get me through the other ten.

I wasn't going to let the Yarmouth filth clog me up and stop me moving. I knew there was more out there, I just had to find a way to get to it. But Ma wouldn't, maybe couldn't, listen; she turned the telly up, rolled another fag, walked to the fridge.

‘Ma? Are yeh listening? What are yeh even looking for?'

‘Just something.' She turned and I saw her face flat and numb in the cold light of the fridge. ‘Something tae fill the hole.'

She would have listened, been gentle if I'd told her what she'd probably already guessed. Then told her how. She just wanted to keep me there. I thought she might even have been glad. But I knew that if I gave her the secret I might as well have given her everything. A little mass of cells, a growth. Not cancer but feeling like it. The Lump, sucking away and getting fat on all of my plans and dreams and future. I looked at Ma sitting with her tea in front of
Coronation Street
and pushed it deeper.

But of course she'd know; for all the things she pretended not to or couldn't handle seeing, she saw it all. When I'd done the test in the bus-station toilet I hadn't been sure myself, they had those blue lights in there so junkies can't see their veins, or maybe so girls in school uniform can't see if they're fucked or just having an irregular cycle. I had to open the door a chink and there it was, in a thin line of daylight, two little blue lines cutting right through my future. I dumped my unmagic wand in the tampon bin, and the first thing I did was promise myself not to tell Ma; the second thing was to not think about it for as long as it took me to get shit-faced.

In February I took a job selling hot dogs in a little booth attached to an arcade. All day I listened to rattling coins and laser-gun sounds and the tinny ‘Oh My Darling Clementine' played over and over, watching bright cars streak along the seafront, smears of paint on a grey sky.

Soon enough the sizzling fat and sweet onions nagged at my stomach and I had to leave. I didn't give any notice, just tucked the thirty pounds I'd earned into my jeans pocket and carried home a jumbo box of hamburgers that Ma and Tiny would still be eating now if she hadn't thrown them out as soon as I brought them in. We had mangy dogs sniffing outside the gate for days.

I found another job; I still looked reliable and sweet on the outside. I pierced ears at a jeweller's on Regent Road. On a Saturday I could do fifty pairs of ears and twenty noses with the little golden gun. There was always a pause when the metal hit the gristle of the earlobe, and it felt good to give the trigger that extra squeeze.

I liked it there, gallons of tea and never-ending fig rolls, except for when you'd see a woman with her dirty, snotty-nosed kids come in trying to sell her ring, or an ugly necklace that said #1MUM like the one I'd once got Ma. I'd go and sit in the toilet so I wouldn't see the shame hovering at the edges of her eyes. One less witness to the quick way she pocketed the cash like she was scared someone would take it back again.

The stocktaking was good too. That's what I did at nights. After the jeweller's I'd go and have a Fat Boy All-day Breakfast, hoping I wouldn't see it again that night, then went to the Toy Market across the road and helped them with their big before-season stocktake. I spent hours counting piles of Slinkies, whoopee cushions and cheap baby dolls with staring eyes and faces that would crumple in on themselves if you left them too close to a fire. I took one of those dolls home and hid my wages in the head; a sick joke. I didn't need to hide the money but I got used to hiding everything. I squashed the doll between my mattress and bed frame. Like Ma would say, out of sight, out of mind. But I couldn't ignore it and, of course, Ma wouldn't either.

I couldn't think while I was stocktaking, ticking the printouts, and that was good too. That, as well as the sickness, was why the hot-dog stand was no good because there's too much time to think while all you have to do is move the sausages a centimetre this way and a centimetre back. It's then that the thoughts that are carefully plugged like a blocked drain, clogged with slimy hair, start reeking.

Behind all that, right at the back, trapped where the little flies buzzed, there the Lump was. It tried to make me listen, plagued me with a craving for fizzy penny sweets, and punished me with stringy bile and dry heaves if I didn't give in, and punished me again with cola-cube-coloured sick if I did.

Every morning, and then when it started in the night-time too, Ma would be standing outside the bathroom door for me with a mug of tap water. She'd put her head to one side, pull her concerned, knowing face.

