Hands, p.3
Hands, page 3
She was so well behaved that when she broke her arm on a caravan holiday, aged about seven, it took five or so days of quiet whimpering, swimming trips and outdoor activities for my parents to realise. The only time an injury overwhelmed her, to my knowledge, was at a birthday party in our garden during which the neighbour brought over a life-sized inflatable Spider-Man. As he carried it under his arm past Liv, the ridge going right around the edge of it, by some terrible, terrible bad luck, scratched Liv’s eyeball – her actual eyeball. I remember tears, lots of them, but I don’t remember noise.
So while I was wriggling about on my ugly-patterned seat on that coach home from Lanehead, I’m sure she was colouring in or reading or else just sitting in silence with her perfectly manicured hands on her perfect lap, perfectly peaceful perfect bitch.
On that coach I knew no peace. I can honestly say those two hours were the worst of my life. At one point – and this is why it’s important I was sitting on my own – I regret to say I took a couple of sanitary pads and layered them on top of each other in my knickers. I’d started my period on my grandad’s birthday when I was 10 or 11 (which is a bit much), so was thankfully on this occasion stocked with what my young entrepreneurial mind suddenly saw as makeshift nappies. At a school assembly around the same time, a local entrepreneur, who I think had maybe been on Dragons’ Den, brought in an invention to show us anything was possible and that we could be inventors too. It had been a sort of glorified pipe cleaner, bright green, with a magnet on the end for pulling wires through small holes during DIY projects. Sexy, sexy stuff. Three pads layered on top of each other was my secret contribution to the St Michael’s hall of business excellence.
Once semi-successfully installed, I switched tactics from holding it in to relenting and letting it out. The desperation! But my body had other ideas. I tried with all my might to let myself just wee, but thoughts were wheeling in my head. What if it doesn’t work? You’re surrounded by your classmates: what if someone sees? What if it leaks onto the floor and once you’ve started you can’t stop? So I didn’t go. Couldn’t go. After what seemed like an age, a second Dark one, we pulled up outside the school’s green fence and I dashed inside to finally go. It hurt and was no relief.
This same sweet and cruel reception teacher at Our Lady of the Most Holy Rosary Catholic Primary School gave us all a lesson, once, about lying. Innocuous stuff, you’d think, to teach five-year-olds about honesty. We’d all been guilty of pretending we hadn’t smashed a sandcastle in the sad plastic pit, or stolen a doll straight from someone else’s grubby hands – crying snottily, confronted, as we explained they were ‘hogging it’. But the hardcore Catholic bent of this class quite literally put the fear of God into me.
As we all sat slack-jawed and cross-legged in a semi-circle around her, she told us that if we told a lie (however big or small), God would give us a tummy ache and we’d feel bad. Well, I couldn’t bear it. What did she mean? Would I actually vomit? Good God, I thought, I’ll never tell a lie again. And for a solid couple of years, years as my mam tells it, I’d hastily add a ‘maybe’ or an ‘I think so’ to everything I said. Liv and I would be ready to go to sleep in our parallel single beds, our mam would shout ‘Night, love you,’ to which Liv would reply ‘Night, love you’ (like a sane person) and I’d shout ‘Night, I love you, I think.’ At first she’d shout back, not unkindly, ‘What do you mean, you think? You daft sod,’ but then it became part of the routine. Maybe as she hoovered or moved from room to room (sometimes I’d shout down to ask what room she was in, just so I knew) she’d tut or roll her eyes. This again.
The teacher’s hellfire specificity sadly didn’t extend to whether or not I’d know I was lying. What if I only realised once the belly pain started and it was too late? How could I repent if I didn’t know what the lie was? How would I differentiate between a normal belly ache and a God belly ache? To my squishy mind, my only options were either to hedge my bets every time or become a frenzied bureaucrat with a car-park-sized filing system to record and rank every word that came out of my mouth. I’m not an idiot, so plumped for the former, and it worked. No belly problems, no problem. The perpetual state of fear and anxiety was apparently a small price to pay for an untroubled gut. Eventually, my mam tells me, she gently confronted me about my quirk, and with gentle coaxing I stopped saying my two favourite suffixes.
