Mark reaches forward and eases off Andy’s boots. They aren’t real cowboy boots, just his normal ones. Andy stops listening to the tired squeaking of his eyes as he rubs them. He tenses.
Mark leans over him. “Andy…”
“Are you putting me to bed?”
Marks shrugs.
“Am I that drunk?”
“I don’t know. Are you?”
“So why are you putting me to bed?”
Big Sue is looking for the loo, not used to the layout of these houses with upstairs landings. Even on a small trip out like tonight, she can start to miss her own bungalow. There’s nothing like your own place, she’s telling Jane as she hauls herself up the stairs. Jane is sitting with a Fuzzy Navel, made with Pernod instead of orange juice.
“Are you looking for the loo?” Jane asks after her, following her. “Because there’s a queue…”
Big Sue has flung open the walk-in cupboard at the top of the stairs and with a great sigh it disgorges its contents into the hall and down the stairs, taking Jane with it. Jane vanishes under squashy bags of old clothes, stacks of vinyl LPs and floppy paperbacks. She gives a squawk and is silent, buried under what looks like a car-boot sale. The stuff keeps on coming out of the cupboard, as if pushed. Nesta and a few others standing at the bottom of the stairs are screaming. Jane sits, very calmly, in a heap of old Look-in magazines, and discovers that she has twisted her arm.
Penny comes out of the bathroom to see all these old belongings strewn. She groans and snaps at Sue when asked where the toilet is. “How am I going to get this lot back in there!”
Elsie is at her elbow. “Give it to the spastics!” she says, gleeful again. Her hair smells of vomit, Penny realises. “Give me it all to give to the spastics!” And Penny remembers that Elsie does voluntary work in the week.
“Penny?” A deep voice comes from the downstairs hail, someone new making themselves heard above the music and kerfuffle. “Is Penny here?” the voice asks crossly. “Is Penny Robinson here?”
Her head jerks up as she starts kicking her way through the old records and tangle of musty coats. She skids her way to the top of the stairs and takes them at a run, almost pitching herself headfirst. “Who is it?” Penny daren’t admit to herself who she hopes it might be. In her heart she knows she has to be right. This year, this New Year, her mother has to have returned.
At the bottom stair there is a man she doesn’t know. He is in a tank top and nylon trousers and he wears a taxi driver’s numbered badge. “Are you Penny Robinson?”
Standing on the middle stair, Penny nods.
“I’ve brought someone from the station,” he says.
Liz is bundled up in the back of the black cab, smoking a quiet cigarette, tapping the ash out of the partly opened window. That cold shushes in and she snuggles into her fur, sighing. Soon she’s got to go back to the house that used to be hers. Will Penny be cross that she sent the taxi driver in ahead? Liz wanted to make a big entrance but, when it came to it, she couldn’t do it alone. She wants to return with her daughter at her side.
Liz stares at the low, square houses and the play park, the humped shapes of parked cars, the lit windows. Phoenix Court seems so small to her now. But she’s got to fit back in. No more flitting about. Nervously she smokes the ciggy down to its filter. She stubs it out on the old-fashioned metal ashtray and tosses the filter out the window. The town clock begins to chime. She wanted to be indoors for this, there in the thick of the party, among her own kind. Are they my own kind? she wonders. She straightens and glances out over the street. Everyone, it seems, is round number sixteen. Penny has made herself the centre of it all. Shit, thinks her mother, I needn’t have worried about Penny being lonely.
She lets herself out of the taxi and steps carefully, as if testing the slipperiness of the snow. Then she braces herself and starts to hurry across the gravel as the snow starts falling again. The music from her house is getting louder, pulling her in.
Between Liz and her house, there is Donna, flat on her back with the bad lads round her, still weighing up what best to do with her on the stroke of midnight. Donna wills herself the strength to move just one hand a little, pick up one of the rocks she has collected, and throw it at one of the lads. The one closest to her. The bravest one, or the one who thinks he’s bravest, who’s chuckling now, low in his throat, as if he’s decided what to do with her.
Donna doesn’t even think it’s worth yelling out. Everyone she knows in the world is in the loud house, having a party. She’s fallen out of her orbit. She clenches her teeth.
Craig has closed his eyes and he wishes she would start to yell. He could yell, but where would that get any of them?
“Penny?” a voice calls to them.
In a long white fur coat there is a figure trotting carefully across the gravel of the play park. Her hair is shaken out, wavy and golden white. As she approaches, she is lighting herself another cigarette and her thin, awkward
