Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Burning Arrow of the Spire
The Other City
A River Curling Like Smoke
1
2
3
4
As Close to the Stars as Possible
Deep in the Middle of Nowhere
The Burning Arrow of the Spire
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Bantam Press
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Barney Norris 2016
Barney Norris has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473540026
ISBNs 9780857523723 (hb)
9780857523730 (tpb)
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For Charlie
We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.
George Eliot, Middlemarch
LONG BEFORE THE steep trickle of the Channel widened to make an island of England, before the first settlers arrived and started claiming the land around, laying down tree trunks to make pathways through marshes from ridgeway to mountain to hill, something unusual happened in the green south of Wiltshire. By a trick of the land, the rivers known today as the Wylye and the Ebble and the Nadder and the Bourne, which all ran through this landscape, all found their way into the Avon in the same stretch of flood-prone fields, pitched into one another by the sly gradients of the county lying in front of me this evening. Five rivers met on a wooded plain, and under the weight of that water, an extraordinary thing took place. The startled world, stirred by this confluence of riverways, started to sing bright notes into the blue air. A great chord rang out in the deep heart of England, and feeling welled up through the skin of the water like a shaft of light that breaks through cloud. The earth was awake and alive and amazed by every sensation it experienced.
Centuries passed, and people found this miracle in the green south of the island, this rare confluence of water giving voice to the song being sung by the world, either by accident as they passed through or drawn by the sound of it. However it happened, people undoubtedly came, and we know they heard the song. They kept trying to put it into words, to make a shape of it.
The first attempt was Woodhenge. You can still visit. You will find the remains of a wooden circle that someone built in the middle of a clearing, heeding the call, feeling the need to worship. The place is surrounded by trees and hills. There are stone circles intersecting with it. There is a tea room for visitors. The settlers moved on within a few thousand years, looking for some more permanent expression of the feeling in the landscape than wood could provide.
Stonehenge was what they made next, a few miles to the south. It was a miracle of Egyptian proportions. Great slabs of rock quarried deep in flint and rain of the Welsh hills and barged halfway over the country to stand opaque in the middle of nowhere, an Easter Island marooned on the soft green roll of a hill. People wonder what it was used for. The mystery must have been part of the point. The thing about stone is you don’t get to the heart of it. It stares back into you, its secret intact and inviolable. The stone circle gave life to a million ley-line stories that still sprout from the soil around that place today. It created a whole world of imaginings, freedoms, rituals. But the stories and solstices that are part of the Stonehenge myth are only subordinate clauses of a greater phenomenon. They are only new phrases in the song that was born in the rivers, as it seeks and finds other outlets, pouring into new mediums, expressed now in story, behaving like a river pursuing a path of less resistance as it finds its way into the mouths of women and men.
The next iteration of the song in stone was a cathedral built in the middle of a hill fort. The men and women who worshipped at Stonehenge were long gone by the time Old Sarum was built a few miles to the south. Some other listener must have heard the rivers, understood there was life to be lived here and laid a foundation. Old Sarum, the first city constructed out of that impulse, was a garrison fort whose walls encircled a body of men, beds for them to sleep in, fires that kept them living and the cathedral at the heart of it. As had been the case before, it was the place of worship that best expressed the song in the air and the rhyming human desire to look up, imagine further, see the vastness of the world around and the ideas hidden in the landscape. It was around the cathedral and the sweep of its tower that this new society and its arguments were organised.
The first cathedral collapsed and was replaced by a second, built on the same spot from many of the same stones. But faith and the army don’t mix well, and it wasn’t long before the church fell out with the soldiers. Tensions rose, the cohabitation of the hill became insupportable, and it was decided the cathedral should relocate. And it is now that this process of stanza following stanza I have been describing reaches its climactic, capstone rhyme. This budding on the vine of flower after flower each successive spring, the growth of form after form like shapes in a coal fire as Woodhenge and Stonehenge and the Old Sarum cathedrals tried to mimic the music of the land around leads now to the apex of our story, as Salisbury Cathedral emerges from these myriad discarded drafts, the best expression of the land around finally soaring up into the air.
