IN THE WOODS IN the dusk the Didsbury lad was just for her. But when he spoke Jan was surprised to be sad he said nowt worth hearing. Nowt was happening, except the usual – never mind the lad, who could be white or wog; her age or older; rougher, or posher like this one – and the usual was never enough. She would finish with him, there, in the woods in the dusk after their second tryst; Jan Dodds was no timewaster. Shame though there was nowt in his eyes but moving light from cars beyond the silvered trees and the whispering canal. Or in his daft voice, which he had scuffed up for her but could not unsweeten. Not in the gorgeous halfsight of him. Not inside her, either. Nowt burned in secret. What Jan had instead was dead easy to find and she would give it this one gladly: settle for his heat, his smell, his weight against her heart. Whichever the lad, Jan was after those things and caught them, first cast. Jan stood up some of them on the second go. Even the older lads. She might’ve done that today, if she hadn’t had other places she’d been told to be: the classroom, the kitchen, the pew. Sod them. Sod Kelly. Sod the welcome home do. After Poundswick hot dinners she’d suck anyowt to swap the taste, eat anywhere except Fellside Road.

They’d tramped the dry mud of the canal bank, flattened grass over Millgate Fields, Alice Willows trailing them – with two satchels on one shoulder – docile, shrugging off three of his mates feeding her vodka. And now at dusk the mates had given up and gone and the woods and earth smell were in Jan’s hair and clothes and it pleased her.

She wasn’t cold or afraid. Backed against flaky bark shedding into her knickers, her school tights to the knee.

The Didsbury lad pawed her, dithered, his nose stabbing her eyelid.

Breathing him, Jan scanned the gloom one-eyed, sensing the paler lines of a girl against the next tree. Alice drifted closer. Their satchels dropping. Her uniform shone apparent while the wood was silhouetting in the last crumb of light, as if the new dark not the dying day were keeping her solid.

Jan clenched what the Didsbury lad offered; he swore like a dormouse and undid his pants blind.

More headlamps made them. This light didn’t find Alice. Jan looked but the trees had changed and blocked the thread. Jan’s white thighs glowed, then didn’t. Glowed. Then didn’t. He touched them, afraid.

‘Ay, Alice, he’s all yours you know after this. If you fancy him.’

‘. . .Fuck off,’ the Didsbury lad said and kissed her.

‘It’s not even in!’

‘Yerrit is!’

Jan stopped him rushing. ‘Oi, give it here, you.’

He was broad and skinny. A bit older though not as old as he’d said. As she put it in she wanted to laugh but it would push him back out and end it there and she didn’t want that yet.

His fingers did guesswork. He dragged her skin but when she bristled he rubbed lighter, and with pressure and pace half learned she had him conduct her, had him collect their heat – letting it run onto his thumb. Both her eyes stayed open; his scared shut.

Ordinary feeling returned to her piecemeal, even before he’d finished.

He pulled out already shooting –

smear-shot the rest on her right thigh, which glowed in the next wash of headlamps crossing the canal –

leaving her chilly but too proud to cover up straight away. She wanted him to see the lovely mess they’d made but he wasn’t bold enough to admire what he’d done.

