Authors: Calvin Wade
SIMON – August 1992
A new shop had opened in Chorley called Penny Pinchers. Largely, it sold a load of cheap rubbish, plastic toys, brushes, frying pans that looked like the handle would fall off whilst your pancake was in mid-air, but it also sold the best cream for acne that was ever known to man and it was only 50p a tube! Zeitkila was made in Taiwan, like most other items in that shop, but it’s clear, magic gel attacked spots like no other cream I had ever bought. It actually left scorch marks on your face, which probably looked as bad as the spots themselves and was withdrawn on safety grounds in 1994, but when I was nineteen, I was buying a tube a week.
On this particular Monday, after my window cleaning round, I had walked back up into town in desperation, as my previous tube of Zeitkila had run out on the Friday, but when Mum had given me a lift into Chorley on the Saturday, they were out of stock and awaiting a delivery first thing on Monday morning. It felt like Christmas Day when I saw Penny Pinchers had re-stocked and I gleefully grabbed six tubes of the liquid magic, determined to never run short again. As I was heading to the counter, I saw Nicky Moyes, dressed in dungarees that looked like they have been stolen from a circus clown. I watched her for a few seconds and noticed her head was bowed and she was sobbing into the baby section. Her baby bump was pushing out against her weird clothing.
Joey Neill had told me that Nicky was pregnant back in May. He had found out via his mother and had specifically phoned from Polytechnic to break the news. I think he did it to be spiteful really, as he knew how much I thought of her.
“You’ll never guess what,” he taunted, “Nicky has only gone and got herself up the duff.”
It felt like a death to me. In a way, it was a death, the death of the perfect future that I had always imagined. I had always pictured Nicky floating out of Euxton Parish Church, in a perfect virginal white wedding dress with a magnificently long train, walking down the slope with me, arm in arm, being showered in confetti by the gate at the bottom, whilst the whole village looked on and applauded. Jason McLaren had made his move and now she was having his child, they would be together forever. The day Joey told me, it felt like my dream was over.
In Penny Pinchers, whilst Nicky continued to sob, I stood and stared at her bump. I had no first hand experience of pregnancy, no-one I knew had been pregnant since Mum had had Colin and I had no recollection of that time, so I couldn’t tell how pregnant Nicky was. I knew she wasn’t about to give birth, because sometimes you saw women walking around town whose pregnant stomachs looked enormous and Nicky’s looked neat and tidy, so I made an educated guess that she was about halfway into her pregnancy. Bizarrely, as it turns out, I wasn’t far wrong. The other thing that kept crossing my mind was that Jason McLaren had been lucky enough to have made love to Nicky. I thought he must have felt like a lottery winner. I approached her slowly as she continued to sob.
“Hi Nicky!” I tried to speak softly, “are you
OK?”
Nicky was facing the shelves, so she turned ninety degrees to see who it was that had spotted her breaking down.
“Oh God, Simon it’s you! No, I’m not OK. Look at me, my life is ruined. Why I ever let my Dad talk me into having this baby, I’ll never know. I should have just gone with my instinct and had the baby aborted.”
My heart sank a little when Nicky said this. There were two reasons really. First of all, I had spent several years developing a strange crush on a girl three years
younger than me. I had grown to idolise her and to hear her sound so in despair and broken saddened me. Secondly though, it was also a savage and un-Nicky like thing for her to have said and my dream like, perfect image of her was shattered in that moment.
“You don’t mean that, Nicky.”
“Don’t I? I’m a pregnant sixteen year old girl. Everyone from school thinks I’m a slut. I have just dumped my boyfriend after discovering he went to a party in Brinscall on Saturday night, got hammered and ended up in bed with Vicky Lancaster and her massive tits. What sort of father is that, Simon?”
“Not a very good one.”
“A crap one, Simon. A really crap one. I kidded myself he was going to be alright too, that he was going to be there for me and the baby, but he isn’t. If I’d have had an abortion, it wouldn’t really have mattered, but now, now I feel like my world is ending, Simon.”
