school photos 40

Jean stood with her back against the sink with a Silk Cut in her mouth. The kitchen smelled of disinfect and bleach. It was just a reflex to smoke between jobs and also sometimes when she was hoovering, or washing the dishes, or making the bed, or peeling the spuds, a fag would find its way into her gob. It was as natural as breathing, but they were getting a bit pricey now, up to almost thirty-pence a pack. She promised herself if they got any dearer she’d stop. It was a stupid habit anyway. To show she meant business she turned and nipped it, stubbing the burnt tobacco out on the overflowing clay pot of an ashtray, perched on the windowsill. Something moved on the periphery of her vision.  

Outside it was getting dark and the schools weren’t even out yet. Wind whipped the rain through the branches and boughs of the trees in the gardens below, the tops of them reaching out like swishing and swirling net of spidery dark wood against the wire fence. A flock of crows were lined up on the orange tiled roofs, flapping and strutting, their beady black eyes flickering and flitting from one thing to another. The one closest to the gable was looking straight at her. It raised its oily slick shoulders, scolding the wind and rain, tightened its talons and took off. Glass black pits of corvine eyes tracked her movements through the glass and the sharp hook of its beak cut through the sound of the wind and it cawed as she stumbled backwards and away from the kitchen window.

‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph,’ Jean muttered to herself. ‘I thought that thing was coming straight through the window.’

 She edged forward craning her neck looking up at the mottled whitewash on the ceiling, as if she could look through the walls and wood and metal and roof of Daft Rab’s house above to see where it went.   The front door banged open and shut, in a quick one, two, and she heard Little Ally’s feet scuttling up the hall. She sighed, reaching into her apron pocket for her fag packet. The packet of Swan Vestas matches was beside the ashtray. When she glanced out, the sky was dark and empty, rooftops bare, the crows gone.

‘Happy Birthday Mum!’ Little Ally dropped her school satchel on the inside of the kitchen door. She was out of breath from running, strands of blonde hair plastered to her forehead. Her anorak was unzipped but snagged on the bottom rail and half on and half off and her sweaty blue shirt tucked half in and out of her grey skirt. Launching herself at her mum she flung her arms around her mum’s legs and waist and pressed her face into her side.

‘Ally, I’m smoking.’ Jean flagged the hand with her cigarette to one side, as if wearing a plaster cast, and shoved her daughter’s head away from underneath her chest. Ally stumbled backwards, but Jean’s expression softened at the hurt in her daughter’s eyes.    

Ally sniffled. ‘I’ve got you a card.’ Clutched in her hand, a yellow piece of cardboard, folded over once, with gold and silver glitter and the word MUM in red crayon with an orange smiley face and blue crayoned  kisses surrounding it in the shape of a love-heart. She held it up to show her mum, a toothy smile flickering across her face.

‘That’s nice.’ Jean nodded in acknowledgement. ‘Leave it on the table, I’ll get the dinner on and I’ll look at it later.’

Ally’s head drooped like a three-month-old daffodil. She turned her back and flicked the card face down on the kitchen table, but it fell onto the seat and then onto the disinfected stone floor tiles. She left it lying as she trudged into the living room, flicking the switch to put the telly on, pulling her anorak hood up over her hair and standing before the dusty dull screen, waiting for the dot and the set to warm up and the voices of cheery children’s presenters to fill the living room with laughter. Turning her head, looking back into the bright light of the kitchen, she saw her mum bending, scooping the card up and opening it. She held her breath and the telly came on blaring out and Mum looked through at her, with the card in her hand.

‘Turn that down a bit, will you darlin’?’ Mum shouted through, turning away to tend to the pots on the back cooker rings.

The card was still folded neatly in her hand when Jean came back and stood in the frame of the doorway. Ally had settled like sediment into the cushioned framework of the chair, near the window, just a face and feet poking out.  ‘Thanks for the card,’ said Mum.

Ally scrambled up out of the seat, kneeling on the cushion like a puppy begging for attention. ‘You really like it?’

‘Thanks it’s great. The colours are so bright and you’re so clever. And there’s lots and lots of kisses. I’ll need to collect them all later.’ She made kissy-kissy noises with her pouted lips. ‘But one thing darlin’.’ She held the card up and pinned up at the back with her thumb and fingers. ‘Who wrote on the inside of it and signed it with all these kisses?’

‘I signed it. I signed it,’ squealed Ally, jumping up and off the chair. Behind her mum the pots on the rings began to bubble and one overflowed.

‘Give me a minute darlin’?’ Jean put the birthday card on the kitchen seat nearest the door and turned the gauge on the rings down and, as the Bakelite stopper for the pot lid was missing, used a fork from the sink to flip it over a touch.

Ally had spirited into the kitchen and was standing looking at the open card and the crayoned squarish writing, which was not her own, with Lily’s sprawling signature. Her shoulders heaved up and down, like newly hatched bird wings, as she cried. ‘I’m sorry Mum,’ she mumbled into her chest. She felt a warm hand on her shoulder. 

‘I’m sorry too,’ Jean said. ‘I’m just dead-beat all the time.’   

‘Whit’s moany face greetin’ about now?’ Jo stood outside the living room door peering in her cross-eye way, first at her mum, then at Ally for an explanation. ‘Happy Birthday Mum,’ she shouted, without waiting for a reply, ‘how many dumps have I got to give you now?’

Ally looked at Jo and they smiled complicity at each other.

‘Thirty-six,’ said Jean.

‘Jeez, you’re really old,’ said Jo, with a note of admiration. ‘That’s nearly as old as Dad. And he’s as old as the moon.’