Blackpool Pleasure Beach, 1968
They’ve only been there five minutes when Ted grabs her hand.
‘Carol, look,’ he says, tilting his head. ‘The rockets! Come on!’
In front of them is the giant spider of Maxim’s Flying Machine. Blackpool is famous for it. That and the bright pink rock that sticks your teeth together. Oh, and the illuminations, of course.
Carol shakes her head. ‘No, Ted,’ she says, pulling against him as he drags her towards the ride.
‘Aw, come on! You can’t come all this way and not go on Maxim’s.’ He’s still pulling her forward; her stiletto soles slip on the grimy ground.
‘You know I can’t be doing with heights,’ she says. ‘You go on. Go on, go.’
He looks at her a moment before snatching a quick kiss. ‘All right then,’ he says, already backing away. ‘Wait here for me.’
He lets go of her hand and she watches him, the cocksure way he walks, pulling his comb from the back pocket of his suit trousers, teasing the slick duck’s arse to perfection, returning the comb with one deft hand.
She loses him then, in the crowd. Meanwhile, the torpedo-shaped cars fill with thrill-seekers. They’re excited to be out on a Friday night, flush with a week’s pay, armed with pastel clouds of candyfloss and filthy innuendos. Lads joke and flirt. Girls laugh and smooth out their miniskirts. Fleeting orange sparks of last-minute cigarettes flash to the ground.
Minutes later, there’s Ted: last on, hooking one drainpiped leg into his capsule, grinning and mugging at her like a lunatic. From this distance, his bootlace tie is lost against his pale pink shirt, his black velvet lapels invisible against the milk-chocolate brown of his jacket.
No sooner is he in his seat than the rockets begin to chug, lurching along to the first slow, discordant notes of the organ. Smells of petrol, cigarettes and sugar syrup settle on Carol’s new cream mohair cardie. The rockets climb; as Ted’s capsule lifts, he half stands, wobbling, his body at a terrifying angle. The great metal spider extends its legs; the rockets climb higher. Ted is flying towards her now, coming up to eye level.
‘Carol Green!’ he shouts at the top of his voice as he glides past. ‘Will you marry me?’
And then he’s gone, the back end of his capsule circling away.
Her mouth is open in shock. She can hear Ted laughing madly, hidden inside his pod. He reappears then, further away. He’s sitting down, thank heavens, but he’s still larking about. His rocket floats lower, there on the other side of the ride; a couple of bumps and it begins to climb once more, heading back around to where Carol stands rooted to the wet tarmac.
He begins again to stand. Oh for pity’s sake. Bloody idiot.
‘Ted!’ she cries out to him. ‘Sit down, will you? You’ll get yourself killed.’
Embarrassed, she stares at her feet, covers her forehead with her hand. But here he comes again, higher and higher, over her head.
‘Carol Gree-een!’ Only the round base of the rocket above her. Only his voice. ‘Will you marry me? Oi! Carol! Can you hear me?’
Never mind me, she thinks. The whole fairground can hear you.
In the puddle by her feet, the crescent moon shines up at her: a white arc in a reflected navy sky – faceless, like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. The rockets revolve, faster now. Up and down, round and round on the ends of the spindly spider legs. The music reaches full speed: a heady, spinning waltz. She can’t hear Ted anymore and it looks like he’s sat down properly now, thank goodness. Oh, but he’s still waving his arms about, still carrying on. He’s always mucking about, is Ted. Always creating. But he’s never shouted down at her like that before, never asked her that.
He was only joking, though.
Obviously he was.
She’s not stupid.
Once he gets off, he’ll not ask her again.
Not to her face.
Will he?
As if to get her attention, the funfair flashes its lights – rudely, she thinks. It might have been pouring down since dawn, they seem to say, but the rain’s stopped now, it’s getting dark and we’ll not be put out, so stop your brooding, Carol Green. This is a funfair. You’re supposed to have fun.
