When their go on the dodgems was over, one of the Gypsy fellers jumped on the back of their car, clung to the pole and drew them to a standstill. When he grabbed the pole, he took some of Elsie’s flyaway ginger hair and yanked it by accident. She screamed out. This and her subsequent muttered complaints took her attention off her son’s morbidity as they wandered through the rest of the fair.
Fish and chips on the way home and that was their Friday night out. In bed Craig listened to his mam play Shirley Bassey and he thought about why it wasn’t worth bothering.
One morning that December he came down into the kitchen. Mam had been making her milky weak tea for them both and the radio was on. Some New Wave band was on, just before the news, he couldn’t remember who. His mam started saying something bright and cheerful about the snow that was coming, how they might go sledging, when the news started up and the first story was that John Lennon had been shot and killed in New York City.
Then the news was finished and the first song after that was ‘Help!’ Elsie’s face was wet with tears. She finished making the tea and sat down heavily at the breakfast bar.
“Who was it, Mam? Who’s died?” By then, though, he recognised the song as one by the Beatles.
“John was the cheeky one, he always said something to annoy the interviewer and make them look daft. It was Paul I liked, because of his eyes.”
“So why are you crying?”
“I don’t know.”
Elsie was thinking, You’re a morbid little bugger. Kids have no heart.
Craig wanted to know all the details of the shooting. Who, why, where, how and how many bullets did it take? After his mam had finished with the papers, he kept them and pasted the clippings into a scrapbook.
“And he’d just got back with his wife,” Elsie said sadly. “That awful Jappy wife. But still, they were happy.”
Craig thought, They get you in the end. Don’t bank on too much. Doesn’t matter what your special powers are, your number comes up some time or another. He tried to tell Elsie this as she played her copies of the Blue Album and the Red Album that night.
“Hush your mouth, you heartless thing!” She looked shocked at him. How dare he tell her life is futile? What was she raising here? And she sang ‘Strawberry Fields’ to herself.
These were the convictions that Craig grew up with: that it was all going to end soon anyway, wherever or whatever you were. It made him set his goals within manageable limits. He worked on his body and he sought out a girl. And here Penny was.
With Penny all this unquestioned stuff of his had to alter. He started looking at things differently for the first time he could remember. It wasn’t what she said that changed what he expected out of life, though she never shut up about things like that. She was for ever questioning things. What made Craig think again was her very presence, how much he loved to be with her. He felt full up and hungry all the time. He started to think there would never be enough time. For what, he wasn’t sure. Thinking about this showed him that he believed this time limit was on everything. They were doomed and Penny would go. So when he looked round after thinking this, at his mother’s house, their lives on this estate, in this town, they all looked too shabby for what he imagined he and Penny had going. There wasn’t enough life here for everything he wanted.
I’ve started to want too much, he thought, and this frightened him. There was a danger in wanting too much. This was the one thing Elsie had succeeded in drumming into her son. Hubris, she called it, with a sneer. Don’t get greedy like your father, she warned. It’ll end in disaster. Though neither of them knew exactly what disaster had befallen his father when he swanned off to his new life in Leeds. Perhaps things had gone wonderfully for him. What Elsie had meant, he realised, was that his father’s greed had meant disaster for her. Now Craig was thinking he could play with greed. He could allow himself to want things.
That night when Penny went to meet him at the gym, they returned to find that Elsie was out.
“I thought she was nervy about going out now,” he said.
Penny frowned. Sometimes Craig talked as if his mam really pissed him off. “Maybe she wanted something at the shop.” Penny was relieved Elsie wasn’t there. She wouldn’t have to tell her just yet about the state of the spastics shop.
There was a note on the pinboard in the kitchen. “She’s gone to Fran’s,” Craig said. “We’ve got the place to ourselves.”
“Yeah?” The house was gloomy. They walked through it without switching lights on as they went. It was like being intruders. Elsie had left the place messy, which was unlike her. Not messy enough to be worth making a comment on, Penny thought, but the place bore evidence of Elsie’s distractedness. The living room looked as if a tide had swept in and out again, subtly dislodging and disarranging things.
Craig pulled Penny down on the real sheepskin rug in front of the fire, which he switched on. The fire-effect cast orange shadows on them; Penny watched them creep back and forth on his perfectly sculpted chest when he sat in front of her. She felt the sheepskin tickle up her crack as Craig went down on her. He hadn’t done that before and he was clumsy. He lapped right into her like a mother cat cleaning a kitten. Penny said, “Is that all right?” when he came up for air and could have kicked herself for asking. Did he ever ask the same when she sucked his
