Chapter THREE
“WELCOME TO THE BACK END OF BLOODY BEYOND,” MY MOTHER announced, stepping down from the removal van and swinging her arm listlessly across the vista of bright fields and dark hedgerows that stretched all the way to the horizon. “Welcome to the rest of my pathetic bloody life.” For the first time in weeks, she was dressed—in a wrinkled gabardine mac and pearly blue stilettos, and carrying a matching blue handbag. She’d covered her hair with a silk headscarf decorated with pictures of ships and anchors. It made me think about the world-cruising mother I’d invented and I wanted to pull it off.
“It’s not that bad, Mum,” I said without conviction as I squinted toward the ugly brick house that was to become our new home, its crumbling fa?ade stained green with moss, its window frames peeling paint like dead skin. I turned back toward the fields. “I mean, the air’s fresh.” I took a deep breath to emphasize my point and noticed the whiff of manure tingling my nostrils.
My mother wrinkled up her nose and folded her arms across her chest.
“And there’s lots of space.” I indicated the broad landscape, as level and uncreased as a giant map laid before us, its only vertical features the occasional trees that stretched defiantly above the flat ground. Most were green, lush with bright summer leaves, but some were bare, their dark branches stretching upward like charred and twisted bones.
“Yes, I’ll not argue with you about that,” she said, pursing her lips and looking longingly at the thread of gray road on which we had just arrived.
“Well, it could be worse….”
“You should go into advertising, you Jesse. That’s the best slogan I’ve heard in years. ‘It could be worse.’ That would sell a lot of bananas, now wouldn’t it?”
I looked into her frowning face, searching desperately for something to say that would soothe her. I took a breath, opened my mouth in anticipation of finding the right phrase, but I could think of nothing.
“So, what do you think?” My father was beaming as he emerged from the other side of the van, where he’d been providing instructions to the removal men. As he approached us, the two men had begun unloading our things, noisily rolling my father’s battered armchair down the ramp toward the front door. I watched flecks of its stuffing fall onto the path and float, like huge, asymmetrical snowflakes, across the weed-ridden garden to catch on the rangy stalks of purple-blooming thistles.
“What do you think I think?” my mother said, opening her handbag, fumbling about for a few seconds, then pulling out her sunglasses and promptly putting them on. Since there was no sun in sight and the clouds overhead were so dark and threatening that I worried we might not get our furniture inside before it began to pour, I suspected that she might be trying to make a point.
“Oh, come on, Evelyn. Don’t be a wet blanket. I mean, what a beautiful view, eh?” His voice was jolly, as expansive as the landscape. “And we’re only a few minutes from the village.”
“Sorry,” my mother said. “I’m afraid I didn’t see a village. I must have blinked when we drove through it.”
We had driven through the village of Midham a few minutes before arriving at the house, and though it wasn’t quite as tiny as my mother made it out to be, it was hardly a bustling center of activity. There was a little main street that, on one side, held an old stone church, a post office, a handful of shops, and two shabby pubs; the other side looked out across open fields. The street was narrow enough that, as we’d driven through in the removal van, the couple of cars we encountered coming in the opposite direction had had to pull over to let us pass.
My father turned to me. “What about you, Jesse, do like it?” His features were animated with hopefulness, his smile a buoyant question pressed across his face.
I stood between them, my needy father and my irate mother, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, looking at each of them and then up at the ominous sky. Finally, I shrugged. “It’s all right,” I said, turning to walk toward the house, hoping for shelter before the imminent storm.
NOT LONG AFTER the removal men started carrying our things out of the van, the skies opened up and the rain poured, promptly revealing several holes in the steep, slate-tiled roof of our new home. While my father and I ran around frantically trying to locate enough buckets, bowls, and any other containers available to catch all the water that drip-dripped, drizzled, or simply flowed into the house, the two men worked at a leisurely pace, apparently unfazed by the rain that glided off their greased-down hair and soaked almost every item of furniture we owned. That evening, my father and I sat on our damp settee eating cold baked beans out of a tin that we planned to use afterward to capture what we hoped was one last leak discovered in the upstairs bathroom. Meanwhile, my mother, having spent the past half hour drying her side of the mattress with the hair dryer, had gone to bed.
