I can think of one or two things she’d have to say about all this. Oh, I want it to turn out all right.
To start with, I want to present Nanna Jean with her great-grandchild, because that is what he is. I can see myself travelling south to Tyneside, arriving at Newcastle station, carrying Jep bundled up in baby blankets. I cross the white marble, the cool, crowded expanse of the platforms, and get us onto the Metro. As the shuttle flashes between the crumbling red-brick houses and over the green river, I’ll be having second, third, fourth thoughts about knocking on my nanna’s door. What if she rejects me? What if she rejects my child?
So here I am, on the last leg of my journey back. She’s had her front door repainted, I see. A glossy scarlet. I knock and it’s then that Jep starts to cry. He doesn’t cry often and the noise he makes is strange. It raises the hair on the nape of my neck and my stomach knots up for him.
I can see Nanna Jean through the door’s frosted glass as she undoes all the locks.
When the door opens, she smiles. I suppose you could say her face lights up. Her hair’s been tinted that tobacco colour. She goes to the place where they let students practise on you. She’s in a flowery blouse and yellow rubber gloves. She is staring at the baby now.
I suddenly see how small my child is and I have this stupid thought that if maybe I’d given birth to a larger child, she’d be more likely to accept him.
So this is what she’ll say. This is what she’ll do. She’ll make me feel at home. What am I thinking? I grew up here. Nanna Jean made her home my home when I was little, when my parents died. She denied me nothing.
“This home will be yours,” she once said fiercely. “Till the day I die this home will be yours.” I knew then that Nanna Jean would fight for me, whatever came. Whatever was wrong with me, she would defend me. In the end that was the one thing I knew I had: this woman who believed in me. Vince never had that. He and his dad never got on, his mother ran away. Penny’s mother ran away, too. I was lucky. Even though an orphan, how well I was parented! So do I feel secure about Nanna Jean?
She’ll take my spotted child to her bosom. That magnificent, matronly bosom under layers of lace and silk and cardy. She’s not had any great-grandchildren yet, no tiny bairns to lay on that breast. Will she let Jep clamber over her old-lady bulk? That small leathered nose of his, twitching, wet, inhaling the old-lady smell of face powder and sweet, cheap perfume.
Nanna Jean belonged to a generation that wore fur. Women of her class knew they’d never get this close to the real and lavish thing.
In that back sitting room, which is still her favourite room, the gas fire will be blue and orange, spitting, fluttering. The telly will be on. The pot will be mashing under an ancient, stained tea cosy, as if she was expecting us. She’ll look kindly as she eases herself into her squashy brown armchair. But her eyes will look tired and knowing. At first glance she has worked out what’s been going on.
Like an old woman who has seen everything, she will say, “I know what you’ve come expecting me to say.”
I blink.
“You’ve come expecting me to say that everything’s all right.”
I open my mouth to tell her that it’s not forgiveness I’m expecting. I just wanted her to see my son. My son. My insides do a little flip when I imagine this phrase to myself. I get a little glow. A hard-on without having a hard-on.
Nanna Jean will shush me. “I can’t say that I like the way you’ve chosen to live.”
I want to ask her, How do you know how I live? But I don’t push it. I remember the shameful made-upness, the living one minute to the next, the hand-to-mouthness of my current life and I shut up.
“I can’t say that it’s not a disappointment, our Andrew,” she says.
I brace myself to be told that I started out such a sweet boy. I had everything in front of me.
She says, “I thought everyone had made sacrifices for a reason. We all had no money. We all muddled through. We lived ten to a house and no one got any privacy. No kind of life at all. And we all thought we were doing it for a reason. You had to. It kept you sane, to think that the ordinary, day-to-day suffering you were going through led to something. It was for the benefit of someone else. For your children and their future.”
Nanna Jean lets out one of those long, expansive sighs. The sort that seem to reach right back in time.
For some reason I don’t feel like I’m being preached at. Before, I might have. I’d think, here we go again. All about the old days. Old days and sacrifice.
Nanna Jean wears that make-up she discovered and came to late in life. She’s my glamorous granny, but now her mascara’s coming down in long, gentle fingers. Her face is smudged.
“I lost your mam. You know she was my favourite. I never made any bones about that. It was for her I thought I’d put everything by. She was my new life.” Nanna Jean pulls herself together, as she always does when she talks about Mam, and moves swiftly on to the subject of me. It’s always like this. We’re Russian dolls, slotting neatly in and in and in each other. She says, “So I placed a lot of hope in you, Andrew. I won’t pretend that’s not true. I had high hopes of you.”
Now I sit down on the low, uncomfortable couch along one wall. As
