The Bad Mother's Handbook (7 page)

He lay there chewing his nail and watched me
struggle with my trousers. I’d got my toe caught in the
hem and was pushing at the stitching, making it rip,
wanting it to rip.

‘You want to watch it, you’ll tear ’em.’

‘Jesus!’ Some threads gave and my foot shot out. I
staggered against the bed end.

‘All I meant was, it’s not been, oh, you know. Like
you hear it’s going to be.’ He looked embarrassed, but
resolute, like he was going to say his piece whatever. He
held out his hand to me in a gesture that might have been
meant to reassure. ‘Did you not think the same though,
really?’

‘And could it not be,’ I put my burning face close
to his, ‘and could it not perhaps be that it’s
you
who’s
getting it wrong? That it’s
your
amazing technique that’s
failing to deliver?’ I nodded at his flaccid cock which lay
across his thigh innocently. ‘That your mighty equipment
is not quite
up to the job
?’

He pulled the sheets across himself and flushed.

‘No,’ he snapped. ‘’T i’nt, actually.’

‘Really?’

‘No. An’ I’ll tell you why.’

‘Go on.’ I sensed what was coming.

‘Because. Because Jeanette Piper never had any
trouble, that’s why.’

So I finished dressing and let myself out. Past next
door’s sad Alsatian, past the bench with no slats left, and
the tyre-marked verges, past the shattered bus shelter
and home to my room where I cried for half an hour.

It’s true, he never actually said he was a virgin. But
then again, he didn’t say he wasn’t. I should’ve kept
asking, only, what do you do if you don’t hear the answer
you want? ‘Stop, it’s all off, put your underpants back
on; I only sleep with the undefiled!’ I don’t think so. And
it’s not something he could have done anything about,
you can’t rewind time. Once It’s gone, It’s gone. I should
bloody know.

No, it wasn’t the fact that he was one step ahead,
though to be honest it’s not nice knowing he’s dipped
his wick elsewhere (thank God I don’t even know this
Jeanette Piper, I think she lives in Standish. He did say
she was a bit of a dog before I slammed out, but that
was probably only to make me feel better). No, it’s what
he said before. About me. My defective body. What if it
turned out to be true?

‘OVER THERE, BY THE BAR. I THINK YOU’VE
GOT AN ADMIRER!’ twinkled Gilly as she squeezed
past, a pint glass in each hand.

I squinted across the room but it was all heads and
bodies and there was a great fat man in front of me. I stepped backwards into a bit of a gap and immediately
trod on someone’s toe.

‘Sorry. SORRY.’

It was Daniel Gale, recently arrived in our sixth form
from somewhere down south and already dismissed as a
boring swot. He swept a hand through his wild hair and
grinned weirdly. What was someone like him doing here,
for God’s sake? He should have been at home chasing
Internet porn.

‘ACTUALLY,’ he leaned closer, ‘IT’S A PROSTHETIC.’

‘A WHAT?’ I was still trying to see over to the bar.

‘GALVANIZED STEEL AND PLATINUM BONDED.
BIONIC. I HAD IT FITTED AFTER A TERRIBLE
FREAK ACCIDENT. YOU COULD DROP A MINI
COOPER ON HERE AND I WOULDN’T FEEL A
THING. IT’S FULLY MAGNETIZED TOO. IF YOU
DROPPED ME IN THE SEA MY TOES WOULD
POINT NORTH.’

‘YOU WHAT?’

His shirt lit up dramatically as the ultraviolet came
on: it made his head look disembodied and wobbly. I
don’t know what my face was doing but I don’t think it
was registering anything very positive. His glasses flashed
reproachfully at me and he opened his mouth, then shut
it again. ‘JOKE,’ he finished sadly and drifted away,
shoulders hunched.

It was then I spotted him; a tall bloke leaning against
a pillar, watching me. Black jacket slung over his shoulder
like a catalogue model, dark curly hair, thin nose, might
have been all right but it was difficult to tell from a distance. He waved. I looked away. I looked back. He
started to come over, smiling. Bollocks, I thought. Then,
well why the hell not? Teach that bastard Paul, wouldn’t
it?

It wasn’t till he got really close that I could see the
leather pants.

Now the only stuff I know about leather pants, not
owning a pair myself, is what I heard some stand-up
cockney comedian say once, that they turned your privates
into a fiery furnace. As he got closer I could see he was
quite nice-looking, but the thought of the turkey-neck
testicle skin and the accordian-wrinkled penis cooking
gently in there persisted and my brow furrowed.

