Oxblood

AS LIVING GHOST OF her vacated house Carol slept undead till the baby called to her in a song sweet enough to reach her.

Carol woke, knees drawn, sexually sore, bathed in netted light, the whole bed hers. She knew what day it was – Saturday – having agreed to leave the house that evening with Mac.

Yes, tonight Carol would tart herself up for Ira ‘Mac’ McGowan, if she remembered how to, if she exhumed a frock that about fit her. Yes Mac I’ll go with you tomorrow and every day after no matter when or if you carry out your jewellers job with my criminal son under your wing my soft son who was once so in danger of forgetting his name he threw himself in Strangeways to find it before you came to teach him its true meaning but since you are more Dodds man than he and as a Dodds man in all but name and with an eye now on a dead Dodds man’s wife and another on a dead Dodds man’s son you can claim us both and save us from ourselves and so it is a yes to you and Kelly and Rodney Westlake and whoever else you’ve dredged up from Manchester’s sorry canals filled only with loyal luckless blood and it’s a yes if you get away with armed robbery and a yes if you get pinched and sent down which at your age with your record could leave you forever at Her Majesty’s pleasure and it is a yes without needing you to rob me a diamond engagement ring because if you kept it I shall wear your Minnie’s rock instead like a trophy and toddle out of Wythie for good like a past-it glamour puss of the North, the last of her kind. Yes I will love you Mac McGowan. Yes come take me and take my name and give me yours. Yes so long as tonight you say where you dug my tender Vern’s grave.

Because to learn his burial ground meant escape for all things trapped in her house by accident, consequence or design. Dodds women were women of inflexible devotion. She had carried gentle Vern with her through time, having locked him, with her, between life and death, in a purgatory he did not deserve – a shared cell too good for her yet too much for her to bear. To let Vern rest she would forsake ten thousand sweet fucks without which her wounds could not remain open, or her guilt be nightly renewed. Scarred instead she would abscond from a life lived to be forgotten, in a place vast and proud and half-abandoned by the present and half-ruined by false promises made to it in the past, made before Carol was thought of, made to her own house-proud Wythenshawe mam and the house-proud Wythenshawe mams her mam knew: lies whose legacy had left Carol as set and sad and defeated as she ought to be; lies which had helped her pay small penance she could otherwise scarcely afford. To let Vern rest she would forsake more than Vern and no less than Vern: her maminlaw, son, daughter and daughter’s son. She would escape this zoo and its rolling menagerie of boisterous, unwashed, unfed, unloved kiddies on the cadge, filling her house and keeping her cupboards empty, and her scrubbing endless – and for which her maminlaw scarcely charged the neighbours enough to break even. Tonight Carol would gladly make like Eunice and fly the broken nest. To be with the womanshy older thief, the late guvnor’s loyal muscle and cuckold. They had enough in common. Both cowards both widowed both killers. Their better halves monsters slain without swords.

So, Carol left bed Saturday, peeled her shift, its egg-blue seams and trims navy with unguent and grime. From behind the door she unhooked a scratchy towel dressing gown so shell-dry it couldn’t mop the nightstain from her thighs – proudly jellied from hugging Vern.

Downstairs she lit the stove to brew up and warm some powdered milk. In what was once her son’s room she changed and fed the baby then licked his nose to bring back his light. Nameless and officially undeclared, unvisited by state or health visitor. He looked up at her with inscrutable happiness. Wriggling bunflesh refusing to be swaddled. He gave her a stream of excited chatter and babble in the metre of speech – sharing his dreams with her this way before he tired and dreamt some more. Carol looked over the cot for Vern. When she looked down the baby was sucking her fingertip content – more watchful of her than she was of him. Carol checked over her shoulder, as if she might find Vern by the porridge woodchip wall, his ridiculous prick bobbing while he told her daft things to shield her from his useless cleverness and instead impress his unwavering and contented light so that it might kindle her own. A soft light and warm; she hated that it couldn’t burn her. His light neither forgiving nor unforgiving since Vern didn’t recognise or confer forgiveness. Alive Vern had said to her it was funny to be living. The joke wasn’t that he was dead. One night in bed Carol reminded him of this while he pretended to magic an endless hankie out of her bellybutton, a hankie that was really her snazziest black cotton briefs (snazzy meant by some miracle their elastic hadn’t gone). Mid-trick, Vern kept gesturing naked that there was nowt up his sleeves; and at first he hadn’t remembered what or why, because the dead forget quick, but then he’d said:

‘Do not mourn the living, Carol, my love, they don’t know what they’re doing.’