A hiss and a heavy, industrial clunk. The rockets slow, descend, stop. The laughing riders clamber out: squeals, shrieks, names lost on the sticky air. The turnstile gives out greasy squeaks as, one by one, the new crowd pushes through while the old is spewed, chattering, through the exit.
‘Oi.’ Ted appears in front of her, blows at his black quiff, smooths one side with the flat of his hand. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’
She nods at the puddle between them. ‘Mind your shoes. Suede never comes right if you get it wet.’
He steps over in one stride and grabs her by the shoulders. His fingers are thick. He’s hurting her a bit, but she doesn’t say anything. In the blinking coloured lights, his dark eyes shine with something like mischief. She can smell Old Spice, whisky and cigarettes – things she’s been told to avoid.
‘Carol? Didn’t you hear me, what I was shouting?’ He hitches up a trouser leg, gets down on one knee.
‘Ted! Your good suit!’ Around them, people stall, stare, nudge each other’s elbows, oh heavens above.
‘Carol …’
‘I did hear you,’ she whispers. Her hand comes to rest on the swell of her belly, a bump it’s getting harder to hide. ‘But you don’t have to, you know, just because …’
‘Don’t be daft. I’d’ve asked you anyway.’ In his black eyes, the white sliver of moon – tiny and still grinning in a smaller, darker sky. He is so handsome. She can only bring herself to look at him for a couple of seconds at a time. Any longer and she begins to feel like her make-up needs fixing or her hair has gone wrong or something.
Ted doesn’t flinch. He never flinches. ‘Come on, Carol Green. You’d be a fool not to marry me.’
Merseyside, 2019
That’s how it starts, for me, the story of my mother. In Blackpool, that midsummer’s night, with Ted Watson, a man I ceased to call father a long time ago. All that followed would never have occurred without his flamboyant proposal in that damp, defiant funfair. So yes, it starts there, but of course there is a before. There is always a before. My mother was pregnant, her parents had thrown her out, she was living, as she called it, in sin. Marriage was the only way out of shame, as far as she was concerned, and if I can remember every detail of that scene, if I can see those flying rockets and smell the oil and the candyfloss, it is only because, in sentimental mood, she would tell me that particular story over and over. For her, it still had a romance to it, even after everything he did to her.
It wasn’t me in her belly. It was my older brother, Graham. Conceived if not in love, since I don’t believe my father capable of it, then in passion – the furtive fumblings of late-sixties sex. Any swinging associated with the decade had not yet reached the small towns of Merseyside in anything other than music and fashion, jukeboxes and coffee bars; the pill, out of wedlock, was not something my mother ever would have dreamed of. Brought up on a Northern working-class diet of fear and gratitude, she would never have had the confidence to ask for such a thing. She would not have had the vocabulary.
The call came a week ago. I was on my way out of court. I was meeting Seb for a drink at Waterloo before we caught the train home together. It was Friday. We always try to meet at the station on Fridays after work. On average, we achieve this twice a month, if I’m honest, sometimes once. A shared bottled of Pinot Grigio in a busy station is what passes, what has to pass, for a date just at the moment. There’s a bar called the Cabin on the upper level, where you can drink and talk and watch the train timetable on a television screen and we know we can make it to our platform in three minutes. It’s our way of being together for as many minutes and seconds as we can, and that we still want to do this is, to me, romantic. The train ride also counts. Once home, domesticity will, we know, swamp us, and by the time we are alone again, our last remaining drops of energy will have been spent on the girls.
So when the call came, I was on the Strand. A GBH case had taken less time than I’d anticipated, and I was considering texting Seb to tell him I was heading back to chambers and that I’d see him later at home. I took my phone out of my coat pocket, and at the sight of my brother’s name, my body tingled with presentiment. I just knew, as they say.
‘Graham,’ I said.
‘All right.’ The T hissed; my blood chilled.
‘Is it Mum?’
‘Yeah.’
