ONE OCTOBER SABBATH JIM swept her to the howling moors for two nights, having sorted, he said, a black stone cottage with a fire and a great big kitchen, overstocked courtesy of Minnie McGowan. That woman who only spoke arch or blue, who even cheeked Jim, and whose barren body was sinful standing, sitting or waddling. Aged thirty-five by then, but denying gravity; still Mac’s twenty-one-year-old bride.

That Sunday Jim returned from the Woodpecker at two and sprang it on her. Told her to forget his bloody dinner, neat’s tongue, already dished up having scented the house before he’d left. They were going on their holidays and going now. He wouldn’t say where, which was romantic. Her Jim told her like her Jim: calm, firm, and then went out and sat in his cramped Triumph bibbing the horn while she packed fast as she could, packing for him too without knowing what to take or how much, which was romantic.

Nedra Dodds was fifty then and working. She, the most beloved dinnerlady in Wythenshawe, let alone St Christopher’s Infant School, feeling guilty that October for having more time off and guiltier for not feeling guilty enough. It’d been eight days since she lost the miracle and still she bled constant. For the first few she was punch-drunk with pain so intense she couldn’t stir a pot on the new stove fast enough to keep the stews from burning on the bottom and so found herself bobbing in the wake of Jim’s wrath come teatime. Twittering sorry twenty times to his feet and twenty more to Our Lady.

Our son gets his self home, back home from that blinking place, and here’s you, here, bringing us down. Make us wanna be back inside meself. Jim talked these truths to her Friday. Mary speaking through Jim so she’d listen. And Nedra tried and tried yet found herself in tears just gossiping with the streets’ women after Mass about nowt more than those hairdos you only see in the wicked magazines they bring out for young girls, who knew bloody better round this way. Nedra, wet-cheeked, reassured the old aunts and new mothers, until two went past up Dunkery Road, bare legs and dyed dos, like foreign harlots, both girls unidentifiable through her tears, but surely spoilt and truanting. But truth was, if her Jim wasn’t in, Nedra turned no child away, no matter whose, no matter what. Fed every stray who found her table – absconding lads from Rose Hill reformatory, with those glints of fear and shame shining through even the unruliest buggers; lasses rouged and disowned and with hardly a stitch of skirt (for this was 1969 and man had decided Heaven wasn’t high enough so built rockets to fly beyond it) – she fed them and fed them seconds. Nedra spoke of each, in kitchens, front rooms and Sunday pews, settling her suspicions and reproof in saints’ prayer.

Days ago: the tears came while explaining to a new neighbour how to balance ingredients in some recipe or other when you were short, like back during rations. Tears washing her doorstep. Anything could set her off. Anything what had stolen her mind from the pain long enough for her to realise it’d momentarily gone which meant the miracle would soon be truly gone as the cruel spells of mess and pain shortened and the physical marks went and then the physical memory went too and finally it would be like the miracle never came upon her at all. So at fifty Nedra prayed the hurt kept, and was grateful that week, and grateful even after the stay at the moorside cottage, for each minute it did. Knowing soon there would not be enough pain to believe in. . .

For years, after the miracle and the pain of its leaving had left her, almost up until her Jim and her Sefton were taken, she often woke herself of a night having salted the pillows. She wept them through, pretending she was an oyster diver like in the pictures they used to show before the one you wanted to see, at Tatton Cinema, during the war. Nedra would trap the sound of her swimming inside her pillow for fear of waking Jim and causing another to-do.

Nedra returned to church and baked plum cakes to raise pennies for the tots keen for shoes. And if she was fit for church she was fit for work; but her Jim understood once he’d been fed, told her not to mither just yet and give it more time.

See how you feel, our lass. Just mind how you go.

Feeling so out of things, so suddenly aware of herself that she feared she would splinter. Her bleeding mind from her bleeding body. Maybe there was no Heaven for her. Maybe there was no Heaven. No miracles. Only a harlot moon.

Nedra banished these thoughts; confessed her shame and her precious pain.

