The walls hummed with the crying in your room. I could hear Mom join the couple with a fistful of tissues and a ‘let it all out’. I pictured myself walking in with crucified arms held high, blood steadily flowing from my wrists, dripping onto your My Little Pony rug.
‘Look Mom! No razors.’ Mom would clap her hands in joy. Isola would piss. ‘It’s a miracle! The boy’s special!’ she’d say. Everyone on the lawn would fall to their knees, if I gave them a reason. I walked to the window and stared at strangers praying outside, waiting to be let in, misty-eyed and wilting in the sun. I closed the curtains, sucking a wrist. You can keep the prayers, all that hope, please, it’s all yours. Honestly, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
There’s a Woman Works Down the Chip Shop
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.