At eighteen I would feel myself blush and go cross and have to leave the room. But this time I felt obliged to stay until the end of the visiting hour. “You’ll see, you’ll see,” she said. “It’s human nature. Maggie’s got it right. The first right thing she did was take away the free school milk. That’s setting the bairns up wrong, thinking they can get something for nowt.”
It always got back to the free school milk and how it bred a generation of ingrates. That was my mam’s generation. Her sisters were remarried, doing very nicely, thank you, with six cars and seven bathrooms between them, both living in the south with different accents. Nanna Jean still couldn’t quite approve of them. Full of the spirit of free enterprise they might be, enjoying holidays in Tunisia and all the rest. “But the joy has gone out of them!” Nanna Jean moaned. “Before they’ve even hit forty!” My parents were killed in the first plane ride they ever took, to Hong Kong. They had been on Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right and won the holiday. Only Mam was above Nanna Jean’s criticism. She was an angel.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child. Sometimes I think it hastened Nanna Jean’s reinvention of herself. As if regaining her sight and seeing her daughter die were things to make her seize what remained of her life and shake it for all it was worth. Every time I come here and wake in this room full of my old things, I think about this stuff. I look at the wardrobe of clothes left behind. I always had too many, none of them quite right. I thought I was a funny shape. Every Dr Who novelisation Terrance Dicks ever wrote, about two hundred of them, are lined in a bookcase on top of which stands an almost complete set of Star Wars figures. Only Princess Leia is missing. Every time I’m here, going over all these old thoughts, I think, if Nanna Jean thought the generation after her, her daughters’ lot, were wasting their time, footling it all away, then what must she think about my life?
At twenty-four I’m sitting up in bed wondering what to do with the Lemsip I’ve let grow cold and toying with the bare Action Man I’ve found under the bed. Listen to his joints squeal!
Then she pops her head round the door, smacking her lips to get the fresh lipstick even, pulling on some lilac gloves and asking, did I want to come into South Shields with her? She had an old friend dying she felt she ought to visit and there were a few things to pick up for tea.
On the Metro going into town we have the following con-versation. I say, “I like this train system. It’s like a little London.” It’s homely, I think, with a map that isn’t at all complex, and much of it, unlike the tube, runs overland. The Tyneside Metro whistles and shunts over scrubby waste-land, through docks and estates, across town centres. And there are thrilling moments when you glide on bridges over the Tyne. All the trains are an off-yellow colour, that of the juice in the cheapest of baked beans.
“You haven’t been to London much,” she says and it’s not really a question.
“No,” I say, knowing full well that Nanna Jean can’t see the point of London or the south of England at all. The south is where she has to pass through on her way to travel the world. Gatwick, Heathrow, these are the south to her and they are just waiting rooms, stepping stones. Everything in the whole world, she says, you can find here in the northeast. Now that she’s been everywhere, this is her solemn declaration. More than once I’ve sat on the Metro as we’ve rattled across Tynedock and she’s told me without a glimmer of irony that all human life is here. Any human drama can be played out in South Shields. There’s room for everything, she’s said.
“I thought you’d end up going to London,” she says. “You lot often do that, don’t you?”
And I don’t know what she means. She might mean young people generally, or she could mean queer fellers specifically. And now there is an ironic cast in her eye as she sits opposite me, bouncing slightly on her seat. Oh, I’m not out to Nanna Jean. Whatever that means. I can’t make that phrase sound right in my mouth. That I’m out to anyone at all is more by luck than design, I suppose. Easier just to be self-evident, no questions asked. But sometimes you want more. You want questions, interest, you want — I suppose — explicit acknowledgement. I want Nanna Jean to ask about Vince, now, on this day out; have I seen him, how is he, will he be coming back to me? I want her to divine, with her wise old womanly instincts, my unhappiness and to tell me I was silly, insane, lucky or entirely right to get involved with Mark Kelly, the tattooed man. I even want to tell her about his tattoos. Nanna Jean’s husband, my granddad as would have been, was in the navy and he probably had tattoos. We could share that.
“You don’t think about going to London, then?” she says.
“I’ve thought about moving,” I say. “I wanted to last year.”
“Ah,” she says simply, gazing out of the window at the grey shelf of the sea. In that ‘ah’ I can hear as much understanding as I want. She’s given me that much space. It’s true, though, I have thought about moving to somewhere bigger. I was going to go to Edinburgh and live in the gay village part of town, wear tight T-shirts and go out dancing every night.
She changes the subject.
“It was in the Gazette, the day before you came. They’ve closed down Lampton Lion Park.
