The Night Following

Uncle Les leaned across the counter and seized her by the wrist. “Giving me cheek, are you?” he said in a rough whisper. “Eh, but you’ve ruined me. You’re a minx and a madam,” he said through clenched teeth. “Always were.”

“You ruined me. I hate you. You’re a pig.”

“Keep your voice down, your Mam’ll hear. Is that what you want? You want me to tell her her daughter was born bad and she’s been a dirty little minx since she was eight years old? I could put the pair of you out on the street, and don’t you forget it.”

“I hate you. Anyway, Mam’s round the baker’s getting me a birthday cake,” she said. With a wail of despair in her voice, she added,“A birthday cake! Oh, happy birthday, Grace!”

Uncle Les let go of her wrist and slapped her across the face. “Your Mam doesn’t know what you are, thanks to me. It’s a mercy she can’t see you, it’s a mercy your father never had to lay eyes on you. There’s bad blood in you. So get yourself round here where I can get at you.”

“Why should I? I won’t.”

“Oh, but you will.” Uncle Les’s voice was quiet and slow. “You will, miss. Birthday or no birthday, because I say so. And don’t forget I’m doing you a favour. You’re getting past it. You’re getting too old for my tastes. Now do as you’re told.”

Grace stared at him, biting her lip, but obeyed. Uncle Les pulled down the shop blinds and locked the door. He turned back, unbuttoning his trousers, and moved towards Grace, who had seated herself up on the edge of the counter.

“Aye, you know what you are. You know what I want. And I get what I want. So let’s be having you, you hussy,” he said.

Grace parted her legs and looked away as Uncle Les pushed a hand roughly up between them.

“I’m late,” she said. Then she slapped his face, hard.

“What?” Uncle Les drew his hand away and fisted it, ready to strike her. “You bitch!”

Grace flinched for a split second and then squared up to him.“You heard. And don’t you dare lift another finger to me or I won’t care who knows. I’ll tell the whole world what you done to me.”

Uncle Les buttoned himself up, staring at her. “But I’m careful. I’ve been careful since that last time, three years ago that were. Who else have you gone with, you bitch?”

Grace smoothed down her dress and slipped off the counter with a sideways look. “I’m late. Do you want to tell my Mam I’m in the family way,” she said,“and not for the first time, neither? Or are you going to help me out?”

Uncle Les pulled her round to face him.“Are you trying to get money out of me?”

Grace gave a sour laugh. “Money? I wouldn’t touch your rotten money. No, you just have to cough up for another week outside Blackpool, that’ll do it. Call it a birthday present. Still there, is it, your nice quiet place, family run? I’m sure if it isn’t you’ll find another. Somewhere discreet. Only be quick about it.”

She twisted her arm away and picked up her bag from the corner of the counter. Quickly she pulled out a compact and dabbed her face with powder. She slung the bag over her arm, marched to the door, and unlocked it.

“Oy, where do you think you’re going? Your mother’ll be back any minute.”

“Say ta-ta for me, then,” Grace said, opening the door. “Tell her I’m not staying for tea. I’m going to the Red Lion. I’ve got friends that want to buy me a drink and wish me happy birthday. Enjoy the cake,won’t you?”

Soon after my grandmother died, my mother closed the shop and sold it to a firm of bookmakers. They bought only the ground floor and we kept the rooms above. First of all they demolished the shop front and replaced it with mysterious, opaque glass, and a flat illuminated sign. There were laws against children setting foot on premises licensed for gaming, so the bookies made us a separate door from the street, opening onto a passageway newly partitioned from the rest of the ground floor, that led to our stairs at the back. In the space of two or three days the old shop ceased to exist and the new betting shop became, to me, forbidden ground.

