‘What – having your own toilet?’
‘Yeah. You’ll soon learn to hate limescale. You can get these tablets for the cistern – but it turns the water blue, and poisons the dog when it drinks from the bowl. Are you taking the dog?’
‘Of course!’
‘Oh good. We can start using the tablets again. More Blu Loo for me. Hurrah.’
I see Mum is crying. I hug her.
‘I’ll be back all the time.’
‘Make sure you tell me in advance. I’ll put a chicken in the oven. Just a small one.’
I put my arm around her.
‘You’ll always be my baby,’ she says, in a small voice.
‘Your big, black, depressed baby?’
‘My big, black, depressed baby.’
‘Now I’m going, you can finally say how proud you are of me, and that I’m the best one,’ I say, giving her a shove.
‘I’m proud of you all,’ she says, fiercely.
‘Well, yeah, obviously. I’ve always admired how you’ve treated us all equally, whatever our abilities.’ Pause. ‘But I am the best one, aren’t I?’
‘I was just as proud of David, when he started using his potty,’ she says.
‘Well, yeah – theoretically. But working for a national magazine at the age of seventeen is quantifiably better. That’s a proper, notable achievement.’
‘You’ve never potty-trained a toddler, have you, Johanna? It’s like working as a ball boy at Wimbledon, but with shit. And it goes on for months. With people crying at you.’
We carry on smoking.
‘So I’ve got spare pots and pans in the loft, and cutlery, and you can take one of the Buddhas,’ she says, starting to fuss. ‘Just pick whichever one you like, apart from the big one. They’ll bring you luck. And I’ve got a spare dream-catcher.’
‘Awww, thank you, Mum. I wouldn’t want my dreams … roaming around the flat. It’s good to trap them, in a window.’
She smokes more.
‘Mum. Will you be able to do without the money? Do you need the money I give you? Are you going to be okay?’
My mother is silent for a minute.
‘You’re sure you want to move out?’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘London’s the place for me.’
‘Then we’ll be fine, love,’ she says, putting out the cigarette. She smiles in an odd way. ‘We’ll be fine.’
The second conversation is with Krissi. There is a leaving party for me, at Uncle Jim’s house – ‘Because we’re not having a party here,’ my mother says, firmly, dishing out shepherd’s pie in the front room. ‘Last time we had all your dad’s family over, I found your Uncle Aled trying to climb into the cot with the dog.’
It’s not just my leaving party – as my father romantically puts it, ‘Your Aunty Soo’s kid’s got some boiler in Halesowen knocked up – so this is their engagement party, too.’
When I get to the party, I locate the ‘boiler from Halesowen’ and try to congratulate her – but she’s playing football in the garden with some of the kids, and tells me to get the fuck out of the way when I impede her impressive on-target shot at the goal (two swing-bins, by the fence).
‘I hope you have a very happy future together,’ I say, clutching my breast where the ball hit, and making a dignified retreat to the front room. She plays an unexpectedly competitive game for someone five months pregnant. She is a true Black Country woman.
In the front room, Krissi is sitting on the windowsill with cousin Ali, who looks very different to last time I saw her. She’s smoking out of the window. My tits still hurt. I tell them this.
‘She’s gone rave,’ Krissi says, gesturing to Ali, as soon as I approach them. I see this.
‘I’m on a Ragga tip,’ Ali says, doing some vaguely E’d-up hand gestures. She’s wearing tie-dyed dungarees and a day-glo beanie hat.
‘What happened to the bloke from The Nova?’ I ask. ‘What happened to the shoe-gazing dream?’
‘I found a raver with a big cock,’ Ali says, smugly. Krissi visibly blenches.
‘So what’s big in the … rave?’ I ask.
Ali tells me about some records she’s been ‘banging’ recently, and drones on about the mythical rave bass-note that makes some people poo their pants.
‘And is that an … advantage?’ Krissi asks, drily. Ali ignores him.
‘What I want to know, Ali, is how you reconcile your love of so many different musical genres?’ I say.
‘Oh, I’m a goth in the kitchen, a shoe-gazer in the parlour and a raver in the bedroom,’ Ali says, flicking her ash out of the window.
