‘Me and you? Hah! I mean a proper relationship. A romantic relationship.’
‘Romantic. God help you.’
But she did have a few relationships, years ago – relationships in which she invested enough to be jealous. Are you sitting comfortably? I’ll begin anyway.
A long time ago, back in the days when love was still analogue, my mother knew a man named Roger. Roger the Theatre Producer, to give him his full title. And you really must, with men like that, or there’s simply no point to them. Like most of my mother’s men, Roger was married and lived in London, but he travelled a lot. The first night he stayed I came downstairs feigning a headache, a thirst, I was feverish (with curiosity). I was thirteen.
She was in the kitchen fixing something long and cool. He was short and hot.
He started at the sight of me, white-gowned in the doorway. Oh, hello! You must be Jenny.
I nodded and went to sit at the end of the sofa, beside the coiled cobra lamp that was my mother’s most beloved possession. I smiled at Roger expectantly. I had things to learn. I liked the way his arms looked in his short-sleeved shirt. I was at an age when I still trusted muscles.
How old are you? I asked.
Forty.
Wow. So vastly, impossibly ancient. He looked smart and rich and like he’d been around all the blocks. I hadn’t even been around our block. I tucked my feet up and sat, knees making a rhombus – greeting him, and all exciting men, everywhere!
I heard the glasses she was holding tinkle. I didn’t turn. I sat there, eyes on Roger’s eyes, waiting, counting. Two seconds, three. What time is it, Mrs Wolf? Her hands clamped onto my shoulders. She hauled me out to the hall.
You’re too old to sit like that.
She wanted me to cry. I wanted to cheer. I suppose because I felt like we were finally on the edge of something real. She wasn’t protecting me with her anger – not like when I ran near the road or went missing in shops. There was fear in her eyes along with the anger, I could see that, but there was also a third emotion – one she wasn’t comfortable with, but one she couldn’t suppress. Aha! Ahaha! Oh, the pitiless epiphanies of the child confronting the threshold guardian. She was my end-of-level boss, the obstacle between me and some higher plane; some outside; and I would defeat her eventually, and she knew it. Those spurts of golden growth – they come like sailors, giving everything, taking everything.
And then one day, Roger stopped coming.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘It ran its course,’ my mother said. ‘As all relationships with men should.’
I looked in her eyes for the lie. She stared back, like she always did, with her eyes folded. I’d looked into her eyes so many times, in real life and in photographs, trying to do a sort of past-life regression on myself. And what of my mother’s childhood?
The McLaine Sisters were four redheaded sisters, my mother being the eldest by three years. Even my grandparents saw their children as a novelty – they made them sing together in competitions on holiday in Rhyll, Blackpool, and other such seaside towns. My mother said they lined up in a row on stage, like the von Trapps. They wore black jodhpurs and white blouses and grey waistcoats, like four little horsewomen. (‘Not my first rodeo,’ my mother says, every time she’s about to go on stage.) They usually won, but when they didn’t it rather ruined the holiday. My mother still throws out a tune when she has a drink in her. She’s what you might call a loose karaoke cannon.
What does your mother do? the kids asked at school.
She’s an actress, I said.
She did still her vocal exercises every night. She rewatched her appearances in obscure soaps (Under the Doctor) and low-rent biopics (Shelly’s Shame). She had a bedroom that was more of a boudoir. When my friends came round she tried to correct their pronunciation and gave them instructions on voice projection and vocal preparation – Breathe deeply from your lower lungs, imagine a rubber ring around your waist and try to push the ring outwards as you breathe in. Shoulders down, breathe in through your nose, out through your nose and mouth. Bend your knees – not THAT much, you look like you’re on the toilet … Relax! RELAX!
We had hot holidays. A 20-inch TV. I swanned around school in my Clarks Magic Steps with the hidden key in the heel. I used to drive with her on the ring road, to and from the satellite towns where she performed: Sale, Altrincham, Eccles, Weaste. Me, riding shotgun, solemn as a priestess. I used to saunter into those clubs and pubs, those half-done places that smelled of stale beer and freshly sawn wood. I saw the staff and punters nudging each other. There, look, it’s her. The Daughter. The One.
And so that night at the restaurant, I watched her carefully with Art. The way she straightened his napkin for him, pleased on a helpless level, and it was like seeing her smooth the tie of someone who’d never existed. She was relieved. She didn’t have to worry I was going to be left stranded. I’d met a man, a socially mobile, upward man, and she, for all her old feminist foot-bones, could relax on account of the fact I had safely – finally (that shelf was getting dusty!) – entered some version of adulthood.
INT. YOUNG JENNY’S BEDROOM
Night. A single bed with a rainbow-patterned duvet cover. A rug. A full bookshelf. A bedside lamp on. Everything small and infused with hope. Jenny is in bed. Carmen is pacing the room, reading from a book.
CARMEN (over-emphasising): Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be OUTRAGEOUS. Go the WHOLE HOG. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it’s UNBELIEVABLE.
Jenny picks at a patch of loose paint on the wall. Carmen stops reading.
CARMEN: Right, that’s it.
JENNY: What?
CARMEN: You’re not listening!
JENNY: I am!
CARMEN: Do you know how much people pay to come and see me these days?
JENNY: A million pounds.
CARMEN: Seven fifty with booking fee.
JENNY: Wow.
CARMEN: Look. I’ve worked a long day after a long night and I’m off to work again as soon as Aunty Bev gets here and I’m trying to make precious time for my daughter and she could not care less.
JENNY: I was listening.
CARMEN: You weren’t! You couldn’t give a monkey’s. Here I am, giving it my all. TO THE WALL.
JENNY [quietly]: You’re overdoing it.
CARMEN: What did you say?
JENNY: Again.
CARMEN [huffing]: It’s drama, darling. It requires voices.
JENNY: It’s Roald Dahl.
Carmen throws down the book and storms out of the room.
Jenny sighs, rolls over, switches her lamp off and goes to sleep.
We were at the Mind Body Spirit show at the Birmingham NEC. I stood behind the partition wall, watching her doing her thing on stage – plucking people from the audience and giving them messages from beyond. I was drinking a cup of lemonade. She was grandstanding. She was majestic.
She says she’ll see you for the dancing, pet, can you accept that?
She said you were