To the Devil - a Diva! (11 page)

Colin didn't want his gran thinking he treated their place like a hotel. He made a habit of popping back home for tea with her every day. Even when his shifts at Slag! were tight, he still thought it was worth going home. Even when it seemed like he only had time enough to turn round and get back on the bus.

He couldn't let his gran down.

She wasn't lonely or bored. Wasn't that type. She had stacks of mates and no end of gentlemen admirers, as she called them. Colin's gran wasn't one for being left at a loose end. Teatime was sacrosanct though, and that was when she made time for Colin, and the least he could do was be there for it.

He caught the bus back to their estate and the whole trip out of the city centre passed in a blur. He was thinking about Raf, about Lance, about what might happen. He'd never seen Raf so animated about anything.

They were on the ninth floor of a block overlooking the river. You could see right across the city from there: all the dark, blocky roofs under the streaky blue brown of the sky.

When he got in Gran was frying bacon, grilling halved tomatoes, fussing in their narrow kitchen. The light was
subaqueous, strip-lit and the air thick with cooking fumes, from a grill pan neither fancied scouring out. She was in a high-necked dressy dress, spangling with silver threads and a pinny tied over the top to catch the splashes of fat. She'd had her hair done. A pale blue wash through the fine scalloped waves.

‘Are you off out, Gran?'

She gave a small jump and shriek and glared at him. ‘Sneaking up on me. You could have been anyone.'

‘I yoo-hooed down the corridor.'

‘Not loud enough, Colin, love. My heart's doing twenty to the dozen.' She had Radio 2 on, rattling away on the formica table, the extendable aerial poking out through the window. Gran thought the reception up here exceptional.

‘You look very nice,' he told her.

She touched her new hair distractedly as she poked her spatula at the bacon. ‘Do I? Thanks, love. It's an Old Dear's Night Out. Special do at Harry Ramsden's. All the fish and chips you can eat and an old time singalong. Not really my thing, but I swore down to Effie I'd keep her company.' Gran's face was squeezed up in a grimace. She had a terrifically lined and seamed complexion. Somehow it looked good on her. Colin never understood that. She used about a million different moisturisers and youth-enhancing skin treatments but she still always looked ‘like a used bloody old paper bag,' as she put it. ‘Still, I'm characterful, that's what I am. Full of character. And people like that, don't they, chuck?' She was very slim too, and bizarrely sprightly for her age.

‘Are you working tonight, lovey?'

He nodded and his gran was looking at his Slag! T-shirt, pursing her lips.

‘I hope you look after yourself down there,' she said, peering under the grill, knowing she was talking out of turn. ‘There's stuff in that local paper. People coming to bad ends. They found another boy dead, floating in the canal.'

Colin knew. He'd seen the bunches of flowers strapped to the lamp post by the canal wall. Photos covered in clear plastic taped over the ‘missing' posters.

‘He was a rent boy.'

‘Does it matter? He was still someone's son.'

‘Didn't mean it like that, Gran.' He got the plates out of the cupboard. The ones with the hunting scenes trim. ‘I meant that rent boys come in for more danger than the likes of me, working the bar.'

‘It's still a dodgy place down there,' she said.

‘It's just a tourist trap now. It's like …' He laughed. ‘It's like the Alton Towers of the gay world. It's OK.'

She peered at him thoughtfully. ‘It's a funny old place,' she said. ‘That whole stretch of canal, from Piccadilly Station to Deansgate. And it always has been a funny place. It attracts all sorts of people.'

He knew better than to say too much when his gran got into one of her mysterious moods.

He helped her dish up tea.

They sat in the living room to eat. Gran's massive,
evil-looking
cat was stretched on the sheepskin rug. The telly was blaring. Local news. The newsreader was the one that neither Colin nor his gran could abide. He tended to read things out and then raise his eyebrow in scorn or incredulity. ‘He makes his feelings too plain,' Gran would grumble. ‘He should be more impartial.'

‘Thinks a lot of himself, that one,' Gran added today. She pointed at the screen with her knife dripping egg.

The living room was crammed with china figurines. Every available surface was cluttered and arranged. An avid collector, Gran couldn't resist the adverts in the Sunday supplements. Commemorative plates, ludicrously cute puppies and babies, ladies in crinoline skirts. She'd cut out coupons and fetch postal orders and wait for treasure to arrive, giftwrapped in tissue papers. Colin found himself having to be very careful, moving around at home. He couldn't begin to imagine how Gran would react if one of her babies were smashed.

‘Hang on,' he said. ‘How come you're having your tea now? If you're having fish and chips later?'

She scowled again. ‘You know,' she said quietly. ‘When I'm out … I only ever … pick.'

