The man was taller than Chris, who at five foot six was not short. Her slight and wiry figure was diminutive against his larger, stronger frame. He could have snapped her ribs like wish bones. She rubbed his arm and leaned against him, pressing her cheek to his chest. She had little time to weave a spell of her own:
‘He’s scum. Don’t get nicked for rubbish like him. He’s dog shit on our shoes. He’s scum…’
She held her body against his, and made herself a dead weight and in an awkward dance they inched crabwise towards the exit. All the while she repeated the same phrases to let him know that she was on his side. As they reached the foot of the steps, she dared to relax. She turned the man around and keeping behind him talked in a lighter tone now that they were out of earshot of the tramp, as they trudged up the last flight to the street.
‘You’re worth ten of him…’
When they were on the pavement, without looking back the man broke away from her and darted across the road towards Newington Butts and out of sight. Chris wasn’t offended. There was nothing he could have said or done.
Despite the heat, she shivered and a dribble of cold sweat like melting ice ran down between her shoulder blades. She was still holding the copy of the Evening Standard she had bought earlier. At some point she had rolled it tightly into a baton and the ink had stained her palm and fingers. She took off her rucksack and stuffed the paper into a side pocket. Then shrugging the bag back on to her shoulders and oblivious of the heat, she too started to run.
As she neared home, keeping under the shadow of the flyover, it occurred to her that if the old man was blind, how had he known the other guy was black?
That morning Alice had announced that Chris must go to the launderette after supper. Chris hated doing the washing there and the chore had grown more onerous over the day so that now, fizzing with adrenalin from the encounter in the underground, she imagined killing her Mum. Not quickly with a gun, but slowly, giving time to explain to her exactly why.
She would tell her in measured tones that she could not forgive Alice for not asking the full name of the Renault car mechanic who Alice had said was Chris’s father, so that one day, when Chris wanted a new and better parent, she could find him. All she had to go on was that he was called Gary and specialised in fitting automatic gearboxes. Most days Chris didn’t need Gary. She got on with her life, but at night as she clarified her ambitions and formed resolutions it was Gary she told them to.
Chris had left the house that morning without kissing Alice and had run to the bus stop, chased by her mother’s snapping hounds. Once in the street, a wet sheet of misery assailed her as she saw her Mum pottering around all day with nothing to do but clean and wait. If a bus hadn’t come, Chris would have gone back to her.
She had stared out at Elephant and Castle from the top deck. A man in cycling shorts and a black vest kept pace on a racing bike. The veins on his legs and arms were like thick string. She tried to forget her Mum, but all she could think was that the bus was taking her far away from the woman she loved more than anyone else in the world.
The last time she had been to the launderette was a month ago, when her mother had taken it into her head to do all the bedding and needed two machines; Chris had taken Pride and Prejudice with her to read. For once she had done everything correctly, tipped the soap into the right compartment, and she had even found a rogue tee-shirt tangled in a duvet that would have stained the cotton pale blue.
Only when she had settled into a bucket seat and prepared to read, did she realise Jane Austen had gone in with the washing and was now well into the ‘agitate’ section of the cycle. She cupped her hands to see through the glass. The book was there. Every now and then the spine made a dull thump as it hit the drum.
All week they had picked out snatched words and sentences from their clothes.
‘…“How strange!” cried Elizabeth. “How abominable!”’
‘Next time do the washing yourself!’
‘Her mother only scolded her for being nonsen…’
This was the worst thing Chris could have said. Both of them knew her Mum couldn’t do it herself. Chris believed it must now be years since she had left the flat and had only dim memories of seeing Alice in the open air. Her Mum could get muddled between her dreams and what had really happened. Chris too, would wonder if her memories of being in the park with her Mum were just wishful thinking.
She wanted to go out with her Mum. Perhaps to the park, or they could take a train to the seaside. She might wander around the supermarket picking out treats with her Mum, like other girls did. Some nights she lay awake horrified by the prospect of her Mum dying alone in the pokey flat on the Old Kent Road. If Chris was to see her own dreams of becoming a forensic scientist come true she had to rescue the Alice of the bedtime stories from her rabbit hole and return her to the safety of the riverbank. At other times Chris would be in dread of her mother’s hidden self. The sexy monster had had nothing to do with being a Mum.
Chris had seen this monster a few months earlier when she had come home unexpectedly right after lunch. A teacher had been ill and her chemistry lesson was cancelled. She had heard the music from the landing, and assumed it was the people in the flat above with whom Alice had regular run-ins. Chris sighed. Her Mum would have scribbled an embarrassing note and expect her to take it upstairs and wait for a response. Chris had called out in a cheery voice as she shut the front door.
The music was coming from the living room. It was so loud her greeting was drowned out. The door was open three inches and she saw movement in the full-length mirror on the wall in the living room. Her mother had fixed it there to make her feel she had company when she walked towards it. Now it gave Chris a view of the whole room and she was brought up short. Keeping back in the gloom of the darkened hallway, she gaped dumbfounded. Her mother had kicked back the rug, cleared aside furniture and was dancing. Not the sort of dancing Chris would have expected: the clumsy clumping back and forth accompanied by contorted air guitar playing, but proper dancing. Her body was moving in perfect time to ‘Rebel Rebel’ by David Bowie, a song Chris did not imagine Alice had heard of.
The woman in the mirror spun around, sashayed back and forth, her movements fluid, her timing exact, as she echoed the rhythm of the guitar riff and with consummate understatement mimed the words. She exuded sex and vigour. Chris blushed, and tentatively touched her hot cheek with the back of her hand. She had never had to undergo the agony of seeing a parent lumbering hopelessly to sounds they were too old for. Her mother’s agoraphobia had spared her that. This was worse. This was a woman Chris was not meant to see. This woman was a stranger evoking feelings Chris was not meant to feel for her own Mum.
Chris’s mouth had gone dry, and feeling sick she had sneaked away. As she ran out of the flat into the street, gulping in the cold winter air to stop herself throwing up, she felt orphaned. Her Mum had abandoned her. As she could not belong with the bold, statuesque woman upstairs, with whom did she belong? Gary in his oil stained overalls was no last resort.
She clattered up the stairs to their flat on the second floor, her thoughts past and present stuck to the dingy walls and appeared half soaked on the staircase, like the washed fragments of Pride and Prejudice. She fumbled in her bag for the door key and at last found it swaddled in the tissues her Mum gave her every Monday. The half-empty packet was her Mum. Whenever Chris pulled a hanky out to blow her nose she was both reassured and annoyed.