The unfilled space these words left has stayed ever since, their imprint permanent. Faced with my bird’s death, my bird that wasn’t ever meant to be ours, the paradoxical presence of this unfilled space – the low-level uncertainty – throbbed. Had we made him suffer? Confined to a bowl he didn’t have strength enough to leave? Maybe.
The field round the corner from our house is named after a college long gone. A distant memory tells me Mam went there when she was young to learn flower arranging. I can picture its buildings although I don’t think I ever saw it. Maybe I saw it in a photograph once, the large square windows rounded at the corners, its sandy, reddish colour. Maybe through her eyes I’m able to see it, a genetic imprint like a faded picture. Maybe my young mind had soaked up whatever brief information she shared – ‘I learnt flower arranging at the college’ is quite enough to go on for a kid – and constructed it using the not-quite colours of our living room.
It wasn’t there when I was young, and so the field stretched back further than it does today. Now, especially on bleak days, it looks rather sad. Nothing marks it out, there are no distinguishing features of note other than a short dip in the grass, not steep enough to be a bank. A half-feature on an otherwise plain expanse of green. There’s a bland, new-looking GP surgery, but that’s more to the left by John Whitehead Park.
If you walked across the field you’d get to the baked-bean-tin-shaped block of flats Dad’s eccentric friend Big Michael lives in alone, right next to the town centre. Even as a little girl I thought his flat seemed like something out of a bygone age: the old fireplace, lots of brown panelling and a gramophone from the forties, a small TV and radio or record player, and sepia photographs here and there.
Big Michael was a postman, like my dad and his two brothers, but I can’t believe he ever successfully finished his round. With a broad smile and in his huge, booming voice, he would stop to greet every single person. Not strangers, but local people he’d known for decades and whose family trees he’d no doubt memorised. His enthusiasm never dims. His hair has greyed but his big brown eyes swim with wonderment whenever he spots you. Through him I learnt the word ‘blighter’: ‘you cheeky blighter’, ‘the old blighter’. He must have a notebook filled with birthdays, since he never misses one. When his card drops through the door, it’s immediately recognisable by his almost completely illegible handwriting, though I’m something of a codebreaker now. I can’t help but think of him as the Patron Saint of Billingham. These days he volunteers in the new food bank in the gloomy, orange-lit underbelly of Billingham town centre, where empty husks of shops sit. Now an abandoned lot, there used to be a butcher where Gran would get us chopped pork and Billy Bear meat slices, out of which Liv and I used to barbarically pop the eyes and mouths. There’s also a gutted Silly Prices, a ’Spoons that used to be the bookshop my auntie Karen worked in, and a now-closed furniture store that sold hideous patterned sofas at Low Low Prices. The Boyes, an 80s-looking emporium of factory discards and irresistible tat, is, miraculously, still open. These are the upstairs and downstairs levels of The Dark Bit of Town.
In Boyes, you can buy comfy granny bras, tights and quality £1 eyeliner. Upstairs there are rolls and rolls of fabric and all things crafty. As a kid we’d go in after having gravy and chips at The Galley next door: a greasy spoon that had cream cakes behind glass, plastic green sofa booths, help-yourself cutlery and salt sachets, staff dressed like dinner nannies, and – crucially – coffee with condensed milk (Gran’s favourite). Like everywhere else in Billingham, you’d no doubt run into someone you knew. Grandma’s friend, maybe, who’d come over and tell us how she’d known us since we were ‘this big’ and how much we’d grown. Gran walks through the town centre like a royal, honestly, so many people does she know.
The last time I saw my uncle George – my dad’s uncle – before he died unexpectedly while on holiday with his doting wife, was in The Galley. We’d never been close but you could tell his heart was enormous. Even then I marvelled at the ability of family members to love each other with the fierceness of kin and shared geographical place – a Billingham love, rooted deep – without ever really knowing each other. He wrapped us in a bear hug and we spoke, among other things, of Brexit. He was in favour, and sometimes his Facebook profile picture would have the St George’s cross in it. Even as we grew up and went to uni, he’d comment on every single picture we were in: ‘Love u’ or ‘Love u take care uncle George’. Liv confided once that she wasn’t sure what to say because, not in a nasty way, she didn’t love him back. Or maybe I’m remembering wrong, and she was just uncomfortable because we hardly knew him and it was intense. In any case, I gently nudged her to just say it back – what was the harm?
