By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
5) Parkway, Sydenham
Julie's mother moves through her day's treadmill of routines. She has reached the bedroom.
The lumpen parachute of the duvet deflates onto the double bed. On the fluffed up cover, in brown and green on a cream background, is a country scene of shire horses and tall elms. It does not engage her interest.
The bedroom unit, beside it, is in teak finish melanite. It is in three parts. Two wardrobes have between them a vanity unit complete with mirror and light. Below the mirror are trays of cosmetics, tubes, sprays and glass jars. The shrine of her womanhood, the mirror itself is hung about with belts and flimsy scarves, and a couple of glitzy necklaces. In the bottom corners of the mirror are photographs of both sets of grandchildren.
This is a mirror to be sat in front of, mascara applied, and reflection avoided. A reflection to be communicated with unseen. (If looked at wholly objectively she would see, like all the pink world, two small piggy eyes, a fat red nose and swollen purple lips.)
The mirror shelf does not need tidying. Tucked neatly under the shelf is a velvet quilted stool in the same off-white as the quilted velvet headboard. On the two matching melanite bedside lockers are globe bedside lights. The pink globes are made of plastic with an angular frosted motif. The bases of the lights are white ceramic with an indentation on each for the black on-off button. Also on one locker is a clean glass ashtray, on the other a digital clock/radio with red numerals. The time is 11:17. Kevin's due at twelve.
The curtains have a pattern of interlocking quadrangles in fawn and green. She slowly pushes back one curtain, then the other. Her movements lack alacrity, are those of tired ritual, easily relinquished. So she stands where she stopped, looking out through the white net curtains.
Beyond the clean nets is grey space and separateness. The light comes down from the sky and sits in square blocks between Sydenham's houses and across the straight road.
The road's broad grass verges make it look wider than it is.
One mile long, straight and flat, the narrow dual carriageway runs from the Bath Road to the Westonzoyland Road. Along the green middle of this dual carriageway, that isn't a dual carriageway, are high pylons, stepping down in perspective like rigid stick insects holding hands.
This is Parkway.
On either side, beyond the strips of lacklustre grass, are council houses of every style once in fashion with the people who built them. Some have white stippled walls and flat iron window frames; others are low dwellings of plain brick; some are tile-hatted and some have concrete porches. There are also squat blocks of flats in greenstained concrete. Apart from the evenly rectangular council houses there are a row of shops across from the glass and green panels of a large school, which also doubles as a community centre.
Near the Westonzoyland end of Parkway a low pub, with black glass windows, sits in its carpark.
From here she cannot see the pub, nor the cellophane works. This, her house, is almost midway along Parkway. All she can see from here is the wide road and the houses opposite all their upstairs windows have net curtains. A few gardens have green hedges growing through their wire fences. Hers has only yellow grass clinging to the rusting and sagging wire.
Not that she looks down at her garden, nor the wire. Except that its sagging reflects her state of being. Inert.
Remaining where she stopped in the window her whole posture denotes defeat, her upper half sinking into her hips.
In the house next door a hoover grinds off and on like a baby's whine.
Dimly, from a conversation she has had with herself before in her life now everything is a repeat she tells herself that she is tired of it all, dog tired. She gives up. She's beaten. What's the point?
A week or more now since her latest man has been gone. Or longer. She again tells herself that she doesn't care. All she has left is habits. And they're no comfort. Dead of feeling she no longer has any expectations of life. Nor of men. Especially of men. What right, she asks of herself again, has a grandmother to have feelings?
She sees herself as an impostor in the present, a ghost from the past, being where she has no right to be. And all that frantic past seems so unimportant now. All her memories, of men and children, are like photographs of long gone pets, forgotten until the photographs are found, and the feeling then that those memories should mean something.
Her last man she won't now favour him with a name is already a part of that past. Her men, all much of a muchness, smelling of pubs and fag smoke, have ranged from the quiet to the non-stop talkers; and all have been the same type. The type who blamed her for her being who she was and left her.
