1980

Though Alison had looked for them, the gypsies had not returned. In the meantime, Alison had moved from primary to secondary school, and though she still found solace in the outdoors, she had recently discovered music as another source of connection, retreating to her room to listen to the latest album and read her newest book.

Mum poked her head around Alison’s door, jaw sharp, cigarette in hand. Blondie on Alison’s turntable, the volume knob at the same level she’d had it the day before and the day before that.

“I can’t hear myself think,” Mum said.

“Sorry, Mum.” Alison set down her book, felt Mum watch her cross the room.

She hung in the doorway after Alison turned down the music. A pause. The tap of the Laurel branch against the window. Mum’s face tightened.

“You owe me,” she said.

Alison nodded, though she couldn’t recall anything she’d borrowed.

“If it weren’t for me, you’d be in an orphanage.”

Alison felt suspended—still upright but without the carpet, and below that the base of the house, the dirt, the solid earth, as though Mum had discovered what Alison had feared, that Elizabeth was right, that she was not worthy of this life.

“Just remember that.” She closed the door quietly. Feet on carpet down the hall, the snap of the living room door.

Alison remained, uprooted and unable to move, in the middle of her room. The music ended. The needle scratched against the vinyl. This, at last, drew Alison’s attention. She lifted it, watched the record still, watched the branches of the tree outside her window sway, remained in her room.

The next day, Mum pulled the curtain back while Alison showered.

“Better keep an eye on those legs,” she said. “Your father must have been a rugby player, by the looks of them. No boy will want that.”

Alison looked down at them after Mum left. She’d wanted to play rugby when she was younger. Dad said no. Girls didn’t do that. She bent, hands on thighs, wanting answers from them, wanting to hide them.

The next day, Mum seemed normal, friendly, even. She asked Alison to take a drive with her. “Just for fun,” she said.

Dad’s recent promotion had afforded them a BMW. Mum liked to be seen in it. They careened around the curves, Mum’s joy carrying them forward. And then, just before dusk, they scraped the corner of a rock wall on the way home.

Standing outside the car, Mum drew, hard, on her filter tip.

“It’s okay, Mum.” Alison patted Mum’s arm.

“Don’t tell Dad,” she said.

“Okay.” When had Alison ever told him anything?

“I need to sort it before Dad gets back.”

Alison didn’t question this tiny secret to keep, and, when she came home from school the next day, she felt only relief when there was a note and money resting on the kitchen table instead of Mum sitting at it. She was at the mechanic. She didn’t know how long it would take. Alison should get a takeaway from the chippy.

Book on one knee—she’d recently become obsessed with Ray Bradbury—and black pudding supper on the other, Alison perched on the wall across from the chippy. She had just settled herself when a girl sauntered up. Dark eyeliner, pierced ears and spiked hair, cigarette in hand: Alison had seen girls like this in the older classes at her new secondary school. Something in her chest fluttered, a new sensation. Her breath quickened. She had the impulse to sort her hair.

“You doing homework?” The girl accused, reaching for her book.

“No.” She snapped the book shut. Her normal response would have been to make an excuse, find another place to enjoy her time outside, but Alison handed the book to this strange and wonderful girl.

“I’ve read some of these,” she said, her accent rounder than Alison’s: Irish. All Alison knew about the Irish was that they were mostly Catholic, which meant, according to Mum, that they couldn’t be trusted, and that the northern bit was where the Irish Republican Army was based. They’d recently bombed Lord Mountbatten’s boat into matchsticks.

There wasn’t a breath between the girl’s words that would have allowed Alison to ask about any of this, not that she would have. The girl said she kept her books hidden, so her brothers wouldn’t make fun of her for being a swot. She handed Alison’s back.

“I haven’t seen you before,” the girl said. “Not that I’ve been here long enough to see everyone. Vic,” she extended her hand, as though they were doing something important. “It’s actually Victoria—Vic pisses me mam off. Like a boy, she says. That’s the point, I say. Pisses her off more. Which is what she deserves after naming me for some fekkin’ English queen. She blames it on me da, like everything else. So it’s Victoria at home. Where we aren’t at the minute.” She took a deep pull on her cigarette, pretending to look at the ground, but measuring Alison out of the corner of her eye.

“I’m Alison.” She thought her voice sounded flat and boring.

“What about Al?” Vic looked at Alison as though she saw everything hidden within. For that fleeting moment, Alison thought it might be okay to be seen.

“Alison is fine.”

