Dating : We Know how to Live

A short story about the desperation of poverty and the richness of love

I choose the practical pumps that sit beside the patent work shoes in the hallway. This is not a journey for heels. No. This path is worn into my muscle memory. Every sinew resists, but I pull on the plimsolls and tie the frayed laces.

The bags are in the kitchen cupboard waiting for me. I hurry through and choose four. Three Sainsbury’s and a Waitrose. The small part of me that still fights this asks who am I kidding? It’s a rhetorical question, I tell myself as I fold the bags into tiny triangles.

At least I don’t have to turn anything off. I involuntarily remind myself of those halcyon days when I would dive out of bed and shower. Pull on a cashmere jumper dress, soft tights and the patent shoes. Rush around. Keys. Phone. Money. A beautiful handbag that Jon bought me for my birthday years ago. Wishing for a single remote switch for the TV and lights and sockets so I didn’t have to check everything.

‘Kerry? I’m off now. I’ll be back later on.’

There’s a rustle from upstairs. A door creaks and footsteps tread soft in the silence.

‘Right, Mum. Will you be OK?’

She doesn’t appear over the top banister. I know she is standing just out of sight near her bedroom door because I know the creak of every floorboard. The love seeps through the cracks in the boards, connecting us. I hurry outside and slam the door behind me before the rush of tears. No. There’s no time for tears. I have to be more like Mo.

It’s exactly three miles, which now, at forty-two years of age, is not so bad. But back then when I was six, it was forever. I look back at the house, her house but mine now, and the grey mist descends. It always starts in my stomach — a hole in my jumper noticed, my school socks were always one fashion statement behind — and rises to meet the sniggers and pointing.

I would run home crying, but Mo would just nod and pull back her lips.

‘We know how to live, Jennifer. We know how to live, though.’

I didn’t understand what it meant. She’d suck on a cigarette and pile her hair on the top of her head. She’d lie back on the battered sofa and point a long scarlet nail at me.

‘You see, later on you’ll appreciate all this.’

The swirls of smoke as she circled her fingers around the scruffy lounge made hoops and I would poke my fingers through them. Her laughter rang through the house and I would give anything to hear it again.

I walk. My body pulls itself through the greyness as I struggle with myself until I feel her my hand fall into hers. This is the only way that I will get to my destination. I am in a computer game where I need to avoid meeting anyone I know at all costs. I weave through the back streets, making my journey much longer than it needs to be.

Mo taught me all I need to know about face. She could stand, arms folded in Madonna-esque garb, and deny that she had just slept with someone’s husband. I lost count of the times we encountered angry women out for revenge. Mo was beautiful, despite everything. She was hard but delicate. She absolutely knew she had great hair and would touch it all the time, flicking it and pulling it over her shoulder.

My brothers bickered and fought and she would only need to stare at them, even as teenagers, to pull them apart. But me. I watched in silent adoration as she lurched from one crisis to another. As she opened and closed NATO-like negotiation with our dads — yes, dads — daily and basked in the drama, replaying it to her sister Paula each evening.

Then there were the men. She never hid it. She dealt with their angry partners like a hot knife through butter and left a trail of debris. Debris? No. Devastation. I didn’t know what it was then. Her transaction. What she did. I Just thought she was popular.

When I challenged her, mid-teens and all Spiced- girl power, she blew a shot of smoke into my face. No smoke ring messages now.

‘It’s that or we don’t fucking eat. Simple.’

It was shockingly simple. The first I will never be like her bolt shot through my tender mind. The first hint of preparation. A satisfied look which I mistook for defensiveness followed each declaration of her life. Mo being right. Me being wrong.

I smile to myself as I hurry through the overflowing wheelie bins and tight backstreets. She wasn’t defending herself. No. She was making sure I knew what not to do. By that point her life was irrevocably scarred and she wanted to save me. We still did the three-mile walk at least once a year, though.