You can prepare yourself for a moment you know is coming. You can make plans, even rehearse it in your mind. I knew my mother was dying. She had been transferred to the hospice a month earlier. I had travelled north the previous weekend, said goodbye just in case. I truly believed I’d made my peace with the inevitable. But now here was Graham telling me that he had held her hand and that she had taken ‘this big breath, a big gasp, like’, then closed her eyes, sending one tear trickling down each side of her face into her near-white hair.
‘And then she let go,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘And that was it, like. That was it.’
My brother doesn’t say much, but he had known, without me asking, that I would need every detail, second by second, and he had given it his best shot. It was his way of including me in the immense and private privilege of our mother’s last moments.
‘Thanks for calling,’ I said, which seems ridiculous to me now, like thanking someone for reminding me of a hair appointment or a delivery. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Are you going to be all right?’
‘Yes. I’m meeting Seb.’
‘Good. Tell him I said all right.’
‘OK. Talk to you tomorrow.’
I had prepared. But there is no preparation. Nothing can or will help. Any plans you make for yourself and how you will behave will be forgotten. You will be alone, not with loved ones, as planned. You will be alone on the street and you will be crying like you told yourself you would not, and you will descend into precisely the red, snotty mess of your fears, blowing loud sobs into a crowd of strangers, there in your suit and your high-heeled shoes – the armour you were foolish enough to think would protect you. And you will find the sight of so many people carrying on as if nothing has happened so surreal, so fucking offensive, frankly, that you will have to stagger into a side street and find a wall to lean on while you get yourself together enough to text your husband.
Mum’s gone.
Seb would still be at work. I wasn’t sure if he’d even have his phone with him; tried not to let that thought fill me with panic. But he rang immediately.
‘Hey. Are you OK?’
‘I’m fine,’ I managed.
‘Where are you?’
‘The Strand.’
‘All right. I can be there in half an hour, three quarters.’ He paused, enough to sense that I couldn’t speak. ‘First one there gets the drinks. I’m on my way, Nick. I’ll see you soon, all right? Walk there. Take the air, look at the beautiful city. Do you want me to stay on the phone?’
‘No. No, I’m all right. I’ll see you there.’
If you were walking across Jubilee Bridge that day, you would have seen a very smartly dressed woman with a great haircut weeping snottily into a shrivelled tissue. Perhaps you would have smiled your sympathy and looked away. But she would not have seen you. That day she didn’t even remember to look at the view: the South Bank Centre, the London Eye, the glorious sweep of the capital’s riverside. And when she arrived at the bar, she had no idea how she had got there.
Seb was already sitting on the red leather couch at the back. Bottle of white in a silver wine cooler. This didn’t make sense; I’d been nearer to Waterloo than him, but now I think about it, I think I must have wandered about in a daze for a bit. I have a memory of looking at lipsticks in Boots that can only have been that afternoon, a shop assistant asking if she could help me. I never buy lipstick in Boots. The way Seb looked at me as I made my way through the bar was enough to make tears come again. I blinked them back and sank down beside him. He kissed the top of my head.
‘Petes,’ he said.
Story on that: my brother’s nickname for me is posh twat. I’m not, not really, but everything’s relative. When I first met Seb at a juvenile court case long ago, I told him this and it amused him. I don’t know what you’re laughing at, I said. You’re a much posher twat than me. Posh twat became PT, which became Petey, which became Petes. There.
I let Seb hold me while I cried into the new cashmere jumper I’d bought him for Christmas, the one he said was too expensive for a social worker but which he’d not had off his back.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘This jumper’s dry-clean only,’ Seb replied, which made me laugh while, with the discretion of a priest, a waiter slid a stack of white paper napkins onto the table.
I took one and pressed it to my face. ‘It’s all right, I cried most of my mascara off on the Strand.’ I met his eye. ‘Don’t say anything kind.’
‘All right. Shall I tell you I was called Shrek four times today?’
