‘So where’s your cardigan, then, after all that? Honest to God.’
I muttered at her and did a sharp U-turn.
‘You mek some noise, you do,’ she grumbled as I thumped back up the stairs.
We were nearly out the door when I had my second shock of the day: Dogman, nose to nose with me. He must have been standing on the step, under the impression the bell had rung.
I tried to get past but he blocked my way, holding his arms out.
‘Stand and deliver,’ he said.
Fuck
off
, I thought, and barged him to one side. It didn’t stop him grinning.
‘Your money or your life?’ he shouted into the living room.
Poll came out with her hands up. ‘My life, I’m saving up.’
Dogman pretended to shoot her, and they fell about laughing. ‘I’ve brought a couple of tins of this bathroom mousse,’ I heard him say. ‘Big ’uns. They were just sitting there, on t’ skip near t’ council offices. There’s no propellant so they don’t squirt, but they’re full. I bet you could get the fluid out if you stuck a knife in ’em, though.’ He raised his voice. ‘And I’ve summat for Katherine too.’
‘Wait up!’ said Poll, but I was already at the gate and I didn’t stop. ‘Dickie’s brought you a beautiful calendar. It’s all pictures of Stratford, and that Shakespeare. Aren’t you going to say thank you?’
I knew without looking it would be last year’s. ‘Get a move on,’ I said to the dog.
We inched up the hill to the main road. In my mind’s eye I’d arranged all the new clothes on one of those rotary washing lines, and I was gloating over each outfit as it came round. Not that I’d ever get to wear any of them; if I swanned up the village to Spar wearing a bright red basque, Poll would have some kind of Attack. Ambulance men would find her frothing on the front-room floor and clinging pitifully to my grey cardigan. ‘It were them tights as started it,’ she’d gasp before she pegged out.
Who on God’s earth would leave a present like that for me? I gave Winston a tug and replayed the moment when I’d opened the front door. There it had been, my present, sitting on the mat. Maybe one of the neighbours had seen something. Maybe it was one of the neighbours. That wasn’t very likely, though, because Poll’s fallen out with both sides and I can tell they think I’m just odd. Whenever any of them do speak to me they do it s-l-o-w-l-y, as if I’m backward. Usually I don’t bother answering.
Might have been Maggie. But she’d no money, and it wasn’t her style, and she’d already given me the pen set. The timing suggested it was a gift from Dogman, but why not say? If it was him, then the level of literacy was higher than usual. Two years ago he’d sent me a Valentine card.
GESS HOW?
he’d printed inside. I’d binned it immediately.
At the top of the Brow we turned onto the high street, the village proper. ‘An example of Ribbon Development,’ I remember writing in my Y7 geography project. ‘Bank Top grew up around the mining and cotton industries, but today is primarily a dormer village for the surrounding urban areas.’ It’s just a road that runs along the crest of a long flat-topped hill. Exit one direction and you’re on the way to Bolton; exit the other and you’re Wigan-bound.
Very historical, is Bank Top. General Julius Agricola used it as a vantage point to spy out Britons skulking in the forest below. Panicked Elizabethans lit a beacon here to warn of the approaching Armada, and Samuel Crompton invented his spinning mule just up the road. But time’s moved on and, at the start of the third millennium, Bank Top’s past its best. It’s all very well the local papers publishing quaint photos of children playing on the cobbles; anything remotely picturesque was cleared away years ago. The rows of stone cottages built for the handloom weavers, the Georgian horse trough, the worn granite mounting-block three hundred years old outside the church, were demolished half a century back and the oldest buildings you get now are Victorian terraces. The rest is post-war bland, with some Sixties eyesores thrown in at random.
Bank Top teenagers moan there’s nothing to do here, except try and sneak into pubs. (I could go in a pub if I wanted: I don’t.) The activity of choice for the underage seems to be to go down the bottom of the Brow of an evening and set fire to a garage. But it’s not a bad place, really, there’s worse. It’s got the library, and it’s where my dad is.
Right outside the cemetery gates there’s a bus stop. That always used to strike me as funny, imagine the dead queuing up to go off to Bolton, but today it was a damn nuisance because two of Poll’s Over Seventies chums were there having a natter.
