Ironopolis Read online

  Kids always say the same laced-up things to their friend’s parents, and I was no exception: ‘How’s Mr Cruickshank, Mrs Cruickshank?’

  And any other friend’s parent would have given a laced-up response, but this was Talitha: ‘Oh, don’t get me started on him. Laziest creature in all of Christendom, him. Promised me we’d live in a palace – sit, sit, sit – but is this a palace?’ – she crouched to look in a cupboard for clean cups – ‘This concrete coffin? This cement maze? People’s googly eyes oogling through my windows, the nosey parkers!’

  Was that directed at me? I liked a good look through a window.

  Talitha put cups on the table. ‘And that’s not all,’ she said. ‘I see things.’

  ‘What things, Mrs Cruickshank?’

  She planted fists on the dirty tablecloth. The sleeves of her gown rose to reveal scarecrow arms laced with powder-blue veins. Stark black hairs against blanched skin.

  ‘The dead,’ she said.

  ‘Is Una upstairs, Mrs Cruickshank?’

  ‘The dead are everywhere round here,’ she said. ‘Trapped. Buried. Do you ever feel like that?’

  ‘Like…what, Mrs Cruickshank?’

  ‘Like we’re all piled on top of each other? One mass grave?’

  I was fourteen. What could I say?

  Talitha shooed a fly from the sugar bowl. ‘But all that idiot’ – George, I guessed – ‘does is moon about all day, staring into the aether.’ The kettle jittered and whistled on the stove, but Talitha wasn’t done. ‘He’s upstairs right now. Cosmonaut Cruickshank! And I think to myself, will I escape the Never-Never? Ever? Never! I take care of everything round here, it’s true. George, I say, George – there’s only so much I can hock, only so many times I can put the rent man off.’ She looked sideways at me as she lifted her gown. ‘Still,’ she said, patting her crotch, ‘a woman has her ways.’

  Thank God she was wearing knickers.

  Her hair was heaped high on her head, stabbed through with a knitting needle. She wrapped the handle of the shrieking kettle in a crusted tea towel and lifted it off the gas. ‘War’s over, I say. War’s over! Hello! It’s been over twenty bloody years! So what if all your pals are in bits? You think you’re a special case?’

  She slopped scalding water into the pot and sat down across from me, not caring how her gown gaped. An awful thought occurred – what if Una wasn’t here? What if Talitha and I were all alone?

  She stirred the pot with the handle of a butter knife. ‘So I said to him, I said, what are you going to do about it, husband dear? How long are you going to weep? You have to think about the future because the future’s coming. It’s getting bigger every day. It might even be here already, not that you’d know. Time to get off your arse!’ She smiled conspiratorially. ‘But I’m wasting my time, Jean, really I am. I’d get more sense out of a maggoty old corpse than that man. Imagine!’

  She was wearing makeup, but not that day’s makeup. Cords stood out in her neck. She licked her lips and it was obscene.

  ‘You’re becoming a very pretty woman,’ she said.

  I blushed. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I mean it. I was a beauty once too, so I know.’ She snatched across the table and gripped my hands. Her nails were splintered, gnawed. The stump of her ring finger puckered at the end. She said, ‘So don’t let those fuckers take it from you.’

  I fought panic. ‘I won’t, Mrs Cruickshank.’

  ‘Call me Talitha. Una needn’t worry, but you, I’m warning you. Because they’ll try.’

  ‘I’ll remember that…Talitha.’

  ‘They’re pig ugly.’ She loomed at me through the teapot steam. ‘Ugly like pigs.’

  ‘Thank you.’ I pulled my hands from hers.

  ‘Oink.’

  And then, just like that, she was pouring tea and smiling and none of it had happened. The room spun. I heard the blessed sound of Una pounding down the stairs and into the kitchen. Mother and daughter fired flurries of Polish at each other, while I thanked Talitha for my untouched tea and made for the door.

  Outside, warmth and reality were waiting. Una popped her elbows. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘Nothing. We were just chatting.’

  ‘I hate her. Can I stay with you tonight? I can’t take another one of her sprongs.’