And she’d laughed herself awake to find him still in her bed and her bed still a catafalque, his girlish hands shushing her. He had her knickers in his gob; and he gulped like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Mimed amazement. Fish-hooked himself to show her they were gone. Bloody blinking magic. Then he rolled off her to banter with Sefton – her wedding photo framed on her bedtable –claiming Sefton knew how the trick was done and had threatened to tell out of spite.

‘Tell who?’ Carol said.

‘A certain regional ruling body.’

‘Mine.’

Vern raised his chin. ‘You always get one, don’t you? Sees the rest enjoying themselves and ruins their bit of clean fun.’

She’d turned her husband’s picture to spare him and woken without her black cotton briefs, beside her maminlaw who slept like a walrus, sinking the double bed. Carol had looked for the pair on washday and was relieved to never find them again.

Was that the joke? That her dead men didn’t give threats or answers or forgiveness or mither with or recall even the dull petty graft of living. Funny Living as Vern had called it, being in love with life because he saw it for what it was: a Sharston to Piccadilly double-decker, on which the two of them had found themselves strangers sharing a bench, not so much fated to sit together but had done so anyway, and got off together instead of where they were supposed to, knowing from then on they couldn’t go anyplace without the other.

But the dead could steal your life while you lived it which was itself the answer, the threat and the punishment: all of which you could count in old pence like the small currency of forgiveness.

But Saturday morning in the backroom with the baby, Carol saw only motes and heard only a quiet odder than the one that had preceded Kelly’s do. Neither of her kids had come home last night. They’d left separately, would return separately. And with Nedra churching early (Carol had come downstairs to a cold stove, counters dusted with flour, a pie bird drowning in a rusty pool in the blocked sink) those who weren’t strictly of this house were yet to invade. Nedra had likely got next door’s eldest to carry her dishes: weekend dinners and pudding for her priest – full-haired, bow-legged, sixty-odd – who made fewer social calls since October, but still bobbed in to drink whatever Nedra stocked for him and poured from an old decanter into the surviving tumbler. Between regal sips he would glance at Carol in her kitchen the way brutal men, home after last orders, ageing in their frontroom chairs, stared at water bowls under gas fires. Men hollowed. Wedded to women of battered bodies and mocking faces. On his regular visits Nedra’s priest wouldn’t ask Carol owt other than a clenched Well? to which she’d reply by the same word or now and then with a sigh, after which he would laugh weakly and steal his glances.

Carol shouldered the baby now and took him from Kelly’s old room into Jan’s, which had become Kelly’s too, since the baby had taken his. It was fag-stale, the single bed unmade – the floor a jumble sale. Slagheaps of robbed clothes. Sun diamonds spotted the floor via the mirror. Carol waded into one and warmed her gleaming perfect feet. A skinny orange Bic lighter stood on a shelf with bottles and palettes of tutty. Tea rings, stacked coppers, costume jewellery. Torn pages from schoolbooks leafed the tiny dresser: doodles scratched right through the paper.

‘Has Strangeways changed him?’ Vern had asked her in the night.

‘Changed him how?’

‘Made him more of this or less of that.’

‘I wouldn’t know. I don’t know me kids. Times I forget they’re there.’

‘I don’t believe you. They’re both too there to ignore.’

‘But I’m not all there, am I?’

‘Some of you is. Which means you can be there for them some of the time. And that’s all you can ever be.’

‘Give us the punchline.’

‘I’m not there at all. But we make do.’

Now she put the baby down on the sheeted mattress and banked him with pillows.

Shhhhhhhh. . .

Without waking, he hushed her like he was in on it; his sibilant breath telling her to hold her nerve: let Jan get home and fight somebody else for her own room.

