Nothing Left Unsaid, page 5
I managed to shave my legs, and plucked out all my eyebrow hairs so I could draw them back in higher up like sexy mistress Joan Collins. She is so classy and fabulously fashionable.
I am thinking of getting myself a man. But who will take a woman with three kids on? And where would I meet anyone new? I never go anywhere and I don’t fancy any of the men I already know but Billy has moved on quicker than Warren Beatty so it’s my time to do the same. I don’t want a man like Sandra’s Jim – that bastard gave her a right sore face last week because she spoke to the rent man out the back court when she was hanging up washing. Clearly a clandestine meeting of lovers . . . if you’re an idiot. We all know the rent man, Andy, lives with a man called Gary and they breed angelfish. I wish she would do something about Jim, but there’s no telling her. Once when I pulled him up for slapping Sandra he told me I was ‘too cheeky’ and I ‘answer back’ and that’s why I can’t keep a man. My ex, Billy, punched me in the stomach when I was pregnant with my Sharon, and my brother Alex near beat him to a pulp in the bookies. It’s punch or be punched. You don’t see that on Coronation Street or on the cover of Woman’s Own magazine.
So, I don’t want a wife-beater or an angelfish breeder. I just want a guy who will bring me chocolates in the dead of night like the Black Magic man off the adverts. On second thoughts that’s terrifying and Laddie would bite the fuck out of him and it would traumatise the weans. Nobody needs a creepy burglar who delivers chocolates.
I think I’ll stay single just now, unless someone can knit me a man. That’s a joke my mammy always says.
Made a quick egg salad and drank a gallon of water today. Spent the night doing the ironing, pissing like a racehorse and catching up with the telly.
Watched Coronation Street – Ken and Rita get together at Deidre’s party and she invites him back for a nightcap. Deidre tells Ray she’s pregnant. He announces it during the party.
Tuesday
It’s still sweltering and I am sick of lettuce. There are no tomatoes to be had anywhere, the country is tomato-less, as everyone is living off salad.
I went to see Bunty – she has some nice new electric rollers her dodgy cousin got off a van. Her cousin was there too, he always looks scared when there’s a knock on the door. I can use the rollers on the lassies when I’m doing my wee hair jobs for extra cash around my cleaning job. I don’t do that many hair jobs, just for friends and family really, but I enjoy them. Wee Carol, another one of my many cousins, is coming up this week and I am going to do a home perm on her. She has just been told she is diabetic and needs cheering up. These rollers are expensive in the big shop in town, and do make a great Farrah Fawcett Majors flick on the hair. I am so excited to try them. I took two sets off Bunty as they come at a bargain price. I asked no questions about where they’d come from. We have to keep quiet about them as it has been all over the local news about a factory getting burgled. Bunty says the police raided her mum’s house but found nothing, thank the baby Jesus and his wee donkey. Her cousin is too wide to get caught and Bunty makes a few quid selling the stuff on. The Devlins have been involved, no doubt, but everyone round here just keeps their mouths shut. Bunty says one of her twins has an ear infection again, poor wean, nothing worse in this heat.
My kids keep themselves busy. Sharon went down the street and took out Mrs Kelly’s newborn twins in the pram, down to the big park. It was really hot but she knows to keep them in the shade when she is playing on the swings. Wee John runs errands for the pensioner up the stairs – he gets bags of coal for her and sometimes cleans out her budgie’s cage. Janet does the rounds of the closes, offering to wash the stairs for people who can’t manage. Ten years old and she has her own wee cleaning business and a bucket and mop. ‘Get your stairs done for ten pence,’ she shouts up the back courts.
I saw the news on the telly and people were fainting in the heat. The weans watched people frying an egg on the pavement and cracked a whole box on the street. I was so annoyed at them. ‘Mammy, we made you an egg,’ they said as they brought up the dirty dribbling mess. I wanted an omelette, but not one that contained gravel off the tarmac. Laddie ate it.
