Peter was six years old when baby Alison was brought home from the hospital and, though no one expected him to, he’d loved her as soon as he laid eyes on her, a squalling bundle, red-faced, furious, unsafe in their mother’s arms. He’d been afraid Catherine would drop her, because she’d already – famously – dropped him; everyone talked about it, the time she lost her footing on the stairs and tumbled to the kitchen floor, breaking baby Peter’s fall with her own body, as if she was heroic, as if it wasn’t her fault in the first place. Young as he was, Peter couldn’t understand why other grown-ups laughed at this story. He watched his sister, this baby, as Catherine carried her into the house for the first time, plonked her down on the settee like a parcel and reached for the drink that someone handed to her. All the adults in the room said, ‘Cheers!’ and Catherine said, ‘Make the most of it, Geoff, because there won’t be another one.’
This was Peter’s earliest memory; Alison roaring with newborn rage and nobody but him seeming to care, and the hot fire warming the room beyond comfort, the perilous, clumsy clink of glasses, his mother’s laughter.
In Alison’s first memory she was perhaps three years old, and sitting, in shorts, T-shirt and sandals, on the kerb of the pavement in the street, the same Attercliffe street where they still lived. She had no concept of time, but it was dusk, approaching dark, and all the children from the neighbouring houses had gone, called inside from the street by their mothers, one or two at a time, until Alison was alone. The chalk lines of hopscotch were on the pavement, there was a ball in the gutter which she could just reach with her left foot, and Alison’s bare legs were very cold. She waited and waited, until Peter came, swinging a kit bag and whistling. They waved, and she was very glad to see him. He gave her a cuddle and then let her into the house with the key he wore on a string around his neck.
This, then, was her earliest memory, but there were many, many subsequent times when Alison waited to be found, and she remembered them all: if not the specifics, then the cycle of sensations. She remembered, for example, the uniquely lonely feeling of extreme hunger; a wariness of encroaching night; an inarticulate infant desire for Peter to never go anywhere without her. Every time she waited for him, Alison would close her eyes and try to conjure up different places she might like to be. In a basket, with a pile of warm puppies. In a feathered nest, curled among the baby birds. In a field of corn, like a mouse, very small and hidden, very secret, very safe. Then Peter would seek her out, or come home from wherever he’d been, and he’d try to gather her up in his skinny arms, and all his warmth flowed into her, and he could always make her smile. At three, she loved him so dearly there was no space in her heart for anyone else, and still, at sixteen, she was devoted to her brother: her safe harbour, her trusted ally. When he was at work, or out with Toddy, she still listened for the sound of his key in the lock, breathed more easily when it came.
Last night, after the football, when Alison had come home from Daniel’s house and gone immediately upstairs to listen to his mix tape, Peter didn’t come home at all, but Martin Baxter did, letting himself in and raging about downstairs, looking for Catherine, shouting her name. His feet were heavy on the stairs, thundering up, pushing open Catherine’s bedroom door with so much furious force that Alison immediately got up from where she was sitting on the bed and crossed the room to open her own door before he could get to it – a small, defiant gesture, denying him his power to startle and intimidate. The Byrds were singing ‘The Girl With No Name’, and Alison was facing Martin, who stood on the landing, all sweat and grimace. She thought of Mr Lawrence in his pigeon loft, and imagined herself still there with him, imagined him placing a sleepy, placid bird into her cupped hands, imagined herself not being afraid to cradle its soft weight and feel its plump breast rising and falling against her fingers.
‘Your mother’s a slag,’ Martin said. ‘A fucking slag.’
Alison watched him. There was nothing to say.
‘Where is she?’ he demanded, his voice loose and slewed by beer. ‘Who’s she wi’?’
Alison had no idea, and said so. She recognised this bluster in Martin; she’d seen it before. There was spittle on his lips, which were incongruously, revoltingly feminine in his brutish face, plump and red and soft. In his right eye a burst blood vessel had filled in half of the white, which gave him a ravaged look, disorderly, off balance. He had reddish hair cut close to the skull and a tattoo on his neck, a blank-eyed snake curling around the flat blade of a dagger. The Byrds ended their song and started another, ‘Why’, the final track on Younger Than Yesterday, and Alison, steady as a rock, registered this although only on the margins, because she was imagining, from the distance of her mind, the horror of being Martin, pitying him his useless bulk, his foolish, clumsy torment, all his responses slowed down by beer, humiliated by Catherine who – he was probably right about this – was more than likely in another man’s bed, trading her body for the promise of more booze, postponing her shame and remorse until the next time she was sober.
