‘Hello …? Mum …? It’s me.’
‘Lou? Is that you, love? It’s a terrible line. Are you at the chip shop?’
‘I’m having a quick drink at The Arms with the girls from work.’
‘Oh. You won’t be back for tea then?’
‘I can’t hear you. I’ve got Christmas songs blasting in my ear. I’ll stop at the chippy on my way home. It’s my turn to get tea in.’
‘No, love. Stay and have a nice time with your friends. I’ll go. Dean’s been hassling me since four o’clock. I swear that boys got hollow legs.’
‘Oh – oh, well if you’re sure, I’ll have chicken pie and extra mushy peas. Keep it warm in the oven for me, would you?’
‘I was thinking we could put the tree up tomorrow and make some mince pies and—’
‘I’ve got to go. My drink’s coming.’
‘OK. See you later then. Love you.’
‘Yeah. See you later.’
Lou hung up, shoved her phone into her bag and watched Mel squeeze back through the payday scrum at the bar.
‘‘Scuse I, pardon I,’ Mel laughed, rubbing up against every man in her path, no hint of shame or subtlety. If an irate girlfriend or wife challenged her, she had the readymade excuse that she couldn’t help it; she was as wide as a small family hatchback and as short as a gingerbread man – her words, not Lou’s.
Mel plonked a pint on the table. She squeezed on to the bench seat beside Lou and wedged the straw from an odd-looking blue concoction into the corner of her mouth. ‘Was that Andy?’
‘No-o. We split up last week, I told you’
‘Oh yeah. Shame.’ Mel slurped her drink loudly.
Was it? Lou thought. Two months was good going by her standards but it hardly qualified as the romance of the century. A series of un-inspirational dates peppered with a few disappointing meals barely qualified as a romance at all.
‘I wouldn’t kick him out of bed,’ Mel said. ‘Just so long as he didn’t fart under the duvet and waft it in my face.’ She cackled before launching into a croaky rendition of ‘Deck the Halls’, her tongue slipping around modified lyrics – ‘Deck the halls with pints of lager, Fa la la la la!!’
Lou laughed and took a sip of her pint. ‘Where’ve Becca and Shelley disappeared to?’
‘‘Bogs. Becca’s spotted that Luke bloke she fancies. Shelley’s giving her an emergency makeover. Reckon she’s in with him. Lucky cow.’
‘Luke Smedley? He only split up with his wife a few weeks ago.’
‘Fair game, then, ain’t he. A butcher doesn’t put his meat in the window unless it’s for sale.’ She elbowed Lou in the ribs.
‘Is that all you think about?’
‘What else is there?’
Here it comes, Lou thought.
‘We haven’t all got the brains to be teachers, you know,’ Mel said.
Lou curled her toes in embarrassment. She should never have let slip to the girls at work that an Open University prospectus had landed on the doormat that morning. ‘Just because I’ve got the application form, it doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything with it. Anyway, it takes two years, and where am I going to find ten grand to pay for a PGCE?’
‘A PG-whatty?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Mel drained her glass and slammed it down on the table. ‘Are we having a whip or what? I’m spitting feathers here.’
Lou placed her hand over the top of her glass. Mel looked at her as though she had just refused a share of a lottery jackpot.
‘‘Ark at Einstein. Not even a teacher yet and already too good to be seen out with the thickos.’
Lou tore a ten-pound note from her purse and slammed it down on the table. ‘You win!’ God, she was weak. But what was waiting at home apart from an evening of Coronation Street, Family Fortunes and a soggy chicken pie?
At some point, just after nine o’clock, Becca and Shelley disappeared with Luke Smedley and his mates, heading for a bar in Northampton. An hour or so later, Lou stumbled into a waiting taxi. An unnecessary payday extravagance.
‘Don’t forget you promised to get your mum to make us some of those mini chocolate logs like last year,’ Mel said, hanging out of her own taxi. ‘She’s great, your mum is.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you had to live with Mrs Christmas.’
‘See ya tomorrow, Piss Head!’
‘Laters, Lush!’
The cab pulled away, and Lou tried to focus on the orange strands of light from the streetlamps trailing across the dark night sky. She bloody loved those girls. They were the only friends she had left here since Katie had got herself hitched and moved away to Manchester. She fell back into her seat. Was she a cow, then, for wanting to escape: to break out of the shell she had constructed to hide who she really was? Because the Lou she was around her workmates – dumbing down her vocabulary, drinking in pubs with people she had gone to school with – wasn’t the Lou she knew. That Lou – the real Lou – had spent three years reading history at Sheffield, expanding her brain and her horizons, experiencing the world beyond this small town.
Her head began to swim. Was she thinking too hard? Or was it the second vodka chaser or maybe the fifth pint? She pressed her forehead to the cold glass and frowned at her reflection. Seven years since graduating, only just back in the black after paying off her massive student debts, and here she was, contemplating another loan to put herself through teacher training. All so she could stand in front of a class of fourteen-year-olds, desperate to share her passion for the past, when they were only interested in the future. She giggled. She must be mad.
Just short of the parade of shops on the edge of town, the cabbie made an unexpected stop. He nodded to a police car blocking the road. ‘I’ll have to take a detour.’
Lou looked out at the crowd of boys milling around behind blue and white police tape tied to lampposts. ‘Fine,’ she said and slumped back in her seat.
After paying the cabbie, Lou stumbled up the path and into the house. She kicked off her trainers, dumped her bag in the hall and tripped over the Christmas tree and a box of decorations at the bottom of the stairs. How many times had she told Mum not to go up that rickety old loft ladder on her own? One of these days, she was going to fall and break her bloody leg.
‘Hey, Mum,’ she called, ‘there’s a police car blocking the road at the parade. Do you reckon someone held up the chippy? Was it assault and battery? Get it? A salt and batter-y? Did you get me that pie?’ She grabbed a strand of silver tinsel from the box and wrapped it around her neck, making a twinkling boa. She giggled and was still giggling when she fell into two police officers in hi-vis jackets, standing in the living room. Dean was on his knees in the middle of the room with Stephen and a female police officer standing over him.
‘I don’t believe you,’ Dean sobbed. ‘I want my mum. Get me my mum!’