Sam finished dishing out and uncapped a bottle of gin. One of the comfortable, square bottles, the girth of which neatly fits the palm.
“I’ve got a fifty-pence piece!” Iris shouted out. “Sally, you really ought to have some pud! You get free surprise money with every portion!” She waved the coin and the square of lilac paper it had been folded into. “And what’s written on this? Is it my fortune?” She read aloud, “’Age before Beauty’. What’s that supposed to mean? What have you got, Peg?”
“Two pence.” Peggy shrugged. She looked at Sam, who shrugged too, and poured herself more gin. “And this says, ‘There’s no place like home’.”
“They’re not fortunes,” said Iris, “they’re mottoes. We got it wrong. They don’t tell your future at all.” She paused in one of those curious moments of lucidity and doubt often brought on by alcohol, and added, “These aren’t about the future; these are about the way things are.”
Sam let out a sharp yelp of laughter and raised her glass to her mother’s lover.
“What do you have, Mark?” Peggy asked him gently.
“No money.” He smiled sadly. “Just a piece of paper. Lots of writing, though, by the looks of it.” He began to unfold it.
“What does Dad’s future say?” Sally asked from the carpet. “Mum, what does Dad’s future tell us?”
Sam slipped back into the kitchen with her glass and the bottle.
In the oven the lilac paper had turned brittle and crisp. It was charred slightly at the edges and botched with alcohol and grease stains. It was a letter than began, ‘Dear Mark,’ and continued the length of the sheet in Tony’s customary scrawl, the black ink burned a deep brown.
“What is it, Mark? Quite a long, involved one?” Iris stopped, noticing his expression.
Behind them all, the back door banged shut. Not loudly, now with any particular finality, but with a breezy negligence that left an awful silence in its wake.
TWELVE
IT HAS BEEN DARK FOR HOURS AND THERE IS STILL A LONG WAY TO GO till morning. On Christmas morning, traditionally, everyone tries to get up before it is fully light anyway. Parents are harassed into waking early. All over the estate tomorrow morning, lights will click on, orange squares of windows, beaded with frozen black dew, competing with frail red streetlamps, which buzz indecisively, wondering whether the night is really up.
All over the estate, first cigarettes will be shakily lit, kitchen doors creak open to let eager dogs out and dogged cats in. First pots of tea will be brewed, too weak and too milky, poured in haste and abandoned to cool as other rituals exert their demands.
Here, houses are very close to one another and the same rituals are gone through a thousand times over, within a few hundred square feet. Yet each family, still in their pyjamas, exchanging presents with the TV on and unwatched, will be entirely unaware of their neighbours that morning. Neighbours will had wished each other a merry Christmas the previous afternoon, when they were out with their kids to see the council Santa Claus come by their street on his lorry decked out with fairy lights. On Christmas Eve they locked and bolted their doors and will emerge only once tomorrow morning, to crush armfuls of used wrapping paper into their wheely bins.
The council won’t remove a wheely bin that is too full to shut. The neighbours press down the paper harder, reflect on the waste, maybe even stand on it with their full weight. In a quiet moment, perched unsteadily on top of their binful, they might reflect upon the silence of the streets. It will be about eight in the morning, say, and although it isn’t a white Christmas, the tarmac is bright with untouched frost. Then they’ll go in, back to their hive of activity, nervous hilarity, disappointment and torpor. They won’t emerge properly until Boxing Day when, perhaps, it will be time to visit relatives across town.
In the darkness before that dawn, it is almost like any other night. Even the twenty-four-hour garage opposite the flats is still open. The garage is new and under the white lighting its brickwork is a sickly colour and seems fake. As Sam wades over a churned-up field of long grass and brackish, part-frozen water towards it, she remembers the garage in the Noddy books and how it had been made of alphabet blocks or something. She recalls Noddy stopping off for petrol, before he was hi-jacked and joy-ridden by the gollywogs, taken to the forest and ceremoniously gang-raped. Reading the sanitised version of this story to Sally recently, Sam had been disappointed by the changes. How much gin has she drunk tonight? She shudders and stamps her shoes clean on the garage forecourt.
Inside the shop they’re playing Cliff Richard’s Christmas album and the girl at the cash desk is looking oddly at the man facing her. He taps his plastic card on the desk in what Sam would take to be a threatening manner.
This shop is much too large for what they have to sell. This is all she can think in her state. Large white bottles of oil and pop, and about four flavours of crisps. And cigarettes, of course, which is what she is here for, but she takes one of each flavour of crisp anyway. When she is miserable sometimes, crisps seem the only thing. She thinks it has something to do with the noise; there’s nothing like stuffing yourself with loud food.
She waits blearily in turn, eyeing herself in the mirror to one side of the till, behind the sweet racks. She looks a blotchy mess, of course, and begins to suspect she is looking into a two-way mirror. Something to do with safety, crime prevention, probably, since garages are so often in vulnerable spots. Into this mirror she mimes, “What the fuck are you looking at?” and to herself, insides lifting up in