Martin stepped closer to Alison, who stood her ground. ‘If you dunt tell me where she is, I’ll fucking beat it out o’ you,’ he said, and he let his fingers roam over the buckle of his belt.
‘I’ve been out all day,’ Alison said steadily. ‘How would I know?’ Contempt made her calm. She felt certain she’d kill him before she’d let him lay a finger on her. Martin breathed like a bull through flared nostrils and Alison half expected him to start pawing at the floor with one of his black boots. She wanted Daniel, suddenly, urgently. Daniel, his family, his house; she wanted it all with a shocking, desperate longing, but most especially, she wanted him, his arms around her. Not here though. Never here.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘wasn’t she out with you?’
Beer, the effects of it, made him suddenly stagger backwards and then plunge recklessly forward, as if the landing was tilting like a boat in a storm. He cursed, righted himself, and slowly but deliberately focused his gaze on Alison’s breasts, and this was meant to intimidate her, but she wasn’t afraid of Martin Baxter, not at all.
‘She’s at the Carlton,’ Alison said, realising suddenly that any old lie would get Martin out of the house. ‘Yeah, that’s what she said. The Carlton.’
He raised his head and regarded her with his bloodshot, swimming eyes.
‘You said you dint know,’ he said, pointing a fat forefinger at her face.
‘The Carlton,’ Alison said again, to imprint it on his mind, and he made a careful forty-five-degree turn, swayed for a moment at the top of the stairs, and then lumbered down them, recklessly, two at a time. She waited to hear the door shut behind him, and then she closed her bedroom door again. Now, on the mix tape, it was that band Dan went on about, the band she’d never heard of, Talking Heads, ‘Take Me To The River’. Alison sat down on the edge of the bed and listened, to see if she could hear what Daniel heard in them: to see if they’d speak to her as they seemed to speak to him. She turned up the volume and lay down.
In the morning, Peter was back and when Alison came downstairs he was sitting at the kitchen table in his donkey jacket. He looked sheepish, Alison thought, so she nudged him and said, ‘Got lucky, did you?’ It was so rare for Peter to stay out all night. In fact, she couldn’t remember when he last did. He shrugged and didn’t answer, so she didn’t push it, only pulled up a chair opposite him and sat down.
‘Is there tea?’ she said.
He nodded, and pushed the brown teapot across to her, followed by a cleanish mug.
‘Good time?’ she said.
‘Saw Superman, at the Gaumont.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’ He sounded defensive, and she laughed.
‘And what did you think of it?’
‘Oh. Yeah, fantastic.’
‘With Toddy?’
Peter nodded. ‘So, you a Wednesday fan now then?’
Alison laughed. ‘No, but oh, I had such a laugh, Peter. We threw snowballs at Arsenal’s goalie.’
‘I know,’ Peter said. ‘It were ont radio.’
‘We walked back, took us ages, eating chips and talking. Went to Daniel’s house. His dad keeps racing pigeons. His sister painted my nails.’ She spread them out on the table, perfectly pink, and considered them for a while, then she looked up at Peter. ‘It was nice.’
Peter smiled at her. ‘It sounds it. I still wish he were a Blade.’
There was the sudden muted clatter of a key in the door and then it burst open and Catherine could be heard in the small front hall, kicking off her high heels and dropping her bag and coat on the floor. She came into the kitchen and brought a smell of fags and stale alcohol, but the look on her face wasn’t blank or hostile, only weary. She dropped heavily into the remaining empty chair at the table, then she tilted her head to look first at Peter, and then at Alison.
