Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma (20 page)

I rustled the paper. ‘That's a good thing by the way, Tiny. Anyway, listen to this. “Gentle, intelligent 40-year-old man seeks interesting companion for nights of food, music, friendship and possibly more”.'

Ma craned her neck over. ‘Where's that one then?'

‘Here: “Men seeking Men”.'

‘Aye, very fuckin' funny, Janie. I'm glad yer ma's just a big joke to you. Anyway, I'm better off by myself.'

‘No yer no', Ma, you should meet someone or get out a bit.'

She shifted her knees from under Tiny's head now and had turned away from me towards the ashtray; shoulders tight, she made herself another roll-up, pulled the paper back and covered her face. ‘Yer a kid, Janie, yeh've no idea about things.'

‘I'm just saying. Or yeh could make some pals an' go out an' maybe get something better than cleaning this season. The Flamingo Arcade are looking fer cashiers. You could get a haircut, maybe a perm, an' go on Slimfast an' –'

Ma slammed down the paper. ‘Is it not enough that I'm going out to work cleanin' other people's toilets an' that this place is tidy an' there's food in the fridge? I don't need a lecture from my teenage daughter thank you very much.'

‘Well, someone needs tae cause yeh hardly leave the house now, except fer shoppin' an' work. An', Ma, it's true, yer getting huge an' no amount of elastic waistbands is going tae be able tae hide it soon.'

Tiny stood up. ‘Yer not huge, Ma! Janie's a stupid bitch.'

Tiny reached across and patted Ma's belly and Ma turned her face towards the telly in the corner; it was always on, an extra person to turn to when we got sick of the sight of each other. I couldn't see the hurt on her face but I saw her suck in her stomach. ‘Sorry, Ma, I just want yeh tae be happy. What are yeh goin' tae do when we move out? It would be nice then, if yeh had someone.'

Ma turned and took a quick puff of her roll-up to smooth out her wounded expression. ‘Janie, I stay out of your business an' you need tae stay out of mine. That's how this works.'

I said nothing, took back the
Advertiser
and flipped to the jobs. No one asked her to stay out of my business. In fact, sometimes I wished she'd stick her nose right in it.

‘Right, I'm going for a sleep. Wake me when
Corrie
starts, an' put the Fray Bentos and chips in twenty minutes before that.'

She gave the top of my head a kiss, I smelt her roll-ups and sweat smell, then she shuffled off to the bedroom in her slippers and trackies to close out the last three hours of golden afternoon sun.

Circling ads for Waitresses Wanted, I realised that Ma's days of bouncing back were done, she was happy just to roll along till she came to a stop. Then I thought I might be able to make it as a miserable goth after all, until Tiny climbed up beside me. ‘Yer no' really a bitch.'

She tucked her head under my arm, started quietly singing ‘Three Lions'.

*

The Greeks owned most of the seafront cafes. They all had names like the ‘Olympia Grill' and ‘Athena's Chip Shack'.

I went to work at the Acropolis Cafe, a proper waitress with an apron and a pad of my own and my wages went up to £2 an hour plus tips. It was good working for the Greeks, they didn't tax you, but everyone knew that if you pissed one off you'd never work for another, and they had tempers on them that would have given the Ryan Temper a run for its money.

I worked with two Romanian sisters. One was tall, beautiful and a bitch about sharing tips, and the other was a short dumpling, as soft and sweet as butter icing. We'd often catch the tall, bitchy one pocketing a tower of coppers from a table, muttering to herself, ‘I have a first-class university degree.'

After work, Beth, who worked on the dart stall on Britannia Pier, would come and meet me and we'd change in the toilets, banging our knees against the sink trying to get our high heels on and spraying Impulse up our skirts. We'd down a few shots of sambuca in whatever club was likely to have a few tourists in it, get us caught up. We'd dance all night, maybe pull a bloke or two, then stagger back to mine at 3 a.m. ready for a few hours sleep and the next day's fourteen-hour shift.

When I had a day off and I was too hung-over to make it in to town, I'd lie on the sofa all day and read or watch
My So-Called Life
or
X Files
. I'd remind myself that I was different from everyone else in Yarmouth; an American, I could go and live there any time I wanted, go on dates, hang out in diners, get my first ever tan instead of blistering bright pink skin. Sometimes it worked and I felt the walls crumbling away from around me. I got transported to places where anyone could do anything and good things happened to kind people. But sometimes it was just like my books, and it really was just words and stories and when I tried to get back that electric, excited feeling I just felt a bit empty; like I needed a few shots or a good ride. Still, those programmes and books were a bruise I had to keep pressing and I went back again and again to them over the summer. No matter how off the rails I got, whatever stranger I had let shag me, or however hammered I'd been the night before, I always found myself back turning those pages, or flitting through channels, and hoping. And on the days when it didn't feel like magic, I let that empty feeling sink into my bones and it scared the shit out of me.

