Swallowing Grandma
SWALLOWING
GRANDMA
PICADOR
For Mum and Dad
Dogman turned up on our doorstep at nine o’clock sharp, wolfhound in tow.
‘You’ll love me,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you a crevice tool.’
‘Let him in!’ yelled Poll from the kitchen.
He rustled past in his grubby mac and I pressed my back to the wall in case he brushed against me. The dog sniffed my crotch, then trotted on.
‘Here you are,’ he said, rooting in one of his plastic bags and pulling out the crevice tool for me to admire. It’s true, I had been wanting one for about six months. Ours had disappeared; probably Poll threw it out by accident, we lose a lot of stuff that way.
Poll marched in and snatched it out of Dogman’s hand. She felt it carefully all over, then took it over to the standard lamp to peer at it in the light. ‘Well, aren’t you lucky, Katherine Millar? She’s always moaning about dog hairs. Winston sheds all summer and all winter, it’s a wonder he in’t bald. Say thank you. Where did you get it, Dickie? Car boot?’
Dogman grinned. ‘I found it.’
Nicked it, more like.
Poll handed it over to me and I squinted at the maker’s mark. ‘But it’s the wrong brand,’ I said. ‘This is off a Dyson, we have a Lervia. It won’t fit.’
‘Get away,’ said Dogman. ‘Bit of duct tape on the end of your tube, it’ll be fine.’
I could have inserted the tool into his mouth, Tom and Jerry style.
‘Are you seriously expecting me to start mauling with duct tape every time I want to use the thing? Putting it on and taking it off? I’m not going through that performance.’ I dropped the tool onto the settee. If Poll wanted to claim it, she could do the hoovering herself.
Poll tutted and Dogman shook his head sorrowfully.
‘Young people today,’ said Poll, ‘they want life gift-wrapped, they do. Tek no notice of her, Dickie. She’s on t’ crest of a rebellion all t’ time. I think it’s hormones. At least, I hope that’s all it is.’ She raised her eyebrows at him.
Piss off, I nearly said.
*
‘One day I’ll die,’ Poll’s always going, ‘and then you’ll be sorry, my girl.’
No I won’t. I’ll put the bloody flags out. I’ll tie a red-satin bow round Winston’s neck, dance stark naked up and down Mesnes Park, and put an ad in the ‘Celebrations’ column of the
Wigan Observer
.
She always had a lot to say
She had a tongue sharp as a knife
But now my grandma’s passed away
I’m off to start a whole new life.
In remembrance of Pollyanna Millar,
evil-minded shrew and dog-botherer
That night, after Poll had groped her way along the landing from the bathroom, I wrote in my diary:
New Year’s Resolutions
- Stop eating (lose 10 kg by Valentine’s Day)
- Get everyone at school to call me Kat, not Katherine, as sounds cooler
- Try to make friends with Donna French X X X lush lush
- Decide what to do about My Future
Then I lay down on the bed, under Dad’s old posters of Blondie, and tried to block out the bad thoughts that always gather about this time by doing A-level essay plans in my head. Finally I turned out the light and blew Dad a kiss, like I always do. It might be mad, but it helps.
I share my room with two dead people. As well as Dad, in his jar on the windowsill, there’s Great-grandma Florence, who was Poll’s mother, in the bottom of the wardrobe inside a black and gold tin. I never think about her, to be honest, except when I’m hunting for shoes.
The rest of Poll’s family are buried in Bank Top cemetery, a sloping field down which the gravestones are moving imperceptibly, along with the wall that’s supposed to keep them in. If you climb up on the war memorial in the middle you get a good view, a clear view anyway, of the dirty brick town of Harrop below, with its derelict paper mill and defunct loco works. Surely this can’t be where the occupants of the cemetery are headed? I can’t see the attraction myself.
My big dream is to be normal. I need to ditch the socks and frocks and be more like other girls, but it’s not easy with a grandma like mine.
‘Make-up? What do you want to wear make-up for? You’ll ruin your skin. You’ll end up looking like a clown or a prostitute, one or t’ other. Smear some Vaseline on your face, that’s all you need at your age. I were a married woman before I owned a lipstick.’
We have this bollocks continually.
It’s dawning on me, now I’m reaching my eighteenth birthday, that actually a lot of things Poll says are rubbish, e.g. that mending your socks while you’re still wearing them brings on terrible bad luck. ‘It’s sewing sorrow to your heart,’ she always moans. ‘You’ll rue.’ She also reckons that washing your hair while you’re having a period sends you mad, and that sleeping with a potato prevents cramp.
When I was younger I believed her, so therefore all the other kids assumed I was mad too and wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I couldn’t catch a ball either, and I wore a hand-knitted school cardigan instead of a bought one from Littlewoods. I pretended I didn’t care.
‘Not everyone has a mother and a father,’ I would recite when they cornered me on the rec. ‘Me and my grandma are a family too.’
‘Piss off, Fatso,’ they’d say. ‘You don’t even call her grandma. How weird is that?’
‘She doesn’t like it.’
‘She doesn’t like you. You’re mental. Your mum killed your dad and then ran off. Weirdy-weirdo.’ Then they’d run away screaming and screwing their index fingers into their temples. Weirdy-weirdo would skulk by the bins for a bit and then go and stand by the teacher till the bell went.
The trouble with Bank Top is that everyone knows everyone else’s history.
*
Poll doesn’t want people to feel sorry for her – which is lucky, because in general they don’t. She’s as blind as she wants to be: some days, you’d hardly know she had a problem; others, she’s all but bed-ridden. ‘It’s like having a black spot pasted on the front of your eyeball,’ she says. ‘If I look at your head, now, all I can see is an empty space.’ She’s got peripheral vision, though, so you’d be unwise to try anything sneaky.