He nodded. It was true. Gran didn't like eating in public. As far as Colin knew she had always been like that. She would sit down to dinner with people and she would pretend to eat. She'd slice things up smaller and smaller and keep talking and hardly touch a thing.

‘And I enjoy having my tea with my handsome grandson, don't I?' she smiled. ‘That's what tea time's for, isn't it?'

For a second he thought she was going to lean over and pinch his cheek. Poor Gran, he thought. What would happen when he eventually moved out? Into that mythical urban apartment of his? On the day that his real life actually began. What would happen to her then?

She'd starve.

He blinked away a vision that had risen before his eyes. Bizarre. He'd imagined walking up into Lance Randall's rooftop pad (and he was picturing what all the furnishings would be like. Fantastic) and Lance was asking him, very seriously, almost pleadingly, if he'd care to move in with him immediately, to share his lonely, starry life and to make everything wonderful and complete. Colin blinked again and shook his head like an Etch-a-Sketch to clear it. Sad bastard.

His gran's eyes were on the telly again. Riveted. Her mouth had dropped open, showing what she'd been chewing – and that wasn't like her at all.

‘What is it, Gran?' Colin thought she was having a stroke. He wouldn't know what to do.

She pointed at the telly. ‘It's her!' she said hoarsely. ‘What's she doing on the local news?'

Behind the bootblack hair of the ironic newsreader there was a blown-up still of Karla Sorenson.

‘BACK IN MANC' the headline said.

No one in the world called her Gran but Colin. Her real name was Sally, but she liked being called Gran in the privacy of their flat. It was like a game they were playing. Sally pretending to be this old person, to do old person's things, to have old person's cares. It did her good to have Colin fret over her. She liked the way those tables turned: when he was sixteen, suddenly thinking he was the most grown up, the most responsible of the two of them. That must be eleven years ago. Since then, she'd consented to become the wrinkled-up, ancient child and he called her Gran and he fretted. Fretted that she didn't get out enough, fretted that she stayed in too much. Fretted that she fretted over him and also that he was too young and she was too old and they'd have no common bond other than all the shared blood and these few square metres of living space.

Up here on the ninth floor, from where you could see right over the city centre.

Was it perverse to like him fretting? This orphan she'd taken in at eleven and brought up as her own. After the death of his parents … No, she doesn't want to go over that again. Not just now. He's an orphan and they've lived together since he was eleven. Legal guardian, the whole
shebang. They don't even talk about her son, his dad, his mam, death. They never talk about it all.

The fact he worries about his old gran means he cares. It shows that his heart is still here and he listens to her. She is still a figure in his life. Even now, when his life holds so many distractions. And life has so many distractions. Sally knows well how easy it is to have your head turned. How easy at his age – and at any age.

Oh, what does that mean, precisely: to have your head turned?

Turn again, Dick Whittington.

It means you've been flattered or duped into turning your back on where you came from. You've forgotten your roots, your family, your friends. You've abjured – that's the precise and brutal word – all those at home who know all about you, who know you too well and who love you still. They continue to love you with that irksome, embarrassing ferocity, fondness. Only those who know your faults and foibles can show that kind of love.

And having your head turned … that means you can chuck all that back in their faces. Dick Whittington, too big for his boots.

Karla, Gran thinks. That's just how that silly mare turned.

But not Colin.

Colin has his own Dick Whittington moment. His Ladybird storybook of the old tale was one of the few books that came with him from his parents' burnt house to his gran's flat. And it was that book – with its weirdly photo-realist paintings on every right hand page – that gave him his very first erotic frisson. It wasn't long after moving in with Gran.
He kept looking at the pictures of the pauper boy and his handkerchief of belongings tied to a stick and slung over one shoulder. His cat trotting along at his side. A jaunty stride down the dirt track to the city, passing milestone after milestone. Dick's devil-may-care expression and his glossy black hair. He was off to seek his new life. And there was a moment, mid-story, when he flung off his tattered and dusty clothes to bathe in a river as his puss guarded his stuff on the bank. Colin kept lingering over those pages.

There was a time about then, when he had a stomach-ache in bed. Gran brought him Lemsip in a bone china cup and the pain drilled away, faded, came back again, all one night. She was so reassuring.

She said: ‘Ah, you get all sorts of pains, all over the place, when you're the age you are and you're growing. There'll be more to come yet. And you'll never know what they were about. But they won't do you any harm, Colin. They're all just natural.

‘Do you know what I think, lovey? I think it's more than just growing that's hurting you. I think it's the very feel of time moving through you. It's invisible and most of the time none of us can feel it. But the age you are, chuck – you're just that bit tender and susceptible to time.

