Dancing in the Dark (43 page)

Charmian glared at her. “Is that a hint?”

“No, luv, it’s an offer.” Flo shrugged. “It’s up to you if you take it.”

“What about the owner? He mightn’t want an ex-pro working in his bloody launderette.”

The girl scowled, but she hated what she was doing and Flo could tell that she was tempted. “The owner will go on my recommendation.”

“And you’d recommend me when you know . . . ”

Two large tears rolled down the satiny cheeks. “Oh, Flo!”

Eddie Eddison didn’t last long. He died a happy man in the arms of his glamorous wife only eighteen months after their wedding. Bel was left with a hefty weekly pension, a gold Cortina saloon, and immediately began to take driving lessons.

Charmian gave up her job when she married the emergency plumber, Herbie Smith, who moved into the ground-floor flat with his ready-made family.

Unlike his dad, Tom O’Mara didn’t desert his friend Flo when he started comprehensive school. He was a cocky little bugger, full of confidence and sure of his place in the world. It didn’t bother him being seen going to the pictures on Sunday afternoons with a middle-aged woman, or two middle-aged women if Bel decided to come. Bel had transferred her affections from Gregory Peck to Sean Connery.

1983

When his dad died Tom was fifteen, and the cockiness, the confidence, turned out to be nothing but a sham.

The firm in Anfield swore that the accident had been caused by negligence on the part of their workman, Hugh O’Mara. The house he was rewiring was dripping with damp: he’d been a fool to try fitting a plug in a socket that was hanging off the wall, the existing wiring having been installed half a century before. Knowing O’Mara, he’d probably had only half his mind on the job. His heart hadn’t been in it for years. He was usually in either a trance or a daydream, the boss was never sure.

Anyroad, the stupid sod had been thrown across the room, killed instantly.

Flo didn’t go to the funeral. She couldn’t have stood it if Nancy, the Welsh witch, had behaved as she had outside the gates of Cammell Laird’s, weeping and wailing and making an exhibition of herself. At least she’d had a claim on Tommy, but she’d none on Hugh.

It was as if Hugh had already been dead a long time, Flo thought, strangely unmoved, as if she had already mourned his loss. Tom, though, was distraught. He came into the launderette after the funeral, his face red and swollen as if he’d been crying for days. Flo took him into her cubicle out of the way of her ladies’ curious eyes.

“No one wants me, Flo,” he wept. The mam walked out, me dad went and died on me, and Gran doesn’t like me.”

He was almost as tall as her. Flo’s heart ached as she stroked his bleak, tearstained face. If only her own history could have been rewritten, how would things have turned out then? “I like you, luv,” she whispered.

“Promise not to die, Flo. Promise not to go away like everybody else.” He buried his face in her shoulder.

“We’ve all got to die sometime, luv. But I won’t go away, I promise that much. I’ll always be here for you.”

Tom took a long time to recover from the loss of his dad. When he did, there was a callousness about him that saddened Flo, a chill in his green eyes that hadn’t been there before. He left school before he could sit his O levels and moved out of his gran’s house to class down in the homes of various friends, sleeping occasionally on Flo’s settee if he was desperate. He got a job helping out at St John’s market. “I’m going to start a stall meself one day,” he boasted. “There’s no way I’m working for someone else all me life, not like me dad.”

He brought her presents sometimes: a portable wireless for the kitchen, expensive perfume, a lovely leather handbag. She accepted them with a show of gratitude, although she was worried sick that they were stolen. He even offered to get her a colour telly at half the list price.

“No ta, luv.” She would have loved a colour telly, but felt it might encourage the criminal tendencies she was convinced he had.

Bel was doing her utmost to persuade her friend to retire in May, when she turned sixty-five. “You’ve worked nonstop since you were thirteen, Flo,” she said coaxingly.

“That’s fifty-two long years now. It’s time to put your feet up, like me.”

Tact had never been one of Bel’s stronger virtues: the reason behind her solicitude for Flo’s welfare was obvious. “You only want me to retire so you’ll have company during the day.”

“True,” Bel conceded. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.”