The Rehab Officer likes to stay upbeat. ‘Here, we prefer the term
partially sighted
,’ she says when Poll goes to be assessed for extras e.g. hand-rails, magnifiers, large-button phones. Not that she bothers with most of these aids; after all, it’s what I’m there for. I’m just a two-legged guide dog.
When she first began to lose her sight she was given this handy booklet,
Coping With Age-Related Macular Degeneration
. It’s full of top tips for someone with a reasonable take on life:
• Use strong lighting throughout the house, particularly on stairs.
Poll says, ‘If you think I’m getting an electrician in you’ve another think coming. Pass us that flashlight.’ Our sockets are loaded to buggery and we have nine table lamps in the living room alone.
• Tell others clearly what you need.
No problems with this one. It’s all I get, all day and every day. I shop, cook, clean, wash, iron after a fashion, lay her clothes out for her every night and put her eye drops in. She doesn’t need the eye drops, she just likes the idea. She needs the ICaps dietary supplement pills, but she won’t take them, of course.
• Use your cane as a signal that you need help.
Or a weapon. She may only have limited vision but she can always locate an ankle bone from a good height.
• Don’t dwell on your difficulties. Treat your visual impairment as a challenge to be overcome.
To be fair, she isn’t much into self-pity. Anger, petty-mindedness, pig-headedness; now those she does a treat.
• Get to know your neighbours; build up a community around you.
Don’t know if Dickie the Dogman counts as community; he certainly hangs round our place enough. Poll thinks he’s marvellous because he’s always posting tat he’s got off the market through our dog-flap; loaves with big holes all through them, unperforated toilet roll, bacon that’s about 90% fat. And they have these long gossip sessions in the kitchen while Wolfie lolls about on the flags and tries to chew his own paws off.
‘You know that woman up Nettle Fold who did Maggie’s daughter’s wedding dress?’
‘Oh, aye?’
‘She’s a medium.’
‘A medium what?’
‘No, she talks to spirits.’
‘Oh, right. What, part-time?’
‘I suppose so. Maggie said she’s snowed under with alterations for people.’
‘So can she tell the future?’
‘Maggie says she can.’
‘It’s a pity she didn’t let on about the groom knocking off the chief bridesmaid, then, in’t it?’
I never used to mind Dickie Dogman, in fact I thought he was quite funny when I first knew him. He came on the scene when I was about five, after he knocked on the door and offered us some sand he’d found. ‘Mek a nice sandpit for t’ littlun,’ he’d said. ‘Oh, go on, then,’ Poll had said, unexpectedly. The pit was a disaster; it stained my arms orange and was a total cat-magnet. But somehow Dickie stayed on the scene. He knew a lot of jokes, and he could do tricks with matches. Sometimes I’d go with him over the fields while he walked Wolfie, or the other dogs he had then. In the spring he’d help me catch tadpoles which would go in a jar on the kitchen top for about two weeks, then Poll would knock them over, or pour melted fat on them, or swill them with bleach. In the autumn Dogman enjoyed identifying fungus, then smashing it up. ‘That’s fly agaric, that is. We’ll have that bastard for a start.’ I have a really clear memory of him sitting on a stile once and a red admiral butterfly landing on his coat sleeve. ‘Look at that,’ he said, watching it dip its wings and unfurl its tongue briefly. ‘The miracle of Nature. Oh, it’s fucked off.’ But his favourite crop was dirty magazines, which grew all along the hedgerows near the lay-by. For a long time I thought he was just litter-picking.
As I hit puberty, I began to see Dogman for what he was; a dirty old man. I kept catching him staring at my breasts and licking his lips. From the time I was fourteen, I never had a cold without him offering to rub Vicks on my chest. Then, one day last year, something really horrible happened.
I came out of the library to find him sitting on the form outside, talking to someone on his mobile. He had his back to me and he didn’t know I was there. Wolfie wagged his tail at me but still Dogman didn’t notice. He was engrossed in conversation.
‘Well, you know me,’ he was saying, ‘I like ’em big. Yeah, completely topless, nips and all.’ His shoulders shook with laughter. ‘She didn’t know I were there, it were first thing in t’ morning. Yeah, massive. Round the back, through t’ kitchen window. Hey, hang on, it’s not my fault if she parades round wi’ no bra on. I was just standing innocently by the back door, me.’
As he was sniggering down the phone, I remembered Saturday and how I’d run down at half-eight to let Winston out for a wee in the garden. I’d not finished getting dressed, but you don’t hang about with Winston because his Westie bladder’s old and unreliable. Not ten minutes later, Dogman had appeared at the back door with the glad tidings that Lidl were selling off dirt-cheap TVs, and did we want him to get us one. I thought he seemed agitated at the time, but I put it down to the amazingly low price deal.
So ever since then, I’ve tried to avoid him, he gives me the krills. But it’s not easy; he virtually lives here. He’s Poll’s number-one best friend.
Dogman’s not the only pervert round here, either. I’ve seen a penis, and I was only about eight. This elderly gent stopped me in the street near Flaxton’s Chemist and asked me to help him get his puppy out of a drainpipe. ‘I know wheer ’e is. I can hear ’im whimpering. What’s your name love? Katherine? Well you’ve lickle ’ands, Katherine, you’ll be able to reach in an’ cotch ’im reahnd ’is collar.’
‘I’ll be late for school,’ I’d said. Because I
thought
it sounded suspicious.
But he’d taken my arm and hustled me down the ginnel to the yard behind the shop, a scruffy walled area full of rubbish bags and cardboard boxes, and indeed there was a drainpipe sticking out of a mound of earth in the corner.
