Chapter 5 #2
‘Actually,’ I said, standing and reaching for the jacket I’d thrown over the battered and cracked faux-leather sofa when I’d come in, ‘I’m going to ring home.
Maybe something’s gone there?’ I knew I was clutching at straws, but stress over not hearing anything, as well as the overcooked cheap frozen pizza we’d just demolished, was sitting like a stone in my stomach and I needed to move. Needed fresh air.
‘It’s dark out there,’ Clare said, her eyes glued to the TV. ‘Wait until the morning.’
‘The Ripper was caught years ago,’ I said. ‘Women need to reclaim the night.’
‘Never mind the bloody night,’ Clare now said, her tone accusatory.
‘One woman here needs to reclaim that tub of Wall’s ice cream we left in the freezer.
Who ate the last of it and didn’t own up?
’ When both Katy and I evaded Clare’s question, she went on, ‘And if you’re going to reclaim the night, Anna, reclaim it with a mate.
Katy’ll go with you,’ she added, making a big thing of kicking off her slippers and curling up into a more comfortable position in her chair.
‘I’m fine,’ I said, feeling for coins in my jacket pocket.
I set off, walking the quarter mile or so to the red box on St Michael’s Road.
The streets were deserted, the dark sky lit only by the sliver of a new moon.
‘Make a wish,’ I muttered as my mum had always urged me to do at the first sighting of any new moon.
Or was it bad luck to spot it through the window?
I couldn’t quite remember which, so made a wish as I walked.
Please let there be a message waiting for me at home in Rothersley.
That Brian Sykes’s office in London was just desperate for another student intern to work with them, and I must get in touch straight away to confirm details.
The phone box was empty, two of its glass panes vandalised, one side daubed with the outdated graffiti: Catch the Ripper.
The usual reek of stale cigarette smoke, sweat and urine was in my nostrils as soon as I tried to open the heavy door.
‘Needs oiling,’ I muttered, once I was in.
Despite the smell and the sneaky draught round my legs from the broken panes, there was something womblike about the box and I paused for a second, rather enjoying the sensation, taking time to read the calling cards of the girls touting for business.
One for blokes looking for blokes, as well, I mused.
Were there ever cards from blokes touting for women?
‘That’d make interesting research,’ I said aloud, thinking of an upcoming essay I had to put a title to in the next few weeks.
I stood, searching, but all I could see was Best of British Buxom Brunette (alliterative, anyway), Oriental Dream (advertising a woman in a local Chinese takeaway?), and Transexual Lucy, as well as photographs of mind-boggling-sized breasts.
I looked away hurriedly at the photo of a woman’s full-frontal nether regions, partly fascinated, partly horrified.
Was I being prudish or just disheartened at women forced to sell their wares in a foetid Leeds phone box?
I knew I was prevaricating, putting off the moment when Mum would tell me there’d been no letter or phone call for me from the MP’s office.
‘Hello, love?’ Mum answered the phone on the first ring.
Ever since they’d had the phone installed only a couple of years previously, Mum had hovered over it, willing it to ring, always ready to settle down at the telephone table Dad had made for her out in his shed.
She was never too busy to catch up with me and my elder brother, David, who was in his final year at Newcastle University, or my Aunty Sandra who she saw most days but with whom she still had long chats on the phone at least every couple of hours.
My younger brother, Les, never interested in school and anything academic, had been determined – despite my dad urging him not to – to follow him down the pit at the colliery just a few miles from the red-bricked terrace where I’d grown up.
‘I was just thinking about you, love,’ Mum said.
‘Oh?’ Hope soared.
‘I wanted to let you know…’
‘Yes?’
‘We had a phone call this morning…’
‘Right?’
‘Hmm, your cousin Sheila’s having another one.’
‘Right. Lovely. How many’s that?’ I asked despondently. ‘Three?’
‘Four!’ Mum, I could hear, was torn between envy at her sister, Sandra, becoming a granny yet again, mixed with wanting to criticise her niece for bringing yet another mouth to feed when times were on the verge of becoming hard in Rothersley’s pit villages.
‘And with what’s about to happen down t’pit… ’ she started.
‘Mum,’ I interrupted. ‘Has there been a phone call or a letter for me?’
‘What, here?’ Mum sounded surprised and I could almost picture her, turning to the mantelpiece where letters – usually bills – were kept waiting for her to deal with once Dad had brought home his brown envelope with her housekeeping money every Thursday afternoon.
‘No, love. What you expecting?’
‘I gave our phone number to Brian Sykes’s office.’
‘Brian Sykes, the MP?’ Mum’s voice rose, her interest obviously piqued. ‘Why’ve you done that then?’
‘Well, I was hoping I can spend my year out with him.’
‘Well, that’d be grand, wouldn’t it? Hang on, your dad’s just come in from th’allotment. I’ll ask him.’
‘What? At eight at night? How can he see his carrots and leeks in the dark?’
‘Not much growing yet,’ she said. ‘No, it’s th’allotment until it gets dark and then a pint down at the Miners’ Social.
’ She laughed, shouting to my dad who I knew would be settling himself down in the little front room, adding more coal to the fire and reaching for the TV Times.
‘He says no, love. Nothing at all. Hang on, he’s here… ’
‘Hello, skarbie, when you home?’
‘Got reading week in a couple of weeks, Dad. Thought I’d come home for a long weekend then. I might bring Fliss with me.’
‘Oh, nice girl. You bring her home with you, yes. What’s this about MP ringing you?’
‘Or not ringing me. I did give them your phone number when I wrote to them and really hoped they’d get back to me, but they haven’t. I really want to be in London, Dad.’
‘Pah! London!’ Dad almost spat the words.
‘You stay here in God’s own country.’ That made me want to laugh.
Despite Dad being born in Warsaw, he was now a Yorkshireman through and through, supporting everything Yorkshire from Michael Parkinson and Dickie Bird to Huddersfield Town football club and cricket at the Headingley ground, not far from my student house.
‘Listen, Anna, there going to be fight. Big fight.’
‘A fight? Who’ve you fallen out with?’
Dad tutted. ‘You not heard news? On Look North?’
‘No, we tend not to watch the news. Usually Dynasty…’
I trailed off as Dad tutted once more. ‘That Margaret, she just announce she going to get rid of twenty coalmines.’
‘No!’ While Dad had been talking about this for months, worried that his beloved mine was going to be in trouble, that he and my brother, my uncles, cousins and neighbours, the whole village I’d grown up in, were going to be thrown on the scrap heap and on the dole, I never really thought it would happen.
‘And yours is one of them?’
‘Aye, love, very probably.’ Mum, who was obviously sharing the receiver with Dad, now spoke up.
‘You come home for your year, Anna,’ Dad said. ‘You want something political? You got it right on your doorstep. Right here, in Rothersley.’