Love and Fallout (28 page)

Annie Lennox wailed and the room began to tilt. My legs thought they were back at Greenham, stuck in a muddy track. Maggie opened and closed her mouth, then looked to her side as if she might be about to find me a seat so I could join them.

I made a U-turn, not heading back into the saloon, but out into the freeze of the car park where I leaned over, gripping my knees as if I'd just completed a marathon. A minute later, Maggie arrived.

‘I thought, I thought you were at that camp.'

Up close, the tarmac glittered. She put her hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off. Somewhere unseen a motorbike engine revved and choked. I sat down on a damp picnic bench and pushed my thumbnail along a ridged line of wood. Someone had folded a crisp packet into a tight triangle and stuffed it into one of the slats. I pressed my thumb down and jammed it further in, like a coin stuck in a telephone box. Maggie didn't sit down, she shifted her weight, one hand clasped to the white flesh of her upper arm, a cigarette dying in her fingers.

‘I didn't know you were… me and Tony, it's nothing.'

I focused on the stuck crisp packet and couldn't look at her. The bike engine revved again. I'd only had one boyfriend I'd cared about and she had to take him. She had to have the attention.

‘Tessa, we were just messing about…'

I got up and went inside.

Dad was on the verge of dozing off, his face ruddy with the fire. ‘Hmm… whaa?' he said, springing awake when Mum poked him. I'd blurted it all out.

‘With
Tony
?' said Mum, ‘What,
your
Tony.'

But he wasn't my Tony. He never had been.

‘You stay here, I'll see you at home,' I said.

They both got up.

‘No, we're ready for the off,' said Dad, barely conscious, sacrificing the remainder of his bitter, and despite my protestations, Mum was putting on her new coat. When we got outside she squeezed my shoulder and said I was worth ten of Maggie, but kindness only made it worse.

This was usually Mum's territory and I felt sorry for Dad, shuffling around in the car park, abruptly pulled onto an island of female distress.

‘What was your news?' I asked, suddenly remembering. Annie Lennox's voice was still going around in my head, the smog of cigarette smoke and Maggie swaying across the pub, that packet of crisps dangling from her mouth.

Mum questioned Dad with a glance. He shrugged. ‘It's spoiled now,' she said.

‘What is?' I felt queasy.

‘Me and Dad had a bit of luck on the pools.'

‘Did you?' Perhaps I hadn't got off the bed yet. Perhaps this was a dream. ‘What sort of luck?'

Mum paused for a second before saying it. ‘Forty-five thousand pounds.'

24

Telly

Three hours later I was lying on Mum and Dad's bed while Mum got ready for the social club Christmas dance.

‘I don't have to go,' she said. She was standing beside her underwear drawer in her bra and slip, searching out a good pair of tights.

‘Don't be silly, you've got tickets.'

She ran her hand through the leg of another pair, splaying her fingers to check for ladders.

‘You could have a whole drawer of new tights now, Mum.'

She laughed to herself. ‘Old habits, Tess.'

It was unreal to think of them having money, to think that Mum would be able to go into a shop and buy anything she liked, rather than returning home to describe it in detail before adding it to the store of treasures she carried around in her head: Axminster carpets, microwave ovens, garden tables with holes where the parasols fitted.

‘Why don't you come with us?' She'd started putting her face on at the dresser, closing her eyes so the foundation went over the lids and gave her eyeshadow something to stick to. I didn't make any comment, the last thing I felt like doing was sitting in a room with a glass of Babycham watching middle-aged couples do the quickstep. Mum opened her eyes and caught mine in the mirror. ‘Don't waste any more time worrying about Maggie Evans, will you? I'm surprised at Tony.' I didn't want to go over it all again, we'd already spent the last hour talking and there wasn't any more I could say or any more of Mum's kind words I could absorb. I'd replayed Maggie's visit to Embrace the Base and couldn't put the pieces together. Had I upset her?

‘Why don't you come along, get out of yourself for a bit. Bernie's daughter will be there, you know Karen don't you?'

Mum assumed that if I'd played in a sandpit with someone aged three-and-a-half, we'd established a lifelong rapport.

She moved on to eyeshadow, dabbing and blending a lilac tide along the crease of her lid with a miniature sponge applicator.

‘What would you be doing there on a Saturday night?'

‘Where?' I knew where, and she didn't dignify it with a response. ‘We go to the pub sometimes. Other women visit, the weekenders. We sing. We chat. There are four women who have a folk band, one of them plays those Irish drums.'

‘Bodhran.'

‘That's it, they play for us, we sit around, have discussions.'

‘Sounds like the social club.'

‘It's nothing like the social club.'

‘We have discussions,' said Mum, tweezing a stray eyebrow hair.

‘About what?'

‘All sorts. You and your pals haven't invented the art of conversation, Tessa.'

She lowered her tweezers and faced me with her one purple eyelid. Her lips had been blotted away by the foundation. ‘You can talk to me if there's anything wrong. I don't mean tonight, with Maggie, but generally. If there's something on your mind.'

‘Like what?'

‘I don't know, that's what I'm saying.' She studied my face as if she wanted me to confess something.

‘I'm fine.'

‘You're not, love. Why else would you go and live like that?'

‘We've been through this.'

‘Outside in all weathers.'

‘Mum.'

I ground my head into the candlewick bedspread. ‘You know why I'm there.'

‘Tessa, it's not right for a woman to live like that. It's unnatural.'

‘Unnatural? It's the most natural thing in the world. Living next to nature, in a community, helping each other. Not like living in a little box not knowing who your neighbours are.'

‘I know who my neighbours are.'

‘I didn't mean you.'

‘I've known my neighbours for years.' She turned back to the mirror and pinched the applicator between her thumb and forefinger. ‘All those women together, getting themselves in trouble with the police.'