Ma finally got a council place that summer and we moved to the Barracks Estate; it was so close to the Pleasure Beach that you could smell when they were frying a fresh batch of onions and hear the roller-coaster screams when you were having a shite.

I got my own room to cover with Oasis posters and Ma got herself a garden with a sad, lopsided pampas grass in the middle. Ma seemed happy enough just to stay in the sunny garden while I worked and Tiny ran with the estate kids or visited Doug in his bedsit a few roads up. I'd hoped Ma might make a few pals but then I remembered Pam next door, who was so fat she went to the offie in an electric wheelchair and came back with carrier bags of bottles clanking from its handles, and I thought Ma was probably best off by herself, even if Pam had been friendly, and she hadn't.

Sometimes me and Beth got a day off together.

‘We're like family now, you an' me. Yeh know me better than my ma an' me you. I sometimes wish we could stay on the beach together an' never go home at night,' I told her.

Beth, drawing moustaches on a picture of Sophie Ellis Bextor, gave me a hard look through her eyeliner and drew a speech bubble next to Sophie's mouth that said. ‘More twat, vicar?'

Beth didn't go in for smushy stuff but I knew she was sad the days were getting colder too. She knew that that summer we were closer to each other than our own families and the beach was more familiar than our own homes.

We used the beach for eating ice creams and cones of chips, for sunbathing slicked in baby oil. We met the other freaks there, and went under Britannia Pier for sloppy, pissed-up sex with tourists who'd be on a coach home the next day while we were laughing about their wonky cocks or weird sex noises.

During those six weeks we got to know everything about each other without even meaning to. By the end of the summer I'd a red stripe down my nose that foundation couldn't cover and Beth had morning sickness.

We both knew we'd never have a summer like that one again.

They got embarrassed teenage mums to come and talk to us. They stood in shapeless jumpers of no particular colour and mumbled about how much they wished they'd used protection/waited for someone special/finished their GCSEs, but they all finished by saying that their Marky/Chantal/Moira was the best thing that ever happened to them.

The following week a nurse showed us how to put a condom on a banana while blindfolded. They really went to town on sex education but it was a bit like bringing out a fire extinguisher after the place has been torched by estate kids; we'd all been ‘sexually active' for at least two years, and that was just the slow ones.

Beth wasn't the only one to come back with more than a suntan from the holidays. No one could believe the number of girls wearing their boyfriends' school jumpers and complaining of backaches and cravings. People thought it was an epidemic or something to do with the tides, ‘so many careless girls in one year'. Not one word about the careless lads.

‘I bet the head's having a fit.' I was sitting with Beth behind the music rooms pretending to hang out but really just hiding in the shadowy steps.

‘How's that?'

‘Well, half the girls in Year Eleven are up the duff, it doesn't look good on the school.'

‘What the fuck's that supposed to mean?' She'd been really touchy since she'd found out. After we'd done the test in McDonald's toilets I'd bought her a Happy Meal. She ate her nuggets without a word until I offered her my toy to save for the baby.

‘What's he going to want a My Little Pony for?'

‘Might be a little girl. Do you know whose it is?'

‘What's it matter? It's mine now, like it or fucking not.' She ran out of McDonald's crying, and when I tried to go after she shouted at me to piss off. No one looked up from their Big Macs, they heard worse from the kids' parties.

Now, sitting on the steps, I thought she might do the same again. ‘Jesus, no offence.' I saw little dark spots on her school blouse. ‘Are you cutting again?'

She shrugged, tugged at her sleeve with chipped black varnished nails. ‘Are you trying to deliberately piss me off today?'

I ignored her, snapped the elastic of my necklace against my neck. ‘Have you decided yet?'

‘Keep it, I suppose.' I looked at her with her blood spots on her blouse and bitten nails. She was going to be someone's ma. She met my eyes and gave a tap-water smile. ‘Since all the cool girls are having one.'

She laughed, a sharp, heavy laugh that dropped to the pavement between us. When the bell rang I was even glad to go to Maths.

*

We lived for the weekends. I put up with all the shit, that hadn't stopped after the summer, it just stopped being new, and lived for Friday nights down the Brunswick.

All week we'd talk about what happened last Friday, who we'd get off with, who was a bitch who deserved a slap and what we'd wear; though for Beth that meant baggy and black and for me, same as always, that meant short and sexy.

After a week of being squeezed tight, flattening myself down, trying to merge into walls and disappear myself into carpets, I could go out to the Brunswick and not give a fuck. Be seen, be looked at and give as good as I got.

Shots burned down my throat and I kept drinking until I was on my back. Passed out or with someone on top, it didn't matter. The point was to smash apart the weekdays.

