shops

My bottom lip turns up like the toe of a ten-bob sannie, it drags my face westward and squints my eyes. ‘Why is it always me?’ The words fall and tumble flat. There’s hardly enough room for elbows. I’m sitting in the corner seat of the kitchen piling Cornflakes into my mouth as fast as my tongue can swallow because the Marine Boy theme music bounces me up and down, but it’s on the telly in the darkened corner of the living room next door. My legs dimple matching the pattern from the tan-coloured seat cushion where my grey shorts have rode up over the top of my leg and bum. The round kitchen table has its wooden wings clipped and so have I. One chair is wedged against the wall opposite the cooker, only the top of its frame showing. Another opposite me is pushed in, unused and out of the way of the door to the stumpy corridor with the boiler room cupboard and back door. The flap on the table closest to the cooker is where Phyllis sits pulling a guttural laughing sound out of the air and her sniggering face jump- starts my fury. I want to punch her, but not in the chest, because punching girls there can kill them by making their tits not grow. I’ll punch her hard in the stomach. But she might beat me in a fight because she’s older and bigger. I don’t care. I’ll still kill her. Nobody’s listening.

‘I went yesterday.’ Phyllis is sitting snooty-nosed with her legs underneath the table mocking me with her lies; the pulley is above her head. The rope to lower it is in a figure of eight is pushed up flat against the corner chair. I could untie the pulley and drop it on her head.

‘You never went!’ I spit bits of Cornflakes onto the yellow oilskin cloth on the table as I speak.

‘Did.’ Phyllis holds her spoon up to her mouth. She sneaks a traitorous look towards Mum plunging her hands into the hot water of the bigger of the two sinks at the window, with her back to us. Soaping clothes with mushy-green bars of soft Sunlight soap makes the kitchen smell of summer, but shrivels her hands up like red dead things. ‘I went twice.’ Phyllis puts Cornflakes in her mouth and does her told-you-so face.

I don’t believe her though it’s true. ‘But Mum!’ I appeal to a greater power.

‘Just get my purse.’ Mum turns her head towards me. Her hair has a flattened ginger bounce and her features are blotted pink. Rivulets of sweat run down her forehead and cheeks and onto her open-necked white blouse, with her brassier poking through, but her hands are still locked in combat with the frothy clothes in the sink and they bleed ink coloured suds as she fights dirt with a rubbing washboard for a weapon. She plunges the washing into the cold water sink and lets it drip into defeat, but unsatisfied with the stains in my Da’s overalls winning ways, she begins the campaign anew. The big kettle on the back ring begins to boil. Out of the big sink her hands are angry red crab claws that pick up the blue-checked cloth dish rag to dry her hands and make her human. It’s casually draped over the big brass coach-bolt of the clothes mangle which separates the bigger sink from the wee sink. I spring up from my chair defeated and slap Phyllis on the back.

‘I’m tellin’.’ She hits me back on the upper arm, but it doesn’t hurt so I win.

‘That’s enough!’ Mum carefully lifts boiling water from the kettle and tips it into the big sink.

I stand on my tiptoes to reach up and over for her purse lying on the chipboard work surface near the cooker and pull it towards me. Coins threaten to spill out. Mum pulls open the upper food cupboard door where we keep the tea caddy, a bag of Tate and Lyle sugar, brown sauce and other necessities.

‘You better get margarine.’ She strains to look at the top of the cupboard before making a final decision. ‘And milk and bread and ten Mayfair and if they’ve not got Mayfair get Embassy Regal.’

Mum looks at me and smiles. My face is like fizz. I’m betting that Phyllis didn’t have to get near as much as me.

‘I’m finished mum.’ Phyllis’s voice rings out her victory. She slips from her chair like a cat and slinks through into the living room where Marine Boy is doubtless having a great time with his underwater gum and his boomerang that Kapows fishy looking bad guys.

‘Do you need a note?’ Mum’s voice strokes at my wretched state and makes me look up at her.

I tuck my chin into my chest and shake my head that I don’t.

Mum hands me ten bob from her purse. ‘Don’t lose it.