What more did they want? She sighs at the bedroom window. She tried to give them everything they asked of her, in bed and out. To be whatever they wanted her to be. If they had the nerve to ask. And while she was with them she was faithful to each of them each in their fashion. Maybe they just got tired of her. She is tired of herself.
Maybe they just didn't like her come the end. None of them had liked her children. And that was her fault. She wanted everybody to like everybody else and for everyone to like her. When the girls had been little she had wanted to be the most popular mum on the whole Sydenham estate, the one her daughters' friends would wish they had a mum like. She had let them run wild in her house. Swearing and jeering and shouting and screaming, they had driven her men away.
Not her daughters' fault. The way she had raised them. Still her responsibility. The three had issued from her womb and had suckled at her breasts. With all three she had waited for that special mother-child bond to appear. She is still waiting.
Nor can she hide from herself that all three were closer to their fathers, or stepfathers, than to her. Except when their fathers, or stepfathers, left. Then they shared their secrets with their sisters.
Certainly they cried for their mother when they were ill, or in discomfort the same wail as when they'd sought her swollen breasts, as when they'd had dirty nappies. So do they now come looking for her only when they're in trouble of some sort, or in desperate need of a babysitter. At least, if she's not their friend, she can still be of some use to them.
Three daughters with three different surnames different to her own. And they're each of them going the same way. Fine example she's been. What else could she have done though? The opportunities just hadn't been there. And she hadn't pushed, hadn't delivered any ultimatums to her man, had been scared of driving him away. Maybe she should have pushed, should have argued and clung and fought.... What was the point though? She wouldn't have liked to have been a woman like that. Nor does she like what she is now. This lonely tired woman.
Life happens to some people, she tells herself again. Some people seem to have no control over their own lives. She is one of those people. Though she doesn't truly believe it.
She watches her daughters sometimes, all keen and eager, chattering together and clicking off to their lives. Then sitting in pubs somewhere here waiting for Life to happen to them. Later on they will realise that all those evenings, all those little inconclusive miscellaneous adventures, were It. And they'd thought that'd do until the Real Thing came along. She tells herself, again, that she has given up waiting for the Real Thing.
They laugh and they talk and they put their arms around each other; and we're all of us lonely. Don't you know that? We're all of us lonely daughters. It's part of being human. And that's why you go out and sit in pubs. It's to ease the ache of loneliness. To let you feel you belong. Because the good times'll never come .... Yet she knows, somewhere deep inside her weary soul, that still she wants this other life, that clean nugget of existence that's there somewhere inside the loose-ended shell of a world out there.
Paul and little Alice are coming along the street talking together.
Now there's a puzzle he asked Julie to marry him and she refused. At least he doesn't beat up on her like that other sod. And he takes good care of the children. And she didn't find him in a pub.
She wonders again at that novelty; and she smiles to see him and Alice laughing together. She's bright that one. Julie was like that at her age small and cheeky with a swagger. Have to watch this one when she's fifteen. And no good telling her. Oh no. She'll have to find out for herself, the hard way ....
She turns from the window.
commentary .... Keeping a spotlessly clean house is typical of Bridgwater. Because of its multifarious stinks the majority of Bridgwater people are scrupulously clean in their personal habits; there being nothing like an unidentifiable smell to make one turn out cupboards and wipe down shelves.
Within the house Julie's mother was the kind of person who, being alone in a house, imagined she was being watched. Not that she was frightened of being watched, rather she was made aware of her loneness and that what she was doing might seem odd or of interest to someone imaginary watching. So she caught glimpses of herself. So she had a contemptuous pity for herself that was not self-pity.
This is not surmise. I knew her, had heard her shouting at her men, sobbing to her daughters; and I have sat across dead-of-day kitchen tables to her, and have listened to her grumbles, her defensive self-mockery.
