SUNDAY IN MEMORY LANE (Episode 13)

An avalanche of shocks

Shivering against the cold January air, I popped out to run to the cigarette machine outside Wagstaff's sweet shop. It must have been around midnight. In those days we could pick up a pack of 10 at any time, day or night from these conveniently placed machines.
I was whizzing back to the flat when a slight movement in the recessed Co-op shop doorway caught my eye. It was Tony standing upright, screwing a girl against the shop door. I stood and watched him for a shocked few seconds, but he was so intent on his activities that he did not even notice me.

I ran up the two flights of stairs crying.
'He is such a lying shit!' I was thinking.
'Oh Fran, you are the only woman who understands me!' I reiterated his words in my mind with a distinctly sarcastic tinge.

I burst into my bedroom all snotty and tearful with rage.
Dougie was standing by the window, gazing out at the horrible weather.
Of course, I had left the lock on the latch for just those few minutes.
"Oh hi" I spluttered diving for a box of tissues. "What are you doing here?"
Dougie appraised the state of my face. Before he could ask, I described what I had just seen and he shrugged, raised one eyebrow and said "Yeah. That is Tony all over.... come here!" He hugged me while I sobbed and raged. He complained that I was making his perfect white shirt wet and made me smile at his fastidiousness.
"Fuck it woman. I have been here 5 minutes and you haven't even offered me a coffee yet!" He said to break the pathos. I play-punched his chest and he collapsed on the bed pretending to be mortally wounded. Writhing in feigned agony he gasped, "Coffee!" and I finished mopping my face as I sneaked into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
Dylan beat the floor with his tail but did not move from his warm bed while I made the coffee in the dark as usual. Dan was barely visible under the covers in his alcove.
The air was frozen in there. I could see my breath. I only had about £1 in credit on the electric meter and that would have to last all weekend. The sheer weight of poverty, the endless balancing of pennies wrought more tears from my eyes.
Was I ever going to escape this terrible draughty flatlet?
Steeling myself with a shake, I dismissed the misery and re-joined Dougie in the bedroom. I turned on one bar on the electric heater and tried to warm my frozen face by kneeling at close to it as I could get. Dougie reached into his pocket and pulled out some coins.
"Put these into the meter." he insisted and I quickly refused.
"No, no. Really Dougie, it is alright!" I was beyond embarrassed.
"No, it fucking is not alright!" he frowned, "Do as you are told woman! I am freezing my balls off here!" I knew Dougie well enough to know that he could afford it and that arguing with him was futile. He would never back down. He was an Aries, far too much fire in the soul for a wet fishy Pisces like me.

I turned all three bars on for the first time that winter and the scent of burning dust filled the room as the bars reached full redness. I took the coins, slotted them into the meter on the kitchen wall and, opening the oven door, I turned it on to take the chill off the kitchen. Dylan stretched, sniffed the air and enjoyed the rare luxury of sleeping with his nose out from under his tail for a night. The ice on the inside of the windows began to defreeze and slide down the window pane.

I went back to the bedroom, where Dougie was expertly shuffling the deck of cards.
"Read my cards!" he ordered reforming the pack and handing them to me.
I laid them down on the bed as I found a favourite album to put on my knackered old record player.
Dougie loved Bruce Stringsteen.
He had nicknames for everyone and Bruce laboured under the title Loose Springboard.

“In the day we sweat it out on the streets of a runaway American dream
At night we ride through the mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway nine,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected, and steppin' out over the line
H-Oh, Baby this town rips the bones from your back
It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap
We gotta get out while we're young
Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run!”

I spread the cards, face down and was surprised that he remained silent listening intently as I turned each one. He asked what certain cards signified and how did I remember them so easily.
I told him about my grandmother teaching me to count with playing cards and how each number has a significance. I explained the houses and what they represented. I was wondering if he was simply humouring me because people rarely respected Romany skills.
Dougie asked me why I had removed the King of Diamonds from the pack and laid it at the top of the spread.
”That is your card.” I stated plainly. “Removing it lets the pack know that this reading is about you.”
”Which is your card?” he asked.
”The Queen of Hearts.” I said, just as I turned it over and laughed at the coincidence.
He smiled. Tapped the card and pulled an amused face.
”She brings me luck, that lady.”