The launderette provided a good, steady income, and Flo had no intention of giving up, not while she remained fit and well, though she got tired if she was on her feet for too long. Her ladies had changed over the years, but they were still the irrepressible, good-humoured Scousers she loved. Nowadays not all were poor: they went on holiday to places like Majorca and Torremolinos and brought brasses back for Flo’s walls.

When the letter came from the property firm in London offering to buy her out for twenty-five thousand pounds, her first instinct was to refuse. The firm was acting for a client who wished to turn the entire block into a supermarket. But the offer had come as a boon to Flo’s neighbours. Hardly anyone ordered coal at a coal office, these days, when they could phone from home.

Who’d buy wallpaper and paint from a little shop that had to charge the full price when it could be got for much less from a big do-it-yourself store? The watch-repairer, the picture-framer, the cobbler all reported that business was at an all-time low. Flo couldn’t bring herself to turn down the offer and spoil things for those who were desperate to take it.

There were thousands of pounds in the bank now and not much to spend it on. Flo went to see the solicitor in Castle Street and made a will. She’d never thought she’d have property and money to leave behind, but she knew who she wanted to have it. She put the copy at the bottom of the papers in the bureau—one of these days, she must clear everything out. There was stuff in there she’d sooner people didn’t know about when she died.

She bought the coveted colour television, a microwave oven, because they seemed useful, and a nice modern music centre, hoping that the man in Rush-worth and Draper’s didn’t think a woman of her age foolish when she chose a dozen or so records: the Beatles, Neil Diamond, Tony Bennett. She didn’t feel old, but later the same day, when she was wandering around Lewis’s department store, she saw an elderly woman, who looked familiar with rather nice silver hair, coming towards her. As they got closer, she realised she was walking towards a mirror and that the woman was herself. She was old! What’s more, she looked it.

When Bel was told she laughed. “Of course you’re old, girl. We all grow old if we don’t die young. The thing is to get the best you can out of life till it’s time to draw your last breath. Let’s do something dead exciting this weekend, like drive to Blackpool. Or how about London for a change?” She was fearless in the car and would have driven as far as the moon if there’d been a road.

“Oh, Bel,” Flo said shakily, always grateful for her friend’s unfailing cheerfulness and good humour. “I’m ever so glad I went to Birkenhead that morning and met you.”

Bel squeezed her hand affectionately. The too, girl. At least one good thing came out of that business with Tommy O’Mara, eh?”

“Where did we go wrong, Flo?” Sally cried. She asked Flo the same question every time they met.

Flo always gave the same reply. “Don’t ask me, luv.”

Ten years before, Grace, Keith and their two sons had upped roots and gone to live in Australia. Sally and Jock only occasionally received a letter from their daughter, and Grace ignored their pleas to come and visit. Jock was becoming surlier in his old age, Sally more and more unhappy. One of these days, she said bitterly, she was convinced she would die of a broken heart.

“I could easily have done the same when me little boy was taken,” Flo said. She thought of Bel with her three husbands and three lost babies. In her opinion, Sally was giving up far too easily. “You and Jock have still got each other, as well as your health and strength. You should go out more, go on holiday. It’s never too late to have a good time.”

“It is for some people. You’re different, Flo. You’re made of iron. You keep smiling no matter what.”

Flo couldn’t remember when she’d last seen her sister smile. It was impossible to connect this listless, elderly woman with the happy, brown-haired girl from Burnett Street.

Sally went on, “I remember when we were at school, everyone used to remark on me sister with the lovely smile.”

“Why don’t you come to the pictures with me and Bel one night?” Flo urged. “Or round to William Square one Sunday when Charmian usually pops down for a sherry and a natter.”

“What’s the use?”

Grace didn’t bother to cross the world to be with her father when her mother died. Sally’s heart gave up one night when she was asleep in bed, but perhaps it really had broken.

Bel went with Flo to the funeral on a dreary day in March. It was windy, dry, sunless. Grey clouds chased each other across a paler grey sky. Jock held up remarkably well throughout the Requiem Mass. When Flo had gone to see him, he said that he intended moving to Aberdeen to live with his brother, and she could tell that he was looking forward to returning to the city of his birth. It was as if he and Sally had dragged each other down in their misery, frozen in their grief, unable to come to terms with the loss of Ian, and Grace’s indifference. Flo had expected that Sally’s death would be the last straw for Jock; instead, it seemed to have released him from a state of perpetual mourning.