 

That October Sabbath, the stone cottage mid hill and sky –

the moors, pitiless home to lost graves. A Devil’s garden planted of angels. Those Manchester horrors: tabloid headlines Nedra still wouldn’t read. But that day the moors were –

for her resting; Jim’s treat.

Miracle blood.

Innocent blood.

She bled.

When they got up there, as well as an open fire and a stocked pantry, she found indoor plumbing and a cellar full of what looked like her old linen, knotted, and several spades and shovels. Upstairs were three draughty blue-ceilinged bedrooms. Mac was there too, with his Minnie.

‘Your face,’ Minnie said, sauntering towards her like Cleopatra in her silk stockings, her teeth lit with excitement. Mac was behind her, his shoes off and all, but still having to duck the painted beams.

Jim stared down Nedra’s shock, warning her to keep it buttoned, and so Nedra just said – having been told nowt, and knowing it best not to ask – Oh hello. Even as Minnie hugged her warmly and took her smallest case from her and hauled it to the biggest bedroom before Mac grabbed the rest.

When they returned Sefton had arrived, driving somebody’s green Morris Minor up the gated mud lane. It matched the moors’ green through the cottage window but minutes later when Nedra looked again, it didn’t.

So it was a family holiday.

What with her son here, fresh out of prison. What with her Jim knowing she needed it, having come unthreaded. A change of room and air. The landscape a humbling display of the Lord’s hand. Thanks to Jim, they had rallied.

Sefton stepped in sullen and prickly, without his Carol or bag even, or change of clothes. But Nedra pressed him as mothers can and learned that Carol was back with him already, as was little Kelly. Nedra had her grandson again. Things had been put right and she kissed his face, everso glad.

Minnie said: ‘Ay, this means you and Carol are new again. And all new couples do is each other.’

Sefton’s bleak smile as Jim roared.

Minnie went: ‘Why’ve you not brought them along, love? The more the messier.’

‘Kelly’s caught a bug,’ Sefton said, picking knuckle scabs.

‘Poor lad,’ Nedra said.

‘Fix us a brew, Mam. Am gasping.’

And she did.

Then the menfolk went for a ramble on the moors before last light, leaving her with ageless Minnie, who ran a bath and stripped off in front of the fire. Took her tea with three sugars and no milk into the tub and read Reveille magazine. Nedra briefly forgetting her miracle and her pain while she prepped supper for five – all Dodds men and women, regardless of what it once had said on their ration cards.

 

With the last vegetables chopped, she heard Minnie emerge from the tub and stoke the fire.

‘How we doing, Nedra, love?’

Working. Bowed at the pew: ‘Long as this stove stays lit we’ll get there.’

‘Been everso quiet, you. You’re not right in yourself. And we all know someone has to give us a dressing-down when I get gobby, and if it’s not you, well. . . Our Mac won’t do it. Will he ’eck. God, this fire’s toasting me tits. A good dressing-down is what I need regular, otherwise there’s trouble. From not having a mother, that is, Mac reckons. But you know I’ve meself to blame there. This fire. This place. Feel like a fucking duchess, don’t you? Sorry. Ay, shall we have a drink? Brought Babycham for us and bottle of Navy for your Jim.’

Over her shoulder, Nedra saw a steaming white body bent before the fire, gold-beaded with bathwater.

‘Good God, you’ll catch your bloody death, girl—’

Minnie laughed, straightened, turned. ‘If our boys don’t catch us first.’

The sittingroom and fireplace were divided from the kitchen by an oriental rug in need of a beating and Nedra left the black stove to drag the heavy curtains. Sent dust into the reach of firelight backshaping Minnie. The rooms became a glowing pit and Mac’s wife a glittering cut-out limned against the coals, her beauty blasphemous, her hipped stance wide, her waist a child’s, her eyes rubbed out. Minnie seemed to be prancing skyclad like a Pendle witch above the fire, but never moved more than her head to follow Nedra crossing the rug to dark the cottage.

