Authors: Jenn Ashworth
The picture on the television changed quickly, from the music programme to the adverts. The first picture was bright yellow because it was an advert for summer-smelling washing powder, and the shock of it in his eyes must have startled Donald because he moved slightly and the plate tipped and the cheese cubes fell onto his lap and some of them bounced onto the rug. I was going to have to clean all that up and where was Barbara, who had been out with that bin in the hailstones for about a million years?
I didn’t move to collect the food from the carpet, and Donald didn’t acknowledge it even though some of it still rested in the creases of his shirt and trousers.
‘Some weather we’re having, eh?’
I nodded. ‘Hail every day for a week, apart from Christmas Day. Did you put a bet on this year?’
‘Yes, same as usual. And it’s not a white Christmas, no matter how white it is, unless there’s a flake falling in London on Christmas Day itself.’
‘What’s so good about London?’
‘It’s where the weather’s measured. It only counts as weather if it snows down south.’
When neither of us was speaking, you could hear the hail battering against the windows.
‘It even snows under the sea, you know,’ Donald said.
That was the thing with my dad – half of the things he said sounded as if they couldn’t possibly be true, and you’d be an idiot for believing them.
Barbara came in then, round lumps of hail in her hair, which was clipped up in some kind of roll on the back of her head. I got up quick, and gestured towards Donald and the lumps of cheese.
‘I just remembered, I forgot to empty the bin in my bedroom. There’s some paper in it. Some orange peel and stuff. I’d better go and take it out?’
Barbara looked at Donald and made her mouth go thin, like a letter box. She nodded at me quickly.
‘Put your coat on when you go outside, it’s evil out there. And hang it up in the hall over the radiator when you get back in. And make sure you latch the gate properly after you. I don’t want it banging to and fro half the night.’
I ran out of the living room like there was nothing in the world I wanted to do more than empty my bin. It wasn’t really a lie. I did go upstairs and empty the paper and orange peel into a carrier bag. And I knotted the bag at the top and stood on one leg on the kitchen lino to pull my trainers on through the laces that I never, never untied unless Barbara was watching. Barbara, who probably wished I had never been born.
And then I took the green bottle from the side and poured half of what was in there into a mug and took the mug and the bag out of the back door, through the hail and the wind and the black, and into the garden shed.
The shed was going to be pitch black too, and freezing, maybe a bit scary, but I had the cigarette lighter and I waved it about a bit until I had the courage to close the door behind me. It wasn’t so bad. There was a set of folding chairs in there for the summer, and one was already unfolded. It must be another one of Donald’s secret hiding places. And the chair was sitting in front of the little, book-sized pane of dusty glass in the side of the shed. I could sit in it and see the lit window of the kitchen and the green bottle on the worktop and my latest school report stuck to the fridge with a magnet in the shape of a Coca-Cola bottle. And the kitchen door was open so I could see the flicker of the television and the very edge of the couch, with Barbara’s hand and wrist lying on the arm of it, her nails painted a funny kind of brown.
This is as crap as Christmas, I thought, as I flicked the lighter. I imagined the whole world blowing up: a mushroom cloud the size of a planet, and everything dead in the time it took for me to tap the tiny wheel against the flint with my thumb. The light from the wobbling flame turned the window into a mirror and the house, the bottle, the couch and Barbara’s arm disappeared. The noise of the hail on the corrugated roof of the shed was amazingly loud and comforting.
I laughed then, because Crap As Christmas sounded funny, and I said it out loud and laughed again because it was even funnier the second time around. The next time anyone asked me my opinion of anything at all, I decided I was going to say, ‘What, that’s as crap as Christmas.’
My cigarette was lit and I let the lighter go out, then I was in the dark with the hail sounding like someone throwing stones at the window, and I thought about Emma, out in the thick of it and having to cadge a lift home, or even pay for a taxi and wait for it in the freezing cold because Chloe had buggered off with Carl somewhere. And Carl and Chloe, parked under a bridge in the dark, his hands inside her clothes and the pair of them panting and pawing at each other, filling the car with their hot breath until bang! the battery on the car goes dead, or the heater packs in – and it being too dark for her to get her jeans back on properly before the AA man comes to rescue them. Ha.