It was obvious that Martha, stiff with self-importance, was relishing her role of Being in Charge. Jock, a bit put out, said that she’d taken over the funeral arrangements, had ordered the coffin, the flowers, seen the priest. In the cemetery, in the wind, beneath the racing clouds, Flo saw the gleam in her sister’s eyes behind the thick-lensed glasses that she remembered well, as if this was a military operation and she’d like to tell everyone where to stand.

When the coffin was lowered into the grave, Jock suddenly put up his hand to shield his eyes and Martha poked him sharply in the ribs. It wasn’t done for a man to cry, not even at his wife’s funeral. That gesture put paid to the vague thoughts Flo had had of exchanging a few polite words with her sister.

The Camerons were there, Norman handsome and scowling but, oh, Kate had changed so much, her lovely hair chopped short, her once slim figure swollen and shapeless. There was a battered look on her anxious face, no bruises, bumps or scars, but the same look some of Flo’s ladies had, which told of a hard life with many crosses to bear. Yet her eyes remained bright, as if she retained a hope that things would get better one day—or perhaps the light in her eyes was for her children, who would have made any mother proud. Millicent, whom Flo had last glimpsed in the hospital, only a few days’ old, had grown into a graceful, slender young woman, with none of her mother’s vulnerability apparent in her lovely, strong-willed face. She was with her husband, as was Trudy, whose wedding had been only a few weeks before.

Trudy was pretty, but she lacked her sister’s grace and air of determination. However, it was the son, Declan, who took Flo’s breath away. A slight, delicate lad of ten, it could have been her own little boy she was staring at across the open grave. The Clancys might well be pale-skinned, pale-haired and thin-boned, but they had powerful genes that thrust their way forcefully through each generation. There was no sign of Albert Colquitt in Kate, no indication that Norman Cameron was the father of these three fragile, will o”-the-wisp children. There was another girl, Flo knew, Alison, who had something wrong with her and was in a home in Skem.

“Aren’t we going for refreshments?” Bel was disappointed when the mourners turned to leave and Flo made her way towards the gold Cortina.

“I’m not prepared to eat a bite that’s been prepared by our Martha,” Flo snapped. “And don’t look at me like that, Bel Eddison, because there’s not a chance in hell I’ll tell you why. If you’re hungry, we’ll stop at a pub. I wouldn’t mind a good stiff drink meself Sally had gone, to become a memory like Mam and Dad, Mr Fritz and Hugh. Each time someone close to her died, it was as if a chapter in her life had come to an end.

One day, Flo too would die and the book would close for ever. She sighed. She definitely needed that drink.

September, 1996

Flo pressed her fingers against her throbbing temples, but the pressure seemed only to emphasise the nagging pain.

She knew she should have been to the doctor long ago with these awful headaches but, as she said to Bel, “If there’s summat seriously wrong, I’d sooner not know.”

There were times when the pain became unbearable, and all she wanted to do was scream: it felt as if an iron band was being screwed tighter and tighter around her scalp. A glass of sherry made it worse, two glasses made it better, and with three she felt so lightheaded that the pain disappeared. Getting drunk seemed preferable to having her head cut open and someone poking around inside, turning her into a vegetable. Peter, the nice young lad from next door who reminded her so much of Mr Fritz, got rid of the bottles for her because she felt too embarrassed to put them out for the binmen.

A concerned Bel had persuaded her to have her eyes tested, but the optician said she had excellent sight for a woman of her age, though he prescribed glasses for reading.

Main, Flo remembered, had been terrified of letting a doctor near her with a knife. The girls used to get upset, worried that she’d die. But Mam had only been in her forties. Flo was seventy-six, nobody’s wife, nobody’s daughter, with no children to care if she lived or died.

Bel would miss her terribly, Charmian less so, what with a husband, two kids and three grandchildren to look after since Minola had gone back to school. Tom O’Mara didn’t need her so much now that he was married with a family, two lovely little girls, though he still came to William Square regularly, at least once a week, often bearing food from the Chinese takeaway around the corner and a bottle of wine. She never asked how he made the money he was so obviously flush with. After years spent living on his wits, involved in ventures that were barely this side of legal, he was now something to do with a club that he adamantly refused to talk about.