But over the road the noise seemed menacing. It came thumping from a sealed house as if building up pressure. The house looked fit to burst open.
Nesta crossed the few hundred yards to Big Sue’s bungalow. The field of virgin snow showed plainly that Sue hadn’t left her door that night. She was too scared to walk past the Forsyths’ house alone. Well, these days. Nesta certainly thought of herself as a prouder and braver person and, in her own secret ways, she was. I may look no different on the outside, she found herself thinking as she banged on Big Sue’s door, but I feel like I can do more. It isn’t all so hard.
Big Sue’s head poked out of the toilet window above. “Is that you, Nesta?”
Nesta looked up, startled to see Big Sue without her wig on. A few soft strands hung past her face as she squinted into the gloom.
“Ay,” Nesta’s face was stiff with cold. “Lerruz in, man.”
Big Sue always made her own clothes and this made Nesta sorry for her. She would look at the thick curtain-material skirts the old lady wore and her heart went out to her. She’d tried to tell Sue she ought to...well, smarten up. To update her image. To do like they said on This Morning and have a makeover. Nesta had shown off her new leggings, saying Big Sue should have some. They always look smart. But Big Sue had her Singer, she said, and she could run up anything she desired or needed, quick as a flash, from oddments. What I like, she said beadily, on the day Nesta suggested a shell suit like hers, what I like is being self-sufficient. Nesta pointed out there was a warehouse on the industrial estate where you took your design of how you wanted your shell suit to look, and they would do it for you. She and Tony had tried it: eighty quid and they gave you a stencil of a little feller to colour in with felt tips, just how you liked. They’d had a lovely pair made.
“I’m happy how I am,” Big Sue insisted. This New Year’s Eve she was wearing the same shapeless, mustard-coloured tardy and pea-green skirt. Impatiently she ushered Nesta in, locked the door again, and took her into the living room.
The one thing Big Sue never skimped on was hats. She had a marvellous selection of ones dating right back. She even wore them indoors, watching the telly. On top of her wig too, which must have been scratchy and hot with the heating on. Nesta had brought her one or two back from the car-bootie as presents, but she’d never seen Big Sue wear those ones. Tonight she wasn’t wearing a hat. She sat on her swivel armchair in the centre of her living room with a completely naked head and, even though she was pretending to be as gruff and ordinary as ever, this was the biggest sign of her distress.
Wisps stuck all around the surface of her head. They put Nesta in mind of an Easter-egg-painting competition at school years ago. Nesta had messed up her display of three eggs. She’d been doing Planet of the Apes, but two broke in transit so that was the apes gone. She just did Charlton Heston, sticking his cotton-wool hair on with PVA. That went wrong too and his hair was reduced to shreds and patches of fluff. Nesta was bursting to tell Big Sue, You look like my Charlton Heston egg! But she held herself back, being too used to people just looking at her, baffled, when she said the first thing on her mind.
Nesta was the first person Big Sue had seen in days. Even plain, stolid, expressionless Nesta was a welcome sight. There were high spots of colour on her cheeks so you could tell she’d been on the cider already and her self-bleached, dry-straw hair was standing nearly on end. Why can’t she put a brush through it? What irritated Big Sue most about Nesta was her eyes, which were never fully open. She looked perpetually on the point of nodding off and it made the older woman want to shake her.
“You have to come to the party,” Nesta was saying. “It’s an all right do.” On Big Sue’s china cabinet her wedding clock bonged out eleven o’clock. “All the street’s turned up. You can’t miss everyone. They’ve all asked after you.”
Sue’s face crinkled into a smile as wide as Nesta’s hand at the thought of being asked after. She was a broad, motherly woman who had never had kids, which always surprised Nesta, who’d had bairns without really thinking about it. When Nesta was having bairns it seemed to be in someone else’s hands. Nowt for her to do but get passed pillar to post and that was all right. Nesta thought Sue’s breasts under her hand-knit cardy must be colossal, like water-filled balloons. She wondered if she would finish up one day with breasts like that.
“I’ll see,” Sue began. “Maybe I’m not up to all them faces tonight.”
When Nesta opened her mouth to protest, Big Sue held up her hand. “Oh, you know, Nesta. When sometimes you can’t imagine wanting to talk to anyone?” She gritted her small, square, yellow teeth and snatched a Regal from the
