Frank even gives a speech before he unveils what he has built. He dedicates this pond to his ‘lovely lady wife’. The four kids clap wildly and she smirks and curtsies. “Tah-dah!” Frank goes, and peels back the tarpaulin.
It’s a nice pond. Four juicy orange carp roam around in the cool water. He’s arranged it quite nicely, with flowers and green frondy plants hanging over the edge. Fran congratulates him and he glows with pleasure. Poor Frank.
Poor? she wonders, when they lie in bed, a couple of hours later. Why did she feel sorry for him as he fiddled on proudly with his fish pond?
Through the back wall of their bedroom you can hear Nesta and Tony next door, going for it hammer and tongs. “They fuck like rabbits,” Frank grunts, his head muffled in the pillow. Fran lies still and listens to the bedsprings going mad on the other side of the wall. She feels like telling them to keep it down. This is ridiculous. Obscene. Nesta starts wailing out her pleasure like a ghost.
Fran supposes she’s sad that Frank’s dreams and ambitions come down in the end to a fish pond. She is startled by how proud he is. Later, watching a film, she noticed him looking round at his pond and his fountain, as if reassuring himself that it was still there. Fran hates the tinkling of the filtration system disguised as a fountain. It made her want the loo. But she supposes she’ll get used to it.
In the end, she thinks, we all have sad lives. Even the popular kids at school have the same ordinary time as everyone else when they leave. By all accounts Jane was a pretty, sought-after girl in her schooldays. Look at her now, alone. Taken on holiday by her mother to cheer her up. No one is ‘cool’, thinks Fran. But we all wanted to be that. She grew up in the sixties. Everything was a French film. She worked in an office but she learned to smoke her ciggies like Bardot. She was on the lookout for Marion Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. All a-sweat, all a-flame. At that age she thought desire made you special. She thought it made you magical and cool.
She looks across the bed at Frank. She tries to block out next door’s racket. When she touches Frank, as she does now, the fine hairs on his legs stand on end, excitedly. He can’t help his response to her. Or maybe he’s turned on by the noise from next door. It’s hard not to think of sex with all that panting and shunting through the paper-thin walls. But Frank turns to her with a hard-on and they push close to one another and this time she doesn’t think it ridiculous she is so much bigger than him. They start to make love.
Even our rediscovery of each other, she thinks as he slips her straps down off her shoulders, is a quiet thing. A whispery thing. His soft red hair brushing her as he puts his mouth down to her breasts. When you lay these experiences of ours alongside those that others have…that’s when I see my life is lived on a different scale.
Next door Nesta comes with a lion’s roar. Her husband is silent, as if he isn’t even there. Soon, however, they are heard bickering about putting the cats out, about who will fetch a cup of tea.
By then Fran is about to come. It keeps building and she keeps thinking surely now, but it goes on. Tonight is quite a shock to her. She had forgotten how she and Frank were, after all, experts in each other.
TWENTY-NINE
This is us down the Copper Kettle.
It’s the morning of the sit-in, a Saturday morning. Penny took the photo. It was in the Newton News, the free paper, the following week, posted into every letter box in the town. A bloody horrible snap of us ganged round coffee tables, looking terrible, protesting. They were going to close the place because it was filthy inside. I mean, it was filthy inside. But we liked it because it was a good place to meet up. I wouldn’t have had their cakes, though.
Still. I got a copy of the original and I got it framed.
I’m on the front table, lifting a cup of coffee in a toast. I’m with Penny, Liz, Fran and Nesta. We’re all grinning madly. I am the one with the tattoos all over my body.
At the time of this photo, I was about to leave Aycliffe. I got my own copy of the photo because I wanted a memento. In fact, I think the all-day sit-in was the last time we were all together. And whatever you might say, it was quite a gang we had. Look, even Frank’s there, sitting behind Fran. He’s drinking lager. The bodies are pressed ten deep, all the Aycliffe women, pressing in to get their faces in the free paper. Their bairns, teenage lads, single mums, old blokes, all those faces you’d recognise from seeing in the precinct and just going about the place.
That was a busy day, that. The day of the sit-in. It was shadowed by bigger events. Ridiculous events.
Penny turned up and told me that her Craig was being questioned by the police. They had torn through Elsie’s house. They found Tom dead. Elsie and Craig were in for questioning. Tom was dead. Well, not many round our place mourned much for him.
Funny thing was, he’d lain there for days. Nobody knew. And, while he lay there, Fran had invoked his name in a white lie. In a ploy to get Liz out of her doldrums.
Fran went to number sixteen and stood in front of Liz. “You know what they’re saying, don’t you?” Fran meant business. She stood with her hands on her hips.
“What?” Liz groaned. “What are they saying?” According to Fran, Liz looked a sight. She hadn’t washed
