And it isn’t really all about the bleak working class north, and travelling south.
Wendy goes south and my quandary as much as hers, as well as Isabel Archer’s before us, was where to stay put.
Your fancy man always tries to take you elsewhere.
Newton Aycliffe and Phoenix Court still drew me back, of course.
It’s where Aunty Anne’s own fancy man wedged his glorious bulk and from where he refused to budge.
Perhaps I’m as drawn to origins as I am to the way we reinvent ourselves.
I’m always interested in survivors.
My characters, my family, my friends are survivors.
This book also comes with thanks and love to another long list of people who have influenced me and go on doing so.
“All the lighting in here is from candles,” said Katy, staring across the oyster bar. “It’s like sitting in a cave.” It was atmospheric here, they all decided. It was coming up to midnight and it was even snowing outside.
They were in a bar under the dripping stone arches in the east end of the city. After the shops shut town was almost empty. Katy, Simon, Douggie and Shelley had come out to celebrate and do tequila stammers. Lick-slam-suck. Chins gleaming with salt and lemon juice. Puddles of Montezuma on the table, soaking the Rizla papers. They’d had nachos, of course, and the orange mess of their leftovers sat with them all night. ‘Wonderwall’ came uninterruptedly on the juke box: someone’s favourite.
In her spare time Katy was a painter, but she worked in an office. “The way the fight here is moving...it’s like that cartoon. Remember Roobarb and Custard? It was done with scribbly felt tip so the colours jogged about and hurt your eyes. It’s like that here.”
It was Katy’s birthday. She’d already had a bottle of wine at work. Her friends’ presents were laid out on the table. Housey things because she’d moved in with Simon.
“But he’ll get the benefit of these too!”
Simon ran a self-conscious hand over his new-shaved head. “Smart.”
Matisse-blue salt and pepper shakers. A fun orange plastic cafetiere, more show than use. A silly collage pasted into a green frame, from Douggie, a painter friend of Katy’s. “This means,” she said gloomily to Simon, “we’re really fucking married now!” Quite suddenly she felt like crying. She went to the loo and sat there for a while. There was no paper. She found a few shredded bits in her pocket.
What had Simon bought her? A food mixer. So she could make her home-made hummous even better. Four cloves of garlic, just how he loved it. He’d waited till tonight, to give her card and present with the others. Blithely he’d let her leave the fiat this morning, her birthday unacknowledged. This made her cry as soon as she reached work and the doorman told her many-happy-returns. Simon looked gorgeous with his hair new and fluffed up. The goldy studs of his piercings glinted and his clever hands picked scabs of wax off the bottle.
Shelley had brought After Eights. She didn’t have much money because she was doing voluntary work down the homeless centre. She came all dreaded up like a crusty, and got everyone to use the black envelopes the mints came in to send each other silly messages. Simon wrote one for Katy that said he wanted to go down on her when he got her home and Douggie got it by mistake. Simon coloured.
He and Katy lived four flights up a red fire escape in Thistle Street, the centre of town. The fire escape was the only way in and out of their new flat. To them it seemed quite hazardous, quite glamorous.
After midnight they found the empty city frozen and sheeted with ice. Their party stuck together for half an hour, sliding about on the ice. In St. David’s square, taking long running jumps and skating easily. Then they broke up, leaving Katy and Simon to go back to their canyon of warehouses. A streetlamp was level with their front window and shone in yellow on them as she laid him down on the sofa, their hard, green, 1950s sofa. She undressed him slowly, like a present.
“I’m the same old thing inside,” he said. She couldn’t disagree. The same old salty taste of him.
He gave her something in a home-made box. Something arty farty. It was a packet of Marlboro Lights with only one in. He had dipped a single ciggie in pink glitter. She held it up and laughed.
“A camp fag!” she said. “A glittering fag,” he said.
Before he could stop her she’d lit it and taken a drag. She coughed and coughed and he thumped her back and the cigarette, dropped in the ashtray, put itself out.
Shelley and Douggie couldn’t call it a night. They shared a flat further out of town and wanted to make the best of being here. As usual Douggie was pulling them towards the Queer Triangle, towards CC’s and dancing. “I’m tired,” Shelley wailed, standing in the abandoned main street. He was skipping ahead, oblivious to the cold now he felt he was getting his own way. Shelley wore six layers, jumper on jumper and two denim jackets. She had worn these in the advice centre office, where the clients came off the freezing street in even more layers. Layer-chic, Douggie called it. Like all the gay boys here he wore his clothes as small and tight and thin as they would go.
Tonight he suddenly disappeared over the black iron fence into the private gardens along Queen Street. His jeans were a vivid orange in the murky, untouched snow beyond. It was a different world. “It’s not fair that it’s private in here!”
“We’re free to break in,” Shelley pointed out reasonably, throwing her leg over the fence.
They lay in the snow and made angel shapes, flapping their arms to brush and make wings. Then they rolled balls of creaking snow larger and larger, to build a snowman.
“I was