Behind his back she gave Alice a thumbs-up in the ghostlight. She knew when it came to a shag Alice either would or wouldn’t and no amount of plying or pressure decided for her, which couldn’t be said for owt else; Alice let Jan rule her; the girl was meek and mild in every way but appearance and had none of Jan’s gobbing fire, and was immune to it even, and never caught from her a contact flame, not even after all their budding years living in each other’s pockets. Yet Alice could be unreachable in sickening ways. A natural with secrets, decisions unshared: like the school morning she clippered her hair off beginning a spate of Poundswick suspensions successfully appealed by her mam Bev. And the ten piercings needled in Affleck’s Palace. Jan had been blind to the truths of this transfiguration until a January Saturday last year when she had seen Alice waiting cold at the bus stop full-formed. A grade three and slathered kohl and tangled earrings that winked like fishing lure. Alice’s mouldy bedroom got re-postered with shite bands that she sung to the tropical fish in her front room as she nosed their tank, the breathed-on glass mucked with crisp salt, makeup. The way biddies spoke to babies Alice spoke to earthworms, garden spiders, not just cats and dogs. Even Bev’s own dog, Bully: a staffie like Joey’s, but which barked forever and chewed their unstarted homework and shoplifted clothes. (It hated the stink of blokes Bev said, which was maybe why it always went for Jan.) Alice had even had a terrapin for a few hours which Jan had traded off a ginger mong in the year below after he told them his cousins would tie it to a balloon. Ginger wanted to cop a feel at break but Alice changed her mind behind the science mobiles, and so Jan took her place. (This was just after Jan’s house got dawnraided, when her brother got pinched. This was before she had a term off from Poundswick, when the lasses that she’d thumped and robbed and nicked fellers from for a day or two would spread word that she’d been up the duff all summer because of one night with a Longsight nigger.) Come hometime Ginger gave them the terrapin in a crushed shoebox. But as they dozed in Painswick Park by the pond, the terrapin ate its way out and went swimming. They’d been lain on their fronts, Alice talking her dreams and Jan tracing a scab on her elbow with a blade of grass. Jan had plucked a dandelion and rolled it, juicing it, till the scab perfumed and stained. When Alice saw her doing this she stopped talking. They sat up together. Jan spotted the terrapin as it plopped in the pond. Alice, checking the empty shoebox, seemed almost glad, but cried later, at her mam’s. Bev just laughed when she heard what had happened and said thank God because their staffie would’ve no doubt et it if Alice had got the thing home; and from the backdoor their staffie barked on cue and Jan laughed, laughing more at Bev.

But Alice hadn’t cried in front of Jan since.

Now in the woods her distance from them seemed to close without any movement from her until it’d happened and Alice was right beside her and the Didsbury lad and the rotted tree in that dip of land. Letting herself be led. Her kohl eyes stayed open and upward into his until he turned her and bent her and flipped her skirt – and then looked down at her own scuffed green Kickers, bridged apart beneath her.

‘Is he in?’ Jan said, not dressed.

‘Dunno’ – Alice’s voice flat and her face for a moment lit and not blank-scared or blank-sad but Jan didn’t know what this meant.

Still soft, he spun her hips to try again. Jan cupped his arse, humping away.

‘. . . Fuck off,’ the Didsbury lad said.

Jan cheered him on till it was useless and both girls giggled.

Before he could get his pants up Jan grabbed it. In her sticky palm he squished to nowt, like a dishrag under a hot tap. Alice moved and Jan took her place kissing him away until they almost fell over and had to break for air. ‘She not getting a go then?’

‘Fuck off,’ he said.

But then the two of them were caught inside a yellow-moon net. The Didsbury lad bolting instantly, tripping through bramble. Twig-snaps. His pale arse chased by torchlight.

Jan called into the yellow halo and danced, spotlit, giving two wagging sets of Vs, which she worked into her routine. On a mound of exposed roots near and above them, between slanted, shattered trees, a silhouette watched. Shining them.

Alice jumped her tights up, then lifted their satchels which the torch found for her. Jan pulled Alice’s free arm and ran her right into the halo shouting ‘Have a nice wank!’, both girls floating above tree stumps and blurring under a roof of branches and Jan catching bloke’s fingers filthy on her shoulder before they were free of the woods and the torch and free with their shrieks and weeping laughter across the field and canal bank to the bridge then the road.

‘Am gunna be sick, me,’ Alice said.

‘Least you don’t need us to hold your hair back.’

‘I mean it, Jan.’

‘You’ve not had enough to spew.’

‘It’s all that running.’

Jan veered off into a tiny front garden through its missing gate. She squatted in the dim, pissing out the Didsbury lad. Shrubs with fat teacup flowers gave off a sweetness and hid the girls from each other as liquid staggered from them both – Alice’s slapping the pavement; Jan’s pattering dry soil.

‘So has owt happened yet with you and whatsisname?’

‘. . .No,’ Alice said, her voice thicker: ‘but his mam and dad’ve always been dead nice to me, and our Bully never barks at him.’ The new voice carried like she’d walked on, forgetting Jan wasn’t there.

‘Oh well, that’s it, then. Meant to be. You two might s’well get wed next week. . .’ She finished watering the garden. ‘You know I wouldn’t waste a wank, me, over that lad.’

‘Bet he would. Bet he likes you best.’

