‘I CAN’T BE DOING with it today, me,’ said Bev Willows, lewd large loud, clocking on after Carol, trying to shield her from that morning’s skens, which came before a shift, from the other factory girls, who, unlike Bev, were long resigned to Carol’s frost and bruises. Those factory girls of December ’76, on the last shift of the festive week, with their upturned noses catching a bad smell. Claiming to know her business so thoroughly that among them it could no longer be oversold as gossip. Finding her solemn as a Benedictine nun. Wary of her married name. Talking out of their plucked-chicken gobs: Well, you can’t help them what don’t help themselves, can you now? They tutted and left her to it, unpitied. All except Bev bloody Willows: trying to distract her from their ritual scornful apathy. Bev made out she hadn’t noticed the brutal colours that marred Carol’s wrists – colours worn without pride or shame but as banal news reprinted weekly on her body to be read and then folded up inside her factory-floor coat so that she could go and sit for seven hours on a production line, quality-checking Battenbergs, French Fancies or gluing Viennese Whirls while her maminlaw minded the kids. Her Jan and her Kelly, steadily bewitched by their nana’s careful slips and home cooking: sweets and cakes nicer than any industrial-estate confectionery Carol brought home by the boxload to bargain for love. See, Nedra was still, from time to time, accident-prone herself. Stove burns and bath falls; tumid cheeks and sudden limps due to bad knees, advancing age. Carol had often enjoyed teatime round her inlaws over the years. Nedra, serving Jim his heaped plate first, ignoring his ‘What the bloody hell’s this?’ He’d wait till they all had their meals served before throwing his at the ever-changing wallpaper. Then Nedra would twitter, uncontrollably, fetch dustpan and brush, with Jim demanding Carol and Sefton start without them. Which Carol would, almost untroubled, as Nedra cleared the mess. Like Carol, Nedra didn’t hide bruises with tutty, but unlike Carol, she had the purity of a lifer; living her lies not as lies but as faith – summat to believe in for herself, hoping to convert others. Which was how Carol’s two – her lad soft at fourteen, and his six-year-old sister who soiled the beds whenever their dad came home off remand – got taught to despise their mam. Both Carol and Nedra had lived each day since Vern Jenkins’ murder seven years ago in mutual assurance. They relied on each other to maintain their martyrdom, as one battered wife scorns and saves another.

As she slotted her punch card into the wall – while the factory girls slit their eyes; while Bev bloody Willows crowded her, gabbing on and on – Carol wondered why it was Sefton let her work. He said they needed the drip of clean cash to keep the dibble off their doorstep, not that it did. He said it kept her occupied whenever he was inside, which was often. And she was grateful to him for both. A few of the girls there knew what it was like being married to a crook, to have wed into a proud clan of English thieves or Irish hellraisers; but none had fell to a Dodds man.

This, the day before her husband died. He was taking her out tomorrow: Christmas Eve with Jim, Nedra, Minnie and Mac, as was tradition, for a tipple at the Woodpecker or the Cock of the North, where the Burtonwood came in plastic cups. Each year, Carol wore an old frock and pattern stockings and three squirts of a discontinued Charles of the Ritz that due to association or alchemy only suited her once it mingled with clouds of Minnie’s rosewater scent. Sefton would always drop Carol off home by half ten and take his mam to midnight Mass, then drain the rest of the estate pubs with his father till dawn, before going on to town in the Triumph to breakfast in a Moss Side brothel, and return to Wythie at dinnertime, tinselled, bladdered and reeking. In a hum of dope, yoni and scotch bonnet. Still have bellyroom for his mam’s glazed ham, local turkey and sherry pud. At her inlaws’ last New Year’s, Minnie had grabbed her on the landing, squeezed her into the water closet and drew these details for Carol with Never-guess-what eyebrows and titters. Some Christmases Mac stayed home with Minnie after the pubs, but some he not only ferried father and son to and from town in their Triumph, he also. . . Wet his wick! Having a bloody whale of it, they were. Our husbands, Carol. Playing Tarzan of the Apes with two to a bed. Minnie was proud. She never thought Mac had it in him – to step out even once a year, so rare did he step in. So she said. And Carol knew when she saw Minnie tomorrow for Christmas Eve at the Cornishman, Minnie would still be heartless and childless and free from envy. At forty-two uneaten by age: practically a Pendle Hill spell that was to be severed finally on Christmas Day, once news of the accident reached her. After dropping her home from the pub tomorrow Carol would spend late Christmas Eve with Vern – who was ageless like Minnie – testing the fold limits of time and mattress springs. This cuckoldry had continued after his murder, regardless of whether her husband lay in the bed leaking fears from his dreams or resting sound in a cell bunk, and regardless of whether her husband had beat her blue that night or called her Minnie as he shot his own muck into her, fantasising he was his father, and she his father’s mistress. Whatever Sefton did to her, Carol could erase it with Vern, his daft jokes shared inside her, flushing her husband out.