She didn’t take us out so much when we reached our teenage years. Mal and Ben had friends and they adopted their families and sat in warm bedrooms with hot chocolate and no footsteps on the stairs. I am the youngest so she still had me to feed and clothe. The confrontations in the street and in shops were hard for me and she knew it, so the annual journey took in everything. School uniform. Haircut. And the dreaded shoes.

‘You’ll have the ones I say, Jenni.’

I fingered the black patent leather Mary-Janes and fantasised about the jealous looks of Susan Potts and Melanie Shaw. I pictured myself on their table with a packed lunch instead of on the dinner ticket table. Us all laughing together. I must have smiled because Mo smiled too. She grabbed the sensible shoes and not the patent ones and took them to the counter.

My heart started to beat fast. She was suddenly prickly and frowning. Confusion reigned as this was the first time I ever sensed Mo lose her shit, as she dubbed the sight dent in her armour-like demeanour.

The women behind the counter were uniformed and sober. I wondered if one of them was someone’s furious wife, but there was no sign of a showdown. Just a developing mountain of tension as Mo got her purse out of her bag.

‘Just these, love.’

The small, blonde woman picked up the shoes.

‘Tried ’em, has she? Only…?’

Her gaze rested on me and I saw something in her eyes I know I will see again later today.

‘Yeah. Yeah. It’s fine.’

Curt and brisk now. Wanting to get it over with. I hadn’t tried them and I anticipated the blisters. They were always a size too big. Maybe two. So I’d grow into them.

The till rang out and no money was exchanged. Just a ticket that contained all the shame in the world and reduced my hardened mother to almost tears. But the shoes were in her possession and we hurried out of the shop, breathless, as if we had pulled off a heist. Outside, she lit a ciggie and I exhaled into the autumn air to mimic her smoke rings.

I had my first cigarette at sixteen. I was always a late starter. Mal and Ben had been stealing Mo’s since they were twelve, but I was too scared of her. So when Jon offered me a Silk Cut on our first date, I took it. I didn’t want him to think I was too young. I was willing to do anything — anything — to make sure I kept him. No broken heart for me. No crying in the street. No anger. I would keep my man.

So I breathed in the smoke and stepped into the trap. She smelled it on my clothes immediately, of course. I arrived home a little tipsy from underage gin and from teenage love and she was disproportionately angry.

‘Think you’re old enough, do you? Well. Go on then. Get a job.’

And that was it. My dreams of college and university whipped into the air. I had left school and it was the holidays. There had been talk of me going on a business studies course. Undecided as yet because Mo hadn’t yet understood if she would still get Family Allowance. She was looking into it. But the slightest whiff of adulthood hanging on me had her running for the Manchester Evening News.

‘Look. Office junior. Clerk. You like that sort of thing, don’t you?’ I didn’t respond. I was too angry with her for ruining love. I sat expressionless, like her. Staring. ‘Well you’d better bloody like it, madam, because I’m not paying for your ciggies and booze.’

She hurried away and I knew that she was in the kitchen, arm folded fuming. I took the paper and the next day I rang every job. I had interviews. Incredibly, I had seven GCSE’s and that impressed them. I had a job in an accountant’s office within a week.

Two years later I married. Mo hated Jon. She stared him down every time she found him in the lounge waiting for me. She never discussed him until I told her we were getting married. Her face clouded the way it did when she thought something would cost her.

‘Not a big do, Jen. Not with him.’

It was time. I had nothing to lose. I’d soon be gone.

‘It’s my wedding. I’ll do what I want. Anyway, you won’t have to pay for it. Dad will pay.’

I may as well have stabbed her through the heart with a blunt poker. She lost her shit, her armour buckling almost indiscernibly.

‘Oh yeah? Oh yeah? And where was he when you wanted new shoes? Eh? Where was he when you had bloody chicken pox in your eyes? With her.’ The cigarette-laden finger was waving dangerously close to my face. She leaned in and nodded dramatically. ‘Where was he on parents’ evening? Eh?’