‘Nobody likes me best – I’m just easy.’

‘They do like you. Jan, they do.’

‘You’ve had whatsisname living next door to you for donkey’s, right? Goes Poundswick, same year as us. Same everything. And you never looked twice till now?’

‘I have. Just never said.’

‘He’s a no-mark.’

‘You don’t know him.’

‘And that’s how I know.’

Green Kickers, scudding closer again.

When Jan finally rose her thighs for a second seized up like her nana’s. ‘You wanna wear you mam’s stilettos round Civic.’

‘She can’t walk in um neither.’

‘I’ll teach you.’

‘He don’t fancy us.’

‘I’ll knock on for him in the morning before I knock on for you.’

Alice ignored her, said: ‘. . .Who’s he shagged, d’you think?’

‘Just his hand, I bet. Unless he’s had that Sharon.’

‘Sharon who?’

‘Posh bras. Take her tits up to her chin.’

Alice retched again.

‘Look, you’re the one what should hear if he’s dipping his wick. When his mam and dad aren’t in, put your ear to the wall and find out.’

‘He plays his music.’

Jan’s water had gullied the soil and glistened with the upstairs windowlight. The house was pink-cladded, a telly going in the top bedroom. Applause or a gunfight. From somewhere behind the shrubs Alice said, lonely: ‘You gunna keep shagging Mr Somerville then?’

‘Yeah, course.’

‘. . .’

Hopping to dry land, Jan took three empty milk bottles off the porchstep and loaded her satchel, which Alice had carried all day. She returned to a dead street of dark windows, without kiddies playing out, and got spooked by its stillness. Her bag swung as she dodged Alice’s pools on the pavement; the milk bottles clinked on her hip. She undid her bag and bent her torn exercise books to stand the bottles separate, the gaps stuffed. Alice was patiently swaying by herself, head down, ankles together, stage solo under the cut of a lamppost which spotted her without so much as a Cortina parked for the corner stretch of road, so that before Jan reached her Alice seemed to be drifting in outerspace.

‘Please don’t, Jan.’

‘What?’ She caught up and kissed her temple. ‘Sup with you?’

They walked touching. Conquered street after street.

‘Jan, is he really seeing that Sharon?’

‘Whatsisname? Fuck knows.’ Answering, she took a milk bottle and threw it over her shoulder, giving it spin. It smashed on the windscreen of a parked van. Alice turned at the bang and shoved her away but Jan sucked her close again.

Alice stared at her, transmitting nothing.

Jan loved her: even though Alice had become dreary music and jangly tat. The Willows were lapsed Catholics too. Bev had her girlhood rosaries buried in a jewellery box they routinely raided. Jan didn’t care for Slaughter and the Dogs, the Fall, Blue Orchids, the Chameleons or any other noisy whingeing local bobbins that knifed her spirit. She liked Top of the Pops, Mary Jane Girls, Terri Wells, Five Star, and knew Alice did and all. She’d switch off Alice’s two-stack turntable – tape deck missing, a car boot sale find – and tune the radio, after some Prince or D Train. Last week she had done this and Alice had said nowt; stayed lotus on the single bed by the window and watched the shared wall like she could see through it, into whatsisname’s bedroom next door: another gormless lad tugging his prick.

Jan had watched her watch the wall. ‘He’s not even that good-looking. He wants his hair cutting.’

Alice blinked. ‘Sounding like your nana now.’

Jan went over and slapped the shared wall: ‘Oi, knobhead. Do you even know what you’ve got next door? Lucky sod, you are. So get your arse round here and don’t forget your tiny cock—’

Alice had leapt to spike the radio and upset the aerial when she kneed the bed table, scattering pic-n-mix and lashing vodka. Vanity 6 fizzed from the speakers, then blasted. Bully barked downstairs. The bassline made the shared wall come alive. Alice’s new posters warped and shivered, their corners curling off their Blu Tack to flutter like shy insect wings. . .

Now Alice coughed on her shoulder and the midweek night was cold, the houses already asleep. They came to a posh main road with a little traffic but the pavements stayed empty. The set-back houses grew, were lined with high privets. A bus hushed past them; they didn’t know its number. Their stolen clipper cards each had only one ride left, which had to be saved for going town.

‘Freezing now, a’you?’