The minutes documenting the meeting where the decision was made to relocate the cathedral are lost, but someone, recognising their absence as a fault in the historical record, has invented a story to stand in their place. The story goes that on the day it was decided the church would leave the hill, the bishop of the second cathedral on Old Sarum took a bow and arrow and stood looking over the land around. He announced he would fire into the landscape below, and wherever the arrow stuck would become the site for the new building. His problem, of course, was the same chauvinism that hobbles most men. When the bishop fired his arrow, by way of reminder that he was not, never had been, never would be in charge of the world beneath his feet, a white hart interceded between the blade and the ground, and the bishop watched, perhaps crestfallen, certainly amazed, as the arrow lodged in its haunches. The startled deer proceeded to run for three miles before expiring in the middle of the floodplain south of Old Sarum where those five rivers met.
Nowhere could have been harder to build on. Foundations could only be sunk eighteen inches. But the building work began all the same, and over the course of only five thousand years – the blink of an eye in geological terms – the song of the earth had coaxed the men who built their cover versions over the land fourteen miles south from Woodhenge, to Stonehenge, to Old Sarum, to the source of the music itself. It had reeled us in. And they say Christ was a fisher of men.
Salisbury Cathedral was built laboriously, lovingly. It lay on foundations that should never have held. A spire was added which ought to have fallen, and the pillars at the heart of the nave bowed and sang like a tree after rain, when the rain still falls from the canopy long after the sky has cleared.
Life welled up in the shadow of the building, a city that was named New Sarum, though it came eventually to be known as Salisbury. Events of historical importance blushed up in the streets, couples met and were married and grew old together, harvests were good or else failed, falcons nested on the spire, and the invention of the aeroplane meant there had to be a light bulb at the top, which someone sometimes had to climb up and change. House prices rose and kept rising and took flight, drink killed too many, and young men and women fell in love, and some of the sex was good and some was forgettable. The song went on. Five rivers ran together, and the earth sang in celebration at the top of its voice, a music hidden in the details of the everyday, in the footfalls of thousands of locals, the ringing of cash registers, the great soaring dream of the spire.
And the song sings on, finding a new path of less resistance to the sea and sky.
Salisbury Cathedral is the most beautiful building I have ever seen. I don’t quite mean the look of the place. Buildings are not beautiful because of their shapes or patterns, the bricks or stones that make them. What are transfixing are the ideas and dreaming and longing they encase. They stand as memorials to the lives of the people who made them, who raised the money to raise the walls, who buried the men who fell from the scaffolding. What I see when I watch Salisbury Cathedral cutting the air is a diagram of prayer, the hope at the centre of my life expressed as the burning arrow of the spire shot into the sky, asking us to look up beyond the everyday, see the size and possibility and quietness of the landscape, and imagine something greater than we are. It asks us to stop walking and think. It demands we look outside ourselves.
I have stared at that spire every night for a year now, and I think it is the purest picture of the human heart I have seen. It seems to me from this vantage point that the city has been built as an illustration of the way all our ordinary acts, our cups of tea and walks to the postbox and phone bills and potato peelings, are shot through with a heartbreaking and extraordinary love. That there exists in all of us a song waiting to be sung which is as heart-stopping and vertiginous as the peak of the cathedral. That is the secret meaning of this quiet city, where the spire soars into the blue, where rivers and stories weave into one another, where lives intertwine.
ONE WAY I bung a bit extra’s the funerals. Cos there’s always flowers at funerals, aren’t there? In my trade you have a bit to do with dead people. Like you have a bit to do with brides and adulterers and all. It’s about extremes, is selling flowers, that’s why they’re such bright colours. That’s when people buy them – something banging, something shit. When I have a busy morning I know it’s either been a car crash or it’s Valentine’s Day and no one’s sent me a card again. I was never the one the nice boys fancied even when I was in school. But what’s a girl to do? I carry on, that’s always been my story.
