Lying Together (20 page)

SIX WEEKS WITH KIMBERLEY

O
ur Linda used to laugh at me when she was expecting and I used to carry her shopping for her and help lift her up out of the easy chair. ‘Gerraway, Mick!' she'd say. ‘I kin manage. You'll gerron me nerves in a minute.' She thought I was just fussing, but I just wanted to be part of it all. I loved looking after her and watching her grow bigger. And when Kimberley was born – well, I can't say how I felt, then. I couldn't get over it. Such a little wrinkled thing she was, kind of strange and familiar at the same time. And all ours. When they put her in me arms I just wanted to burst out crying, like a big kid. ‘You're a reel softie, Mick,' said Linda. ‘Honest you are.'

She was always saying things like that, teasing me. But she was right in a way. She was the strong one out of the two of us. From the first time we started going out she said she could see she'd have to take me in hand else I'd get walked over by some designing woman. But I knew from the first that the only designing woman I wanted was her. When we got married, she looked so lovely coming down the aisle that I was the one in tears.

And then, when we took Kimberley home and laid her down in her cot all wrapped up and sleeping, I felt as if the whole world had blossomed like a flower, and we three was tucked right deep down in the middle of it. I hated getting up and going to work, leaving Kimberley snuggled up next to Linda in the double bed. They seemed so happy and warm together, and everything else seemed so cold.

It
was
cold, mind. It was February. And although I was on a job inside that month, the place I was working on was as bleak as hell. It was an old house in Small Heath – nothing special, just a corner terrace. I reckon it hadn't been touched for years – no proper kitchen, no bathroom, just all this brown wallpaper and green paint. And that smell. They always stink, these old places. Rot, I suppose. And rats. Hardly worth the effort of messing about with, I thought, but renovation was getting to be all the rage.

To be honest, I'd had me fill of old houses when Doody's was first doing the demolition. I'd just left school and they'd taken me on no problem (that was when you could walk into any job easy). Of course I loved all that knocking down and smashing up; it was a great job for a young lad. But it gave me a shock, too, seeing how some people lived. I thought I'd been brought up pretty rough meself; seven of us in a little terraced house, Mom with a widow's pension and a cleaning job to make up the difference – but we lived like kings compared to some of what I saw when we was demolishing the slums. I could hardly believe the state of some of the houses: all the filthy yards, filthy entries, filthy piles of rubbish. Every day I went to work I'd tear into them old places like a tiger, ripping them apart with sheer joy. And when we'd knocked everything down, and all the bricks and timber had been taken away, I used to look at the flattened streets and think what a great job we'd done.

The paper was full of it. Sometimes I used to sit at our kitchen table having me tea and looking at the plans in the
Evening Mail
. ‘Artist's Impression,' it would say, and I used to think that if Birmingham got built like that, it was going to be a real space-age city: motorways up on stilts, underpasses with tunnels, roads going up and over other roads in great big curves like a fairground ride. And everywhere there was tower blocks and new houses set in green spaces, like a big park. I reckoned Paradise was going to come for all us Brummies. We'd have new flats, central heating, fitted kitchens – everything we'd never had before. So, as soon as Linda and me got engaged, I put our names down for a council flat. I didn't want us starting married life with my mom – not sharing a kitchen and bathroom and having to keep all our wedding presents under the bed.

As it happened, we had to wait a bit, but six months after we got married, we were given the keys to a maisonette in Nechells. All clean and new; fitted cupboards and Formica tops in the kitchen, and an inside toilet. We were dead chuffed. I even pretended to carry Linda over the doorstep, but she said we'd look like fools in front of the neighbours, so I put her down and just give her a kiss instead, saying I didn't care what the neighbours thought of that. I didn't mind moving to a new area with people I'd never seen before. After all, they'd been on the waiting list for years, just like us. I reckon if you treat people fair you'll get on with them. All the people in our Close was grateful to have a decent house to bring up their kids in.

Not everybody felt the same, mind. Some people from the slums had been moved right out to Chelmsley Wood and they was all moaning for the Housing to let them come back to the old terraces. But there was nowhere for them to come back to. We'd knocked nearly everything down, and what'd been left standing had been taken over. Whole families of Asians had been moving in. They were running all the old corner shops, selling everything under the sun including curry and rice, and nattering away in their own lingo.