Without leaving her shoulder, Alice yawned into a nod.

‘Stop. Give us your thumb.’

Alice gave it and Jan posed her into a teapot with her spout to the road. She stood back; a dozen cars went by; Alice yawned at them.

Jan tried instead.

The seventh car pulled in. A greasy frowning woman about her mam’s age wound down the fogged window while the car rattled. The woman had a loose, chestnut perm and spread-out features like a cartoon rabbit – her forehead oily under the cockpit bulb. The other car seats were empty. Jan was only sure the woman was looking at her and not Alice when she cocked her head.

‘Why you young girls cadging lifts round here this time of night?’

‘We’ve to get home, miss.’

‘You two’ve been drinking.’ Her eyes were like frozen peas.

‘Y’what?’

‘Don’t tell lies. Must think I’m daft. Can smell it from here.’

‘With that nose you can.’

The woman sped off, checking her mirrors.

Already Alice had her thumb out again.

 

The dash clock said eleven eleven. Crinkles of smoke patterned the spaces between them till he cracked his window.

‘Give us one.’

He handed Jan a pack of Lamberts and she sparked up with the car’s lighter, then pinched two more and started jabbing buttons on the radio but each gave her static.

‘What do you want on, love?’ he said.

‘Dunno yet, do I?’

He used her fingers to tune the radio, holding them tightly, carefully, not crushing them, said: ‘How’s that?’ – Jocelyn Brown needing you to remember days shared in the sun. He let her go to drum the Granada steering wheel, but his belly didn’t leave much room. Pork skin and grimy nails, long like a woman’s.

He drove slowly on the quiet roads, baring his teeth at her each time he turned right, letting her fiddle with everything. Whenever light swept in she glimpsed the oil-stained roof fabric or the page-three girls papering her footwell. Constellations of silver nuts and screws twinkled around her satchel. A tape measure in the cup holder. Jan tapped her fag ash between her knees, then tried the glovebox.

‘What you doing, you?’ he said.

Fluffy winegums, betting slips and blue johnny wrappers fell out and she found a cut envelope creased shut which he grabbed before she could unfold.

‘Oi, don’t go messing with that.’ He stuffed the envelope down his door pocket. ‘Lad from work left it in there.’

‘Can we not have a bit?’

‘Have a bit of what?’

She slipped her skirt right up and untwisted her tights, fixing the gusset. His glances came quicker.

‘Oi, you’re not a nutter, a’you?’ Jan, wriggling.

‘Am I ’eck.’

‘Some fucking perv.’

‘Listen to that gob.’

‘Who a’you, me dad?’

‘No. But I might know him. What’s his name?’

After a beat she said: ‘Sefton Dodds.’

‘. . .Sefton Dodds? Bloody hell. There’s a name what takes me back. Aye, I know Sefton, yeah. . . His old man, Jim, you had to watch, mind. Had a right temper. Always good with his mitts. Well, they both was. But not seen Sefton for donkey’s. We moved away you see when I got work down south. Worked all over, actually. Before me and the missus moved back. How’s he getting on?’

Jan unshut her legs.

He glanced at them, taking another drag. ‘By God, ay? Sefton bloody Dodds’ – to the road, then to the rearview, tapping the wheel harder, losing ash.

Wake up, Jan mouthed between the front seats.

In the back Alice swayed, kipped. Once last summer Jan had got her so drunk that she slept standing against the outer wall of the Golden Garter on a Friday night that was still day, holding chicken in a basket while they waited for Bev to be chucked out or for their lives to begin, or at least for their legs to be noticed; to be taken for a joyride in a twoc’d Nova by a Magnum-tashed pisshead who was last in line for a Sharston factory job; otherwise Jan and Alice would have to walk Bev home – clasping her from each side to keep her up as she sang the gossip and the grief she’d wrought. Sometimes it was Bev climbing into a Nova, waving them ta-ra.

Headlamps scrolled over them now and for a moment Jan saw Bev’s face atop Alice’s, busying her dreams, and Jan saw through the faces and saw the woods again. Then Alice was wide awake.

The fat bloke coughed and went: ‘Am Bryan, by the way. Shoulda said.’

‘Sharon. That’s our Gina. She’s missing her bed.’

‘Oh. The wife’s name, Gina. Iya, love.’

