IRA ‘MAC’ MCGOWAN, CHIEF of the honorary Dodds men, turned up that Thursday midmorning to raise the dead and rescue Carol Dodds from martyrdom and widowhood first by recruiting her son over a cooked breakfast followed by a warm slice of angel cake both courtesy of her maminlaw who after all knelt at the altar of hospitality, hypocrisy and false modesty, and might’ve welcomed Mac after all these years for Jim’s sake, or, equally, spiked Mac’s tea with oven cleaner for Jim’s sake, then fed his bones to the white dog that patrolled their street and one night last November got loose and tore up a family of foxes on Carol’s lawn who’d been at her bins for months, leaving Carol to find the magpies first thing, picking through dead leaf, plucking intestines like worms, while she smelled no blood only mulch and dew. But Mac reached her doorstep without running into Joe 90’s white dog. Mac might yet charm her son into becoming the Dodds man his dad was or even his grandfather was: Jim Dodds being the Dodds man Mac once worked for as Fixer and Muscle. Mac had been a touch too young to be Jim’s peer but too old to play second son, so had bagged the job of Right Hand – long before Carol ever met a Dodds man.

It was inside that Jim met Mac. Having grown pally with a young Brendan Behan in Strangeways who had failed to break a comrade out and wound up locking himself in. Mac brought him to Jim. But the Dodds man’s sympathies, a generation from Limerick, were already thinned by the belief that politics and religion were just ways of making a few bob when they weren’t getting in the way of doing so. Still, he admired the cause and the romance of it, which made Mac and others think Jim more emerald than he was. They also took Jim for a radical because Jim was unaccountably bright and had taken to reading aloud the Manchester Guardian to those who dared listen. Jim’s audience of wingmates – many of whom thought to be illiterates or soft in the head – and even screws from the next wing, would come to hear Jim’s riffs and editorials, delivered as homilies. The interstices of local government came with the latest ration list and price of beer (1s. 4d. a pint); trade union affairs and London banking disputes; Prime Minister Attlee’s speeches; the Princess’s engagement calendar; the King’s health; the young Queen’s coronation. Some men listened in blank terror and those men always sat closest to Jim, letting their cigs burn long. Others relaxed and shut their eyes and warmed themselves in front of the fire of Jim’s voice which was steady licking those difficult words and never wavering to milk or acknowledge this communal awe. Jim repeated society obituaries alongside local barber notices for masculine perms at three guineas a piece. It scared them. Jim knew things he shouldn’t, things they didn’t. And what they knew didn’t matter because at any moment he could bash them and open their skulls to learn whatever he wanted or rather make certain they knew nowt.

Jim was naturally the first Dodds man to leave Angel Meadows when the City of Manchester claimed Wythenshawe; and later, with Mac, Jim claimed Wythenshawe from the City, and became its guvnor. . .

So said Sefton –

who had first fed Carol all this, as the adoring son recounting his father’s legend, reluctant but unprompted, that night in ’61, not yet having done any time with or for his father, but having seen the inside of a borstal when Carol was still doing Whit Walks with Royal Oak Junior Morris troupe.

Nineteen sixty-one: they were just courting then. He was seething at her cool interest. Wanting to impress on her the savage history of the Dodds clan. Carol was soon up the junction with Kelly and had yet to meet Sefton’s mam and wouldn’t until she was showing and by then there was nowt to do but fix a wedding date. And so Carol found her approval the easiest to earn, and her respect impossible to gain.

But first Sefton brought her to town, to a basement spieler behind Peter Street, crammed with villains. Ageing Teds like Crombied peacocks. Bent bobbies goosed her and drank to her health. Pimped chorus girls doing blue ditties on the stage apron; their tired winks met her across the club through a fog of Woodbines. Carol was there that night as Sefton’s bit, to meet Jim, and all the honorary Dodds men and their women. (Of course, not Jim’s missus, Nedra, chained between stove and pew.) This was to be an audition then. And poor Carol, dead keen but no actress. No hope of bagging the role long-term.