‘What's it this time then, Janie?'

And I'd take a gulp of the steely water to get rid of the taste, shrug and walk past her. ‘Hangover. What else?

It was a battle, it was war, and I might have been occupied but I wasn't defenceless.

*

‘Are you sure you want to do this?'

She was Irish, the auburn curls of her tight perm stiff and shiny. The little gold cross she wore swung just above my eyeline, a point of light. Her eyes were too dark for her pale face like uncooked pastry, two dried currants staring blackly into mine.

I wondered if she'd believe that I was once considered ‘close to the spirit'. Should I respond in the nonsense tongue spasms that meant God was talking through me? But it's hard to be defiant when you're on your back and you have on a robe that shows your rainbow knickers if you stand up. I stared at the raisins.

‘I've already said yes twice. Why is twice not enough times for me to say it? I'm sure. Give me the jab.'

She pushed me over and gave me a sharp jab just below the red piping of my knickers that meant I couldn't get pregnant again for three months, no cotton wool or swab, then walked back through the ward like she was trying to slice the air.

I stared at the ceiling with its brown, finger-shaped stain and a daddy-long-legs taking refuge from the bleach smell. The woman next to me lay on her side, her body going in and out, a squeeze box of sobs.

I wondered if it was deliberate. Why else wouldn't they close her curtain or mine? There was a woman across the ward reading a
Woman's Own
, flicking through, licking her middle finger as she went. She looked like she was at a spa and I thought that she must be getting her tubes tied. We were all in for our tubes in one way or another.

You could taste it on your tongue, after the pinprick, before you felt it sneaking away up your arm like metal. The anaesthetist kept saying, ‘Count backwards, Janie, from twenty . . . nineteen . . .' and while I counted backwards and felt the drug filling up my vein I had a little daydream that we would get married. I couldn't see much over the mask but he had soft eyes and gentle hands and didn't seem to hate me for taking up his time with my Yarco slapper shite. He held my hand gently and the needle hardly hurt at all going in.

My nose itched and the Beautiful South played in the background. I had that tape, I listened to it when I was in the bath and sung along. The first thing I said after they vacuumed me out was, ‘I know all the words to this.'

They wheeled me from the room with the lights and tables of other sleeping patients and back to my ward filled with grey afternoon light. The squeeze-box woman was on her other side, facing me. She looked older, at least thirty, and she wasn't shuddering any more, just staring with wet leaking from her pale brown eyes. I thought she might shout or attack me but she didn't even seem to see me.

They brought round lunch and said I had to eat before I could go. I ate the hard little pot of green jelly. I felt empty, though I knew that was just a trick because they hadn't taken anything but a lump.

I've always liked jelly, the way you can gulp it down without using your teeth. That's what green jelly reminds me of now, pale brown leaking eyes, the same colour as the saline stains splashed up my thighs, and the currant-eyed nurse staring at me from the nurses' station probably thinking to herself, ‘Oh! She's eating her pudding. Lord help us if a murderer can sit here and enjoy a pudding at the NHS's expense.'

You wouldn't think I'd eat green jelly any more but I do. It's important to remember.

I caught the Banana bus home. They didn't check that someone was there to get me, I just signed the form and walked out, the giant NHS sanitary pad like a whole toilet roll jammed between my legs.

Ma was having a sleep when I got in and Tiny was at school. I lay in the bath that turned a pale brown from the saline and whatever was still inside of me and then lay on the sofa under a pale yellow candlewick and ate some rice pudding from the tin while watching
Neighbours
. Ma came in and sat at the end of the sofa on my feet.

‘How was Beth?' She scratched at a spot on her chin. I stared at the telly.

‘Fine. Her bump's already huge.'

She looked at me, her eyes squinting with leftover sleep and impatience. ‘You alright?'

‘Aye, just a bad hangover.'

She nodded, a heavy movement like she expected nothing less, but she leaned over and tucked the blanket under me, her fingers flat between my body and the sofa. I was worried she'd smell the hospital on me, or maybe feel I was just a pinch of flesh lighter.