I missed the significance. The image of Mo in her Sheena Easton phase sitting opposite my maths tutor Mr Crompton drifted through my consciousness and I winced. I did not see it. I didn’t see the fire or the quiet determination. No. I only saw the thick black eyeliner.

As predicted by her initial cloudy forecast, she paid for the wedding. She blamed herself for the thread of lack of responsibility that ran through her ex-partners. She didn’t see that it was them and not her. My father didn’t even turn up to my wedding, yet Mo blamed herself for my tears.

The terraced houses thin into brown field sites now; demolitions of this mill town flattened into an oasis. A piece of scrubland with a huge steel faux Art Deco fountain. It’s the outdoor equivalent of the media generated huge TV’s in poverty lounges trope, but scarily real. I always rest here, where we did. She tried to drag me past, but I stopped, mesmerised by the water tumbling over the blocks and drowning the stainless-steel angel.

Many sighs later she sat down on the bench and stretched her legs. A man was using a machine to blow away leaves.

‘What’s he doing mum? Mum?’

She sat forwards, legs apart. Perpetual cigarette between her lips, stained by her ruby lipstick. She watched and thought.

‘He’s making sure the leaves don’t stop the water from flowing. There should always be someone to do that.’

I looked at her. Was she losing her shit? Her eyes looked glazed but she was smiling slightly. I had a six-year-old’s idea. Innocent to the world.

‘You could do that, Mummy! You could clear the leaves. You could get a job!’

I wince now at my enthusiasm. It clung to me back then and well into my twenties. She shrugged and threw the glowing remains of her roll-up into the edge of the fountain. It fizzed and burnt out.

‘I’ve got a job, kiddo. I’ve got a job.’ She took my hand and pulled me from the bench. ‘Come on. We need to go.’

She dragged me the full distance. The fountain is about halfway. One and a half miles. My little legs ached as I lagged but she was my pacemaker. I realise that now. She knew that if she stopped, even once, they would judge her even worse than she already was. And that I would never learn.

I watch the fountain and think about Kerry. I didn’t want a child until I was sure I could care for it. Her. Him. I didn’t want to bring another human being into the world to have my life. But Jon wanted something. He didn’t know what it was, so we tried everything. Holidays. A nice house. A new car. Engagement. Wedding. Baby.

We decided to get pregnant because the glow had worn off all the other things. It was another party where Mo could sit sullenly in the corner. Anther happy announcement. It had happened quickly and Jon was delighted.

‘Great. You can finish work.’ I panicked. I hadn’t factored that in. I loved my job. By then I was a manager in a housing association. Helping people. It separated me from the being helped part of my life. I could have maternity leave. I had checked. Twice. ‘Oh. And you’ll have to give those up.’

He rattled my red cigarette box, spilling my heart shaped gold lighter from the top. Something in my stomach lurched then soared. This was it. This was it. This was where I changed things. For me and for my baby. I did it there and then. I took the box and tipped the eleven cigarettes into the bin. I poured water onto them because I know myself so well. I stored my lighter in a case on the top of my wardrobe. With the pictures of Mo and Mal and Ben that Jon didn’t like on show around the house. I was beginning to think he was right. This was my life now. My chance. My change.

Kerry was born at 3am on a Monday morning. Jon was asleep at home, or so he said. Mo rushed in at the very last minute, her hair tied up in plaits.

‘Bloody hell. Jen. Where is he? Eh? Where is he?’

Who would miss their first child’s birth? Who would be so un-contactable that it took them a full day to get there? Mo sat in the side room where Kerry slept and I fixated on the door and nicotine. Her stare told me that when Jon arrived, she would not silently leave like she usually did. She had nowhere to go this time. She belonged there, beside me, representing her solid track record that flowed behind her. Errant, absent men who made a career out of women like Mo who wore their vulnerability on their sleeve.