I made myself a couple of friends straight off after I got my stall. You don’t get anywhere without regulars. You have to have some steady trade keep you ticking. I did a bit of flower arranging in a couple of churches, charmed some grandmas, charmed some vicars. I shagged a couple of undertakers, and that’s paid off and all. They say it’s the ones you don’t fuck stay loyal, but fucking them’s a fair way of getting their attention, I’ll tell you that for nothing.
So today I was doing this little old bloke’s sending off into the sunset, or the ground. It was in St Martin’s church, sweet little draughty place on the edge of the city with a lovely old rood screen they hid in the civil war. It’s so funny how recent history can feel sometimes when you live in a place like this; you can stand and look at a thing people were hiding in the 1600s so it didn’t get chopped up, and that was more or less the last important thing that happened in here. That might as well have been yesterday.
I think the vicar at St Martin’s pulls the odd fast one. He’d sold this widow the works, had me doing lilies ring-a-rosy round the coffin, but no one came to the funeral. Just the family, poor little things feeling sad, though you could see in the photo they put on the coffin he’d been fit to bust a while before anything happened – wilted or withered or wrinkled or rotten, whatever the word. Dozen in all, dirty dozen snivelling in their dirty hankies. It’s so fucking sad, an empty funeral. This vicar, he’d sold them an organist pumping out Chopin, and someone had shifted a fuck-off coffin the old girl looked like she couldn’t afford – what are the best ones, are they oak maybe, mahogany? – and the old girl herself sitting there crying in her shit funeral outfit. Folk in Wiltshire don’t half look backward sometimes.
I stayed for the service cos I like the music, it’s dreamy, and the family smiled and didn’t ask me who the fuck I was. People in England are that fucking scared, buttoned-up, stick up their arses, buried under everything, you can sit in a stranger’s funeral and no one asks how you knew him.
I didn’t go the burial or the wake, mind. It’s not about taking the piss. I just like the words and the sweet dream music.
I chavved my pennies out of Rev’s sweaty palm when it was over, his leering palm held out like I should lick it, like I’m a horse and he’s feeding me carrots. Bowed and scraped cos you have to be grateful with the God squad. Smug cunts. They know you need them, know as well as you all the trade comes trailing after the bodies they bury, know you want them to call you and not some other slapper, never let you forget it. I’d like to shove it in his fucking face and see him eat it. But I need my regulars. I’d have a hard time making friends again now. Not many undertakers fancy a go once you’re my side of sixty. It’s all about sex with the vicars, too – they always want you, that’s why they call you, that’s the game. This is what I’ve learned. Sex is everything. There’s sex in everything. Everything you do is sex, and you know for sure how it works when it stops fucking working. So I bow and scrape because I need the ones who don’t see the real me when they meet me. I need the ones who remember what I looked like when I were young. Who are looking at me through memories, who still fancy me cos they like remembering their lives when they were young as well. I need those boys, cos I’d never make new friends now.
The old girl was standing in the churchyard like a dog without a master when I walked out the porch with my bags and my rucksack and my sadness over my shoulder. I thought she’d want to pass me by. I know what it looks like, a coffin in a grave, how far down it is, how fucking weird it is there’s someone in there who was part of you. I wouldn’t talk to anyone if I had someone to love and they went and died. But she seemed to think like the opposite, seemed to want the company. Cos she perked right fucking up when she saw me, like she was wagging her tail and trotting to sniff.
‘Thank you for staying for the service,’ she said, and she was looking at me like I might want to say some fucking thing back at her about how nice it was or where did she get her frock or what was she doing with her husband’s money now he didn’t need it. I didn’t know what to say. I’d never really been thanked after a show before. Ignored, usually. Once or twice someone feeling pissed off if I hung around to listen to the organ when they carried the corpse out. No one’s ever been glad about me at a funeral in my life.
‘It was a lovely service,’ I said.
‘Do you think?’
‘Yeah. It was lovely music. It was your husband?’
‘Yes.’
Stupid question. I watched her want to burn up, want to wither up. Course it was her husband. People her age don’t know no one except the one they’re married to. That’s why it’s important to stay married if you can fool someone into marrying you. Cos your world ends around you all the time you’re growing older.