Thursday
I got the big green bus with the kids all the way up through the scheme to Easterhouse, to visit my pal Janine. They built the new houses up there but forgot to add some decent shops and somewhere for the kids to play. Just rows upon rows of blocks of houses, not old, dirty black tenements like we have but white blocks of six with inside toilets. I met Janine in my first job in the betting shop, before I knew Billy. I left my job when I married him but I kept in touch with Janine because she is just such a wise woman. She’s a bit older than me, and she’s the manager of the shop now.
And my pal Janine has one thing nobody else has – a veranda.
I yearn for a veranda . . . a word I had to practise saying as it was so foreign to me.
The kids love a visit to the veranda up in Easterhouse, we can all cram out there in the blasting sunshine. Me, Janine, all our weans and her big dog Prince who takes up most of the room when he stretches out. She lives alone with her two lassies Brenda and Shona, who both are medallists at Scottish country dancing, and she makes all the outfits herself on her Singer sewing machine. She never really mentions her ex-man and I don’t like to pry; I think he’s in the Army though because she used to live in Germany and there’s photos of the kids on a military base.
Me and Janine like to slip off our bras, roll up our shorts and sit on the veranda cushions and watch the world go by. She has gorgeous natural blonde hair and really fine features. I always think she’s Scandinavian and my John says she looks like the woman out of Abba. Janine says she comes from Vikings and I believe her. I have seen her swing an axe in the garden. She loves her wee flat in Easterhouse, calls it her ‘sanctuary’, so a lot of shit must have gone down before she got here.
There aren’t a lot of men up here in Easterhouse, they call it ‘single mother city’ and we love it. We get comfy on the pillows and get our vodka and orange in picnic cups and bake in the sun. We are no longer two fed-up women sitting on sponge squares. This is not Easterhouse on the farmlands near Gartloch Mental Asylum. We are ladies on the Riviera, we are ‘tall and tan and young and lovely’, we are barefoot on the beach in Ipanema. We stare out to an azure sea and wave to Sophia Loren who is passing by on her yacht with Frank Sinatra at the helm. The world is full of sunshine and beauty.
That is, until Prince saw a cat in the street below and started barking and pissing everywhere, then we were back to our own real life with a bump. The kids were downstairs getting an ice-cream cone off the van and singing songs.
Me and Janine put the world to rights on that veranda and sometimes, like today, I do her hair too. I put it up into a very posh chignon and she looked like she could be a presenter on Sale of the Century on the telly. She has wonderful thick hair, so it takes about thirty kirby grips to hold it in place.
We talked about Jim and Sandra. Janine said some women don’t want to admit they’ve picked a bad man as it makes them feel ashamed. I reminded her that I threw that bastard Billy out because of his handy fists, and she reminded me that he left me and I accepted the punches.
I don’t like it when Janine is like that – sometimes she can be too honest and it hurts. But deep down I know she is right so I can’t argue back. I want a man like Tom from The Good Life on the telly. He’s kind and you can’t imagine him screaming with a hangover or punching Felicity Kendal in the head if his football team got beat.
We sat in silence a while and then I gathered the weans and we walked to get the big green bus back down to our tenements, just as Alan the delivery man arrived. He is always keen to speak to Janine and runs up the stairs two at a time, carrying two crates of lemonade and orangeade. I think he likes her.
When will this weather break?
Got home and forgot Laddie was locked in and he’d pissed the floor and Mrs Wilson was shouting at Derek.
This is not Ipanema.
CHAPTER 6
2019
Day three
Sharon
By lunchtime when I went back to the flat the sky was overcast and the leaves were falling everywhere. I nearly slipped on them taking the rubbish out, but managed to right myself and grab on to the railings.
Betty was watching me from her bedroom and, seeing me slip, threw open her window and shouted, ‘Watch yerself, hen, thon wet leaves will kill you!’
‘Thanks, Betty.’ She missed nothing.
I got back into the flat and, after an age of fiddling with buttons, I managed to put on a small wash in Mum’s front-loader. I was suddenly reminded of the old twin tub she used to haul out and hook over the sink, spending a whole day getting all the laundry done.
