The History of Us Read online

  I see a few people are looking at their phones. I’m tempted to look at my own. Some people at the front, though, I notice are gyrating in time to the music. Others are practically wailing. At first I think, oh come on, it’s not that bad. But then I realize they’re crying because Jocelyn has gone, yet they can hear her voice, and they probably loved her, etc., and I feel chastened.

  And then, before I know it, the priest is doing the committal, and the curtains slowly travel to meet each other, and the coffin has vanished from view. Like the flats. Like our flats. And some doors behind the priest are opening and people are heading out into the sunshine. It takes forever to get outside. I recognize a few people from the telly, but no-one major. A girl from Hollyoaks who kept her sunglasses on for the whole service, and that TV chef that Jocelyn had the ill-advised fling with years back. At the back of the chapel is a garden of remembrance, and here the floral tributes to Jocelyn have been laid out along a path like roadkill. We all file past them, looking at them as if they’re going to grant us the meaning of life; we try to eke some wisdom out of the words, ‘RIP Jocelyn. We’ll miss you babe. Love all at Unbeweavable Hair & Beauty Salon.’

  I search again for her mum or Billy, or both. Then I feel someone nudging me. I turn. It’s Adam. I think he is going to hug me, and I go to hug him, but he’s motionless. His eyes are so bright. I don’t know if it’s just because the sun is so strong, or whether it’s because he’s been crying. Instead of hugging him, I just awkwardly rub his arms and then step back.

  ‘So sad,’ I say.

  He nods.

  ‘Such awful circumstances.’

  He nods. OK, so he’s like a frigging nodding dog. Help me out here, Adam. Say something. He doesn’t. So I do.

  ‘I went to the old flats before. They’ve been knocked down.’

  He nods.

  ‘Those nights she’d come over to see us, and we’d watch Hollywood movies on video and eat popcorn, and . . . the world was our oyster back then.’

  He nods again. But then he does say something. And he says it quite loudly. And I really wish he hadn’t.

  He says, ‘D’you think this has got anything to do with us?’

  A cold iron fist grips my heart. I find it hard to breathe.

  Liverpool, 1985

  ‘Eat your egg and chips, love. And we’ll see whose face pops up.’

  Nan had a habit of saying this to me during my evening meal. She had a set of dinner plates and each one featured a famous face from the Bible.

  ‘Can you see yet, love?’

  As I wiped up the runny yolk with one of my chips, a scarlet nose with blackened nostril was revealed. I knew these plates too well not to know which one I’d got. ‘I think it’s Jesus, Nan!’

  Nan grinned, lit up a cigarette, and immediately blew smoke lovingly my way. ‘Awww. God love the bones of him.’

  She said this a lot, my nan, about fellas on the telly, beggars on the street, and our Lord Saviour Jesus Christ. She also said it about Elvis, a framed photograph of whom was hanging over the fireplace like he was a member of our family. I had vague recollections of the day he died. I must’ve been about seven. It was the summer holidays, and I’d been swimming with Adam at the baths on Picton Road. I’d got back for my tea and found the curtains drawn and Nan crying at the table, a glass of something on ice in her hand. I thought something must’ve happened to my mum or dad, or one of the neighbours. But then she put ‘Love Me Tender’ on the record player and told me the world would never be the same again.

  ‘How was school?’

  ‘Yeah, it was all right. Mandy Matthews has had her fella’s name done as a tattoo on her thigh and her mum’s gone mental.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. She’s far too young to be courting.’

  Oh, I thought she’d have a problem with the tattoo. I should have known.

  ‘She’s fifteen, Nan,’ I pointed out. ‘Same as me.’

  ‘Exactly. She’s still a baby. How are your oven chips?’

  ‘Bit burnt.’

  ‘Sorry about that. I got a phone call, so I had to nip out.’

  It was a source of intense frustration for me that I was the only person I knew who didn’t have a phone in their house. A neighbour, Sue Overtheroad, took calls for my nan and called her over if it was urgent. The doorbell would go, and you’d hear Sue’s voice: ‘Nora? Phone!’ And off Nan would dash, dropping everything as if she’d been summoned to meet the Pope. And we were Church of England. Cigarettes were left burning in ashtrays, visiting friends were abandoned mid-sentence – and, in this case, oven chips were left to blacken in the Smeg.

