Chapter 12: Grace Tries to Take a Stand
It was Grace’s eighteenth birthday, and a Saturday in July. Summer lay like a warm haze over the sleepy little corner shop. The blinds had been drawn half down over the windows to protect the contents from the sun, but still the heat burned through, sending the warm sickly smells of powdered sugar and tobacco mixed with dust into the dark stuffy air. Grace had slipped into a doze in her chair behind the counter. There had been few customers all day, perhaps because the shop did not sell ices. There was an ice-cream kiosk a few yards up past the station and Uncle Les said they couldn’t compete on price. They moved quite a few bottles of pop in this kind of weather, but in general business was slack. Nobody wanted melting chocolate, bags of sweating barley sugar, or warm, prickly twists of sherbet.
Grace didn’t care. She despised the shop and that extended to its customers, too. Three years ago she had left school and come to work in the shop full-time. Her mother very seldom served behind the counter anymore, and many of the regular customers had dropped away. Only a handful of the old gents came in for their pipe tobacco anymore and Grace was none too pleased to see even them. To her they were a bunch of stinky old men and she couldn’t be bothered making herself pleasant. She hated their wavery voices and their coughing and their shuffling feet. She hated their lips clamped over their rotten pipes, and most of all she was repelled by their hands. She couldn’t bear to take money from them in case there was an accidental brushing of their skin against hers. She placed a plate on the counter for them to drop their money into, and she paid out their change in the same way.
The women and children who came in for sweets were scarcely less offensive. Grace had strict rules about finger marks and shopping baskets on the counter, and about children taking gobstoppers out of their mouths on the premises. She put up a sign threatening the direst consequences if bicycles were left against the window or if chewing gum was dropped on the pavement.
The ringing of the shop bell woke Grace up. Uncle Les strode in, rubbing his hands.“What, not cashed up yet, young lady? Resting on our laurels, are we, and on our birthday?”
Grace glared at him, made her way over to the till, and stabbed down hard on the keys to make it open.“Won’t take long, there’s little enough to count,” she said with bitter satisfaction.
Uncle Les leaned across the counter and seized her by the wrist. “Giving me cheek, are you?” he said in a rough whisper. “Eh, but you’ve ruined me. You’re a minx and a madam,” he said through clenched teeth. “Always were.”
“You ruined me. I hate you. You’re a pig.”
“Keep your voice down, your Mam’ll hear. Is that what you want? You want me to tell her her daughter was born bad and she’s been a dirty little minx since she was eight years old? I could put the pair of you out on the street, and don’t you forget it.”
“I hate you. Anyway, Mam’s round the baker’s getting me a birthday cake,” she said. With a wail of despair in her voice, she added,“A birthday cake! Oh, happy birthday, Grace!”
Uncle Les let go of her wrist and slapped her across the face. “Your Mam doesn’t know what you are, thanks to me. It’s a mercy she can’t see you, it’s a mercy your father never had to lay eyes on you. There’s bad blood in you. So get yourself round here where I can get at you.”
“Why should I? I won’t.”
“Oh, but you will.” Uncle Les’s voice was quiet and slow. “You will, miss. Birthday or no birthday, because I say so. And don’t forget I’m doing you a favour. You’re getting past it. You’re getting too old for my tastes. Now do as you’re told.”
Grace stared at him, biting her lip, but obeyed. Uncle Les pulled down the shop blinds and locked the door. He turned back, unbuttoning his trousers, and moved towards Grace, who had seated herself up on the edge of the counter.
“Aye, you know what you are. You know what I want. And I get what I want. So let’s be having you, you hussy,” he said.
Grace parted her legs and looked away as Uncle Les pushed a hand roughly up between them.
“I’m late,” she said. Then she slapped his face, hard.
“What?” Uncle Les drew his hand away and fisted it, ready to strike her. “You bitch!”
Grace flinched for a split second and then squared up to him.“You heard. And don’t you dare lift another finger to me or I won’t care who knows. I’ll tell the whole world what you done to me.”
Uncle Les buttoned himself up, staring at her. “But I’m careful. I’ve been careful since that last time, three years ago that were. Who else have you gone with, you bitch?”
Grace smoothed down her dress and slipped off the counter with a sideways look. “I’m late. Do you want to tell my Mam I’m in the family way,” she said,“and not for the first time, neither? Or are you going to help me out?”
Uncle Les pulled her round to face him.“Are you trying to get money out of me?”
Grace gave a sour laugh. “Money? I wouldn’t touch your rotten money. No, you just have to cough up for another week outside Blackpool, that’ll do it. Call it a birthday present. Still there, is it, your nice quiet place, family run? I’m sure if it isn’t you’ll find another. Somewhere discreet. Only be quick about it.”
She twisted her arm away and picked up her bag from the corner of the counter. Quickly she pulled out a compact and dabbed her face with powder. She slung the bag over her arm, marched to the door, and unlocked it.
“Oy, where do you think you’re going? Your mother’ll be back any minute.”
“Say ta-ta for me, then,” Grace said, opening the door. “Tell her I’m not staying for tea. I’m going to the Red Lion. I’ve got friends that want to buy me a drink and wish me happy birthday. Enjoy the cake,won’t you?”
Soon after my grandmother died, my mother closed the shop and sold it to a firm of bookmakers. They bought only the ground floor and we kept the rooms above. First of all they demolished the shop front and replaced it with mysterious, opaque glass, and a flat illuminated sign. There were laws against children setting foot on premises licensed for gaming, so the bookies made us a separate door from the street, opening onto a passageway newly partitioned from the rest of the ground floor, that led to our stairs at the back. In the space of two or three days the old shop ceased to exist and the new betting shop became, to me, forbidden ground.
My mother liked it, though. When I got back from school that’s where she would usually be. I asked her once if she won money every day and she told me scathingly she didn’t go there to gamble. That would be common. She only went for a bit of company, which was the least anyone was entitled to. I found out later that in fact from time to time and for a few discreet shillings she kept the floor swept clean of discarded betting slips. She also became adept at attaching herself to the day’s winners; if she could persuade them she’d brought them their luck, as often as not she could also persuade them to take her to celebrate at the Calypso Lounge of the Commercial Hotel up the street.
The betting shop and the Calypso Lounge were within a few hundred yards of each other and I walked past them nearly every day, but I could never picture my mother actually in them. I didn’t know if that was because I never saw inside them for myself, or if I had some notion of keeping alive my grandmother’s disdain for drinking and gambling. Whatever the reason, my mother grew ever more insubstantial and puzzling. She seldom went more than half a mile beyond the radius of home, but still her life seemed conducted at too vast a distance for me to make it out clearly, like something mimed on a rickety stage very far away, tawdry and mercifully unclear.