‘PENNY FOR THEM,’ he said as he reached me.

I could hardly say I was thinking about his genitals.

‘YOU LOOK LIKE YOU’RE IN ANOTHER
WORLD. YOU DO. WITH YOUR BIG EYES. LIKE
YOU’RE WAITING TO BE RESCUED. LIKE A
PRINCESS.’ He put his hand on my arm. I didn’t move.
‘SO WHERE
DO
YOU COME FROM?’

I couldn’t think of an appropriate reply to this – there
was no way I was going to utter the words ‘Bank Top’ –
so I reached up and glued my lips to his. Out of the
corner of my eye I could see Daniel Gale watching us, so
I shifted round and put my back to him.

This guy knew how to kiss, that was for sure. No bits
of escaping spit, no feats of ridiculous jaw-stretching or
clashing front teeth, just a nice lazy action. I let myself go
with it and after a while we found ourselves a corner and
settled in for what was left of the night. The leather pants
felt odd under my hands but also safe in a reinforced sort of way. You couldn’t feel anything
personal
through them,
just the lumps and bumps of folds where they creased. We
had the last dance together, well we stood on the dance
floor and snogged while slowly pivoting, then the lights
came on and we were suddenly blinking at each other and
looking sheepish. It was then I realized how much older
he was.

Outside in the
quiet cold air his pants squeaked.

‘Can I see you again?’ he murmured over the creaking.
My ears were still ringing slightly and it took a moment
to register what he’d said.

‘How old are you?’ I found myself asking. Around us
crowds of people moved into knots and couples, shouting
or embracing, slapping passing cars on the roof. Someone
was throwing up in a shop doorway amid cheers.

He held up his palms to me, head on one side. I was
sure I could see crow’s feet in the lamplight. ‘Hey. What’s
up? Does it matter?’

Does it matter? That’s what Paul said when I asked
him if he’d done it before. And yeah, it bloody well did,
as it turned out. So not a great question, Rawhide.

‘I’ll take
your
number. I’ll give you a call.’

He shrugged. Then, with difficulty, he extracted a pen
from his back pocket and wrote it on my hand, held onto
my fingers afterwards. He was staring into my eyes.

‘I’m twenty-eight, if you must know. God.’ He shook
his head. ‘Still don’t see what the deal is. Why, how old
are you?’

‘Like I said, I’ll give you a call.’ I loosed my hand from
his grip. ‘See you.’ And I joined Julia and Gilly on the taxi rank, feeling as if, somehow, I’d got one back. On somebody.

See the doctor. I should bloody cocoa.

*

IT WERE summat an’ nowt, only a dance at the Mechanics’,
but I got in a row over it. It were a regular thing when I was
about sixteen. I’d throw my lace-up shoes and best frock out
of the window, then tell my mother I was off to Maggie
Fairbrother’s. Her mother used go out drinkin’ so we could do
as we liked. So then we’d walk it into Harrop and go dancin’.
The last time though it were t’ Carnival Dance and when I got
back home I had confetti all in my hair and cuffs. I kept brushin’
it out but it sort of clung. My mother spotted some of it on
the floor, and I got a good hiding and sent to bed. She was
allus angry, and tired to death, bent over her dolly tub or her
scrubbing board or her mangle. And shamed. You see she
could never hold a man, never had a home of her own. I think
she were terrified I might end up the same.

*

I
HAD A TRIP
into Wigan to find out what I already knew.

There was a time, late sixties I suppose it’d be, when
approaching the town was like driving through a war
zone. Nan and I would get the bus in and I’d stare out of
the windows at rows and rows of shattered terraces, brick
shells, piles of rubble. Sometimes there’d be a square of
waste ground with just a line of doorsteps along the edge
of the pavement, or ragged garden flowers sprouting
through the masonry or a tiny patch of floor tiling in the
mud. On the horizon there would always be those huge swinging metal balls on cranes. It made me shudder to
think what they could do. That was the progressive period
when they were busy putting people into tower blocks (I
don’t know what they called the period when they moved
everybody back out again).

The journey through all those ruins always unsettled
me. We’d have reached the Market Hall by the time I felt
right again. Nan would visit each stand, chatting and
joking with the stallholder over every purchase, and I’d
turn on my heel and gaze upwards at the steel rafters
where pigeons fluttered, and escaped balloons dawdled
tantalizingly. You could smell the sarsparilla from the
health-food booth, and ginger and hot Vimto. If I was good
I had a hair ribbon off the trimmings stall, and I got to
choose the colour.

