It was Fran’s father who had taken the time to tell her things like this. Her mother, meanwhile, was all for her boys. Her strong two boys who would grow up to protect her. The mother taught her boys to care for horses. They were like Gypsies, her father said. That was where her mother came from, from Gypsies, he said, with a scowl, one morning walk they took. The brothers and mother thundered by, leaving the father and daughter to amble and talk. You come from Gypsy stock, he told his daughter sadly. Then her mother won the pools and bought the big house outside Ferryhill, bought stables, more horses. Father died of a brain tumour. He was gone in a flash. Fran was in her late twenties, working in an office, and she hardly felt she’d seen him go.
When computers took over offices, Fran never updated her skills. That was how she ended up cleaning.
If I wanted, she thought, walking on, I could imagine that everything leaves me behind in the end. She couldn’t bear to think of her children going. Yet the eldest had a boyfriend already. She was making noises of complaint. The restless, triumphant sounds of a child wanting to escape. Fran didn’t want her children held in thrall to her. She hated going to visit her mother and brothers. Apart from the walk to her mother’s house, these days were a chore. They taunted her subtly and made her feel stupid and wasted. She didn’t want her kids to feel like that, dreading coming to see her. Resenting the binds.
My life, she thought, is very ordinary. When she went to her mother’s she had to explain it. She felt compelled to talk it through, to justify it. Even when her mother didn’t seem interested and Fran had to work to get herself noticed, she still felt the need to explain away the organisation and decisions in her life.
They thought she had thrown her life away, living with a ginger-haired man on a council estate. She’d given her life to four brats and a drinking man. Look how free her two brothers were! They were in their thirties and went everywhere on horseback. They lived with their mother in a house they’d bought for nothing and they could please themselves. To Fran it seemed that they lived on a different scale to her. Their lives were bigger than hers.
When she arrived it was lunchtime. Her mam was ladling out thick orange stew for her two boys. They both had newspapers out.
Fran let herself in and they barely nodded. Her mother had done up her kitchen like a country farmhouse. Everything was green. She’d bought copper pots and pans — or picked them up somewhere. The boys did house-clearance work round here and sometimes they picked up treasure. She watched their thick red hands ripping up bread, turning pages, thinking that they had the golden touch.
“There’s some lunch,” her mother said. She was in a pinny with the sexy, naked body of a woman on the front. Her hair had been permed again and it was a shocking blue. Fran went to kiss her mother’s proffered cheek and murmured something about it making her look very youthful.
Her mother gave a shout of pleasure and fiddled with one of her clumpy golden earrings. “Hear that, boys? She says I’m looking youthful.”
One of the dark-haired brothers spoke without looking up from his paper. “She must be after borrowing money again.”
“Are you?”
“No!”
“Hey,” said her mother, reaching for a plate, stirring the copper pot some more. “One of your neighbours is in the paper. They’ve done a story about her in the Northern Echo.” She jabbed one of the boys in the back. “Find the page. Show her.”
“Who is it?”
Her brother sighed and laid out the page. A full-page spread. ‘fight for life’, it said. There was a picture of Liz, unconscious. Tubes. Eyes closed. Someone had put her wig on her for the photographer.
“They say she’s making a miraculous recovery,” Fran’s mother said.
“They reckon,” said Fran, feeling cross that she hadn’t seen this spread first. She peered at the columns of print. Quotes from Big Sue and Nesta. Even, at the bottom, a smaller photo of the pair of them, looking concerned and heartbroken, outside the hospital. Their looks said, “Our friend’s in there.” Fran was piqued. Though she didn’t really want to be in the paper, it would have been nice to be told.
“She’s started saying things in her sleep,” said her mother.
“It isn’t really sleep.”
They sat down to eat. “Messages from beyond!” her mother cackled. “I wonder if we can tune her in to your father! See what the old bugger has to say for himself!”
One of the boys looked over his paper, tutted, rolled his eyes. There’d been no love lost between father and sons.
“Get our lottery numbers checked,” said the other brother. “They say people half in, half out of life get the second sight. You should ask her. It could be us!” He snorted.
Fran was feeling more uncomfortable than when they criticised her personal life.
“She’s very beautiful,” said the other brother. “She looks serene and beautiful. She’s like something out of a legend.”
His mother gave him a strange, appraising look. “Yes,” she said. “Do you know her well, Fran? Are you still visiting?”
Fran nodded.
“Well,” said her mother sardonically. “Fancy our Fran knowing a living legend in the flesh.”
Fran stared at the picture of Liz. She was thinking of her brilliance, the way she could catch your eye without even trying. Glamour, Fran’s father told her once, wasn’t just being made up, pretty and sophisticated. It wasn’t just a film-star thing. It was a witchy spell that women pass across your eyes to draw you