I stuck on the radio and listened to BBC Scotland, then ran a hoover around her living room and did a wee bit of housework. There was a phone-in debate about whether Catholic schools should exist and a man called in and shouted about the Orange Walk parades and I said, ‘Nothing changes, Glasgow,’ to the kettle as I wiped around the units. I couldn’t wait to get back to Mum.
The excitement of contacting Isa had kept me buoyed; wait till Mum heard that.
I drove to the hospital again and sipped my coffee in the recyclable cup that Clyde had given me as I climbed the stairs, walked through the myriad corridors to the backdrop of low voices and beds being pushed about on squeaky wheels, and got to her ward.
She was propped up on several white pillows with her hands on her chest. I thought for a horrible moment she was dead. Then she gently turned her head towards me.
‘Hi, Mum,’ I said. ‘It’s beautiful out there, I know it’s your favourite time of year but I nearly slipped on my arse on the leaves today.’
She smiled.
Seeing her so reduced and small made my chest hurt. I just couldn’t get used to her being so frail and meek. Especially now I was immersed in her diary and her young voice was so fresh in my mind. I kept expecting her to sit up, push her hair behind her ears and launch into a conversation about the price of mince, or laugh at something her neighbours had said.
I put my bag on the floor, took off my coat and dragged the plastic chair towards her bedside. Then I chatted away, the way you do to someone who isn’t really listening, just small talk about Janet and John. I am sure I even rambled on about Steven and the shite he’s been up to.
The nurses came in and fussed around her bed. I pulled out my iPhone, pressed play and put the phone beside her bed. The sound of ‘Hotel California’ drifted through the sunlit room and Mum smiled and actually tapped her fingers. I desperately wished she could just talk me through all these emotions and memories. I knew that wouldn’t happen. But I was hoping that in her morphine-soaked dreams she was dancing around the room with Laddie jumping at her feet to the beat.
The nurse leaned over the bed, tucked in the sheet and said to me, ‘Maybe she would like some music that the elderly enjoy, like Bing Crosby or some big band tunes?’
‘She hated that stuff, it’s too old for her. My mum loved Meatloaf and The Eagles,’ I explained.
The nurse raised an eyebrow as if I was kidding myself; she checked Senga’s intravenous drip and had a look at her temperature.
‘Mum is younger than Mick Jagger, she was born the same day as David Bowie – she was a young woman once, who loved music,’ I told her. Mum faintly jigged her feet to the music as if to back me up. She was still in there somewhere, and I wished she could talk to me about the book.
I still had strong memories of the veranda and that summer. Janine had been funny and full of life; I wondered where she was now.
Reading about how Mum suffered so much at the hands of my dad, and how other women just accepted their lot back then, had really shaken me. I hadn’t known my dad had treated her like that. But weak men attacking women still happens to this day; not much has changed, has it?
I tried hard to think of the times I’d seen her and Dad together, but every time I strained to grasp the images the memories were like grainy home videos, out of focus with no dialogue. I wondered if I had deliberately forgotten the arguments and violence. I must have been witness to it; there were tiny snatches of images of Mum crying in the toilet and one strong memory of Dad shouting outside in the street, but they were so out of context I couldn’t make sense of it. Was that what trauma did? Your mind just blanked it out to protect you?
I knew he’d left her for a much younger woman; that was something none of us could avoid as we grew up, it was rubbed in our faces as kids, him believing he could recapture his youth and get away from too many kids and too much responsibility. But he’d ended up alone, washing his pants in the bathroom sink of a bedsit near Paisley. What a waste, a life unlived.
He’d died of liver problems when I was twenty-one years old. The drink finally got him. I often wondered if they played the Bay City Rollers at his funeral. None of us went; we didn’t want to.
When Mum told me he was ill, I’d once called him from my halls of residence in Bristol. John had got me his number. He’d sounded so broken and sad, but ultimately, he was a stranger to me. He knew nothing about my life. Senga had been everything to us: she’d worked hard and helped me save for the course and books, Dad used to walk past us in the street holding hands with Donna and not even acknowledge us.