Carol scooped Kelly’s ashtray bowl off the inside windowsill and went back downstairs where she managed to spark up with maybe Jan’s, maybe Zuley’s, orange lighter. She binned it after it gave her a flame and took up her housework, foursquare on the speck-green lino, cig between her lips: wiping dark sticky fingermarks off doorframes and cupboards. Cloudy marbles, a ruby hairslide and squished berries filled her dustpan; even a duffed charm of St Jude, helper and keeper of the hopeless, and a broken crystal chaplet and devotional medal, each Nedra’s, each of which Carol had been accused of pawning, last week maybe or last year. Found beneath a fresh warp in the lino, at the skirting that ran to the backdoor. Under the table was what looked like a cold drumstick but what she swept up was a plastic baby doll leg, webbed in dog dribble and toothmarked. Though she didn’t let in next door’s staffie she knew Nedra fed it on the sly whenever Carol was mithered elsewhere.

Carol kept the ashtray moving –

on the lino with her

as she cleaned from the floor up, the opposite

of how it was done.

No less perverse for her than knowing what day it was.

The nicotine technicoloured her memory, regrew the divides between moments lived, shaping her inner world with solid edges. She hadn’t smoked since before Jan was born. Not since she had caught her sisterinlaw Eunice in the chilly WC at her inlaws. Eunice, sat there under the flat spongy cobwebs, wearing a straw pillbox hat after Mass, holding a just-lit fag when Carol pulled the splintered door. The lit match in the tight space gave Eunice a fugitive glow. She looked up at Carol and then down again and smiled, quick, without teeth, and Carol joined her without knowing why. Eunice, maybe twenty-one then, fat as a duck, a shy office girl – who no one knew was even courting, never mind weeks from mixed matrimony, elopement and emigration – passed Carol the cigarette, already lippy-stained, but not as a bribe. Then she lit another from a packet of Embassy inside her Sunday purse. By then Carol had been four years in the family and knew next to nowt about Eunice, just that the girl typed Monday to Thursday, took no milk in her Lyons instant coffee, lived at home and more than enjoyed her mam’s cooking. There Carol sensed for the first time not hidden depth exactly but muddy shallows, an unexplored sadness in the girl, like some mystery scab in a reachable blind spot: ready to pick. Not that Carol wanted any female communion. She was after summat from this girl, but what, she couldn’t decide so might have called it fun. Locked in together they puffed the water closet into a tepee, waiting to see who’d speak first.

‘Is it sore?’ Eunice whispered, seeing her rub at her jaw.

Carol wondered then if she could make one of them cry. ‘You’re best not asking.’

Eunice’s posture rounded; she glanced behind her at the Izal. Both knees jogged with the chill. When Carol and Sefton called round, Eunice always forgot to cross her knees after taking her usual perch on the green three-seater, end furthest from the fire, in that maple-veneer front room. Nedra would notice and tell her daughter to mind herself. But on the toilet Eunice smoked with bolted knees. Carol took a drag and another and cupped the ash: ‘Your brother, he batters me about once a fortnight. Does it if I please him. And if I don’t.’

‘. . .’

‘Ay, least it’s not in front of our Kelly.’

Without warning, Eunice half stood to lift the toilet lid and ashed the bowl and resat and smoked what was left. ‘Wasn’t your Kelly good as gold today? Don’t know how you keep him so clean. When’s he turn four?’

Carol remembered telling her and remembered Eunice had flushed their stubs, and shivering, taken off her hat to fan the smoke out the dirty latch window but the hat had slipped out of her fingers – into the toilet bowl.

‘Fuck,’ Eunice whispered, covering her mouth too late. At that time in that place that word from that girl: it froze them. She saw her pinch the hat rim and lift it, wringing.

Carol talked into the splish of the bowl: ‘We’re daft apeths, ain’t we? Me and you.’

‘. . .’

‘It’ll dry. I shan’t breathe a word. . .’

Now, crawling on her kitchen floor, Carol heard her street echo and she put on the telly not to watch it but to snuff the playing-out shrieks. Mike Read, patronising Five Star on Saturday Superstore, a pop group she only knew because Vern had once told her that Jan liked them. When Carol had asked how Vern knew, he danced a Top of the Pops routine full-mast. She’d cackled, sat up in bed, applauding. He’d bowed and put an ear to the wall between her room and Jan’s. See, the dead can only listen. . .