I laughed, tears spilling. Seb isn’t ugly, but his ears stick out and his nose is, how can I put it … kind of rickety. Like a contraption that would straighten if you were to wiggle it. We have both broken our noses, actually, though mine was only a hairline fracture, with no lasting disfigurement. And of course Seb’s was broken by a slope at St Anton whereas mine was broken by a fist. His eyes aren’t all that fantastic either, to be honest. With Seb, it’s all about the smile. Think ice caps melting. Think jelly legs. Think this is probably my subjective opinion.
He had filled my glass, was now topping up his own, saying nothing.
‘I’ll be all right in a minute,’ I said.
‘I know you will.’ He moved closer along the couch until our thighs touched. He tightened his arm around me and kissed my hair, and I was more grateful for him in that moment than I had been in a while. He is so kind that I forget it. That he would only ever lay his hands on me in affection or desire is something I don’t think about. But I gave silent thanks in that moment for the fact that I’d married a man so unfailingly kind that I have the luxury of letting it slip my mind.
We made short work of the bottle and the just one more large glass each for the road. Once home, once the nanny had left, I was still tipsy enough to tell the girls that their grandma had died without making too much of a mess of it: normal, not scary, amounts of crying. We huddled together on the sofa and had what my mother would have called a right good weep. They didn’t see their nan that much, but they loved her and spoke to her every week on the phone. Seb went for fish and chips. And that was how the immediate aftermath went: a good weep; fish and chips; Carol anecdotes and teary laughter. It was exactly what Mum would have wanted.
And now here I am a week later, at the pine table of my mother’s kitchen, in the silent aftermath of her wake. Seb and the kids are at home in south London – we decided that the girls were too young to face a funeral – and so now, alone, prompted by more than a few drinks in her honour amidst cheap sharp suits and signet rings, set hair and firm bosoms, I find myself thinking about that night in Blackpool in 1968, the year my parents decided it was a good idea to get married. And remembering my mother – I have done little else since I heard – I feel an overwhelming, indescribable, almost eerie connection to her. Something not of the mind but of the body.
Stage one, stage two, stage whatever, grief is the same yet different for us all. Perhaps what I mean is that the specifics of grief are individual. For me, raw and new as I am to it, Carol is knocking at the doors, asking to be let in. My mother is a spirit – not bad for an atheist like myself, for a woman of reason, of the law – and I am the medium. She’s here, she’s everywhere, inside and out, in the air, in the water, in the things she left behind. In her spotless kitchen, I open a drawer at random and find the red-and-white-checked tea towels that she favoured, the cloth napkins she never used because they were too posh, and, here, a handkerchief, laundered, pressed, initialled in bright blue cotton: TW. Thomas Wilson. Tommy. I know this handkerchief. Its whiteness is marked with an old, old stain. How that stain came to be there is the story of the night she bundled a few scant belongings into bags and took me and my older brother with her out of the fear and violence that was her life.
And here, now, this night, my mother’s bravery strikes me perhaps harder than ever. So much I witnessed as a child, only understanding its meaning many years later. So much I only knew on some foggy, intangible level. But now that she is irreversibly gone, I realise I want to piece the whole thing together. Because nothing brings home our adult status like the loss of both parents. I want to understand. Graham told me some of it, but only after the years we spent estranged from one another. My mother filled in other parts much, much later as we sat up together, two women talking – dry-roasted peanuts, cheap box of red, me cadging one of the cigarettes that ultimately killed her.
That I will never see her again, never feel the warmth of her next to me as we chat for hours on her soft old sofa, never hear her laugh when I say something clever or mimic someone we both know is as unbelievable to me as God. All that I have left of her, beyond the material remains, is this need to be with her, and to make final sense of her life. Call it survivor’s guilt, some vague desire to make amends for my career, my lovely home, my kind, boxer-nosed husband and my two children: well dressed, well fed, safer than I ever was. Call it the familiar floral scent of this bloodstained handkerchief that I press to my nose; call it the maudlin after-effects of too much fizzy wine drunk in toasts to her; call it, quite simply, love – for my mother, Carol, who one night in 1984, with no qualifications, no possessions and no home, struck out alone with her children into the unknown.