In Boyes, my little hands perched on the counter with my chin on them, I’d watch huge, black-handled scissors slice through the fabric of Mam’s choice. I’d try to replicate the action with paper, at school or at home, to recreate the perfect sound of the fabric being torn asunder, but I’d only get so far and the paper would rip. Also in Boyes’ upstairs section were tubs and tubs of buttons of every design and colour imaginable. There were pearlescent buttons perfect for a polite cardigan, chunky plastic ones for a coat maybe, wooden ones for a more rustic look; it was miraculous.
There we’d pick up the foil scratch-art kits me and Liv used to devour as kids – you know, the ones where you’d carefully scratch away at the lines to reveal an elaborate tiger, lion, fish, or whatever. These were perfect for me, and probably the only time I displayed any modicum of patience in my life was watching the scratch-card grey peel away under my metal pen; it was so satisfying, and I was actually able to apply myself to it in earnest. A potential precursor to my picking, I was able to escape my thoughts for a while as the foil came away in perfect coils.
Beyond that, though, my attention span was (is) frazzled. Liv used to lie belly down on the living room rug and copy out the encyclopaedia, just, I suppose, for the joy of writing with a nice pen. It may seem an odd thing to do, and that’s because it absolutely is, but who among us can deny the unbounded pleasure of a rollerball rolling over good paper? Mam was into calligraphy, too, so there was perhaps a desire in Liv to perfect her own handwriting. We were about the age when you’d be given your first red handwriting pen at school – a real rite of passage. She and Mam would also labour over thousand-piece jigsaws picked up from charity shops all over town. Liv coloured inside the lines, but I couldn’t be arsed. What was the point? I would skip between activities – unfinished drawings, the Game Boy, the telly – like it was my last day on earth.
Mam and Dad separated when we were eight. I remember her throwing a Pot Noodle at him and it going all up the curtains. From Big Michael’s flat, looking out over Billingham at the rows and rows of houses, you could see the tiny, freezing-cold house my dad lived in with his new wife, Ruth. Although it was concealed by foliage, I could also locate their neighbour’s bomb shelter, right at the back of the garden.
We’d sometimes play with a girl called Billie, who was in the year below and lived a few doors down from Dad’s new house. I remember standing on top of a green wheelie bin down the side of Dad’s house to climb over the fence and into the neighbour’s garden, rushing, crouching, to the end where we found the dusty tin shelter. Inside were what looked like two hard single beds with a sort of chest of drawers. It was dim and not much to look at, but I was completely enthralled. It was like peering through a window to another world. I’m sure if we’d just knocked and asked to have a look, the owners would have let us. But maybe Billie was worried they’d ask how she knew it was there, sheltered as it was.
I can’t remember being that close to Billie, but I loved going to her house. Her dad worked for the local crisp factory (where my two cousins work now) so we’d always get BBQ crisps. They’re still my favourite.
Further down the road and around the corner was a cluster of streets, like a square, where:
Auntie Karen lives with Dad’s brother – also a postman and a former marathon runner – and their son Ben
Grandma and Grandad (Dad’s parents) lived with the huge tree in their front garden, and
Uncle George had lived next to Daniel at school, on the street perpendicular.
It was like a sprawling family tree made of tarmac.
You only had to walk for about seven minutes across the field from Mam’s to Dad’s, they were that close, but the flat expanse of grass seemed like an ocean to lazy teenagers. It hadn’t always seemed that way. Around the time the bird died, along with other local kids, we would climb a gnarled tree at the back of the field. We were a hotchpotch group, united by the streets connecting our houses, none too far away for our parents to worry. We’d all ‘call for each other’ to run through garden sprinklers or play kerbie.
I cannot tell you how perfect a tree for climbing it was. The branches were basically stairs, inclined at intervals just so. You could climb them like cartoon cloud steps to heaven. Not too easy, mind you. Their difficulty level was set at a cool medium to hard, meaning you would chafe your palms or a knee occasionally on the scramble up, but always with some effort get right to the top to look out over the field like the captain of a pirate ship. In my memories it’s always sunny there. We’d stay until the summer night became balmy and pink and we started to get hungry. A clan thrown together by age and circumstance, that tree was absolutely everything we could ever want it to be. I remember it most as a house.
