I asked gently, “Should we go and see your friend now?”
Nanna Jean sighed. “I suppose we should, if she’s expecting us.” She was clasping her handbag, I noticed, upside down. “It’s not that I don’t want to see her,” she said. “Every time I do, though, she looks worse. It reminds me of the way things go.”
As we walked back down she told me how her other friend, Minnie, was the first to know of Iris’s illness. Iris had visited with tea and cakes and vomited blood on Minnie’s new three-piece. The stain wouldn’t come out. Minnie said Iris had dropped to her knees to help scrub it up. After that she stopped visiting people. Nanna Jean said she couldn’t look at anyone ill these days. She’d seen enough of all that business.
Iris’s skin was almost olive in the late-afternoon light. After hearing Nanna Jean’s lurid reports, I’d been expecting this poor old woman the colour of custard. She lived above a pub that she used to run, but that was all over now and it was a fun pub these days. While we ate our sedate tea with her, we could hear the video games and the jukebox downstairs. Iris had laid on tinned-salmon sandwiches cut in white triangles. Nanna Jean looked impressed and relieved. We ate sandwiches and angel cake and sipped tea almost wordlessly while someone in the fun pub kept putting on that Billy Joel song ‘I Love You Just the Way You Are’.
Nanna Jean popped off to the bedroom to try her new Marksies slacks on. I was alone with Iris and suddenly aware of a rank smell.
“I’m not sleeping in my room now,” she told me brightly. “I sleep in my chair. And, oh, sometimes I do feel heavy.”
There was a fruit bowl made of shiny metal wiring on the sideboard behind her. The fruit had turned brown and deliquescent, the shapes all humped into one, spreading into a puddle through the wires.
Nanna Jean came back to show off her slacks and we admired them. She kept them on for the rest of the visit. “Did your nanna tell you that we’re related, Andrew?”
Iris perked up suddenly. She had flecks of white bread-crumbs on her lips. Her voice was rather posh, I thought, gentle and restrained in comparison with Nanna Jean, who, scarlet-faced and embarrassed by something, was braying out when she spoke. Iris went on, “I’m some kind of auntie to you, I think.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
“There are all sorts of connections round here.” Iris smiled. “I bet we don’t know the half of it. It was only in recent years I found out I had all these cousins in South Shields. All of them black. An aunt of ours married a man black as coal in 1900. They had dozens of children and they all stayed here. Imagine that! So when I found out, I looked them up and went round paying visits. Ever so clean. And they all looked like members of my family! Except all of mine, the white ones, were dead. All the same faces, all the same personalities, almost. Different names — and all of them a different colour.” She clicked her fingers. “Ha! What do you think of that?”
“Don’t confuse the boy,” Nanna Jean said huffily. “He doesn’t want to know about all that.”
“He’s a man!” Iris smiled gently and reached across the perfect tablecloth for her Embassy Milds. “He’s interested, aren’t you, pet?”
I beamed at her.
“The family stories have to go somewhere, Jean,” she said in a voice sounding as if she was falling asleep. “He’s the one who’s got to carry it all on, and give it to his own bairns.” She was becoming fainter.
“It’s a lot of nonsense,” Nanna Jean said, but kindly, trying not to hurt her feelings.
TEN
Penny found herself pushing Liz further to the back of her mind.
Every other day Penny went to the hospital. She listened to her mother’s bedside machines bleeping. Was she meant to talk to her? Liz showed no sign of change. She lay there, straight, her features strong and implacable. She was bathed in the lights of the displays that showed how she was getting on. Elsie said that she talked to her, chattered to her about all sorts. She couldn’t stop herself. She said that the other visitors did it too — all the women of Phoenix Court. She made Penny feel inadequate.
She would arrive in the late afternoon and sit down in the uncomfortable chair at Liz’s side. She’d have spent the whole bus trip through wintry fields thinking up things to tell her mam. And she’d sit down and there would be nothing. Suddenly she felt stupid. If she opened her mouth, the air would crack. Her voice was sucked away by the dull machines lining the room. She looked at Liz and thought about speaking, coming out with caring, cheering, supportive things, and it felt like talking to a plant.
Things were moving on with Craig. Andy called him ‘your
straight boyfriend’ and this gave Penny a warm glow. Was she proud of him? He came round to fix a problem they had with wiring. And then the toilet wouldn’t flush. He went in and sorted it, not in the least put off that the toilet was chockablock. He was very handy. In the Forsyths’ house across the road he had been an asset because somehow he knew how to do things. To make things, fix things, to sort them out, without really being aware of how he came by such knowledge. Craig just somehow knew. Penny adored this about him. She was used to living around people who relished their own haplessness. Andy would tut and wave his hands at problems like these, practical concerns. Liz would treat them with a derisory sneer. And because both were so set on behaving like ladies, both would call in a plumber or an electrician.
Craig, on the other hand, would stick his head