  That was another source of embarrassment. Nan never called the oven the oven. She called it the Smeg. And round our way, Smeg was a really rude word. I’d not actually any idea what it meant, because it caused such fits of giggles, and I definitely didn’t want to appear naive or thick by questioning its definition, so I just laughed along, going, ‘I know. Smeg! What’s she like?!’ And to make matters worse, our oven wasn’t even a Smeg oven. They’d’ve been far too posh for the likes of us, but Nan had heard someone on the telly referring to her oven as her Smeg, and thought it was just a posh word for cooker.

  I’d lived with my nan for as long as I could remember. My mum had left when I was only a few months old, supposedly to start a new life in Australia with her ‘fancy piece’, but I’d never known whether to believe this or not. Maybe she just didn’t like the look of me. Or maybe Nan – my dad’s mum – interfered too much, and she’d had enough. There was no way I could ever find out. She’d just disappeared into the ether. My dad was away a lot. What we had to say, if anybody asked, was that he was working the oil rigs in the North Sea. But it was common knowledge round our way that in fact he was in and out of prison. I was always spared the details, and Nan would often talk about the perishing icy waters and how he was getting on. But I heard too much talk not to know otherwise. Plus there was always Adam. He knew all the local goss, because his mum ran the sweet shop. And if you worked in the sweet shop, you heard everything.

  Some nights I lay in bed, screwing my eyes so tight they hurt, trying to conjure up a memory of my mum. Many came, but I knew each one was an invention. A wisp of blonde curls, the smell of a fresh perfume, elegant piano fingers brushing the handle of my pram, all invented. Easier to remember was my dad: the handsome Jack the Lad who only looked like a kid himself. I recalled his dimples, his rockabilly quiff, held tight with shiny Brylcreem – a half-used tub still sat on the window ledge in the bathroom. Hands like baseball gloves. And the gentle rise and fall of his soft Liverpool lilt. I tried to picture him with my mum. I saw nothing.

  A new TV programme had recently started called Surprise Surprise. (Though Nan called it ‘Surprise surprise, Cilla’s still got a Liverpool accent’.) Before it aired, they ran adverts on the telly asking people to come forward if they wanted to trace members of their family they’d lost touch with. Before I could even open my mouth to say, ‘Hey, I could try and find my mum!’ Nan fixed me with a steely stare and said:

  ‘Don’t even think about it, Kathleen. She was a bad ’un, a wrong ’un. She’ll bring nothing but pain to your life, believe you me.’

  And then she switched over to All Creatures Great And Small. And laughed as the ancient vet who we were meant to think was young and swarthy got pulled around by a cow in a field of dung. All over again.

  ‘Have you got any homework tonight, love?’

  ‘English. But I said I’d go round to Adam’s to do it.’

  She could see I was wolfing the egg and chips down, desperate to get over there.

  ‘You’ve got yolk on your nose.’

  ‘Oh.’ I wiped it away with my sleeve. This often happened. My nose was, let’s just say, a bit on the big side. Some of the nastier kids said that when I stood in front of the sun, there was an eclipse. Others shouted, ‘Put your torches on, Kathleen’s walking down the street!’ I just tried to let it wash over me. But it was hard.
r />   ‘And anyway, you can’t go just yet. I’ve got you a lime mousse for your pudding.’

  Sometimes finishing Nan’s meals was like finishing a marathon. And by that I didn’t mean the chocolate bar.

  ‘Great.’

  I scraped up the last blobs of egg yolk with the less burnt chips I’d saved till the last – always save the best till last with food – revealing the familiar painting of Jesus looking quite confused on the cross, as well he might be. I jumped up to wash my dishes.

  ‘I’ll do that, love,’ Nan said kindly. It always worked. If I wanted her to wash up I just had to start it myself. If I didn’t offer, she’d be all, ‘Those plates won’t wash themselves, Kathleen.’

  ‘Get your lovely lime mousse out of the fridge. I’ll get Jesus clean. I got John the Baptist, look.’

