‘Lamp for the living room, if I ever get the plug on,’ Gina said.
The woman in the chippy would have sympathised, but it wasn’t her job to do more. Elvis had other ideas. He offered to take care of business. Mam went to Gina’s after work with a screwdriver in her pocket. She wired the lamp, somehow turning her Elvisness on full-time.
Everything was different. It was the summer of Elvis, and Mam having a friend she didn’t give birth to. Gina lived on the estate where houses had gardens. We stopped sitting in our slice of yard where the wall blocked the sun. The ginger toddler, Simon, bounced up and down in the open back door. We sunbathed, the grown-ups pulling weeds and mowing wonky lines in the lawn. All the usual stuff, but somehow less boring. Elvis made it fun. Carrying stuff out for the scrap-man, the adults lifted one side of a fridge apiece, then creased up laughing like it told a joke. I listened to Elvis’s laugh. I thought it made my mother’s old one sound like something running out of batteries, barely used. The sun blazed. She sweated and shone, her skin a gold suit. She watered the roses and turned the hose on Gina with a wink.
‘Eeee! Pack it in! Eeee!’
Gina squealed, ducking and diving around the garden, soaked through. I sat on top of the coal bunker, the hot felt almost burning my legs. I watched the wifey next door put out rubbish and linger on tiptoe by the fence, grass making her slippers damp. She stood there for ages, unable to tear her eyes off Elvis.
‘You making that sarnie or what?’ her husband yelled through the back door.
The smile on her face twitched like a curtain. She went in.
Brian tossed stones up to the coal bunker. He’d never be an Elvis man. Later, when I asked, ‘Do you remember that amazing summer Mam was Elvis?’ he wouldn’t talk about it. By then, our mother was gran-shaped, and he liked that just fine. I had to wonder about it by myself.
‘Why do we have to come here?’ Brian said, skimming a stone off my foot. ‘What’s Mam doing that dopey smile for all the time?’
I thought about this. I didn’t think a smile had to be clever or dumb — it just was. I looked down at Elvis and Gina taking a break: two tatty towels lying side by side on the grass. They turned towards each other, talking so quietly only a bee flying over might hear. Brian’s ears were red with listening. Brothers. He didn’t like going to Gina’s. He liked it even less when her boiler broke and she stayed at ours. Even when we went to Sandsend for the day he walked ahead on his own, cheeks red as a slapped bum.
Elvis took Gina’s hand, to steady her walking across the dunes, then dropped it as if it burned. Someone was coming. An old man and woman stopped to let a ratty dog do its business. I turned back to see the woman from my nan’s street. What was her name? Gwenny, maybe; everyone Nan knew was a Gwenny or something like it. Every morning the women crossed paths on the way to and from the newsagent’s. I’d shuffle as they stood still to chat, flowery headscarves flapping like parrots in the wind.
‘What’s wrong?’ Gina said.
She looked at my mother looking down at the sand. The old man shook his head. His wife was muttering something I wasn’t sure I heard. I think it was, ‘You should be ashamed.’
Not till they walked on and Gina set up a windbreaker fort on the beach did I see Elvis again. Somewhere along the path my mother had taken his place.
Then, she was gone again — buried. Elvis grinned at his body of sand, the mermaid tail covering his hips. I swear, no one could stop looking. This was Elvis, right here. Elvis — bursting out of his sand tail and picking up Gina to toss in the sea like she weighed less than my mother’s shopping bags.
‘Do you like Gina, honey?’ Elvis asked, tucking me in, sleepy with sea.
‘I wished we lived with her all the time,’ I said.
Mam sighed like an Elvis who didn’t want to be famous, an Elvis realising the guitar he clutched was too small.
The queue in the chip shop didn’t move as fast as it used to. Sometimes lasses hovered at the counter, smiling at Elvis. They looked at the menu unable to decide what they wanted. An Elvis pelvis rocked to sizzling fat like music. He whirled chips into paper and span round, laying them down. Some women applauded and blushed, placing a hand over their mouths to stop their hearts leaping out. And some didn’t. They folded their arms. Tutted. The lady who lived next to Gina twisted her ring as her husband tapped his fingers on his wallet.
‘What the fuck’s taking so long?’ he said.
Elvis turned from the pie window, sauntered to the counter and leaned forward.
‘That’s no way to talk in the presence of a lady, sir,’ he said, head bowed.
‘Pardon?’ the man said. He looked at old men queueing behind him, blokes back from the football, and his wife at his side.
‘I’ll talk how the fuck I like in front of her, she’s my wife,’ he said.
‘Maybe you should apologise,’ Elvis said.
The wife tugged her husband’s arm. ‘Leave it,’ she said.
He shrugged her off, pushing her into a stagger. Elvis slowly shook his head, then WHAM! A fist landed on the man’s jaw with a cowboy-loud crack. Kids smudged their noses on the window trying to get a look in, ‘Fight, fight, fight, fight!’ The man stumbled back, the queue scattered like sparrows.
‘You’ll be sorry,’ he said, rubbing his jaw.
‘I am sorry,’ Elvis said. ‘I’m sorry for your wife.’
Everyone talked about the fight for weeks. The woman in the fishy went mental and knocked a guy out for no reason, people said. No, that wasn’t it — she gave him a black eye for pushing in. No one was sure, not even the manager, who was at his sister’s wedding. There was nothing he could do. No one actually complained. Elvis apologised to everyone present. It was free chips, no, it was free fishcakes, cod, all round.
It wasn’t the punch that changed things, I don’t think. It was something quieter that wiped the Elvis off my mother’s face. It was pension night. The Gwenny we saw at Sandsend popped in for supper after the bingo.
‘What can I get you?’ Elvis beamed.
The old woman’s mouth was a zip, syllables caught in her teeth.
‘You can’t get me anything,’ she said.
The queue shuffled and whispered. They looked at Elvis, then the woman, and whispered again.
The old woman glared. She didn’t place her order, and she didn’t budge.
‘What can I do for you?’ the manager said.
He smoothed his comb-over over and walked to the counter to dip her haddock in the batter himself.
I looked towards Elvis, coins for Pineappleade sweating in my hand. Elvis wasn’t there, only my mother, filling the box of wooden forks, looking like someone booed offstage.
‘You still hanging about with that lass? What’s her face?’ Nan said. Her lips were a line.
‘No.’
Nan nodded, broke out her stash of Bullseyes and squirrelled them back in her bag.
‘Hear her husband’s back. Best thing. Shame you can’t find a good solid man,’ Nan said.
‘You make blokes sound like tower blocks,’ Mam replied.
She looked out the window as if imagining women who lived behind the walls of good solid men — constantly moving the furniture, repainting the doors.
Elvis had left the building. There was no sign of him at home. Mam brought in tea and dropped the biscuit tin like a sinking Titanic. I looked at the Custard Cream in my hand, the special pattern like a scrolly invitation on old-fashioned notepaper, then I dunked it in my tea. Mam hunched over the newspaper, ads for people next to lost cats and dogs. She circled ‘GSOH’ with a pen. Stepping out of the house in heels, for the first time in my life, she was Bambi learning to walk on ice.