This was quite recent. Something’s come between Steve and me. I’m not sure what it is, but he’s using every opportunity he can to take the piss, to turn the others against me. And they don’t take much turning. Maybe it’s because my mam’s feller’s a nutcase and everyone knows that now. Maybe they think I’ll turn out a nutter too and I end up wanting to tell them, But it’s not blood! He’s no blood relation of mine. Other times I think it’s my foot and the way you’ll catch them looking at it sometimes. It’s why I won’t sit about in places like the sauna for long, when they’re all about. Downtown once we saw an old woman, she was quite small but she had huge, swollen legs. She had that elephant disease and I could hear what the other lads were thinking, I thought I could sense them, itching to say that her legs were bloated up like my foot. That I must have an old woman’s disease. I knew that if I hadn’t been there, that’s what they would have been saying.
Steve says to me as we’re getting changed, “That lass you’ve got hanging around you — that’s the daughter of the woman you punched out, isn’t it?”
Steve is staring at his own full-length reflection, hoisting up his arms, flexing them like wings, watching the stretching of his pecs. He’s dripping wet from the shower and he’s pulled on his pants without drying properly.
“Penny’s not hanging around me,” I go and, as I say it, I realise that’s exactly what she’s doing. She came to see me today, as I worked out.
“I want to say thank you,” Penny said, walking up to me as I sat on the pec machine. You have your arms spread out either side over bars like James Dean and I was kind of trapped there as she said her piece. I couldn’t shrug like I wanted to or look cool like that. Actually, she looked minging, her eyes all bloodshot, with these awful bags under them. She was dressed like a mess too. I was hoping the other lads hadn’t seen her visiting me like this, but they had, it turns out.
“Canny bird you’ve got there,” Steve says with a smirk, pulling on his shirt, and it irritates me, the way he won’t put on deodorant or dry his back. I hate the smell of sweat in this tiny wooden room. It smells like the pie shop down the precinct.
Penny said, “It’s because of you that my mam’s still alive.” And I gulped.
Now Steve is pulling a face at me. He mocks Penny’s voice, does it like bad acting, “It’s because of you that my mam’s still alive.” He comes closer. “Are you gunna tell her it was you who punched her mother out?”
She was waiting for him down in the precinct. She would never put it like that, God knows, but she thought, if he comes by after the gym, then we’ll bump into each other. And that’s all right.
Penny spent some time looking in the other charity shops, not Elsie’s. There were ten in the town, out of only about thirty shops in all. She was always up for bargains and she remembered fights with her mam. Liz had always refused to dress her daughter in anybody’s castoffs. Liz couldn’t bear the thought of it but as soon as Penny was of an age to buy her own things, she was straight down the second-hand shops. And the things she would come back with. Even Penny had to laugh now at the thought of those bargains. Bargains she had picked up and worn, almost out of defiance — as if defiance could make these clothes stylish. At thirteen she was dressing in old women’s things, willing them back into fashion. But those particular shapeless black dresses, those exact flowery polyester blouses, never came back. Penny wore them layered, like a bag lady. When she turned vegetarian and cooked each night, tossing all her sliced and diced vegetables, her herbs and her spices into a wok, Liz had said, “You know, you’ve started to cook how you dress. Shove everything on at once and hope for the best.” At the time Penny had thought this acute and dreadful. Her mother was never anything less than fastidious.
Nowadays Penny was free to heap as many old castoffs on her back as she liked. She could block out her mother’s old horror of second-hand clothes, the thought that someone might have died in them. She could go round dressed in old men’s clothes if she liked and no one would object, no one would bat an eyelid. Going round the drab shops this afternoon, she thought about making herself into a real fright — Stig of the Dump — and visiting Bishop General, sitting by Liz’s bed. Hair stuck all over the place, odd socks, lumpy old jumper and yesterday’s pants on. She could imagine Liz’s eyes flying open: “A daughter of mine visiting her mother like this!”
She sat on a bench under a tree in the middle of the precinct. It was freezing. She couldn’t pretend she