  She pointed to the draining board, where her now clean plate was drying. It featured a man with a bubble perm coming out of what looked like a municipal swimming pool, but was probably a lake. I was never sure the artwork on Nan’s plates was really that good.

  I went to the fridge and yanked open the door, bending over to peer in. I saw no mousse. ‘There’s no mousse in here, Nan.’

  ‘There is. There on the top shelf.’

  I looked. On the top shelf sat a plastic holder with a grid on the front and green gunk behind it. I pulled it out. It had ‘Glade Homefresh’ emblazoned on the back of it.

  ‘Nan, this isn’t lime mousse. It’s lime-scented air freshener.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh God. That’ll teach me to go shopping without my specs on. I bet the fridge smells nice.’

  I sniffed. ‘Mm. Dead limey.’

  ‘Sure you can’t eat it?’

  ‘Positive, Nan.’

  And she made a disappointed sound. A bit like when she thought Prisoner: Cell Block H was on, but she’d got the wrong night.

  It was safe to say Nan was not the best cook in the world. Though that’s not to say that she never tried to be experimental. She did. I’ll never forget the night I came home from school and she announced we’d be having Pisa (she meant pizza): how she took great delight in theatrically drawing the grill pan out of the oven, only to reveal that not only had she grilled the frozen pizzas, but she’d left the plastic wrapping on as well.

  Today, however, the upside of not having any pudding meant I could get round to Adam’s quicker than I’m imagined. I threw a few school books in a plastic bag, along with my make-up bag, and went out.

  The street I grew up in felt like the longest street in the world. Stand at one end of Alderson Road and you could only just make out the other end. On hot days the horizon seemed to bubble away like a mirage. We lived at 357 and we were only halfway down, that’ll give you an idea of how long it was. Although the length made it feel, to me at least, extraordinary, it was undeniably very ordinary. Identikit red-brick terrace after red-brick terrace punctuated by religiously named streets, side alleys, the occasional more modern building where a bomb had dropped in the war; it was a street full of colour and noise. Walking along the pavements you could see into everyone’s front rooms, and almost touch them – a walk down Alderson Road was a treat for the senses. You smelt a different dinner every four paces, heard a different TV show too. The wallpaper and furniture flashed by like someone flicking a deck of cards, each one more garishly coloured than the last. Front doors were open with kids dashing in and out, phones rang, kettles whistled, voices rowed, voices laughed, babies cried and dogs whined and barked. It was the place that I called home.

  Our biggest claim to fame was that a few years previously Alderson Road had been featured in the TV series Boys from the Blackstuff, as they’d filmed an episode in one of the houses. A camera crew had moved in and the family who lived there, rumour had it, had been sent to live in the poshest hotel in Liverpool for a few weeks, the Adelphi. This had caused quite a bit of jealousy on the street. Nan had said, ‘Blimey, if they send you to live in the Adelphi they can film what they like in ours.’ But then when the series had come out and the episode had shown a family living below the breadline, Nan had claimed, ‘No wonder they didn’t want to film in our place. We’re a cut above.’ Even though we weren’t.

  I couldn’t wait to get round to Adam’s because he’d been saving for ages and ages and ages and had finally bought himself the Alison Moyet LP that had been in the charts for a looooong time but none of us thus far had been able to afford. We were going to lounge around on bean bags, just the two of us, doodling and chatting, and him giving me advice on my make-up while we listened to Alf.

  The other thing we were going to do, and he’d told me this earlier that day in Geography while Mrs Maneers was having an asthma attack, was he was going to unveil some Very Important News about this year’s nativity play. One thing that we did together, apart from being in the same class at school and being best mates, was we were both members of the local church choir. I know that doesn’t sound trendy or cool, and it wasn’t something we’d broadcast massively, but we enjoyed ourselves and treated it as one big excuse to have a laugh. We went to the local protestant church, St Thomas’s, which had a congregation of about three and a vicar, Mr English, who was on his last legs. If he took too long a pause in his sermon we always had to peer round to the pulpit just to check he hadn’t gone and died on us. The church itself was a few streets away from Alderson Road on some wasteland left over from the war – which the council were always trying to buy, but the church remained steadfast in its opposition. Even if the numbers in the choir outnumbered those in the pews. Sometimes I wanted to leave the choir, but I knew I would miss my Sundays spent with Adam. And besides, even though she rarely went to church herself, my nan would never have sanctioned it.