Nicky really went for the crying then. It was proper sobbing, so much so her nose started running and she fidgeted around in search of a tissue that she didn’t appear to have.
“Look at me, Simon! I am a fat, snotty, unwanted mess. I hate myself. I absolutely hate myself.”
I wished in that moment, that I hadn’t come to Penny Pinchers. I wished I didn’t have an addiction to Zeitkila and a small part of me wished that I hadn’t run into Nicky. I think that part of me wanted to go on imagining that she was perfect. I
didn’t know how to cheer her up. I wasn’t a counsellor for teenage mothers. I was a nineteen year old window cleaner. A nineteen year old window cleaner who, despite everything that he had heard, was still in love with the fat, snotty nosed mess beside him.
“Nicky, let me go and buy my things. I’ll buy you a packet of tissues too and then let me take you for a cup of coffee somewhere. I haven’t seen you for ages and I hate seeing you looking so sad.”
“Thanks, Simon. Do you know if they have a toilet in here?”
“I don’t think they have a customer one. If you ask, with you being a pregnant lady, they may let you use the staff one.”
“Forget it, I’ll nip to the public toilets in the main car park and sort my teary self out. I’ll meet you outside here in five minutes and then we can go and grab a coffee.”
“OK.”
Nicky and her tear sodden eyes trudged off. I grabbed a box of tissues and went to pay for them at the counter. A funny thing happened whilst I was at the counter, it was an insignificant thing really but when shop workers chat to each other whilst serving you, it always reminds me of this day. There were two tills and I put my tubes of Zeitkila and tissues in the basket by the first till. The woman serving me didn’t acknowledge my presence, she just continued chatting to the woman on the next till about how her husband hadn’t sent her flowers since before they were married and they’d been married more than fifteen years. A funny looking man with a white shirt on and a moustache which was slightly longer on one side of his mouth than the other, who I presumed was the Manager, came up behind the two ladies.
“Sylvia, who is the most important person in this store?”
“You are, Mr.Brazier.”
“No, I’m not. Who is?”
“Me?”
“No, not you either, Sylvia. Want another go?”
“Go of what?”
“Go of guessing who is the most important person in this store?”
“No, I haven’t a clue.”
“I know you haven’t, Sylvia. The customer is the most important person in Penny Pinchers, Sylvia. Now, I’m sure that this young man, buying his Zeitkila and Penny Pinchers own brand tissues would rather be treated in a courteous, professional manner than have to listen to you and Janice talk about your hopeless husbands. Isn’t that right, sir?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Err..yeh.”
“There will be no charge for your items, sir. As the Manager of Penny Pinchers, Chorley, I’d like to apologise to you for the unprofessional manner in which you have been treated today and I guarantee that you will never experience such shoddy service in my store again.”
“What do you have to say, ladies?”
“Sorry, Mr.Brazier.”
“Sorry, Mr.Brazier.”
“I don’t want an apology, our customer does.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“It’s OK.”
“Sylvia, can you just close down your till please, I would like a word with you in my office.”
I left Penny Pinchers with a smile on my face. I was going to have to go to a cashpoint to get some money out for the coffees but didn’t have to now. I waited outside for a couple of minutes until Nicky showed up. My mood had lifted. I had always felt that I was destined to marry Nicky. That she was the only girl in the world for me. Perhaps though, if things had worked out perfectly for her, she wouldn’t have looked twice at me as anything other than a friend. Nicky was a stunner after all and I was a tubby, spotty, window cleaner. With Nicky being pregnant and single at sixteen, it levelled things out a bit. I would still have been punching above my weight, but I now felt I had some hope and perhaps this was the time to grasp the opportunity.
ARTHUR – September 1992
Simon Strong was ruining everything. I had never liked that boy. I had always felt he lacked a certain something, but could never put my finger on what it was. He had always been well mannered, but I just didn’t find anything else about him appealing, perhaps the certain something he was lacking was a brain.