‘Can I get sweets?’ There’s a laugh in my voice and I stand up taller.

‘You can get two pence.’ Mum leans over and pats me on the head. ‘Do you need a bag?’

I think about it. There’s quite a lot of stuff to get. Mum swaying from side to side can carry four big bags at a time from Parkhall shops without her arms falling off. But only girls take bags and I’d get a massive reddy if anybody saw me. ‘Na.’ My nose and mouth crinkle up. ‘I’ll be ok.’

‘Watch the road.’ Mum reminds me. She always does that as if I’m a baby.

I slip my feet into the red summer sandals at the front door. They’ve got buckles so you don’t need to tie them, because I’m not very good with knots yet, and they’re made of plastic with holes to the let the water in and out when you’re paddling, so you don’t need socks.

The sun reflects off the windows of Summerville’s Ford car, but it’s not yet burny hot. I’ve got on my cream coloured t-shirt with a blue turned-down collar to keep me warm. I’m only out the door when I try and remember what I forgot. I check my pockets for the money and as I walk up the hill I repeat the items I’m meant to be getting like the Rosary again and again. By the time I skip down the short-cut at The Old Folk’s Home, down the stairs and onto Duntocher Road my head is singing, but my tongue already tastes what kind of sweet I’ll be getting.

I’m real careful crossing the road, looking right, left and then dashing across so fast no car could ever hit me. I knees- up onto the wall and scramble up the overspill of rough grass that glows green and nettles that lurk and snag, overhung by trees and bushes, more alive than a jungle with the bees foraging for food and red ants aggressively patrolling the mystery of my feet and something else that chatters and chirps and hides. The well-trodden path leads to Johnnie Graham’s shop from behind it. The back door is reinforced with metal plate painted brown to blend in with the roughcast and looks as if it would need to be blow-torched to spring it open. There are three bars on the window of the storeroom, but I know the shopkeeper is always pacing in his shop with the electric lights glowing a dull welcome.

‘Whit do you want son?’ Mrs Graham is behind the counter, near the till. She’s a thin faced woman, with pancake makeup and a blue nylon overcoat.

Customers stand on a rectangle of matting worn black as shadow by so many feet, surrounded by overhanging walls packed with so many choices of Heinz soup tins, Brasso, Fairy liquid, Jeyes Fluid, blue boxes of Soda Crystals, to the penknives and kites on walls at head height. There is a gap between the sacks of potatoes and the glass cabinet which protects the valuables like Mars Bars, Milky Ways and Marathons in which Johnny Graham stands peering at me, a red mug to his thin lips, assessing my worth. He’s a man with a monk’s tonsure, shopkeeper’s tan frock coat that hangs open to show a white shirt and slim tie knotted tightly at the neck, the same colour as his coat. Da calls him a robber and a shitehouse and he makes me nervous.

I try and remember what I was to get, but it’s slipped out of my brain when I’ve not been looking. Mrs Graham tries to help.

‘Have you got a note son?’

I shake my head. ‘I want ten Regal, a pint of milk, a loaf and a Curlywurly.’ It all comes out in a rush. I remember the most important things first.

Mrs Graham gets the cigarettes and Curlywurly. Mr Graham nips into the storeroom for those other things. I hand Mrs Graham the money that’s in my pocket and wait for my change.

Outside the shop the sun seems brighter. I crush the loaf to my chest and balance the pint of milk like a swinging baton; I switch hands as I run. The Curlywurly in my back pocket melts and whips me along.

Mum is feeding Da’s overalls through the rollers of the mangle when I get back to run the water off them. I put the milk and bread down on the kitchen table and lick my lips. My Curlywurly is in my hand I’m ready to flaunt it in front of Phyllis’s face. I’m red faced as Mum and out of breath.

Mum looks down at me and at the messages on the table. ‘Where’s the cigarettes and margarine?’