“For now,” Vic said. She tossed down her cigarette. “Be seeing you about, I’m sure. Nice meeting you.” She began to walk away.

“Nice to meet you, too.”

Vic turned, just before the corner and waved. “Cheerio. Al.”

~

Alison had not said her prayers for a very long time, but she did that night, asking for God to make the car repairs take another day, and for Mum to leave money for the chippy again, and for Vic to be there. The first parts of the prayer granted, Alison took up her place, holding the same book. The chips were gone. She’d eaten as much of the black pudding as she could, binned the rest. She’d read a chapter, and then another. She sighed. She thumbed ahead. Three more pages to the end of the next chapter. She’d finish and go home.

“Hi, Al,” Vic said, as though they’d known each other for ages. Alison felt, somehow, as though they had. She suppressed a grin.

Vic sat beside her on the wall. “Not interrupting, am I?”

“No.” Alison closed her book.

They nattered like old friends. Vic was a year ahead of Alison and went to the Catholic school in town. She was somewhere in the middle of a rabble of children. Her mother had moved them from Cork, away from their dad, who was English. The law wouldn’t allow a divorce but, according to Victoria, that was nothing that would stop her mam seeing them safe and secure. Mam had a cousin here who’d helped her find work as a hairdresser.

“Just like the English,” Vic said, meaning her father. “To hold a person down.” She claimed that in the ancient days of Ireland, and Scotland, too, women were warriors, queens, in charge of their own sex and when they had it and with whom. And in charge of divorce, too.

There was no telling how long the repairs would last, so they arranged to meet after school the next day, and swapped phone numbers, just in case.

In seldom-used alleyways that curved off backstreets in the town, Vic introduced Alison to cigarettes pilfered from her mother’s bags. They crouched, cupping hands against the wind. When they walked, Vic hooked her hand in Alison’s elbow. Alison loved the warmth of it, the feel of their bodies close together. Vic invited her to spend the night one Saturday, which she did, not informing her parents that Vic was Catholic, and attending mass the next day. Incense and candles being lit at the front, the creak of the kneeling boards, up and down they went. The recitation of the prayers. Hail Mary, Full of Grace. Alison was fascinated. It seemed so much richer than her memory of church. She asked questions as they walked home, breathing in Silk Cuts and catechism.

Alison loved the idea of absolution. She loved the stained glass. She even liked the kneeling and standing and crossing. The ritual of it all. Vic taught her the words to the Hail Mary. Alison liked the idea of praying to a woman, even though Vic disdained the lot of it. Alison also liked that Mary had had a baby, and, though Joseph had married her, no one really knew who the father was.

“God,” Vic said. “The Holy Father. That’s what we’re meant to say.”

But even Alison had at least a vague notion that something else must have happened.

The whisperings of those crouched moments made her forget, for a while, that she might be a gypsy or something worse, that she might owe Mum, that she wasn’t worthy of the Happily Ever After. With Vic, she did not have to pretend to be perfect.

Alison took Vic’s words as gospel, asking her, one day, what she confessed. Vic explained about the categories of sins—the venial and the mortal. Alison told Vic about going to the sea with Papa when she was small, about their trips to Tursa, which had happened several times since she got her compass, about finding the gypsies, though not why. She told Vic about being adopted, and that Dad had recently told her she had the rights to all the records of it when she was eighteen. Her real birth certificate was at the House of Records in Edinburgh; all she had to do was make an appointment and go and claim it.

“Will ye?” Vic asked.

“Yes,” Alison said. “I want to know who she was.”

“Your mother.”

“Yes.” Her Beautiful Girl, who loved her so much she gave her away. “Would you go with me?”

“Of course.” Vic pulled her close.

She told Vic about Mum, too—not about the gin or leaving her and not saying where she was going, but about finding her as Alison often did now, slouched on their newly re-covered sofa, sipping her drink, after she’d been to the mechanic, Laurence. She took the BMW to him often. The maintenance and repairs were obviously exhilarating and exhausting. Alison deciphered this from the way, on repair days, Mum’s body curved back into the low-slung middle chair of the burgundy sectional sofa.

“Laurence,” she’d breathe, as though he was still there. “Fixed it. We went for a test drive. Got up to ninety miles an hour.” She’d sip her gin. “It’s definitely working now.”

But a week or so later, some wee noise would start. “Germans,” she’d mutter. She’d follow with something about the war, something about how you couldn’t trust them. Laurence was different: young, Scottish, trustworthy. Not a warrior. Not at all.