He turned up at 5pm. He hugged me and looked into the clear plastic tub that held our daughter.

‘Kerry.’

It was an instruction, not a request. Mo shook her head and huffed. He stared at her in disgust. No one looked at me and I knew it was over.

Three weeks later Jon did not come home. Kerry was a good baby, just the usual night feeds, but it was the last straw for him. He was there less and less and eventually he appeared in the lounge with a suitcase.

‘I’ve been a bad lad.’

I could hear Mo’s voice in my head shouting ‘No Shit Sherlock’, but I didn’t respond. I just nodded. He collected his things together and picked newly ironed clothes from the laundry pile.

‘So is that where you were when Kerry was born?’

The classical conditioning had not completely bypassed me and I knew where to insert a cutting truth. He didn’t answer because he didn’t have to. Silence, I have learned, says the most. Those with no voice scream their pain the loudest whether it’s in response to damning lies or the cruellest truth.

He left and I never saw him again. He did not respond to any letters from the benefits agency or from my solicitor. I heard years later that he and his girlfriend had emigrated to Australia. I went back to work and Kerry thrived. Mo loved her. I had never seen that kind of tenderness in her before. She even took to smoking in the yard when Kerry was around.

I’m almost there now. I’m on the edge of town and anonymous amongst the people leaving with shopping bags and small children. This was always my favourite part, but I need to make a detour because I cannot walk past this spot. She is everywhere. She is in the trees here and on the grass, each blade full of her.

Kerry was eleven when I was made redundant. It had been sudden. Because I was employed concurrently for years, I got a lump sum. I’d done a degree on the side. Sociology to help me understand my customers, as my employers called homeless people. I paid a year’s rent up front and started the search for another job. I had qualifications. I was smart. I had the patent shoes. But, all of a sudden, another computer-savvy generation rose below me. I saw them for the first time, people who had just been my neighbours and colleagues were now the competition. And I lost. Badly. I stumbled over my words in interviews and I failed.

The redundancy pay ran out and I signed on. No, they told me. No. You can’t have the full benefit because your redundancy pay should last longer. I argued and they sanctioned and I argued and they won. Tearful and angry, I went to see her. She sat there with wet, red eyes as I ranted and sobbed. When I finally subsided she opened her mouth to speak but nothing came out. Except a small cough. She lifted a tissue but it was too late. Red specks told me all I needed to know.

Two weeks later she was in a hospice. Kerry and I would paint on her ruby red lips, wheel her outside into the fresh air and light up a cigarette for her. She would silently smoke and look up at the sky. On what turned out to be the last day she spoke.

‘I’m sorry love.’

I wanted to reach over and touch her, but it wasn’t like that between us. No.

‘It’s OK. Nothing to be sorry for.’

She laughed a harsh, rough giggle.

‘Oh there fucking is, madam. Plenty. The shoes. I should have let you have them patent shoes.’

We stared up at the sunshine. Even though I was lost for words, I spoke.

‘We knew how to live though, didn’t we Mum?’

The brittle skin at the side of her eyes crinkled into a smile.

‘We did, love. We did.’

That was the last time she spoke. She faded out over the next day and died on a Friday night at eight o’clock. The same time she used to go to the pub.

I look up at the sky on the last leg of my journey. Maybe that’s where she is now. But I always think of her on that last day as they carried her into the crematorium. It was crowded. Elderly men but a few women I didn’t know too. Kerry stood by my side and squeezed my hand so I didn’t lose my shit. As the curtains closed around her coffin, Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ played out over the huge speakers, echoing through the high roofed building. It was what she would have wanted.

The congregation faded back into their own lives but I lingered outside and Kerry collected up the roses that were laid in the doorway for her. I watched as her last plume of smoke circled above the crematorium and dissipated over the trees and buildings. She was there, back in the world. All around me.

