YOU TRACE IT ALL back to £5 worth of Woolworth’s vouchers you don’t spend for a year.
You eventually get Bucks Fizz on cassette because Look-in gave it 10/10. You sing along with the wooden end of the skipping rope in front of the full-length mirror in your mum’s bedroom. Stars in your eyes. Little one. Where do you go to dream? To a place, we all know. The land of make believe. You are Cheryl Baker. You only learn the words to her parts. You paint your nails the colour of a goldfish, just like Cheryl Baker. Oonagh Macnamara, who’s as fat as her name, says it looks like you’ve been smoking. Dirty fagger, she says and gets everyone to chant—Dirty fagger, dirty fagger—and no one will sit next to you because you stink of fags. So you sit on a desk that juts out on a table for four like the fifth member. ‘Everyone knows that the best groups are always a four,’ says Oonagh. The Fab Four. Abba. Bucks Fizz. ‘You’re just the groupie,’ she says. ‘And everyone knows why they’re with the band.’ And those are her mother’s words as you’ll come to know that this is what girls do.
Mum says you can use her nail varnish remover but don’t use all the cotton wool. Both cost money. Everything, you remember, costs money. Even Mum. Her nail varnish remover smells like pear drops and stings at where you’ve chewed at the skin around your thumbs. You sing ‘My Camera Never Lies’ with the wooden end of the skipping rope in front of the full-length mirror in your mum’s bedroom until your mum flicks the trip and plunges the house into quiet. Your tea is on the table. You never do as you’re told and you’re the oldest, Dee. Set an example because I’ve got to go to work. And as she puts on her lipstick like she’s chewing a wasp she tells you again: You’re too clever for your own good and you’re wasting it already because Cheryl Baker isn’t even Cheryl Baker. Her real name’s Rita Crudgington and don’t ever forget who you are.
You are nine years old. You have a birthday party and invite all the girls from your class. Pass the parcel. Pin the tail on the donkey. Musical bumps, because the house is too small for musical chairs. And you don’t have enough chairs anyway. Oonagh Macnamara gives you a birthday card and no present. Inside the card it says I do not like you and I do not like your house, it smells. Love Oonagh. She watches your cheeks burn as you read it. The picture on the front is of Victoria Plum. She tells you it’s a card for babies and you think she’s so cool and wish you could be best friends. She sits on the edge of your settee with her arms folded. Pass the parcel is for babies. Musical bumps is for babies, and why haven’t you invited any boys? Then she flounces towards the stereo and demands: What’s this crap? You tell her it’s Bucks Fizz and sing: If you can’t stand the heat, keep out of the kitchen. If you can’t stand the cold, don’t sleep on the floor. She wants to see your bedroom so you show her.
You share a bedroom with your two sisters Sasha, who’s five, and Colette, who’s not yet four. You have three beds all in row with Care Bear duvet covers that you are too old for. It goes Funshine, Daydream and Love-a-lot bear. You sleep with your duvet cover inside out and tell your sisters stories about a bluebird called Bryony who’s Welsh and slightly deaf. You can’t remember if you told those stories with a Welsh accent, just that when it got to the parts when Bryony misheard something—‘Trump, sir? Bluebirds don’t trump! Oh dump! Yes, I agree. It’s a right dump round here’—both your sisters would kill themselves laughing because according to them you are the funniest person in the world.
According to Oonagh you’re the filthiest person in the world. ‘And you’ve had the same trainers for ages,’ she says, slamming the door on her way out.
Later, Mum asks why your trainers are in the bin. You blame Sasha and Sasha blames Colette. Sasha gets shouted at and bawls. So does Colette. You lock yourself in the bathroom and clean your teeth until your gums bleed and your toothbrush looks like you’ve been scrubbing drains.
Mrs Chew, your teacher, introduces you to the Reverend Chew, her husband, who gives you a copy of the Holy Bible. The cover is made of white satin wallpaper and the words ‘Holy Bible’ are stitched in silver. Inside, on the front page, someone has written ‘I shall never question who I am’. It’s only now that you realise what a grand percentage of your life you have wasted in doing exactly that, but turn that house upside down and you will never find that bible. That is gone too.
When you are ten you are still the eldest of three. It goes Mum, you, Sasha and Colette. You are doing your maths homework. Your mum says: if one man has two apples and another has three, and as your mum counts the apples you count the men. Then she tells you that you’re getting a new baby for Christmas which will make you five. You yell, ‘How? Why?’ but that’s another thing your mum says you’re too young to understand.