These were nice thoughts. I took a sip of the clear stuff in my mug. Because it was so, so cold and because I didn’t really like the taste I drank it quick. Then I flicked the lighter again, holding it downwards so I could see what was lying about. I was looking for something to put the dog-end in. I was hoping for a glass jar with a hard circle of paint in the bottom, a tin lid, or even the lip of a rusting trowel. I swept the lighter through the air in slow arcs.
‘Typical.’ I hardly ever talk to myself. I swore. ‘So hypocritical.’
There were about twenty cigarette ends on the floor, a big flattened heap of them, and they’d been under my feet the whole time. One was stuck to the side of my trainer and I had to stamp my foot to get it off me. I dropped my own cig on the floor along with the rest of them, some faded, some fresh, all kissed on the orange edge of the filter with a ring of brown lipstick.
The world was getting whiter and whiter. It was the kind of white you can feel even before you get out of bed and look out of the window because of the cold, bright quality of the light coming in between the curtains. It was the Saturday before the start of school and I’d still not heard anything from Chloe.
Barbara turned off her vacuum cleaner to listen to another news broadcast about the unusually cold weather. Apart from the aftermath of a New Year’s Eve street brawl which had started when one of the patrolling vigilante groups had noticed an old man pissing against the window of Tammy Girl and taken it the wrong way, there had been nothing new to report. It was January. It was freezing. Frosty. A bit of the river had frozen over. Big deal.
Donald had been in a strange, restless mood that morning. Barbara had given him a toilet roll and sent him wandering about the house mopping the condensation from the inside of the windows. He dabbed with wads of toilet paper that left fibres sticking to the glass and the mess agitated him even more so now he was busy rubbing at the glass with the cuffs of his shirt. Yet even he was caught by the afternoon broadcast and had drifted towards the front room to watch it with us.
Terry, wearing what looked like a ladies’ mink coat and matching hat, stood on the old tram bridge over the Ribble and talked about climate change and global warming as the camera zoomed in on the lacy frill of ice working its way across the river from either bank. Baffled ducks skated along the rim and plopped into freezing, fast-flowing water that was brown and opaque. Things protruded from the water: trolleys, old bikes and prams, dented traffic cones wearing wreaths of twigs and slime. On the far bank, a mattress had been wedged against the bare earth by a broken wheelie bin, half filled with mud. The top part of the mattress bent forward, as if bowing to its invisible audience. In the morning broadcast Terry had said this was the coldest winter on record for eighty years, but now his researchers had revised the figure to eighty-four, and there were pictures of yellow trucks moving slowly along the emptied ring road, spewing salt and grit behind them.
‘But it’s not all doom and gloom,’ Terry said, and grinned.
Barbara leaned on the vacuum cleaner and wound the lead around her hand, catching it expertly on her elbow in a series of swift, jerky movements that never caused her to take her eyes off the screen.
‘He’s had his teeth fixed again, hasn’t he, Lola? A polish, at the very least. What do you think?’
I was draped over an armchair pretending not to be interested although secretly I was hoping for the school pipes to go, for the holidays to be extended and for school to be cancelled – indefinitely.
‘Indeed, the young ladies of our city will be most pleased with an unexpected side effect of this cold snap,’ Terry said.
Barbara leaned forward.
‘The spate of unpleasant incidents that has been plaguing our city’s parks, gardens, train stations and other remote places,’ he went on cheerfully, ‘seems to have dried up. As we reported, there was an attack on Christmas Eve when a man accosted a fifteen-year-old girl outside the city train station on her way to visit her grandmother, exposing himself to her before attempting to assault her. The man has still not been identified,’ Terry twitched camply at his hat and grimaced, ‘and the girl’s name has not been released to us at this time.’
‘It’s still getting to him, isn’t it?’ Barbara said.
Fiona, by virtue of being a woman, had managed to get an exclusive interview with one of the earliest victims – a thirteenyear-old who’d been felt up behind a pub in Chorley. It was persistently rumoured that Terry wasn’t going to rest until he got one of the victims to recount her experience live on his evening broadcast, or even better, unveiled the identity of the flasher himself. That’s why he didn’t condemn the vigilante patrols – even though the police did. Barbara said they were Terry’s eyes and ears on the ground. He was determined to get to the next girl first.
