“It’s all right, pet, I’m not after one of your fancy cocktails.” Penny put the shaker back on the sideboard and smiled. She recognised the old woman as Elsie, but couldn’t remember having talked to her before. She was a friend of Jane’s, one of those nosy types who couldn’t be bothered to actually get to know you before they knew all your business.
Elsie’s eyes were pink and they settled uncertainly, speculatively, on Penny, as if she was after something. “I’m just on the gin, if you don’t mind,” and, almost shyly, she proffered her glass for a top-up.
Wasn’t she an alkie? Hadn’t Penny heard that somewhere? And wasn’t she the one with the religious nut for a husband, the feller who reminded Penny of Dracula? He’d lope across the kiddies’ play park and you’d make sure not to cross his path. Penny had even stood at a different bus stop just to be away from him. And, of course — she recalled this as she hastily mismeasured the gin — Elsie was the one whose son was over the road with the bad lads.
“Ay,” Elsie said appraisingly. “Our Craig’s right about you.” She stared at Penny’s dress and Penny thought for a moment that she, like Rose, would say she wished she’d dressed as a mermaid in her youth. “Do you know our Craig? Have you met him yet?” Elsie was keen and rabbity, with urgent, pink-lined eyes, forcing Penny back against the dresser.
“Who’s Craig?” Penny asked, and found she was looking for an escape. Something about Elsie set her teeth on edge. That overeagerness of hers and her humbleness. One thing Penny had learned from Liz was to keep your distance. Penny trusted to a certain reserve. She knew that the way she carried on seemed the very opposite of that, as if she threw in her lot willy-nilly with just anyone, but that wasn’t quite true.
Now Elsie was staring into Penny’s face as if she could see the future there. Maybe she could. She looks like a bloody witch, Penny thought, and then stopped herself. What if Elsie really can see what is coming? Penny wasn’t prepared to dismiss the possibility. Her starfish bristled at the idea, she could feel them close to her scalp, mumbling their eager suckers on her dyed scarlet hair.
Pleased with her own circumspection, she beamed at Elsie, ready to start the conversation again. “I was miles away, Elsie. I’m sorry. Was I rude?”
“It’s that night,” Elsie said, stealing a glance at her watch. “It’s that night when we’re prone to slipping off miles away, thinking about people.” Elsie rather startled herself with her own lucidity. There was a grasping sensation in her chest and she thought she was going to vomit, but it was a sob, a deep, sudden sob that took her as much by surprise as Penny.
Penny seized Elsie’s glass of gin and found herself giving her a hug. That peppery hair in her nose made her think, This is how red hair ages. It was harsh against her face and smelled sour. She wondered if she would end up like Elsie, as if they’d met across the ages. Am I anything like her? Elsie was bawling now, right into the front of Penny’s crinkly mermaid dress. “Bathroom,” Penny said.
As she led Elsie there, through the massed bodies, squeezing between balloons and treading on beer cans, Penny was wondering, What if Elsie were to succeed? Surely she was here to matchmake. If she managed to get Penny and her Craig together, then what would happen? What if she and Craig married and got a kid and a council house here? Would Penny after twenty-odd years wind up the same as Elsie? Was it as easy as that? In the relative quiet of the bathroom she sat Elsie, still crying, on the toilet seat’s pink cover. Penny poured her a cloudy, toothpasty glass of water. Was that the clean and simplified trajectory of a life? What other factors need she take into account? The marriage plot almost seduced her by its simplicity. She watched Elsie gulp the water down.
Suddenly Elsie tipped her head, as if it was far too heavy, into the bathroom basin, and bellowed until Balti and gin rushed out.
Here at the hinge between years — and these are tricky, rusted hinges that squeal perilously — you could easily slip, show yourself up, make a terrible mistake and lose yourself. Disappear as others have disappeared before you, Penny thought.
She then listened to Elsie pant out her story about Craig’s poor foot and how it and his difficult young life had led him to get in with a bad crowd.
He needs a good woman.
Penny brushed all this aside, running the cold tap to sluice out the basin.
“I’m not going to be sick again,” Elsie said, grasping her arm. “I’m trying to tell you about my boy.”
Andy had never travelled, but even as Vince started to describe it, in a tinny, exhilarated voice, he could see exactly what Paris on New Year’s Eve looked like.
All Andy could say was, “What are you doing? It’s almost midnight! Who are you with?”
Vince was saying again, “I’m in Paris!” as if he couldn’t quite believe it either.
“You haven’t called me in months, and now this!”
“Yeah, yeah.” Vince was drunk. “How are you keeping, pet?”
Andy felt tears spring up. “Oh…smart. How about you?”
There was a pause as Vince decided to be nothing less than honest. Not even consideration for Andy could stop him. “I’m having a lovely time. I love it here.”
“Who are you there with?”
“Ralph.”
“Ralph? Who the fuck’s Ralph?”
“We’ve been together since October. Didn’t Penny tell you?”
Andy pulled a face. “She told me nowt.”
“He’s a Jane Austen expert.”
“Smashing.” Andy scowled, imagining them reading books together. That would be right up Vince’s street. He probably couldn’t think of anything sexier than reading with his lover. On the rare occasions when Andy read anything, he couldn’t bear