‘I’m sorry for your loss.’
She smiled, like she knew as well as I did what an empty fucking phrase is that one.
‘Thank you. Are you going back to your stall?’
‘Yeah. How do you know about my stall?’
‘I’ve seen you in the market. You’re in front of the Guildhall. I used to walk past you on my way to the library. I used to go to get him books.’
I thought it was so strong of her she could say that.
‘Oh right.’
‘And mine. But I never read as fast as he did.’
‘Yeah?’
‘He was always a better reader than I was. Have a good afternoon, then.’ She bowed her head like she was letting me pass, and I suppose she wanted me to fuck off, didn’t she, so I said the same to her, have a good one or whatever, which wasn’t big enough words either, and I walked on out through the gate to the road beyond and the shutdown pub and the bowlin’ alley and the Laser Quest and the YMCA and the side way into town past the nightclub and the strip club and the dodgy Chinese and the cheap hotel. My Salisbury, the other city, the one you don’t see from the cathedral. And I thought, I wish I had big enough words I could do something for her. I wish there was some fucking thing I could say. I wish I could get out the feelings I’m feeling and make a river of them and help her.
And then I thought I wish I had what she had. I wish I had something worth losing.
I was a wild child but he was wilder. First notch at thirteen – I lay down in a wood with this boy, this blond tousle-haired boy I met in the fields outside my house. I don’t know why. I hardly knew him, didn’t even fucking like him. We ran around for a few weeks – we were kissing, holding hands, I let him rummage around up my skirt and then he wanted me and I suppose I let him. When I were fifteen I’d slept with fifteen boys. After that, one set of notches grew faster than the other for a fair bit. Then in my forties the years overtook the boys again, and I’m once more like a girl these days, having had more hot dinners than lovers. There’s second childhood for you. Long dry years stretching all around me for ever Amen.
I used to meet them at gigs and go with them into the shitters. Used to go with them in parks, end up on my hands and knees on the benches in Lizzie’s and them disappointing behind me. Used to go with them at house parties, slip into bedrooms, slip into any empty room, more than one in a night if I fancied. I think I thought I loved it. Used to go with them in the shed at the bottom of the garden where we kept Dad’s stuff if he ever wanted to come back and get it, if they were nice enough or canny enough to walk me home. Used to go with them all because it always seemed like what they wanted. But he wouldn’t go with me first time.
We met at a disco in a scout hut in Harnham. Not a place you set out for expecting to meet the love of your life. I’d gone looking for lads, and there was a bar, and they let us bring vodka. Me and my ladies, me and my girls. I don’t know any of them now. Wonder where they ended up, whether they’re rich, whether they’re happy. I fucking hope they’re all as miserable as I am.
He was the tallest boy there, and I knew from the minute I walked in he’d picked me. Sometimes you can feel it, like gravity. Wherever I stood in the room I could tell where he was, which corner of the room and when he was listening to me. Like he was a plughole and sucking me into the middle of the world, cos I always thought the middle of the world was where he was after that evening.
And we made out in the car park and I put my hand on his cock and he took it away. So I undid his belt and I reached in and thought about blowing him there behind the scout hut against the Astra we were leaning on, but he said no, took my hand away, and I didn’t understand it, felt embarrassed, felt ashamed like he didn’t like me. And he said it wasn’t like that, he just wanted to see me at the weekend, just thought we might get to know each other before we did anything else maybe.
I was seventeen years old. I fell in love for the first and only time, fell in love with the idea of just talking. Like he wanted to hear me, like he thought I might be interesting.
Even then, first night behind the scout hut, my hand on his cock down his trousers, he was playing the long game, reeling me in.
I’d never had a boyfriend before. What a funny word, that – seems cutesy and old world even when you’re a kid. I still hear people using it today though, old people, scared to commit to any more of a real fucking life than they had when they were sixteen, scared to be anything more than provisional. Most of us are fucking suitcases buffeting our way through lost luggage, aren’t we? That’s the problem.
