Rose attacked the wayward shirt arms. ‘I’ll say this much. A wooden leg means bugger all lying down. It’s a bit strange getting used to the stump, mind. Anyhow, we’re getting married.’
‘You’re what?’
‘I said I’d give it a whirl. I’ve nothing to lose.’
Jane agreed numbly and the rest of her mam’s news passed her by until she left.
This was where Jane had grown up. It was the old part of town, where the houses were turning grey. They had been built in the fifties, with pebble-dashing coming off in chunks. The gardens were bound in by iron railings, scabbed with rust. The wasteground hemming their backs was being filled in with private houses, crammed in but nice. They were bright orange, four windows and a door, like a child’s drawing, filling up the empty space. Jane thought about living in one. They called them ‘starter homes’. Jane had a head start. She thought about ending up in one.
This whole part of town was nicer than Jane’s. Nicer than the estates. She felt temporary in the estates. People never seemed to stay long. Her own house had been up fifteen years, she was the fifth family in it. But here, where the trees were named after famous poets of the past, people were growing old. Their heels were well dug in.
Jane mulled over Rose’s predicament as she headed the short way to town. She thought of it as a predicament; a mess that Rose was getting herself into. A new engagement was fairly routine for her. Rarely did she follow them through. If she acted according to habit, soon she would be asking Jane’s advice for shaking this peg leg off.
Something was disturbing Jane about this one, though. It was the nonchalant way Rose had announced it, just as Jane was leaving. Usually her engagements were a big joke, a bottle of plonk mid-morning. Yet Rose was almost coy about old Ethan. And, as she ironed that morning, in the rumpled whiteness of the kitchen, a large ruby had glinted and winked at Jane from the hand that drove the iron. Well, they would just have to see.
The cafe was in the arcade. The arcade smelled of many things. Piss on concrete, chlorine from the recreation centre’s swishing doors, flower and animal scents from the pet shop.
It was dark in here and boys from the comp on their dinner hour were slouching around by the broken automatic doors. They gave her the usual perusal. And I can fettle the lot of you, she thought, elbowing through.
It was market day and the usual fleet of disabled person’s dodgem cars and metal trolleys was moored outside Boots.
When she went in she could hear the pensioners still mourning the loss of their own wooden shack where coffee for OAPs was subsidised. Someone had burned it down. Jane couldn’t help seeing the funny side of that heap of blackened chairs and tables outside the ruined shell. Make the old gits pay the same as everyone else. They get the same on a pension that I get for both Peter and me. Some of them have mattresses stuffed with fivers, too.
Fran was at a table near the back. A mock fireplace stuffed with dried flowers and a number of crowded tables separated them. Fran was with another woman Jane didn’t recognise. She started to squeeze through, moving with a guarded smile towards them.
It wasn’t often Fran found time to waste in cafes. This morning she had left Frank in charge. He wasn’t going to work. He disappeared beneath the duvet with his favourite upholsterer’s joke: ‘Tell them to stuff it.’
‘They’ll get you one of these days, you lazy thing.’
She put the two toddlers on the bed with him, and took Tracey and Kerry to school. Then she was free for coffee and quiche with the girls.
Jane approached the table cautiously, prising a way past the hunched backs in anoraks, glad of the diversion. She decided on a casual air and to wait for Fran to introduce her new friend. It didn’t work out that way. A twinge of nervousness took her and she burst out, ‘Hi-ya, Fran! Who’s this?’
Fran blinked. She moved a strand of dark hair from her eyes. The woman next to her smiled expectantly.
Fran said, ‘This is Liz. She’s just moved in where Mrs Griffiths who died used to live.’ At the back of Jane. Jane already knew. She had watched from her window all Saturday afternoon, judging the new arrivals by their furniture.
‘Oh, so it’s you,’ she said to Liz, sitting down.
Liz looked as if she might be a bit stuck-up. She was difficult to put an age to. She obviously took care of herself: smart clothes and properly done highlights. Liz was wearing fuchsia and no one else in town wore those sort of clothes to go shopping in. A garish silk scarf was knotted at her throat. Lot of jewellery, too. Taking out cigarettes, offering them around, she gave off a metallic gleam, like artillery.
‘Jane lives at the back of you.’
‘Oh,’ Liz mouthed. She and Jane were anxious for Fran to keep talking, or for the waitress to butt in.
Fran said, ‘Liz has got a little girl. She could be a nice little friend for Peter. I’ve been telling her.’
Why do they do that? wondered Jane. Matchmaking for the under-fives. What’s wrong with them?
‘Sorry, I meant to say,’ Liz began. ‘Penny’s actually seventeen. I tend to make her sound younger.’ They laughed.
‘So where did you live before?’ Jane asked, blunter than she had meant to be.
‘In Durham,’ Liz said. ‘Quite near the centre of the city.’ Several assumptions clicked into place for both Jane and Fran. She’s come right down in the world, they thought. We wonder why.
‘I do like these council houses,’ Liz said. ‘They’re so much cosier.’
Jane snorted. ‘Not when they’re being fire-bombed.’
Fran stared at her. ‘We’ve never been fire-bombed.’
‘I meant that it isn’t always that cosy.’
Liz asked, ‘So you get trouble on the estates still?’
The
