He used to put that pasty face in front of mine, dimpling like a vicar, and say, 'So what do you want to be, Mandy, what do you want to do when you grow up?' As if it earned him points in her eyes. Someone at last with a bit of concern, with a bit of respect. Neville the devil. What I wanted to say was that I wanted to be wicked, I wanted to be wicked like Dad said I was anyway. I wanted to be Mandy Black, and I wanted to be wicked.
And so I was. I hung around in pubs and dance-halls, I twisted and shouted, I let hands scurry up my skirt, and worse. I let myself be pushed up against walls. I gave Mum and Neville hell, which was only what they gave me. But more than that, I said to my best friend and partner-in-sin, Judy Battersby, 'How about it? London. Bright lights. You and me.' But she never showed up, she chickened out, the cow.
And I suppose what I always hoped, right up until the last moment, was that he'd come back anyway, with five years' worth of excuses. That he'd throw down his kit-bag then he'd throw Neville out the front door. Then I wouldn't have to run away myself.
But they found the Hillman in Liverpool, not Fleetwood. So he might have gone anywhere. Not a floozy in the Isle of Man but floozies all over, in Shanghai and Yokohama. I had this picture of him, which I still have, it's a daft picture but I still have it. That he'd sailed away to the South Seas. Grass skirts and coconut trees. He's still there now, thirty years younger, with a flower stuck behind his ear. Not the Isle of Man. Isle of Woman, more like.
He said, 'What's your name, love?'
I said, 'Judy.'
He said, 'Mick. Anywhere London or somewhere London?'
I said, 'Anywhere London.'
He said, 'Til take you to Smithfield. Heard of Smithfield? There in two hours. It's all right, love, it's okay, you can nod off.'
So Mandy Black, or Judy Battersby as she was travelling as, arrived in London in a meat lorry and got carted away again in a butcher's van, without so much as a peep at Leicester Square. It's a famous story, it's done the rounds, it might even have reached Ollerton Road. Blackburn to Bermondsey, going up in the world. But now when I think of it, now when I see them huddled up in shop entrances and archways, in smelly blankets, I think, I was lucky. And when I think of that girl with a rucksack heading down the A5, I think, That was my adventure, my big adventure, though it hardly lasted twelve hours.
To run away from home and find another home in less than a day, though the new home wasn't a real home, any more than the one I left. The new home was all the opposite of what it seemed: a son whose home it wasn't but it was, a daughter whose home it was but it wasn't because she had to be kept in a Home, a mum and dad who weren't really a mum and dad, except to me.
Why should I have fitted into that? Why shouldn't I have taken off again like a shot? When the world was saying anyway everything is changing now, everything goes. It couldn't have just been him, Vince. That we were somehow, underneath it all, like brother and sister, worse, father and daughter. Just back from the Middle East, 'from the bleeding garden of Aden, sweetheart,' with his kit-bag slung in a corner of that bedroom he'd hardly moved back into before he moved out again for me. 'V. I. Dodds.' The smell of him in there, sweat and engine oil and Senior Service. Tattoos up his arm. 'You can lick 'em but they won't come off.' So it was like committing incest, like throwing the whole thing open, like being dangerous where you ought to be most safe. Safe as houses. And in a camper-van too, Uncle Ray's camper, like a pair of gypsies.
Blackburn to Bermondsey, aiming high. But that's where I stayed and that's what I became. Vince's floozy, Vince's wife, Vince's sister, daughter, mother, his whole family. And Jack and Amy's little grown-up girl. So it's as though I don't know any more who that lassie on the A5 was. As though in those twelve hours on the road I might have been aboutfl to become anyone. What do you want to be, Mandy? November '67. The year of Sergeant Pepper. Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. It wasn't Wednesday morn- f ing at five o'clock, it was Thursday evening at eight o'clock. But I couldn't help carrying that song in my head, like my theme tune: She's leaving home, bye, bye.
He said, 'A doodlebug.'
I said, 'What?'
He said, 'A buzz-bomb. V-l. Flattened the house, killed 'em all, except me. I aint who you think I am, I aint Vince Dodds.'
I thought, I could have guessed that. Not just from the way you look but from the way you keep to your own separate space, from the way you were so ready to move out and kip down in this camper-van. But that was a sly move, wasn't it, Vince, a crafty move?
She can sleep in my room.
And what about you> Vincey?
I'll think of something.
I thought of saying to him, Tm not who you think I am either.' Because I don't know who Mandy Black is, not yet, I'm discovering.
But I'd already told Jack, sitting there in that meat van while we did a sort of dawn tour of London: Tm not who I said I was, my name's not Judy. It's Mandy, Mandy Black, from Blackburn.' And he said, 'So who's Judy?' And I said, 'No one.'
Old Bailey, St Paul's, London Bridge, the light breaking over the grey river.
Vince said, 'My real name's not Dodds, it's Pritchett.'
I felt him shrinking, slipping inside me. I sank down so my face was on his chest.
He said, 'It aint no secret. It's a known fact. Except he tries to pretend it never was a fact.'
'Who?'
He said, 'Old man. I mean, Jack, Why d'you think I took off in the first place? Why d'you think I joined up? Because I wasn't going to be no Vince Dodds. I wasn't going to be no butcher's boy.'
I said, 'But you came back,'
He said, 'I came back to show 'im.'
I said, 'It's easier for men. They can go and be soldiers, they can run away to sea.'
He said, "You ever done a stretch in Aden?'
I started to lick his tattoos. One of them said 'V.I.P.', with a fist and a thunderbolt. I said, 'It says "Dodds" on your kit-bag. So what are you going to be, Vince? What do you want to be?' And he said, 'Motors.'
I said, 'Motors?'
He said, 'You saw that old Jag in the yard, didn't you? '59, Mark 9. It's a start, aint it? Aint any old jam-jar, it's a Jag. I'll make it like new again.'
Then he told me about motors, he told me all about motors.
I thought, It's never how you picture it, never how you picture it at all. Me and Judy Battersby knocking around the West End, getting picked up by a couple of fellers in a rock band.
A butcher's van, an ex-soldier with oil under his fingernails. Meeting a man from the motor trade.
He said one day Jack would come crawling to him, I'd see.
I licked the hairs on his chest.
I said, 'How do you know I'm who you think I am, either? How do you know my name's really Mandy Black? I could be anyone too, couldn't I?'
I put my hand on his sticky cock.
He said, 'I aint teasing you, I aint having you on. I'm telling you so you know what's what. I'm telling you so you don't get no wrong ideas. That's fair, aint it?'
I said, 'Yes.'
'That's only honest.'
I said, 'Yes, Vince.'
He said, 'I was only three months, I didn't know nothing, did I?'
I felt his cock stiffening under my hand.
Tm telling you so you'll be prepared.'
'Prepared?'
'He'll try and do the same with you. They'll try and do the same with you.'