  Dorothy’s Sweet Shop sat on the corner of Alderson and Cardigan Road. Or as the locals called it, Cardy Road. Although it was called a sweet shop and sold a zillion old-fashioned sweets in row upon row of quaint Victorian jars, it was also a newsagent’s, and as such was open all the hours God sent.

  I pushed the door open. The shop was empty but for Adam’s mum Dorothy sat behind the counter, curlers in, engrossed in a well-thumbed copy of Flowers in the Attic, a half-chewed liquorice shoelace hanging from her mouth.

  ‘Hiya Dorothy!’ I called as I barged through to the back of the shop and the door that led up to Adam’s flat.

  ‘Hi Kathleen. How’s your nan?’

  ‘She’s great.’

  ‘Oh good.’ Dorothy sounded relieved, as if Nan’s life had been hanging in the balance, and even though I knew that Nan would, at some point today, have been into the shop to pick up a couple of pints of milk. And Dorothy, although conveying a keen interest in the welfare of my nan, hadn’t looked up from her book once. The hand that wasn’t holding her book reached up and adjusted her bra strap. She then looked like she’d remembered something important.

  ‘Hey. Kathleen,’ she said, like I’d just walked in and this was a new conversation.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is your dad home again?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Oh. No reason.’

  But she looked like she did have a reason – why else would she say anything so bizarre? How could my dad be back? If he was back, he’d be home with me. And he wasn’t.

  ‘Why, Dorothy?’

  ‘Oh, something and nothing.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Someone said they’d seen him on the wasteland the other day. I said it was probably just someone who looked like him.’

  I wished I could find someone who looked like my dad. That sounded kind of nice.

  ‘No. He’s not back.’

  Dorothy nodded. ‘Doppelganger, then.’

  What was she talking about German sausages for?

  ‘That book any good, Dorothy?’ I asked, trying to steer her away from her new-found fresh meat obsession.

  She slammed the book on the counter, like she was glad to be back on dry
land, talking about something she was an expert on. ‘Oh, Kathleen, it’s incredible. It’s about these four kids locked up in an attic by their wicked grandmother.’

  ‘Realistic, then.’ The sarcasm in my voice was obvious.

  ‘Well. Between you, me and the gatepost . . . it’s only what they say goes on at 53 Cardy Road.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. No-one’s seen the granddad for years. Rumour has it, her with the hatchet face keeps him locked up upstairs coz he’s gone doolally.’

  ‘D’you think it’s true?’

  ‘I hear moaning of a night sometimes. You know, I sleep something terrible, Kathleen. And if it’s a hot night and I’ve got the sash up, it’s amazing what I can hear in the early hours. Did you know we’ve got foxes living round here?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘They cry. In the night. And they sound like dead babies.’

  ‘What do dead babies sound like?’

  ‘Foxes.’

  ‘But don’t dead . . . babies . . . or people . . . don’t they just . . . not make any noise?’ I was confused. As well I might be.

  ‘Well, you’d think, wouldn’t you?’ Dorothy looked like she was confused now. ‘But as I always say, Kathleen . . .’

  ‘Aha?’

  ‘It all goes on round here, I’m telling you.’

  And then she picked the book up again, licked her forefinger, flicked a page brusquely and carried on reading. Which I took to be her way of saying this conversation was over.

  Nan said Dorothy’s gossip was always right. Could Dad really be out of prison? No. No way. Like she said, it was someone who looked like him. But were that family on Cardy Road keeping their granddad locked up in the attic because he’d lost the plot? How would they benefit from this?

  Nan often said I was prone to flights of fancy. I struggled, usually, to understand what this meant. But as I left the shop and climbed the narrow staircase to the flat above, I wound myself up into a dramatic frenzy that less than twenty feet away from us, a man was being held hostage against his will. Oh my giddy aunt! What if it was my dad?! The thought was too much to bear. By the time I hit the top step I practically kicked the door in and stumbled into the flat, screaming, ‘Oh my God I can’t breathe I’m so SCARED!’