Again Minnie laughed at her. ‘They’ll be a bit yet, don’t worry. It’s just us girls.’ A satanic-sweet giggle coating the words – only around Nedra. A tool which any other vulgar tart with fantasies would no doubt overwield. Plenty flocked after Nedra’s men. With coarser soaps and thinner stockings and cheaper rosewater perfumes than Minnie’s. Sawdust on their worn-down heels. Lasses in pencil- or mini-skirts, hanging off the ends of war stories and good tailoring, while stuffed inside corner booths at the Woodpecker, supping heads off her men’s Watneys Red Barrel. Nowadays Nedra didn’t frequent pubs with her husband. Jezebels posed no threat. Though Carol had once been one of them. And by the Devil she’d done well, having snared Sefton to be accepted, had Nedra’s first and final grandson, only to take him and run off at the first sign of bother. Now Carol was back, to be forgiven and embraced once more. Carol she saw through. But not Minnie. None like Minnie. Who could talk nude under a cottage roof on a strange hinterland in autumn afternoon without her flesh goosepimpling, without her lashes, breath or bones quivering, without breaking into shards of shame.

The big light was on now and Minnie took a folded towel from the settee arm and patted herself without modesty. The snowtops of her thighs wore delicate blue veins. A fresh outfit for evening laid over the moss cushions though Nedra never saw her lay it. Minnie rolled on a clean stocking:

‘You’ve always been a mother to me. And he’s like me little brother, is your Sefton. Even if it was just daft business. He had us going – thinking he might do real time, you know? No idea why we worry. Glad he’s out, though, ay? And back with his Carol. There’s plenty worse about. Aren’t you glad it’s sorted? They’ve all fixed it.’

‘Fixed it?’ Nedra said.

Minnie, eyes reckless, insinuating, welled with some colour of sympathy. Nedra hadn’t noticed her put on the pearl brassiere. Minnie wandered into the kitchen, her crisp plum dress folded over one arm. She spooned the broth on the back burner, sampling it greedily. The cold-carved whiteness of her: like a provocation from those French picture pamphlets that Jim’s lads once left a box full of in the Triumph’s boot.

Nedra tried: ‘You forget your drawers in a hurry?’

Minnie seasoned Nedra’s broth, chuckling, then offered the spoon for approval.

But the hurt reclaimed Nedra who winced and stepped backwards across the oriental rug till she caught the settee arm as a crutch. More of the miracle was leaving her. Could she make it to her room before the lavatory?

‘Nedra?’

A vision of a lipsticked teacup left on a sopping bathroom tile.

‘You know, I’ve lost all mine. Three. Or four. Dunno whether to count the last.’ The broth spoon down. Counting on painted fingers. ‘That’s right. One last year. Then there was another two just after we got married. And then the time I’m not too sure about, over the summer. Our Mac always makes like he don’t know what’s the matter. Women’s business, they call everything, don’t they?’

‘. . .’

‘Men can’t think what to say, can they? Not men like ours. Don’t care how many fights they have; we know, don’t we? We bleed better than them.’

‘You never said.’

‘No, I know. . . But what with you. . . I mean at your age. When you’ve a couple grown already. Must be different for you.’

‘Minnie. I am sorry for you. I’ll say a prayer for you before bed.’

The giggle not gone: ‘Why? It’s you I’m worrying about here. Don’t feel blue about me.’

‘Did our Jim tell you?’

‘Told our Mac what a right shock it was. You at your age up the duff. Can’t blame him. He didn’t know what to do. Course, neither did our Mac. Course, me, I must’ve said the right thing somehow.’

Nedra unclutched her belly, watched her and winced. ‘Sorry?’

‘What you keep saying sorry for? T’isn’t your doing.’ Minnie came closer, cupping Nedra’s elbows, and Nedra had never felt such naked warmth from a grown woman. Both of them brewing tears.

‘Our Mac’s fifty now and not bothered now. Reckons it’s down to his shortcomings. Honest to God. He’s good; he’s like that; it’s way he thinks. It’s him what was after some babies. Only what can you do?’

‘Pray. Our Lady will listen.’

Minnie lit the dry saucepan of garden peas and hiked the flame. ‘Don’t worry; I’m not burning them. I get the pan dead hot, right, then I pour the hot water in. I like seeing the peas dance. Taste sweeter this way, I’m telling you. Can blame me if they don’t.’