So now I drove through the outskirts of a reinvented
Wigan with grassed-over areas and new, prestige estates
with names like ‘Swansmede’ and ‘Pheasant Rise’.
Imaginative chaps, these developers. I got through Scholes
and onto the one-way system, over the River Douglas, past
the Rugby League ground, under Chapel Lane railway
bridge. Huge hoardings promised faithfully to change my
life if I bought a new car, cereal, shampoo: if only. Then I
was out the other side, glancing over at the
A–Z
spread out
on the passenger seat. Finally I was turning into Prentis
Road.

Streets like this used to be cobbled, but the council tarmacked
them over years ago. At the beginning of the road
two short blocks of terraces nudged the pavement. I know
these back-to-back houses, there’s enough of them in Bank
Top. The flat red fronts, the white doorsteps that nudge the pavement and, at the back of each house, a flagged yard
walled round six foot high and a door opening onto a
cinder track. The original outside privies would all have
been demolished in the sixties, and little narrow kitchens
built on to free up what had been the parlour. Then in the
seventies everyone had to go Smokeless, so the coal sheds
went. While they were at it, most people had the two
downstairs rooms knocked through and folding screens
put in (so much more versatile!). Anything so long as it
didn’t look Victorian. (You want to get them picture rails
tekken off an’ all.)

This was where my Real Mother grew up.

I parked the car and walked slowly along the pavement,
this stupid song going through my head, the one we
used to chant on school trips when I was in the juniors.

We’re goin’ where the sun shines brightly (BLACKPOOL!)
We’re goin’ where the sea-hee is blue (RIVER DOUG-ER-LAS!)
We’ve seen it in the movies
Now let’s see if it’s true (IS IT BUGGERY!).

Christ, I thought, I’m turning into Nan. But that should
have been impossible. At least I wasn’t singing out loud.

I started counting door numbers although I could see,
ages before I got to the end, that I was going to run out.
28 was the last in the row, then there was a grassy space
with a sign saying ‘Hollins Industrial Park’. Past this was
the first building, a sort of hangar, Naylor’s Body Work
Repairs. A row of courtesy cars was parked outside and
one of those revolving signs turned sluggishly:
OPEN/SUNDAYS
. A young lad in overalls came out, saw me
staring and shouted over.

‘Y’ lookin’ for summat? Boss is out the back.’

‘It’s OK,’ I called.

He shrugged, climbed into one of the cars and started
revving the engine with the door open. I walked a bit
further, to where I reckoned 56 would have been, and
silently blessed my mother. I knew she wouldn’t be here.
I’d known it all along. She was in London, with a Life.

Talking of which.

I’m supposed to be holding out for Mr Right, but what
do you do in the meantime? I was prepared to settle for
Mr Do For Now If You’re Not That Fussed, while I was
waiting. ‘Love ’n’ Stuff’ had sent me Davy, looked a bit like
that actor who played Jesus of Nazareth in the ’70s, only
not so holy. Same age as me but a completely different
attitude to life. Dressed young, smoked roll-ups. Tall and
lean. I’d seen him twice, once for a quick drink at the
Wagon and Horses (he had an appointment with somebody),
and once for an Italian meal in Bolton (we went
Dutch, but that was OK, it is the nineties). Right from the
word go he let it be known that he had a full and active
social diary. Well, I thought, I bet you don’t have a mother
with a high-maintenance colostomy and a daughter ready
to hurtle off the rails at any moment. I just smiled and said,
‘Good on you. Hope you can fit me in somewhere,’ which
sounded naff and desperate (again).

At Luciano’s he told me he was divorced, which I think
even now was probably the truth, and that he’d been in
a few different dating agencies but ‘Love ’n’ Stuff’ was the
best so far (he gave me a little wink when he said this line).
Then he did some tricks with a bread-stick which I thought
were screamingly funny, although in retrospect I’d had quite a lot to drink by then. He also said he was a rep and
so the only way he could be contacted with any regularity
was through his mobile. Yeah, well, I know it’s the oldest
trick in the book, but when you want to believe someone,
you do.

I wouldn’t have brought him back to the house but he
claimed to be Mr I Might Be Able To Fix Your Metro too.
Also it was Saturday afternoon, Nan’s nap time, and I
knew Charlotte had gone into town as usual, so the coast
should have been clear. Hah. When is my coast ever bloody
clear?