It was better, of course. Better than one-offs, I mean. The sex got better when you learned each other’s secrets and you talked and you went on adventures. I didn’t always believe him when he told me he loved me, but I always liked hearing it. Fucking massive feeling that. Like something in you’s bursting if you love them back, like a massive fucking cardiac arrest.
He started fucking around pretty early. And I’ve had enough NHS counsellors tell me ever since he was a leech, he was a wanker, he picked me out cos he thought I was weak enough to keep in his pocket while he fucked around. Cos what it was was he didn’t like shagging or nights out or pretty women, what he was addicted to was cheating on girls. Thrill of it, fun of it. Black ops. Fuck ops. He needed someone he was hurting before he could come, that was more or less the shape of it, the trouble with his dick. And I nod when they tell me, I nod when they explain me my life like it happened in a textbook. But they don’t know shit all, really. They don’t know anything. And if they were in my place they’d have forgiven him and all and gone on taking him back every fucking time he got caught with his cock in some stranger. Wasn’t like there was anyone else in the world for me. Wasn’t like I didn’t need him just cos he fucked me over. I was in fucking love with him, wasn’t I?
We had fights. I’d go back to my mum’s, if we were talking, or I’d stay at a mate’s house. He’d always find me, cos the other thing he got off on was having me forgive him. Got a hard-on crying to my shoulder, crying at my feet, crying down the phone in the middle of the night. And I’d always fucking melt in the end. I was like a fucking snowman round him.
That was the first two years. Then there were the good years, cos he stopped. He stopped for ages the minute he knew I was up the duff.
I went back to the stall and hung out there for the rest of the day, and it was just like most other days of my life – fucking quiet, fucking boring. Day after day after day after day nothing happens and it all feels so like waiting, but the thing is, the thing that scares you if you stop to think about it is, it’s not waiting; there’s nothing to wait for; you’re not waiting for anything. It’s just your life. Fuck me, it’s awful when you stop to think. We’re all in training for a race that won’t happen. That’s why I try not to think more than I fucking have to. Cos it’s most of your life, the awfulness, so you put up and shut up and make your money and have your evenings and try to distract yourself and try to stay pissed enough or stoned enough to not stop and think. And most of the time that’s enough to keep out the cold.
Night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night after night.
At the end of day I packed up and binned up and locked up and went to the Hatchet and bought half a kilo off Dave. He stared at my tits the whole time we were talking, but I don’t mind him. I’d put my push-up on so as to give him an eyeful. He’s all right, is fucking Dave. I had a vodka and tonic and a vodka and tonic and a vodka and tonic and then we were out back having a jump in the ladies. No one ever uses the ladies shitters in the Hatchet. No fucking ordinary women ever drink there; they only keep them open for shagging or coke. And that was how my night ended, up against a cubicle wall again with lovely dirty Dave. Going back in the bar for another drink and thinking of the old girl standing in the graveyard for some reason, not able to stop thinking about that sad old fucker in her sad old outfit, shiny at the cuffs where she’d spent so many years rubbing her nervous fingers trying to make the arms long enough when they just weren’t. Walking home alone to Coldharbour Lane at end of evening with the thought of her and half a kilo of weed in my bra, the swallow tattoo on my hand my only star to steer by.
What was she doing now? That was what I wanted to know. What do you do the first night after you bury your feller?
I got the booze sweats, every year as the pounds keep piling on and the bulk of my body drowns me a little further I sweat worse and worse when I drink. I lay on my back and I stared at the ceiling. And I thought of her lying the same way somewhere in Wiltshire, saw her face again and again as the room span. I forgot to close my curtains, and all the time I was awake and lying there I thought the cathedral might come over and get me, pull its legs out like they were roots and walk right over my ends to peek in the window. I hate the red eye of that spire. Staring into you like Lord of the Rings. It sings you to sleep when you let it into your head, when you start to wonder of an evening whether you really belong here. It’s like nodding off to heavy fucking metal. So you think you deserve to live here? it says. You think you deserve to breathe the same air as me? You think you belong with my people, you’re one of my people? You can fuck off if you think that.