So you tell her that you do understand because Oonagh Macnamara has drawn you a picture in your maths book: a stick-man with a line between his legs that pokes at a stick-lady’s tuppence. You’ve told Oonagh that everyone knows that babies come out of your bellybutton which unravels and opens up like a flower, but Oonagh pointed to the stick and said, ‘A million of them have poked your mum.’ She also tells you that there’s no Santa and no tooth fairy and that’s why you’ve got such disgusting yellow teeth, ‘Hooker spawn,’ is what she said.
The new baby arrives on Christmas Eve so Christmas gets all forgotten. You only eat Quality Street because Santa got to your house last and had run out of wrapping paper and new tellies. You get Bucks Fizz Greatest Hits which you play on repeat. Side 1. Side 2. Side 1 again. Your mum calls the new baby Iona without asking any of you if that’s OK. You never get told who her dad is, though Iona asks and asks and all through her life until she and Mum stop speaking completely and she doesn’t even come to the funeral. But you know it’s not your dad or Sasha’s dad because you’ll never meet them, and it can’t be Colette’s because he’ll be in prison soon for robbing your old telly. So it goes Mum, you, Sasha, Colette and Iona, and you do not get that battery-operated toothbrush for Christmas even though it was the only thing on your list.
You’re leaving school for the next one. You have to go and see the headmaster, Mr Aliss, and your mum is sat in his office wearing a man’s overcoat and you hope that she’s got more than underwear on underneath. You instantly think your nan’s died. She’s in a home called Cheddleton that you tell no one about because it’s the funny farm. When you go she tells you that you should care for nothing but boys and petticoats and calls you our Ruthie which you’re not. She squeezes your hand so tight all your knuckles go white and says, ‘They’re robbing me, Ruthie. They think I don’t know. But I do. They’re robbing me blind.’ And even though you’re not our Ruthie, because that’s your mum, and your nan has nothing to rob because her room is bare and just white, you tell her that you’ll take her home where she can squeeze in with you and one of the nurses has to come and prise your fingers from hers.
So you offer to leave school and look after her. Mum looks at Mr Aliss and goes, ‘What! With your brains? Are you mad?’ But you’re not mad, not ever, and you’re not a troublemaker either or ever going to turn out like Mum. You’re not entirely sure what it is you do that the other girls don’t like but you tell Mr Aliss, ‘I’m trying really hard not to be clever.’
Mr Aliss says you’ve one hour to do the exam. He makes you do it in a classroom all on your own. The clock on the wall is MASSIVE and it ticks even LOUDER and you write in time to the tick and the tock, the tick and the tock, and when you’ve finished you realise that you’ve written most of your answers in rhyme. And they seem to be the right answers too.
The next headmaster you meet walks with a stick and says it’s going to be super. You have to meet him on Tuesday for a look around the new school and as you wait for Tuesday to arrive, Sasha has to tell you a million times that it’s not a hospital, you won’t be getting a stick and you’re not going mad, and don’t you get it? Not only are you the funniest person in the world, but the brainiest too.
You start the Grammar School with a briefcase and Rick Astley on your walls. You’ve won a scholarship to be here and your uniform’s second hand. You’ve been given a briefcase by your mum and your sisters because that’s what they think girls in private schools on scholarships have. You sneak out of school one dinnertime and run into town to buy a pump-bag with a month’s worth of pocket money you’ve been saving up. You keep this pump-bag in your briefcase and transfer all your books and pens into it when you get to school. Then you roll up your skirt and leave the briefcase in the senior cloakroom because you’re sick of the girls calling you ‘briefcase’.
‘Oi, briefcase!’ they go, and don’t pick you for their netball team even though you’ve been given a county trial. So you make mistakes in your homework so you only get a C, and collect Grolsch bottle tops from pub bins so you can wear them on your Docs like Bros. ‘But you don’t even like Bros,’ says Bryony Bluebird, and you’re surprised to hear her voice because you’d thought you’d lost her for good. You still make Sasha buy the Bros album with her Christmas money and keep it in your pumpbag so that every now and then you can let it fall to the floor and everyone can see that you’re just like them. You also keep hoping that the briefcase will get stolen, but it doesn’t because your mum’s a slag and shit breeds shit and scum like you from down the Abbey have no place being at a school like this. So you spend a lot of time hiding in that senior cloakroom with your briefcase because that way you won’t speak with your fists.