“Now, I know there’s a few things to be fixed here, Jesse,” my father said, exhibiting a remarkable gift for understatement. “But nothing I can’t handle, mind you.” I watched an orange streak of tomato sauce roll down his chin as he leaned forward to pick up one of a stack of new handyman books he had laid in front of him on the floor. “Look,” he said, flipping open the shiny cover and leafing through the untouched pages. “They explain everything in here. I’ll be done in no time.”
I wished I shared his confidence. The house was a shambles. Aside from the leaking roof, there were the broken sashes on the windows, drooping ceilings, wallpaper that hung off the walls in strips, rusted, dripping taps in the kitchen, and lights that flickered whenever someone walked across the room. The whole place smelled of mold and old people, and when I’d first walked inside I wondered if the previous owners had died there. I imagined them buried beneath the uneven floorboards, dead eyes staring upward between the wide gaps.
My father flipped happily through House Repairs Made Simple, telling me how he was going to rip out this, repoint that, take out walls, add walls, and generally transform the place into a palace of Formica and fake wood paneling. Since he didn’t exactly have a track record with this sort of thing, I found myself more than a little skeptical. Apparently, though, he didn’t plan to do things by himself.
“You never know,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “Maybe your mother will rise to the challenge. I mean, she’s quite a handywoman when she gets herself going. Remember what a transformation she did of our old place?”
How could I forget? My mother had discovered do-it-yourself right around the time I entered primary school, after she’d watched a television program that showed how to frame your favorite print. Once she’d managed to put van Gogh’s Sunflowers in an oversized wooden frame and hang it above the mantel in the living room, there seemed to be no stopping her. She began staying up all night to regrout the bathroom, assemble a shed from a kit in the backyard, or put down new green-and-black linoleum in the kitchen. My father had spent weeks sleeping in a nylon sleeping bag on the living-room settee while she overhauled the bedrooms. I stayed up to help her, partly because I couldn’t fall asleep while she played the same two records—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”—all through the night, and partly because I loved slapping on the wallpaper paste. In my first two years of school, it wasn’t uncommon for my mother to spend weeks at a time working through the night to put up sliding glass doors in the living room or install a new fitted kitchen. It also wasn’t uncommon for me to fall asleep in the middle of lessons, and I was almost put in the remedial class because my teacher, Mrs. Sparks, seemed to think this indicated that I might be, as she put it, “a little on the slow side.” Fortunately, by the time I entered the third year my mother had completed her renovations. I was able to get a good night’s sleep, and my performance at school improved.
My mother, on the other hand, went through what she and my father came to refer to as one of her “bad patches.” With no more home improvements to work on, she seemed to lose all sense of purpose. It was a strange and dramatic transformation. One week she was hauling child-size stones from the local gardening shop so that she could make the patch of lawn in front of our house into a Japanese rock garden; the next she was spending hours at a time sitting at the kitchen table, staring into space. The only thing she seemed to care about was listening to the Jimmy Young and Terry Wogan shows on Radio 2. The house reverberated with the djs’ bouncy voices and the Engelbert Humperdinck, Val Doonican, and Andy Williams songs they played throughout the day. It was around this time that she first began mentioning the possibility of being taken off to Delapole.
I remembered vividly the first afternoon I came home from school to find the house cold and still. It was January, the sky was filled with inky clouds, and dusk had already fallen. I had trudged home in my duffle coat and Wellington boots through snow that lay trampled and dirty on the pavements and was starting to freeze over into a layer of gray ice. A group of older boys had pelted me with snowballs that were hard as stones, and the back of my head was still aching from one that had hit me there. I had been crying, as much from anger and humiliation as from the pain, and the tears stung my cold cheeks with sudden heat.