Dealing’s more like running a club than a business. I don’t sell to anyone if I don’t know them. I’ve got my regulars, and they’re all I want to keep me ticking over. It’s nice. You get sort of close to them over the years. Plenty kids I been selling to since they were fourteen or fifteen are thirty now. I watch their lives happen to them, clothes change, haircuts, shoes they walk in. They’re my favourites, kids whose A Level results I remember better than they do. They all work in Londis or Costcutter or Co-op or Tesco now, but I remember how excited they used to get about turning into rock stars. Some of them get somewhere of course. A boy called Liam went and worked for the Guardian. I don’t know whether he works there any more. Another boy called Andy joined the police. But most of them, I have to admit your average stoner’s not an aspirational type.
The other trade comes from passers-through. Posh kids, grammar school boys. Rubberneckers thinking they learn something smoking. You pick them up by word of mouth, give your number out careful, and the strivers fuck off after a few years to London, cos they don’t think there’s life worth living in Salisbury. Smug cunts. But you take their money while they’re knocking around. It’s fair to say there’s a fair bit of preying on the thick or the fuck-ups. You can’t feel bad about it; you get used to it. You’re the highlight of the week for them, and even if you’re not doing them any good it’s hard to feel guilty when they’re that pleased to see you. I never sell from the stall, can’t be mixing that up, so I deal in the evenings. Mornings I’m getting the flowers. And the texts roll in all day and I line up my trades. And I run my stall and I smoke my fags. And I meet them here and there in the evenings.
And it was on the night after I did the old lady’s funeral I got busted. I was waiting outside the shitters in Vicky’s for a sale and the cunt was late. There’s a lesson for you: don’t fuck around with timekeeping, never fucking wait if they won’t turn up, cos you’re out there with your arse in the air and your pockets stuffed and you never know what’s gonna happen to you. Some cunt of a gavver, a pig like, he comes round the corner, grin on his face like he already knew he had me. Stopped and searched and I had an ounce in different baggies – that’s the way you do it, buy in kilos, sell in ounces. And he carted me off, and I told him if I had a prick as big as he was I’d fuck his good day’s work up his nose till it came out his eyeballs, and then I was in a cell and he’d locked me up, the fucking cunt that he was. And I sat on the little bench you get there and I wanted to cry, cos with my record and eight little baggies in my pocket I knew I was fucked, simple as. They’d roll it all out in front of me.
Smallsbury, they call it. Everyone knows everyone and everyone’s business and everyone’s treading on everyone’s toes and of course if you sell long enough in a town that small you end up busted, and I was stupid, I suppose, for not thinking that when I still could have done summat about it. All the places I’ve been I’ve never known nowhere like this place for showing you how petty people are and how they like to stick their nose in and have a fish around in the guts of you and find out how your life is and what you’re doing with it. How stuffed their shirts, how up themselves, how self-regarding, how cliquey, how insecure, how vain, how careful looking after number one. Smallsbury’s a club parades itself in front of you but you never join, and in the end if you keep on getting under their feet they fuck you up down some side alley.
I lived a lot of places in my wandering years. Chichester Putney Harlesden Holloway Shepherd’s Bush Norwich Northampton Oxford Scarborough Aberystwyth Hull South Shields Ipswich Exeter Plymouth Watford Hereford Golders Green Andover Tooting Brixton Earlsfield Upavon Corsham Melksham Trowbridge Chippenham Devizes. Oh, my wandering days. I never found people anywhere with sticks fucked further up their arses than Smallsbury, though. But some reason or other I still ended up coming home. That’s what people do. That’s our lives. We don’t pick em, we’re born living them, and there is such a thing as home, you see.
