It’s pulling up. Someone inside kills the music. The black door zzziipps open with that exhalation sound spaceships make in films. I scramble upright. Have I stumbled into the middle of the weirdest drug deal ever? (I’ll meet you at the OAP club at 9.) Somebody is getting out of the car.
The tinted windows and glossy black door make it impossible to see anything apart from their feet.
Plop!
A little sausagey leg with a white plimsoll squashed on to the end lands on the ground, quickly joined by another one – apparently their owner is short enough to have to actually jump out of the car.
Scccrrriick! A familiar walking stick joins the sausage-legs. Little metal coats of arms are screwed into its length, indicating that whoever it is might need a bit of help, but still gets out and about on her travels, thanks very much.
Glad.
“Thanks for the lift, Calum!” she trills, sounding (as always) like a little Scottish cockatiel. The door swings open and a large square white plastic handbag appears, attached to an elderly lady of similar dimensions. “Candy! What on earth are you doing here, lassie? In the name o’ God! You’re freezing! Aren’t you supposed to be at school? Something’s happened – what is it now? An argument with your mother again? You’re as bad as each other, that’s the trouble. That’s it, Calum, just down there, I’ll get the door open…”
Without pausing for or expecting any kind of response, Glad reaches into the cavernous depths of her white bag and produces a huge prison-warden-style bunch of keys. As she immediately selects the right one from the bunch I recognise the driver of the car for the first time. Calum Stainforth. I sort of remember him from school. We all do. I mean, he was one of the wildest pupils in his year. Legend has it that he was eventually expelled for releasing not one but two dogs slap bang into the middle of his English Lit GCSE exam. Nobody knows how he got them in there, but the resultant chaos was so intense that Miss Aitken who was invigilating, had to have a fortnight off and some tablets from the doctor for her nerves. Since then Calum has been trying to make a name for himself as the baddest bad boy MC in Bishopspool. It is somewhat at odds with this precise moment. Calum has removed a fully-stocked tea trolley replete with cups, saucers, teaspoons and two urns from the back of the 4X4. He pushes it along in as manly a fashion as possible, towards the Day Centre. Two saucery-eyes peer out from deep within his hoodie. They meet mine and he stops dead.
“Hey,” I say.
“All right?” he mumbles, not waiting long enough for an answer, then presses on towards the door, with his head bowed even lower than it already was.
“Descaling,” Glad tells me, as if this explains everything, then she turns back to Calum. “Good boy, Calum. I’ll tell your granda what a help you are, he’s so proud of you!” She gives his arm a small pat of approval. Somewhere deep inside his fluorescent hoodie, Calum smiles wonkily at her and nods at me, before hopping into the car, reigniting the music and screaming off into the distance.
“Do you remember Calum from school?” Glad asks.
I squint and nod in a non-committal kind of way that tries to avoid saying, “Yeah, I heard he was a headcase!”
Glad smiles, apparently oblivious. “He used to be a bit of a wildcat but he’s a good boy these days.”
Glad fixes me with a beady glare, which makes her look not unlike Yoda from Star Wars. She taps one of the urns with the top of her walking stick. “Right you. Let’s fire this lot up and you can tell me all about it.”
So this is Glad. We go inside and she settles into her favourite chair in the corner of the optimistically named ‘Sun Room’ in East Bishopspool Pensioners’ Day Centre, clutching a proper cup of tea with saucer (very important).
“Well?” She Yoda-glares at me again over the faint steam and hiss of her cup.
“Mum’s marrying Ray.”
A pause. “I see.”
“What do you mean, you see? It’s a disaster! I feel like I’m in a badly updated fairytale. It’s Cinderella, but instead of a wicked stepmother I get David Brent as a stepdad. And she barely knows the guy! It’ll never work Glad, you know what Mum’s like as well as I do! She’s not…She’s never going to…to settle down. She’s not that kind of person!”
“Well, l would have thought not. But…people change. Maybe she knows herself better than we do, lassie.”
“She’s doesn’t! That’s just it. She’s not herself at all! She’s gone temporarily insane, or he’s hypnotised her, or…or…I can’t do it, Glad. I can’t! It’s only ever been the two of us. I don’t want her bringing a stranger in. A nuclear family! With a dad who pronounces nuclear ‘nuc-u-lur’ and thinks he understands me because he likes Coldplay!”
Glad sips her tea, does a whisky-grimace and chews over my news. She’s fond of a mull, is Glad. So while she’s thinking, let me fill you in on how a Little Old Lady ended up being the only person in the world (apart from Hol) who actually understands me.
You might not have noticed this about my mum, so let me spell it out. She is unusual. By which I mean NOT NORMAL. I mean, I love her and everything, but she’s unreliable. Take my name. Depending on what mood she’s in when you ask her, Mum either claims I’m named after Candy Darling from the Velvet Underground song Walk on the Wild Side or the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Some Candy Talking. Which means I’m either named after a vulnerable transvestite or a song that everybody thinks is about drugs. Brilliant. She forgets things (I don’t think I have ever got a permission slip to school on time). She doesn’t really know how to work our oven, even though we’ve had it since I was two. She makes bad choices (from shoes to boyfriends – neither ever fits – she walks home barefoot a lot to cry about being single). If the job of Me had been left entirely to Mum I would be a mess. OK, more of a mess.
Luckily, for the last thirteen years we have lived next door to Glad, the closest thing I’ve ever had to a nan. (The real Granny Caine lives on the Costa Brava. All we get from her is a card at Christmas with a new photo of her and my grandad and their shiny mahogany tans).
Glad is the opposite to Mum in every way. A piano teacher by trade, she has been as steady as the metronome on her upright ever since I can remember. Always next door. Most days after school she would pick me up and, back at hers, I’d plonk-plink-plonk my way through Twinkle Twinkle Little Star before being rewarded with a strawberry milkshake. That was how I first found music.
Playing gave me a sort of filled-up feeling, heavy and satisfied. And no matter how all-over-the-place things were at home, Glad was there in her front room, sheet music open at something I could dive into. Over the years my fingers got quicker and lighter until I felt they could almost play anything and then, eventually, I could just sort of think the music out of my head and into the keys and it wasn’t anything to do with my body at all.
So I live in the world, but I also live somewhere Glad calls Candyland – a place I slip in and out of all the time. I’m very susceptible to the power of a tune. A song floats by out of a car window and suddenly I’m lost in my imaginings. And my biggest imaginings of all are that I will one day make music of my own. The songs in my head will be out in the world.
How could Glad not be my mate, when she introduced me to all that? Anyway she’s finished thinking and is about to deliver her verdict. “Sabotage is out I suppose?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard me, lassie. If you’re THAT unhappy maybe you could sabotage the wedding?”
“What, in the ‘if any persons here present can think of any lawful impediment blah blah speak now or forever hold your peace’ bit I get up and say something? Like what? ‘He’s an idiot, Your Holiness! He calls having a chat dialoguing! His favourite film is Ghost.’