Annie Edge lives and writes close to a nuclear power station on the east coast of England. She finds this gives her a sense of urgency to her writing. The county is Suffolk and it is stuck in a 1950s time-warp in lots of ways. Apart from having nuclear power, of course. She has been writing in her head for twenty years and has now, finally, put pen to paper.
Private Parts of Speech (Issue 23.)
Midnight on the Tyne Bridge (Issue 22.)
Private Parts of Speech (December 20, 2010. Issue 23.)
We were more or less accomplices.
Loretta – quick, lithe, brunette, good at netball, all adjectives. Me – a little smaller, a little dumpier, the one who was always falling over. The stooge. The side-kick. The noun. On first meeting she stood in my shadow and said Let’s be anything. Playing hop-scotch she ran at it sideways and said you can never have enough legs. We held hands then, she took mine, and I felt a rush through my fingers as we ran at it and kept running. Round the playground. Flying. No one else there but us. She asked our teacher if she could sit next to me, so Graham Corley had to move up to the spare desk at the front. The Corleys lived next door to us so I had enough of him at home. Loretta and I worked together and played together and that’s how it stayed at first.
Mum was keen. Oh Loretta. From Royal Avenue. Made sure she checked my jeans for holes and hemming before sending me round on Saturday mornings to play. And Loretta’s house had wallpaper that you could run your hand over like velvet. And they always went abroad for holidays, in August. Her mother asked if I wanted to stay for supper and I didn’t know what that meant. Thought it might mean bread and milk. You never had to eat anything all up at Loretta’s house and you could always have pudding.
And that’s how things were for a couple of years. Until Loretta found the bag of shoes, stuffed at the back of her mum’s wardrobe. They’d come from her mum’s sister who had recently died, who, as a grown woman, had very small feet. Loretta said she’d caught polio as a child. I knew this was something to do with sugar-lumps, that they gave us at the doctor’s, and imagined her aunt shrinking, melting, her face granular. So Loretta had these wonderful shoes, patent-leather, peep-toes, stilettos, five-inch heels, a perfect size three, and she would smuggle them to school in her PE bag. And at lunchtime on Fridays, away behind the swing-frame and the monkey-bars, where there was a clearing with silver birch saplings and a little bench, we would strut. Calves pushed up and out, our bodies tilted forwards and our backsides sticking out. And Loretta would raid her mum’s jewelry and we’d slip on the rings and stones and hold our hair up from our necks.
That’s when Graham found us and said that he would tell. His freckles stood out on his white face and he had tears in the corners of his eyes. Anthony joined him, holding the soc
k ball, and said we looked like tarts. Well, if we’re tarts, come and have a taste. I’m sure Loretta said these words. I would never have had the nerve, or the forethought. Sit there she whispered at me through clenched teeth and pull your knickers out at the front. So I sat backwards on the bench with my legs pushed under the wooden slat and as I looked down it was as if my legs didn’t belong to me. Loretta had the boys organized in a line and they filed past and I pushed my legs out straight and pulled my knickers out at the front. One by one they filed by and peered over the elastic. Some curious, some afraid. All except Graham.
How long did we keep this up? I don’t know. Weeks maybe, months, until the end of the summer term. And none of the boys told. Loretta would phone me up each Thursday evening before bed, planning it. What to bring, whether I could get my hands on some of my mum’s make-up, or perfume. How she would bring clips to do my hair. On the way to school her eyes were feverish and she would chatter about which boys would be there and what I could do, and how I could keep each one stood there longer. Now there were many more boys to join the queue. Loretta would stand with her arms folded, stopping the bigger ones from pushing in. The rougher ones moving on to high school in the Autumn. And one of them, taller than the others, growled cunt as he stood there staring. And Graham was the only one now, left with the football on the field, doing keepie-uppies by himself.
Friday. Last day of term. Going home time. Mum was always late on a Friday as she had to do double shifts at Jenson & Co and would come running along the road with her coat undone and you could see the blue overall underneath. So I waited along from the gate, at the corner of the road where I could see her coming through the cars and the bright red buses. Knee-high socks, t-bar shoes, the younger ones pouring out. And I saw mum and she waved with a wide smile and at the same time I saw Graham coming out of the gate. Seeing me and mum, he stopped and stepped away from us to cross the road. The car smacked straight into him. His satchel flew up into the air and all his books and pencils and things came out and fluttered about and rolled into the gutter. Mum held me tight under her coat and wouldn’t let me look but I heard the sirens and the little ones crying and a while later I heard Mrs Corley’s scream No. No. Not my Graham. Not my little love.
It was the hottest summer on record, that year. We had the paddling pool out. Mum smeared herself with coconut oil and wore bikini tops with shorts all the time, even down to the shops. Dad built a barbeque at the corner of the patio next to the neighbour’s wall. We had a plague of stag-beetles in the garden and Dad said it was the heat that had brought them out. Their black bodies were so fat and heavy that it seemed impossible that they could fly at all.
The Corleys held a small service in the local church but it was August so Loretta was away and mum had to work that day so we didn’t go. We were invited round next door afterwards for drinks and nibbles. I was the only one there from school. Mrs Corley’s hands were shaking as she handed round plates of ritz crackers and primula with something pink on top. She had red eyes too. I asked her where the toilet was and she led me upstairs, holding me by the hand, and we stopped outside the open door to Graham’s bedroom. I knew now I had to tell her. I squeezed her hand. Graham I whispered Graham wouldn’t … and then something stuck in my throat and I made a noise like I was choking and then I was choking and sobs were coming out of my mouth and I couldn’t breathe. Mrs Corley crouched down and put her arms around me, awkwardly at first. Then she pulled me in close, held me away and looked into my eyes and I felt that she could see right down inside me. You’re a good girl, she said. Remember that.