That Friday I was pissed as usual but not hammered, walking ahead through Market Square with the lads from the band, Toe Jam, trying to impress them by saying how old school Jo Whiley was, and then I was flat on my arse. The skinny drummer helped me up and I was pissed enough, and chuffed enough to be on my way to my first lock-in, that I just gave a bow to the lamp post as Gordon and Beth clapped and cheered behind me. ‘That's what I call a Glasgow kiss!'

At every lamp post that we passed on our way down the docks they shouted, ‘Watch it, Janie!' The docks were deserted by day, except for a weightlifting gym above a tyre yard, and by night the only movement was the ripped red canopy of the bar, flapping in the distance, signalling us in.

Gordon hung back, hands in his pockets.

‘You're sure this is alright? I mean, it's cool for us just to turn up?'

The singer turned his head an inch or two but kept his eyes on Beth's boobs, just like he had all through his set. ‘Yeah, I told you, Trevor the owner's sound, I get him gear sometimes. Come on.'

He dragged Beth by the hand and started running and we all followed, our whoops and laughs echoing off long empty shells of buildings. By the time we were knocking on the thick metal door of Dick Van Dykes, Great Yarmouth's only and not-so-premier gay bar, we were tangled up for the night with each other, breathless from a shared joke, reckless from our sprint through the deserted docks, excited by the blacked-out windows and an actual metal slat that opened to see who was asking to get in. The singer from the band pushed his way forward. ‘Trevor, we alright for a drink? They're cool, they're with me.' He grinned round at Beth and easy as that the door clunked open.

I don't know what we were expecting, maybe more mirrors, sex swings and feather boas. What we got was three old bald blokes at the bar, two younger ones in vests dancing up at the end of the room to a mini-disco machine throwing out weak primary colour strobes, a smelly grey carpet, aluminium chairs and tables and eighties posters of bare-chested, bare-arsed blokes across the walls. Gordon spoke first, staring around. ‘Fuck, this is . . . weird?'

We got our drinks in while the singer had a chat with Trevor, middle-aged and neat in stonewashed jeans and polo neck. Gordon's Jack and Coke came with little penis ice cubes floating in it. He wasn't pissed enough not to look nervous and he kept looking over at the lads dancing, pulling his bony hands in and out of his pockets, tugging at his Bush T-shirt, staring down at the tinkling penises in his glass.

‘Can I get some dick an' all please?'

The singer rolled his eyes as I sloshed my half of snakebite across the counter towards Trevor who put his hands on the high waist of his jeans and looked at Gordon shuffling over to a dark corner table.

‘Darling, cock is just for the boys here.'

By the time I walked back to the table, ready to complain of my lack of cock, everyone was watching Beth do a tiny blow job on one of Gordon's ice cubes. You could hardly tell she was pregnant cause she'd always been a big girl, but you could just see the lads in the band thought she was sexy. It was her boobs and that dimple, the lucky bitch.

‘Aye, very impressive, Beth. Let's dance.'

After a while the oldies at the bar headed off and the band left to score some dope and never came back. The drummer hadn't even given me a goodnight snog. By 4 a.m. it was just us and the two younger lads, pals of Trevor's down from Diss.

‘Yarmouth's a shithole but it's better than Diss and I like you. You're not a country bumpkin. What's the scene like in Scotland?'

He had hold of my hips, was shouting boozy breath into my ear, but I could tell he was looking over my shoulder at Gordon, sat at the table staring at his glass, the dance floor and then back to his glass.

‘D'yeh like him then?'

‘Beggars can't be choosers, love.'

He pushed by me and started trying to chat him up, but Gordon just kept staring at the other lad vogueing on a table while Beth pretended to stick notes in his invisible G-string and blew him kisses.

I was by myself now, sat alone in the only gay bar in town, watching Gordon's arms twitch and his Adam's apple bob, his eyes avoid contact as the lad laid his hand on his leg. Gordon didn't move it though. Watching Beth shake her arse and her three-month foetus to Ace of Base, pressing at my lamp-post swollen face with my fingertips.

Trevor walked over to me. ‘Here. Special occasion. For that eye.'

He slid a pint glass across the counter to me, filled with glistening penises just starting to melt. I held one to my eye and crunched through the rest of them, bouncing away to the music, until my teeth were screaming, my tongue was numb and Gordon was scared off by a hand up inside his shirt.

When Trevor let us out, I gave him a kiss on each cheek like I'd seen on TV. The light was starting to bleed into the oil slick of the sea.

‘Did yeh have a good time then?'

I took Gordon's slim hand in mine, Beth's soft, sweaty one in the other; they held on but didn't reply. We walked, three in a line, towards the centre of town, the cold lying on our grimy skin, all the things we could be talking about gathering up in our mouths.