Carol hoovered her front room. The TV’s square picture settled. Kelly’s girl, Zuley, had a look of one of the sisters in the group, but under a pound of tutty she couldn’t be sure. Carol wiped new dust off the telly top with her dressing-gown sleeve, planted the ashtray bowl and balanced her dog-end. Carol jogged her baggy pockets: lippy bullets, applicators, vials and pots from her daughter’s shoplifted makeup hoard. They clacked together like a bag of marbles. Her sleeve fell down her arm and passed over the painted singers being live-interviewed on her telly, answering daft questions. Static lifted her hairs, tingled.

As she went back to her housework short shapes appeared in the mottled glass of the front door. But the shapes soon ran off, impatient. Carol outwaited them – spying from the kitchen through the hall. There, Carol sucked the unsmokable cig right to the filter, dropped it into her dustpan and poured another brew.

Her floor drying spotless.

She stared at it into October last: when Vern had woken her with kisses so that she would have to listen and leave his arms and go downstairs, none of which she would’ve done voluntarily –

to find their fourteen-year-old daughter in the kitchen having come down in the night to break a full glass of water before taking a sip, her own waters already broken.

Jan gave birth upright, backed and squatted against the cooker, while Carol swept glass and Nedra midwifed, without asking the good St Gerard for help. Jan didn’t scream but panted the same as when Carol had found her there – moonlit feet bleeding on broken glass – in just a rancid sweatshirt of Kelly’s that Jan had kept out the wash and worn for bed ever since his conviction. Only once Jan howled blue murder, when she first noticed Carol in the kitchen dark with her. Carol had stiffened and her daughter recoiled and Nedra found them with the big light off – the bulb gone when Nedra tried the switch; the fuse blown – the crescent moon in the window cutting wide between net curtains which normally met. At that point, Carol and Jan had peered over their noses at each other, like they were both about to sneeze. Then Nedra rushed forward –

Jan sinking

and no sooner had it slipped out of her.

A tiny mess of recremental blood finding it had a voice and with it began the unwanted task of living as it entered their kitchen song-first.

Nedra took it beaming and tut-tutted into its noise. Then she gave it Carol to change the bloodwater in the pot-wash tub which she set on the lino beside Jan, right where the afterbirth had slapped like a dropped pie. Redding a new dish cloth, Nedra said to Carol: ‘This is like in the old days.’ Her voice had lost that sharp flutter; it even carried a trace of sleep.

Out of moon’s reach, Carol knelt and held the corded baby. Drenched in glop, passable as a clump of clay and about as real to her, it was surely too slight and unwelcome to stay but its song said otherwise.

Not once did Carol see Jan look at it. Jan’s tears fixed higher, her crown resting on the oven door. The moon caught her daughter down one side, showed her hair sweated flat, her resting features greased and florid, her lifted shin dirty, bruised like a lad’s. Fluid pearled her thighs, between which Jan groped absently almost, tame with exhaustion.

Nedra took the baby again. At sixty-five Nedra was claiming she would soon be unable to genuflect before the tabernacle. Carol watched carefully. No wince or strain or hissed prayer; not while she was bent-kneed under Jan; and this miracle went unrecognised. Nedra had caught her only granddaughter parturient, and it’d cured her aches on sight. Left her oxblooded. Nedra’s acceptance of the situation seemed instant, like the surprise was none, the event minor, and only proving she had been right about the girl. Nedra and Carol had raised her without love but with enough basic thankless upkeep to stamp their pain on her which by virtue of her blood Jan provoked.

For Carol, Jan’s thereness was best ignored, like everyone else’s. She might look too deeply into Jan over breakfast one morning and find Vern in there, then split her daughter open with a breadknife to free him, and have him to herself. Carol knew Nedra had always treated Jan different to the kids she saw to school, who ran riot, who gave as much cheek and caused as much grief and still Nedra fed them love. Bitterly, Nedra had accepted that Jan was Sefton’s daughter and Nedra could not entertain otherwise. Especially when Jan became her dead son’s daughter. Carol had brought about Jan’s ruin by abandoning her to Nedra’s forecasting of it. Carol knew that Jan’s fall would redecorate their martyrdom. Knew her maminlaw was keen to greet this great-grandchild and picture scandal.

