“That was all right,” I said. “The house was finished. We’ve a lovely home together and it’s all down to you.”
“You almost crippled me, woman.” He looked at me and what was in his eyes stopped up my voice. “Do you realise what put me in here? Do you?” He stopped in his tracks. “You’ve bored me stupid, you pathetic woman! You’ve got nothing to give me. You’re all curtain rails and cups of tea and cheese sandwiches and the News of the bloody World. And mowing that rubbish bit of garden out the back of your house. Is that all you want out of your life? Keeping that house of yours nice? Forcing me to make it right for you? Couldn’t you see what you did to me?”
“Tom,” I said, and I wanted to say more. He looked at me, waiting.
“You’ve no excuse, have you?” he snapped. “You don’t know any better. You don’t know what else to expect out of life.”
His face was all contorted. He burst into tears and then he ran away, back into the main building.
What was I meant to do then? Go in after him again?
I have my pride. I wouldn’t beg him to listen to me.
He thinks I’m an ignorant woman. He thinks I’ve nothing to say to him. Well, maybe I haven’t. I came away and caught the bus home. Left it a full week before I came to see him again. Then, this time, I brought my pal. I brought Fran.
When he was shouting at me, when he was saying, “Couldn’t you see? Couldn’t you see how miserable I was with you?” I wanted to tell him, Yes, Tom, I could always see how miserable you were. But I didn’t know what to do about it. How was I meant to know? Why does everyone want to know the answers from me?
They were made to wait in what looked to Fran like a rather grand hall. The woodwork was dark and shiny, like toffee hot from the oven. The floorboards creaked under-foot and there were stuffed animals lodged high in the walls. She could imagine coming down those stairs in a frock, Scarlett O’Hara, maybe music playing for a ball. Again that antiseptic smell, which spoiled the atmosphere. Beside her Elsie was scratching herself. Both sweatshirt sleeves were up to the elbows and Elsie rubbed the skin fiercely. When Fran looked the skin was blotchy. She wanted to tell Elsie to pack it in.
“They’ve never kept me waiting out here before,” Elsie said. “Something’s happened. Usually they’ve let me straight in to see him. Something has been going on.”
“I’m sure it hasn’t,” said Fran, though she wasn’t so sure. Every time she heard a yell or the thudding of feet from elsewhere in the building, she flinched. But the only other soul they had seen so far was the nurse who showed them where to sit.
The nurse was back. “You’re Elsie?” She smiled, and Elsie looked up, wondering why they didn’t have these nurses in proper uniforms.
“Has something happened to him?” Elsie asked, clutching both her elbows and hugging herself.
It was the fair on the waste ground that came every holiday weekend. They set up on Friday and there were three nights of noise and music and everyone trampling through the heavy dirt. Elsie always loved the penny arcades. She took Craig after school on the Friday, and then the next two nights. He watched as she played for ten-pence pieces and, when she made enough, he was allowed to run off to jump on a ride. Nothing too dangerous. Elsie would train herself not to go after him and watch, not to call him down and show him up. Once she had asked the man in charge of the shuggy boats to switch it off, to bring down her son, because as he was going round and round, she could have sworn that he looked upset. Everyone had laughed as she ran up to help him down. Afterwards she kept to the penny slot machines and wouldn’t look at him enjoying himself.
It was on the slot machines she met Tom. He had only just started out with the Rainbow Gang, helping the underprivileged kids on the estates to find God. He brought his Friday-night kids to the fair because they had all insisted. He abandoned the games and the songs he had planned for that night in the Methodists’ hall and gamely walked his flock of forty over to the waste ground instead. “Stay together!” he called when they arrived and as they dispersed suddenly, noisily, he realised he had no hope of rounding them up again. The Rainbow Gang for that night was ruined. As he walked around the fair, the sun going down and the coloured lightbulbs strung between booths and canopies coming on, he kept glimpsing the different members of his flock. They waved and yelled at him from dodgem cars and swinging chairs on the rides that reeled above him. Tom always waved back and shouted a greeting, but he wasn’t sure if they were taking the mickey out of him. When he saw his children at other times, in shops, in the post office, slouching on the corners of streets, and they shouted out loud hellos, he wasn’t sure then, either, whether he was the butt of their jokes. On the whole he didn’t mind. He was bringing them together. He gave them a place to meet every week. Kept them off the streets.
Elsie watched him work the
