My mother was like a Custard Cream, nothing special, an ordinary sort of nice enough. She was just there, like gravity. There was no need to think about her. She was Mam-shaped, bits of her flattened under a white overall with pearly buttons. Then, one summer, she became Elvis. She was yawning, frying chips, and worried if there’d be enough hot water for a bath when she got in, then BAM! She was Elvis, hips a gogo, rocking onto the balls of her feet with only the counter between her and lasses screaming and promising to love her for ever. Maybe she just thought, ‘Sod it. I’d make as good an Elvis as anyone.’ Who doesn’t want to be Elvis now and then?
The funny thing is, I don’t think my mother was ever an Elvis girl. The radiogram went on only on Sunday mornings. She dusted with the aid of Julie Andrews singing about a nun’s favourite things. All her Beatles records were before ‘Lucy in the Sky’. I sat on the carpet and flipped through my mother’s singles, her name written in a tight scroll round the run-out groove. She must have gone places she might lose them, I suppose, but I couldn’t see where. She left school, got a job at the dogs and married the bloke who set the rabbit running. If she was ever going to be Elvis, you’d think it would have been then – somewhere between school and the man who made a greyhound whip itself into the shape of a winner. No. For my mother, becoming Elvis took time. We never deliberately listened to the King, but we knew how to dance to him. Maybe that’s what she needed, someone who just knew the words to her songs.
Everyone knew my mother, from the waist up. She was the woman in the chippy – a portion on the stingy side to spitters, overly generous to anyone who said ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ (never ‘Ta’). She knew if her regulars were the mushy peas or beans sort. That was it. Then came that lass. The lass looked like someone who finally got into her mam’s make-up box and went mad. Black stuff all over her eyelids like tyre-tracks, her gaze was like a crash victim’s. Chips. A mist of salt. No vinegar. Red cola. She came in with a slobbery ginger bairn in a pram and a fistful of coins like a piggy bank spewed in her hand.
‘You want scraps?’
Mam held the vinegar, snowed on the salt and turned to the fridge for pop.
‘I like your bobble,’ the lass said.
‘Sorry?’
She said it again.
My mother’s hair came home every night smelling of other people’s suppers. It grew long and dark and looked like it was waiting for her to become a beatnik to make it feel at home. It was permanently scraped back with one of my bobbles. This one had white spots on red, like a dice. What are the chances anyone would notice something so small? Who cares? Mam looked sort of stunned. Who comments on a bobble? There was something sad or lovely about it, it was hard to tell. The lass lined up coins on the steel in order of size. Nice enough lass. Friendly. Why? My mother wrapped the chips and threw in a free sachet of ketchup to hide her embarrassment.
On Saturday she came in with a haircut short enough to stop her needing to hold anything back. I ran my fingers along the back of my mother’s tapered head. It felt shy, soft as suede. No accessories needed. No comment required. She didn’t do much with it, but every morning, without trying, the top of her hair rose in a quiff, a wave swallowing her ordinariness.
‘What’s with this hair?’ she murmured. ‘Got a mind of its own.’
She patted it down. It popped back up.
‘You look like my woodwork teacher, thinks he’s all that,’ Brian said.
I noticed just how black my mother’s hair really was. It was the sort of black that made me look at roads and crows and decide ‘black’ needed more names. Elvis was waiting to enter the building. I don’t think she could have stopped it if she’d tried.
She couldn’t stop the lass with the ginger kid fancying chips.
‘Long day, rushed off your feet I bet? Not long now,’ the lass said, looking at the clock.
Mam lowered the basket into hissing fat, pausing to look at the lass. Thin, eczema on her knuckles, inquisitive chin. Her mouth had a look about it like it wanted to smile, if the woman behind the counter said anything that let it. I don’t suppose my mother was used to considering how long she’d been working or if her feet hurt. They just existed, in a perpetual state of half-ache. She fastened her eyes on the lass now and smiled. Unexpectedly, a curl softly tugged her top lip. It wasn’t her usual smile. It was all Elvis, a smile that lets a second breathe. I noticed her Elvis mouth, how much she looked like him in the face. I’d never thought that if Elvis was a woman, and worked in a chippy, he’d be my mam. But I could hardly see my mother for Elvis now. Elvis jiggled the chips, hips tick-tocking like an over-wound clock, all because someone asked how she was. It was like the difference between being Elvis and not being Elvis was as simple as someone really looking and wondering how you feel.
‘You’re my last customer,’ Mam said, like it was special.
When Elvis said it, it was.
Then, as if forgetting something, she added, ‘Cute bag.’
The bag was a stringy thing full of holes. Impractical, my mother would have called it, if she’d noticed. But Elvis liked it. The lass wriggled fingers in and out of her bag’s strings, little fish caught in a net. Elvis grinned.
‘Have fun,’ the lass said, hugging her chips.