When Ali goes to get a drink, Krissi leans in and goes, ‘I cannot stand her. Stupid bloody female. Come on. Let’s go.’
He jumps out of the window. I look around to see what the kids are doing – David is carefully trying to push his finger into the VHS player. His concentration is total – and, reassured that he’s occupied, I follow Krissi out of the window.
We walk over the road, to the swings and slides at the playground. Krissi takes two cans of cider out of his pockets.
‘So, you’re off, then,’ he says, as we swing on the swings – legs too long for the ropes.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘You going to be okay without me?’
‘I managed for the first year of my life perfectly fine.’
‘Yeah – but you spent those mainly crying and wetting yourself,’ I point out.
‘I guess I can re-discover those early pleasures, then,’ Krissi says, swinging – knees almost touching the ground.
‘Kriss – I’ve got to ask you: do you think you really will be able to manage without me? I mean, I can’t not go – if I don’t leave home now, I’ll die. A lot. But is everyone going to … manage?’
Krissi sighs: ‘Yes, Johan, we’ll be able to manage. You’re one less mouth to feed, after all.’
My indignation is instant, and considerable. ‘Hey, man,’ I say. ‘I’m not the one who can drink an entire can of rice pudding. And, anyway, half the time, it’s my work that puts food on the table. I eviscerate the Soup Dragons – and then you get soup. That’s the food-maths.’
‘Well, to be fair,’ Krissi says, slowly, ‘if you look at it another way, you could just as well say it’s you working that’s taken food off the table.’
I stare at Krissi. I can sense my face is dim-looking, and uncomprehending.
‘What … do you mean, I took food off the table?’ I ask. ‘Also, can we stop saying “table” – we haven’t got one. The table’s in my room. It’s a desk with a load of Primal Scream CDs on it.’
After graciously conceding the table point – ‘Okay. Your work took food off our laps, where we had plates, balanced on cushions’ – Krissi sighs, rubs his forehead, and then explains what’s been going on, all this time.
When I left school to work for the D&ME, that was why they’d cut our benefits. Because I’d left full-time education. That was the 11 per cent cut.
Our impoverishment was all my fault, after all. Not because of anything I’d said to Violet – but because I’d left school. I had been the ruin of my family – but by trying to save it.
Oh, the tangled web of panic and causality. I suddenly feel a massive affinity with Marty McFly in Back to the Future, who goes back in time, and then almost causes his own non-existence by heroically stopping his father from being run over by his mother. Poor Marty McFly. Poor me.
‘Bloody hell,’ I say, absolutely still on the swing. ‘I’m Marty McFly. I’m Marty McFly, Krissi.’
Krissi hands me a can of cider.
‘Yes. Yes you are,’ he says, soothingly. ‘You’re Marty McFly. Drink your cider up, little lady. You’re obviously in shock, because you’ve started talking bollocks. You probably need a tin-foil blanket or something.’
‘Not with these shoes,’ I say, automatically, opening the can. ‘They would clash.’
‘So, who knew then?’ I ask Krissi. ‘You, obviously – and Mum, and Dad?’
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‘Yeah – that’s what all those arguments were about,’ Krissi says, looking into his can. ‘And then Mum told me and Dadda not to mention it to you, in case you freaked out, under the pressure. So, now you know. Now you know the big secret! Just in time for you to solve the problem – by fucking off.’
‘Yeah – thanks for the summary, Ceefax,’ I say, drinking some cider. ‘Fucking hell.’
‘We were very noble,’ Krissi says, reflectively. ‘We were all very noble about you.’
‘But … you called me your saviour when I bought the new telly!’ I said.
‘Yeah – we were aware of the irony.’
‘Fucking hell.’
I hang on the swing utterly limp, like a potato. I don’t really know what to say. I’m learning a whole new thing: that sometimes, love isn’t observable or noisy or tangible. That, sometimes, love is anonymous. Sometimes, love is silent. Sometimes, love just stands there when you’re calling it a cunt, biting its tongue, and waiting.
‘As soon as you leave, we should be alright. We’ll lose your Child Benefit, obviously – but to be honest, it’s costing us more than £7.50 a week in loo roll. You use an extraordinary amount of it.’
