It was a windy day. The wind blew itself round the town-centre corners, it blew people into shops they didn’t want to visit. The precinct was oddly silent as Jane arrived, though there were as many people as usual. Newton Aycliffe was a funny town, she thought, because people stopped and talked in the town centre. They danced an awkward quadrille and moved from group to group, spending ages, talking about nothing. When she went to other towns everyone seemed to go dashing about. Jane didn’t think it was because people in Aycliffe were friendly. They didn’t have anything to do, she thought.
At first the keening wind seemed to have killed the noise. Tossed it elsewhere, across the rooftops and over the clock tower, dropping it heavily into a field. But it hadn’t. As she made careful, tiny footsteps under awnings, she realised that it wasn’t sound the town was missing.
It was artificial light. Everything was dimmer. The shop signs, the windows … they were all dark and inscrutable like neglected fish tanks. Shit, she thought. Half-day closing. But it was only eleven o’clock. She went in the ladies’ in the arcade and there she found Mary, who looked after the lavs, sitting in candlelight. Mary took great pride in her job, and you could find her sitting in her glass-fronted office every day, in her trackie bottoms, knitting and chatting to all her customers. She kept her lavs a treat. She was a reassuring presence, watching over her endless knitting for vandals or anything untoward. Today she was in her glass office surrounded by her twelve grandchildren. Boys and girls of all ages, all eating Greggs pasties and sausage rolls, unperturbed by where they were. Mary sat in the middle of them, proud, glowing in candlelight. It was like a holy picture, Jane thought when she walked in.
‘All the leccy’s off in the centre,’ Mary told Jane as she gave her change for the lock. ‘It’s a disgrace. All the leccy’s gone off in the wind.’ Mary repeated herself, Jane had discovered. It came of seeing too many people in one day, being obliged to make conversation with them all. When Jane sat on the lav, she heard Mary tell someone else, ‘It’s a disgrace. Leaving us in the dark with no leccy.’
When she went back out she noticed that some shops had resorted to candles, too. From the outside this gave their facades a Victorian glow. It was like going round Beamish, the open-air museum. Jane had hated it there when Peter’s dad took her, when they were together. He’d made her go down into the pit with him. A real working pit and her afraid of heights. ‘But it’s not heights,’ the ignorant bugger said. ‘It’s underground. How’s that heights?’ And at the bottom Jane had passed out, which served him right. It was a wonder she hadn’t lost the bairn.
The Spastics Society and the Gas Board looked inviting and curious, Olde Worlde. And Woollies! Woollies looked a treat! Oh, it was like something out of Scrooge. An air-raid shelter full of yellowing candles had been unearthed and they were stuck throughout the entire shop. No longer plastic and dirty white, it was graced with a dusky vitality.
She pushed in to see the glints of purple, gold, green of the pic-n-mix display. And, with a throbbing heart, she waited for the coast to be clear, and filled her coat pockets with humbugs and eclairs and blackcurrant limes. No surveillance cameras either. She felt about twelve. She looked at the wax congealing on the video counter, pooling on shelves and getting stuck in the silver tinsel they already had on display. She looked at the hushed faces of the customers. They were acting as if they were in a cathedral. This is how shops used to be, she thought. Warily they all went up and down aisles, unsure of what lay hidden in corners. Usually they would bustle up and down, finding everything uniform, exposed. There was a gentle calm about Woollies this morning. And the absence of music, Jane thought. That helps, too.
It was getting late. She had to pick Peter up.
Vince was hoping he could duck into the staff room at lunchtime and quietly go about his business. Get some coffee, set about marking. Keep his head down. But it was at this point that the PE teacher decided to acknowledge him.
That face coming across the room at him. That bloody monkey face! His pitiful strands of hair over skin the texture of an avocado. This man was avocado-shaped, in fact, in a too tight, unwashed tracksuit. Mrs Bell had made Vince smirk once by remarking that they should all complain about the PE staff wearing their tracksuits in the rest of the school. Teaching other subjects dressed like that! She thought it was awful. And she thought it was unwise, his blithely stomping about the place in his tight tracksuit bottoms, showing the plain impression, as she put it, of his genitalia. It wasn’t right.
He came up to Vince and there was the smell of cheese-and-onion crisps on his breath. ‘Have you been in the wars, then?’
It took Vince right back. This bloke’s face was always bearing down on him when he was in his early teens. Whether it was cross-country, swimming, rugby or the long jump, there was his bloody awful face coming into view and screaming at him to put some effort in. His face going scarlet. The other lads sniggering. Once he’d stood them all in a line and thrown a cricket ball at every one of them so they could catch it and
