Since coming back from the hospital she had been lying on their settee watching daytime wily and old films, with a duvet over her legs and an old coat pulled on backwards. For warmth, she said. She couldn’t keep warm. She still had dreams of the snow and that she was turning blue. She thought, when she closed her eyes, that she was under ice, under the polar cap. So she sat curled up on the settee and shivered under a backwards coat, her arms pushed down the sleeves. Penny waited on her mother, bringing her drinks and dinner and tea and snacks day and night.
“You’ll pile on the weight if you live like this,” warned Fran. Fran thought how slim and svelte Liz had been.
“So?” shrugged Liz. “Who does that affect apart from me?”
Fran tutted. “That isn’t the Liz I know.”
Liz bridled. “I’m not the Liz you know. Haven’t you heard? Everyone has. I’m a…I’m a bloody travesty.”
“Ha!” Fran wouldn’t let herself get any more sorry for herself. “We’re all travesties. It’s all a bloody travesty, Liz, man.”
There was an amused glint in Liz’s eye at this. “So tell me, what are they saying?”
“It’s that Tom,” Fran lied. This was her great white lie, making use of poor Tom while he was lying dead across the street. “He’s been going round like an evangelical. Telling all and sundry that he reached into your perverted soul and put you back on the straight and narrow. He brought you back to life and cured you of your sickness. He found for you your true self, and that’s why you came back like this. Why you came back to us as a man.” Fran took a deep breath after this.
Liz’s mouth hangs open. She looks down at herself. She shrugs off the anorak and the duvet, and dashes to the mirror in the hallway. She is in tracksuit bottoms concertinaed around her knees and a shapeless grey T-shirt. Her pale arms are mottled with mauve and blue.
“This isn’t my true self!”
Fran comes to see what Liz can see. Liz’s complexion is pale and she seems almost featureless. A pallid, empty man.
“This isn’t natural!”
Fran shrugs. “This is what that Tom is telling the world.”
“The little bastard!” Liz says.
“Why don’t I…” Fran begins. “Help spruce you up?”
“Spruce?”
“We’ll do you a make-over. Like on the telly.” Fran, watching Liz stare at herself, knows that she has won already. “I don’t suppose you’ve thrown out your old clothes yet?”
“Oh,” says Liz. “No. Not yet.”
“So!” cries Fran. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get up them stairs! Let’s get you dolled up!”
These were the dramas we had that morning of the sit-in. Penny arrived from the police station to announce that her lover and his mother were being held in cells. Pending an enquiry. Elsie had gone doolally. Penny sat with me and smoked my cigarettes for the rest of the day.
“Have you ever ended up involved where you didn’t want to be?” she asked me. I shouldn’t have, but I laughed.
“All the bloody time.”
“I want out,” she said.
And I hadn’t the heart to tell her that I’d already booked my ticket. The next day, Sunday, I was bussing it up to Edinburgh. It was cheaper that way, but it took all day. I was going to see Andy. And going to see my son.
The next thing, into the busy café came Fran with Liz. Everyone stopped to stare. They all knew about Liz from the papers. They knew she had survived. They also knew she was a feller.
She came dolled up to the nines. It was the Queen of Sheba riding in, swanning right past the staring faces and plonking herself at our table.
She wore a fine white fur coat over a scarlet dress. Her look was imperious and she jangled with all those jewels. Her hair was up, quite different to how she was before. A more sophisticated look. It was as if she had been away all this time simply planning a new look.
Penny marvelled at her. “Fancy dressing up like this just for a protest!” She grinned, hugging her mother.
“I can’t let my public down,” she said.
Big Sue stood up and started the whole café on a standing ovation. They cheered and clapped Liz until she took her bows.
“This is ridiculous,” she hissed, but she loved it. “Where’s Jane?” she asked Fran.
Then Fran produced the card that Jane had sent, announcing she was marrying an Arab.
“She’d have married anything if they’d asked her!” Nesta cackled, but no one joined in.
“Good luck to her, I say,” said Fran.
Liz opened her handbag and slipped a bottle of Jameson’s around the table, to top up everyone’s tea.
“Get some music on!” she told the little waiter. “Make it more like a party!”
THIRTY
Ferryhill
Seventeen Years Later
She doesn’t think of it as her new house any more. You could even say she is used to it.
As in the days when she woke up to go cleaning down Fujitsu, Fran is up with the lark. She likes to make coffee and watch the light come over the flat fields. Depending on the season, they get touched with different colours. Now it is spring. Field after field turns pink with the dawn. Leaning against the doorframe, Fran cradles her mug. Usually she fusses about in her dressing gown, the radio on. A local station, on which they play nostalgic pop songs of the seventies and eighties, for the young at heart. Fran will watch the morning start to happen and feel all shivery and full of memories.
This morning she keeps the radio off. She has a guest in this house of hers and compared with her, he is a late sleeper.
Does Fran get many guests here? Her grown children come to stay, all four of them; the three girls