John missed him the most, I think, but I don’t know why; he was the youngest and had the least time with him. Sometimes there’s no working out why things happen.
Lifting my bag from the floor, I pulled out the red book and the brown envelope. I carried them everywhere with me now, as though I couldn’t let them out of my sight.
I sat beneath the hospital anglepoise lamp and flicked through some of the photos. There was a wee snap of me standing at our tenement close in a pale pink short dress. I must have been about ten years old. My face was sunburned and I had bare feet in sandals, my dark hair cut in a home-made ‘bob’ which was squint at one side. Laddie was standing behind me; I had forgotten how big he was. His tongue was lolling out and he was staring straight down the lens. I was sure my mum had taken this photo. I took out my phone and snapped photos of a few of the images and sent them to our family WhatsApp group, so we could all check them out later.
I held each image up and described them to Mum, and then tucked them back into the envelope. She lay there still but with a shadow of a smile on her face again. The late afternoon sun bounced off the city skyscrapers and flooded into the room, one big shaft of light shone right across her bed.
‘So, you found the book,’ she whispered and then added, ‘I love the music.’
We sat until the tea trolley made its way round. Mum sipped some water and I scoffed a damp Jammie Dodger washed down with weak NHS tea.
When she fell asleep again, I walked outside the room and down to the car park and called Janet and John on our WhatsApp. I read them a bit of the diary and brought up the subject of Dad. It was shocking to realise how little Janet and John remembered of him.
‘Dad was a prick,’ Janet said in her usual off-hand way. ‘How is Mum doing?’
‘Yeah, Janet is right, fuck Dad, how is Mum?’ added John.
‘You know, John, it’s not great. She’s weak but she had a wee sip of water today, plus she said a few words, which was amazing. She’s hanging on,’ I replied. ‘Janet, can you remember Dad much in your life when you were wee?’
I couldn’t get Dad out of my head. I wanted to know what they remembered.
She went quiet and I could hear her breathing, then she just let rip. ‘He was worse than useless as a father. He was only a few months older than her and yet he couldn’t handle the responsibility of kids; he was never really there. I have patchy memories of him and Mum fighting, and one good memory of him swinging me about down the park, but other than that he always seemed to be some vague shadow that annoyed us all. Do you remember him much?’
‘Yes, I recall the mad outfits he wore and him being drunk at parties or shouting at us round the back court,’ I said.
‘Yes, the Bay City Rollers tartan, I remember that,’ John added with a laugh, and we all went quiet.
John said, ‘I remember him trying to show me how to bounce on a space hopper and the times he tried to make me play football. It’s a shame really – as much as I get upset about him, he never really seemed to get his life together, and Mum had to be strong because he kept messing her about.’
‘I know – looking back, you wonder how we all made it out of there,’ I said. ‘Look, I’ll call you with any more news tomorrow, speak soon.’
‘Give her a kiss from us both,’ said Janet, and John chimed in with,
‘And a wee hug.’
We did have lovely memories as well as the dark ones that the book was throwing up. Mum had been so good with us. God knows how she had the patience: she cuddled us in bed, read stories to us and sometimes, when the wee ones were asleep, she would let me sit up late at the window on hot summer nights and chat to me about stuff that was happening in my life. She was so interested in my world, and in making it bigger than hers. She’d wanted me to have all the opportunities she hadn’t had. She would look up to the horizon, as the sun streaked orange over the sky, and say things like, ‘You should get a passport and travel, Sharon, go and see all the big oceans, find yourself out there, walk down the streets in New York.’ She’d wave her hand at the window, indicating ‘out there’. All I could remember seeing was Barlinnie prison and the water towers up in Cranhill. At that age I could only vaguely imagine the ocean, and America beyond that.
The radio would be playing softly in the background as she smoked a ciggie and blew the smoke out the window, watching the neighbours walking home from the chip shop or the pub. I missed that love and affection now. I realised I hadn’t thought of Steven nearly as much. My heart was being filled up with real love from people who cared about me and wanted more for me.
