And nowhere to be seen—not even on the sideboard where he’s set out the cans of lager, the bottles, bowls of nuts and crisps and three fresh, shiny ashtrays—nowhere is there any of their healthy food. There’s nothing here that me or any of me friends and neighbours won’t know how to eat or what to call.
I’M SITTING IN ME BATH WITH A GIN AND A COCKTAIL STICK OF NIBBLES. Pink foam riding up over me nipples and I’m easing away all the aches and pains. I’ve got Tamla Motown playing out all around me. Our Joanne’s a whizz with owt electrical and we’ve got four stereo speakers in the top corners of the room. At the time she put them in, standing on a chair with a screwdriver, I kept fretting because I thought it might be dangerous with all the steam. Like we’d all be getting shocks in the bath. But as it is, it’s safe and bloody marvellous. I love to lie there, soaking in me bubble oil with Marvin and Tammi. The world is just a great big onion.
I’ve got a range of different bubble oils. Christmas presents last year, Boots’ Natural Selection, from Andrew. Little bottles inside a wickerwork hippo. Tonight I’m in Fruits of the Forest and it’s lovely.
I need to relax tonight. Have I mentioned yet the reason I’m having me soiree?
God, I can’t believe I forgot all about it! Lucky our Andrew’s not daft.
Ay, the reason I’m having me mates round tonight. Wey, they’re not all mates. Some of them are just neighbours.
You see, I’m not going to all the trouble and expense of playing the glamorous hostess just for the fun of it.
This night’s Wednesday night and it’s Wednesday nights Elsie and Tom come round.
I’M FLICKING THROUGH ME FROCKS, HEAD STUCK IN ME WARDROBE.
Time’s running out and I’m fucked if I can found owt decent to wear.
I’ll slather mesel’ in Tendre Poison and wear me heels and it’s funny when you do that for a party in your own house. You stand taller and it’s kind of formal and everything in your own rooms looks a bit different.
Wednesday nights Elsie and Tom come round after the Rainbow Gang finishes. Tom runs the Gang for the kids in the Methodist Church on the next estate. He looks like Dracula and he’s had some trouble with his nerves, breakdowns and that, but Elsie says he was an architect when he was younger, before she knew him, but they laid him off. She’s out of work with him.
They’re not married and they come round menacing people. They’ve got God and they tell you the same stuff again and again, sitting there from six to twelve at night. I can’t just chuck them out, like Joanne says I should. They don’t mean anyone any harm and they’re not malicious people. They’re just daft. And they’re company, even, sometimes, when Joanne is out at night, and Andrew is upstairs, reading and that. Bloody boring company, mind.
A couple of months ago, Tom flipped. In the middle of their Rainbow Gang he was meant to be umpiring a game of indoor rounders, but he’d gone missing. Else was worried. She can’t handle sixty of them scruffy bairns all by hersel’, so she sent them all off on a kind of treasure hunt, looking for Mr. Tom. One of the scruffiest—”I patted him on the head and I could feel the nits squirming under me hand!”—found Mr. Tom in a cupboard. He was crouching by himself in the dark. Elsie had to phone the Casualty blokes to come and talk him out.
Next time she came to see me it was alone. She was dead upset, so I was embarrassed because I’d been pretending I wasn’t in that night. I’d turned all the lights off and the telly, kept quiet and waited for her to go away. I’d forgotten to lock the back door and she just came in! I felt like I’d been rumbled. I just said I’d had a migraine and had had to switch everything off, lie down.
She told me all about Tom. He was in that big place past Spennymoor, three bus rides away, and she was visiting him every afternoon, even though the doctors had asked her not to. They probably felt the same as I did about her knocking on the door. She bangs like a kid—bang bang bang bang bang. Demanding attention for a scraped knee or sweets or summat. Not an adult’s knocking at all. Adults knock little tunes on doors. They don’t sound desperate.
Tom was in this place, a big old mansion in its own grounds with deer and that. Pretty, but they don’t put you in there for nowt. Elsie was saying to me, “It’s not a place for, you know...mental cases. Mind you, there’s a bloke in the bed next to Tom who thinks he’s Jesus.”
They let him out after a couple of months. I reckon they realised it was her they should have put in there instead. Bad depression, he was supposed to have had, really bad depression. I’ve known more depressed people these past twenty years or so than I dunno what. As soon as they invented a word for it, bang—everyone had it. I suppose they invented the