Mac was the biggest and the brightest or at least the quietest. Minnie, his missus, the beauty. Carol took him for a Dodds man by blood and hid her surprise when Sefton said he and Mac didn’t share a last name. Sefton drank to this like it was a blessing so small he needed reminding of it. Then ordered another round to forget. It was later Carol realised that the more Sefton drank that night the soberer he got. No bar tab. No shillings. No nothing. It was the same everywhere he took her in those first weeks, in town or on the estate, and the ridiculousness of it hadn’t worn off, or the queasy glamour it gave her – completely changing how she held a Babycham, wore mother-of-pearl, filled her stockings. Any room full of boozing strangers could credit itself because she were in it, would tear to make way for her delicate feet; where before she would’ve been swallowed, now she would be looked at like food. The Jean Shrimpton of Delwood Gardens, this one. Little more breast. Little less leg. But that night Jim had approved. Of his son courting a mousy bit of fluff in tiny heels and brand-new ribboned polka-dot frock:

Dodds men, laughing.

Go on, then, Jean. Be a good girl and give us a twirl.

Cry later, Carol.

But really Mac’s young wife Minnie had done the approving, had won her the job.

Though only Carol had clocked this.

Who took orders from whom.

How Sefton resented Mac.

How satanically sweet Minnie was that first night –

‘I’d be well away in that frock, me’ – perched cross-ankled at the sinktop when Carol came out of the ladies’ stall. An arm ready to whip round her middle.

‘Can borrow it, if you like,’ Carol said.

Minnie stepped in front of her. ‘Go on, then. Let’s do us a swap. Imagine their faces, that lot. Those buggers won’t know who to take home.’ Minnie began to shimmy and moult her own chevron stripes like an insect queen. Joints bending round to unclasp what would on Carol be well out of reach. ‘I’m not having you on!’

Carol nodded in polite terror, reversing to return to the stall, only to glance off the shoulder of another girl passing behind. Minnie stopped and giggled and with her thumb knocked once on Carol’s lips and Carol opened her gob to protest and Minnie left a little summat dissolving on her tongue.

‘On me life if you aren’t the absolute cherry. Fucking best thing that handsome bloody brute’s ever showed up with of a Friday night. And Jim thought we’d never get to have a look.’

Carol gulped. Burning all the way down.

‘Do me up, love.’ Minnie, half-spinning. ‘Right. Come on. Let’s make a few records jump.’

The kindest face housing Pendle-witch eyes. She being a touch older than Carol but a fraction of Mac’s age and ruled him as she did Jim. Carol saw all this that night. That Mac’s queen ruled the Dodds men, and ruled Jim, even years later, after her youth was spent and her beauty had grown into something seasoned and superior which men still acknowledged with passion and women envied too much to admire.

Carol soon learned Minnie.

Or maybe Minnie soon learned Carol.

Since all Carol really learned that night was that it wasn’t just Minnie’s body that was half-wasp.

In the cab home Carol shivered and Sefton sulked after she’d done him proud he said and said it like he meant it even if he said it to Oxford Road and not her. He leaned away, breathing, not mad at all but dazed almost, not wanting to be touched, though she needed his shoulder for a headrest and thought he might take her shivers.

‘Want me jacket, love?’

‘Am fine. It’s them uppers Minnie give us to keep awake.’

Sefton, so chuffed with how it went and still deflated. Except for his prick, which scored a third pleat in his best pants. Showed in tides of carnival light along Oxford Road.

Carol, weathering Minnie’s pills, sedentary in motion, a razorblade in wet tissue: ‘She wants your dad, that girl. Seft, I’m telling you. She wants Jim. And did you know she don’t wear any drawers?’

‘And how the bleeding hell d’you know that?’

‘We was in the ladies’. She pops more pills than cross-country lurry drivers. Black bombers, purple hearts. . . Tried giving us allsorts. Never seen anyone dance so much in me life. God, and she knows what she’s doing.’