  Sprongs. Una’s name for the times her mother acted strangely, as in: ‘She spronged and tipped over a display of washing powder in the shop today.’ Or, ‘She sat in the yard all night in the rain, spronging out.’ Talitha would get this look in her eyes, and you just knew. It was the look she’d had at our N.Y.E party. And they were getting worse, too, Talitha’s sprongs.

  Once I asked Una what she thought their root was.

  ‘The war,’ she’d said, as if those two tiny words stood for all the unfathomable madness in her house.

  And who’s to say they didn’t?

  Now please don’t think I’m weird when I say that you, Stephan, might be the only friend I’ve got left. A person I’ve never even met. Leanne Dawson lives on Windhorst Avenue, and me and her have been friends ever since her boy Richard started playschool with my Alan. We’d go for a coffee every day after we dropped them off. I made the cake for her youngest Tori’s christening. Then there’s Rita from down the street, who I’ve known these past fifteen years. Michelle and Sally I’ve known since we were all bairns. I even went to Thornaby with Michelle, and I can count on one hand the amount of times they’ve all been round to visit me.

  I thought, maybe I had some sort of massive personality flaw. One so big it was hiding in plain sight. I mean, you meet folk like that sometimes, don’t you? Folk oblivious to their own awfulness. But no, I wasn’t having it. I knew the real reason: Vincent. See, he’s always tried hiding parts of himself from me, but I’m not daft. His ‘late nights’ at the garage, the shady men who slip in the back door when they think I’m asleep. I’ve heard all sorts of whispers about him (which, for your sake, I won’t get into).

  Earlier in our marriage, I used to invite couples round for dinner on Friday or Saturday night. Nice and neighbourly, nothing flash, but the excuses were knuckle-chewing. So many weddings of never-before-mentioned cousins that had to be attended, or bairns that suddenly came down with chickenpox for the second or third time. This, I’m sure, is also the reason Alan had such a hard time making friends growing up. The parents saw him as a proxy Vincent and warned their children to keep away.

  I’ll admit that this hurt, but I was able to console myself with the fact that it was Vincent they really wanted to avoid. Not me or Alan. They liked us. But then I remembered how Loom Street had treated the Cruickshanks. Nobody ever popped their head round Talitha’s door for a cup of char and a natter. I recalled the cruel bets down the Labour Club as to the whether or not George wore a nappy to bed (we heard they’d found him in the burned-out cellar of some ruined Sicilian café. His whole squad had been wiped out, and he’d been down there for days, alone in the dark. Climbing the walls). You see, nobody was interested in the personal hardships experienced by George or Talitha, nor did they see Una as the tragic sum of both. No, to Loom Street, the Cruickshanks were just that lot at Number 1. All of them lumped together.

  Which makes me wonder, is that how people now see me? See us?

  Later that night, after we’d escaped Talitha’s kitchen, me and Una had a conversation. I think it will interest you, Stephan, considering how you discovered Una’s work. The two of us lay squashed together in my single bed, and I was just drifting off when she whispered, ‘We should be artists when we grow up.’

  I thought about my art classes at Thornaby. My flat watercolour fruit and wonky charcoals, my kiln-fired deformities. ‘We should?’

  ‘Aye, and we can move to Paris and get rooms in the Le Bat-ee-uh La-voy-eer. That’s where all the artists lived. That’s where Modigliani lived.’


  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘A dead good painter. We’ll paint masterpieces in the day, and drink red wine and smoke cigarettes and have affairs all night. We’ll always have paint on our clothes.’

  ‘Can we go up the Eiffel Tower?’

  Una’s breath tickled my neck. ‘But the best thing is nobody’ll know we paint these beautiful paintings. They’ll think we’re just scruffs, so they won’t give us the time of day.’

  ‘We’re scruffy?’

  ‘And then, then we’ll die – because they all died young – and they’ll find hundreds and hundreds of paintings in our room, and they’re better than owt anyone’s ever seen before. They put them in galleries all over the world, and the people who hated us before, they’ll realise they wasted their chance to know us.’

  ‘We’ll have to speak French,’ I said. ‘We do French at my school. Do you do it at yours?’

  ‘I’ll learn when I’m there.’

  ‘Oiseau, that means bird,’ I said.

  ‘Then our sculptor friends’ll make a statue of us and put it in the town square so every day the people have to see it and be reminded of how boring and afraid of everything they are.’

  ‘Dog is chien.’

