I hope you enjoy it. Even though it’s full of freaks, oddities, aliens and cocks. Welcome back to the end of the twentieth century.
Paul Magrs
Manchester
April 2016.
ONE
My sisters were fearless and I could never understand that. I was the youngest, so was I the protected one? They bred and fed me on the titbits of the world they saw. I thought the world was something that would gobble you up, soon as look at you. Some days I became too scared to leave the house, and certainly night saw me indoors.
My sisters were out on the streets. “Like cats on heat,” our mother would say. It was a harsh way of putting it, but I could see she was scared for them. My mother was scared of the whole world. Mandy, my eldest sister, said it was our mother who unsettled me.
I was the third child. The dregs. I was the last scrapings from our mother’s womb, the last spitter spatter of use from our father’s balls. Half-heartedly they whipped me up, my eldest sister said, and I was the best they could muster.
Was I offended?
I pictured this conception. I saw it in the fluffing up of pink candy floss, when they jab a naked stick into the vibrating metal tub and you watch, standing at the candy floss caravan window. How the strands and strands of spun pink toffee whirl and attach themselves in a claggy, gorgeous beehive. I loved the way it looked like genetic material coming together in a hasty massing of life.
So I wasn’t offended.
My eldest sister also said my mother breast-fed me and she was so short on milk I got curdled, watery stuff like the water you have left after poaching eggs. Our mother had hit a fearful, confused middle age by then and her milk no longer came with brio.
My sisters watched her feed me in the evenings and they looked at each other. They were amazed by her loss of nerve. By then we were in the poorest place we had ever lived. It was the hardest of times we had fallen on: all of us in one room, sharing a balcony and walkway with hundreds of other families. Under layers and layers of balconies. It was the first home I remember. My sisters lost no time in telling me that we had come down in the world, and that I was their Jonah.
My two sisters looked at our mother and were embarrassed by the squelch and slap of my feeding noises. They stared at her tits and the fatness of the orange settee.
They said that was when they started to feel scorn for her. She had let us all down, they said.
We lived off the Golden Mile. A breath (a smoky, lipsticky, fish and chippy breath) away from the promenade, where all was glitter and tack and nostalgia.
The Golden Mile makes me think of...
Fat ladies on toilets
Skinny men at keyholes
Magicians pulling rabbits
Strongmen flexing and testing their muscles
Blue comics...
I love the word blue (don’t you?) for everything risque. It puts me in mind of...
Colour of oil and rare sea birds
dredged onto beaches
nuns’ knickers
tadpoles
bush of pubic hair in the dark
Bluebeard himself.
Between the gold-painted Tower and the hoops and skirts of the rides at the fair, the sea sucked... pushing up the rubbled belly of the beach... drawing back a long slow suck of sand...
At night you’d get the illuminations on the water... an underwater jamboree competing with the shore... showing up green and gold and red, the letters on signs and logos and hoardings reversed and a-quiver... the lights leeched out like blood flowing over your teeth—gingivitis—when you suck your teeth too hard... and your gums, soft, swollen, bleed.
This was my town.
My mother would sing and sing as she worked in the kitchen.
She cleaned things till they shone, even formica. Home smelled of bleach to me. Bleach still reminds me of home. My mother would wash and hang the dishcloths on the shiny, silver taps to dry. Nothing smelled worse than a foisty dishcloth, she said.
She would sing a song about her golden chances passing her by. It’s the only line of that song that I remember. What was that song? When I asked her she would say, ‘Was I singing?’
For years I spent more time with my mother than the others did. They were at the age of going out and not coming in again until they had to. Crawling home with the dawn, with their money all spent and yesterday’s knickers back on.
“Those sisters of yours,” my mother would say. “They’re running wild. Now, you’ll be a good girl, won’t you? For your poor old Mam?”
We lived in that town up against the sea... and we were
barricaded from the sea by the Prom (diddley-om-pom-pom)...up and down, all weathers, folk would go up and down the Prom...in the long stormy winters...we were scared of floods, even though we lived in a tower block...but the water could still get in, up the shafts of lifts...rising level by level...and then the concrete pebble-dashed chipboard towers would tumble and topple...I could see the whole of north-west England crumbling into the brown grey sea...bad as that perilous crust of California.
They sent out sandbags in preparation—like in war-time—to lie at our doorways, to hold back the tide...like Midas, or Ming the Mighty, or Moses...or, who was it? Canute! Oh, my head for names...watch out for my memory. I might be what the expert—the bloody expert—Mandy calls an unreliable narrator. Ay, that’ll be right. But I’m one who’s been surrounded by unreliable narrators, all my life... buggers! ...everyone I’ve ever known...they’ve all been up to it...telling their own sides.
And watch out for when I jump ahead of myself...and tell some of the story in advance. Don’t worry. I live in the end. In case you were worrying. I already know the surprises to come.
I hate surprises. Life springs too much shit on you as it