‘It’s shocking, it is, honest, they’ve had all the lead flashing off his roof while he was away – Oh, hello, love. Birthday girl. I’ve a card for you.’ That was Mrs Batley, thickly wrapped against the cold. She rooted in her bag and pulled out a mauve envelope and, bloody hell, a tube of Smarties. She clearly thinks I’m still about six. ‘Here y’are, love. How’s your grandma?’
I put my head down and looked through my hair. ‘OK, thanks. Thanks.’ I shoved the Smarties in my pocket and shifted away.
‘Will you ask her, love, if she’s had a letter about her heating allowance?’ Mrs Threlfall, posher coat, furry hat as opposed to headscarf. ‘Because we’re all supposed to have had one, all them as is on benefit, and if you’ve not, you’ve to phone the council—’
I mumbled and nodded, squeezing through the gates onto the gravel path that leads up to the war memorial and Winston now pulling ahead, God knows what he’d seen or smelt. As I walked away I heard them murmuring together. Poor lass, poor Poll, she’s a big girl, it’s a shame. I bet that was the gist of it. I didn’t care. They were going to die before me.
We crunched past the chapel then I bent down and let Winston off the lead. I found my perch on the memorial steps and watched him totter around for a minute till he disappeared behind a gravestone.
I leaned my head back against the granite and stared up to heaven. The sky was perfect winter blue with white clouds streaming across it. My eyes scanned back and forth for the message.
‘Are you there, Dad?’ I said out loud.
*
They were playing ‘Land of Make Believe’ on the radio at the actual moment he penetrated me.
I’d seen Bucks Fizz win the Eurovision Song Contest, watched the girls whip their skirts off for the finale. Never dreamt they’d be the soundtrack to my undoing. He said it would be OK, he kept saying that all the time, till he stopped talking altogether and started jerking around and biting my neck.
He was clever, string of O-levels already, predicted top grades for his A-levels – which he got, despite everything. But the clincher was he said he knew, he’d studied women’s bodies and there was a cycle and it was an impossibility that an egg could be fertilized during that particular window. He had a textbook with a diagram in it; we had it open on the bed as he took his trainers off.
Mum was in hospital dying by inches, I had no one I could ask. Trust me, he said, I’m nearly a doctor.
My dad left me:
– his posters, LP records and cassette tapes
– a collection of stringy ties
– a pair of nail clippers decorated on the front with an enamel violin
– some medical textbooks
– a stack of science-fiction novels
– a gold ring set with a sovereign
He didn’t specifically leave this stuff to me, but Poll’s never said I couldn’t have it. She threw everything else away after the crash. ‘Why did you keep his ties?’ I asked her one time she was in a better mood. ‘He looked so bonny in a tie,’ she said, then locked herself in the bathroom for an hour afterwards. Neither of us can get the ring on, Poll with her super-size knuckles and me with my sausage fingers, so it lives in my jewellery box, on a velvet hummock.
My mother left me: a single 6”x 4” photograph. I found it in between the pages of
An Illustrated Biology Course
. It was under Symbiosis, although I don’t think that’s significant. I’ve left it there because that way it’s safe from Poll. When I first came across it, at thirteen, I looked at it every day.
She’s blonde and plump, and
young
; but then she’d only have been my age. Her hair’s flicked into two wings at the sides of her face and she’s wearing blue eye-shadow, a black T-shirt and a knee-length floral skirt. You can’t see her feet because they’ve been cut off the bottom of the picture, so I don’t know what kind of shoes she favoured. She’s resting her hands protectively on her big bump of a stomach – me – as she leans against the bonnet of the deadly Metro. I’d say she looks fairly happy. She doesn’t look like someone who’s about to abandon their baby.
I can’t place the house behind her. It’s certainly not this one, because the window to her right has little octagonal leaded lights. We used to have two small stained-glass panels at the front, but when it came time for replacing them, Poll made Dogman cart them off to the tip to save on repairs. Although I bet he sold them to a reclamation yard, thinking about it.
Pictures of Dad are easier to come by. Poll’s got dozens, charting his progress from babyhood to A-levels. He goes from a cute, cheeky-looking boy to a really handsome man, with dark brown hair swept across his brow, an intense gaze, and evidence of a slight mullet at the collar. He reminds me of the drawings in Auntie Jean’s old
Dr Kildare
annuals.