You don’t really fancy Rick Astley. You only put his poster up because you’ve got to fancy someone and, according to Libby Lymer, use your tongue. So you stick Rick Astley over your Bucks Fizz posters but only with Blu Tack so you don’t spoil them because everything costs money. Even Mum. Then you try and sit next to Libby Lymer because she has the most beautiful set of felt tips you have ever seen. ‘Tits?’ says Bryony Bluebird. ‘I’m a bluebird not a tit!’ and your sisters kill themselves laughing as you cuddle up as four, because your mum works at a gentleman’s club now and has bought you two double beds with her tips.
You and Libby Lymer are best mates. She takes you up town and introduces you to Ant. He asks what you do and you say you go to school durrr! and he says, ‘No. What will you do?’ Because slags breed slags and ‘If you won’t do it with me, your mum will,’ he says. So you punch him in the kidneys and then run for your life which was also the one Bucks Fizz song you never liked.
You do a silly thing to fit in. You let on to Libby Lymer that your mum works at the Velvet Rope. You’re in Libby’s bedroom listening to INXS at the time and she has a life-size poster of Michael Hutchence on her wall. Heart-throbs, your mum would say. Think of them as heart-throbs. Everyone has one of them on their walls.
Because that’s what Mum had said after you’d met that man coming down the stairs. You’d got home in time to meet him coming down your stairs and you’d been struck by how ordinary he was. A man just in jeans and a shirt and shoes; he was wearing brown lace-up shoes. He didn’t flinch when he saw you. Walked straight past you and out of the door as if you weren’t there at all. Perhaps you weren’t. It’s possible that you’ve made that up too.
Libby Lymer chucks a camera at you, whips off her top and poses in front of Michael Hutchence’s crotch. It’s a Polaroid camera, and the Polaroid that comes out is blurred because your hands were shaking and you weren’t really looking through the lens. So you’re instructed to snap her again, and again, until there’s no Polaroids left and Libby gives you the best one and tells you to give it to your mum to take to the Velvet Rope in case it’s good enough for Page 3: because don’t you know that Page 3 girls earn shitloads? And if you’re too scared to say what you want, you won’t ever get what you want. ‘That’s what Madonna says,’ she says.
But you don’t give the Polaroid to your mum and keep it in your briefcase instead so no one from the Velvet Rope ever calls Libby Lymer. And because you’ve let her down, she tells a teacher that you’ve a topless photograph of her and your briefcase is searched and the Polaroid found.
All the while you got asked all those questions you sung ‘My Camera Never Lies’ in your head and you tell them that there’s nothing worth lying for. Except for Mum. Which you do: ‘She’s a hairdresser,’ you say, ‘who cuts men’s hair.’
You become fascinated by Page 3 girls after that and start to collect them like stamps. You’re fascinated by Linda, by Melinda, Samantha, Maria, their beauty, their guts, the size of their pearls, and you have three full scrapbooks by the time social services confiscate them, and you never see them again. All you ask is that they keep them protected like you have done, those girls. ‘They need protecting,’ is all you will say.
The social worker is called Mrs Incavich and when she talks her mouth barely moves. You lie down in the passenger seat of her car so no one sees you and she also drives a Skoda. You’re not allowed to go to anyone’s house after school and so Mrs Incavich drives you in and drives you home. And though you’ve said, and said again, that Libby Lymer made you do it because she wanted to be on Page 3, they’re worried about your fascination with boobs. You try and explain that it’s nothing to do with the boobs. You kind of get that bit.
Your new bedroom is so big you can cry yourself to sleep and not be heard. Sylvia and John—they’re alright, you suppose—say you can stay as long as you like and your sisters come on Saturdays but go to their new homes on Sundays, and sometimes you all get to see Mum and go home. ‘We’ll get through this,’ says Mum, when you have to say goodbye. ‘And you will go to university, Dee.’ Which you do.
Because Sylvia and John know someone who knows someone whose husband is a professor and you are sent to see him to see just how good you are, but the questions he asks you to answer are bizarre. They’re not normal questions like ‘Discuss the historical importance of the Bayeux Tapestry’ and you ask if you have the right paper. The professor tells you it’s a test of your thinking skills and that if we don’t find new thinkers we’ll never be able to think the world otherwise. So you go back to the paper and write about your own tapestry. You realise just how little of your life is actually yours and how so much of it doesn’t belong to you. You share that part with Sasha and all of that with Colette and some of that with Iona and most of it with Mum, and though you remember the men that used to come and go and come and go, how your mum reassured you that they never used your bed, you cannot understand why a woman who’s a mother—your mum—would ever want to go any further than Page 3.
You call your essay ‘The Land of Make Believe’ and you write it in pencil because pencil doesn’t last. You don’t ever get told if you’ve passed or if you’d made any spelling mistakes. Just that there was a place for you. Everything paid. And you go, just shy of your eighteenth birthday. Four A levels already in the bag.