Runcorn, 1984
Carol is in the hallway, putting on her make-up before Pauline and Tommy’s wedding. It is the last day of her marriage, but she doesn’t know that yet.
The bulb in the hall is dim. Carol Watson, née Green, has read in Woman’s Own that you’re supposed to have bright light when you apply make-up, but at this moment she can’t for the life of her imagine why. You’d never go out again if you did that, she’s thinking as she rubs a blob of foundation as thickly as she can over the bruise under her left eye. She pats at it with the ends of her fingers. In Woman’s Own there are never any tips on how to cover a shiner – this is a technique she’s invented all on her own. She tops the look off with her new red lipstick: Soldier Soldier by Avon.
‘Ted,’ she calls into the lounge. ‘Better get off soon, eh, love.’
She ducks her head into the cupboard under the stairs. Her jacket is stuck under Nicola’s anorak. Nicola, her princess, her too-clever-for-me girl. She lifts both coats, puts her daughter’s back on the hook and pulls her own free. Behind her comes Ted’s rattling cough. She steels herself and turns to face him, the war between dread and hope burning its usual hole in her chest.
His eyes go straight to her lips. Dread wins out. The lipstick. A mistake.
‘It’s only for the wedding.’ She covers her mouth with her fingers.
He knocks her hand away and grabs her chin. His fingers press hard on her jaw. In the dining room, the kids fall silent – an alarm system in reverse.
‘What is that?’ he says in his low, quiet voice.
‘It’s only from the catalogue,’ she says. ‘I got it with my points.’
‘Take it off.’ He lets go and heads through to the kids, who are eating sandwiches at the table. ‘Right, you lot, there’s two Lion bars in the sideboard,’ she hears him say as she wipes the lipstick from her mouth with a cotton wool ball and some of the Anne French cleansing milk she keeps on the phone table. ‘They’re not for you,’ he jokes. ‘Just keep an eye on them for us till we get home.’
‘Aw, Dad!’ The children laugh, and she tells herself that if the kids are laughing, then things must be normal. This is family life. Every household has its ups and downs. Women complain about their husbands’ bad moods the same way men talk about football, don’t they?
She steps out into the garden and lights a ciggie to calm her nerves. In the flower bed, the funny faces of her violet pansies shimmer in the breeze. Behind them, rooted by concrete posts, the green wire fence runs along the back of all the gardens, hemming everything in. If you were to lift it up, this fence, all the little strips of lawn, the wooden pickets and the gardens and the houses would dangle from it like washing on a line. On the other side of the fence, the field stretches away – out of the estate and beyond, to the railway track, to the expressway, to who knows where.
With no Pauline to talk to over the fence today, she smokes quickly and stubs her fag out on the wall. Inside, Ted is saying ta-ta to the kids. Once she’s sure he’s gone out to the car, she hurries back so she can say goodbye to them herself without him hovering over her.
The two of them are still in their pyjamas, watching Saturday Superstore, their weekend treat. It’s nearly midday.
‘Get dressed straight after, all right?’ she says. They nod, blank-eyed, chewing. She picks up the empty squash jug. ‘I’ll just get you some more juice before I go. Your dad’s waiting.’ She turns to make her way out to the kitchen to find Ted filling the doorway of the dining room. ‘Jesus.’ She almost drops the jug on her foot.
He throws his arms up against the door frame. ‘For Christ’s sake, I live here, don’t I?’ He glares at her like she’s mad, a fool to startle like that.
‘Sorry. Thought you’d gone to the car, that’s all. Do you want a sarnie? Don’t know when the buffet’ll be, do we?’
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘I’ve made boiled ham and salad cream. Or there’s tongue.’