I need to avoid her now. Let go of her hand for this last part. Everything has prepared me for this. Kerry had the shoes. Yes. I took her last year. But we walked slowly and I let her watch the fountain for as long as she wanted too. We circled the crematorium gardens. She left a rose she picked from someone’s garden in Plot B where we had scattered Mo’s ashes on a windy day. It was almost as if my mother was determined to escape. The ashes swirled around us in a tornado and blew into my face. I breathed her in, but she was already deep inside me.

I let Kerry choose her own shoes. I pawned my gold bracelet to so she could have whichever style of shoes she wanted. She didn’t choose the patent ones. She went for a pair of sturdy lace ups with patent strip across the front — perhaps just a flash of me. And Mo. I had never been so proud. Teenaged yet sensible, Kerry might break the mould. Somewhere deep inside I felt the greyness ebb and a hard, round ball of I will do anything form.

I am beginning to see that everyone’s anything is different. The level they to which they will stoop — or is it rise? What is yours? It’s the thing you will do for someone you love. Something selfless. Something that contributes to someone else’s survival more than your own. And you don’t tell anyone. No. Because no one is interested. It isn’t front page news, it’s just an everyday trudge through the grey mud of life. It isn’t on the internet or on the TV because you can’t actually see it. It’s disguised as badness or dysfunctional or downright disgusting, but there’s a base reason. If you dig deep enough, you see that it’s survival.

It sounds dramatic. I smile to myself as I pick up my steps through town. It’s raining a little and I pull up the hood of my charity shop cagoule. Mo loved the drama. The costume drama at the school gates when she turned up dressed for a nightclub rather than after-school club. The fights in the street with the wives and girlfriends. Her face afterwards, angry and scratched but slightly amused. Because what could she do about it? Nothing. She was in too deep. Might as well make it fun.

But she never picked a fight. She looked hard as nails but she was completely accepting. No one could have accused her of trying to be something she was not. She just went from day to day swerving the obstacles in her way, which came in the form of people who hated her. People who didn’t understand who she was or why she did it.

Mo did not have any allies. Even Aunty Paula drifted away once she remarried as her second husband didn’t know about Mo and Paula wanted to keep it that way. So she severed the thread. Like Jon. I suppose that was their anything. They walked away from something they cared about because they knew there was something better to care about. That is the stark truth. And, deep down, right at the bottom, life is stark.

I turn the corner and my stomach lurches. At least there is no queue. I feel the carrier bags folded into tiny triangles and the letter in the cagoule’s pouch. This is the starkness in my world. The place I would never go. But what choice do I have?

We moved into Mo’s house when she died. She didn’t make a will — no shit, Sherlock — and Mal and Ben have lost touch. So while it’s all being sorted out it makes sense that Kerry and I move in. I’m sleeping in my childhood bedroom and Kerry has Mo’s room with the brand-new double bed. She loved it at Nana’s. Even without Nana here. But that still leaves the question of how we will live. We knew how to live so it shouldn’t be a problem, but it is.

My problem is that while I was sanctioned, I got into debt. Yes, that’s terrible. Yes, it’s my fault. But I needed to survive. Read it again. Survive. I wasn’t buying a sixty-inch screen TV or new clothes. Weed or alcohol. It was to eat and to keep Kerry warm. To make sure she had clothes to go to school in. So yes, it was a loan shark. A payday loan with no payday. Because people like to take but don’t like to give.

Now my benefits are reinstated, I need to pay it back. Except I can’t get a job. Not even with my degree. Not even with the patent shoes. Employers somehow see the desperation. I’ll do anything. So the benefit payment comes in and goes straight out again and I have nothing.

It turns out Mo’s house is paid for. It belonged to her. She made sure I had a home. Somewhere to grow up in and have food to eat, even if I didn’t have the fashionable socks. I found out after she went into the hospice. Her consultant called me in to see him and requested a list of her medications. I didn’t know what they were. I scoured the house and, down the back of her bedside table, I found an old prescription. Under the bed were the deeds to the house.