‘Then what you doing?’ He watched her fingertips walk.

‘Don’t be nasty.’ Carol stroked his jaw instead. Five hours since his last shave and already enough grain to catch, to calm her shakes.

His mouth, turning, sodium-lit: ‘Me dad. . . you know, he took me last one into the bogs first time I brought her out. Oh yeah. Give her a good time. Same story with the one before that, only he waited a fortnight with her. Though the lass wasn’t so keen. Screamed the bloody place down, she did. Still never put up much of a fight, he said. . . And so that was that.’ He kissed Carol’s hand. ‘Good job he took a shine to you back there.’

Carol did things inside that cab, things she could later blame on Minnie’s pills.

 

When her front door went, Carol was bent double, in citrus fumes and squeaky marigolds, her arse showing above stirrup leggings and aimed at her front door. The visitor knocked in threes, politely spaced, on the warped glass. Her shirt scabbed with powdered milk and babysick. A red bucket of foamy slop with floating dog-ends was for sponging scuff marks off the skirting and for dribbling water into her maminlaw’s handbag, which dangled open on the end of the stair rail, the chocolate purse inside it open too, like a thirsty mouth. The red bucket spread her bare feet. Carol glanced when water splashed them. The nails were sharp and yellowed, her feet otherwise like fresh bars of soap. They belonged to Carol but Carol no longer belonged to them; over the years she’d swelled like cake mix, though Nedra’s baking wasn’t to blame. She toed the crusty carpet daintily while she worked, dried her lovely feet. She heard six-shooters and horse-trot from the telly playing Bonanza to itself in a tidy front room. Then she heard the letterbox clapping and Nedra’s tangled jewellery at the stove where a pot of summat bubbled. Heard the baby’s contented silence in Kelly’s room and Kelly’s snoring in Jan’s.

The letterbox clapped again. At her bucket Carol didn’t stop, didn’t turn. ‘You can see it’s open,’ she said finally. ‘It’s always bloody open. Strays get welcomed in this house.’

Mac pushed the door, cleared his throat and stayed outside and she turned – not enough to see him at first. Carol knew Mac just by the mute of his manners. The solid signature of his presence. The huge quiet configuration of his space. With marigolds she tried raising her waistband and soaked her leggings.

‘Lo, Carol.’ Stooping, clean shaven, no clue where to look.

Her back twinged. She held her hips, wet through, and twisted herself right, grimacing at the hard brightness thinning his silver hair which was parted the same, exactly how it was, almost nine years earlier, at the double funeral. In this hard morning light Mac glowed strong and sheepish and handsome at sixty-five but no younger. His granite features florid. His height unlost and his boxer’s hands liver-marked and drawn out from his body, like a gun fighter or a heavyweight champion in a gala suit, comically contained. Shy with it and boyish with it, but in Mac no younger.

‘Carol, love?’

‘Why now?’ she said, going fat at forty-three, skinning those marigolds. They slapped the red bucket and wet her dried feet.

Carol Dodds left Mac there midmorning and traipsed through the hall she’d lined with bin bags, passed the straightened pictures of her dead men on the walls, towards the kitchen and her maminlaw, whose wide hips blocked her, held the doorjambs. Necklaces chiming. Nedra crossed herself. Carol glanced round but saw only wet footprints in her still-to-be-hoovered carpet. She advanced and Nedra glared through her, to welcome or strike Mac.