‘So it twinges a bit and aches sometimes, winter mornings maybe, when you wake and twist round when you sit up in bed and it's nothing to be scared of (though I'm glad you told me – there's nothing worse than needless worry). It's just time moving through you, Colin, and it means you are ready to join the world …'

‘Join the world, Gran?'

She pointed out of his window. At the pink and yellow lights of the city. The low orange cloud under the black.

‘I mean, of an age to meet the rest of the world of
grown-ups
. Out there. To take the everyday pains and knocks and not be scared by any of it. You're hardening up. Becoming a person. A person of your own, Colin.'

Later that evening, Sally walked her usual route along the canal, out towards the main road. She let the rippling lines of light on the water calm her thoughts; the plaiting and twining of reflected streetlight on top of the mucky sludge. There'd been a suggestion, at one point, that the Old Dears should book one of those trips on a barge for a night out, and eat their chips as they sailed along the canal. They'd decided they didn't want to chance it. Less danger to ancient bones just sitting in the restaurant on the ring road, having a singsong.

She called on Effie, as planned. Her old friend still lived in the same place. There were some nasty-looking shops open down her way: everything for a pound, places with handmade signs advertising their meagre wares. There was a kebab place right underneath Effie's flat. And Sally didn't care what Effie said; you could smell those meat fumes rising up through her floorboards and through her new carpets. It was like dog food, but Effie claimed to be oblivious. The whole area had come right downhill and Effie refused to see it. When she looked out on her street through her old sash windows, she still saw the place as it was thirty years ago.

‘It's not so bad,' she always said.

‘You don't see things as they really are, Effie,' Sally would tell her.

‘If you'd had your way, you'd have had me up one of them tower blocks in l967, same as you,' Effie said, with just a hint of spite. ‘Well, we all know how that turned out. People scared for their lives. And you! When you first moved up there, you cracked on it was like living in Milan!'

Sally would purse her lips. She remembered. At first, she'd been a great supporter of that whole notion of living up in the sky. And she'd liked having her own terrace with plant pots stood out. It really had seemed like living on the continent.

‘I like to keep my feet on the ground,' Effie would say smugly.

Sally hated her best friend's name. On numerous occasions she had told her she thought it was awful. She thought it sounded rude.

‘Indeed it does not!' Effie had said hotly. ‘It was my mother's name.' And that was that. She wouldn't have a word said against her mother.

Effie was seventy-five if she was a day and, to Sally's eyes, she still went on like a rather prim, Victorian child. Look at her tonight, preparing for a fish supper at Harry Ramsden's: fussing with her lacy collar, patting it over her cardigan, blinking into her mottled hall mirror.

‘I suppose you saw the news tonight,' Sally said glumly. She was fingering the sleeve of her new frock, as if testing the silver-threaded black for quality. She always felt too flashily dressed when she came to call on her friend. ‘The local news with that big-headed fella reading it?'

‘I did,' said Effie. ‘Though I try not to, as a rule. It's all
murdered taxi drivers and initiatives to make people more tolerant. I can't stick it.' She was pursing her lips, aiming her lipstick, clacking the top palate of her teeth.

‘Did you see her?' Sally asked, meaningfully.

‘I did. You knew her, didn't you?'

‘When I was a kid. Before I knew you, even. We were kids together. Daft as brushes.'

Effie eyed her. ‘You'll forgive me for saying so, Sally. But you look like you've got twenty years on her.'

Actually, she wouldn't forgive her. Sally was seething as they tottered down Effie's front stairs to street level. Damp and musty and reeking of aspidistra. ‘Karla's had all the money and the life, hasn't she? She's had all the hard knocks pampered out of her. Injections and stretching and all the luxury treatments. She has every right to look younger than me.'

Effie was fishing in her huge handbag for her multiple sets of housekeys. ‘I think it's supernatural,' she agreed.

Sally watched her wrestle with the locks. ‘What makes you say so?'

‘A woman her age. Looking like that and taking her clothes off.'

‘She was never shy, that one.'

Now they were out on the street. The kebab smell was very strong out here. Neither had eaten a kebab in their lives. They agreed that they couldn't see the attraction.

‘There's something unnatural about her,' Sally said. ‘Really.' They moved off towards the busy road.

‘She's still an inspiration,' said Effie. ‘To all of us old duffers.'

At this Sally fell quiet for a few moments. Effie cast a
sidelong glance at her friend and saw that she was stewing with anger. ‘What?' she asked.

‘She's no kind of inspiration.' Sally's voice was low. ‘She's wicked through and through.'

‘Oh, come on.' Effie was laughing.

‘I mean it.' Sally looked at Effie's thinning perm, the pink scalp showing through. ‘I could tell you things about her that would make your hair curl naturally.'

This made Effie self-consciously pat her head and the two friends went quiet as they negotiated the complicated crossing of the ring-road.