Jan said: ‘Where was you going?’

‘On me way home,’ he said.

‘To your Gina?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Where we going now?’

‘Wherever. Wherever you want.’

‘Gina? Where d’you wanna go?’

‘Home,’ Alice said.

‘Drop us off Civic.’

He flicked out his cig. ‘What’s matter?’

‘Don’t want your Gina worrying, do we?’

‘Fair dos. Ay, Sharon – remember me to your dad, will you? Say hello for Bryan Banister.’ He touched her thigh for this. When she touched his it was damp. Polyester pants like skin. She smudged his fallen ash. His polo shirt packed him in like a girdle and before she’d got under the dome of his gut her wrist vanished. She almost gagged at the vinegary stench when she tried curling to his lap. There wasn’t room for anything and he soon yanked her up by her hair and kept hold of it. Alice screamed then. He waggled the wheel one-handed – the car rounded a bend on the wrong side of the road – and the girls slid from their seats before he snapped the car straight.

Jan freed her hair. He was shouting at her now but all she heard was Alice.

‘Take a breath, you fat cunt!’ she said and held his stare till he turned his head to keep them on the road.

Jan cranked the radio – ‘Nasty Girl’.

He drove on, snorting like a bull in between little laughs of fear. She knew.

Her own fag had gone in the footwell; it was smoking the newspaper tits. ‘Am gunna tell me dad.’

‘Ay now. Don’t go telling your dad. No need for that.’

‘Well,’ said Jan. ‘You best give us some of that then in there before we go.’

They hadn’t far to go but he turned off quickly after the Sharston factories and pulled up at a blacked-out strip of shops with glowing flats above and name signs so worn they were secrets only Nana Dodds would know. Knuckled trees stood in tufts of bluebelled grass. Tall weeds gridded the flagstones. A lamppost was on the blink.

He turned the key and the radio went off but loitered in their ears while they waited for him to make up his mind. He took the creased envelope, gaped one end and flicked the other, then spaded some powder, squinting so he didn’t drop the key. ‘Not like me, this, not during the week.’ He bared his teeth at her afterwards, offered the key, then hesitated before giving her the envelope.

‘What is it?’

‘Just a bit of whizz.’

Alice, slapping the passenger door.

‘Gina?’ he said. ‘This’ll keep you going.’

‘Let her out,’ said Jan. ‘She’s gunna spew.’

‘It’s not locked.’

As Alice leaned her door open, Jan swung out her own – tossing the envelope up – frosting him and the page threes as she legged it, Alice dashing with her. He revved off, but Jan returned for her satchel when he threw it out.

 

After walking Alice home she needed summat to do. The two milk bottles she had left were broken. She tipped out her bag, nabbed two more off next door’s step – off Alice’s boyfriend-to-be – and took them to the carpark behind Portway shops and lobbed them to hear them smash. She’d aimed them at holes in the wall when she saw a ginger tom poke through a missing brick. The noise was good. But the silence returned vast under a low sky of hoover dust. Streetlamps hummed and the trees between them kept their leaves still. Jan grew hungry, invisible. She mooched along the streets’ grass banks, no longer feeling the cold, noticing things in the branches above. When she was alone after dark everything was different but it wasn’t enough. She wondered how late it was, if she’d skive off tomorrow, sleep in. For ages she listened to a car before seeing it, so when it shot up the road she forgot it was coming and she jumped. It was gold and beside her for half a second – full of blokes and one in the back had his window down to yell at her: Fucking gorgeous. They made eye contact on geous. Jan stopped where she was, visible again under the sudden wag of the leaves, her grin wet as the gold car went from sight again to sound. After that, she was called to Civic by the screams of the joyriders’ tyres in the courts below the eyeless blocks of flats. A few ex-Poundswick lads were bunched around the callboxes, toking dope. She was by herself on the sidewall at the entrance to Violet Court, thinking herself invisible again, when a ghost said her name. No one else seemed to hear it. Hear him.

‘Jan.’

She looked.

‘Jan, love.’

On this went. Livid, she almost said: Where a’yer? But she was cold again, her feet hurting, taking her home.

 

She kept the house dark and helped herself to whatever had been left out – scranning it without cutlery since there was none in the drawer, not even a clean plate.