 

Her maminlaw put the kettle on and refused his refusal to be fed. Had him tea-warmed and creaking his kitchen chair, the others empty, his brogues crossed under her kitchen table, on her mopped lino. Nedra hovered, twittering questions. Carol leaned waxen and stiff against a cupboard so his ox shoulderlines were to her with their polite, solemn geometry of violence and she saw everything he was and remembered –

the night she had clawed his back, Christmas Week ’76 – four days after losing her husband – when Mac had finally asked her to bed. After the burials, after his wife Minnie became impossible to console in the Oaks where the mourners’ finger buffet was held, and began laughing hysterically, in denial or ragged amazement, throwing gin and tonics at the flock walls and dismantling festive decor. Minnie’s beauty no longer bewitching; she was just a strung-out mistress wilting without her stolen fucks. When all the drinks were smashed or held from her she began to sway-dance to Johnny Mathis – ‘When a Child is Born’. Mac came to her but she snatched off a plum stiletto to javelin him with it, then ran out the pub carrying the other. Nobody but Mac would ever see her again. Humming ‘Soleado’ in the broken glass of Minnie’s laughter, Nedra had dabbed his cut brow with a spill-soaked bar cloth and Carol had smelled rum and tasted rum when he sweated on top of her that night in Minnie’s bed, hoping Minnie might come home and catch them. Carol had clawed his back good. Cradled Mac’s sweaty head through the night, used his burly weight to trap her despairing giggles. He’d lasted hours, was more patient with her than real love could ever be. Like Nedra, Mac only knew what it was to worship. As he wore out her name Carol wondered where Minnie was. Expecting her to appear at the foot of the bed in ruined makeup with a kitchen knife or revolver. In the morning she left her whitest underpants in Minnie’s empty knicker drawer.

Mac’s marriage to Minnie was an unconsummated marriage to Jim –

Minnie’s marriage to Mac was a consummated marriage to Jim.

Jim Dodds was much the same as Minnie from what Carol witnessed, only a man, so also a hypocrite.

And Carol knew Mac had suffered two decades’ cuckoldry, with an ascetic pride and sickness. He had said as much to Carol that night, more concussed than unburdened. His talk was rare but it came freely then, and it was heavy as another body in the bed, fucking her.

For a living Mac had meted out Jim’s cruelties, having been weak enough to hurt and be hurt, having needed only to hurt and be hurt. And so in the end, Carol reckoned, his soul was a spot cleaner than Minnie’s and no blacker than her own.

She knew for years Mac had pined for her: Jim’s son’s missus. And she knew her husband had once tried it on with Minnie. But Sefton had no chance with his dad’s mistress. Maybe the reason Sefton had toasted Mac’s not being a true Dodds man in blood and surname was because unlike a Dodds man he had never been bewitched by Minnie; he’d married her instead.

That night Mac had shrugged his own abeyance onto Carol, to simmer and reduce, till it was burned on her for good. When, after her body’s possibilities had been exhausted and these open secrets shared, Mac told Carol he was sorry. Dead sorry at having helped bury that bookish Sharston feller she’d been keen on for a time. Mac had known Sefton knocked her about and, with him being inside then, it was only natural she’d seek comfort elsewhere.

Comfort. Yes.

Carol nodded close. On Minnie’s duck-feather pillow.

Mac nodded closer.

And still nodding Carol replayed Vern’s daft jokes and drippy quotes inside her head so as not to scream.

Mac took her thin smile for forgiveness and slept peacefully beside her, spent.

The next morning, knickerless, she collected Jan and Kelly from her inlaw; Nedra, widowed too, would soon move in. When Vern climbed into her own bed the next night, Carol had whispered: I finally had me a fuck with Mac. Decent stuff too. No complaints. Poor Vern, resting his soft hands on her waist while she told the jokes for once. Vern was then only seven years dead. Laughing with his ear to her belly as she described Mac’s prick pumping the content of his confession, Vern’s laughter light and sincere. Carol’s thicker. Crazed. Vern hadn’t mentioned it since and Carol never brought it up. By now he’d forgotten because of course –

the dead soon forget; it’s the living who don’t.

‘Sounds like quite the performance,’ Vern had said. ‘Especially for an older chap – even a big ox like him. For you he must’ve been on fire.’

‘He sets people on fire, Mac does. For Jim. With petrol.’ Carol held Vern’s face. ‘Laugh,’ she said. ‘Go on.’