‘But thankfully it has now been over ten days since that attack, and while our community action patrols continue to search the City’s dark places, it seems the rest of us can sigh with relief. Our Friends in the South may make jokes about the Lancastrian Man’s famed tolerance for the cold but it seems for the time being our girls are safe. The weather is a touch too nippy even for the most prolific pest our city has ever seen.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ said Barbara – suddenly grumpy. She turned the television over. A Christmas Special
Cluedo
was playing on the other side, and I settled in to watch it.
‘I’ve no problem with that flasher staying at home in front of his Calor Gas,’ Donald said. His hand reached through the air, bumped my shoulder, and squeezed. ‘No one with a daughter would.’
‘He’ll be at it again, come the spring. You can guarantee it. Him having a Christmas holiday isn’t the same as him being caught and having his –’ Barbara stopped, looked at me, coughed, ‘people like that – they’ve not got a choice about it. There’s something wrong with them upstairs.’
She clattered the vacuum away into its cupboard and emerged without her apron, tying her hair back with an elastic band.
‘Come on. Let’s go out. We’ve been stuck in the house for days. I’ve sucked the flowers off the carpet, and we’ll be down to boards if I can’t get out for some fresh air soon.’
‘It’s freezing out there,’ I said. ‘Were you watching something different to us just then?’ I turned my face back to the television: Leslie Grantham as Colonel Mustard accusing Mrs White of something unspeakable, but it popped and the screen went blank. Barbara was holding the remote control, and she tucked it away in its holder by the side of Donald’s chair.
‘If it’s not frost, it’s flashers,’ she said. ‘We’re entitled to get out of the house. We’re going stir crazy. Look at your father.’ Donald was twitching the antimacassar on the back of my chair. ‘And anyway,’ she raised her eyebrows, looked at me meaningfully, although whatever it was she did mean was lost on me, ‘you’ve got a little errand to do, haven’t you,
Laura
? Come on. Shoes and coats. Lola, you can wear your new one. Just don’t let me see you dragging your cuffs along the railings.’
She stood Donald in front of the hall mirror to go over him with the lint roller before she would open the front door and let us out.
Even though I should have been prepared for it, the cold outside shocked my lungs, bit the insides of my nose and made my teeth ache. We were two weeks past the longest night of the year, but winter was working backwards and spring felt like it was getting further and further away. The paths and the walls of the house were scratched with frost and without saying a word to each other Barbara and I stood on either side of Donald – not touching, but hovering as he navigated the slippery, glittering pavement. We walked all the way into town like that, up Fishergate Hill and past the train station where the girl had been flashed at, three abreast under the white, freezing sky. Barbara tutted and shook her head at people who didn’t want to let us by.
It was a bright, bright day. All the smooth surfaces – car bonnets, illuminated advertisements in bus shelters, the green and gold plastic litter bins – were coated with their own thickening layer of white, and Donald’s coat was a light beige sports jacket that was dated and gleaming and wasn’t right for the weather, but it was all he would wear.
This walk to the shops felt like a special occasion. I knew that we weren’t quite like other families: I had few memories of my parents outside our house. I knew they went out walking some afternoons when I was at school, and Barbara drove them both to the supermarket twice a month, but it was always during the day so I didn’t see it. There were never any seaside holidays or weeks in Spain. I didn’t even get day trips to Windermere or Grizedale or Blackpool. Nothing like that.
The only trip away I could remember was to a Pontin’s in North Wales. I must have been five or six years old. A dim memory of a dark pub with seats upholstered with a blue plaid fabric like the seats on the City buses. It was a variety night with Orville the Duck. I was sitting between Donald’s legs under the table pouring a can of cheap supermarket bitter into an empty pint glass. Barbara had bought a pint of lemonade, made me drink it, and then kept the glass in her lap. My mouth and hair were sticky. The brown fluid turned white as it hit the glass, and it fizzed over her patent leather court shoes.
‘Tip the glass! Tip the glass!’ I remember her hissing, and kicking her feet out of the puddle.