The house I was working on when Kimberley was born belonged to one of these Asians. Ali – something or another. Never saw him, though. Mr Doody just told me what to do and left me to get on with it. He'd promise me a lad to give me a hand, but ten to one I was on me own most of the day. Mr Doody knew he could rely on me. Turn me hand to anything I could – and still can. I'm just the sort of bloke for a small job with a lot of different things to be done.

Well, this particular day I was refitting the upstairs window. I'd pulled out the rotten old sash and was putting in a nice new louvre. I'd been having a sly look at the Indian women across the street with their bright veils and bits of gold and silver. Nice, they looked. I'd have liked to have give them a wave, be friendly; but I didn't want no trouble from their husbands. So I just went along with what I was doing, transistor on the mantelpiece, listening to Dave Lee Travis, whistling to meself.

Then I saw this blond woman getting out of her car. Really struggling, she was, her belly out like a balloon. She must have been a good eight months gone. In fact, she looked as if she might start off in labour any minute. I stopped with a handful of panel pins in me mouth, watching her. She was a little thing, much shorter than our Linda, and she was just wearing this loose cotton dress, no coat, in spite of the bitter cold. I couldn't help wondering what she was up to. I'd never seen her in the street before. No one ever parked outside, except us builders – and Mr Doody when he came by in the Rover – so this woman's car stood out a mile: bright canary yellow. Looked foreign, too; a French thing. Anyway, she made a beeline for the skip we'd got outside, and started to poke about in it.

Now if she'd a been a bloke, I'd have tapped the window and yelled at her: ‘What the bloody hell d'yer think yer up to? Clear off!' But being as she was a woman, and pregnant, I was more worried about her than anything else. That skip was too bloody full (I'd been telling Mr Doody about it all week, but he'd let things drift as usual), and some of the stuff was ready to take a flyer. I could just see her trapped under a purling or one of them heavy bits of cast we'd just ripped out. I thought about shouting out to warn her, but I was afraid I'd make her jump, and then God knows what might have happened. I knew I'd have to do things more gently.

It took me a few minutes to get to ground level because we'd pulled out the stairs the week before, and I had to use a ladder. When I got down, the woman was already in the house, bold as brass, standing in the middle of the passageway between two split bags of browning. ‘Hey, watch yerself, bab,' I said. ‘This is no place for a woman in your condition. One slip and I'll be running you up to Marston Green.' That was where Kimberley had been born.

She laughed at that. ‘Oh, it's all right,' she said. ‘I'm quite used to it. My house is a building site too. Probably worse.'

I was a bit shocked by that. I couldn't imagine our Linda living on a building site when Kimberley was practically ready to be born. She'd had everything decorated and ready months before – new bedroom, new cot, new quilted eiderdown, soft fluffy carpet – everything perfect. She was a really great organizer. And she used to budget down to the last halfpenny. In them days we didn't have much left over, once we'd paid the rent and the bills. But I knew that with Linda in charge, Kimberley wouldn't want for anything.

Anyway, this woman started peering in at all the rooms. ‘I'm looking for a fireplace,' she said. ‘You know, a grate. I saw some bits of cast iron in the skip, and I wondered if you were throwing out any old ones. I'm desperate to get one in before the baby's due.'

I must admit I felt sorry for her. A well-spoken woman she was – quite posh in fact – but she had no winter coat and she was having to scavenge around in skips to find a fireplace for herself. ‘Look, love,' I said, ‘you don't want to be messing about with all this dirty old stuff. I can tell you where you can get a really nice modern grate for next to cost price: Coventry Road, friend of mine. He supplies all the stuff for Doody's. Tell him Mick Hanlon sent you. He'll sort you out.'

She kind of smiled at that. ‘No,' she said, ‘I don't want a modern grate. It's a Victorian one I want. Could I just see if there is anything else here?' She started to poke round before I could stop her. ‘Oh look, here's one!' she said. She was looking at the one Terry and me had tried to get out the day before. Bloody great thing. ‘Oh, it's broken!' she said, pointing at the front bars where Terry'd put his crowbar. ‘What a shame!' She looked up at me. ‘Are there any others?'