My mother liked it, though. When I got back from school that’s where she would usually be. I asked her once if she won money every day and she told me scathingly she didn’t go there to gamble. That would be common. She only went for a bit of company, which was the least anyone was entitled to. I found out later that in fact from time to time and for a few discreet shillings she kept the floor swept clean of discarded betting slips. She also became adept at attaching herself to the day’s winners; if she could persuade them she’d brought them their luck, as often as not she could also persuade them to take her to celebrate at the Calypso Lounge of the Commercial Hotel up the street.

The betting shop and the Calypso Lounge were within a few hundred yards of each other and I walked past them nearly every day, but I could never picture my mother actually in them. I didn’t know if that was because I never saw inside them for myself, or if I had some notion of keeping alive my grandmother’s disdain for drinking and gambling. Whatever the reason, my mother grew ever more insubstantial and puzzling. She seldom went more than half a mile beyond the radius of home, but still her life seemed conducted at too vast a distance for me to make it out clearly, like something mimed on a rickety stage very far away, tawdry and mercifully unclear.

I left school when I was fifteen and got a job in a shop selling artists’ supplies. I went to night classes in painting and drawing, starting with still lifes of fruit and the more picturesque vegetables. All my attempts were misbegotten, deformed; not once did I not regret my despoliation of the white paper, not once did I prefer what I had done to its insensate purity before a mark had been laid upon it. Yet even as my efforts failed, images poured into my mind’s eye and I tried to catch them and set them down with watery brushstrokes or with wiry, silvered turns of my pencil. I filled sheets and sheets with seashells, feathers, bark, clouds, grasses. Some were painted from life, and others were either remembered or dreamed, I do not know; all were phantoms, lit by the gleam of white paper beneath. One tutor described my work as uncommitted and dismissive of basic tonal values, but I didn’t see those as faults. Another graded me poorly for putting both the observed and the imagined together in the same pictures, but I couldn’t see that there was a difference. Even if there was, was one more real than the other? Nor could I be persuaded to paint anything alive or moving.

So my mother and I continued for a time, living not together but side by side, doing all that we could, through some sort of kindness, to erase each other. By the time I was nineteen she was often drunk for days at a time, venturing no further than across the rolling seas of her own floors and negotiating her way with arms outstretched for the next anchor post of furniture. One day she fell against a small table, hit her head on the edge of the fireplace, and gashed her leg on a metal ashtray that was knocked off in the crash. I came back from the art shop to find her lying in her dressing gown on the yellow linoleum in the passageway. A ragged red trail of smears and drips reached behind her all the way back up the stairs. She had tried to drag herself as far as the street and given up, and when she’d thumped on the partition wall nobody in the betting shop had heard her above the television’s live relay of the afternoon’s racing from Sandown.

The ambulance took a long time. While we waited I cradled her in my lap and pressed my scarf, the only thing to hand, against the wound on her head. I wasn’t alarmed when she lost consciousness. I was too alert, all my attention taken by the sound of the racing commentary that floated on through the wall in an absurd, unvarying cycle, dignity ending in indignity, the man’s voice starting so measured, and then losing control and rising finally to that nervy, screaming finish. Was he not ashamed of his hysteria, did he not know that there was something ridiculous in such public, repetitive, and climactic excesses?

My mother’s hip and a number of ribs were broken and her bones were slow to heal. In the hospital her feet and hands turned blue and she stopped speaking. Bruises burst out in purple plumes all over her. She got a lung infection and then she died. Her absence joined my grandmother’s as a kind of added weight inside me that I was afraid I would carry for the rest of my life. My pictures grew paler and more ghostly still, and I got married.

Dear Ruth

I’m rather disturbed by the last bit of your story, I must say. How could you think up that kind of thing? I had no idea your mind worked that way. It’s not going to get any closer to the bone, is it? You weren’t going to publish it under your own name, were you?

There must have been many times before now, times in the old way I mean, when I heard you about the place, downstairs or in the next room, but it was different then. I could hear where you were, and usually I could tell what you were doing, but it meant nothing. Not then. Why is it so different now?