‘I recognise those two. They live just by you, don’t they?’ She was shocked. He’s been checking up on me! It didn’t seem half as sinister as it might have.
‘Yes, Fran and Liz. Liz moved in last Saturday.’
‘Liz, is it?’
‘I don’t know her very well yet. She seems all right. A bit flashy, if you ask me.’
He was peering past the bent heads, catching a glimpse of Liz and Fran looking back at him with now unconcealed curiosity.
‘I don’t suppose you could…’ He laughed and shook his head. ‘Could you introduce me to her?’
Jane’s hands gripped the chair back very hard indeed. ‘God, I don’t even know your name?’
‘Jane,’ she said.
‘Jane. Would you mind introducing me to your new friend?’
His eyes never left the gap he had found through the crowd. He never even glanced at Jane. Not even when he asked her name.
‘Right,’ she said.
THREE
The wind ruffled Penny’s hair as she stood in the grey mud under a goalpost. She lit a cigarette.
It’s been an epidemic this summer, her mam had said. Burning things down. First the Portakabin in town where the pensioners went to drink tea and then Penny’s new school. Penny gazed at the ruined section of her new school. In the early-morning drizzle it glistened and its smell was acrid in the air.
‘Newton Aycliffe’s rough,’ her mam warned, with the air of someone who knew the place of old. Apparently they had both lived there in the late seventies, early eighties, but Penny couldn’t remember that at all. No, that wasn’t true. She could picture the royal wedding and some kind of street party in a cul-de-sac.
Since then, though, mother and daughter had lived in Durham. Penny had always loved their house there. Her window looked out over woodland and you could just see the cathedral if you stood on her bed. Theirs was a house on the end of a terrace of converted miners’ houses.
All you could see from upstairs in the new house in Aycliffe was Woodham Comprehensive and its slushy, trudged-over playing fields. When they lost their house in Durham it was her mam’s idea to come back to Aycliffe. She got them down on the council waiting list and it took almost a year for their number to come up. They were given a place in Phoenix Court, on the Yellowhouses estate, between the blocks of flats and Burn Lane. ‘Better the devil you know,’ Liz told Penny.
Do I know this place, though? Penny wondered when they moved in the thick of autumn. The first day she wandered around, trying to make it seem familiar. The pink asphalt of the play park rasped under her feet. The corner shop smelled inside of cheese and crisps and lager; not at all of Indian spices like the one she was used to. Everyone had their front-room windows open so you could hear the tellies blaring at night.
She wondered whether her mother felt she was taking a backward step, moving back to a council house and a town and a way of life she’d left nearly fifteen years ago. Liz turned red.
‘Of course it’s a backward step,’ she said. She was unpacking her chinaware from crumpled Northern Echos. ‘Do you think I want to do this?’
Later, painting the bathroom and laughing uproariously because they’d spattered the bath, the mirrors and the floorboards with hot-pink sploshes, Liz said, ‘It’s exciting to have somewhere new to do up, don’t you think? Sometimes I felt stifled in that old place. You could smell the oldness there.’
Penny smiled but she was keeping her mouth shut on the subject of the move and just helping out as best she could. The move was unavoidable. They had money troubles and they had lost their house. That was all there was to it. It was just them, mother and daughter by themselves, and there was no one they could rely on. Both of them had to muck in.
They managed the move well by themselves, bringing all their belongings in shifts down the A1 in Transit vans. They crammed everything into a house almost half the size of the one they were used to. ‘We’ll have to chuck loads of this old junk out,’ Liz fretted, throwing open yet one more cupboard in the old house, dismayed to see boxes of books and clothes and records that had gone undisturbed for years.
‘We can’t get rid of anything,’ Penny said. At seventeen she was in a phase of sentimentally rediscovering things. She had a craze on fishing out all Liz’s scratchy LPs from the sixties and seventies. To the mother the cupboards they had to clear were nothing but a headache. To the daughter they provided a nostalgic musical jamboree. Penny found herself yearning for times she couldn’t remember, and for times before she was born.
That summer was the one following Penny’s botched O levels and she spent it in a minor alcoholic daze to a soundtrack of Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart. She wore an old suede coat of her mother’s. When she passed only three of her nine exams, Liz put it down to the threat of upheaval. They had been trying to sell the house in Durham since January, and revising in her room, Penny was continually disturbed by prospective buyers. But Liz wasn’t one to blame herself. The thing for Penny to do, she said, was resits.
Resits in Newton Aycliffe. Liz was sitting her own test there, too. She was trying to fit back in. Only she knew how much she had changed in the interim years. That’s exactly what the eighties were, she thought: interim years. And then she looked at Penny and thought, That poor bairn grew up in my interim years.
They took the little money they could make from the old house and, with all their old possessions in tow, set up camp in Phoenix Court. They were fired with determination: Liz to get to know