Lucky then there was more –

and that Nedra had saved her sign of the cross for when – washing the baby – she learned its stubborn skin. ‘Nigger brown. Carol. Look. Them wicked buggers. Look. God help her. Nigger brown.’

And from then on Nedra shunned it just like its own mam. Which left Carol caring for it. Having to jack in work. They had little to live off without Kelly’s thieving and were left with a single giro, a pension and a few tenners a week from Nedra’s childminding. Nedra claimed Jim had been wily and thoughtful enough to put away some brass, so nobody would go short after he was gone. Nedra kept this lie alive. But the fatter Carol grew – living off reheated leftovers and Vern – the surer she was that nobody round here starved. Mouths you never knew you had, you could feed best.

A month Carol had known her daughter was pregnant and said nowt; she’d not even told Vern. Bev Willows had rung the house before work, sounding more legless than hungover. She promised to keep it out of the factory girls’ ears and for a time – gobshite or not – she did. Nobody shopped the Dodds women. Sat on the bottom stair on the phone Carol shook with bottled laughter and thanked Bev, sensing that thanks were wanted or maybe required, and thanks were simpler than questions. Before Carol could ring off Bev asked her to clock in for her, and if she couldn’t, then tell the foreman she’d be in by nine so not to dock half her pay. While Bev waited on the line for an answer Carol heard hope. And hope was always pregnant. Carol moved her mouth from the receiver to laugh – rolling and twisting like she did at Vern’s jokes. . .

Nigger brown. Carol, look.

Carol looked again in her kitchen by October moonlight and wanted to rush upstairs and shout Vern, then she remembered he was dead.

‘Gorgeous. Must take after his daddy, whoever that is.’

Carol looked at Jan.

No words for or from.

The last time Carol had had words for her that mattered was on the maternity ward when nursing with a painful latch a shallot face in shade and shape. Carol hissed that she would swap this life of minutes for ten more with Vern if she could. Him being dead and buried before they’d known they’d made her. . .

Carol bedded Jan’s baby in a wrecked Easter basket, tucked it under moth-bitten shawls that her maminlaw had been saving for the rag-and-bone man since the year of Carol’s wedding. When she came to bed she found not Nedra sleeping but Vern waiting. He had folded the corners of the sheets, like he was setting places for ghosts, which he was. Odder still, he was wearing summat: a pair of sixties clubmasters. A twist of Sellotape replaced a lost screw. Through them he stalked her bedroom reading a snapped paperback and missed her undress: ‘“At first you think that you can bear only so much and then you will be free. Then you find out that you can bear anything, you really can and then it won’t even matter.”’ He saw her, over his specs. ‘Any cop?’

‘You can write down owt and make it sound clever. Won’t make it true.’ Carol took his waist – his prick heating her belly. Behind her head she knew he was rereading the passage to himself, in agreement. She rubbed into him to try to take his smell but couldn’t find it –

till he dropped the book on her bedtable, where by morning it wouldn’t be. ‘What about “a dead body revenges not injuries”?’

‘Well, yours still looks in fine fettle – and to think now you’re a granddad.’ Carol laid on her bed, pointing thick white legs. ‘I should’ve had the sense not to let meself go.’

His woman’s hands: ‘You’re like a bloody Botticelli, you are.’

‘Just get here.’

His lips reached her halfway through a joke, and he performed the rest inside her, and she waited until she could hardly see, then said:

‘Vern Jenkins. . . a granddad.’

She reminded him of the day he took her and a sweet little boy to Belle Vue Zoo to watch animals do nowt. Kelly had cried when the big cats yawned but Vern put him on his shoulders and told him the cats were sharing stories to pass the time. Soon had Kelly giggling at nonsense about Growltiger the Bravo Cat. . .

Carol upset the bedtable – bruising her knuckles, tipping Sefton’s bridegroom photo onto Vern’s book.