“Mum,” I called as I pushed my way through the front door and into a hall that was almost as cold as the air outside and far darker than the premature evening sky. “Mum.” My voice echoed through the house. It felt hollow and unoccupied, and it was hard to imagine that this was the same place in which I had gobbled down hot porridge that morning while my father slurped his tea and my mother methodically scraped burned toast over the sink. I walked to the foot of the stairs and noticed the chatter of the radio coming from one of the upstairs bedrooms, the cheery announcer, and then the smooth gurgling of a Perry Como song. “Moon River, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style some day….” I trudged cautiously up the stairs, stumbling on the uneven carpet, feeling my way along the banister with my fingers. When I reached my parents’ bedroom, the door was closed. I pushed it open and stepped inside. The curtains were pulled shut. I could barely see anything. For a few moments I stood still, the satiny voice of Perry Como filling the emptiness. Then, as my eyes got used to the dark, I was able to make out the outline of my mother’s body in the bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin and her head resting on a single, flat pillow.
“Mum,” I said, venturing toward her. “Mum, are you all right? Are you feeling poorly?” She said nothing, nor did she move. Her face was a perfect mask of stillness. “Mum?” I said again, my voice shaky. I wondered if she was sleeping, but I couldn’t imagine her being able to do so with the radio right there on the bedside table so close to her head. My anxiety blossomed into panic, and I had an overwhelming fear that she had somehow died since I had left her that morning. “Mum,” I said, leaning over to shake her shoulder beneath the blankets. “Mum. Wake up.” Her body felt loose, without will or substance under my grip. “Mum.” Tears were running down my cheeks now, burning against skin that was still raw from when I had cried earlier on the way home. Still, she didn’t respond. And then I remembered the film I had watched the other night, the one my mother had sobbed and sniffled at when the heroine collapsed and the doctor put his head against her chest, listened for her heartbeat, then pulled away shaking his head. I wiped my eyes on the scratchy woolen sleeve of my duffle coat and clambered onto the bed. Then I leaned over her, pressing my ear against the blankets that covered her chest. I couldn’t hear anything, so I pressed my head harder against her.
“For God’s sake, get off me, can’t you?” Suddenly she sat up, shoving me away and pushing me to the floor. I landed, dazed, my legs splayed out in front of me. I sat there for a moment before scrambling to lift my head and peer over the bed.
“I thought you were dead,” I said. “I was listening for your heartbeat.”
“Dead, eh? Yes, well, I might as well be.” She flopped back onto the bed again and pulled the blankets all the way over her head.
After that, it became a regular occurrence to arrive home and find the house dark, the syrupy thick melodies of those Radio 2 songs emanating from upstairs, my mother, lying weighted under heavy blankets, still as a corpse in her frigid room. I got the impression she spent most of her days like that, and it wasn’t long before she stopped bothering to get up in the mornings to see my father off to work and me off to school. She sometimes got out of bed, trudging down the stairs in her yellow flannelette nightgown, dark circles under her eyes, her hair sculpted in strange and angular shapes. She never said much during these visits while my father made nervous jokes about his terrible cooking. I’d sit in a corner of the kitchen, noticing how my mother seemed each day more removed, her gestures more loose and weary. My father could barely get her to respond to his questions, never mind laugh at his jokes. She regarded us both with distant, apathetic looks, as if our voices were nothing more than the background music that came constantly from the radio in her bedroom.
It was Mabel who was finally able to coax my mother out of this utter listlessness. She arrived one evening while my father was hunched over the cooker, stirring obsessively at a pan of Heinz baked beans with pork sausages. He’d burned our previous two meals beyond any redemption, and as a result we’d dined on toast and marmalade; tonight he seemed desperate to make dinner without mishap. Mabel swept into the kitchen in a choking vapor of perfume and cigarette smoke, dropped her massive handbag onto the kitchen table, and took in the chaos.