‘I said I’m not hungry, didn’t I?’ He heads back into the hall, shaking his head. The chink of keys as he lifts them from the phone table, another phlegmy cough. She hopes he’s not over the limit already. She smelled mint on his breath just now. He’s checking himself in the mirror, turning his head this way and that. Finding himself marvellous. He has on his best shiny grey suit from C&A, the sky-blue shirt she ironed for him yesterday and a new paisley tie she picked up in Burton’s in the Shopping City. The skin of his neck overlaps his collar in an oily fold. He’s taken trouble over his hair for once, combed a duck’s arse at the back. Usually he just does the quiff at the front and leaves the back flat, as if he’s run out of energy halfway through, but today, with it being next-door’s wedding, she guesses, he’s made an effort. He looks like a ruddy throwback. It’s 1984, for pity’s sake. Thirty-three years old and he still thinks he’s Elvis.
‘Are we going then or what?’ he calls to her.
‘Yes, love. All set.’ She bustles round the children, kissing both of them on the cheek. ‘Be good now, kids, all right?’
‘M-Mum, stop f-f-fussing.’ Graham speaks with his mouth full.
‘Graham Watson,’ she says. ‘Mouth. How many times?’
He makes a great show of swallowing. His hair is thick and black like his dad’s. ‘B-beautiful M-Mother, please may you stop f-f-fussing?’ He opens his mouth wide, to show that it’s empty, making Nicola giggle.
‘Don’t be cheeky.’ Carol gives him a wink, lays her hand on her daughter’s cheek and smiles at them both: her world, her two reasons to keep going. ‘Nicky, be good for your big brother, all right? I don’t want any nonsense.’ Holding on to the door handle a moment, she charges the batteries of her heart with the sight of them. They’re getting older, bigger, living proof of time passing. ‘Right, troops,’ she says. ‘I’m off.’
‘Carol,’ Ted shouts from the front door.
‘Coming!’
‘Mum,’ says Graham.
She turns back to her son. Quick, love, she wants to say, but she can’t, of course – that’ll only make him worse. ‘What, love?’
He gives her an awkward smile; his eyelids hover, almost close with the effort of speaking. ‘Y-you look really n-n-nice.’
The waiting room of the register office is packed, the smell of shoe leather and cigarettes just about held at bay by a medley of perfumes and aftershaves. Ted still hasn’t come back. He said he needed the gents, but Carol knows better. He’ll be outside, smoking, swigging, looking common.
Tommy and Pauline, the happy couple, are over on the far side, by the entrance to the wedding suite. Carol’s brother, Johnny, is chatting to them, waving his hands about as he does. He hasn’t brought anyone by the looks of things. Shame, Carol was hoping he might have a date. There’s a chap she doesn’t recognise next to a green plastic plant on a pillar, chatting to Trevor from Trev’s Tyres. He’s fair, very tall. He has to bend forward to hear what Trevor is saying.
From behind the closed door, music drifts into the foyer. The previous wedding finished, the newly married couple will be on their way out through the back. This place is a conveyor belt, she thinks, waiting for one couple to tie the knot before the next can go in – a sausage factory, twisting links.
For a few minutes then there’s no music at all, only chatter bubbling in the air, before the far door opens and a song plays out: ‘How ’Bout Us’, Pauline’s favourite. She and Tommy go ahead into the wedding suite, laughing. ‘Some people are made for each other,’ Carol whispers, allowing herself the smallest private moment of something like bitterness or regret.
The crowd follow the happy couple, surging in through the double doors. Still no sign of Ted. Carol has to go in with the others, she knows that. She’s chief witness. But if she doesn’t wait for Ted, that might make him cross, and his anger will write itself on her body later, invisible ink that reveals its black message by degrees. Where the heck is he, though, really? A frantic scan of the foyer, a quick look out onto the car park at the front – but nothing, no sign. Pauline will be waiting. It’s not right to keep her hanging about, not after all she’s done.
After anoth. . .
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