And they did.

Then she’d rolled Vern to the other side of the bed: the space as warm as Vern’s cheek since her husband’s shattered body was but a day in the ground; Nedra’s still to replace it.

 

So Ira ‘Mac’ McGowan was Carol’s last living shag. Back in Manchester, shy in her kitchen expecting scran, and without Minnie. He even uncrossed his brogues and craned with his brew to show her the reverse tan of his ring finger around the curve of the mug.

‘You’ve no need to be going to any trouble.’

‘You’re alright, cock,’ Nedra said. ‘Might as well have summat if I’m making our Kelly his breakfast.’

Mac looked at the wall clock. To Carol he said: ‘How’s the lad doing?’

‘. . .’

‘What age is your Jan now?’

‘. . .’

At the cooker Nedra’s twittering became humming became bacon hissing. The pot on the back burner; lard smoking the pans.

An angel cake cooled in a tin on the window ledge, its heat raising Carol’s wrist hairs as she cracked the stiff window some more, then refilled the kettle and sat in her own seat, a space between them. Fry-up smells smothering the cake’s, replacing yesterday’s stew.

Mac was the same polite animal, afraid of women. His small eyes wet and lips half open, wanting and not wanting to settle on her. Everything here embarrassed him. She hoped he’d use the toilet and have to replant the orchard of varisized bras drip-drying on the racks just to piss standing up. But Nedra’s shame would be greater than his. At the table Carol outglared him and he turned for help but her maminlaw kept her back to them, cracking eggs, nude tights wrinkled about her ankles and her enormous arse flossy with white dog hair. Carol never let that beast in her house but knew Nedra brought it in through the kitchen to spite her. Carol caught her the other day feeding it corned beef off the lino with Joe 90 prancing on the back step in his school uniform, looking like he could have done with the extra slices on his butties.

‘Our Jan’s fifteen now, isn’t she, Nedra? With a baby upstairs she won’t so much as look at. Me eldest Kelly’s twenny-three in June and got let out of Strangeways yesterday. But you knew that. Be why you’re here.’

He blew on his tea, tried again: ‘So your Kelly’s a chip off the old block, is he?’

Nedra dropped a warmed plate. It clattered intact on the counter like a coin losing its spin. ‘Wait till you see him, Mac. Just wait. Grown up now, has Kelly. Would make his dad proud’ – her voice so flighty her words took off and vanished into sausage smoke.

When he let go of the mug Carol reached across the damp clean table to touch his mottled left hand. She shaped her fingers over the mass grave of his knuckles as if hoping to find a name on a headstone. She kept smirking and made his frightened eyes follow hers to the ceiling. ‘See for yourself.’

Nedra waddled into the hallway, hammering an empty saucepan with a wooden spoon, then returned as if she were still sounding her dinnerbell, shouting: ‘Kelly’s good as gold, Mac. Always they’ve crossed the men of this family, haven’t they? Always. But by Mary’s mercy he is home again – our lad – where he bloody belongs.’

Watching her maminlaw put spoon and pan in the sink, having failed somehow to raise Kelly or even the baby, Carol said: ‘By here she means in bed on a Thursday morning at ten past eleven like the jobless ex-con he is.’

Mac picked up a knife and fork.

Carol folded her arms and leaned in. ‘Where’s Minnie? That bitch ever bear you any of your own?’

Neat cuts and stabs; he loaded his tools: ‘You know what our Minnie were like. Nah, no kiddies. Not on your life.’

‘Well?’

‘Cancer of the breast. They told us just after Christmas. Give her some options, but she said Sod all that. Said they could fu— Pardon me, Nedra. She told em where to go. Fifty, she was. Picture our Minnie at fifty. Wedded at twenny-one.’

Carol watched her maminlaw: careful, worrying her rosary and necklaces. Nedra came over but changed her mind, retreating to the cooker. Put her back to them and said:

‘Well, Carol wedded our Sefton younger. Of course, he never had much choice, but that’s by the by. And I were eighteen with our Jim. It were the done thing then, you see? God rest them both.’