“Sounds as though she’s got a wee bit of confessing to do,” Vic laughed.

Shame slithered in, feeling like that old, familiar itchy rash inside, as though Alison was to blame.

“Bless me Father for I have sinned. It has been several lives since my last confession,” Vic went on. “I have let Laurence repair my car. A lot. I have let Laurence drive my car very, very fast, down curvy roads and across humpy bumpy terrain and up over hills, peaks, into valleys and nooks and crannies. I have made Laurence test the brakes in some of those nooks and also crannies. I’ve made him idle there. Idle the car and then I got him to rev the engine, yes rev it right up before the zoom, zoom, zooming down that straight bit of road between the village and the city of Glasgow, along the River Clyde.

“Bless me Father for Laurence and I have braked and idled and zoomed all over Strathclyde.” Vic lit another cigarette, pleased with herself.

Alison took a puff when she offered, and wondered about her own sins, too. Bigger than smoking or any other small transgression, there was the notion that she was sin itself, the result of one of the mortal sins, of balls and cunt and fucking. She wished to be Catholic, to be able to confess for herself and for Mum and maybe earn them absolution.

“C’mon,” Vic said. She often noticed subtle shifts in Alison, but never let her succumb to them. “The more she’s gone, the more time we have on our own. Maybe I can give the mechanic’s name to my mum as well. It might make her less bitchy.”

“Or,” Vic stopped. “It could be us who go.”

“What? Where?”

Glasgow. They could stay with Papa and go into the city centre with its thrum and swirl, so much better than their tiny, boring village. Alison would have gone anywhere with Vic, and the city centre did sound fun, but Alison could not bring herself to speak of the danger she felt asking Mum anything. One day, it might be fine. Another, Mum may remind her of the debt she owed, or pull back the shower curtain, or throw a drink at her. Perhaps there was something worse she might do. On other occasions, she beamed, driving Alison to Papa’s on rare mornings. They still went to Papa’s favorite spot in Inverkiven, then rolled across the waters to Tursa, and made their way back to The Sheiling. Mum came to collect her in the evenings, happy. All was well. And then for no apparent reason, Alison angered her.

~

A week later, Alison thought Vic had let go of the idea, and then Vic arrived on Alison’s doorstep, face scrubbed clean and hair falling around her face instead of spiked the way she wore it when they were together.

Vic took her hand, pulled her in close. “Did you ask?”

“Ask what?” Mum looked up from her paper.

Alison glared at Vic.

“Ask,” Vic elbowed Alison.

“What should she ask, Victoria?”

“If we can go to Glasgow,” Vic smiled. Who could resist her?

“New clothes?” Mum brightened. “Is that you getting interested in fashion at last?”

Alison had been interested only in what was comfortable for tree climbing and hill walking, reluctantly wearing the dresses that Mum and Dad bought only when she must.

“And music,” Vic said. “There’s no record shop here. And Alison has that nice record player she got for Christmas.” It was tiny—the LPs hung over the edge—yellow and plastic, and Alison loved it. “And maybe stay with her Papa. As she used to.

“Alison has told me how much she liked staying there when she was wee,” Vic said.

Mum’s eyes tightened. Vic had gone too far.

Nonetheless, she pressed on. “She says you used to love the city. What’s it like? Maybe you could give us some pointers?”

Saved.

Mum prattled on about dances at the Palais and boys and how she loved turning their heads.

She sounded as though she had forgotten it was children, rather than friends, she was talking to. Alison wanted her to be quiet.

“So can we?” Vic interrupted her.

She paused, sipped her drink and took a long drag on her cigarette. Her eyes narrowed, as though a tighter focus would help her see what these girls were up to. And then a slight smile, as though something had occurred to her. Alison didn’t think it at the time—it will be only in retrospect that it will occur to Alison that having her away would have been helpful, that Mum couldn’t ask Papa after that long-ago argument. But if Alison asked, that might be different.

The train swayed them into the city. Clean-faced girls, they supped lentil soup at the tiny table. When she’d been small, the only thing she’d disliked at Papa’s had been the seemingly infinite pot of lentil soup that bubbled on the hob from late September until March or April. That afternoon, it warmed them after the chilled walk from the railway station under a clear November sky, and the slow swoop of the spoons gave them something to do so that they wouldn’t look too eager for their release into the city centre. Bowls emptied, they held they places until, at last, Papa spoke the words that freed them: “Back by ten,” he said.

Their downturned lips said they wanted later.

