Waiting in the Forsyth’s kitchen and catching sight of her own startled, blushing face in the cracked mirror, Elsie found herself thinking, I’m glad he’s in care tonight. He’s like an old fart. He’s like my dad. I’m glad he’s in the mansion on the hill outside Spennymoor. With deer in the snowy grounds and lovely walks. I’m glad he’s in a bed next to a man who thinks he’s Jesus. If he was here he’d only hold me back.
When she saw her face it was red with shame and the warmth of the kitchen. Look at all my lines, she thought dismally. They weren’t even wrinkles, they were grooves. And I’ve warts, she thought: two of them, with wispy hairs. I look like a witch. The old image of a witch we had when we were kids. I’ve grown up to be an old witchy witch without realising it. And I’ve got a husband who’s mad because he’s disappointed and a son with a foot that will never get better. If I’m a witch, they’ll all say I’ve put Curses on them. I spoiled Craig’s foot because I didn’t take him down the doctors’. I thought they would take it off. I didn’t want them taking bits off his beautiful young body. It feels mine as much as his.
She could still think back to how they talked about his tied umbilical cord dropping off, days after delivery. Nineteen years ago, now. That withered end of skin, she thought, with sudden, peculiar clarity, is a piece of both of us. Whose is it, though? And maybe it’s best that it dries up and dies and gets chucked away and then we won’t need to decide where one of us ends and the other begins.
Footsteps upstairs. Her son was up there with who knew how many other lads and maybe lasses of his own age. It was like an adventure to them, having the run of this place, doing just what they wanted. Elsie looked at herself again. Her hair had been auburn once and now it was threaded with silver. Tom called it salt-and-pepper hair and she liked that. There was more of the salt than ever these days and he was the one putting it there. Her pepper was thinning out. I’m losing my spice! she thought. Today she had her hair in bunches. I look like I’m pretending to be a child! What am I doing that for?
Then Craig was coming into the kitchen, in his tracksuit. “Mam?”
When Craig wasn’t home on Christmas Eve, he said it was because he’d been down the gym till closing and then he went straight to the Forsyths’ house. They were having a Christmas party. “Didn’t you even think,” Elsie said, crying, on Boxing Day, “that your poor old mother would want to you on Christmas Eve?”
Haplessly he shrugged. “I knew you would see me on Christmas morning. I knew I was coming home then. I thought that would be enough, Mam.”
She relented then, as she always did, content that he was doing his best, that he meant what he said. She had made him squirm with guilt just enough. He deserved the guilt, a part of it, she thought, because of everything she had gone through on Christmas Eve.
On the Thursday before Christmas, Torn had taken himself off to his bed. They had separate rooms now, which suited them both, because she found his religious’ paraphernalia gloomy and he had announced, quite calmly, in April, that the sins of the flesh disgusted him. He added that, even if they had been married, he still wouldn’t want to sleep with her.
That suited Elsie, too. In her younger years she had been — what did they call it in the papers? Highly sexed. Her drive was high, that was it — but now she could take it or leave it.
Years ago, at the Sugar Factory, Elaine Francis once told her that you couldn’t be too picky. Take what you can get. If you have standards that are too high, then you don’t get any fun. You can’t hang about waiting for Burt Reynolds. Old Elaine was crazy about Burt Reynolds. Take what you can, she cackled — she was like another mam to Elsie, a mother on the same production line — and you have yourself a nice time. Fellers are just fellers. One’s as good as the next. You don’t have to stick with them if you don’t want. Give them a test drive! Give them a whirl!
So Elsie hadn’t been too picky. You couldn’t, in this life. Not in a town like Newton Aycliffe. Mind, she loved her town and, as the seventies went on, she found she loved the fellers here, too. Their bluff, slightly sour wit. Their pliable features and sometimes bulky Yorkshiremen’s bodies. Or the stocky, proud forms of the fellers from Teesside. The allure and dark glamour of the broad Geordies, coming south. She was an expert.
She wasn’t choosy, but she knew what she liked. Tom in his declining years — he’d never see fifty again — was a sight. He barely had a body to speak of, he was so thin. He dyed his hair the black of Kiwi boot polish and slicked it down with old-fashioned Brylcreem. It smelled of the fifties, of her uncles. He wore old suits. When he took to his bed, as he did at irregular intervals in the year, he’d pull the counterpane over his head and ignore her, when she tried to be nice. He wouldn’t get up to eat, to wash or to dress. He hardly got up to go to the toilet. As the days of not eating went by, he had to do that less and less and so he stayed under there, but he started to smell
