Elsie looked stung.
“Oh, not you,” Jane said hastily. “I meant all that lot coming over from the Dandy Cart. The council move them out of there for being trouble and then they shove them on our doorsteps.” Jane scowled. Elsie thought Jane scowled too much. Far too much for a young lass like her. She was what? Twenty-eight? And there wasn’t a drop of joy in her. Everything seemed to get on her nerves. Elsie would think how she’d been at that age. That was the seventies, and she’d got up to all sorts.
Those were the years before Tom and God, even before Craig. Everyone she knew worked up on the industrial estate, assembling fiddly electrical parts in the Sugar Factory. All the lads and lasses from school were together still, as if, on school leaving day, they had walked out en masse, crossed the town, and walked into the factory together. For work they wore the same plastic hairnets and gloves and blue nylon smocks. They were all in the same boat. The lads kicked a ball about round the side of the factory building and the lasses smoked, standing by the doorways. Gossip and taunts would fly recklessly between parties. Reckless was the word, really. That was exactly how we carried on, Elsie thought. All the laughing on the production line, even the mocking and the bickering, it was all underlaced with a sexiness. It was a joke at the Sugar Factory in those years that everyone had had everyone else. So what if they had? Elsie thought back to all those faces in the early seventies; the lads with hair overgrown, unwashed-looking, big sideburns and tashes; the lasses still wanting to be Twiggy. They’d grown up together in the same small town. In a way it was no wonder they’d all had each other, if that was the way you wanted to put it. They were part of the same litter. Like animals, pulling and nuzzling at each other in unguarded moments. Send them out in a coach on bank holidays with crates of booze, to Redcar or Blackpool, or put them in a nightclub like the Gretna on the A167, and the inevitable happens. Gladly they would lose whatever inhibitions they had with each other. They would communicate everything they could, as quickly and breathlessly as possible.
There was an urgency about us, Elsie thought, passing through Catherine Cookson Close. At twenty-eight she’d had a list of fellers she still wanted to knock off. Was that wrong? When she told that to Jane, only recently, Jane had looked downright sniffy. She’d also told her that the pinnacle had been, in 1977, finding out on the day of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee that Big Jim Burns, who she’d grown up with, wasn’t called that for nothing.
Elsie wanted to ask, what was wrong with that? She’d had a lovely time, the day of the Silver Jubilee. Big Jim Burns was a copper and she kissed him patriotically in the town centre and then took him back to her flat and there they fucked wildly for much of that afternoon.
1977—the very number still glowed with the warmth of that June. She could still feel, if she thought hard, the press of his weight on her stomach and thighs. She could hardly open her mouth wide enough to get this thing in. Elsie wished she hadn’t told Jane that bit. Now Jane looked at her as if she was a filthy old woman. Am I? Elsie thought. Here she was, at forty-something, getting all stirred-up at the thought of a big policeman’s big thing, carrying a shopping bag of drink back from the shops.
Jane made her feel disgraceful. That was the word. Yet Jane was no virgin. She had a seven-year-old bairn and no husband. What made her so prim? Anyway, they were pals, Elsie and Jane, and she shouldn’t think ill of her.
Here she was. Turn the corner, where the puddles were frozen over black, and suddenly she was in Phoenix Court. Everyone’s windows were lit up as the teatime gloom stole in. She counted off all the trees in the windows and felt sad that they would be coming down in a few days. She thought there was nothing sadder than Christmas ending. Maybe she’d be glad to see the back of this awful, lonely Christmas.
She stopped in the play park and looked across to number sixteen. All their lights were on and their tree seemed to be the biggest and most lavish in the street. There were shapes moving about behind the net curtains. They must be getting ready for the party. She could hear music coming faintly from within: ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’. It all seemed inviting.
Before she went home to make some tea, Elsie thought she would check what her Craig was up to. She hadn’t asked him yet, but she felt sure he’d see the New Year in with the lads. She just took it for granted. Most of Christmas he’d been with them. Her Craig, hanging out with the rough lads.
But look at him, when he was with his mates. If she was a stranger, if she wasn’t his mother at all, then she’d see no difference. Mothers could blind themselves, she knew, when it came to sons. But sons were men. They were full of blood and temper and that had to come out. From her bedroom window at night she could see across the main road, over Woodham Way, and sometimes she could see Craig, part of his gang, hanging around the
