She was seven years older than Frank. He was twenty-four when they married and hardly drank at all. Their wedding reception was held in Fran’s mother’s front parlour, where Frank was told he was bringing Fran down in the world. ‘But she loves me,’ he protested. Fran’s mother sneered. He was drinking Babycham at his own wedding and he had a whiny, womanish voice. He went on, ‘So there’s nothing you can do about it.’
He turned to play on the one-armed bandit Fran’s family kept in the parlour, at the end of the white leather bar. These were both from the dump. Fran’s family had made a little money in ‘antiques’. When he was plastered Frank would rail that what that really meant was that they were hawkers. They toured the town dumps and flogged whatever they could find and clean up. Fran’s mother could have her bandit, her bar, her archways and extensions all installed because she owned her own house and didn’t need to ask the council for permission. She owned her own house because once, when her two sons were hauling a battered wardrobe across the council tip in Ferryhill, they pushed it too hard down a slope, into a rusted truck. The wardrobe smashed and a hundred thousand concealed pound notes flew into the grey wind. The brothers ran about clutching them all from the air. They hushed it up and bought their own home. Frank had got to hear about it and sneered. ‘She’s as common as shit, like the rest of us, your mother,’ he would tell Fran. ‘She got her money off a tip.’
Fran kept quiet. There was no point bringing class into it. Her mother still despised Frank. Right at the start she had said, ‘He’s a little ginger bloke! How can you go knocking about with a little ginger bloke?’ Fran’s two brothers were strapping lads. They kept fit hauling rubbish off tips and working with horses. They laughed at Frank too.
‘Taking you to live in a council house!’ her mother spat, into a dry Martini. ‘And your family keeps horses!’
They never let him forget the horses. On their two most gleaming mounts Fran’s two strapping brothers would pass by the council house. Just to piss Frank off. And it worked. It always reminded him that he was a mere upholsterer, stuffing settees for other people’s fat arses, working in a converted garage, sharing his job with an apprentice.
‘But they’re not your real aristocracy, your lot,’ Frank would rail. ‘They aren’t proper horsy people.’
Fran said nothing. It was true. Her mother and her brothers simply liked horses and knew how to make money from them on the broad swathes of countryside all round Aycliffe and Ferryhill.
Now in her forties, Fran was becoming fleshy and thickset.
I’m looking like a farmer’s wife, she thought. She wore hard-wearing clothes picked up in charity shops. She would scrub tweedy skirts in the tub until her hands were red raw. Her hair was cut neatly and scraped back off her face for the day’s work.
Frank was slipping into a life of slipshod workmanship and frothy canned beer. Fran saw desolate years opening up. As a result she became more brutally functional, more busy. Her lack of reproach was the greatest reproach of all. This was the heaviest weight upon Frank.
But look at him, she thought. Dousing the kids like that. He really is a little ginger bloke, with his paunch riding over his jeans like a water-filled balloon. His freckled body with wisps of red hair was wobbling as he hopped around the garden. He was red with the exertion, except for the dead-white parts of his face. They were hardened into premature old age, probably by his drinking. She hoped it was only by his drinking.
Last Christmas Eve he had terrified them all and killed the first batch of gerbils. She got a solicitor to write to Frank — she had a letter delivered to her own door! — threatening him. Her brothers had offered to do him over. But Fran wanted to deal with him in her own way. She got the solicitor to say he would have to leave the house. He begged to be taken back.
In among the work, the ongoing work, the shouting down the street after kids, the hands-and-knees work at the factory, Fran had taken up drinking as well. She would match him can for can. She decided she’d share the bleary world view he imposed on the rest of them. He’d get only half as much beer and she would at least be sharing the madness. It seemed easier somehow.
‘Honestly, Fran, you’re a madwoman. How did your mother produce you?’
‘Like a horse,’ she would say. ‘Squeezed me out, licked me and sent me out into the world. I’m an old grey mare.’
He laughed. ‘Am I a stallion?’
‘No, but you’re My Little Pony.’
And his face would fall. Unlike Fran, Frank had some difficulty accepting his lot in life. But he never had the energy to seek another, especially not by hawking round the tips.
A whiplash of water went over the creosoted fence. Their youngest, Jeff, was only eighteen months, but he had mastered the art of clambering that fence. He was a tiny duplicate of his father. The incoherent bullying was endearing in a child. He was