  At some point I slept and dreamed of the riverbank. The mist was so dense I lost my hand at the wrist when I reached into it. Cold black mud slipped between my toes, and I was naked. I shlurped my way down to the water, through reeds ghosting my goosebumpy skin. The world wrapped tightly around me, no boundary at all between river and fog. I stood in the water up to my ankles. Despite the cold, I wanted to swim, wanted to be inside this place. But I hesitated. Hadn’t someone warned me about rivers? I climbed up through the reeds and walked into the mist, the river to my back. I’d never been naked outdoors before and it was exhilarating. I felt a strange churning inside me, an arousal. Blindly, I walked on until I heard the rustle of reeds and soon found myself at the riverbank again. Had I walked in a circle? I turned and went carefully back the way I’d come, reaching the reeds a third time. My crotch throbbed. It got harder to think. I sprinted aimlessly into the fog, ears roaring, hair streaming, mud splattering my back and bum, and I didn’t stop until I was at the reeds once more. This made no sense. I caught my breath, worked my way down to the water and sat on a tangle of exposed willow root. Somewhere out in the fog, I was being watched, but my sex was throbbing so monstrously I could no longer deny it. I touched myself. My ragged breath moved in and out with the river at my feet. A pressure began building, and I went with it until I cried out into the fog. Then, when I had myself back under control, I wrapped my arms around my shins, closed my eyes and slept.

  I woke up with my back to Una, our curved spines touching. Early morning light strained through the curtains and I felt incredible. I’d always been a fitful sleeper, but that was the deepest I’d slept in my whole life. When I slipped fingers between my legs, I was wet.

  I’m not trying to embarrass you here, Stephan. Only now I’ve started writing, I think it’s important to include absolutely everything. That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? This dream – this riverbank – I know you know it from the paintings she left behind, but I wonder if you’ve ever gone there like I did that night? And if so, did you feel that maybe, for the first time in your life, you were special? Chosen for something more?

  Your friend,

  Jean

  24/6/1991

  Dear Stephan,

  Sponge baths: all they do is make you aware of the bits you didn’t sponge. About a week ago, I slipped getting out the bath and cracked my head on the toilet. I woke up bent on the bath mat as Vincent hoofed the door off its hinges. He didn’t want me having any more baths, he said, unless he was there to wash me. When I refused, he brought me buckets of soapy water and waited outside my bedroom door. I tried it once, to humour him, but I felt like a Ford Cortina. So I put my foot down – I can be a twisty mare when I want to be. I asked him: when you want privacy, how many locked doors can you put between yourself and the world? Maybe the question touched a nerve because he gave in, but on the proviso I take a dinner bell in with me to ring if I feel a spell coming on. So long story short, this afternoon I had my first bath in days, and I can’t tell you how good it felt. I even managed to snaffle my Kate Bush tapes back off Alan, and listened to ‘Never for Ever’ as the water turned grey.

  When I stood to get out of the bath, I saw myself reflected in the mirror, what the cancer and the chemo had done. Nana’s words: ‘You could see her workings under what little flesh she had left – the bones, sinews, tendons.’ I touched my pallid and thread-veined thigh. This body, somehow, was mine, but inside I was still me. The two truths superimposed and a wave of dizziness rushed over me, only the threat of Vincent’s sponge bucket kept me upright. Still, I couldn’t turn away, and suddenly I knew why Nana had said Peg was beautiful. Beauty and decay do not exist independently from each other. The one comes from the other, and it is us – people – who, out of ignorance or fear, insist on their separation. Peg collapsed all that. She was both what we want and fear most, and, like me in the bathroom mirror, we are powerless to look away.

  I don’t like false modesty, so let me say that I used to be a looker. By the time I was fourteen, I’d somehow emerged from my chub to sport a perfect hourglass figure and a 36C bust. Believe me, it was as much to my surprise as it was Mam and Agnes’ when I started turning heads. I liked it when I caught men looking because who doesn’t want to be wanted?

