Nesta was hatching a plan. She wanted to leave Phoenix Court. She had set her sights on one of those Barratt houses they were building out of town. Red brick, three bedrooms, garage underneath. She had her new baby and now it was all change. She was wanting to go up in the world.
“They let them move in for a deposit of £99,” Elsie told Fran. “They’re practically chucking mortgages at anyone.”
Fran was ironing. “It’s a buyer’s market,” she said. She looked at Elsie helping herself to more tea, cutting another slice of Battenburg. Fran had thought that, with Jane abroad, she might get her afternoons to herself. But here was Elsie, glowing and chatty. She kept telling Fran the lurid stories of the restoration of her common-law marriage to Tom. “That devil had me up all night again!” she’d cackle. “He’s a wicked old thing!”
“I just hope,” Elsie was saying now, “that Nesta has counted the cost and knows how much she’ll end up having to pay.” Elsie pulled a face. “Semi-detached.”
Fran knew that Elsie was jealous, knowing that she’d never get out of her council house, where almost all her rent was paid for her. Really, she was here for life. If she did any paid work they’d take benefits off her and it wouldn’t be worth it. Elsie was dug in.
“I’m surprised they gave her a mortgage,’ Elsie said.
“Nesta never paid a penny poll tax, when that was the thing. Her Tony gets that Socialist Worker paper. Says he’s a socialist. They had bailiffs banging on their doors. Nesta said she was paying nothing, because it was against her principles.” She snorted. “Principles! The likes of them!”
“Well, you can’t blame her for wanting to better herself,” said Fran. “For wanting to get off this estate.”
“There’s nothing wrong with here!” Elsie said. “The people round here are the salt of the earth!”
“Are they?” Wearily Fran folded her pile of pillowcases. “You know yourself there are some right bloody horrors round here. The place is getting rougher and rougher. I’m telling you, if I could, I’d leave in a shot.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“I bloody would. I think the younger ones have got the right idea.” She looked at Elsie. “Any sign of your Craig coming back?”
“He’s still in Scotland. He says he might look for work there.”
“I can’t see it being any better there,” Fran said.
“I think he’s enjoying the big city. Poor lad! He hasn’t seen many places. He’ll like the bright lights. I suppose he’s like his dad that way.”
“Are you missing him?”
“It’s lucky Tom came back to me! Otherwise I’d be on my tod!” Elsie gave a bleak little laugh. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than being alone. Yet look how close she’d come to it recently.
There were two things Nesta knew for certain about the telly.
One was that on Beadle’s About people did zany things for camcorders on purpose. There weren’t as many silly-looking accidents in the world as Jeremy Beadle pretended. The world wasn’t as funny as that. The people who got on his show staged their own ludicrous disasters, just to get on the telly and pocket some cash. Good luck to them. But Nesta wasn’t taken in.
The other thing she knew for certain was that only men liked James Bond. Women liked real stories. Stories with real people and lives, not gadgets and guns.
She was sitting at Liz’s bedside with Big Sue and for the past hour they had been talking about what was on the telly. What was good, what was hopeless, and what should be taken off. It was their great point of contact. Recently the two of them had taken to visiting each other to watch telly together. They both liked the way the other interrupted and talked all the way through programmes. When they watched things alone it was this kind of ribald, deprecating commentary that they craved. Now, over Liz’s body, they were agreeing on last night’s Heartbeat. They thought the young policeman was lovely. And the music took you right back in time to the sixties.
“Back to the sixties,” said Liz. They both jumped.
They stared at her. She was quite still.
“She spoke!” said Big Sue.
“She said ‘Back to the sixties!’” said Nesta.
“Fetch a nurse!” said Big Sue, starting up out of her chair.
Nesta was on her way.
TWENTY-FOUR
This was what she liked: getting some wellies on, wrapping herself up against the weather. Tying on a headscarf, plodging over fields. The matted yellow grass of the fields between Chilton and Ferryhill. When she could, Fran took the day to walk over the land between the small villages. This was how she visited her mother and brothers. No kids clinging round her, no shopping to be done. When she could, she dressed up like the Queen when she walks her corgis, and she would stride all the way to her mother’s big house.
It was Fran’s time to think. And the things that occur to you when you let them! Bubbling up from somewhere. She thought this morning that it would soon be the end of the year. The leaves were turning to orange paste on the paths. She was treading them into black mud. She had her first thoughts of Christmas. She could smell woodsmoke on the air. Funny to have the build-up to Christmas and no Jane around, going on about her present-buying. This Christmas Jane would still be in Tunisia. Eating turkey in the desert, she’d said and laughed.
Fran stopped to stare at the sky. Swifts. The trees were shrugging off thick pullovers. They stood half out of them. It did her good every time she walked out like this, to see how close she lived to the country. Newton Aycliffe was an illusion. It only looked urban. You could walk off the edge of the estate, through the trees, and then you were in the middle of a blond, green, leafy nowhere. The sky was huge. Aycliffe came