We each had our own branch, our bedroom I suppose, and we imagined each area had a different function. An upturned trolley from the Asda was our toilet. Whether we actually, you know, did the deed in there, I can’t remember. I imagine we did, though, because at a school friend’s house once we turned her tiny porch into a ‘house’ where we ‘lived now’ and I’m fairly sure we pissed into a bucket and chucked it out onto one of the big trees in the shared grass outside her house.
Around this time I felt the first ecstatic stirrings of young love, too. Hannah’s brother, older than us by a couple of years, with the softest and brightest blond hair, joined us occasionally. When he was there it was like instead of a heart I had a summer flower blooming in my chest.
The tree was everything to us, to me. Even now I feel aglow just thinking of it. Liv and I had bikes with tassels coming out of the handlebars and we’d throw them down in the grass by the tree and scramble like the entire day didn’t stretch long in front of us, like our lives depended on it.
Once, as I crossed from pavement to grass on my bike, past Hannah’s house (which was round the corner from ours), the green electricity box standing on the precipice of stone and earth electrocuted me. I remember the surge through my entire arm, the force of it, and fell off my bike onto the grass. I still got to the tree, though. Maybe I was embarrassed in case her brother had seen through the window.
When the bird died, we knew we had to bury him there, the most joyous place on earth. We packed him into another tissue bed, but this time it didn’t matter if it was damp or warm or felt like a nest, and instead of a bowl it was a shoebox. He was still so tiny and fragile, as still as the day we’d found him.
If I’d experienced the ritual of death before this point it can only have been of our goldfish. We had two. One was your average goldie, but another was black with eyes that popped out of its head. I think it replaced one that died, but I don’t know. In any case, when we found them floating atop their bowl we wrapped them in tissue and buried them in The Dump at the bottom of Mam’s garden. Flushing them down the toilet was just not an option. I no doubt worried that a fish would somehow come back up the system while my private parts were exposed to the bowl and I’d look down and it’d be there, back for revenge. I think I’d seen too many horror films too young. Liv and I were about seven when we watched Saw at a friend’s house in utter nearly-sick shock, and my imagination henceforward always ran berserk. I’ve always hated jump-scares, but I’m drawn to them. There’s a relief in just tipping the glass over and getting the inevitable out the way. It’s probably part and parcel of being perennially on edge.
We called it The Dump because it was the huge pile of dirt right at the back of the garden behind the shed. There was a huge ivy archway dividing one part of the garden from another. It made the garden seem endless. In summer, if you stood inside the archway before passing through, you could hear the buzz of many bees, so I’d always leg it through for fear of being stung. Liv and I constructed a ‘gym’ made of plant pots and planks of wood back there once, and would pop up and down over the top of the fence dividing our garden and another young girl’s over the way, as though we were performing some elaborate magic trick that showed the same person travelling at the speed of light to different areas of the fence. I think we thought that we were identical – to other people but not to each other.
The Dump had a kind of magnetism to us kids, maybe because we knew we weren’t encouraged to go playing about in the dirt. Sometimes I’d find bird skulls there or in the flowerbeds and take them to my bedroom windowsill. One small skull I kept for a while, stroking the soft top and marvelling at the intricacy of its tiny jaw.
Though we always treated our fish well, it’s hard to know if we weren’t the ones who’d killed them. Our friend Amy’s mam worried once that her fish was too cold so put it in warm water, which ended exactly as you’d imagine. Being weird and morbid as kids are, whenever I had a school friend over to play I’d dig the fish back out of The Dump and open the tissue to show them. The bird was different, though. It felt more alive than the fish did. They didn’t change or do much other than swim this way and that and bob-bob with their little mouths. But the bird had grown before our very eyes, made it clear it needed us with its shrieks. I’d seen its little organs through skin sparked with tiny veins, and stroked his swollen belly so the thin skin wrinkled and moved under the pad of my finger. He was warm, alive. I wouldn’t dig him back up. Turns out I wouldn’t even get the chance. Not long after, the tree was felled to make way for the housing estate our closest childhood friend, Ashleigh, would end up living in.