My little one was born, my little boy, and for a long time I didn’t give a fuck about anything else. Only how things might matter to him, what might happen for him if this or that changed or this or that happened. We rented a flat with my dole and his site work, and he got a job in a caff to top us up, and we didn’t have anything, no money and nothing in the flat except what we scrounged off our parents. It must have been shaming for him, a job in a café – woman’s work, really. And that’s why I’ll never hate him. Cos he did that for us, and it must have been a big fucking thing for a boy who wanted so much to act like a man. We went round the charity shops and got all our things for our baby – videos and toys and a cot and a mobile for over the bed and a pram, kind of thing. You get such a list together when you’re having a baby, believe me. I’ve never been so happy before or since than when we filled that flat, and it felt so exciting cos we were acting like grown-ups but we weren’t grown-ups, really.
When Rick was six months I started working some at the same caff as Jonno and leaving Rick with Mum. Every time I saw Mum she’d ask me when I was getting married, and somehow or other, I suppose it must have been me or Mum while she was pissed at some party, that got back to Jon and we started talking about it. How we’d like our little boy to have married parents, one surname, normal family, real life, you know the kind of thing. We had a colour TV by this time, we were proper strivers for a bit. And before we knew it we’d booked a slot at the registry office and a knees-up at the Red Lion, proper man and wife love story we were gonna be. Then Jonno got done for assault one Saturday night town centre, and we had to cancel the hotel and the guests and the registry office so sharp they all got pissed and kept their deposits.
That was a hard time. It was a bad fucking idea to work in the same fucking cafe as your feller, and I didn’t miss that when he went inside – bawling each other out in front of strangers, smashing cups cos every minute of every day we were round each other – but it was worse than that having to move back in with my fucking mum to that horrible house I’d sworn I’d never go back to, and said as much to Mum when I left as well.
I kept my head down. Mum paid for everything and helped me with my Ricky. I wrote Jonno letters and I visited. I was always faithful. He didn’t believe me, but I never went with any other bloke. I had more important things to be thinking about than anything like that. But he was suspicious, I suppose, cos he knew if I’d ever gone away that’s what he woulda fucking done in a heartbeat.
My little boy. My Ricky. He was so perfect you couldn’t ever describe it, not with a million words if you had time to write them. I was like some kind of fucking wolf when I thought about what my boy meant to me. I’d show my teeth, cos the muscles in my face went taut when I thought how much I loved him. Jonno missed his first steps, first word. I had to tell him so much he wasn’t there for, and he cried in the visiting room to think of what was happening, and I tried to be kind but I was angry all the same because it was his fault, wasn’t it, it was him had taken himself away from us.
Ricky’s first word was still Dad, though.
When Jonno got out I thought we’d get back to starting our lives again, but it was all changed. He didn’t want to get another flat straight off, said he hadn’t the work or the money, needed to build himself up again, so we both stayed living in our parents’ houses. There was no talk about marrying ever again. But I think if there had been he would have said it was kids’ stuff. That was how he acted – like he wanted me to think scales had fallen from his eyes and he saw the world was harder than he used to believe it. I didn’t buy it for a minute. I never thought he loved our little baby like I did, but I thought he’d got caught up in it all and I thought that was enough. But six months away and all that feeling died down. Six months away and the spell broke; he couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, couldn’t see why all his life had to be paying for the life of this little fucker he wasn’t sure he loved very much. I don’t think he was really up for love.
So I knew what was coming. I watched his eyes when he told me he was out with the lads this or that Saturday, and I knew what was going to happen. I looked after my baby and I fought with my mum, but I didn’t think about moving out or asking him if we might live together again, cos the moment had passed. I could see it drifting away behind me like a station you’ve been through, like passing through Basingstoke on the way home from London and you see the lights fall away behind you as the train goes back into the dark. And I could tell what was waiting for me at the next stop.
Still, it was a shock when I did catch him at it. It was humiliating more than anything. He was shagging one of my mates from the caff.
They granted bail, course – couple of hundred quid of weed they were always going to bail me even if they lock me up later, and I walked out the station and got in Mum’s car and we drove home. Mum looked after me like she always has. I don’t know why I’ve always been so bad to her. If there’s one thing I regret it’s how old she is now and how long she’s had to put up with me acting the fucktard, cos even if I apologised now, even if we kissed and made up, it wouldn’t matter. She’d still have spent most of her life with me like a cloud over her shoulder, she’ll always have had all that shit in her life even if she forgives it. That’s why I’ve never tried to make up, I guess. No point, really. We drove without talking, and then she was in my ear while we were still in the hall, before we got in the kitchen, before we even stuck the kettle on.