We played card games, drank several cups of coffee and smoked all our cigarettes by dawn. It was a wonderful night that I did not want to end. Not least because I was warm for the first time in months.
Dougie told me all about his life in Glasgow, his endless history of brutal fights, his army detentions, one after the other for defying orders, going AWOL and punching officers or bullies.

He talked about the government and how utterly corrupt it all was. I was completely ignorant of politics and he scolded me for being so wrapped up in my own life that I did not see the wood for the trees.
He was twenty-seven and seemed to be much more worldly wise than I was at that time. While I had been learning classic literature, he had been fighting for his life on the streets of Glasgow. While I had been making pretty dresses, he had been crawling through freezing mud on gruelling army training courses. We were worlds apart in many ways, but I respected him more than any man since my lorry driving grandfather.

Dougie was not making any attempt to get me into bed.
This impressed me most of all.
He was in no hurry.

After another Big Jessie breakfast with Dan, Dougie hugged me tightly and said "Don't sit in the cold, Fran. I will be back tonight to fill the meter." He cuffed Dan on the chin and Dan punched him in the balls. Dougie feigned certain death as he staggered out of the warm flat into the freezing corridor and I missed him within seconds.

Dan, Dylan and I went to visit Elaine that day. I felt really guilty when she told me that she was very keen on Dougie. I agreed that he was indeed very attractive and very intelligent, but I could not bring myself to tell her how scathingly he had spoken about her. Thankfully Dan had not equated the name Plank with Elaine and was unable to drop me in the deep end.

The secrets I was accumulating were reducing my conversation to unusually limited one line responses and she noticed.
"Are you alright, Fran?" she asked me finally.
"Mmm" I replied and told her about seeing Tony in the shop doorway with some unknown unfortunate girl. Elaine ranted on and on about what a shit Tony was and proceeded to fill me in with details that she had never revealed to me previously.
She knew fine well what Tony was all about, long before she met me.
She told me that she was shocked when she had discovered that he was married and that I was the little wife at home, breastfeeding his child.

She had watched him chatting up everything in a skirt from her vantage point behind the bar in the Palace nightclub. She saw him lording it, flashing the cash and never failing to pull all the attention he desired. She said he was always beautifully dressed and when she realised that this was because he had a good woman buying, washing and ironing for him in the background, she had been disgusted.

She asked me if I remembered coming into Jinty's tiny flat the day before Valentine's Day a couple of years before.
"Oh yeah!" I replied, remembering that, for a joke, I had bought 6 Valentine cards, signed one myself and gone to Jinty's, a girl I knew from nights out with the boys.
As luck would have it there were several girls there that afternoon. I did not know most of them.
Elaine had been there, so had Lorraine.
I had handed the cards out and asked them to write stupid things on them and address the envelopes to Tony. I had quickly stamped them, thanked the girls and rushed off to catch the last post.

Elaine said that after I had left, you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife.
All were sitting in silence and Elaine, who had not signed a card was laughing at them.
"You had given a card to each of Tony's conquests in that room" she told me.
"They were convinced that you knew about them and were being smart, sarcastic even".

I was stunned. "ALL of them?" I asked incredulously. "What do you mean?"
Elaine smiled in that knowing way she had.
"You are so psychic Fran and you don't even know it! Tony was putting it about before you got married, while you were safely out of touch working in London. Then after you got married he was still at it. When you were pregnant he was seeing a girl called Jenny and she was pregnant too!"
I remembered Jenny being in the maternity hospital just a few days ahead of me.
She gave birth to an adorably pretty blonde curly haired, blue eyed girl.
She named that child Donna and she had moved into a flat around the corner from us.

"Donna is Dan's half sister?" I was gaping with shock. "Bloody hell!"

"That is not all, Fran!" warned Elaine. She was on a roll now and clearly felt it was time I faced the full orchestra, not just the pretty music.
"Tony never took you out, remember? Well, that was because he was shagging the entire town behind your back.... d'ya know the worst of it? Your brother Roy was often with him and apparently they used to take the girls back to his flat!"
I reeled in horror.
My brother? No!!! No!!! He couldn't have, surely!

