Only now she was gone was I seeing things.
She had three shelves of novelty tea pots, all for show and never use. They were in the shape of cottages, castles, Blackpool Tower, Dusty Bin, the Rover’s Return, a red phone box. I lifted up all their lids and peered inside, finding buttons, toggles, two stamps and some old earrings, not very nice.
They are some kind of fake gold and one of them is crusted in black and brown, with a wizened bit of what looks like scab. I drop it back into the teapot when I realise that what I’m holding is the earring that Mam ripped out of Mandy’s head. I’m looking right at a chunk of Mandy’s earlobe. These earrings have been hidden inside this house-shaped teapot, ever since the night Mandy came back late and announced that she had given her virginity gladly to a boy called Martin.
The earring—once yanked out of her ear—got thrust into this pot, bloods and shreds of flesh and all, and forgotten about, as Mandy howled and bubbled. Linda called an ambulance and when it came we all raced off to watch Mandy get stitched up at three o’clock in the morning.
Mandy was fourteen and I was eleven and she told me, to reassure me, that it was just a grown-up row they’d had. She and Linda never skimped on the details they hoped would educated me, and that included those of her deflowering. They wanted me to know what I had coming to me. They wished someone had explained things properly to them. Our mother was never a very skilful explainer.
Mandy had wanted to lose her cherry in the open air. After the Pleasure Beach that night she had taken Martin, who was in her composition class, to the park, and they rolled under the trees. She let him push a finger into her and then, nervously, both afraid they would buckle and snap it, his tight cock. He pressed on for two or three strokes and then he got scared he would come inside her. She said to push in a couple of times more, just so they’d be able to say they’d actually done it. He fucked her like he was washing up the very best dishes, gritting his teeth. Martin, relieved, pulled himself out and tossed himself off in the long grass. Mandy watched interestedly. Then he tucked himself away and helped her up. She came home, and that’s when Mam hit her, for the first and only time in both their lives.
Aunty Anne said she was never a one for looking a gift horse in the mouth. She said this and she wasn’t trying to be funny, but the things she was referring to were all horse-shaped. Our mother’s ornaments, horses of different sizes, textures and colours. Bequeathed to our Aunty Anne by my mother’s slim will. They presented themselves to her as a quandary. What do you do with a load of horse-shaped household objects? And, as Aunty Anne pointed out, it wasn’t as if she was settled in her own place. If she had her own house—fine—maybe she could consider filling it with horse memorabilia. But she doubted her lover in Phoenix Court would be thrilled if she brought these things to him.
They made quite a collection. We laid them out in rows on the living room carpet. Horse-shaped everythings, even teaspoons. Our mother’s will had stipulated that if anything with a horse on it was to be found in her flat after her death, it was Anne’s. Our Aunt was surprised as any of us. On the day of dishing out the bequeaths and leftovers, Aunty Anne found herself looking at hundreds of gift-horses.
We brought them out from under the bed. They were on shelves, in cupboards, on top of wardrobes.
“I could open a restaurant and the theme could be horses. I could display these to the public, for a charge.” Aunty Anne was full of schemes like this.
“But do you like them?” Linda asked pointedly. She didn’t, that was plain. She was looking at a stuffed donkey from Spain. It was wearing a sombrero.
“I don’t really like them, no,” said Aunty Anne.
It seemed a terrible thing, to criticize a dead woman’s taste.
“Then you’ll have to get rid,” said Mandy. “We can’t leave them here.” Bit by bit we were cleaning out the whole flat. No one quite said that we were leaving forever, but it was obviously in the air, with every neglected corner that got swept, every cubbyhole that got emptied.
Aunty Anne decided she would sell of her horses at a car boot sale on a Sunday afternoon. None of us had a car, so that was something to work round. She thought about borrowing one, but then a very nice man in charge told her she could lay her wares out on a wallpapering table instead. So she set about flogging her horses.
She found that she was a very successful saleswoman. She haggled and hectored and hooted with laughter. There was such a commotion around her stall that no one could go by without looking. All of Saturday night she’d been up making toffee and cakes and scones, using up the bags of flour, icing sugar and spice that were left in our mother’s kitchen cabinets. Aunty Anne was selling cakes for thirty pence each.
Gradually she let fly our mother’s herd...
She made forty-seven pounds and announced that she would take us all out to dinner.
Timon would get her used to being normal again. Mandy told him, “You’re the only one who can bring her out of herself.”
There was little Wendy wanted to do except sit in the mostly-emptied living room and watch videos. Her mother’s horror videos were almost unbearable to her, because