My mouth drops open. I twist on the spot, search through my pockets twice, before turning my head and looking behind me. Mum watches me, following my trudging footsteps back into the hall, but the cigarettes and margarine are not there. I open the front door and track through the garden and up the street. I look down the hardened mud trail at the short-cut and follow my feet, kicking downward, running and bouncing off the chain-link fence in the way that I normally do. A sharp pain in my heel, as if I’ve been bitten runs up my leg and makes me want to stop, but momentum takes over my body and I jump off the little wall that encloses the slab path next to the building.

‘Mammy. Mammy. I want my Mammy.’ I scream and shout until snotters froth out of my mouth as well as my nose. It echoes round the corners and buildings, but old folk are deaf and nobody hears. I begin the slow hop home, a bit of wood nailed into the heel of my foot. I need to go the long way up the stairs, past the front door of The Old Folk’s Home and round the winding curve of the path. I see none of this. I’m looking downward encased in my misery.

Phyllis’s long brown hair is in front of me and her familiar white face is framed against the sky. ‘Whit’s the matter with you?’

I hear her feet scurrying away and shouting, but I don’t know what she’s saying I keep stumbling forward.

Then it’s Mum picking me up. ‘There. There. It’s all right.’ She smells of Sunlight soap and hugs me tight to her breasts. ‘Shss. Shss.’ She strokes my hair and makes cooing noises as she hurries up the garden path and in our front door. I snuggle into the warmth of her neck.

Phyllis walks behind Mum crying. Da waits in the kitchen for us. I’m mute and cling to Mum. She eases me from her, but before she can swing me round and put me in the chair Phyllis was sitting in earlier, Da has pulled the bit of wood and the nail attached out of my foot. He stands with it in his hand. I see the wood and the big nail with my blood on it and in his eyes I see the reflection that I have done something that is good, though I’m not sure what it is.

I’m put down on the hard-backed chair. Da cradles my foot in his hand and undoes the clasp. My foot flinches before he takes the sandal off. There is surprisingly little blood in the heel of my sandal, but my foot is a flapping hanky-white foreign thing. Da runs his hands up and down it caressing up over the toes and ankles. He takes the other sandal off my other foot sits, an ill-fit, in the square of the concrete kitchen tiles.

‘We’ll need to wash it.’ Da looks up and tells Mum.

Da can’t tell Mum anything about washing. The lid on the big kettle rattles on the back ring of the cooker as it begins to boil. She bends to get the brown plastic basin from underneath the sink and clatters it down like an old penny at my feet. My injured foot is ducked by Da into the cold water basin. I shiver and try and pull it away from him, but he holds it firmly inside the basin and I give up the struggle.

‘It could be poisonous.’ Da looks for Mum’s agreement.

She puts her hand on my shoulder and nods.

‘Nae point in taking him up to the Doctors and messing about. A dash of cold water in the basin, but it’ll need to be boiling hot water to kill the germs.’ His voice is low, conspiratorial. ‘Use the water from the kettle.’

Da lets go of my foot, but stays crouched down, the wool of his Brillo pad hair near my head. We are almost the same size. My foot feels slightly achey but it feels fine. Mum lifts the basin away from my foot and partially fills it with cold water from the smaller sink. She slops it back over and I gently put my foot in the basin. Mum hands Da the Sunshine soap and he lathers and cleans my feet in cold water. It’s not sore at all and I’m glad. Da lifts my foot out again and Mum bends over and empties the dirty water into the big sink.

‘You need to be a soldier now.’ Da warns me.

Mum put a tap full of cold water in the basin. She hands it to Da. He clamps my foot into the bottom of the basin so my toes are splayed. Mum lifts the kettle from the back ring. Her fingers stroke underneath my chin so I look up at her. ‘I want you to imagine telling Santa what you want for Christmas.’ Mum’s voice is soft as her hair.

That’s easy. I want a ball and George Best boots and a Motherwell top because I’ve seen it in the football stickers and I like the colours and I want a silver gun with real keps that go bang, bang, bang. I see Santa coming down the chimney and bursting into my bedroom and I know I’ve got to kid on I’m sleeping, but I’m really awake.

Da lets go of my foot and quickly pulls the basin away splashing the boiling hot water into the sink.

‘That’s it?’ I ask.

‘That’s it.’ Mum kisses me on the forehead.