All right, I say, I’ll go north.
Then I wake myself up by sneezing and realise I’ve come down overnight with germs.
More snow has settled, it’s six o’clock and I can hear Penny knocking about in the kitchen downstairs. When I get down there she’s making up some sandwiches for my bus journey north. Somehow she already knows I’ve decided to go. I thank her, though sometimes it unnerves me, the way Penny just easily, unquestionably knows exactly what I have been dreaming of.
EIGHT
Elsie’s incentive for working at the spastics shop was this: getting people to look in. After all her years on the town she knew nearly everyone who came through those doors. Some came in especially to see her. It was what she liked best about the job. It wasn’t paid work. It was all for charity and she wasn’t one of those who expected to get something for nothing.
“There’s also something else,” said Charlotte, when they stood listing incentives to each other over the counter. “There’s also the fact that we get the pick of the best stuff. That’s our best perk.”
Charlotte was a bit posh, Elsie thought. The older woman put on this accent, even though she had lived in Aycliffe for years, well before her man died and she was widowed. She came to the spastics with a clean, pressed pinny every morning.
When Elsie was on the till she could hear Charlotte crashing and stumbling about in the sorting room upstairs. She always got there first, rooting around in the donations, setting stuff aside, pricing things up with the yellow stickers. Elsie hardly ever got a look-in. She found herself thinking unkindly of Charlotte getting to the best donations with those hands of hers like claws. The old woman was twisted up with arthritis and her hands were purple, so that Elsie could hardly stand to look at them. Charlotte had difficulties pushing the till buttons. It was terrible and embarrassing to see. That was why, usually, it ended up with Elsie stuck behind the counter serving people, taking money and chatting away. Meanwhile Charlotte fussed around the racks, straightening and sorting, then ducking upstairs to poke around for the cream of the crop. Elsie knew for a fact the old woman put 20p stickers on the things she wanted for herself. And grudgingly she paid this nominal amount, going home with bagfuls of goodies every teatime. God knows how she got it all to fit into that bungalow of hers. She lived just off Phoenix Court, in Catherine Cookson Close, and thought she was a cut above.
“Someone asking after you,” Charlotte called, waving one of those hands of hers in front of Elsie’s face. She knew Elsie went off into these dozes and she clicked her fingers under her nose to bring her round. Elsie hated it when she did that.
“Hm?’ I want to stay daydreaming, Elsie thought. The shop was overheated and it was empty, which was strange, because the January sale was on. She was enjoying being able to drift off in the relative quiet, buoyed on that dry, dusty air and the scent of washing powder and other people’s houses. Their shop had that particular smell, whatever the stock was. Elsie thought of it as a compound of the smells of all the homes in Aycliffe.
“Someone’s asking after you,” said Charlotte, and pointed to Penny, standing awkwardly new to the rack of blouses Charlotte had spent the morning arranging. She had put them in order of the colours of the rainbow. They shaded gradually from salmon to poison green. Penny was clutching a carrier of Red Spot groceries and she held a family box of cornflakes under one arm. Elsie hurried over and wanted to cuddle her or greet her fondly — do something nice, anyway — but there was something that held her back. She was never quite sure how to say hello. People could be funny about things like that and anyway, there was something about Penny that kept people at a distance. Elsie had forgotten that since she last saw Penny. A few days of fondness and absence had softened Penny’s edge.
The girl looked pale today, her hair unwashed, her legs bare and mottled with the cold. She wore those clumpy boots and what looked like a feller’s old duffel coat.
“Are you all right, pet?” Elsie asked, and made her smile. She was glad someone was asking after her, for a change, instead of her mam. For a week that was all they had said to her, friends, faces she knew, complete strangers: “How’s your mam doing, pet?” These days Liz and Penny were public property. Penny was nothing but the unconscious mother’s press agent. Just because they’d seen Liz lying out there on the ground, they thought they all deserved these constant updates. Penny imagined putting up messages on letter-headed paper like outside the gates at Buckingham Palace. She thought it was just bizarre that people who had never bothered with them before were suddenly wanting to beetle over to Bishop Auckland General to see Liz on her life support and connected to her drip. Were they just ghoulish? Was that the fascination? At least Elsie had the sense not to go asking about Liz again. There was nothing to tell her if she had; there’d been nothing to tell for days.
Penny said, “I thought it was about time I thanked your Craig for everything he did the other day.”
“Ah,” said Elsie, and bit her tongue. She thought, Let the lass take this at her own pace. Don’t jump in and spoil it. Her heart set up a mad tattoo because somehow she knew, she absolutely knew, that she was going to get what she wanted.
“Do you know where he is today?” The poor, washed-out girl hardly had any tone in her voice. It was like she could hardly be bothered to speak. Elsie was flushed in the face, as if she was