I know Dad’s back at the house in his jar, what’s left of him. But for some reason I feel closest to him in the cemetery. It’s so still, a space to think, and you’re up on the highest point of the village so it’s closer to the sky.
The year I was finally booted out of primary school for spooking the normal kids, I used to come up here a lot. If I wasn’t holed up in the library, this is where I’d be. It was that summer, just when things were getting desperate, that Dad sent me his kiss. Some people might have said it was two aeroplane trails cutting across each other, but I knew it was a giant white kiss he’d scrawled across the ether.
So I look to the sky for messages; and sometimes they’re there, and sometimes not. Usually, if you search hard enough, you’ll see something significant in the cloud formations. I’m sure, for instance, that a Westie-faced cumulus told me Winston was going to be OK after his op six years ago. And going further back, when I was waiting to see if I’d got into the grammar, I came up here convinced I’d failed and there was a flat grey ceiling of nimbostratus. Then, as I watched, the sky broke open and a thin shaft of sunlight beamed down over Bolton. I don’t know if it was shining precisely on the grammar school, but the next day I got the letter offering me a place. Last spring I was convinced I’d messed up a French module, but a band of cirrocumulus showed me a row of ticks. I got an A.
It was cirrocumulus again today, making a fantastic curving spine right above me, anatomically correct down to the number of vertebrae and the little tail of a coccyx; now that had to be Dad. I took my mile-high backbone to mean How were the resolutions going.
Well, first off, I’d kicked the diet into touch. They’re rubbish, diets. I’ve tried them before. You start off hungry and virtuous, the next stage is light-headed and high, then ravenous and unreasonable with a blinding headache, as if someone has attached a couple of jumbo bulldog clips to your eyebrows. That’s where the diet begins to fall apart. Eating is my top pleasure, it even beats reading; also, food’s not just food in our house. It’s sugar-coated guilt, full-fat reproach, high-sodium defiance.
‘What’s going on? Why have you left your chips?’ Poll said last time I tried to cut down.
‘I was full.’
‘Full? Full? You normally have twice this number, and a steak pie on top. And afters.’
‘I was trying to lose a couple of pounds.’
Poll rolled her sleeves up crossly, then leaned over to pick up the plates. ‘I’ve told you before, you’re wasting your time. Your shape’s genetic. Off your mother. There’s no way you can change what you are. You were just born fat.’
‘People aren’t born fat. It’s what you eat,’ I said, without much hope.
She patted her rounded stomach. ‘No, it’s inescapable. Look at me. Legs like sticks and a great pot belly. It’s the Southworth Stomach. Cissie’s got it too, all the woman down that line have. You got Castle genes: big all over. You can’t fight your heritage. Thank your lucky stars that’s
all
she passed on. You might have been certifiable. Now, are you having a vanilla slice?’
Far above me, the spine had melted into long wispy fingers, ghost fingers pointing to the south. I stepped back up onto the memorial. ‘Dad? If you’re still there – I really could do with some help. About the future. Can you give me a sign?’
I watched my breath mist in front of my face, and waited. A helicopter chopped faintly in the distance. Two metres away from where I stood a wren flittered onto a hawthorn branch, bobbed about, took off again.
Winston chose that moment to reappear with something hideous in his mouth. I bent down to prise the thing from his jaws but he was too quick for me; he threw his head back and bolted whatever it was down, gagging and snorting. Probably he’d be bringing it back up later, on the living-room carpet. ‘Come on, mutt; home,’ I scolded. ‘You always have to ruin the atmosphere, don’t you?’
I thought again of the backbone when I got in. The TV was blasting out of the lounge,
House-Strip-Neighbour-Swap-Challenge
. Still in the porch, bending to unhook Winston’s collar, I called; ‘I’ve been having a think about things, Poll, and I want you to call me Kat.’ I said it quite loudly, partly because there was this bouncy theme tune to contend with, and partly because I wanted her to understand right from the word go that I was serious about it.
Poll’s frowning face appeared round the door. ‘You want me to call you a cat?’
‘No,’ said Dogman’s voice from behind her. ‘Don’t be daft. She wants you to call her a cab.’
Winston walked stiffly off and I hung his lead up. The urge to impale myself on one of the coat hooks was tremendous. Instead I wrenched my mac off and pulled it down over the hook so hard that the collar ripped. Poll didn’t see this, luckily.