‘What were you thinking, love? What were you doing?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t apologise to me, Rita. It’s your life, isn’t it?’
And then Mum, she sat me down, stuck a cuppa under my nose, and she balled up the sleeves of her skanky blue cardigan in her fists and laid it all out for me. Spoke it all out, what I already knew but thought I’d hide in the back of my mind for a little while yet, all the news I didn’t want on the radio – she sat me down and made me listen to it. What I’d done, who I’d turned into, what the fuck was going to happen to me now.
She told me I’d fucked it. For a few extra quid I’d given all my freedom, cos they were sure as hell gonna send me down. I didn’t even need to do it. Paid my rent off the stall, didn’t need the money. She told me I’d lose my stall if six months was what they gave me, even if it was only six months it was a sure thing there’d be fuck all to come back to. She asked me what I’d been thinking. How I could have risked all I had for no fucking reason. And I couldn’t tell her. I’d always fucking done it, it was what I did, never thought of getting out I’d been doing it so fucking long. How do you put a stop to something so inside your life? How do you cut a bit of yourself off? As normal as breathing, dealing was, ever since my baby was born.
Then she talked to me about Rich. My boy, my baby boy. The man he turned into. And this was what I didn’t want to have to stare at. This was what I wanted to leave alone. Cos there was no way he’d ever fucking talk to me again now. No way he’d ever let me see my granddaughter.
‘Did you think about that?’
‘No, I thought—’
‘I don’t think you thought at all.’
‘I thought nothing was going to happen.’
‘You were dealing – of course something was going to happen.’
‘All those years and they never busted me.’
‘Busted you for plenty else.’
‘Yeah, but they never fucking busted me for this.’
She just shook her head. And I didn’t argue, cos it’s no defence, is it? Not once it’s happened.
‘You should have seen it coming,’ Mum said, as if it were a train and I’d been playing on a line trying to flatten out pennies. ‘You should have seen it coming.’
So I got in my car that evening and I drove to Southampton. Heart in my mouth and Spire FM playing on the radio till the signal gave out and I had to listen to Solent. The spirit of Salisbury – one oh twoooooooo, Spire FM. I’ve been listening to that jingle all my life, and I don’t think they ever changed it. Play half the same songs and all. Spandau Ballet must be minted. Tonight the DJ was taking the piss out of me. They played all sad songs about love, and I don’t know if I ever felt so lonely in my whole life as I did on that drive listening to Celine Dion and Tina Turner. Cos I haven’t got no one, see. No hope any of the ones I miss are coming back to me again.
Rich lives off the Portswood Road. He’s a teacher; they’re all teachers or students round there. He was always a clever, lovely, lonely boy. He stopped talking to me so long ago I hardly knew how to get to his any more. When I parked up I already knew how it was going to go. But I had to go through with it. Sometimes the play writes itself. I’ll walk up the same garden path with the same slope shoulders the day I get my diagnosis and the cancer starts eating me up. Some things just have to happen. When you know you’re going away somewhere as far as the nick or the grave you try and see your kid.
Lucy came to the door, Lucy’s his wife, and when she saw me she turned white like she’d seen a ghost. I tried to be nice, and she went to find Rich. I could hear a TV playing inside. I could hear a family evening. My granddaughter in there, growing up, and I’m missing all of it. Last time I saw her she wasn’t even talking. She’s a nice girl, Lucy. He did so well. She never got involved with us, me and Rich, knows it has to play itself out. I can tell she looks after him, and that’s the main thing for me. Rich came to the door and stood in the doorway with his back to the light, and I knew he wasn’t going to let me in whatever I said.
‘Hi, Mum.’
‘Hi, love, how are you?’
‘I’m all right. Are you all right?’
‘Not bad. What you been up to?’
He looked mad when I said that.