‘Well, yeh'll get no sympathy from me. The way yeh carry on with shots of this an' that, with pints of snakebite. And keeping Beth out all hours when yeh know it's no way fer a girl in her condition to be behaving. Yer asking fer it.'

*

You could say I was asking for it. I'm sure they would say that. A girl my age drinking by herself in the Garibaldi, chugging back Orange Breezers at the bar for everyone to see. Wearing that little vest, her belly showing.

And if I could defend myself? I'd say I was only by myself because my best mate was pregnant and that I'd only picked the Gari because it was for oldies and I didn't want to see anyone. I'd tell them that I was drinking Breezers because they were on special and that I needed a drink after another day when I was called a cunt and a whore at school and then had another screaming match with my ma. That I didn't think to change when I left the house, didn't think that jeans and a vest were a come-on.

I'd tell them that I only took the oldie's drink because he put it in front of me without asking if I wanted it and it was a vodka and Coke and I was sick of fizzy, sweet Breezers and that when I drank it down in one I was waiting for him to say, ‘Easy there, sweetheart, there's more where that came from,' or maybe, ‘I'm not made of money, you know,' when instead he just watched my throat as I emptied the glass in two deep gulps.

But what would be the point? Because after that there's nothing, just a black hole with a scared, sick feeling around the edges. Then, when I'd say I couldn't remember, they'd say it again, ‘You see? Hammered. Asking for it.'

But I didn't ask to wake up frozen on the beach in a dark, damp circle of my own piss. I didn't ask for my knickers to be ripped or the bruises up each thigh, a yellow-and-pink finger painting that wouldn't fade fast enough. Or for the pain, outside and in, when I sat down for a week afterwards.

And after I dragged myself home reeking and ashamed and not knowing why, and I forced myself to push that night down to the bottom of me and sanded off the sharp edges with more booze, I didn't ask for my period to abandon me after our four short years together.

It is true I asked for a lot back then: my belly button pierced, red Converse, Glastonbury tickets, a valentine card from a lad I fancied, for Beth not to be pregnant, for a future away from Yarmouth. But I didn't ask for my mouth to fill with spit or my gullet with bile when I felt sand on my skin, or to find myself panting for air if a lad so much as whistled at me. I never asked for the thwack, thwack, thwacking that echoed in my limbs or the feeling of filth right up inside me.

You might think that I'd be angry. At them I mean, at those that thought a girl like me would ask for it, a girl who'd go out and do that every weekend with some stranger anyway. A tart from the estate, who'd be pushing a buggy by the time she was seventeen. Who dressed to be looked at, who, you could just tell, from the way she walked, her head held high, swinging her arse, thought that sex was as predictable and pointlessly unprofitable as the penny machines in the arcades. It was no wonder that those pennies cascaded over and pinned her down, filled her up with the taste of other people's pockets and hands. They would laugh and say, ‘The penny dropped for her alright,' or, ‘I heard she spent a penny all over herself.' They would roar together at the girl who was asking for it and got it given.

But I wasn't angry. I thought those things myself, plucking at my eyelashes and eyebrows with my fingers, teeth ripping at my cuticles, as though I was getting rid of myself one tiny piece at a time. Start gouging out little bits with my nails, then chunks with a bread knife and finish the job with a cheese grater or maybe the pumice stone that Ma kept on the edge of the bath.

I thought, what was the difference? What did it matter whether I chose to give it to some stranger whose name I wouldn't remember or had it taken? Hadn't I spent enough time in the shadows of that pier holding my legs wide anyway? I thought everything they would have thought myself. Asking for it. Deserved it. Welcomed it. And it would have been easier to keep thinking that way but it wouldn't stick. What did stick was the steely taste in my mouth, the feeling of someone else inside of me and his dirty fingers in my mouth. A person who hadn't checked first whether or what I was prepared to give. So I'd tell them, the reason I knew I wasn't asking for it is because, if I did ask for anything back then, though maybe it was asking for too much, the thing I always asked for was a condom.