“It isnae Strathnamurrah, you know,” Papa said. He ran his meaty hands over his pomaded hair.

Alison pecked his cheek as she took his soup bowl. “We’ll be good.”

“It isnae you I’m worried about being bad.”

Vic’s shoulders shifted. Who could blame her? People in the village talked—her mother, brazenly manless, and with that brood.

“Nor you, either, lassie,” he nodded at Vic. “Just be careful,” he said.

The spatter of water in the sink. Bubbles rising, not fast enough. They were girls who had been trained to clean up. In he came, dishtowel over his shoulder, as usual.

“On yous go,” he flicked his towel. “Not a minute past ten. Train from Central at twenty-five past nine. Bus will get you a few extra minutes.” He reached for Alison’s hand, pressed paper into it: a ten-pound note and a bus timetable.

Away they went, Vic with her trendy, big bag over her shoulder. She had borrowed (temporarily stolen, really) her sister’s makeup bag.

They could have walked the two miles to the city centre if they’d had to, but the train gave time for Vic to make them up. Close your eyes, and purse your lips, and so on.

In the loos at the station, Alison didn’t recognize herself: dark eyeliner and a touch of purple eyeshadow. Not the girl-boy who climbed trees and kept up with the boys at football: a young woman. She shivered, batted her thick, long lashes at herself, felt she’d been disguised and was the better for it. Vic spiked her hair, put on her thick, dark eyeliner, making her already bright blue eyes even more vibrant. Arm-in-arm, they strode from the station.

The city thrummed: roar of engine, scent of diesel, throaty voices of men, cigarette smoke. Gray buildings hovering over them, solid Victorians. Press of the crowd at the street crossing. Vic was in her element. Spine straight, eyes forward, a practiced puff of the cigarette, the easy toss down when it was finished and then the boot crushing it out, effortless, part of her stride. Alison let herself meld with Vic’s bubble.

“Hiya beautiful,” a call from across the way.

“That’s you,” Vic whispered.

Alison turned. A dark-haired boy with too-tight jeans waved. Alison pulled Vic to her.

They ducked into a record shop, thumbed albums. An hour passed, and when they stepped outside, the dark had fully fallen. On the steps in George Square, they watched the city go by. Others perched near them, wearing clothes not seen in Strathnamurrah: chains attaching wallets to back pockets, safety pins and tartan and spiked, multi-colored hair. And they were part of it.

Boys on the steps beside them. “Hallo, ladies. How are you lovelies tonight?”

“Lovely, as you’ve keenly observed,” Vic said. “And not interested.” Alison had no idea how Vic had this confidence.

Part of Alison wanted to retreat to the quiet roll of wave against shore. Part of her wanted to separate each sound: strike of match, ploof of beer tin opening, horn honk, wheel roll, footfall (boot, stiletto, platform, plimsoll), swish of thighs in tights—part of her wanted to silence the noise and hold the swirl of color that Vic was for herself: black spike of hair, oval of her purpled mouth, bright orange at the center of her. Alison closed her eyes and let the colors spiral around her.

Vic leaned her head into Alison, who leaned back. A shared smoke. City lights against the darkness.

When it was time to go, a drizzle began, making the cold, which Alison hadn’t noticed until then, almost visible in the pitch black. Their frigid hands struggled with the coins to get into the loos at the station again. Ponds Cold Cream to return them to their bare-faced selves. Vic’s head under the tap water. Two plain-faced girls on the train home.

Papa’s face in the window as they rounded the corner. Up the stairs and in. Five to ten.

Papa wrapped his long arms around Alison as soon as she stepped inside. From the kitchen, the kettle whistled, already on the boil. He took their coats and pointed them to the front room, then retreated to the kitchen. He returned carrying a tray with roast beef sandwiches with a thick spread of butter on the bottom slice of bread and English Mustard on the top. Steaming tea. The three of them on the sofa in front of the electric fire. The orange rolling up over the pretend coal.

“You’d fun? No bother from any of the lads?”

“One said she was beautiful,” Vic said.

“That was you,” Alison said, face heating.

He paused. “You’re both beautiful,” he said. “Some of these lads just say it. You have to make sure you only get the ones who really mean it.”

Alison looked down, sipped her tea. She wasn’t interested in any of the lads.

They sat up late with him, watching The Two Ronnies, which Dad said Alison wasn’t allowed to watch, and which Mum tried to get her to watch with her when Dad wasn’t around.

After, they tucked into chilly sheets under the piles of blankets. Papa’s footfalls paused outside the door. “Don’t stay up all night nattering.”