Suddenly all the aggression and lack of interest I experienced from Roy lately was making sense. I had always known that his grumpiness began when I had left home at thirteen, leaving him to cope alone with my erratic mother. He had suffered about six months of her strange behaviour before collapsing at school and being rushed into hospital. The police had appeared at my school and I was called out of class to go to the Headmistress's office.
"Oh no, what have I done now?" had been my only thought as I nervously knocked on her door. The policemen were standing there, huge and so intimidating that I had nearly fainted with shock. They said that I had to go with them to see Roy.
They had asked me if he was on drugs.

In 1965, I knew nothing whatsoever about street drugs and assumed that they meant prescribed medicines from the doctor. I said that I didn't know if he had been ill lately because I had not seen him at all.
When I arrived at Roy's bedside, he was just about 11 years old, pale and very distant until he saw me. Then he burst out with his story about our Mum driving like a lunatic and frightening him so much that he had got out of the car at some traffic lights and walked the rest of the way to school.
He had not eaten that morning and just felt a bit lightheaded.
Just before lunchtime he had keeled over and hit his head on a desk.
He said, "They are saying that I had a nervous breakdown!" and I shook my head.
"No, Roy, they think you have been taking some pills from the Doctor."
He looked even more confused than ever and I hugged him. He started to cry, saying how much he missed me and he asked if he could come to live with me at the pub.
I had to let him down by saying "No, Roy! There is no more room! Moira and Albie are very busy and they have got three kids of their own, they can't take another one in!"
Roy was bereft. He swore he would not go home to live with Mum again. I offered to phone our Dad to see if something better could be arranged and he agreed.
Roy went to live with my Dad's sister in Hornchurch but I heard that he was very unhappy there.
As soon as he discovered that I had left school, he walked out of our Aunt's home and hitched to join me in Jaywick Sands at our Dad's brand new holiday home.

I remembered that it had been Roy who had told my Dad that I was raped by Tony.
I remembered that Roy had refused to help me at first, when my Mum had called him during my breakdown in London.
I remembered the screaming and shouting when we had to kidnap Dan and Dylan.
Suddenly, I was realising that my brother Roy was a bitter, twisted individual who had been taking part in the ruin of my life for some considerable time and I resolved to deal with this immediately.

I asked Elaine to look after Dan and Dylan while I popped out for a minute. "Where are you going?" she asked anxiously.
"Oh, just to the shops. There are a few things I need for dinner tonight" I said as I headed for the door.

It was getting dark so I knew that Roy would be home from whatever roofing contract he was on. I went straight to his flat and sure enough, his work van was parked outside. The lights were on. I rang the doorbell. Roy, still dirty from the day's work, opened the door and just stood there blocking the doorway sullenly.
"Aren't you going to invite me in?" I asked, as pleasantly as I could muster, considering I was raging inside.
"What d'yer want?" he sneered at me.
It was far too cold to argue on the doorstep, so I barged past him and ran up the stairs.
I had only been there once before but remembered where the lounge was.
Thankfully, there was nobody else there. As soon as Roy entered the room behind me I spun on the spot and asked him -
"At what point did you first know that Tony was being unfaithful to me?" Roy stared at me through his thick lensed glasses, which he habitually slid back up his nose with an index finger. He stayed silent.
"Why didn't you tell me?" I was not going to accept silence and my body language was telling him that one more lying statement and he would receive the fullest force of my wrath.

"You were so loved up, you wouldn't have believed anyone!" He eventually spat out.
"Roy!" I forced out between clenched teeth, "I would have believed YOU, above anyone! I would have believed YOU!"
I launched into a tirade of temper so fierce that his eyes widened with shock.
I told him that he was a lying piece of garbage, a coward and a dirty low down Judas.
I simply could not find the words to describe how evil he was, deceiving his own flesh and blood.
I said that I would never, ever trust him again, that he was filth in my eyes, lower than a fag butt in the gutter. I said I would not piss on him if he were on fire and I left, slamming all the doors and kicking his van door as I passed, leaving a dirty boot mark on the new "Apex Roofing" logo.

I wished that I had slapped his face hard but for some bizarre reason I have never been able to hit anyone unless they hit me first. I was so boiled up that I walked back to Elaine's with my coat flapping wildly in the biting January wind. I could not feel it.

That night, as promised, Dougie reappeared and loaded my electricity meter with coins. He got out the cards, I put on some music and I told him all the shocking truth I had learned that day. He listened intently and remarked, "There is more Fran. I hope you can take it, girl."

What he had to tell me was beyond ugly.
It was revolting.