God, I can’t believe I forgot all about it! Lucky our Andrew’s not daft.
Ay, the reason I’m having me mates round tonight. Wey, they’re not all mates. Some of them are just neighbours.
You see, I’m not going to all the trouble and expense of playing the glamorous hostess just for the fun of it.
This night’s Wednesday night and it’s Wednesday nights Elsie and Tom come round.
I’m flicking through me frocks, head stuck in me wardrobe. Time’s running out and I’m fucked if I can find owt decent to wear.
I’ll slather mesel’ in Tendre Poison and wear me heels and it’s funny when you do that for a party in your own house. You stand taller and it’s kind of formal and everything in your own rooms looks a bit different.
Wednesday nights Elsie and Tom come round after the Rainbow Gang finishes. Tom runs the Gang for the kids in the Methodist Church on the next estate. He looks like Dracula and he’s had some trouble with his nerves, breakdowns and that, but Elsie says he was an architect when he was younger, before she knew him, but they laid him off. She’s out of work with him.
They’re not married and they come round menacing people. They’ve got God and they tell you the same stuff again and again, sitting there from six to twelve at night. I can’t just chuck them out, like Joanne says I should. They don’t mean anyone any harm and they’re not malicious people. They’re just daft. And they’re company, even, sometimes, when Joanne is out at night and Andrew is upstairs, reading and that. Bloody boring company, mind.
A couple of months ago, Tom flipped. In the middle of their Rainbow Gang he was meant to be umpiring a game of indoor rounders, but he’d gone missing. Elsie was worried. She can’t handle sixty of them scruffy bairns all by herself, so she sent them all off on a kind of treasure hunt, looking for Mr Tom. One of the scruffiest—‘I patted him on the head and I could feel the nits squirming under me hand!’—found Mr Tom in a cupboard. He was crouching by himself in the dark. Elsie had to phone the Casualty blokes to come and talk him out.
Next time she came to see me it was alone. She was dead upset, so I was embarrassed because I’d been pretending I wasn’t in that night. I’d turned all the lights off and the telly, kept quiet and waited for her to go away. I’d forgotten to lock the back door and she just came in! I felt like I’d been rumbled. I just said I’d had a migraine and had had to switch everything off, lie down.
She told me all about Tom. He was in that big place past Spennymoor, three bus rides away, and she was visiting him every afternoon, even though the doctors had asked her not to. They probably felt the same as I did about her knocking on the door. She bangs like a kid—bang bang bang bang bang. Demanding attention for a scraped knee or sweets or summat. Not an adult’s knocking at all. Adults knock little tunes on doors. They don’t sound desperate.
Tom was in this place, a big old mansion in its own grounds with deer and that. Pretty, but they don’t put you in there for nowt. Elsie was saying to me, ‘It’s not a place for, you know… mental cases. Mind you, there’s a bloke in the bed next to Tom who thinks he’s Jesus.’
They let him out after a couple of months. I reckon they realised it was her they should have put in there instead. Bad depression, he was supposed to have had, really bad depression. I’ve known more depressed people these past twenty years or so than I dunno what. As soon as they invented a word for it, bang—everyone had it. I suppose they invented the word about the same time they invented the pills for it. And most people I know have the pills handy. For either calming you down or pepping you up. No bugger’s in the bloody middle. Nobody floats easily between.
Tom looked a lot better and more cheerful the next Wednesday he came round here. Elsie was wary about him, as if he was gonna freak any moment, and she kept jumping up to use the bog.
‘Me bladder’s back,’ she said. ‘All inflamed. I’ve got to dash back and forth all night these days. I know you’ve just had your settee recovered.’
I was bloody horrified. Woman of her age! She’s fifty if she’s a day. Though she’s got that scraggy ginger hair of hers in bunches like a bloody schoolgirl. I reckon that’s for Tom. I reckon he must be kinky or summat.
He was brighter than he’s been for months, holding out the posters the kids had coloured in that night at his Rainbow Gang.
That little Jeff,’ he chuckled, shaking his head. ‘Look! Poor little thing’s gone and coloured carefully between all the lines. But he’s done the whole thing in brown!’ He tutted. ‘By, some of the kids round here are underprivileged. They’ve not half got narrow horizons.’
Now that little Jeff he was on about is from over the way from me. He belongs to Fran, a friend of mine, but I wasn’t going to say anything.
Elsie beamed at Tom. ‘Tom’s bringing colour back into all their lives.’ A thought struck her. ‘Is that why he called it the Rainbow Gang? Hee hee hee hee!’ That stupid bloody laugh of hers.
I was looking at the posters. Tom the ex-draughtsman had designed them. A loaf of bread and some writing. I asked what it said.
Tom sighed. ‘It’s meant to say, “I am the People’s Bread.” But my “I” came out too elaborate, like. Now it looks like it says, “Jam the People’s Bread.’”
‘Hee hee hee!’ went Elsie again, but I could see Tom didn’t think it was funny. His eyes