The woman behind the counter watched her walk past the manager pulling down the shutters. She smiled, leaning back against the yellow glass windows over the lamps heating the pies. Elvis stretched like a cat in the sun. Have fun, she drawled. It was an order no one ever placed. Elvis tugged a pouty lip, considering what it meant.
Now, I don’t know exactly how often the lass came in the chippy, or when Gina became her name. I only got scraps, bits after, and what I saw when I called in to tell on Brian or get change for Spangles. I do know there was nothing special about her, except how she talked. Gina made conversation like a gardener, planting a seed and waiting to see what might grow. None of us knew a woman like that. Women in Hinton’s were snipers. ‘How you keeping?’ was a loaded gun, mouths cocked, aimed to shoot rounds. Mam turned her trolley around to avoid friendly fire.
What really did it was wiring. Gina came in the chippy with a lamp bigger than her. Mam’s quiff stood to attention. Behind the counter, the bottom half of her body tilted in a different direction all on its own.
‘Youboughtsomethingnicesugar?’ she said.
Now, this wasn’t her at all. My mother was all salt ’n’ vinegar, the odd splash of ketchup, but the way she spoke now made the lass shiver like something velvet was being draped around her neck.
‘Lamp for the living room, if I ever get the plug on,’ Gina said.
The woman in the chippy would have sympathised, but it wasn’t her job to do more. Elvis had other ideas. He offered to take care of business. Mam went to Gina’s after work with a screwdriver in her pocket. She wired the lamp, somehow turning her Elvisness on full-time.
Everything was different. It was the summer of Elvis, and Mam having a friend she didn’t give birth to. Gina lived on the estate where houses had gardens. We stopped sitting in our slice of yard where the wall blocked the sun. The ginger toddler, Simon, bounced up and down in the open back door. We sunbathed, the grown-ups pulling weeds and mowing wonky lines in the lawn. All the usual stuff, but somehow less boring. Elvis made it fun. Carrying stuff out for the scrap-man, the adults lifted one side of a fridge apiece, then creased up laughing like it told a joke. I listened to Elvis’s laugh. I thought it made my mother’s old one sound like something running out of batteries, barely used. The sun blazed. She sweated and shone, her skin a gold suit. She watered the roses and turned the hose on Gina with a wink.
‘Eeee! Pack it in! Eeee!’
Gina squealed, ducking and diving around the garden, soaked through. I sat on top of the coal bunker, the hot felt almost burning my legs. I watched the wifey next door put out rubbish and linger on tiptoe by the fence, grass making her slippers damp. She stood there for ages, unable to tear her eyes off Elvis.
‘You making that sarnie or what?’ her husband yelled through the back door.
The smile on her face twitched like a curtain. She went in.
Brian tossed stones up to the coal bunker. He’d never be an Elvis man. Later, when I asked, ‘Do you remember that amazing summer Mam was Elvis?’ he wouldn’t talk about it. By then, our mother was gran-shaped, and he liked that just fine. I had to wonder about it by myself.
‘Why do we have to come here?’ Brian said, skimming a stone off my foot. ‘What’s Mam doing that dopey smile for all the time?’
I thought about this. I didn’t think a smile had to be clever or dumb – it just was. I looked down at Elvis and Gina taking a break: two tatty towels lying side by side on the grass. They turned towards each other, talking so quietly only a bee flying over might hear. Brian’s ears were red with listening. Brothers. He didn’t like going to Gina’s. He liked it even less when her boiler broke and she stayed at ours. Even when we went to Sandsend for the day he walked ahead on his own, cheeks red as a slapped bum.
Elvis took Gina’s hand, to steady her walking across the dunes, then dropped it as if it burned. Someone was coming. An old man and woman stopped to let a ratty dog do its business. I turned back to see the woman from my nan’s street. What was her name? Gwenny, maybe; everyone Nan knew was a Gwenny or something like it. Every morning the women crossed paths on the way to and from the newsagent’s. I’d shuffle as they stood still to chat, flowery headscarves flapping like parrots in the wind.
‘What’s wrong?’ Gina said.
She looked at my mother looking down at the sand. The old man shook his head. His wife was muttering something I wasn’t sure I heard. I think it was, ‘You should be ashamed.’
Not till they walked on and Gina set up a windbreaker fort on the beach did I see Elvis again. Somewhere along the path my mother had taken his place.
Then, she was gone again – buried. Elvis grinned at his body of sand, the mermaid tail covering his hips. I swear, no one could stop looking. This was Elvis, right here. Elvis – bursting out of his sand tail and picking up Gina to toss in the sea like she weighed less than my mother’s shopping bags.
‘Do you like Gina, honey?’ Elvis asked, tucking me in, sleepy with sea.
‘I wished we lived with her all the time,’ I said.
Mam sighed like an Elvis who didn’t want to be famous, an Elvis realising the guitar he clutched was too small.