“This will never do, will it?” she said, looking at me. “Your mam in bed, your dad cooking the dinner, and this house a right bloody mess? I mean, what kind of life is this for a lass your age, eh? She’s a right moody one, our Evelyn. One minute right as rain, the next minute a face on her as long as a wet weekend.” She sighed, pushing a stream of thick blue smoke out of her nostrils. “Anyway, I’m having none of this.” She strode across the room to drop her cigarette into the sink. It hit the enamel surface with a hiss. “What she needs is a night on the town. Something to cheer her up. Like it or not, she’s coming out with me. I’m taking her to bingo.”
My father looked at her dubiously. “You and whose army?” he asked, battling a packet of Wonderloaf to place two slices under the grill. “She doesn’t even get herself dressed these days, never mind out of the house. You’ll be lucky to get two words out of her.”
“Come hell or high water, and whether she likes it or not, that woman is coming with me to bingo.”
Indeed, about an hour later and much to my and my father’s amazement, Mabel appeared downstairs with my mother, who was dressed and apparently ready to go out. I had grown so used to seeing her in her nightclothes that it was strange to see her in a dress and high heels, and even stranger to see her pale cheeks striped with rosy blush, her lips glossy pink, and her eyelids tinted bright green. She reminded me of one of the cardboard cutout dolls I sometimes played with—flat and flimsy, their features painted too big and impossibly bright.
“What do you think?” Mabel asked, nodding proudly toward my mother. “Looks human for a change, doesn’t she?”
My father seemed slightly bewildered, as if he’d seen a ghost. “She looks very nice. Yes, you look very nice, Evelyn.”
“Right, then, Ev, get your coat on. We don’t want to miss the first game, now do we?” Mabel grabbed my mother’s arm and tugged her toward the hallway.
I was asleep by the time they returned, but when I got up the next morning I was astonished to find my mother in the kitchen, cooking a huge breakfast of bacon, eggs, black pudding, and fried bread. The windows were opaque with steam, and she scurried around setting knives and forks on the table, humming along as Tom Jones belted out, “Why, why, why, Delilah?” on the radio.
“Oh, hello, love,” she said, flashing me a bright smile. “Are you hungry?”
I nodded.
“Well, sit yourself down, then. We’re having a celebration breakfast.” I took a seat at the table. “So, don’t you want to know what we’re celebrating?” she asked, putting a loaded plate in front of me.
“Why?” I asked, picking up my fork and pushing a piece of black pudding into my mouth.
“Because …” She pressed her palms together against her chest. “Because I won!” She swung her arms wide. “I won at the bingo. Twenty-three pounds three shillings and sixpence. Now, what do you think about that?” She wore a look of expectant delight.
“Is that a lot of money?” I asked, dipping a corner of fried bread into my egg yolk and watching mesmerized as the liquid yellow oozed across the plate.
“Of course it is,” she answered irritably. “It’s more than your father brings home in his pay packet, let’s put it that way. And if I can win that in one night, who knows what I can do if I go more often. Our Mabel says they have a weekly jackpot on Friday nights. Ten thousand quid. Now, just think what we could do with that much money.”
And so began my mother’s bingo craze. Each morning before leaving for school, I’d sit at the kitchen table as she gave me a blow-by-blow account of the previous night’s events. As she spoke, I felt as if I were there experiencing that unspeakable excitement as the bingo caller announced, “Two little ducks, twenty-two,” and my mother leaped up screaming, “House! House!” and the covetous eyes of all the other women in the Astoria Bingo Hall were turned on her. She told me of her defeats, too. “I was that close, I mean that close,” she said, holding out her thumb and forefinger, the smallest of space between them. “All I needed was that old bugger to call out legs eleven and that national jackpot would’ve been mine. Next time,” she said, pushing clenched fists into her apron pockets, a fiery glint in her eye. “Next time I just know I’m going to win. You can count on that, Jesse.”
