In school, we had been talking about careers in Mr Parker’s PSHE lesson. I was at the back, keeping quiet as per, when the talk came round to what people’s parents did and how people sometimes follow their parents’ careers. All I knew about my dad was that he had been ‘a student’, according to my birth certificate.
I had been planning this for a day or two, how to bring it up. I asked Gram as she poured the tea why Dad had disappeared as a lead-in to what he had been studying.
Instead of answering me directly, she said, ‘Your father led a very wild life, Ethel.’
I nodded, without really understanding.
‘He drank heavily. Took far too many risks. I believe he wanted to live without responsibility.’
‘Wh … why?’
‘I really do not know, darling. I suppose it comes down to weakness of spirit. He was weak and irresponsible. Some men are not equipped to handle the demands of fatherhood,’ said Gram. Her glasses had slid down her nose and she looked at me over the top of them as she spoke. ‘I think perhaps your father was one of those.’
It was the nearest she ever got to saying something kind about him. It was rare for her to mention him without also using the words ‘drunk’ and ‘childish’. Her shoulders always stiffen, and her lips go tight, and you can tell that she’d rather talk about anything other than my dad.
We never got as far as what he was studying, because Gram changed the subject by telling me how she had told off a young man that morning who had his feet up on the seats of the Metro.
So anyway, now it’s just Gram and me, back where Gram was born, on the blustery north-east coast in a town called Whitley Bay. According to Gram, though, we don’t live in Whitley Bay – we live in Monkseaton, which is a slightly posher bit that most people would say started at least three or four streets further west. I still think of it as Whitley Bay. So now we happily live in the same house, but apparently in different towns.
Well, I say just Gram and me. There’s Great-gran too, who is Gram’s mum. She’s not exactly here very much. She’s very nearly 100, and ‘away with the fairies’, says Gram, but not in a mean way. She had a stroke years ago, which is when your brain bleeds; there were ‘complications’, and she never properly recovered.
Great-gran lives in a home in Tynemouth, about two miles away. She doesn’t ever say much. The last time I visited her, my spots were really bad, and she lifted up her tiny hand from under her shawl and stroked my face. Then she opened her mouth to say something, but nothing came out.
I sometimes wonder what would have happened if she had said something. Would it have changed what happened next?
He was with me. Again. Making three times that week.
This was just a couple of days before I turned invisible, so we’re nearly back to that.
‘Awright, Effow?’ he said. ‘You headin’ home? I’ll walk wif you, eh?’
It’s not like he gave me any choice, appearing just as I was shutting my locker as if he’d been lying in wait.
(I’ve looked up ‘bumptious’ by the way. It means ‘full of yourself’ and that’s a good description of Elliot Boyd. There are plenty of other things that annoy me. ‘Effel’ is one, or as he says it, ‘Effow’. I know it’s just his accent, but, stuck as I am with a name from 100 years ago, it would be nice to have it at least pronounced properly.)
So we walked home, Elliot Boyd keeping up a near-constant commentary on his current favourite topic: Whitley Bay lighthouse. At least it was a change from him trying to show me card tricks, which was last month’s obsession.
The lighthouse is there at the end of the beach. It doesn’t do anything, apart from appear on postcards. It doesn’t light up or anything, and this fact really bugs Elliot Boyd. (And only him, so far as I can tell.)
I have learnt – without ever even wanting to know:
1 It was built in eighteen-something-or-other, but there’s been a lighthouse there for ever, practically.
2 It was once the brightest lighthouse in Britain. I suppose that is sort of interesting.
3 You can get up to the top via a back door that’s never locked.
There’s something a bit touching about his enthusiasm. It’s probably because he’s not from around here. For everyone else, it’s just the disused lighthouse at the end of the beach, you know? It’s just kind of … there.
For Elliot Boyd, though, it’s a way of getting people to like him. I have a feeling he just pretends not to care what people think, and secretly cares a lot, and he hopes that taking an interest in something so local could be his way.
I may be wrong, of course.
He may be:
a) Just a tiresome nerd. Or
b) trying to hide something behind his constant blethering. I have noticed that he never talks about himself or his parents: it’s always about some thing. I could be wrong. It’s just a hunch. I’m going to test it soon: ask him something about his family and see how he reacts.
Anyway, I’d kind of switched off and I was just letting him chunter on because there was a shop coming up on the right that I’d had my eye on for a couple of weeks.
Whitley Road is a long strip of half-empty coffee shops, charity shops, nail bars (‘rather common’, according to Gram) and – next door to each other – two tanning salons, Geordie Bronze and the Whitley Bay Tanning Salon, which wins the prize for the least imaginative shop name on the street.
It was the window of Geordie Bronze that I was looking at. There was a huge handwritten sign saying, CLOSING-DOWN SALE, and if shops could smile there would definitely have been a smug one all over the face of its next-door competitor.
I just didn’t have the heart to tell Elliot Boyd to shut up/go away/stop bothering me about the lighthouse and some plan he’d got, but I was wishing he’d give it a rest.
Who. Cares?
‘Honestly, Effow, it wouldn’t be ’ard! Get a few of us togevver, make a little campaign website, an’ that. Call it “Light The Light” – you know, like in the song?’
He started singing. In the street, and not under his breath either.
‘Light up the light, I need your love tonight! Dee dee something something … love tonight!’
People turned to look.
‘It’s a landmark, innit? It should be shinin’ out – a beacon to the world. Otherwise what’s the point of havin’ it there? …’
On and on he went. He’d done this ‘Lighthouse Facts’ thing at school during form time a few days ago. No one had paid much attention. The general opinion was that he is/was nuts.
Most of the lights were off inside Geordie Bronze, but there was a woman sitting at a reception desk reading a magazine.
‘I’m going in here,’ I said and I moved to go in. ‘You don’t have to wait.’
‘Ah, I’m all right, fanks, Eff. I’ll just wait here for you. It’s … you know, it’s a girls’ place, you know?’
I knew what he meant. Tanning