There but for The_ A Novel - Ali Smith [66]
There’s an old song in May’s head for some reason now. Sally, Sally, pride of our alley. That was what was her name, Gracie, Gracie Fields. And that was the thing about Gracie Fields, she defied belief, and then she showed you you’d been wrong ever to doubt her. You never believed she’d be able to hit that high a note. You could sense the note that was coming, the note that was meant to come, and you’d think to yourself there’s just no way she’ll ever reach that high, there’s no way anyone could. And then she’d go and hit a note so much higher than the one you’d expected, like a whole ladder of notes higher, and you’d be left scoured like a clean sink by the highness of it. She was a classy one. She could sing like the women in the operas can. And she was funny too. There was the song she sang about the fly that washed its legs in a jug of beer and dried itself on a man’s moustache, it was the fly’s birthday in the song, and it took its lady friend to the Grand Hotel for a birthday treat. Oh, it was a funny one. There was a song about a clock that fell in love with a wristwatch and the wristwatch told him he was fast.
Sally, Sally up the alley, and there was Walter, Walter, lead me to the altar and I’ll show you where I’m tattooed. We had fun, that was the difference between then and now. That was the intimate all right. I don’t think I ever saw their father with his clothes completely off, and I don’t think he saw me neither with mine, but we had the intimate all right, and we had fun. I don’t see that there’s so much fun in it, what I see of it now, May said in the confines of her head, not out loud, looking at that girl sitting there with the skirt that was barely worth the wearing. The girl was gloomy-looking now, for the alarm in the ceiling had defeated her. She picked at her purple nails. She got her little machine out again and picked at something on it. Oh they all think they’re the first to discover it, they all thought, they were all convinced nobody’d known about it till they did, nobody could possibly know about it but them, with their flower-power, their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we’d had was winter, all we’d had was rations. Just very good at keeping it quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age.
There was Patrick, when it happened to him, coming home all doe-eyed and staring into mid-air over his sausages, then always in the shower and trailing the smell of that godawful aftershave all down the stairs, and going and standing breaking the rose off the stem out in the garden when he thought I wasn’t watching, tucking the bloom inside his leather jacket for some girl and off he went to town, and Eleanor I knew about because she came home from college that time and she gave me such a warm cuddle, and it wasn’t like her to take me in her arms like that, and I had a secret look at her and she had a shine to her so I knew immediately, and I was pleased for her, not that we could say any of it out loud, and not that I dared tell her father.
Not Jennifer, though.
Though what about him, that boy, that boy all along, the boy May couldn’t look in the eye.
Even with all the years of that boy coming to see her and growing into a man before her eyes, she could still see the boy in him.
But him turning up at the door every year couldn’t help but mean another year had passed that May’s own girl hadn’t had.