~
You leave for Cambridge with a holdall, an attitude and acne so bad you’re on medication that makes you weep. You use make-up from the Avon catalogue that your mum buys on tick and, though it tones down the embarrassment, it doesn’t hide you away. Colette says you’ll never get a boyfriend looking like you’re part of a fry-up but Sasha tells you not to mind. ‘She’s just going to miss you,’ she says. ‘You’re our big sister Dee.’
Sasha says she won’t miss you. ‘I’m too old for all that,’ she says and won’t even give you a hug. But when you get to Cambridge and open your holdall you find that she’s put a £5 Woolworth’s voucher in a good luck card for a ‘trigonometry set or something’ that you don’t ever spend.
You last six months at Cambridge. You read Greer and Rich and De Beauvoir and Plath. You’re appalled when Greer instructs you to taste your own blood; furious with Plath, for giving in, for giving up, for putting up with Ted, at their bleating, their squawking at the tyranny of the dick, and you stand up in a lecture and say, ‘It’s not being other to man that’s the problem. It’s other women and those who have no choice.’
The lecturer asks you to expand on that: she’s particularly interested in your use of the word ‘choice’, which she warns you must not use flippantly. So you say, ‘I can if I’m the daughter of a prostitute,’ and, as everyone gapes, you push all those silly books to the floor and leave.
You hitch-hike to a service station and get talking to a woman who’s going north. It’s a three-hour drive and you talk all the way and say more than you’ve ever said in your life. You tell her that your mum’s been a hooker for as long as you can remember but you don’t ever talk about it, you’re not a family of women programmed to talk about it, so you don’t know why she does it or how she does it, just that you knew not to ask any questions and tell many lies. ‘We’re all just products of sex,’ you tell the woman who’s going north. ‘And everyone knows that sex sells.’
After she’s dropped you at the bus station, you find a café and order tea like a grown-up and think of your mum and your nan. You think of them as a mum and a daughter and then as two little girls playing mummies in the park. You have never asked your mum anything of her life. That all you have ever wanted to know is that she is mum to you, to Sasha, to Colette and Iona and that there’s men, plenty of men, who come and go and come and go, and you’ve never had the bottle to ask her why: Why, Mum? Why is sex your job?
So you buy a bottle of Buck’s Fizz as a joke and decide you will ask her today. She’s surprised to see you but she opens the bottle anyway because she’s an interview at four—‘Nothing fancy, just answering the phones’—and as she chinks your glass and asks why you’re here you realise that answering the phones is a demotion. That there are other girls now—younger, prettier, more in demand—and though she hasn’t been entirely discarded, her body’s become cheaper and old.
So you tell her you will apply for the jobs—secretarial, receptionist, checkout—and then give them to her. She slugs down her Buck’s Fizz as if it were tea and says, ‘I’m still a woman, Dee. I’m still working as a woman and I still want to be a woman and it is still happening.’ And because she thinks you don’t understand, she adds, ‘Being a woman has been my job in this life and like anyone who’s worked hard at their job, I, too, am good at it.’ And when you open your mouth to protest that you do understand, that womanhood and motherhood are jobs in themselves, she shushes you with her fingers and beckons you to the stereo to press play. ‘This is your chance to be somebody else, Dee,’ she says. ‘So don’t go and spoil it by not being you.’
‘I’m not a baby any more,’ is what you said. ‘You might see carnality as your job, but if you think objectifying yourself for men makes us equal then you live in a land of make believe.’
You’d pressed fast forward on that tape player and held it down until Bucks Fizz’s Greatest Hits unspooled.
You go back to Cambridge and do all that you’re told. You date no men—though there is one who keeps your lipstickstained fag-butts in a tin—and you make few friends, none of whom you’re ever straight with. You become outraged by the cavorting on the telly, by the skew-whiff feminism that has rag-clad pop stars talk of sexual choices and empowering their desires by skimping on their clothes. You’re appalled by posters of padded-out Wonderbras, revolted by Madonna’s Sex, and you write and write to Linda, to Melinda, to Samantha and Maria and urge them to put a stop to Page 3. We want role models not models, you write. And it’s not ever about the boobs because you get that bit. Your dissertation opens with the 1981 Eurovision song contest and you ask who really won after Cheryl Baker’s skirt got ripped off? And though you get a first and an MA scholarship which you take and then a PhD offer which you decline, because what you want to discuss has no theory, you tell your mum none of this because she can’t be part of your world if you’re ever going to make it as you.
