By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
10) Julie Taking
Julie tries not to grab the pushchair from Alice.
In the pushchair is Alice's folded green duvet and a fluffy white teddy.
Julie tries not to snap at Michael.
This night out was arranged weeks ago: Michael, though, is now acting surprised and put upon, is claiming now that he wants to be doing things at home, does not want to spend the night at his grandmother's, is making himself miserable for his grandmother.
Alice has to look out around the pushchair to see where she's going. Every time she looks out around the pushchair, it alters course.
"Watch where you're going!" Julie jerks the hard little wheels off the dog-messed grass.
Across the other side of the grass the boy, as usual, is sat in his car by the kerb and talking on his father's CB. Soon as he comes home from school he is there. Holidays he sits in there all day.
The boy irritates Julie. Everything about him — from the sprung aerial on the roof to the dull wax gleam on the car, from the spiky hair to his solemn expression as he speaks into the black microphone held like a mask over his lower face; and the snatches of arcane conversation so soberly enunciated "...square-wheeled on the super slab..." — everything about him, the transparent limits of his life, the poses he adopts — he often stands with one hand atop the open car door talking to his skinny friends; or, in the car, he sits with one arm laid along the back of the passenger seat; all the while trying to impress another cretin with a car radio parked elsewhere.
To be not irritated by his posturing, Julie does not this day look at him. She knows, though, that he is sat there.
'If you can't keep it in a straight line, don't bother!" Julie pulls the wheelchair back on course.
At home Paul is in the bath. Julie has had her bath, feels pampered and petulant. Her mood isn't helped by her knowing that she is being unreasonable. Tonight is a treat, a meal out in a restaurant. This night out, though, was planned so many weeks ago that it feels as if it has already happened. And the meal is with his patronising grandparents. "Yes my dear, but..." to her every ventured opinion. The predictability of the evening, the expectations of her, is what depresses.
"That's it!" she snatches the pushchair from Alice, grabs hold of Alice's little hand.
"It was a stone," Alice says. Children always have alibis.
"Why can't Granny come to our house?" Michael sulks, "I don't want to go to her house. She smokes all the time."
"She'd smoke if she came to our house."
"In our house I could go to my room."
"Granny wants to stay in her house. I told you this weeks ago."
"No, you said," the pedantry of children, "Granny was going to look after us."
"I meant that you'd be going to her house."
By the shops are the surly skateboarders with their hard sudden noises and husky voices. Alice pulls her hand free, stands pouting on the pavement behind.
"Well come on!" Julie flaps a hand at her. Michael comes to stand in front of her,
"lt's not fair..."
"Just don't you start!"
commentary.... Julie had more anger than acceptance. Although, in Julie's mind, what placed her apart from those she lived and worked with was again, knowledge of her entrapment. On her guard, she would not be conned by the advertisers or history. She didn't have to enjoy being a housewife or a mother.
Thinking it was one thing, feeling another. Because, whenever Julie was impatient with her children, she felt guilty. Idealised mothers did not get angry or impatient with their brood. And idealised grandparents were supposed to dote on and indulge their grandchildren, not ignore and avoid them.
Julie couldn't get used to calling her own mother grandmother. She was so unlike a grandmother, was still looking frantically for a good time and a man. Grandmothers, according to Julie's ideal, should have been plump and have knitted. They should not have been slim and glitzy.
Paul's mother was dowdy and dirty, and indifferent to her granddaughter. While Paul's grandparents, although they at times took upon themselves the responsibility of rearing Paul, claimed now that they found all young children tiresome, had seen Alice, their one genetic great-grandchild, but two or three times.
Julie saw the ideal grandparent sitting with their grandchildren, the very young and the very old together, both having time to spare, few demands on them, time to sit and watch and marvel. Such old people would most definitely not be passing clever comments, and the children would most definitely not be sneering.
Julie's own mother, though, tried to pretend that time and men hadn't passed; and she sought still the ideals of her own past — a man in a marriage — whilst acting and knowing that the ideal was incapable of realisation because of her age.
Julie's mother, however, was trapped as much by her circumstances as by her aspirations. Were she richer she could have envisaged for herself a variety of other lives, could have belonged to clubs and gone for holidays abroad with friends of either sex. Because what her mother now wanted of a man was company and escort as much as sex. Often, Julie knew, she looked upon sex as the price she had to pay for the company and the escort into public places. If her mother was richer, if she had a car, she could have legitimately socialised on her own and would not have been reliant on a man; and her dreams and ideals would therefore have been different. While for her daughters, trapped in her circumstances, she saw no alternative for them to her own past, envied them only their presently having a man.
Paul called Julie's mother The Modern Savage. A savage in that she accepted all modern day gadgets without question, did not know nor care how they worked, nor where they had come from, nor how they had been made nor who had made them. Merely accepted. So Julie's mother also accepted that that society, that system of gross inequalities bred, as it must, gross injustices. So she accepted that Paul, although he'd been less culpable than the others, should have been sent to prison where the others, who hadn't been caught, should have stayed free. (In Bridgwater the inequalities and injustices were almost arbitrary, depending mostly on how much money or education one had. In a place like South Africa it still depended, at that time, totally on what colour you were to how the law treated you. Mind you, in Bridgwater, at that time, Paul wouldn't have been helped by being black.)
When Julie hadn't looked across at the boy talking on his CB it was because, peripheral vision aside, she had had no need to look to know that he was there. Not looking, however, was also unconscious habit. No-one on the Sydenham estate looked directly at anyone else in passing. Add to that the flatness of the landscape, so grim and uninspiring the architecture, the inhabitants all walked at a cultivated slouch and stared at a point on the pavement two meters ahead of their torpid feet. Mothers with prams and pushchairs on this grey and yellow estate, men tiredly on their way to and from work, getting in and out of their cars, none risked raising their eyes. To look directly into another's eyes there was to challenge or to invite.
True Stories
In September 1985 20 year old Stuart Douglas Norton, of Furzelands Farm, Moorlinch, stole a cardboard figure of Rambo from Mount Street Film Centre, Bridgwater.
In April 1986 30 year old Jacqueline Brenda Chilcott bit PC Peter Yeoman on the wrist after he had reprimanded her for drinking from a paper bag.
On June 30th 1989 Caroline Ann Symes, of Shervage Court, Bridgwater, threw a glass at her cousin Rachel in the Blue Boar Inn. The glass missed Rachel and hit Waverly Liane James.
On Wednesday May 15th 1990 county councillor David Loveridge, of Wellington Road, Bridgwater, asked a meeting of Somerset County Council in Taunton for nuclear flasks to be removed from the railway sidings adjacent to Wellington Road. David Loveridge said,
"After yet another radiation leak from the nuclear flasks stored at the Eastover railway sidings, this council calls upon Nuclear Electric (CEGB) to cause the loading and off-loading of nuclear flasks to be completely removed from the present Eastover location. Coupled with the fact that it is within 50 feet of one of the largest primary schools in Somerset and in the midst of a heavily populated residential area it is vital that this menace is forever removed."