‘All girls do,’ I say. ‘Being a girl involves a lot of wiping. You have no idea. And it’s usually better than tampons. They are tricksy. I once had an incident in a toilet in Vauxhall where I was trying to put a new one in, and found an old one up there. It’s like some kind of … mad cupboard in there.’
‘Your vagina never ceases to amaze me,’ Krissi says. ‘It’s just a massive repository for trouble.’
‘Oh, I know,’ I say.
We stay a bit longer, on the swings, as it gets colder, until Aunty Lauren calls us in, from the house across the road.
‘ARE YOU DANCING?’ she roars. I can hear Dee-Lite’s ‘Groove Is in the Heart’ being bumped up on the stereo, loud.
‘COME AND GET YOUR LEGS AROUND THIS!’ she shouts. ‘I’VE GOT THAT SALT-N-PEPA ON NEXT, AND YOUR DAD SAYS HE’S GOING TO DO THE DANCE!’
We run across the road.
The final conversation I have is a late-night phone call with John Kite. I haven’t heard from him since the bad kissing thing in Regent’s Park – I cannot bring myself to write a letter, even though it’s my turn. I’ve banned myself from even thinking about him, lest I become panicky again. I have clanged shut the door in my head that leads to the thoughts of John Kite.
This is hard – as, over the last year, I’ve taken to saying his name, over and over in my head, like a rosary, in moments where my brain idles, or is stressed: ‘JohnKite JohnKite JohnKite.’ I say it at bus stops, and when I’m walking, and when I hurt myself, and when I’m lonely. ‘JohnKite JohnKite JohnKite.’ In the way some people count, or recite psalms.
Sometimes I say it like it’s the name of a new mineral, or rock: ‘Jonkite. Jonkite. Jonkite.’ Something ribboned with colours, but made hard by the moving of tectonic plates, and the compression of the Earth. I would like to go to the Natural History Museum and find a piece of Jonkite, lying on a velvet cushion. I imagine it would warm to my touch. I would wear a necklace of it, casually, until he noticed. I would wear it with a red dress, and it would go with my eyes. I could have won John Kite if I’d had a red dress. I frequently berate myself for not having one. I was one right dress away from having him.
However, since that day in the park, every time I do that, I have to imagine a bunch of policemen busting into my head shouting, ‘NO NO DO NOT THINK OF THIS MAN ANY MORE. YOU MAY NEVER THINK OF JOHN KITE AGAIN.’
But now, at 2am, the phone goes in my room, and I pick it up before the first ring has finished. I know who it will be, and it is – it’s John, drunk, somewhere in Spain:
‘I’m in bed with a straw donkey, Dutch,’ he says, slurring slightly.
‘Still a hit with the ladies, I see,’ I whisper. I can see Lupin shifting a little, in his bunk bed, and I climb into the wardrobe with the phone, and shut the door, for privacy.
‘So, how you doing?’ I ask, voice slightly wobbly.
‘Oh, you know life on the road,’ Kite says. I can hear him light a fag. I wish I could light a fag, but even I know that’s a bad idea in a wardrobe.
‘I’ve bought a new fur coat,’ he says. ‘I found it in a flea market. It’s magnificent. I think it’s made of dog. It doesn’t have arms – just holes.’
‘That’s a cape, then,’ I say.
‘SO IT IS!’ he roars. ‘SO IT FUCKING IS! I thought they were just ripping me off!’
‘Well, now we’ve established that, I want to state that it’s lovely to hear from you,’ I say. ‘I’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve missed you too, Dutch. I’ve had to drink too many bottles of gin on my own in the last month.’
‘I thought I might not hear from you again, after … last time,’ I say.
‘WHY ON EARTH WOULD YOU THINK THAT YOU MENTAL?’ he roars.
‘Well, you know,’ I say. ‘I was a massive twat.’
‘Were you?’ he says. ‘I was too busy being a massive twat myself to notice.’
‘I think I was the most massive twat,’ I say. ‘You know.’
‘I really don’t,’ he says, sounding confused. ‘What happened? I was totally gattered. I’d been on the piss since eleven. I didn’t do anything … inappropriate, did I?’
‘No, no – God, you didn’t,’ I say. ‘Do you really not remember anything?’
‘Er … I seem to remember there being wolves, and penguins. We had a great day, yes? What happened?’