He scooted up to straddle her. She took off his fogged specs and gave them her husband.

‘Boy or girl?’

‘Boy. Black as sin.’

‘No? Sensational. How did Jan go on?’ Vern stressed hows, like a factory girl, not dids like that German poet he took her to hear once in a mouldy Shudehill bookshop with no heating, rammed with students dressed in pulled threads, reeking of Bovril and dope. She could remember what she had on that day but not Vern – just that he’d smelled more of old books than the old books; and that smile he had worn for her when the poet stopped mid-line to fill a pipe he never smoked.

‘Now it’s out of her she won’t be in a room with it. She hid him for the whole ride. Even from herself.’

He rolled Carol’s body carefully and she shut her eyes and took his weight – even-spread. ‘I feel bad for Jan,’ Vern said.

‘You bloody would, you mug. You know damn well what we women are.’

He tapped her skin thoughtfully. ‘You’re a public convenience.’

She tossed a pillow. ‘If only.’

Vern straightened Sefton’s picture, then said to her: ‘Were you showing when you wedded?’

‘Officially no. Course, that viper Minnie, she came up to me after the ceremony, making dead sure Nedra was in earshot before she went, “Carol, lovey, you can’t hardly tell. Least not from the front.” Minnie wore white too, you see? Reckoned if I bloody could, she might as well.’

Vern blew Sefton a kiss but she turned him away. ‘So Nedra knew there was two inside that wedding gown?’

‘She had to let it out then resew me into it. On the big day the thing was that clinging tight I couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, so I spent the night dancing with all the rum villains Jim invited to the after-do at the Oaks. One got up on the bar with his little guitar for an Irish sing-song. They were teaching me. I can remember their sweaty hands being tighter than me wedding dress.’

‘You had blood sitting in your bridal shoes.’

‘That’s right. Me poor little feets doubled with the swelling.’

‘You fainted before midnight. You butted the corner of the bar on your way down.’

‘That’s right.’

‘They fetched an ambulance and you spent your wedding night up Withington Hospital.’

‘Tell us, how’s it you remember what you weren’t there for better than what you were? This was years before I met you.’

‘Aye, but I read to retain and retain what I read.’

Reading her, Vern reached for the bridegroom photo, turned it again till they could see him and he could see them.

Carol had wedded spring ’62 – on the day the A6 murderer hanged.

Carol was older now than Nedra was then.

Nedra forty-two; Jim fifty-two; Mac forty-two; Minnie twenty-seven; the groom a grand lad of twenty-three whose blushing bride was twenty and already a slut, seven months gone; and knowing this their shrunken whiskered priest read them an encyclical during the nuptial liturgy:

‘“There is danger that those who before marriage sought in all things what is theirs, who indulged even their impure desires, will be in the married state what they were before, that they will reap that which they have sown; indeed, within the home there will be sadness, lamentation, mutual contempt, strifes, estrangements, weariness of common life, and, worst of all, such parties will find themselves left alone with their own unconquered passions. Let them, those who are about to enter on married life, approach that state well-disposed and well-prepared. It will also help them, if they behave towards their cherished offspring as God wills: that is, that the father be truly a father, and the mother truly a mother; through their devout love and unwearying care, the home may become for the children in its own way a foretaste of that paradise of delight in which the Creator placed the first men of the human race. Thus will they be able to bring up their children as perfect men and perfect Christians. . .”’

Carol closed and reopened herself. Pinning Vern to wrap him up –

her ankles and wrists

crossed so tight

she cinched

his breath

he read her

from

cover

cover:

Carol’s mam arrived at the church late and alone in a loose egg-blue suit and knitted snood on sale that month at Lewis’s. She joined a packed middle pew. It was the perfect improper vantage from which a mysterious mother-of-the-bride could witness the ceremony, be declared prematurely a no-show and, when later discovered, be raised by the groom’s lot into the canon of stuck-up cows and queer fish, and evermore thought of as harmless, if not a full shilling.