Nicky’s pregnancy had brought us both a lot of tears and heartache, but I was beginning to feel we were overcoming the problems we faced. Mr.&Mrs.McLaren would have performed Nicky’s abortion themselves, given half a chance, but I had worked hard to build up an allegiance with their son, the baby’s father. I made a huge effort to befriend him, make him feel like he had someone else he could turn to as well as Nicky and be someone he could trust. Then, out of nowhere, when Nicky was about twenty weeks pregnant, Jason stopped calling and instead, bloody Simon Strong started to come around every night. I had no idea what had triggered the swop, it was like swopping a Bentley for a Lada 1500. Nicky wouldn’t tell me what had happened, but until we had managed to get beyond the twenty four week abortion deadline, I still felt very uncomfortable about the whole set up.
One night, after Nicky had shown Simon out the door, I let my feelings be known. I was in the lounge. I remember specifically that I had been smoking my Meerschaum pipe that evening, a habit that had increased through the stresses of Nicky’s pregnancy, although I only smoked when I knew Nicky would not be sitting in the room with me. As I heard Nicky say her farewells and close the door behind the annoying one, I called her in.
“What is it, Dad? My God what a stench! I hate you smoking that pipe.”
“Captain Black’s Royal, a wonderful smoke.”
“I don’t know how you can like it, Dad, it stinks.”
“It has a calming influence on me, Nicky, not like your good self.”
“Can I open a window?”
“No, I’ll only keep you a couple of minutes. All I wanted to know was how you would feel if I asked Jason around for a meal tomorrow night?”
“Dad, don’t.”
“Why?”
“I’ve told you, I don’t want him around at the moment.”
“I know that, Nicky love, but you haven’t told me why. Are you sleeping with that ugly one now?”
“Dad! His name’s Simon, you know it is. Simon and I have been friends since we were little.”
“I know and I’ve never liked him.”
“You have no reason not to like him.”
“He’s weird.”
“The Neill family like him.”
“Even good people can make mistakes.”
“Dad, in this instance, you are the good person making a mistake. Simon is a friend of mine and I wish you wouldn’t treat him like something you’ve trodden in, every time he comes around here.”
“I am perfectly civil to him.”
“You don’t treat him like you treat, Jason.”
“He hasn’t fathered my grandchild.”
“Even more reason to be nice to him.”
“I just don’t like him being here, at the moment.”
“Why not?”
“Nicky, he’s in the way.”
“In the way of what?”
“In the way of you and Jason patching things up.”
“No, he isn’t! I am in the way of me and Jason patching things up!”
“Well, you’re bloody stupid then! Do you want to be a sixteen year old single mother?”
“Not particularly.”
“What if Jason’s Mum and Dad start insisting that he should push ahead with their abortion plans?”
“Dad, no-one can force me to have an abortion!”
“Well, I hope not.”
“Oh my God, Dad, can you hear yourself? Do you know how ridiculous you sound? What are you saying? That I should patch things up with Jason, no matter what he has done, so his Mum and Dad don’t kidnap me and take me for a back street abortion?”
“I don’t know what those people are capable of. They sat on this settee and called your child ‘a thing’.”
“That doesn’t mean they would force me into aborting it! I think you are being a bit melodramatic, Dad.”
“I’d just be more comfortable if you and Jason were on good terms. Anyway, a child needs a father figure. He is definitely the father, isn’t he? There’s no way it could be that Steven’s?”
“Simon’s. You are doing this deliberately now! What exactly have you been putting in that pipe, Dad? No, it could not be Simon’s child or anyone else’s child for that matter, other than Jason’s.”
“Good, it’s just strange that one minute Jason was here all the time, then the next minute Jason disappears and Simon keeps calling.”
“It’s not strange, Dad. Jason and I have split up and I need some company. Simon is good company.”
“You’ve seen ‘When Harry Met Sally’, Nicky, haven’t you?”
“It’s my favourite film.”
“Well, just remember what Harry said to Sally about male-female friendships. Simon isn’t coming here just to listen to Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan, love. He wants a piece of the action.”
“Get lost, Dad! I’m five months pregnant for goodness sake!”
“Mark my words. He wants a piece of the action!”