‘Minnie,’ she whispered.

‘Said a quick prayer for you. Soon as I heard you’d lost it, I said one.’ A wet wink. ‘We do some kneeling, don’t we, me and you, ay?’ Old Shuck lit Nedra inside Minnie’s irises with his unholy flame. ‘Nedra, love, you can kneel to please, but’ – the saucepan spitting – ‘I wouldn’t swap my little cunt for the world.’

Nedra gasped, saw Minnie in the flesh once more and was afraid. Minnie wriggled into her plum frock away from the stove seconds before the cottage door blew open. Dodds men returned with splattered wellies, jackets and shovels but without voices till after the meal was had and Minnie fetched the drink.

Jim said the broth was her best ever but them peas were a touch too sweet. Nedra just cleared the plates.

 

Right before night tipped to morning Nedra woke herself. Bad with the pain. Cheeks smarting and sticky from her oyster dives. Beside her Jim breathed shallow, muttered but didn’t wake. She reached for her rosaries and found only dead space and remembered where she wasn’t. She waited for sight, then claimed the rosaries on the wicker bedtable, lower than hers at home, scratching them into her fist –

her Jim slept deeper.

A Dodds man, hilled peacefully under a quilted spread, even after she peeled a corner to sit up. Saltwater had spilled across their pillows and darkened his bedshirt collar. Further south were spots where she’d lost her miracle through to the mattress – leaving her worst for five days.

Nedra trembled in sweats and bit her rosary fist.

By night the floorboards’ dust had somehow grown into dank fur and the sharp chill cramped her foot, but she’d forgotten to pack her tattered moccasins and Jim’s house slippers were too big to borrow silently.

Time was suspended in the bathroom behind the plank door, dealing with the mess by moonlight, ashamed to turn on the light. Such awful business, and on the first night away, made her meek and feverish and queered her faith. At some point Nedra woke on the lavatory when she upset Minnie’s teacup on the floor tile. It clattered; then the silence burst her ears and her toes were splashed with icy dregs. By the moor’s moon she saw a frantic spider in the bathtub, flinching under the tap drips.

Crossing the L-shaped hall before dawn Nedra felt the air shake with metal falling on cellar stone. She knew the shovelhead sound and knew not to go to it but still went and started the cellar stairs and paused, listening and peeping in a daze, only to retreat in a clumsy hurry and find her son tranced in the livingroom dark listening with her. He was completely dressed; the texture of him told her. His breath showed and again she trembled. The braced oak door to outside squeaked ajar with the draught smelling of dew and wilderness. Sefton raised his fists slowly like an automaton. She went and latched the door and shut out the moors, catching him gently at the wrists and walked him to the kitchen sink where his silhouette became red flesh. She couldn’t get his wedding band off for the swelling. His mangled hands were frozen. She rinsed his blood and cleaned out ticks of grit, grass and soil under his fractured nails, then bathed his knuckles in a pan. She’d done this countless times, mothering one local warrior or other, but most often her son, prefacing the Saxa sprinkles with: This’ll make your teeth whistle. But tonight she was dumb. Sefton didn’t struggle or swear or clown, so she pressed an ear to his chest to hear his heart thump.

‘. . .Mam?’

‘. . .Yes, love?’

His fists dribbled. One broken for certain. Nedra twittered her prayers like tremens. He’d been hitting walls and earth outside. He was not right in himself. In this, he took after his mam.

She heard herself go: ‘You’ve been cooped up for twelve month. That’s why. Needed to stretch your legs again. Lucky you didn’t get lost. Daft devil.’

‘Mam, you not seen them down there?’ A flattened whisper. ‘D’you not hear them?’ Her son’s lips didn’t move.

Her ears tuned to the cellar.

Nedra wrapped his balloon hand in soaked teatowels and walked him to bed like some noctambulist marionette. Then got back in hers.

Jim returned from the cellar soon after, rosewater-scented. Warmer than the bed he’d left. He fell right asleep beside her on a dried ocean pillow.

Morning the moors breezed, the ground frosted, the clear sky empty sun.