She writes only once to tell you that you’ve broken her heart, and inside the card is the little gold locket that she’s stopped wearing to give to you. You look at it and want your own locket. One that hasn’t been around anyone’s neck. You think of the amount of hands that have held it, the value it no longer has, and so you put it back into the envelope and reseal it, post it back with the words: ‘Why couldn’t you buy me a new one? Something that’s for me and just from you.’ But you never get a reply, just as you never would admit that what you hated most about university was that little room of your own and all that space to yourself.
Some time after Cambridge, you travel alone to New Zealand—it’s as far away as you can possibly get—and you’re over on the baggage by 16kg. You have your cards read by a woman called Maureen Fitzpatrick who does you a reading at her dining-room table as if it’s the most normal thing to do in the world. She holds your hand and tells you that whatever’s in your head does not rule your heart and that if you can’t forgive then forget. She tells you to write it all down in a letter and burn it on a clean white saucer with a new white candle and that what you are doing here was not at all what you were after. Then she flips over a tarot card and says she can see you buying cushion covers with your mum. ‘Homemaking,’ she says. ‘Settling down, putting down roots.’ You call her a charlatan and leave.
The next day you join a coach tour of the North Island because you’d always wanted to walk on the Ninety Mile Beach. You do so with a girl called Jen who was born in Ripon but moved to Brazil when she was twenty-one because she used to lie awake at night thinking of all those parties going on in Copacabana without her. By the time you had to get back on the coach you still had eighty-nine miles to go with Jen still trying to convince you that you were more likely to lie on your deathbed wishing you’d had more sex than none at all.
You take a job in a shoe shop for a while. Women customers mainly, those who shopped for their better halves by saying, ‘Oh I know his shoe size by wearing his slippers to the dustbin.’ You catch the bus home to the wrong side of Auckland and only have to look at everyone’s shoes in order to judge their lives feet up. Though you make a point of spitting on every brown lace-up you see.
You fly home shortly after and start to write your letters which you decide you should not burn. Instead, you send them to a publisher because if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em and sex, after all, sells.
Later, much later, when Bryony Bluebird is a franchise about the rise and fall of a call girl who did it all for the girls in her life, you brush your teeth with a newfangled electronic toothbrush that’s been designed by a Harley Street orthodontist especially for you. And though you and the orthodontist are dating and you’re trying ever so hard to finally have sex, you neither make the date nor finish brushing your teeth because that’s your sister on the phone with the news that you’ve been dreading.
Sasha wears black. Colette’s in jeans and Iona doesn’t turn up. In the front pew it goes writer, secretary, psychiatric nurse, and if Iona was here, nanny, because you’re defined by each other and shaped by your past and you all do what women will do. You cry not for your mother or because she was just fifty-nine, but because not one of those men came to mourn her.
‘Who was she?’ you ask as the coffin disappears, and Sasha shrugs and says, ‘Well who are you?’ because she never knows what to put on your Christmas cards. ‘Are you Bryony still Delilah or what?’ And you tell her ‘My other, like you’re another,’ and that she who is weakened by men becomes her own downfall. Sasha just laughs and reaches for your hand. ‘Let her rest in peace, Dee,’ she says. ‘She was just a happy hooker, that’s all.’
You pay for an extra week’s rent because you can’t bear clearing out your mother so quickly. But you don’t need the extra week because your mother didn’t have anything to leave. So you take the bus up to Cheddleton because you’ve got the job of telling your nan. She says, ‘It’s a mother’s greatest fear, their child going before them,’ and you watch her shrink into the armchair she never leaves and puzzle over her hands.
‘Are these mine?’ she asks. ‘Because mine were ever so beautiful. First thing a man would say was what lovely hands I had. I’d say, “Well, there’s the price list, duckie, so where can you afford these lovely hands to go?”’ And you watch her hoot with laughter. ‘You live off men whether you like it or not, Ruthie,’ she carries on. ‘So pity the mother not the whore.’
You take a taxi home and stand in front of the full-length mirror in your mum’s bedroom, that little gold locket still fast about your neck. There’s no skipping rope and no Bucks Fizz but you use your thumb and know all the words. You notice your thumb is bleeding from where you’ve chewed at the skin and as you look for cotton wool you realise there never was any scholarship. It was you who cost the money: Mum who betrayed you all for money, then had the nerve to call you Delilah. But then there is no ‘I’ in being women. Only we, and never you, and so you lie on your mum’s bed and trace it all back: to £5 worth of Woolworth’s vouchers you don’t spend for a year.