Then he was coming out of Stevens the newsagents, the Northern Echo rolled under his arm. He was in tracksuit bottoms, lurching towards her on his bad foot across the slippery flagstones. It was pattering on to snow, hard, dry flakes that wouldn’t melt on your skin when they landed there. He was grinning and that made his hobbled progress even more pathetic to her. Penny had forgotten that his limp was so bad.
“You’re still around,” he said, coming in close.
She hissed out her smoke. She’d done her bit and said thanks already. Now she could afford to be cool with him. They didn’t like you to gush. At least, not at first.
“It’s a bit miserable, back at home,” she admitted and blew her cool by shivering.
“How about some tea?” he asked. “Have the Health people closed down the Copper Kettle yet?”
They looked across the town centre and saw that the café was still open. It had been given a month to sort out its hygiene problems or it would be forced to shut down. Its loyal customers kept on going. They had organised a petition to save their town’s only café and it said they would organise a sit-in if the Health people tried to shut it.
“All right,” Penny said.
At this point in the afternoon Craig often went for some tea at the Copper Kettle. Today was when he bought 2000 AD, a British comic he had been collecting for years. It was folded up inside his newspaper like a dirty magazine. He followed Penny to the café, deciding to forgo his usual hour or so alone with his comic.
NINE
When I woke up the first morning, it was with a terrible pain in my gut. For a few minutes it stabbed and just held in there. I sat up in bed and I couldn’t move, I sat there shocked by the pain. It went off like someone throwing a switch and then Nanna Jean knocked and came in with a tray.
“Lemsip for the invalid,” she announced, plonking the tray on my knees. It had two cups and saucers on it, one of Lemsip, one of black tea. I looked down at the clear green and the clear orange, bits swirling round in both, and neither looked inviting. The nice thing about Nanna Jean, though, is that she always serves tea in the best china, whatever the time of day. I remember when I lived with her in my teens, when she started going out nights again, she’d come back tipsy from dancing and still make tea in china cups at four in the morning. She and her cronies sat round her kitchen table, cackling and tapping their ash into a spare white saucer. I’d watch from the stairs sometimes, loving the homely smell of the smoke.
When I told her about the pain, she surprised me.
“Aah, you get all sorts of pains when you’re growing up.”
And I didn’t remind her that I was twenty-four, that all my growing had been done, that this pain must signify something else, something new besides simple growth. I let it drop.
She still lives in the same place she always did, and I find that reassuring. When I think, it’s the single thing in all my life that has stayed the same. Nanna Jean lives in Hyde Street, a terrace of dark turn-of-the-century houses on a gentle hill in South Shields. When my dad worked in Shields town hail for a year during the sixties, he used to go round Nanna Jean’s in his dinner hour. Ham and a bit of salad. He said Nanna Jean never talked to him much, just gave him his dinner and watched him eat it, weighing him up.
Nanna Jean had this cat, Lucky, who used to slink about the place. Not a hair on it, Mam said. A few bits of fluff on its back. She and all her sisters used to hate that cat. It used to wobble about all over the place, and perch on the antimacassars. She made Dad take it away one day when Nanna Jean was out, down the spiritualists’ church. He got rid of Lucky and it was his first act as a member of our family. He moved into the front parlour and then I came along and we all muddled in together. Auntie Olly lived under the stairs, behind a green curtain. She had a bed like a bunk on a ship and she was nearly seven feet tall. Up on the top floor lived Auntie Jane and her Brian and our Steve, but you never saw them.
Nanna Jean was a proper old lady. Mam always said it was something to do with her generation. Always going about in those long coats, clumpy shoes, fruit on their hats, and their handbags held under their bosoms, arms folded.
I remember Mam saying that Nanna jean was a funny woman. Repressed. Like many of her age and class, she couldn’t quite deal with the world of the sixties. This world that came to claim her children. They started staying out all night in clubs like the Chelsea Cat. When I was tiny, Nanna Jean was this imposing presence all in black, often under a duvet in her armchair. She seemed a real old woman, but she must have been only about fifty when I was little. And all through the sixties and seventies she was blind. It happened very suddenly, just before her husband died, in 1960. She was working in the scullery, doing something to kippers, when he called her from the parlour, where he was watching the telly. “Come and look at this, Jean! It’s like real