The queue in the chip shop didn’t move as fast as it used to. Sometimes lasses hovered at the counter, smiling at Elvis. They looked at the menu unable to decide what they wanted. An Elvis pelvis rocked to sizzling fat like music. He whirled chips into paper and span round, laying them down. Some women applauded and blushed, placing a hand over their mouths to stop their hearts leaping out. And some didn’t. They folded their arms. Tutted. The lady who lived next to Gina twisted her ring as her husband tapped his fingers on his wallet.
‘What the fuck’s taking so long?’ he said.
Elvis turned from the pie window, sauntered to the counter and leaned forward.
‘That’s no way to talk in the presence of a lady, sir,’ he said, head bowed.
‘Pardon?’ the man said. He looked at old men queueing behind him, blokes back from the football, and his wife at his side.
‘I’ll talk how the fuck I like in front of her, she’s my wife,’ he said.
‘Maybe you should apologise,’ Elvis said.
The wife tugged her husband’s arm. ‘Leave it,’ she said.
He shrugged her off, pushing her into a stagger. Elvis slowly shook his head, then WHAM! A fist landed on the man’s jaw with a cowboy-loud crack. Kids smudged their noses on the window trying to get a look in, ‘Fight, fight, fight, fight!’ The man stumbled back, the queue scattered like sparrows.
‘You’ll be sorry,’ he said, rubbing his jaw.
‘I am sorry,’ Elvis said. ‘I’m sorry for your wife.’
Everyone talked about the fight for weeks. The woman in the fishy went mental and knocked a guy out for no reason, people said. No, that wasn’t it – she gave him a black eye for pushing in. No one was sure, not even the manager, who was at his sister’s wedding. There was nothing he could do. No one actually complained. Elvis apologised to everyone present. It was free chips, no, it was free fishcakes, cod, all round.
It wasn’t the punch that changed things, I don’t think. It was something quieter that wiped the Elvis off my mother’s face. It was pension night. The Gwenny we saw at Sandsend popped in for supper after the bingo.
‘What can I get you?’ Elvis beamed.
The old woman’s mouth was a zip, syllables caught in her teeth.
‘You can’t get me anything,’ she said.
The queue shuffled and whispered. They looked at Elvis, then the woman, and whispered again.
The old woman glared. She didn’t place her order, and she didn’t budge.
‘What can I do for you?’ the manager said.
He smoothed his comb-over over and walked to the counter to dip her haddock in the batter himself.
I looked towards Elvis, coins for Pineappleade sweating in my hand. Elvis wasn’t there, only my mother, filling the box of wooden forks, looking like someone booed offstage.
‘You still hanging about with that lass? What’s her face?’ Nan said. Her lips were a line.
‘No.’
Nan nodded, broke out her stash of Bullseyes and squirrelled them back in her bag.
‘Hear her husband’s back. Best thing. Shame you can’t find a good solid man,’ Nan said.
‘You make blokes sound like tower blocks,’ Mam replied.
She looked out the window as if imagining women who lived behind the walls of good solid men – constantly moving the furniture, repainting the doors.
Elvis had left the building. There was no sign of him at home. Mam brought in tea and dropped the biscuit tin like a sinking Titanic. I looked at the Custard Cream in my hand, the special pattern like a scrolly invitation on old-fashioned notepaper, then I dunked it in my tea. Mam hunched over the newspaper, ads for people next to lost cats and dogs. She circled ‘GSOH’ with a pen. Stepping out of the house in heels, for the first time in my life, she was Bambi learning to walk on ice.
‘Did you have a nice time?’ I asked later.
She took two bags of crisps out her bag and tossed us one each.
Brian buried his face in Commando.
‘It was ok.’
I licked prawn cocktail off my crisps.
‘Is no one nice?’
‘They are, but… there’s just… no… no… chemistry,’ she said, slumping onto the couch.
It didn’t seem she was talking to me or Brian. It was more something she had to say to herself, like the way she figured out the crossword by saying words aloud and counting the letters on her hand. I listened, picturing men in test tubes. My mother’s laugh was a scientist’s; none of her experiments was a success. She put her heels in the box and wrapped fish suppers in ads for men who liked long walks. Elvis was AWOL.
I didn’t see a trace of him until tatty-picking week the following year, when some woman started popping into the chip shop on her way home from work.
‘You always put on just the right splash of vinegar,’ she said.
She clutched a note, looking at my mother and leaning up to the counter with a grin. Sandals slipped off the back of her feet. Chips. Pineapple ring. Curry sauce.
‘Quiet night, eh?’ she said.
And there was Elvis again, for a heartbeat, as if he’d never left and was just waiting in the wings – if my mother would allow him to make a comeback. Elvis looked at the lass. Feathery hair, pianist fingers laid flat on the counter, no ring, dimples between her eyes and lips. The woman in the chippy shrugged off a smile and stormed on the salt.
‘You want scraps?’ she said.