‘There might be one in the back room,' I said. ‘It's covered up, so I'm not sure what it's like.' We went into the back room, me holding on to her by the arm, afraid she'd slip. The electrician had had half the floorboards up, and hadn't come back – typical. There was this old mantelpiece with a big sheet of rusted metal over the grate, and a broken gas fire sitting in front. I picked up me claw hammer. ‘Let's see what's behind here,' I said.

I got the stuff off easy enough; there wasn't much holding it together. Underneath was this filthy old fireplace, the grate still with the ashes in it, and cobwebs full of thick brown dust. But the woman sort of knelt down in front of it. ‘Oh, it's lovely!' she said. ‘Just look at those beautiful tiles!'

I couldn't see anything in them meself. Real Olde Worlde stuff. Gave me the creeps. Get rid of it – that was my motto. But this woman was really thrilled. ‘Do you think the owners will want it?'

‘Bloody hell, no!' I said. ‘We're renovating. All this old stuff's going out on the skip. This place is gonna be all nice and clean and new.' (Poor kid, I thought. That's what you could do with – something all comfortable and clean.)

‘Would you pull it out for me?' she said. ‘I'd pay you.' She took out her purse. ‘How much?'

I could see then that she wasn't wearing a wedding ring. That explained a lot. ‘I'll do it for you free, bab,' I said, ‘but how'll you take it with yer?'

‘Oh, it'll go in the car,' she said. ‘The back comes right down. I can get loads of things in there. But I must pay you. Is this enough?' She held out a pound note.

‘Yer on,' I said, thinking it was an easy bit of work. But in the end, it took me best part of an hour to get the flaming thing out. The woman kept getting in me way every time I picked up the chisel, saying, ‘Please be careful,' and, ‘Mind the tiles, won't you?' After a bit I said, ‘I'll get it out for you, love, as long as you stay well away. Otherwise I won't be responsible for that babby of yours.' So she sat down on a bucket as best she could, and stayed quiet. I went round and round the frame, easing the whole thing out. She kept smiling at me as if she was really pleased the way I was doing it. She looked really pretty when she smiled, and I couldn't help thinking about how she'd look tucked up in bed with her baby all nice and cosy, and the fire burning away in the grate.

Getting the thing into the boot of her little car was what really buggered me up. She couldn't help, of course, and it was really a two-man job.

‘You're daft, you are, Mick,' said Linda when I went home that night. ‘Fancy doing all that work for a quid!' She was even more annoyed the next day when I couldn't get out of bed and she had to ring Doody's to say I'd done me back in.

In the finish I was off work for six weeks, just getting me sick pay and no overtime – just when we needed the extra because of Linda giving up her job at the hairdresser's. But I couldn't say I minded, because suddenly I had all day with Kimberley. I didn't have to go out in the cold and leave her behind; I could nurse her as much as I liked. I looked after her every time Linda went out to the shops, and I gave her all her feeds because I was stuck in bed and Linda said I might as well make myself useful. I couldn't have been happier. We built up a real relationship, Kimberley and me. I'd chat to her and she'd look at me, intelligent-like, and grab tight at me little finger. I hardly remembered about me back, and Linda started to joke that I'd put the whole thing on, just so I could skive off with me daughter. ‘I bet she'll grow up to be a real daddy's girl,' she said. ‘I kin see it already.'

Kimberley's eight now. And I have to admit she's a bit spoiled, being the only one. We'd have liked more, but somehow it didn't happen. Linda pretends to be strict with her, but she isn't really; buys her a whole load of Barbies and My Little Ponies and fancy things to put in her hair. And me – well I can't say no to her, not when she looks up at me in that way, her eyes all clear and beautiful, just like when she was a babby them first six weeks. And I can't help remembering what first brought us together: that little woman and her bloody two-ton grate.

I've often thought about that woman over the years, and wondered how things turned out for her in the end. Her own kid would be just Kimberley's age, of course. A little girl, I liked to think, blonde like her mother. Every time I see a yellow car I think it might be her, but it never is. Our meeting in that house was a bit of a one-off. We only came together because she saw that skip, and I was looking out of the window.