‘They're making a stand, like the suffragettes.'

‘Let them make it then; you don't have to get muddled up with them.'

‘What would happen if no one bothered to protest? If we let governments do whatever they liked?'

‘Life would carry on I should think.'

‘It would be like
1984
.' She'd got on with shading lilac powder onto her other eyelid. ‘That's not the sort of world I want to live in.'

She blinked at herself, making sure she matched. ‘Well you don't have to because it's all made up, isn't it.'

She was assessing her lipsticks, lined up soldier fashion in the quilted box Dad had given her as a birthday present. I watched as she applied one then creased a tissue and bit down. ‘When I was your age we were out on a Saturday night in our starched dresses having fun. Being young.' She applied a top coat over the blotted coat for good measure. ‘There we were, in our gloves and heels, waiting to be asked to dance on a Saturday night.' Her shoulders slackened with the memory and she was staring past herself in the mirror, as if she'd gone back there to 1956. She shook her head. ‘The thought of those girls living in the mud, got up in men's trousers. They think they've worked it all out, those feminists, but what they need is a nice home and a steady man. Some of them have probably been dumped by their fellas, turned them bitter I expect.'

I cringed. Mum caught my eye in the mirror and carried on quickly. ‘Sorry love, I didn't mean you. But when you're young, you should be enjoying life. Why don't you come home?'

‘How can I with cruise missiles on their way?'

‘Oh it's big talk, love. You don't think they're really going to use them do you? Kids with toy guns making a match for each other, that's all it is.'

‘They're not toys, Mum. That's the point. One nuclear war head could kill—'

‘I know, I know—'

‘But it's not right
.
And it's a waste of tax payers' money.'

‘You don't pay tax anymore.'

She wasn't listening. I tried to remember some of Angela's phrases, the ones I'd written in my notebook. I told Mum the government was using the politics of fear, I told her it was because the world followed patriarchal systems and these included the male fetishising of weaponry.

Mum sighed. ‘What on earth have they been telling you in that place.' She turned back to the mirror and blinked down deliberately onto her mascara wand before squirting a dab of Charlie on her wrists and behind her earlobes. Then she glanced at her watch and went onto the landing, ‘Brian, have you had a shave yet?'

‘Up in a minute,' came his voice. He was watching
3-2-1.
If you listened carefully enough you could hear Ted Rogers recite a brain-boggling clue.

‘Every time,' she said to her jewellery box. ‘Hoops or pearls?' She held up one of each.

‘Hoops.'

She fiddled unsuccessfully until I got up and threaded the stem through. There were a couple of fine grey wisps in her hair, but mostly it was brown, the same as mine. Or the same as mine before the bleach.

‘What do you think of this then?' She took a red dress from the wardrobe and held it against herself, swirling the material. ‘Real silk.'

‘It's lovely.' The dress shimmered around her body as she slipped into it. I did the zip and she slid her feet into a new pair of matching heels. Then she sat down on the bed beside me.

‘Now, this is for all of us, this money, so we were thinking, me and Dad, when you get yourself a new job we can help you with a little flat, how would that be? Help you put down a deposit?'

She looked so hopeful when she said it. ‘I'm pleased for you Mum, I really am, you and Dad deserve it, but it's your money.'

‘Don't let that business with Maggie get you down.'

‘I'm not.'

She paused to read my face. ‘Once we find you some new togs and sort that hair out, the boys'll come running.'

‘The boys of Stevenage.'

‘What's wrong with Stevenage?'

‘Nothing. Nothing.'

Could I be bought off? Work and shopping, was that what life boiled down to? And what would it mean anyway, a life in Stevenage, back in a pencil skirt moving paper around.

‘Give us a twirl then,' Dad had creaked up the stairs and was standing in the doorway.

‘You need a shave, Brian.'

‘Go on.' He knew Mum couldn't resist. She got up and did a twirl so the red dress floated out like the skirts of a poppy.

‘A million dollars,' he said. Mum giggled and told him not to be daft.

When they'd gone the house shut down into a small painful box. I walked around it, as if I could outwalk my thoughts, but there was nowhere to go. The neat kitchen with the jars of pickles labelled in Mum's handwriting; the washing-up cloth folded and draped over the taps, the plastic bowl tilted on one side to drain; the bathroom, where I pulled at my hair, snipping a few strands with the nail scissors, not caring how awful it looked, or even that Tony had seen it like that. I walked my thoughts around the house, and eventually sat down with them.

It was the same old telly. I had to wiggle the ariel at the back to get a proper picture on the BBC but there was nothing on anyway, so I turned to ITV where the end of
3-2-1
was playing out. A young couple had won a holiday to a luxury resort and as the man swooped the woman in a circle, she flung her arms about his neck, her long permed hair bouncing up and down. I pictured Tony and Maggie lying side by side on white sun loungers drinking Tequila Sunrises, saw her stretching out to stroke his chest. It was mad really, imagining them together. He was supposed to be living in London by now, leading marches, not sitting in The Volunteer with Maggie talking about – what? What did they talk about?

Perhaps alcohol was the answer, a way to hold back the slow spread of sorrow that was creeping like ivy over my heart. I poured a tumbler of Mum's sherry and flipped through a copy of her
Woman's Own
while the alcohol burned a warm pathway through my chest. Then I poured another. A tear dripped off my nose and wrinkled a recipe for Boeuf Bourguignon. The credits were rolling, the TV audience on a free night out clapped and cheered as if applauding my work. I switched the set off and the house shrank back to silence. Outside I rolled a cigarette, then came in and brushed my teeth and sprayed myself with deodorant all over and felt ridiculous for calling myself an activist when I was too frightened to smoke a cigarette in my parents' back garden.