‘So,’ she said, and laughed. ‘Just we three.’ They smiled, uncertainly. She was thin, as a woman who smokes instead of eats must be thin, and pallid, and her left cheek bore the yellow traces of an old bruise. She once was a beauty – a long, long time ago now. The blue seersucker blouse she was wearing was inside out, and the labels showed on the side seam and at the collar. She shivered in the cold room, and Peter poured her a mug of tea, which she took from him silently and held in two hands against her chest but didn’t drink.
‘Did Martin find you?’ Alison asked. ‘He came here, looking.’
Catherine rolled her eyes, put down the mug and pulled a squashed packet of Benson & Hedges out of the waistband of her skirt.
‘I wish he didn’t have a key,’ Alison said.
Peter shook his head. ‘No, he shouldn’t have a key, Catherine. He comes here, mouthing off, shouting the odds.’
‘Oh, he’s harmless,’ Catherine said, flapping a hand. ‘All mouth, no trousers. Find me a match, love.’
She said this to Alison, who stood up at once to get the matchbox from the back of the stove. She clutched at moments such as these, when her mother was lucid and sober. If she could keep her talking, light her cigarette, make her smile … She struck a match and held the flame to the end of Catherine’s cigarette.
‘Ta,’ her mother said. She took a long, shuddering drag and released the smoke through her nostrils. ‘Christ Almighty,’ she said. ‘Where would I be without my ciggies?’
‘So, did he find you?’ Alison asked again.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Catherine said. She looked at Peter. ‘He found you as well, he said.’
Peter looked at her. ‘What?’
‘You and Toddy, walking down Darnall Road.’
He held her gaze, but shifted in his seat and swallowed. She regarded him narrowly, her cigarette poised at her lips. ‘You walked right past him, and never saw him.’
‘He could’ve said summat,’ Peter said. ‘Why dint he say summat?’
Catherine shrugged. ‘Who knows?’ she said.
‘I hate the bastard.’
‘Yes,’ Catherine said. ‘I know you do. He knows it, an’ all.’
Alison watched her brother’s face. If only he’d look at her. But he didn’t look. He wouldn’t.
Catherine smoked for a while, wordless, then she said, ‘If I were you, Peter, I’d be civil to Martin. Makes life less difficult.’
A silence hovered between the two of them that Alison couldn’t interpret, then Catherine stood up. ‘God, I need a drink,’ she said, and she started flinging open the cupboard doors then banging them shut, searching for a bottle. Alison shot Peter a look of despair and Catherine, catching her, said, ‘Oi, Goody Two Shoes, where’d you hide my vodka?’
‘It was me,’ Peter said, at once. ‘I hid it.’
‘Oh, right, well, you can fetch it then.’
Just for a while he seemed about to defy her, and Alison held her breath. Then he said, ‘It’s there, behind that cereal box.’
Catherine smiled. ‘Good lad,’ she said.
They watched her pour vodka into a plastic tumbler with an unsteady hand, then she said, ‘Cheers,’ into the silence.
Alison glanced at the wall clock. It was ten minutes to nine.
Alison spent more time at Daniel’s house as the weeks went by. She kept schoolbooks there, sometimes did her homework at the kitchen table, peeled carrots and potatoes for Mrs Lawrence, leaving them on the worktop in saucepans of cold water, ready for later. She loved the kitchen here, its order, its sparkling stainless-steel sink, the bountiful fridge, and the toaster with its picture of wheatsheaves on the sides and a wider slot for teacakes. All Daniel’s family were good to her, but sometimes she wondered what they really made of her, especially Mrs Lawrence, whose smile didn’t always correspond with the watchful worry in her eyes. And of course, Alison knew her own shortcomings: her reticence in company, her wariness and her reserve, which could come across as indifference. But then, Mr Lawrence was reserved too, so she felt he perhaps understood her, and of Daniel’s parents, she certainly liked his father best. His kindness to her seemed infinite and, she thought, a sort of organic, natural thing, part of his being, a function of living which came to him as breathing did, or sleeping. He’d been a mining engineer, Daniel had told her, highly skilled, highly regarded. But he hadn’t ever gone back to work after being trapped underground for two days and one night, behind a rockfall. This was years ago, Daniel said, and he’d got the pigeons soon afterwards, and now they were his life; he poured all his time and a great deal of his love into them, and in his pigeon loft Alison believed she knew how his birds felt: suffused with a cosy sensation of belonging. He treated them, and her, with the same gentle respect, and she basked in it, as if in sunshine. Daniel, whose school was further away from his home and who got back later than Alison, knew she was there by her coat on the peg and her satchel on the chair, but almost always he had to fetch her from the pigeon loft, and then they ate toast in the kitchen and larked about, and he always managed to get his hands up her blouse before his mum got home from work, or his dad wandered in through the back door. Sometimes, but only rarely, they had the house to themselves and then, if Alison allowed it – which she didn’t always – they had sex on his single bed. And somehow, somewhere in her mind, Alison felt it was strictly forbidden. This development in their relationship – so private, so adult, all skin and heat, limbs entwined and damp desire – was still so new to them both that afterwards, they didn’t know what to say to each other, and they reassembled their clothing swiftly, silently, so that they could be themselves again. But there was the secret knowledge of each other in their eyes now, and Alison felt like part of the sisterhood, happy to have shed the enormous burden of her virginity, and happy that it was Daniel who’d taken it, not some loud-mouthed Attercliffe lad with bragging rights over her for evermore.