‘And God rest my Minnie. You were at ours, remember?’

Still Nedra wouldn’t sit. ‘Aye, I do. Our Jim as your best man. He lent you a few bob for your wool suit and you was both such handsome fellers, the pair of you, with your thin tashes like in the films. And you wanted the reception at the Midland but had to settle for the Brown Cow and so I baked them little pudd—’

‘When did she die?’ Carol said. ‘Minnie.’

Mac chewed and swallowed. ‘Valentine’s Day. You believe that?’

Nedra: ‘Good God.’

‘Good riddance.’ Carol took a triangle of his toast.

Nedra dry coughed, almost a fit.

Mac poured her a glass of water using a dirty glass by the sink and sat again, pulling out a seat but she wouldn’t sit. Then for the first time since the baby, Nedra made Carol a brew and Carol sipped it right away, let it loosen her teeth. Burning herself as the doorbell went.

Then –

the sound of Kelly’s feet quick on the stairs.

Carol saw through the hall; her son slowed before he got to the door to belt his plaid dressing gown, (one which Carol could’ve sworn she’d got rid of) avoiding the bucket and bin bags of party rubbish to let Zuley in, golden brown in a red sunfrock which must have weighed as much as a first-class stamp. Shutting the front door with her back, to kiss her.

Zuley fought him off. ‘Not even brushed your teeth.’

‘Not had me breakfast yet.’

‘Lazy get.’ Zuley saw her sat in the kitchen and crossed the hall smiling like summer and he followed.

Who is it? Nedra mouthed, back at the stove.

 

You fled Manchester with Minnie, and in doing so finished Jim’s firm. Dissolved its elastic web of honoraries and leeches: minders, doormen, drivers, scrap dealers, landlords, bookmakers, pill traders, pimps and armed robbers. You had finally renounced Jim and son by not leading an inquisition into their senseless deaths on that Christmas Eve, which our Nedra had expected then demanded then begged for – wanting summat done about the well-to-do young lads left alive on Christmas morning. Instead you skipped Wythie, and finally got one by Jim, after choking on your eulogy at the pulpit, for which Nedra repaid you hours later in tender nursing, stopping your blood at the Oaks.

Your morbid devotion to Jim: severed only when you let the dead lie. This –

Carol knew, had condemned Nedra to a phantasmal life of righteous nostalgia, blind sight and deaf ears, false memories and wilful distortions and indomitable resilience. With her wrath unfulfilled, her eternal soul came out Daz-white in the wash. In this way it was Mac’s desertion of Jim in death which gifted Nedra the will to live, in stove pots and church gossip. Ira ‘Mac’ McGowan. Not Our Lord or the Blessed Virgin or St Christopher or St Agatha or that week’s patron saint of Miserable Cows. And that was worth a warm slice of angel cake, an extra teabag and a fry-up.

Now her maminlaw glowered at Zuley’s skin and scanty frock, a stirring spoon raised like a club. ‘Oh, it’s you, love. Thought you said you worked in town?’

Zuley said: ‘Thursday I have off’ – and Nedra turned, satisfied, and Carol caught the girl mouth to Kelly: She forgets me name but remembers that?

From behind, Kelly pecked his nana’s cheek, holding her shoulders where she was littlest and not turning as Mac introduced himself but only nodding when he sat with him to eat.

Zuley said Iya; Mac asked her name and she chose the chair between them.

Nedra moved a pan to the front burner. ‘Fraid the kitchen’s closed, love, since we wasn’t expecting company.’

‘Was you expecting him?’ Kelly pointed his baked-bean-juiced knife at Mac.

‘Kell,’ Zuley said.

Mac said: ‘Ee-ah, love. Have some of me toast.’

‘You’re alright, honest. It’s this one what’s in a mood after yesterday.’

Kelly scraped his plate.

