She’s my role model now, I’ve decided. She gets away with it. She’s not ashamed of who she is, and she tells people what she thinks of them. She doesn’t put up with any old shit.
I was at work when I was reading this interview with her, the one in the TV Times. We keep them on the counter with the evening papers. Which means we have to stand there all week with the same old famous faces staring up at us. You can watch the weeks go by that way.
Last week it was Roseanne and I thought she looked dead glamorous. Well, she is dead glamorous for a fatty.
I’m not being nasty when I say that. She says she’s a fatty herself, she admits to it and has a laugh about it. She’s famous anyway and it needn’t bother her now. She knows she’s a fatty and really, she’s made her fortune out of it. And I can’t use it as a term of abuse anyway, because when the chips are down, I’m a fatty. Mind, it’s got me bloody nowhere.
So all last week it was Roseanne’s face staring up from the counter, and that’s when I read the interview. It was quite interesting. She’s had a hard life, actually, even though she’s on the telly and that. I felt quite sorry for her.
I like a good read. Especially interviews with stars like that. When they’ve had a decently hard life, but everything turns out all right and there was stardom waiting just around the corner.
We get all the magazines with that kind of real-life stuff in here. So I can have a good flick-through when we get slack. I needn’t ever buy the things. Which is a saving, really, because I think I’m addicted, sometimes, to showbiz gossip and chitchat.
No, that’s not true. Some of them stars I couldn’t care less about. Specially some of them younger ones. Pauline, who I’m on with serving usually, asks me who it is on the cover of Hello! or Top Santy or whatever, and sometimes I just can’t tell her. Who are these people? Why do they think they’re famous? I have to look to see what it says underneath their faces.
I couldn’t tell you who was who on Home and Away these days. They all look the same to me. And Neighbours. Now at one time I could have told you everyone in that, and everything what they were up to. But now… They’ve chopped and changed actors and that so much, I’ve not got a clue. So I have to look at the names under the faces.
Pauline still follows both, so she knows more than me. She still asks me to read the names out. Tell the truth, I think the lass has trouble reading. She squints up right close at invoices and stuff. And she’s only just out of school. I’ve told her—I’ve had a lot longer than she has to forget everything what they taught me!
Anyway, yeh, so I read these chitchats and articles when we get a moment to ourselves. I mean, there’s always someone in the shop. It’s one of those shops where there’s always someone coming in for something. We’re handy and that’s the point. Cigarettes—we’re the place they come dashing out to and we’ve got an impressive range from your Craven As and your twenty-five-to-a-packet Royals, all the way up to your John Players and your Marlboros and even your Hamlet cigars. Top-of-the-range stuff we don’t sell a lot of, but makes the place classier to have on show.
Or at least, so says Eric. Now Eric’s the bloke who owns the place. He’s a bit younger than me, in about his mid-forties I’d say, and he speaks a different language. He’s been in business and done courses. I’d call him a greedy bugger, actually, but to give the bloke credit, he’s turned this place into a gold mine. But it’s for no one’s benefit but his own. He serves his community, like he says, but it’s also for his community that he’s got broken bottles cemented round the wall at the back of the shop. What about that bairn—he was only a bairn—trying to break in round the back that night with his mates? Slashed all his legs, top of Eric’s back wall. Severed tendons, the lot. And what does Eric say? Serves the thieving get right.
That’s what I mean by a different language. Eric’s forgotten. Now I know the family that kid’s from. They live by us. They’re not that different to what Eric’s lot were like.
Yeh, I remember Eric from when we were at school. He was starting at the secondary modern when I was finishing. He lived by us. Like I say to Pauline, I’ve had the time to forget all-sorts from my schooldays, but some things just don’t go. Na, they don’t. Mind, Eric hasn’t let on that he remembers me. I’ve said nothing to him and I won’t do neither. Just let it go by.
I daren’t think about all the water under that bridge, mind. I look a bit bloody different now. I was in my prime then. I was a bonny lass and they noticed me. Now I’ve—what’s it they say in the slimming magazines? I’ve ballooned. That’s it. I’ve friggin’ ballooned.
So to Eric, I’m just like any of the other clapped-out, hard-faced, fat-ankled women round here. Just the woman behind his till he pays a pittance to.
Eric’s got a wife a bit younger than him and she’s not from around here. He’s got a smart son who’s up at the new university in Sunderland, doing business. Eric lets the kid run this place in his holidays for practice.
Now him, he talks a different language again, that kid. Alex, they call him. But he’s