Click of his door closed. Shushing of the sheets being pulled back. Still winter night, as it had been when Alison was small. Eyes trying to remember how to adjust to the dark.

“Come over,” Vic whispered. “So we can whisper without him hearing.”

Flutter of sheets, scrunching beside each other, on their sides, Vic’s body flat, like a boy’s still, compared to the rounding that was happening in Alison’s.

“And we won’t freeze to death.”

“We wouldn’t freeze to death.”

“Fine, but sure isn’t this nice?”

It was, the warmth of her, and something else Alison couldn’t quite name. She slid her feet between Vic’s.

“Feck, those are cold.”

They often were, even when the rest of her was warm. “You invited me.”

“’Twas a good day, wasn’t it?” Vic began to trace her fingertips slowly, gently, along Alison’s forearm. “Isn’t that nice?”

Alison nodded.

“You should do it to me, too, so.” She squirmed a fraction closer.

Alison tensed, not sure what to make of this.

“What’s the matter?”

The whites of her eyes, so close.

“Are we meant to?” The wiriness of Vic comforted Alison, the lovely touch of Vic’s fingers on her flesh, breath still with the sweet-spicy of the butter and mustard, perfect, yet perhaps because she liked it so much, Alison felt they were doing something wrong.

“It isn’t a sin,” Vic broke the silence. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I just …” Alison still couldn’t name what it was.

“Do ye like the feel of it?”

“Yes.” Alison allowed her hand to move up and down Vic’s arm, feeling guilty, as though she’d falsely accused Vic of something she couldn’t even name.

Tick of Papa’s clock through the wall. Faint swish of their hands against the nylon sheets, like the sound of a distant sea.

~

Across the table from each other on the train, again, Vic faced where they were going; Alison faced where they’d been. They tucked into sandwiches Papa made for the journey home.

“Ye’ve mustard on your cheek,” Vic said.

Alison darted her tongue out to catch it.

“Other side.”

She missed again.

Vic reached across, wiped away the mustard with her finger, licked it off.

“See last night?” she asked.

“Which bit?”

“When I said it wasn’t a sin?”

Alison paused, mid-bite. “Mm-hm.”

“Is that what you were thinking?”

“No.” Alison swallowed. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“My mam and auntie shared the big bed after Uncle Noel died. They just cuddled into each other. No harm in it.”

Alison didn’t want to talk about it, but she did not say this, and so Vic continued.

“It’s not as though one wee cuddle makes you gay. And anyway, it’s always been fine for girls.”

“What has?” Alison set down the sandwich.

“And now it’s even fine for the men.”

“What is?”

“Do ye not know anything?”

Heat rose in Alison’s neck and face.

“Sorry. I forget that not everybody’s mam yaks on about everything like mine.” She paused. “The gays. They’ve made them legal.”

The train rolled on, and Vic brought Alison up to date on homosexuality, which meant she first had to explain the concept, and then that it had been against the law to have gay sex, and then that a new law had passed making it legal for consenting adults. Her mum had been on a rant about it, about how the government and the church seemed to want into people’s bedrooms.

“Mam said the only reason it was illegal was because when they do it, men, you know, one of them has to be the woman.” Vic paused, slurped her Irn Bru.

“But you just said it was between two men.”

“Not literally the woman,” Vic said. “One of them has to be penetrated.”

Alison didn’t get it. Vic had taught her the words for all the parts but she didn’t understand how it all fit together. She didn’t really know what boys did with their bodies other than play football and pull their willies out at the edge of the park to wee. She was too embarrassed to ask.

~

For the rest of the winter and through the spring and, beyond the scope of the lentil soup, Vic and Alison took the train into Glasgow and stayed at Papa’s as often as they could.

With Vic by her side, in the roll of the city, Alison began to open, made brave by the mask of makeup, by Vic herself, and by the sense that this was a place—on a Saturday night, at least—where no one cared if she were gypsy or bastard or anything else.

Every time they clambered up the stairs and put the key in the lock, Papa was on the other side with the kettle on to boil and something to fill their bellies. Each night, they curled into bed together, held each other.

The days with Vic in those months, then, fall into the same category as the days outside in her early years with daisy chains and the sounds of the earth, the months leading up to school, when Mum dropped Alison at Papa’s, when she felt safe and whole. When Vic looked at her, she forgot about what she might carry within her, and whether she was worthy of Mum and Dad’s Happily Ever After mattered less than following the flow of the story she and Vic created.