Vern

turned

back

page

and

reread

it:

A cold, slabbed aisle to aggravate the pinch of Carol’s scalloped bridal heels and each step they took for her cut her feet as the aisle stretched endless. On both sides she saw a leering jungle of stranger-guests twisting to her ascent. Starved wolves. Twin packs of curled lips. She clocked her mam among them. A mother could recognise the agony Carol’s smiling stride concealed.

Carol passed another pew and another and looked dead ahead, grinning wider, until finally she got two steps beyond her mam’s row and tasted salt: her face wet.

See Carol’s mam was a waif and a Methodist widow who ate less than she spoke and only spoke when others intruded far enough down her own mental canals which could not be drained. She knew Carol was courting as soon as Carol knew. She didn’t caution her daughter or weight her with expectation or offer aphorisms of instruction or any peculiarly Northern counsel, and instead left the business of sex to open shop – just not under her roof. And she took the news of a Catholic marriage with cold bemusement bordering on disinterest. Sefton met her the once, so they could announce the engagement. Carol saw her mam look him over while he ate her cooking (beef bourguignon; jam and custard for afters) and through her mam’s eyes Carol saw him put such effort into his manners that his fingers locked in spasm and he ruined her new damask. A crude lad contesting his place in this world. Through her she saw Sefton Dodds as needy and savage and not as handsome as they said and unable to step into let alone out of his father’s shadow; and that she had fallen for his smouldering hurt and misunderstood it by thinking there was summat there to understand and that it could be coaxed into the light by her, then soothed better. Meeting this lad again for the first time, through her mam’s sight, made Carol sick with pride that it was by him she’d finally got caught.

After the wedding Carol’s mam stayed an hour at the do, then snatched her hands to say ta-ra in a grim quiet voice, her eyes damp but not humourless and not anything like Carol’s own, whose might’ve taken after her dad’s, but her mam had kept no pictures to confirm it. There in the Oaks Carol was finally rid of this silent hipless woman who had birthed her and raised her without men and had never bothered to defend a life without them and so Carol had had to go out and find brutal male contest just to know if it existed and see if it were to her liking and, if not, acquire a taste. She found that easy enough and only later knew why: her mam had been teaching her from day nought how to live without life. She seemed to have moved through Carol’s childhood and adolescence like she was rehearsing a play. She had interests; she seemed about happy; she remained house-proud, was a Portway shopkeeper’s assistant through the week; she knew most of her Delwood neighbours; but by forty she was so prematurely withered her hair was too porous to hold a colour – not even grey.

After saying her ta-ras in the Oaks Carol saw her ask Jim to fetch her a cab. And Jim left his top villains crooning at the bar while he flagged one down and overpaid for it. But she returned the money a fortnight later in a scented envelope posted to her daughter’s new address, marked F.A.O. Mr Dodds the Senior. Her husband had drowned at Dunkirk. Maybe there was the dream from which she had never fully woken and so Carol grew up as contained as she and left home as witted and doomed as she, having been raised less by a female presence than by a male absence.

After the wedding Carol saw her mam only twice. A quick visit after Kelly’s birth, before she dropped dead at forty-one.

Vern stopped

reading her

to scribble

in her margins:

‘Oh, we can’t forget that great ox, can we? Poor Mac. Can you see him there on your big day, back at the church, right at the front, next to his missus, Minnie. Ancoats’ own Veronica Lake! Now, he might have all that at home, but. . . well, there you are, swanning up the aisle, numinous in that tight white dress – and all he bloody well wants is you. Can you blame the bugger?’

Ahead of the final blessing Carol laid before the Immaculate Virgin violets and busy lizzies to appease her maminlaw. As she knelt to leave them there was an enthused sob behind her. Whispers travelled the front row for a dry hankie. When Carol glanced round it was Minnie foxing her, sniffling into the silk from Jim’s pocket, not Mac’s. Minnie always said: We’re only here the once. See what you can get away with. The groom stuck his arm out for the bride but forgot to help her stand. Carol began to fall on her way up, then somehow found herself already a married woman, dizzy at her own after-do:

Mrs Sefton Dodds.

Sharston slut and mother-to-be.

‘It’s high bloody time our Sefton had a firm hand on his tiller,’ said broken-nosed men who squeezed her arse.