He seems genuinely not to know – and now I’ve put myself in the position where I have to tell him. For the first time in a month, I find myself picking at the scars on my left arm. Oh, Johanna – why do you keep talking? Why do you say the things you do? I try and tell him in the breeziest way possible.
‘Well, we got very drunk, and we sang with some gibbons, and then I … appeared to be overcome with bestiality, and said that I was both Chrissie Hynde and Elizabeth Taylor, and that it was fated that we have sex,’ I say.
I had planned to do a laugh at the end of this sentence, but find I can’t. There’s a pause.
‘Oh well, you know – we probably will,’ he says, gently. ‘That’s just statistics, baby. How will we not have sex at some point? You’re a you, and I’m a me. It’s just the age thing right now, babe. Too young.’
‘Too young? I’m seventeen,’ I say, with all the huffy world-weariness I can.
‘Not you, Dutch – me. I’m far too young for you. I’m hopeless.’ He sighs. ‘Christ, you terrified me there – for a minute, I thought something bad had happened. I once pissed myself on stage, you know. That was bad.’
He goes on to tell me about how this had happened – ‘It was for some talk; I’d been on stage for hours …’ – but I’m not really listening, as I’m so happy I could cry.
Oh look, I am crying.
It’s like being born again – like surfacing after long months of drowning. I have made my confession in this wardrobe, and been absolved by my drunken priest – and now I may go back out into the world, and do it all again. My future has come back online again, with a brrr and a thump, and all the barnacle-like cancers of my heart have died. I did not misjudge the world when I was drunk! I did not do the wrong thing! I acted as pissed people should! I can simply carry on, as I am! And I will! I will carry on with these adventures!
‘Dutch?’ Kite says, finally. I haven’t replied to the last thing he said. ‘Dutch? Are you still there? Have you nodded off?’
And I sigh, and I sigh again – from pure happiness – and I say, ‘No – I am still here,’ and then I get to say the most beautiful thing in the world. I say: ‘John – we must go for a drink.’
When we finally finish talking, an hour later – after I tell him about moving to London, and going mad, and then getting better again – light is shining through the crack of the wardrobe door. I presume it’s the dawn – but when I emerge, I see that it is,
in fact, the night-light: Lupin’s turned it on, and is sitting on my bed.
‘Can I snuggle?’ he asks.
‘Oh, always, baby,’ I say, pulling him into bed with me. ‘You can always snuggle with Johanna.’
We curl up, in the hollow left by Nanna. This is the last time I will sleep here.
EPILOGUE
MOTORWAY SERVICES, M1. THURSDAY
Dadda comes out of Burger King, eating a Whopper.
‘Life on the road, eh?’ he says – sauce all over his face. ‘Keep your motor running.’
We’re at Watford Gap Services – the border between the south and the north. It’s cold and windy – my top hat keeps blowing off. Really, there are so few circumstances in which it’s possible to wear a top hat consistently … I don’t know how Slash does it. He must use Velcro somehow. Maybe using his hair as the other bonding agent.
The caravanette is parked in the Disabled bay – Disabled sticker carefully displayed on the dashboard. The windows show how full the caravanette is – duvets and bin bags full of clothes pressed up against the glass, like some kind of jumble-sale terrine, all resting on top of my chest of drawers and my third-choice Buddha (‘Oh you can’t take that one either, Johanna – I like his face’).
All my worldly possessions are in this van.
I’ve paid for Dadda’s Whopper – ‘Corkage, Johanna.’
I’ve also paid for the baccy-money – ‘To keep me alert, during the migration’ – and the large chocolate milkshake in his hand – ‘An old man’s gotta have his treats.’
On top of this, I’ve also paid the petrol-money, which Dadda assured me, with his most serious face, came to £90. It was only years later that I found out what petrol actually cost in 1993, and frankly admired the old bastard: rinsing me, right to the end, even as he says goodbye.
We get into the van, and the old man slurps more of his milkshake, as we watch everyone outside, scurrying in the rain.
‘If we had to, we could camp here,’ he says, comfortingly, patting the dashboard of the car. ‘We’ve got a cooker, and a sink, and the bunk beds – we could live here, if we needed to. Fly-camp. Make this our new home.’