Contrary to factory whispers she now had no mystery to her. She was numb to friendship and motherhood and affairs worldly or local, having let life alone so that all that existed for her was Vern’s horizontal stand-up. Their chatter spiralling into and out of delightful rubbish until Carol would be too spent not to sleep, even knowing when she woke he’d be gone. On fag breaks she would bob in the staff toilets and scratch her itch. Biting down on her free wrist. The thirty-four-year-old lawful battered wife not-yet-widow to Sefton Conan Dodds, swimming from owt that stopped her from reliving the night in the day. And had managed all right until Bev Willows started full-time and wanted to know her. She’d worked there too long to hear the machinery, feel its blast bounce off the concertina roofing and ping to the floor as an undiminished echo made and remade on the eternal belt of cakes. Too long to even smell what they made or to crave it, except when she was on. Vern had told her only that week she now permanently tasted of Bramley apple filling:

‘Factory – or homemade?’ Carol worried.

‘If you’re lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young feller, then wherever you go, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.’

She wrestled under him, winning. ‘Oh-aye? Even if he never got to Paris, but had digs behind Sharston Baths, floor-to-ceiling with books? Took in somebody’s wife and kiddie, the daft sod. Died on his own doorstep.’

‘I was Last of the Jenkins, I’ll have you know. The buck stopped here.’

‘You dunno how lucky you are. . .’

Now a telephone was ringing in the factory office. From the corridor Carol saw through the empty window, the office unstaffed except for saucy schoolgirls and topless nurses staple-gunned to the walls and tinsel-framed. Sweet names, upturned noses and nipples: Mary and Madeline looked down at her sisterly. Mary wasn’t climbing out of her clawfoot bathtub to answer any telephone. . . It kept ringing. A tiny red-haired office girl, not much older than her son, rushed in with a hot drink, which she drizzled over her typewriter, lunging for the receiver. Carol turned unhurried. They had minutes before their lines went live but Bev dogged her all the way down like some barmy chaperone:

‘. . .and it’s bloody Christmas, near enough. So I say let’s have us a merry last shift, ay?’ Fag ash glowed in Bev’s crooked hairnet like a rubied tiara. She slowed to flash Carol a hipflask before nesting it back inside a colossal lavender bra. Old girls bustled past, cackled. Bev danced a sort of reverse burlesque where she restudded her factory coat. It took the talk off Carol and was meant to.

Since starting that spring Bev was like a toad after a kiss, having quickly wooed the other factory girls, the technicians and apprentices, the foreman and the packers, with a half-dozen blue gags and frank tales too detailed to be fibs. Each had a filthy boast and a sting at her own expense, to put her in a harmless light, which allowed her to get away with blue murder on the clock. She was single mam to a little lass who went to St Thomas’ RC with Jan. Estranged wife to a Trafford Park warehouse manager who had broken furniture on her back. The night he left her, she let him stay gone.

Carol knew Bev wasn’t daft, wasn’t trying to get close to her for the challenge. Bev thought them the same – wanting only to treat her like she were just another factory girl, and Bev would continue to, unless Carol did summat and soon. So stubborn Bev was with her sympathy – expressed under all that noise – that she could withstand Carol’s indifference. Bev’s volume hid patience. She could clown and gab till pay day on one breath.

‘Ay, I do everything better after a few. Honest to God. Is it same for you? Cos I can –’ Bev was pouring words over her, but an old bint ahead of them answered instead:

‘Pissed?’

‘Not saying pissed. But just, you know. . .’

‘You still are. Time you get in last night?’

‘Now, now. Don’t be jealous cos I do as I please. Stephie, love, I am sorry, but if you stay with that bossy wee feller of yours, you’ll never live to be as old as you look.’

‘Cheek!’

The corridor grew small with tickled women.

‘But listen: working, singing, dancing, shagging, you name it. Should see me needlework after six ciders. Bloody straight as a die.’

‘What about your driving?’

‘Who’s got a bloody car round here that you know?’

‘Our Terry just got himself a Reliant. Brand new, it is.’

‘Oh, he has, aye. Plenty of room in it as well. Even had Maeve in the back, didn’t he? Must’ve been Grab a Granny Night at the Ritz. Hope he got the stains out.’ Bev got louder by the word to compete with the laughs. ‘But it were me he had it off with in the Reliant first, to christen it.’

One went: ‘Poor Terry spent the night in a cell cos of that.’

Another: ‘Bet you nearly died.’

‘Don’t see why it shouldn’t count as indoors and in privacy, long as there’s roof over you both. But no. You get a bobby come a-knocking on your fog window.’