She was one of those women, her expectations still determined by a pre-War love-is-all romanticism, who believed that the whole of human intercourse consisted of courtship, sex and child-rearing. And, depending on the state of her current man she could happily or unhappily accept that as the sum of her own existence. Such a belief, however, post-courtship, left but a little part in it for men. The men consequently felt largely superfluous to the process and so had to find other reasons for their existence. So did some men beyond Bridgwater invent Art and Science and other noble pursuits. Such men, though, were not of Julie's mother's acquaintance. Her men just got fed up with being indoors with her and her children and, eventually, they left.
Men may have been an integral part of Julie's mother's existence, yet she was also a woman for whom men were an alien and dangerous species. A species who occasionally sent another representative blundering into her life. That strange creature, like a fierce animal, could sometimes be roughly domesticated, petted even. But, like the snarl lurking within all dogs, she could never wholly trust them. Bearing in mind that she was also of that generation of Bridgwater women who conspired in their own degradation by actively seeking out and making themselves attractive to Bridgwater's more brutish males.
Her mental and emotional processes were further flawed by that self-negating fear many people have of being left to age alone. Consequently she was a woman who had allowed herself to be used, believing that as long as she let people use her someone would find a use for her. Her men used her, until they no longer needed her. She let her daughters use her as a loan bank, as unpaid childminder.... Although the latter was not simply her passivity dictating her inaction, but rather her own experience leading her to be charitable towards her daughters. She knew that little children do not bring couples together. More likely the sleepless nights and the differing ideas on child-discipline would drive them ever further apart. All over the Sydenham estate the tyranny of infants presided over the disintegration of marriages. So it was that, selflessly, she tried to stop her daughters suffering her experience
Unable, though, to impart her experiences to her daughters she worriedly watched them repeat her mistakes with men and with children and she invariably made things worse by passing the same stupid remarks that had pushed her into uncaring arms.
Or she saw herself as ineffectual because she simply didn't understand why her daughters did what they these days did, even when she was proud of or pleased for them. (In this she was not exceptional: whether parents approve of them or not, children are always a profound puzzle to their parents. The product of different times the next generation must always be an enigma to the last.)
So was Julie's mother imprisoned as much by her experience, by the times in which she lived, as by the place where she lived. And in those times, on the cusp of the 1980s/90s, there was nothing in the Sydenham estate to spark her draining lethargy. No love had gone into the creation of the Sydenham estate, no expressions of delight. Lines had been drawn and prices agreed, leaving it about as visually appealing as stained underwear.
True Stories
In April 1986 Mr Ray Whitney, a Junior Health Minister, said that radiation-linked cancer deaths were double the national average in the Sedgemoor district. Sedgemoor had 8 deaths from myeloid leukaemia in 1984 where statistically there should have been 3.8.
On Boxing Day 1988 John Ernest Robinson, a self-employed builder of Bristol Road, Bridgwater, took a loaded shotgun to the Bath Bridge Inn, Union Street. When challenged by Mr Burton, the Bath Bridge Inn's landlord, John Ernest Robinson ran off. 41 year old John Ernest Robinson later told the police that he had taken the gun to the pub only to show off. He had been drinking heavily and remembers getting involved in a dispute of some sort in the pub and returning home for the gun and the cartridges. He denied any intention of using the gun.
On March 1st 1989 Roger Withers of Parkway committed an act of gross indecency against a 5 year old girl while babysitting at her home. The girl told her mother about the incident two days afterwards. Roger Withers, a 19 year old butcher, pleaded guilty and was placed on 18 months probation.
24 year old Anthony Paul John Butcher, of Chamberlain Avenue, Bridgwater, stole £38.03 worth or goods from Safeway supermarket on January 12th 1990. Anthony Paul John Butcher said that it had been a hard Christmas and he had stolen the food to feed his girlfriend and child, a crisis loan having been refused. Sedgemoor Magistrates fined Anthony Paul John Butcher £60, and ordered him to pay compensation of £22.38 and £21 costs.