Undressing as she went up the stairs –

missing the squeaky steps. She walked her tights insideout. Debris stuck to her feet. And then with full weight she heel-crushed a drink can and tipped backwards but caught the wall rail. The can bounced down the stairs. She breathed through her nose, her heart ticking in her neck while the house slept. When the kitchen clock ticked louder than her neck she picked up another open can of super lager on the second-to-top stair, swigging the lot on the landing in her underpants, leaving the empty there before she went into the room.

Black it lay in pilled, frayed, corn-coloured blankets. Its eyes moved beneath their lids. Fists to cheeks, uncurling in peace. Sour milk and eczema cream it smelled of and when she peered closer it smiled at her in its sleep. She spat on it but it didn’t wake. Jan opened the window and let the night’s draught in.

Naked she prayed over the flimsy cot for it to die. Rags on the cold radiator. Dirty towels everywhere and sealed nappies and handmedown garb piled into shadow. Her pit-sweat dried. Her nipples went sore. Goosepimpled. Her heart ticking now through her fingers gripping the cot bar.

It stirred and began to whimper, like it was –

falling

falling out of a dream.

Jan shut the window, leaned over the cot –

gozzed again and went out.

At the mirrorstand in her room she kept ticking. The cracks of streetlight from the curtain split lemoned her skin to butter. She was already tender but she put her fingers there and did it and did it so fast she got tennis elbow and kept having to swap hands. Her stretchmarks dimpled. The knots of cramp hardened. But standing there, her toenails raw from clawing carpet, she came as she bit her lip panting and freed her ticking blood.

Too spent to stand she lay on the carpet to change her knickers and climbed into bed.

Kell belched next to her on the pillow.

She yipped and covered her gob. He turned over, with the duvet. She rolled his wiry body further to the wall and let him keep the covers. His heat was enough. Their shared blood enough. An odd calm held her. She combed his hair with tired fingers and kissed the back of his head a dozen times, each kiss softer, then put an arm around him to sleep, accepting her fate –

her ticking to his ticking

You you you you.

You you you you. You you you you.

You you you you. You you you you. You you you you.

You you you you. You you you you.

You you you you.

When she woke it was dim-night and he was sat on her waist in his vest and underpants, strangling her. A blocked-out head and shoulders shivering against the ceiling grey. He had the bedsprings flat, his thumbs on her windpipe so she couldn’t scream. She kneed and kicked, flapping and scratching. Blue crystals began to pop the edges of her sight and jumble his shape. She swung out, cracked his arse bone, then shinned him in the bollocks.

He leapt up, howling –

as she sprang to the floor – dry-heaving – and thought she’d gone deaf but it was only her voice that was gone and she tried to shout it back but choked.

‘What did I say? What did I fucking tell yous before I went down? Can’t keep your legs shut for five minutes.’

Jan coughed a sound.

‘You’re fifteen,’ he said, ‘Stuck with that wailing shitting thing. Unless they take it off you. But Mam’s having none of that, is she? Can always do with more misery, our mam, can’t she? Least I know why she stopped visiting. Fuck me. Nowt changes round here, does it? Except when it does.’

‘Get out. . . me room,’ Jan croaked and stood.

He knocked her back to the floor. ‘I tried mine. No bed, no nowt, except a black baby in there; have you not seen? See, Mam’s got rid of all me gear, hasn’t she? And you let her. Sold the lot to make way for that thing, which I’ve heard you won’t go near. Guess Mam reckons I won’t be needing owt cos I’ll be back inside soon enough.’

‘I said not to get rid of your records,’ Jan croaked. ‘I told her!’

Kell thumped and bashed the wall. Once he’d tired himself, he sank to the bed, rocking, breathless, then he said to her slowly: ‘How’d they keep quiet about you? How’d you manage to keep secret from them? That’s all I wanna know.’ He winced and lay coffin-flat. After a while he raised himself on one elbow. ‘Spose that’s why Nana never come see us. She would’ve let it slip.’

Jan stayed coiled on all fours, glazed with fright, her nose bleeding or running. Her throat on fire. And when her sweat cooled she trembled and Kelly threw her his vest, saying: ‘Might as well have the shirt off me back, our kid, you’ve had everything else.’

Jan wiped her nose with it and threw it back.