Beth waded in first. ‘He was such a good dancer. If I'm having a boy I hope he's queer. I'd love going out clubbing with him.'

‘Aye, but you'd keep trying to cop off with his blokes.'

‘Only if they were fit.'

Gordon stopped walking, pulling us back. His eyes, lashes so pale you could barely see them, were red-rimmed with tiredness, maybe something else.

‘You two –' He looked bent over, all bony shoulders, hair madder than ever, his hand hot in mine. ‘You two won't talk about this? At school or anything?'

I squeezed his hand and looked at Beth who gave a small shake of her head. ‘Naw, but I am going to tell everyone you mugged me for my kebab to explain the black eye.'

He shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Cheers for tonight, it was . . .'

Seagulls were starting their long daily circling now, cawing to each other and the deserted streets below.

‘A laugh?'

‘Yeah, it was cool.'

He said his goodbyes to me, Beth, baby Beth. Still hand in hand me and her stood and watched him walk away till his hair was just an orange dot on the grey of the street.

Beth spoke first. ‘He's alright, isn't he?'

I put my head on her shoulder and she must've been tired because she didn't shake it off.

‘We all are.'

*

Ma pissed herself at my eye in the morning, after she threatened to murder someone, until she'd got the facts right.

‘Did someone do that to you?'

‘Aye, Ma, a lamp post. I'm a drunken twat.'

Then she put down her fag and got off the sofa to come and have a closer look, checked there was no blood in the eye, that it was just a good ripe bruise, and got me a bag of onion rings from the freezer. I lay down on the carpet in front of the fire in my nightie, the bag of onion rings over the top half of my face and then she pissed herself. I couldn't just hear her laughing, I heard the springs of the sofa straining as she rolled about.

‘Where'd you get to last night? Was it just you an' Beth?'

‘An' Gordon.'

‘Gordon? Poor lad. No Nibble?'

‘They'd rowed, she's a nutter. We were cheering him up. Just us and some lads from the band that was on at the Brunswick. Singer fancied Beth. It was good night. Is my eye that bad? ‘

Ma hoisted herself off the sofa, lifted the bag and made a face. ‘It was a good night, was it?'

‘It was aye.'

‘Well then.'

The eye was bad though, bad enough to earn sympathetic smiles from women on the street for a week to come, but it was worth it. Worth it to see Gordon not stooped and shy, to feel his hand warm and relaxed in mine, even just for the night.

*

Before Christmas a careers guidance counsellor came and installed himself in a Portakabin in the playground. Rumours whizzed through the cold, bored air: he was a pervert; he worked for the benefit fraud people and was collecting evidence about parents. The best story was that he was a talent scout for a music company.

‘Aye, he's going tae say what did yeh get in yer mock exams an', by the way, would yeh mind beltin' us out some Spice Girls an' all?'

Some of the rumours had a sharp glint about them though. He told girls to think about training as a nurse or about a GNVQ in childcare. Unless they were pregnant, in which case he told them about the benefits they could get.

I walked in wanting to teach him a lesson but he had bags under his eyes and sweat patches the size of two oranges though it was freezing. He looked tired, a bit confused and I was half-hearted.

‘So what are your interests?'

‘Oh, I think I'm suited tae oral work mainly.'

His eyes flicked over my laddered tights and then back down to his hands on his folder. I leaned forward; I'd taken off my bra in the girls' toilets.

‘Oh, you mean like maybe a call centre or something?'

‘You mean like chat lines? 0890 numbers? Aye, maybe.' Forget sad, I thought, he was a bastard, sitting there being condescending to us. Encouraging us to aim for the gutter. ‘But I'm really, really good with my hands an' all? What do you think I should do?'

‘Well, nursing's a good steady job, and tell me, do you like children?'

The sweat patches were the size of melons. No, it was sad I decided. He sat in a Portakabin all day with a little fan heater and us lot for company. I sat back up straight, pulled my skirt down a few inches and dropped the tease from my voice. ‘Listen, I don't mind children but not fer a job and I'm not interested in nursing neither before yeh say it. I was thinking about studying tae be a lawyer.'

‘A solicitor.'

‘Aye, what's the difference? I could do legal aid, help people not able tae afford a proper lawyer. An' –'

He gave a grim laugh then straightened his face. ‘Well, if that's what you think. Maybe the Citizens' Advice Bureau would be the sort of thing –'

‘Why would I not just go to uni an' study law? It's free, isn't it? So everyone can have a go.'

I felt a prickle of tears, a bit of something lacing through my words, hurt or maybe anger: pathetic. He leaned forward and spoke slowly, a suppressed laugh dancing at the corners of his mouth but not reaching his eyes.

‘You're from the Barracks Estate, am I right?' He was acting like the Big I Am now.