I took the medication list to Mr Murray in his posh surgery. He frowned at me.

‘She’s terminal.’

No shit, Sherlock. I nodded.

‘It was the cigarettes, wasn’t it?’

He raised his eyebrows.

‘How many a day did she smoke?’

He clearly hadn’t read her care plan. She was still smoking twenty a day.

‘Lots. Every day. All her life.’

He nodded.

‘What was her occupation?’

I thought for a moment. What was it she was doing?

‘She cared for people.’

‘Ah. A carer.’

I nodded. It’s all in the presentation. That’s what she used to say as she swirled around the house in her best clothes every single day of her life.

I drag my feet along the wet pavement. The door is shut and I panic a little. I push it, hoping that no one from the Amico Housing offices across the road is watching. The familiar prickle of discomfort stings me. I peep inside. There are lots of people, some with children. You know when you imagine something in your mind’s eye right up to the moment you step inside the reality? This is it. This is it.

A woman sees me and waves me in. There is bunting, a bit worn and tarnished glitter hanging down far enough to drape heads. There is music and someone has brought a dog. I step inside and the door closes behind me. Look around as it clunks shut and I am here.

The shelves are half full and I take a basket. A small woman with a name badge that says Alison hurries over.

‘Hiya!’ She is a little too bright and airy. ‘Have you got your…’

I thrust the coupon into her hand. Our eyes meet and I see the look. I feel the rub of too-big shoes on my ankle and Mo’s over-tight grip. She exchanges the coupon for a list.

‘So just go round and get everything on the list.’ She offers carrier bags. She watches my hand go to my cagoule. ‘Bought your own. Yes. Ok. Good.’

I navigate the racking and start to place items in my basket. It’s over surprisingly quickly and I feel a spark of it will be ok as I head for the checkout. They’ve set it up like a supermarket so it’s familiar. Alison is back and she holds her hand out. I stare at her.

‘Bag?’

I fish them out of my cagoule and she eyes the Waitrose one warily. I worry that this will fail at the last minute, that she will sniff out my fear and find a reason to deny me. But she simply pushes the items into the bags. I take them from her and she leads me to a table near the door.

Three children are playing underneath it. One of them has a tiny pair of patent shoes on, all scratched and worn. Alison smiles.

‘OK? Good. We’ve had some chocolate donated if you’d like to take some?’

I sense tears threaten to puncture and push them deep down. Kerry loves chocolate. I think about giving it to her. Her face.

‘Look, when I’m on my feet I’ll…’

She moves closer to me.

‘Thank you. And don’t worry. It will be fine. It will all work out.’ I feel the warmth of her hand on my arm, the first human contact I have had for months. I let it soak in. She looks at my keyring. A picture of Kerry underneath a ‘Best Mum in the World’ scroll. ‘Is it just you and your daughter?’

‘Yes. My mum… well she died. I inherited her house and… the benefits… I promise when it’s all comes through…’

Alison hugs me tight then releases me.

‘You don’t have to explain. Honestly, you don’t. Everyone feels awkward coming here. It’s because things aren’t how they should be. No one should have to live like this. But it’s something.’

Our eyes meet again and this time it’s shared understanding.

‘Anything.’

Anything. It sinks in. I have done it. I feel the rush of celebration begin and I swear I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke.

‘Will you be OK?’

I nod. I think I will. Alison smiles. Her hand is on the door now.

‘Yeah. Thank you for this. We’ll be… we’ll survive.’ I really think we will. I straighten up and check my breathing, regulate the hyperventilation. I really need a cigarette, but I won’t have one. The greyness subsides into a glow as tainted as the re-used tinsel. But it is a glow. ‘It will be fine. Really.’

I am outside in the sunshine. I feel the weight of the carrier bags and the thrill of the heist. I know I am entitled to all this, but I still feel lucky. We know how to live, Mo. We know how to live.

THE END

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