It was because of the money. Neither of them worked. Barbara had been a cleaner, a dinner lady and an office help, but now she was nothing and Donald got money from the City to stay at home and she had an allowance of some kind for looking after him. It was also because of Donald. The more interesting and colourful Donald’s spare room became, the less he needed to leave it to go into the outside world. The things going on in his head were much more real to him, more real, even, than the documentaries and nature programmes he liked to watch on the television. Gradually I learned that if we wanted to talk to Donald, we had to go into that place with him.
Even so, we weren’t that unusual. We might have been bigger home-bodies than most, but no one we knew left the City very often. It just wasn’t done.
When we got to the shopping centre, Barbara took Donald’s arm and pulled us through the revolving doors together. The three of us were wedged into a single segment of the turning mechanism. The blast of the hot air heater was directed down at us, and Donald started to sweat heavily.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, and pointed through the glass, ‘they’ve still got the Christmas trees up.’
‘Your father isn’t a child,’ Barbara said, and I let the sigh out, very slowly between my teeth so she couldn’t hear it, and the door completed its revolution and we were spat into the warmth and twinkling lights of the shopping centre. It was still prickling with silver tinsel and the air was clogged with the dry, solvent smell of spray-on frost.
‘Where are we going?’ I said, and peered across Donald to Barbara, who was heading towards Boots and brandishing a handbag so brown and shiny it looked like it was made of wood. Brandish is right – she carried it over her wrist, held in front of her like a weapon. I wanted to walk away. I wanted to turn and melt into the crowd like a curl of steam. I knew, then, what she was going to do, but Donald was smiling and tugging me gently along, a fold of my new coat gripped between his finger and thumb.
The decorations in Boots were more subdued. When we got to the perfume counter the woman who was supposed to be serving was kneeling on the top of a short stepladder. There was another ladder on the back of her tights, disappearing up her skirt. She was winding a red ribbon around the display cases on the shelf behind her. Red, heart-shaped stickers dotted the boxes and bottles because there was a special offer for Valentine’s Day and they were putting the displays up for it already. She didn’t notice us until Barbara dropped her handbag heavily on the glass counter.
Barbara coughed. ‘Excuse me, miss?’
The woman turned then hopped, heavily, down from the ladder, staring at Donald and tweaking the hem of her skirt downwards. I wanted to say, ‘He’s not like
that
,’ loud, and in a tone like Barbara’s – but Barbara spoke first.
‘My daughter,’ she said, with such clear dignity I could tell she had rehearsed it, and imagined her standing barefoot on the linoleum in her bedroom, straightening the rosebud cover on her single bed and muttering it like a prayer, ‘wants to return an item she removed from this counter without paying.’
I watched the shop assistant’s face change. I tried to imagine what we looked like to her. The three of us: Barbara in her shabby, aggressively clean houndstooth coat and cracked leather gloves; Donald, rocking slightly and smiling as if he was about to be given a present; and me – jeans at high-water mark, school shoes and the Christmas-Present-School-Coat, shoulders speckled with fine grains of snow that to an unsympathetic eye could have looked like dandruff. And all of us lined up in order of size, staring back at her and her abandoned packet of paper hearts.
Barbara retrieved the white and blue and silver perfume box from her bag. She closed the clasp with a snap (the noise it made was as satisfied as she was) and placed the perfume carefully on the counter.
‘Here it is,’ she said, and gestured towards it. She didn’t look at me – her neck was rigid with fright. ‘She’d like to make up for her actions in some way. What do you suggest?’
The shop assistant glanced at me. I looked at the red hearts and said nothing.
‘Wouldn’t you, Lola?’ Barbara prompted. As if she was getting ready for a fight, she pulled off her gloves and laid them over the pursed mouth of her handbag.
‘Are you sure?’ the shop assistant said. She gestured behind her without looking, like a weathergirl. ‘These are display boxes. We aren’t missing anything.’
‘It’s Valentine’s Day soon!’ Donald announced, and put his hand on the counter. ‘Have you got a boyfriend, young lady?’ The assistant moved her eyes from Barbara to Donald, who had opened his wallet and was proffering an expired credit card, and then back to Barbara again. The credit card was green and white and orange – clearly an antique and the sort of object that would turn up as a curiosity in a jumble sale, and get snapped up by someone collecting props for a retro television programme.