‘Have you no scarf?’ Mac’s eyelids crinkled to the wind, were studded with moles and blended bumps.

Near him Nedra tightened the headscarf knot under her chin, afraid of losing hers as the wind whipped Minnie’s hair loose, then forwards. She screamed for the thrill of it and tugged down her skirt. Nubs of long grass in murmuration for miles about. Rolls of lowland rising with ripples of violet. Once the wind died Minnie picked flowers and they stayed long enough for her to French kiss Mac with them in her hair.

‘Like bloody kids these two’ – Jim smirking and tutting, pointing with his arm round Nedra; their son off ahead on his own.

Small at a distance, Sefton stepped so straight and steady into the sun so as to never be moving farther or nearer, only the wind filling his sports jacket in random animation like a scarecrow pitched in a gale. Stiff-backed, taunting and unreachable like a mirage.

Pushed by the weather, Nedra raised her knees to stride the taller grass without slowing. Each pace they climbed: the moorland unspooling unnoticed into grand region, the incline felt in her lungs, her legs, as she pursued Sefton to higher ground. Her fabric scarf under the plastic hood fluttered; the wind deafening one ear until she adjusted the knot so the wrap squeezed her cheeks into her eyes, trapping sweat.

‘Like bloody kids,’ said Jim.

‘Or just man and wife having their holidays,’ Minnie sang, beside him, garters emergent whenever her coat and skirt inflated. Shrieking and falling about, cat-rubs against two men. That milk complexion powdered, her forehead turned by albescent rays into a second sun. Nedra stared blinded until the wind or bonelight made her tear. Her leaking body knotted tighter in horror. Each step Nedra took became automatic. Mounting steps. Mounting sickness. Doubt the decades she’d given him. A life spent keeping house with and without him. Doubt words spoken to silence local nattering, rumour and dissent, whenever he got put away. Doubt his loving arm now warming and curling her thick waist while he kidded her and Mac and Minnie; at ease unlike yesterday, handsome at fifty-nine but younger that morning, even without a shave. The anger in Nedra’s belly wouldn’t light. To be like them creatures she twice saw on her way to Civic, battling on their roads in broad day, clawing each other bare in front of neighbour and child, over one working man. Doubt Jim’s greatest blessing: a brain which belied his schooling – think of the things he could read and retain. Doubt the miracle of which she was unworthy. Doubt the saints even.

But no.

That morning Nedra had risen last, gone nine, having been awake much of the night. She hadn’t drunk a drop after supper, afraid it might steal her pain. Minnie rose first, they said, despite drinking herself sick, and having been up in the night too. Minnie claimed the kitchen to cook more breakfast than they could hope to walk off. Nedra smelled it, and heard them all, while she knelt to pray. The ruined linen went into a cobwebbed wicker box. Then with effort Nedra flipped the stained mattress, appealing to no saints to lift it through her.

When she came out dressed only Mac at the table looked up. ‘Morning.’

‘Knew you needed a lie-in,’ said Minnie, twisting at the sink. A pyramid of pots. A chequered pinny pinched short and still longer than the hemline beneath.

Mac finished his plate and stopped reading yesterday’s News of the World to pull out the heavy chair between him and her husband; and Nedra said ta and sat across from her son who was scoffing toast. Thirty-one in January and he still left the crusts. His left hand bandaged from a first-aid tin in the boiler cupboard. Right fingers ringed with gruesome plasters.

Nobody sat where they’d sat the night before.

Jim had finished his plate too and yesterday’s Manchester Guardian, which he shut to kiss Nedra’s cheek, then opened again.

‘Sleep well?’ Mac said.

‘Not while you did,’ Minnie said before she could speak. ‘This one were snoring the second he climbed in. Go anywhere and he’s out like that, once he’s had his drop of Lamb’s and a bit of nookie. Bloody Count Bartelli here. Broke the bed.’ Jim’s laugh crumpled the paper. ‘Reckon we could be mithering you and Jim tonight. The four of us having to top-and-tails it like sardines. Imagine?’

‘. . .Twelve eggs?’ Nedra saw the open cartons empty on the sideboard.