What she liked best, though, was simply to lounge against his bed on the floor next to him, in a nest of pillows and cushions, and listen to the music they played on his brother’s old record player, or on the JVC Boombox, Daniel’s pride and joy. She sang to him. He played his guitar for her. They put on … oh, anything, everything, sharing their favourites, enduring the stuff they thought they should like, replaying time and again the music they could lose themselves in: Jimi Hendrix, T. Rex, Pink Floyd, Blondie, the Beatles, John Martyn, Elvis Costello and, over and over, Rory Gallagher – obsessively, religiously, with proper reverence. He handed on his old love for prog rock, persuaded her to lie down and close her eyes for the duration of Wish You Were Here. And she revived his brother’s old Northern Soul records, rare finds, his Motown sounds, and Daniel, who grew up watching Joe dance on his plywood square, showed her the moves and together they re-created Wigan Casino in his bedroom with Jimmy Radcliffe and Dean Parrish, the volume whacked up loud enough to make them feel the music in their blood and their bones.
This evening, she stayed for tea. It was Wednesday, quarter to six in the evening. Shepherd’s pie, boiled carrots, peas. Mrs Lawrence told a story about her office, about the man in charge of them all, Mr Whitely, who put on airs and graces, considered himself a cut above. Claire said she knew a woman like that at Cole Brothers, who put on a posh voice to customers, but got all her aitches in the wrong places. Mr Lawrence never said much at the table; neither did Daniel. They each looked at their plates and shovelled in the food, and only spoke if they were spoken to directly. Alison, listening, smiling, occasionally eating, wished Peter was here, with a plateful of hot shepherd’s pie, and wondered what there was for him to eat at home.
‘What was it you said your mum does?’
Alison started as if bitten. Claire had asked the question in all innocence, and her mum looked up from her forkful of mash, knowing – because she’d asked Daniel about this – that Alison wouldn’t talk about her family, apart from the brother. A deep blush suffused Alison’s neck and cheeks and she swallowed and said, ‘She doesn’t work,’ then looked down to escape Claire’s expression of polite bafflement at the evident discomfort she’d caused with a harmless question.
‘I wish I didn’t have to work,’ Claire said, meaning to lighten the tone but making things worse. Daniel glowered at her from across the table and she looked at him, puzzled.
‘That were grand,’ Mr Lawrence said, breaking his habitual teatime silence, but only to rescue Alison, whose distress was palpable. ‘Right tasty, and if there’s any more, Marion, I’ll take another spoonful.’ Suddenly there was movement and busyness, Mrs Lawrence fetching the pie dish from the stove and offering seconds. Alison looked up for Daniel, and found him gazing at her, trying to convey without the help of words that it was all right, there was no harm done.
‘There’s nothing wrong with not working,’ Claire blundered on. ‘Dad doesn’t work either, do you, Dad?’