She seemed so convinced that it was just a matter of time before she won the national jackpot that I began to fantasize about what we could do with that ten-thousand-pound prize. Walking to school in the rain, I’d daydream about the luxurious holidays we’d take or the brand-new car my father would chauffeur us around in. On weekends, I’d spend whole afternoons leafing through the old Littlewoods catalog that Auntie Mabel had given me, picking out clothes and furniture, keeping a running total of how much I was spending so I knew exactly what that amount of money could buy.
Unfortunately, however, it wasn’t a triumphant jackpot win that brought an end to my mother’s bingo obsession. After talking with Mrs. Brockett one morning, my father discovered that my mother had taken to playing three or four cards at every game, an expensive habit through which she’d managed to completely deplete my parents’ Post Office savings account, and had taken to using a large chunk of the housekeeping money—which accounted for the rather skimpy dinners that had recently made an unwelcome reappearance in our household.
Much to my disappointment, the bingo (and our chance at attaining instant wealth) ended. I found myself again trudging without any distraction through gray blustery streets, and instead of compiling lists of what we might buy from the Littlewoods catalog I browsed for hours at a time through the women’s underwear section, inexplicably fascinated by those coy models in their pointy bras, paneled corsets, and silky black knickers. My mother was less easily diverted. At first, she tried to convince my father that she could tone down her obsession and go only once a week to try for the national jackpot on Friday nights. But soon she began trying to sneak out to the bingo hall on other nights, only to be pursued by my father. For a while, it was almost routine for them to have an enormous, screaming fight in the middle of the street, much to the amusement of the neighbors. “Beats bloody Coronation Street,” I heard Mrs. Brockett comment over the other side of her wall to our next-door-but-one neighbor. “Ought to start their own soap opera, that family.”
Finally, my mother was defeated. But instead of taking up another hobby, as my father had been suggesting, she simply stopped doing anything at all, sinking almost immediately into another of her bad patches, far longer and worse than the last.
PERHAPS THERE WAS method in my father’s madness, after all. Maybe my mother, unable to bear the decrepitude of our new home in Midham, would spring into action and throw herself into its restoration. But, as I looked up at a crack in the ceiling that ran through the plaster like a deep river, opening into a wide delta that ended above the fireplace, I couldn’t help thinking he was taking a rather dubious gamble. “Why didn’t you buy a new house?” I asked.
As soon as my father announced our move, I’d begun hoping for a brand-new brick semidetached house with a neat square of lawn in the front and borders filled with pansies in the back. I’d seen pictures of such houses on television, and traveled past rows upon rows of them when we’d driven through the outskirts of Hull. I was convinced that a house like that would solve all our problems. I could come home from school and enter the basking warmth of central heating and double glazing to be greeted by my mother, who, just like the women on the Fairy Snow adverts, would be calm and smiling and made happy by a clean wash and a sparkling home.
“This is new,” my father said, smiling so wide that his dimples showed. They made him look like a little boy, and I wished I could be swept up in his enthusiasm. “It’s new to us,” he added. “And what we don’t like we can change. It will give all of us a whole new start.”
“Yes,” I said dully, thinking that at least with a different school to go to I might have a chance to make some friends. I’d have no history. No one would know that my mother had been in the nuthouse or that I’d made up stupid stories to try to hide that fact. And I wouldn’t have to crave the approval of Julie Fraser or any of her stupid friends ever again.
THE BAD PATCH after the bingo had lasted several months but finally came to an end when my mother began watching The Galloping Gourmet and discovered a sudden passion for cordon-bleu cooking. She spent entire mornings scouring the shops for the appropriate ingredients (veal was something there had never been much demand for at our local butcher’s, and the grocer hadn’t even heard of some of the things the recipes called for) and entire afternoons in a flurry of flour and steam preparing the evening’s meal. At night, in bed, she sat propped against her pillow reading recipe books. The Galloping Gourmet program itself was a period during which absolute silence was demanded in our household, as my mother pulled her chair to within four feet of the television, scribbling notes and sighing at the Galloping Gourmet’s momentous culinary achievements.
