Maureen, in spite of everything, but she would have preferred to deal with things herself, not among strangers.
My father loved Birmingham. Perhaps, for a drunk, cities really are better: in a small town, a man runs out of goodwill pretty quickly, and people soon know where they stand with him. In a city, he can go from pub to pub, hotel bar to hotel bar and, if he makes a mistake in one, there’s always another. Meanwhile, he can be anybody he chooses to be. He can walk into a strange place, strike up a conversation, gradually let slip the clues and revealing details of a life he has never known. A life he might have had, if things had been different. He can even believe, as he slips into the familiar-seeming role, that he came so close to making that life happen, his story might as well be the truth. If he hadn’t married that particular woman. If he’d never had kids. If he’d stayed in the air force, he’d be just a few years from a pension by now.
He must have known that it couldn’t last. He’d led my mother to believe that flitting to Birmingham was the beginning of new life, but he was just doing the same casual work on the building that he’d been doing at home. At least in Cowdenbeath, we’d had the prefab to ourselves; now, in Maureen’s house, we were living with strangers, some of whom were fixtures, like the furniture and the smell in the hallways, while others came and went, men from Cork or Somerset who stayed a week or so, then disappeared, women who were almost indistinguishable from Maureen, some a little younger and fresher-looking, some older, caked in dark, wet-looking make-up. The men were mysterious and sullen, which made my mother think they were criminals; the women popped in for a cup of tea one afternoon, stayed for a few days, then wandered off somewhere, never to be seen again. They were so like Maureen, I thought they must be her sisters, or cousins; they dressed in similar clothes, smoked the same cigarettes, talked the same talk. They might as well have been the same woman, variant incarnations of the coarse, good-humoured, hard-headed landlady who beguiled and frightened me.
My mother waited for a few weeks, as I remember, before she went to work on talking us home. To begin with, she was careful: it wouldn’t do to suggest that my father had been wrong, or that he was stuck in the dead-end work he’d been getting so far. It wouldn’t do for him to feel that he’d failed. He would have to be talked around slowly, with great care, like a sulky child. Towards the end, though, when it became obvious that he had no intention of leaving, she never stopped talking about going back, and my father got more and more angry, more and more desperate to get out into the world and show people what he was capable of. I think he really believed he could change his life, given half a chance; but the truth was, he wasn’t the type to charm success from the banal apparatus of the daily grind. As soon as he got ahead, he was in the pub, buying drinks for everybody; or he would spend the morning with the racing papers, studying the form, then he’d put everything he had on the one horse, to win. Soon, he was staying out late, or not coming back to the digs at all. One night, Maureen locked the door when she saw him coming back along the street, his face bloody, his clothes torn. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, but she was afraid for him, and she had come to the point of believing that what he needed was a firm hand. She was afraid for my mother, too, and for the children of this unlucky pair, sick and thin, in cheap clothes, desperately homesick and frightened by what was happening to their father. She had said it before: one day, that man will say the wrong thing to the wrong people, and he won’t come home at all.
My mother assumed it was the West Indians Maureen feared. She came from West Fife, where black people were unknown, and she’d heard all the usual stories that went the
My father loved Birmingham. Perhaps, for a drunk, cities really are better: in a small town, a man runs out of goodwill pretty quickly, and people soon know where they stand with him. In a city, he can go from pub to pub, hotel bar to hotel bar and, if he makes a mistake in one, there’s always another. Meanwhile, he can be anybody he chooses to be. He can walk into a strange place, strike up a conversation, gradually let slip the clues and revealing details of a life he has never known. A life he might have had, if things had been different. He can even believe, as he slips into the familiar-seeming role, that he came so close to making that life happen, his story might as well be the truth. If he hadn’t married that particular woman. If he’d never had kids. If he’d stayed in the air force, he’d be just a few years from a pension by now.
He must have known that it couldn’t last. He’d led my mother to believe that flitting to Birmingham was the beginning of new life, but he was just doing the same casual work on the building that he’d been doing at home. At least in Cowdenbeath, we’d had the prefab to ourselves; now, in Maureen’s house, we were living with strangers, some of whom were fixtures, like the furniture and the smell in the hallways, while others came and went, men from Cork or Somerset who stayed a week or so, then disappeared, women who were almost indistinguishable from Maureen, some a little younger and fresher-looking, some older, caked in dark, wet-looking make-up. The men were mysterious and sullen, which made my mother think they were criminals; the women popped in for a cup of tea one afternoon, stayed for a few days, then wandered off somewhere, never to be seen again. They were so like Maureen, I thought they must be her sisters, or cousins; they dressed in similar clothes, smoked the same cigarettes, talked the same talk. They might as well have been the same woman, variant incarnations of the coarse, good-humoured, hard-headed landlady who beguiled and frightened me.
My mother waited for a few weeks, as I remember, before she went to work on talking us home. To begin with, she was careful: it wouldn’t do to suggest that my father had been wrong, or that he was stuck in the dead-end work he’d been getting so far. It wouldn’t do for him to feel that he’d failed. He would have to be talked around slowly, with great care, like a sulky child. Towards the end, though, when it became obvious that he had no intention of leaving, she never stopped talking about going back, and my father got more and more angry, more and more desperate to get out into the world and show people what he was capable of. I think he really believed he could change his life, given half a chance; but the truth was, he wasn’t the type to charm success from the banal apparatus of the daily grind. As soon as he got ahead, he was in the pub, buying drinks for everybody; or he would spend the morning with the racing papers, studying the form, then he’d put everything he had on the one horse, to win. Soon, he was staying out late, or not coming back to the digs at all. One night, Maureen locked the door when she saw him coming back along the street, his face bloody, his clothes torn. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him, but she was afraid for him, and she had come to the point of believing that what he needed was a firm hand. She was afraid for my mother, too, and for the children of this unlucky pair, sick and thin, in cheap clothes, desperately homesick and frightened by what was happening to their father. She had said it before: one day, that man will say the wrong thing to the wrong people, and he won’t come home at all.
My mother assumed it was the West Indians Maureen feared. She came from West Fife, where black people were unknown, and she’d heard all the usual stories that went the
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