‘This lot.’ Minnie accused left and right. ‘Your Jim had three. Anyone’d think you don’t feed him.’

Jim tattooed his belly, reading.

‘I kept two for us.’

Nedra let her serve her and they ate together last. Facing. She felt herself between Minnie’s teeth. Minnie ate like she talked like she dressed like she moved: with a sheer lubricity. A taunting behind the put-on, able to conjure Nedra’s worst fears, of desecration and devaluation; to be kinless, unDodded, ungodly, unwanted, sulphurous and alone. No kiddies or men to dish for. No saint to thank or beseech, no Holy Father or Mother to forgive her sins, no blood to make her world beat. Aberrant thoughts these. But soon she’d be right as rain, right as rain. Even when –

Minnie sang summat wordless and gay and beckoning – as she swung on Mac’s arm after breakfast, on their walk, and did a skip-step to keep up with his long strides. By noon they were a good way from the cottage and the wind gone. And though they saw two chalk-and-slate mountain hares big as dogs, the birds never sang with Minnie. A red grouse got chased off by a magpie beaking moths off the thistles, ripping them to dust. Then the clouds arrived black. It was pouring when they turned around, when Sefton marched through them like a living statue and skimmed his father without apology, and led the four again.

‘Bloody hell. Good job they was no picnic, ay?’ Minnie said as Sefton passed her, lifting her face to him and the weather, and releasing Mac’s hand to cup her mouth and shout: ‘Sefton, love! Slow down, you moody sod! Only bit of water.’ Her makeup soon washed and she looked at Nedra, glinting and giddy: ‘Plus your poor mam’s only got wee sausage legs!’

When Jim jogged after him Minnie said: ‘Oh just leave him then,’ and snatched Nedra’s waist where he’d held it. ‘What’s he expect, that lad of yours? He could’ve brung his Carol. It’s his own fault. She might’ve enjoyed herself. Got the neighbours to mind Kelly, then come flattened some grass up here before it pissed it down.’

‘Watch how you go here, Nedra,’ Mac said.

The moors slipped to mud. Her wellingtons turned and sank.

Minnie kept her straight. ‘Sefton’s not had nowt for months, has he? I’ll bet that’s how he duffed his hand last night, beating out one too many confessions.’

With her other arm, Minnie reined Mac closer. A beast of burden. Slanted into the rain, he looked like a ceremonial shire horse with his drenched Crombie and black parting pasted flat to his temples like blinkers. Minnie kept him slightly in front, breaking the worst of the weather with his body, and sparing Nedra the most.

The rain-wind noisy. The cottage nowhere. Her garb a soaked weight. Its plastic sweaty, her legs chilly. She was near exhausted, hurting. Ahead her husband and son. Talking maybe. Sefton still farthest. It was so hard to see.

‘Oi, this isn’t right, this,’ Minnie giggled. ‘Where are we?’

Mac, pointing at an empty road across a hazy peak, the winding track a garden worm at this distance.

In the other direction waited her Sefton and Jim.

They arrived at a slick rocky bluff where lay a six-by-two scrap of fresh-turned and patted earth. Crescent shovel slices, waterlogged.

Minnie danced across the free soil to reach a final rock where she let nature insideout her skirts and take her bald rubber soles to the rock’s lip. Her hair raised and separated like scored ribbon.

Nedra was about to charge her off into the short drop – maybe enough to dash her or twist her neck. But Mac left first and reclaimed his wife, at the last moment, after she was off the stone, kited and airborne.

He folded her into his arms with her giggling the same unfaltering notes, only muffled by the kisses she fed him. Then Minnie’s eyes rolled onto Sefton, onto Jim, onto Nedra. The giggles spent. And the Heavens shut. Minnie stroked Sefton’s battered hair as Mac carried her past him. Nedra untied her headscarf – dry enough under the plastic – and tied it round Minnie’s alabaster cheeks.

Within an hour they were all thawed by the cottage fire, silent with chipped cups of scalding tea. Outside, another wave of rain. Drops so heavy they hit and bounced on the drive like little dancing men. Nedra watched them dance. A catechism recited, reaffirmed, till she was right as rain and believed it.