For a few weeks, my father and I were treated almost every evening to meals like Coq au Vin, R?ti de Porc Boulangère, and Boeuf à la Mode. I quite enjoyed it, especially since my mother also insisted on “creating the appropriate atmosphere,” with a red gingham tablecloth, candles, and French accordion music playing on the record player in the other room. She even made me teach her a few phrases that I had recently learned in my first year of French at school, like merci beaucoup, c’est très bien, and ?a c’est bon, which she insisted on repeating throughout the meals, regardless of whether they actually made any sense at the time, and with a French accent even worse than that of any of my fellow students. Mabel, when she came over one night, was delighted at the whole scene, oohing and aahing at the paper serviettes, the white chef’s hat my mother wore as she cooked, the packet of French cigarettes my mother had bought her as a treat, and the bottle of white wine she placed on the table before we began.
“I love a bit of good plonk with my food, I really do,” Mabel said, gulping back half her glass of wine before lifting it into the air and declaring, “Ooh là là, here’s to a little bit of France right here in Hull.”
My father, on the other hand, was rather irritated by the whole thing and seemed to have little desire to consume meals whose names he could not pronounce, never mind understand.
“Jesus Christ, Evelyn. Whatever happened to good, plain English food?” he complained one night at the sight of a whole small bird and a pile of haricots verts in cream sauce on his plate. “I mean, what on earth is this, anyway, underage chicken? What’s wrong with a nice steak and kidney pudding, a few Brussels sprouts and some chips?”
My mother’s response was swift and to the point. She picked up the plate she had just placed in front of my father, screamed, “Nobody ever appreciates me! Nobody!” and hurled it at the wall. The plate shattered, the bird thumped to the floor, and the haricots verts in their cream sauce stuck to the wall for a moment before oozing slowly downward, eventually forming a puddle on the linoleum. “You’ll send me to Delapole, you two!” she yelled, giving me a furious look that seemed to indicate that she regarded me as the instigator of my father’s complaint.
“I like your French food, Mum,” I said, lifting my knife and fork, as if I were desperate to sink my teeth into the small bird, which I, like my father, speculated was a prematurely butchered chicken. But it was too late. She leaned over me, grabbed my plate, and spun round to throw that, too, at the wall.
After that, another bad patch. That was followed, several months later, by a brief but very intense interest in dressmaking (I got a whole new, ill-fitting, and rather bizarre wardrobe), then macramé (until every available space in the house was covered in multicolored throws, blankets, tablecloths, and antimacassars), candle making, quilting, upholstery, rug making, amateur dramatics, and, finally, a stint organizing jumble sales for the Young Wives Club until, for some reason that she never revealed to my father and me, she was asked to step down. And, in between all these things, there were, of course, the bad patches.
“I THINK I’LL TRY and fix that roof tomorrow,” my father said, scraping the last baked beans from the tin and spooning them into his mouth. “First things first, after all.”
I only hoped my father was up to it. He’d never been particularly good with heights and wouldn’t even take me on the big wheel at Hull Fair because he said it made him dizzy. I had a difficult time imagining him scrambling over the steep slate roof, but I didn’t want to be too negative, so I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile.
“And you’ll have to do your part, our Jesse.”
“Me?” I was thrilled, visualizing myself scrabbling over the tiles beside him, looking out over the fields like I was on top of the world.
“Yes—I need you to keep an eye on your mother for me while I’m busy. We wouldn’t want her to … well, we’ve seen enough problems already without another little episode, if you know what I mean.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “I can’t stop her from doing anything.” I felt the panic rising.
My father reached over and patted me on the head. “Just look out for her, that’s all. I mean, it’ll not be for long, love. You’ll see, she’ll soon be right as rain.”
“She will?” More than anything, I wanted to believe him.