  There was a handful of estate girls who’d got into Thornaby with me. We were girly girls and most of my money from my afterschool job at Woolies went on zippy-dresses, Maxi coats, Playtex girdles. There was a shop in the city centre that sold Ginger Group clothes, and we would have killed to afford those. My goal was to save up for one of their gabardine dresses. Some of the more well-off girls at Thornaby wore Ginger Group, and they made fun of us estate lasses, but that just made us closer. There were four of us – me, Michelle, Kerry, and Bernadette – and every weekend we went to the under 16s disco at Redcar Youth Club to Twist with boys and drop half aspirins into our cokes. I never asked Una to come. My friends called her Mr Tambourine Man, because of her hair. When they said it in front of me – laughing – I didn’t correct them.

  Another upshot of my transformation was that I was finally initiated into Mam and Agnes’ beauty sessions. The three of us staying up nights, setting our hair, tweezing and bleaching and slathering our faces in Cold Cream. It was important to look your best, Mam said, because while true beauty might be on the inside, who’d hang round long enough to see it if the rest of you was a dog’s dinner? So I smoothed down my sidelong figure in the mirror, tapped my chin ten times before bed with the back of each hand, just like Mam. She taught me all sorts: how to conceal spots, what colours made my eyes pop and, of course, periods. I think she was just relieved that I was, after all, turning into the kind of woman she understood.

  Thornaby didn’t allowed makeup, so we’d put it on at home in the mornings, to wear on the bus for the boys. You’d see us huddled together at the gates, peeling off our falsies and wiping our cheeks with spitty tissues. Daft, perhaps, but it worked. I remember sitting on my bed one Valentine’s Day, reading Una all my cards from the Thornaby boys (it was a mixed Grammar, but we were kept on the other side of the grounds so were forced to arrange meetings through a complicated system of notes and whispers like in P.O.W. films). I read Una all the awful poetry, stuff that rhymed ‘Jean’ with ‘queen’ and ‘most beautiful girl I ever seen’ until she groaned and toppled to the floor like she was gutshot.

  Despite the attention I was getting, I was sexually naïve. I knew where babies came from, of course, but the act itself was this far-off, abstract thing. Sex education at school consisted of medical-looking diagrams of reproductive systems that more resembled B-movie Martians than anything Down There. My own equipment certainly didn’t look like that! And t
he gulf between the two confused me. About the act itself, I had a murky concept of skin on skin, an invasion of some kind. Something Mam and Dad had done, did. At night, I sometimes let my hands wander, but even in that not-too-distant past, masturbation was still very much entangled with blindness and madness. God Himself frowning as thunderclouds boiled up behind Him.

  I was too embarrassed to speak to Mam, so in the end Una set me straight: ‘His dick goes hard then he puts it up you. The first few times it hurts, then it doesn’t. He moves it in and out ’til he shoots his spunk – this white stuff what comes out the end – and once he’s done that, he won’t want to know. And be careful with his spunk ’cause if he does it up you, you get pregnant. That’s why you need johnnys. He’ll want to put it in your gob, too.’

  ‘The johnny?’

  Una rolled her eyes.

  Human beings weren’t capable of that, were they? And if they were…was I? How did Una know all this?

  ‘Just do,’ she said.

  Rumours circled Una. Folk shot her looks. Mothers whispered and tutted when we walked past. Lads nudged each other, and men my Dad’s age followed her with their eyes (eyes that would usually be on me). I remember being in the newsagent’s back when Mrs Connors still ran it, and the old crone slapping Una’s change on the counter as if she was afraid of catching lurgy.

  In the end, I got it out of Sally Peterson (the same Sally who doesn’t visit me now). Sally went to Scunner Academy with Una: ‘I heard she goes up the old waterworks with blokes. And not just one bloke, loads of blokes. She does everything.’

  And me, doe-eyed Jean, still didn’t cotton on. ‘What do you mean?’

  Sally sighed. ‘Shagging, Jean. They take it in turns. She’s worse than a dog.’

  Did Una know what people were saying? I certainly never told her, though not because I was afraid of her reaction, but because of the pictures the rumours put in my head. I wasn’t ready for a world where those things happened. Yes, I put my hair up in a French Twist and stuck my chest out in the mirror. Yes, I practised my Monroe pout, my Hepburn sashay, but for no other reason than that’s what I thought girls did for their own sakes. The looks I got, the Valentine cards, to me they were simple confirmations that I was doing everything correctly. What’s that chess word? The endgame was something I evidently still couldn’t face, even if I did feel its weight pressing.