Fran didn’t know where her kids learned it from. There was her eldest, out at nights and only fourteen. Frank said she was a little tart, the way she dressed. He said he hated his own daughter.
“Come on! You’re coming inside to tell your dad what you’ve just told me!” Not even four and coming out with things like that. “You’re not playing out for the rest of this week!”
Jane turned up for a pot of tea and she commiserated. The kids were getting cheekier. “But what role models do they have? The little bairns look at the grown-ups and look what they’re getting up to!” She looked round at the other houses in the close. “If I was a kid today I wouldn’t know if I was coming or going.”
They went in to sit in Fran’s kitchen. Jane wanted to talk through plans for her Peter’s birthday. She had read something in Bella magazine about making your garden into a circus and fairground by painting cardboard boxes. She liked the idea of a party with a theme. Fran thought Jane liked the idea because it meant she wouldn’t have to have anyone in her house.
“So I might have to ask you for some help,” she said, “painting the boxes in circus stripes.”
“Right,” Fran said. But none of us can paint, she thought. She imagined how it would all turn out. Jane would end up with a pile of rubbishy painted boxes in her garden and that would be the party. Her soft son would be disappointed and cry, Jane would get cross and hit him, then send everybody home. Fran wanted to say you were better off having a clown party at McDonald’s. They did all sorts for the kids there.
“Have you been to see Liz recently?” asked Jane.
“Have I not told you about visiting with Elsie?”
Jane nodded. “It all got eclipsed by the story of you going to the loony bin with Elsie.”
“Don’t call it that.” Fran pursed her lips.
“Elsie’s gone bloody daft now,” Jane said. “She was out in her garden this morning, sobbing and shouting and waving her arms in the air. I leant over the fence to see what the matter was.”
Elsie had looked desperate and worn out, still in her housecoat and nightie. Her hair was out of its bunches and she was raking her hands in the soil.
“I kept my voice as normal as possible and I asked her what was going on.”
“And?”
“She said her garden was back to normal. She said that the day before it was ruined and now it was all better again.”
Fran said, “I think she must be under some stress.”
“She would be.” Jane stared out of the window. “Hasn’t that Penny let herself go since taking up with her Craig?”
“Do you think so?” Fran asked. “I thought she looked happier.”
“That’s just sex.” Jane sniffed.
“Maybe I should go over to Elsie’s,” Fran mused. “Talk to her. See if she wants anything doing.”
“I’d keep well away. That husband of hers. You don’t know where he might be lurking.”
“That’s awful!” Fran gasped and gave an involuntary shiver.
“Well. He gives me the creeps. He could be hanging around anywhere.”
“I think he’ll have left Aycliffe behind,” Fran said. She looked at Jeff, her young, sulking son in the corner of the kitchen. “They all do.”
Mark Kelly turned up. He was in his jogging outfit, a more neutral blue than his tattoos. Jane was quieter with him there.
“Do you think Penny and Craig will last long as an item?” Fran asked.
“Who?” he asked.
Fran explained, smiling. Sometimes Mark was slow on the uptake. He couldn’t keep up with everyone’s business.
“That Penny’s an interesting lass,” he said, looking for his cigarettes, patting his pockets. Jane saw that he had one of those bum bags on. She didn’t like them. Mark, she noticed, was the only person Fran let smoke in her kitchen. When he sucked on the cigarette she watched the tender bit of his temples move and dimple.
“Have you been to visit her mother in hospital?” Jane asked him. “Have you been to see Liz?”
He frowned. “Should I? I don’t really know the woman.”
“It just seems like everyone’s going up to see her,” Jane said. “Like a bloody shrine. All of us touching the hem of her gold lame frock.”
Fran cackled. “That’s good, that!” Then she was ashamed of herself. That poor woman, in a coma. She told Mark the poem her son had come out with. Mark spoiled it by laughing long and hard. His laugh was so infectious he started Fran and Jeff off too.
“I still don’t think it’s funny,’ Jane said. “If my Peter said that, I’d —”
“Jane, man,” Mark said abruptly. “Sometimes you’re a pain in the arse. You think you’re so bloody proper.”
Fran loved this about Mark. He said exactly what he meant. Plain as the tattoos on his face. With a final slurp of tea, Jane took herself off home.
“You’ll have started something now,” Fran said, who would bend over backwards to avoid falling out with Jane. Jane could be quite nasty.
This is like a story I’d forgotten. Was it one of the Ladybird books? Sometimes I’ll remember those stories and see the picture exactly as it was. I’ve still got all those books, on a bottom shelf at Nanna Jean’s. But I needn’t open them to see the pictures. They’re all in my head. How all those characters chased the Giant Pancake, or pulled the Giant Turnip out of the ground, or got swept up in the molten deluge from the Magic Porridge Pot. I liked the obscurer fairy stories. Chicken Licken proclaiming disaster everywhere. And the one I have forgotten, but am reminded of tonight by my dream, is the one where the dog runs through the streets of a town with a princess strapped to his back. Every night in the story the dog has larger and larger eyes: the size