Mac breathed in long enough to make his chair back creak. ‘Heard you got out yesterday, lad. I’ve been in there meself twice. So, what reason in the world could there be this morning for you to be acting your shoe size?’

Chewing: ‘Who are you?’

‘Don’t you know, lad?’ Nedra said.

‘He knows,’ Carol said.

‘. . .You one of them what worked with me dad.’

‘Aye. And your granddad,’ Mac said.

Nedra took Mac’s plate, topped up his brew and cut him the first cake slice.

Mac smiled back silently, smiled at everybody, then tucked in. ‘Champion that, Nedra.’

Nedra was finally in a chair, skimmed to the middle of the floor which had already lost its mop shine. ‘Where did you say you was stopping, love?’

‘Rod’s putting us up in town for a few weeks while we sort out a job. Has himself a gaff now off Monton Street.’

‘Not far from me, that,’ Zuley said.

‘Hope it’s far enough,’ Carol said.

‘Rod Westlake? Never.’ Nedra jogged her fat knees. ‘Oh, I’ll have to wrap him up a slice. He was a nice kid, Rod. Always a gent, which you know our Jim liked.’

Carol said: ‘Bet he’s still a pimp.’ She drew Zuley into a look and the girl chewed her cheek.

‘Oh shush, you’ – her maminlaw’s face, her voice, changing for Mac. ‘Did Rod ever marry?’

Carol kept on: ‘Does he still go around telling everyone he keeps a gun?’

Mac swallowed.

Nedra twisted the bundles of tinfoiled cake and left them by his mug.

‘So, what have these two got planned for the day?’ Mac said to her son.

‘You tell him,’ Kelly said.

Zuley sipped from his tea. ‘Got it all sorted, haven’t we? Gunna go for a walk round Styal, after we see about getting him a job. Then we’re going pictures in Gatley to watch that Starman.’

‘Ay, lad. There’s probably a bit of work for you with us in town if you want it?’

Carol scoffed.

‘Doing what?’ her son said.

‘You driving yet?’ Mac said.

‘Yeah but I’ve no car.’

‘Can fix that.’

From inside his suit jacket Mac unclipped a wad of fives, maybe a hundred pound or more, and slid it folded across the table to her son. ‘It’s work I’m offering. Have a think, anyroad. We can have a proper chat if you’re a grafter. And if not then this’ll sort you till you find summat to keep you out of bother.’

Kelly took it and unfolded it and stared at Mac. ‘Ta,’ he said, stuffing it down his dressing-gown pocket.

Zuley brought Kelly’s plate and mug to the sink, thanked Nedra and said to Mac: ‘Don’t worry, mate, there’s no chance he’ll waste it on me.’

‘He has the look of your Jim now. More than your Sefton. Don’t you reckon, Nedra?’

Carol stared at the table, saying nowt.

Mac embarrassed and Nedra peeved and Kelly wondering and Zuley wanting to help but unsure how.

Mac said to her son: ‘I best be going. I’ve gotta look up a few rum buggers before I get back to Rod’s. Tell you what: come with, lad. We’ll have us a ride out, if you want—’

‘That’s enough,’ she said.

‘I wanna see to it that he can pay his way,’ Mac said. ‘But it’s up to you, Carol. Ee-ah, lad. Come if you wanna meet a few faces.’

Carol left her chair out.

 

In Kelly’s room the baby slept content. Warm-smelling and salt-smelling and one of his legs twitched under the stiff blanket as Death’s shadow brushed him –

Vern Jenkins’, checking the radiator. He raised the temperature and pushed at the window to be sure it was shut.

‘There a draught in here or is it just me?’

‘You are naked,’ she said.

‘Well, who’s to blame for that?’

‘I don’t know. What you doing out in the day? Come away from the window.’

Vern turned, waving to nobody. ‘Neighbours ought to be impressed. First yesterday’s do. And now for some culture.’ Vern swung towards her, full-mast.

‘Can’t you cover up?’