‘Claire,’ Bill said quietly, and Claire said, ‘What?’ and then Alison stood up, her food only half eaten. She excused herself, blaming homework and a headache, brushing off all the inevitable concern and kindness, and left the kitchen in a rush. In the hallway, by the front door, she struggled into her coat, grabbed her bag, burst out into the cold February evening, but Daniel was right behind her so she turned and clung on to him for a few moments, her face wet in the warmth of his neck. He held her while she steadied herself.
‘Alison,’ he said, after a while.
‘I’m sorry.’ She drew away. ‘I’m really sorry. Tell your mum I’m sorry.’
‘But what’s happened?’ Her distress caused him pain, actual pain. He wanted to take her sorrow and own it, deal with it, annihilate it. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing, now,’ Alison said, although this was patently not the case. She tried to recover, sniffing like a small child and wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. Daniel reached for his coat from the peg inside the doorway, because obviously she was in no state to go anywhere alone, but Alison shook her head at him, furious in her distress. ‘No!’ she said, much louder than she’d intended, and she saw the alarm in Daniel’s face. For a few seconds she breathed slowly and deliberately, facing down the rising panic. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I’ll be fine, I just need to get going.’
Daniel said, ‘You know what, Alison, I’m getting on your bus with you tonight. I’m seeing you home. I’m worried about you.’
‘No!’ she said, backing away towards the gate. ‘No, please,’ but he had his coat on now, and he’d closed the front door behind him and followed her down the path, so she started to run, and he jogged after her, saying her name, trying not to shout. When she ran straight past her own bus stop as if she meant to flee on foot all the way to Attercliffe, he slowed to a walk, ended the chase, and called out to her.
‘OK, Alison, I’m not coming with you,’ he shouted. She ignored him, though, flying down the pavement with her coat sailing open and her school bag thumping against her hip.
‘Alison, please stop!’
There was a catch of distress in his voice, and it was this that she couldn’t ignore, so she stopped and turned, and looked at him from the distance between them, her chest heaving.
‘Please,’ Daniel said. ‘Come back, wait for your bus. I’m going home.’
She came back towards him and together they walked in silence the short distance back to her bus stop; then she said, ‘I’m really sorry, Daniel. I can’t really explain how I feel.’
He was silent, head down, hands thrust into his pockets.
‘I don’t have a house like yours or a family like yours,’ she said.
‘Right, well, I don’t care a toss about that,’ he said.
‘No, I know, but, oh, I do care, and I … Daniel, please, just leave things be, will you?’
He looked at her and nodded. ‘You bet,’ he said; then he kissed her dryly on the cheek, and walked away without looking back, towards home, where he knew his mother would be at the window, waiting for him with her questioning, sympathetic face.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow though?’ Alison called with a rising note of insecurity in her voice, so he raised a hand to show her he’d heard, and that yes, she’d see him tomorrow, but he didn’t turn and smile, because he was hurt, and bewildered, and if she was going to hide her feelings, then so was he.
His mother was standing in the hallway when he got in.
‘Well?’ she said.
He shrugged.
‘Whatever’s the matter with her?’
‘Mum, I don’t know.’ He felt a failure for not knowing, and she could see this so she didn’t push. He started to climb the stairs.
‘There’s crumble,’ she said, but without conviction. If she could, if he’d listen, she’d tell him to go carefully with Alison, she’d tell him not to lose his heart to a girl who fled at the mention of her own mother. But when he went into his bedroom and closed the door, she only sighed and let him be.
The bus lumbered towards Attercliffe, and when it finally stopped for her, Alison walked briskly through the short network of streets to her house. She knew she could mend things with Daniel tomorrow, but there was a cold knot of anxiety in her belly now, as she opened the door and braced herself for whatever lay in wait. All was quiet. No chaos, no mess, no Martin. There was a smell of stale urine, but that wasn’t a mystery because there was a pile of Catherine’s underwear on the floor by the sink, waiting to be washed.
‘Peter?’ she called.
‘Upstairs,’ he shouted back.
She was flooded with gratitude that he was in, he was here, when she’d been at Daniel’s for all those hours, pleasing herself. She shed her coat, put her mother’s tights and knickers in a bucket of cold water to soak, then trudged up to Peter’s room, to be with him.