“I’ll wait for my Craig coming home,” Elsie said, gritting her teeth. “My lad will be home for Christmas. You better get back to your family.”
And that’s all the thanks I’ll get, Fran thought as she went for her coat. That Elsie’s a hard one.
Elsie surprised her then. “You’re a star, Fran,” she said, clutching her mug of tea. “Happy Christmas, pet.”
“I’ve brought you some tinnies to see the new year in,” she told him.
His face brightened as she pulled them out of her bag. She twisted her little finger on the plastic thing that held them together and sucked it when she gave him his gift.
“Ace,” he said.
“I thought they’d be the right thing.” She smiled. “And I didn’t think you’d be coming home to watch the New Year on telly with me.”
“Oh.” Now he looked pained. “We’re doing something here. Nothing much. Just a bit of booze. Sorry, Mam.”
She shrugged inside her winter coat. “I’ll let you off this time. I’m away out myself.”
“Yeah?” And look at him looking pleased, she thought. He looks like his natural dad. The same mouthful of flashing teeth. His neck strong like a china horse.
“It’s a party at number sixteen,” she said.
“Penny’s party?”
“Who?”
“Oh...she’s the lass whose house it was to start with,” he said. “Well, it was her mam’s, but her mam ran away and Penny invited her friends to live with her.”
“Oh yes.” Now Elsie remembered the stories Jane had told her about Liz, Penny’s mam, who disappeared with a bus driver. “Nice lass, is she, Penny?”
He glanced down. “She’s all right.” He twisted a can free and popped it open.
“Have you taken a shine to her?”
“Who, Penny?” He smirked, hating being caught out like this.
“I’ll have a look at her tonight,” Elsie said. “Have a word and see if I approve.”
He tutted.
“Nah,” she said. “That’d be good, that. A young lass with her own place. That’s what you want.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He shrugged, tossing his hair — that Gladiator hair, as Elsie now thought of it. “Look, mam, thanks for the booze.”
All of a sudden she felt dismissed. It was time to go back to her own life. He was already in his.
“I saw Tom today.”
“You went all the way up to Sedgefield on New Year’s Eve?”
“Someone has to.”
Craig looked down again. He had no intention of visiting his stepdad, and couldn’t bring himself to tell her yet. “How is he?”
“All right. He wants to come home already. Says he’s fine again.”
“He’s not, though, is he?”
“I’m not sure.” She hugged her carrier bag, with its freight of gin and cigarettes.
“Mam, man…he hits you.”
“Oh…”
“He’s done it before and he’ll do it again.”
She seem to take a deep breath. She wanted to yell upstairs to Craig’s pal Steve and get him to bring that funny fag back. She wanted to inhale spice again. “Oh, let’s not go on about him now eh? I want a holiday from my life. Is that all right, pet? You can have one. You’re having one all the time aren’t you?”
He shrugged. She grinned at him and touched his elbow. “No, that’s great, Craig. I think it’s great. Have a nice time. But I want a holiday too. Tonight I don’t want to be thinking about what to do about Tom.”
“I wasn’t the one bringing him up.”
“I know you weren’t,” she agreed. “But anyway. Listen, in going.”
“Thanks for the tinnies.”
“Happy New Year, pet.”
He opened the door for her. “Ay. Same to you, Mam.”
TWO
It was the year when they ate almost nothing but cornflakes. It was open house round number sixteen Phoenix Court and people came and went, throughout the year. To each new arrival, the fresh faces passing through, the old lags would say, “You’ll soon be eating cornflakes for breakfast, dinner and tea. And there’ll always be crises in the middle of the night, and you’ll sit in your dressing gowns, eating cornflakes.”
No matter whose turn it was shopping at Red Spot in the town centre, they always came back with a family-size box. They were cheap and they were homely. “Well,” Penny said, “what more can you expect? That’s just what I am!” It was Penny who started the craze off in the first place. Last winter, when it was just her and Andy, she began the tradition of cornflakes at midnight. Gradually the house filled with strange faces, and they all wound up sitting there with breakfast bowls, crunching away.
My house, my traditions, she thought proudly on New Year’s Eve. She had been making pizza for the party and the kitchen was full of steam and the comforting aroma of tomato sauce bubbling on the hob. The surfaces were dusted heavily with flour and the lopped-off corners of dough. There was a bottle of wine open already, and the carpet had flour trampled into it. Penny quietly poured herself some wine and gave a silent toast: “To our house.” She tipped the glass and relished the bitterness of the wine. A year of having everyone around her.
Penny’s mother had walked out a year ago. She had run away with her new boyfriend Cliff, a bus driver, shocking the street. How could she leave her daughter, a girl not even out of her teens? The women of Phoenix Court were scandalised, but they knew how wayward and glamorous Penny’s mother, was. They knew she didn’t fit in, she be a part of the normal life they had in this street. Of course she had to go exploring romantic pastures new, swarthy, sexy boyfriend in tow. Word had it he’d her whisked her away on a stolen double-decker bus that was meant to be headed for Newcastle. Good luck to her, most of the ladies of the Court had concluded.
They could also see how resourceful Penny was. She’d had a year alone, and even had a feller living in with her. That young bloke Andy,