‘What with?’

The baby coughed awake and grinned and Carol picked him up and he smiled at Vern who admired him over her shoulder.

‘He’s the best-looking one yet. And this family’s produced some lookers. What’s his name again?’

‘Told you, love. He’s not got a name yet.’

‘Carol. He’s minutes from walking. Soon to start his classics degree.’

‘Hold him a minute. He’ll just sleep.’

‘Can you hear that? He’s singing sonnets.’

‘He’s your blood.’

‘Mine? Me bloody grandson. And I don’t look a day over thirty, I’m told.’

‘Make it go down,’ she said.

‘Only you can do that and even then not for long.’ Vern shrugged and stared quietly and she felt his expression not wanting or willing anything from her but a smile.

‘Does it go when you’re not here, with me?’

‘Where do I go when I’m not here? Stockport Library? I’ve nowt to read but you.’

He nosed her temple, her bunned hair. Back in her arms the baby’s dreams sang to them.

Vern held her waist by the cot and whispered: ‘Listen to that song.’ She winced when his soft daughterly hands left her and Death’s shadow moved to the window again. She hadn’t dared look at him straight on for longer than a glance.

Yellowed linen and a ripped mattress protector and mildewed towels were wadded beneath the radiator and Vern shook them out and fashioned a toga from the best sheet and twirled. Beside her again he breathed along her cheekbone, whispering: ‘I dare you, Carol Dodds, to get dressed and leave this house before the Macintosh Munster carts you off to his crypt.’

‘He wasn’t bad in bed.’

‘Quick. Find your shoes.’

‘I dare you to go, too, if I go.’

‘To leave you?’ he said.

Carol set the baby down.

Vern was scratching his elbow, not coy not proud not punishing her, just reading their grandson’s song.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘I’ll go now, shall I?’

‘For a walk.’

‘Round Wythenshawe Park. How long’s it been?’

‘Why not?’

To the window: ‘Smashing weather.’

‘Shame nobody’ll watch the baby except you.’

‘Take him with. Do him some good.’

‘Vern, love, where did they bury you?’ Carol went sick and heavy with a happiness. On seeing Vern limned by sunshine after sixteen years. She knelt next to the cot, her legs about to give.

Half-clothed at the window there was only gleam where Vern’s lovely nose and mouth should have been. He lifted another mucked towel off the floor and revealed a box of Sugar Puffs overturned. Vern maraca’d the box, scooped a handful of stale cereal to offer it her, but she didn’t respond, wanting only to listen to him crunch and the pleasure it gave her stopped her saying:

I must know where they buried you, love. He’s the only man left who can tell us.

Instead Carol said: ‘Do you miss your books?’ – remembering Vern Jenkins was lovely and daft and hers.

‘Clever is rightly a Northern pejorative,’ he said. ‘“Oi, teach me big words,” you said to us once. When? I forget. “So I can sound as useless as you and sign on.”’ He pulled the waistband of her stirrup leggings – tugging her away from the cot. Her thighs and crotch were chapped from sop water. As he inspected her she looked up at him, loving with her bones. ‘Where’s your knickers, love?’ he said.

‘No clean pairs. I’m as bad as Minnie, aren’t I? Do you remember her? Dead now. She never wore none alive. Nedra used to call her Lucifer’s concubine.’

‘That would make Jim Lord Lucifer.’

‘That’s right. It would.’

She wept and giggled and woke the baby and lifted him: giggling too and grabbing for her nose, tickled by her tears.

‘I’ll marry him. Mac. If he’s back to ask me. I’d marry him just to know.’

Vern nodded, accepting her pain. Dried her grin with thumbs softer than her own ever were.

Then Mac entered the room to speak to her alone – brave, for him – while her son waited for him downstairs by the door. Carol heard Kelly fobbing off Zuley. Who only shouted mock-cheerfully up the stairs: Ta-ra then before escaping Carol’s house, quick and easy, and all by herself.