No longer could she feel her blistered toes. Faint with the noise Carol stood at the wall, her breathing tough and shallow in that mousetrap frock, while the man of the hour gave his fat sister Eunice giddy dance after dance, and left Carol free to be felled by Minnie’s third strike:

‘There you are! Let me look at you. Absolute stunning.’

Carol got cornered not long after her mam went home.

‘. . .A right good do, this, Carol. Ay, have you had a boogie yet? Not with me you’ve not. Come on.’ A party-sweat on her exposed chest and forehead carried Minnie’s rosewater scent farther. Her witch mouth tickled the folds of Carol’s ear: ‘I would’ve give you a couple of goers in like I did when we first met, only I’d get done for murder, now, wouldn’t I? Anyhow, I slipped summat in your Sefton’s toasting glass instead. You’re in for a treat tonight, love. So, thank me. That said, I’ve a mind to pity a poor delicate thing like you once that strapping new husband of yours gets you home. . . Oh, I’m kidding you. Picked yourself a fine brute, there, love. Oh, very nice. Sefton sodding Dodds. . .’

All the while Minnie jigged her about, leading like a man.

‘. . .Bit of advice though, love: never refuse them. Never. Well, unless you don’t mind going without. Steady now. Stay with me. Don’t you be fainting before I’ve had any cake. Where was I? Oh aye, yes: Let him have his wicked way with you little and often. Mind you, you’ve nowt new to offer him, have you. That’s the trouble, see? They’re all the same. After what they can’t have. Take your Sefton. You know well as I do the years he’s been sniffing round me. Then finally, right – God, this was just last month, this – your Sefton, he works himself up into such a bloody state he chases us into the cellar of the Three Coins. Poor lad must’ve thought, Right, there’s old Mac’s wife again, that saucy bitch wagging her arse under me nose. Well, tonight’s the night. It’s shit or bust. Course, Carol, he came on too strong for his own good. Didn’t even get it in before he popped like a Roman candle! I had to bloody laugh. Course, then he whipped up his pants and kicked over a great big bloody keg. Flooded that cellar, he did. Oh, Carol, it was funny. But I did have to have a word with our Mac, who then had to have a word with our Jim. And you know Jim’s not one to spare the rod. He didn’t half belt your Sefton after I showed him what he’d done to me silk skirt. But Jim wasn’t too rough in the end – not wanting no blackeyes or broken teeth in your wedding pictures. . . Beg pardon!’

Carol twirled into Minnie’s belch; it smelled of Babycham and semen. Enough to send her skull to the bar, but Minnie grabbed her waist and straightened her in time. Minnie danced them from one end to the other, spilling pint heads and batting off half a dozen sandpaper faces trying to land kisses on each of them:

‘. . .Sefton’s not your first though, is he? Oh, right. I see. Beg pardon again. Well, you’ve still time to put it about a bit. Be quick though, love. Once you pop it’ll be all over. A-way these bastards’ll go. Only kidding you. We have to laugh, us girls, don’t we? Listen, all I’m saying, love, is it doesn’t have to stop now you’re spoken for. No, does it ’eck. In fact, it makes you a more desirable cut. Just think: our Mac, bless him. Still be soggy in the head for you. . . Tis it, love? Do you need a sit down? Be a shock if you can in that frock. Let’s have us one more dance!’

Mac appeared behind his wife, heads above her. His skin was sparking bright. He was reaching for Carol, but kept growing brighter and taller until he was too tall to pick her off the floor where Carol was dancing away by herself in the dark. . .

Here

Vern

shut

Carol’s

and returned her to Saturday morning – her telly playing to itself in the front room. A fire had broken out in a football stadium in Bradford mid-match. They went there live but Carol bounded upstairs to dig out her wedding shoes.

The shoebox contained dead spiders and twists of newspaper but no damp. Both heels were intact in their coffin after twenty-three years, preserved in dust paste – nowt a good brush and polish wouldn’t fix. Only her blood, which blacked the inner toes, showed they’d been worn. She pushed her hands in first and wore them like hooves. She tried them on again, this time with unswollen feet.

Stalking the house experimentally until she was sure her old blood didn’t flow fresh.

Yes, Carol would wear them tonight for Mac.