‘What did he say?’

‘“You again?”’

How they laughed.

‘Poor Terry.’

‘You won’t be getting any of this in a bit.’ Bev jiggled to remind them she was wearing gin.

‘Best give us a tipple now,’ an old girl said.

‘All in good time, gorgeous. All in good time.’

‘Ay, Bev, me dad used to say he always drove best after four Mackesons.’

‘Like them Jamaicans I met in town, the other night. They like to smoke that stuff, Jamaicans, don’t they? Like the Red Indians. Every day, they do. So I ask one why and he goes: it clears their heads. Well, I’m the same. Only with the drink.’

‘So, you let one of them drive you home after you’d had a dance, did you?’

‘Did I buggery. Never mind one bobby; we’d have the whole bloody constabulary after us, thinking I’d been abducted.’

‘Ay, Bev, who minds your little Alice?’

‘Next door. They’ve got a young lad. They’re dead good. Ay, why don’t we all go town Christmas Eve instead of the Garter, if any of yous fancies it?’

‘You’re alright.’

‘Suit yourselves. Nowt wrong with chicken in a basket.’

‘Ay, Bev, do they get Christmas in Jamaica?’

‘I should hope so, love. Mind you, we don’t even get it here, do we? The miserable gets.’

‘We’ll get the chop if they catch us, Bev. I’m telling you now.’

‘See what I mean? Look, the brass can join in, can’t they? Fucking hell – it’s only once a year. Carol, love, tell them.’

‘Why not?’ Carol said.

This was the first she’d said to Bev, to anybody, in days. It halted the other factory girls’ feet and gobs, left Bev’s fat face open with childish amazement.

Carol split the plastic curtains and they filed onto the factory floor, taking their places on the line. Bev climbed the stepladder and blessed the mixing vat with a sprinkle of gin, then sent the flask along the line from girl to girl all morning till it was empty. Each time Carol got passed the gin she knocked it back and the whole line of blue-coated women – bowed and remote now – juggled their duties and their swigs with choreographed precision. Carol swapped out misshapen Fancies, missing none. While Bev – whose voice, alone among them, could compete with the machines – kept schtum. Instead she and Carol traded smirks without looking up.

Before dinnertime three girls were stone-drunk. Of the three, Frances Hewitt, fifty-odd, wasn’t the worst but was dismissed, despite Frances being well-liked and a good grafter and married to a crippled Pomona docker. With Carol she had worked there off and on since the site opened in ’62, through two changes of hands. Knowing nobody would grass on who smuggled in the booze, the foreman and duty manager had ceased production so they could hear themselves yell – show off their bushy tashes thick with wasted spittle. There Carol stood with the girls, around Frances, watching this cowed and sunken-faced woman slowly unstud her factory plastic, then put on her own coat and headscarf, which the office girl had been sent to fetch from the locker room. As Frances walked, the girl leaned out the office and called to her. Frances stopped and saw Carol and the rest, then the young girl beckoning her. She went to her dazed, as if wondering if it had all been a wind-up. But the typist just gave her a cut brown envelope and flew back into the office to answer the telephone.

At dinnertime Carol sat in a ladies’ cubicle and listened like a priest to Bev suffer through the partition wall. They finished their half hour hearing one weep and the other come. Carol made sure.

When they left their stalls to complete their extended shift, another fleshy factory girl rushed in for the sink. Bev blew her nose with bog tissue, waiting sullenly for her to finish, then said to Carol in a broken whisper:

‘We seeing you Christmas Eve?’

‘Her husband always takes her out,’ this other woman said for her, into the mirror, having likely been told this by another who’d been there longer. Maybe Frances.

Bev blinked to show she understood. Her blotch cheeks and throat and chest –

still rashed when all the girls got out at four, with their docked wages.

‘Happy Christmas,’ they told themselves, for gallows’ comfort, lingering in the locker room in their woolly hats and gloves, like penned cattle afraid of the open gate.

Off home first: ‘Ta-ra,’ Carol said.

***

Nine years widowed and now:

Friday again he came for Kelly. Grey-suited and brogued and widowed also. Towering over her apologetically in the tight hallway like some ancient packhorse whipped into the wrong station. Terrified of her, he’d asked her again to dinner. Alright, she said, nodding, corralled between greyed laundry drip-drying on a mangled rack and radiator. Mac didn’t look at her again or speak to her again, maybe in case she saw summat in him that changed her mind quick. But there was nought new for her to see or to feel – so little left he could keep from her. After he took Kelly for another ride out Carol lingered in the hall and caught her own morning reflection: fat and dishevelled and grimly imperious inside the picture glass of Jim’s studio portrait; a glossy black-and-white that had him looking like a B-movie mobster – taken well before she knew him.