“What’s he come back for?”
“It can’t be her money.”
“Then what?”
“I think he’s come for you, Wendy. You’re the youngest. You’re the one who still needs seeing to.” She looked at the burnt pan, swore, and emptied it into the pedal bin. The pedal was broken and she was faffing on with the bag inside while I digested the thought of being taken off somewhere by my dad and his new family.
“Mandy, I’d rather die.”
“That’s hardly very fucking tasteful,” she said, straightening up. “And who’s that black fella you’ve dragged home?”
I shrugged. “Works in the fish shop. You’ve seen him before.”
Her eyes bugged out. “That’s him? What are you doing with him?”
“He’s my best friend.”
I sat at the kitchen table. Mam’s Cats calendar she’d bought off the Salvation Army was lying open. Whole weeks had been ticked, crossed and circled in a variety of felt tip colours. Someone’s cryptic system of marking off time. “Mandy,” I said. “I can’t leave here. They can’t take me, can they?”
Mandy sat opposite me and, taking both my hands, said the best thing she ever said to me. “Nobody can make you do what you don’t want to.”
Mandy would come here and play these machines, though she never knew the rules. Some of the others who came to play knew you had to—well, look at the words on the lit-up buttons—hold, stick, nudge, all that. Even the pensioners, the old girls coming out with a handbag full of pennies and hope in their hearts knew the rules for gambling on the machines. Mandy would come down here and she just wouldn’t know. What was more, she didn’t care. If I’m going to win, I’m going to win, and no amount of holding-sticking-nudging will help me anyhow. When she came down after midnight, full of hell, full of temper, going hell-for-leather on the one-armed bandits, those at the machines either side of her would look worried. She’d be slamming in the coins and yanking on the bandit’s arm and making the cherries, bells and stars thunder so violently round and round. And if she won she wouldn’t stop even to count up her winnings.
At home the middle sister Linda would be stuck for things to do. She sat beside her mother and watched whatever was on. House of Dracula in black and white and not very scary. She felt a daring leap of disgust in herself. Her mother was so feeble, the scary films she watched weren’t scary. And then disgust at herself: her mother’s helpless face and how she lapped those tame horrors up. Past midnight they watched Dracula chase Frankenstein chase the Wolfman.
“I always loved the Wolfman,” her mother sighed at last. “He could never help himself.” She looked at her plumpest daughter and said, “Why did I always fall for fellas who couldn’t help themselves?”
Linda saw then how much flesh had dropped off her mother. How haggard she looked, even though she was made up with all the free samples Linda’s new job could fetch home.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” her mother asked.
Mandy went on pushing coins into machines. Used all her twos and moved onto fives. These were the coins she had saved over years, saved them in biscuit tins and hidden them under bunk beds. Not even touched them when things got tight. Carried them when they moved from home to home. Tonight she’d brought them to the arcades on the prom and she’d brought them in a suitcase, heaving it along behind her, scuffing the leather.
She swore she wouldn’t leave till all the coins were gone. Her rainy day money pissed away in the dark before dawn. Besides the money, all she had at home were her clothes, which she could cram down into two bin liners. Without the weight of all her capital she’d be free and easy to go, cleared for take-off.
Still she kept winning on the bandits, buying her more shining time in the gambling hall. A boy stood at the next machine, working through his own hoard of five pences. She could see him watch her working on hers. He pulled his bandit’s arm with more deliberate concentration, as if that could have any effect and he actually did all the holding and nudging and winking you were meant to do. He was filling up his own silver tray with jackpot after jackpot. Mandy was glancing across to him as much as he glanced at her. She took in his belted raincoat, real leather, and his jeans, tight and faded that way, along the proper contours of his crotch. A sexy relief map in shades of blue.
Cherries Cherries Cherries.
“That’s you won again,” the sexy boy told her.
“I always fucking win,” she snapped.
And Wendy wanted to get out of the flat as well. It had made her claustrophobic before, but her father’s visit actually tainted the place. It wasn’t even a nice place to go at the end of the night.
She had looked at her father and thought, everything could have been so different, if only you’d wanted it. Their lives could have been any way—better, worse, just different—if his influence had been there. Their mother had influence, but she was inevitable, unquestionable, she was their one constant. He was useless, but he was theirs, and the potential he had for disrupting them made Wendy feel sick. Of course there was no question of her going with him, his new wife and their brats when whatever happened to Mam happened. And that could be years away, anyway.
She had looked at those two babies asleep on her friend Timon’s lap and thought: that’s a brother and a sister I had and never knew. She didn’t feel related. She felt nothing. A twinge of softness at the sight of babies, the sight of babies nestling onto that man who had moved her of late, but that was all. And