Loretta was late to school that first day back. We were in Mrs Jenkins’class now and I was in the middle row next to Benjamin Finn. When Loretta came in she was told to sit at the front. She walked in and turned to sit without looking up once. At breaktime we were in the juniors’ playground at the front. One side of the tarmac was covered with red sycamore leaves, ankle-high and there were two picnic benches and some bins. I came over. Loretta was sitting by herself on one of the benches. She had dark rings around her eyes. She looked hunched, small and her brown hair hadn’t been brushed that morning.
Why didn’t he look? Loretta said.
I thought back to those Friday afternoons, home from school, those lazy early summer evenings that stretched on and on until nine o’clock, when I could kick up my legs and do handstands and hold them for long slow minutes while Graham would be staring out of his bedroom window with his chin on his hand. I thought about him and me with my whole life still ahead of me.
That was your job, I said.
Midnight on the Tyne Bridge (November 20, 2010. Issue 22.)
Drink to me Leona.
Remember the deal we made? Midnight on the Tyne Bridge as the clock strikes? Not that I can hear a clock from here, but you can.
We said we’d meet, didn’t we. Sitting up on my bed, my Mam downstairs with the TV so loud you may as well have been in there with her, and you said We’re seventeen. Will we be together seventeen years from now? It’s a lifetime away and I’d said Yeah. We’ll make sure we are, seventeen years from now, whatever happens. And we’d each written down the date, and a message, and folded it and swapped. I put yours in my wallet and it’s still there. Where did you put mine?
I’d played you that Zappa album, you know, the one with Dinah Moe Hum on it, and you were shocked. Then you wanted me to play it again. And then I listened to the words for the first time. And you pretended you didn’t notice that my hands were shaking with the hooks and eyes on your bra strap. You and me had something then, didn’t we?
You took me in, shouldering past the wankers in their rugby tops, their braying voices and skiing stories. Hair blonded at the tips from too much surfing, sailing, seeing the world on their bloody yachts. I’d wandered into the wrong bar, half-drunk, looking for the Socialist Workers group. You almost walked past me, then stopped. You reached out a hand and touched my face. Do you remember that? And everything else fell away and I knew you were the one, Leona. But I was the genuine article wasn’t I? You knew why my shoulders were broad, not rugby and weight-training in the student gym but hard work lugging boxes and crates down at Salter’s for the night shift. I didn’t need the halls of residence; I biked in from home.
You know what I can see from here, Leona? The cruise liner, you know the one they made into a night-club. It’s still here, now some swanky hotel. Still lights on it, but not multi-coloured flashing ones claiming Happy Hour. These are subtle, classy, just single white bulbs like stars. I can see the waiters in their penguin suits and the diners up on the deck. Quite a balmy night for a Geordie summer, eh pet? Oh you loved that, loved me taking you by the hand down the Bigg Market with the lasses in those crepe paper hats, singing Blaydon Races, skirts up their arses and chilblained legs, their hair so bleached you could tear it off in handfuls.
You. My English rose. Your dark hair hanging down over my face as you held me inside you.
Remember that night, Leona, leaning over the rails on the ship. Those pricks in their leather-laced boat shoes, leering over, Christ Leona, dragged in one of the locals? and how I lost it then. The face on him; cheek bones, perfect teeth, the fucking arrogance of it. And I punched him and he went down, staggered backwards first just to cause a stir and draw in the bouncers. The blood on my hand. And you. That was the first time I’d hit anyone, Leona. It hurt like hell and I stood there trying not to cry in my own hometown surrounded by strangers. You looked at me and didn’t know me. You went to help the other bloke.
When I saw you walk away, and that gentle ringlet that always slipped out of the knot in your hair fell down your back, I wanted to cry then for not knowing how to hold these things together. I couldn’t span the distance, Leona, that was all, so I punched out at the bouncer, went for the other guy too. Did you look round as they dragged me away, face down with my knees buckled under, feet dragging, and that other fucker, the guy with the bloody nose’s friend, Anyone lost a shoe? Anyone mislaid a cheap, plastic shoe? as they kicked me out.
Was that when it started to go wrong, Leona?
Or was it later, when you missed a period, and you came over to my place and you were so pale standing at the door and mam going on and on about her and Dad doing extra for me and how I needed to concentrate on my studying as if I was bloody ten years old. You had to explain it all to me then, about ‘safe times’ and how you hadn’t taken your pills because of some health scare on the news. Christ Leona, I was playing Saturday games for Wallsend under-15s the summer before and here you were talking about babies. And I wanted to be a man for you Leona. That’s why I said those things, about getting rid of it. It was my dad talking. And how your eyes went dull then, even though you said that’s what you thought too, and how we turned up at the clinic in the rain and I’d come down on my push-bike with just a t-shirt, soaked through. As you’d walked off with the smiling woman with the white coat all I could think of was a tiny curling fist, soft in the palm of my hand.
I got to drink up now, Leona.
I drop the empty Newcky Brown bottle into the Tyne but I can’t hear it hit the water. It must be nearly one o’clock. There’s no moon. Sharon will be wondering where I am. She’s a good woman. Fibroids is what my mam calls it; there’s a fancy name for it now, and some sort of laser treatment we can try, but we can’t have kids and when she looks at me sometimes, late at night, when we’ve just made love, she’s afraid and I know she thinks I’m going to leave her.
Here’s to you, Leona, somewhere in that slick city making money, looking out at Big Ben, working your connections. I’m looking at that piece of paper from my wallet, and it’s still here, your round writing and the heart and the words Forever. Do you ever read mine? Do you keep it in a little pocket in your filofax? Reach in and open it. Unfold it and read the words: Bamboozled by Love.
And yeah, I still am.