Franny and June Read online

  “Well, probably. At their age there’s very little hope for them. I blame Top Gear. It’s made casual racism almost acceptable.”

  In the middle of the gift table stands the present I eventually bought her.

  I’ve no idea if she’ll like it. If she’ll even pretend to, but amid all the celebrations and the dancing, I wonder if I will ever get her back, the softer version of Mum, the one who once swung me through the air in an imitation of flight.

  She isn’t dancing tonight. She doesn’t dance.

  Yet, again I’ve a vague memory of her jigging a miniature me around to nursery rhymes, arm hooked round my back as I bounce on her hip, but once more I don’t know if that was her or Dad. Seems more of a Dad thing really.

  In my memory she is always just stood there like she is now, holding court, currently doing so with a little fat man who is virtually scraping and bowing in front of her like some sort of whipped hound.

  Aunty Jac’s looking a little the worse for wear, cheeks bright red from the wine and the occasion, and she keeps hugging people and giggling uncontrollably, yet as I watch her I can tell she's not more than a beat away from crying at any moment.

  I don’t think she’s over Gran yet, so she gets all emotional at the slightest provocation.

  Mum was over it, Gran dying, well, immediately. She may as well have lost her phone.

  I don’t get it. How anyone can care so little for those around them? Gran was a force, a challenge to every view, but she was her mother for God's sake.

  I hate her. I love her. But she doesn’t care either way.

  June

  I’m supposed to open the presents at home since we agreed it was tacky and undignified to start ripping the wrapping off here, but my idiot baby sister (who will be fifty herself soon enough), is pressing Franny’s gift into my palm.

  “Just the one, Sis,” she’s says, swaying somewhat, “just this one, come on it will be love-er-ly,” then I catch a pensive hungry look on Fran’s face and concur.

  The parcel is small and hard, wrapped in paper decorated with a thousand tiny number fifties, and Fran edges in as my fingers trace to find the edge of the sellotape to raise and to find purchase. The paper splits, revealing a hint of something metallic, as Fran moves imperceptibly closer.

  For a moment, I am moved by this.

  My little girl; she is there, with me once more.

  Except.

  I see something as the wrapping comes apart, glinting at me. Bone. A metal skull. She has bought me a pendant with the image of death upon it.

  “It’s Mexican Mum,” I hear her telling me, a wry smirk across her face, “a Santa Muerta pendant, it’s…”

  “You gave me a death pendant for my birthday? My fiftieth birthday.”

  The rage is rising in me.

  I am slowly dying here and she just thinks it’s funny. She thinks my inevitable crawl to death and decay is a joke. The little bitch just doesn’t understand how hard it is to be…

  ...me. To be a grown-up. The battle against aging. The starvation diet to keep from transforming into my gargantuan mother, with such agony in my knees; some days I don’t even know how I make it out of bed, my back crooked and streaming with pain.

  I blame her for the back. It was never the same after I squeezed her out of my ruined body.

  I want to throw the medallion at her. But I settle for trying to push it into her hands.

  “Take it,” I hiss, spitting the words, “take it!”

  Franny

  In the end, I’d picked the present up from this antique stall on that long street market in Walthamstow. I’d got the 123 bus from Ilford, ignoring the catcalls of mouthy, lacklustre boys hanging out at the park by the station, wearing baggy jeans revealing the waste bands of CR7 underpants, as wound my way along the path to the stalls.

  I discovered the people of Walthamstow appear to have their own unique mode of navigation as I made my way along the longest street market in Europe which involved walking in mostly random, diagonal lines across the road, but at no point ever looking in front of themselves. Other people needed to move out of their way. Looking where they were going was for other people.

  Me mostly.

  I found myself spending much of my time twisting and dodging to avoid walking into them.

  To be honest, I wasn’t much impressed with to fare on offer on the market. There was stall after stall of cheap Chinese tat, mobile phone un-lockers, batteries, imported toys, knock-off fashion and perfumes which I’d never heard of and was on the verge of giving just giving up when I saw the stall.

  I could tell this merchant was different to the others. Exotic somehow.

  The drapes over the stall weren’t that stripy plastic stuff you normally get, encrusted with ten years of dirt and grime; this was decorated and enclosed with something which looked like heavy, woven silk, so I had to squeeze my head through folded curtains to even see inside.

  I felt like I was stepping into a Bedouin tent, totally dark compared to the street outside, which began to mute as my eyes adjusted from bleaching sunshine outside to candlelit gloom within, the sounds and smells of the East London market seeming to drift away on late summer breeze.

  There was a small bowl on the table, upon which a delicately scented fire burnt with low red flames, smoke rising to a small hole in the roof of the tent, but as I cast my eyes about the space it appeared to be unoccupied so I began to retreat.

  "Is there something I can help you with?”

  The seller rose from the chair he’d been sitting upon, appearing from a darkened corner, patting his hands downwards the straighten the blue checked cloth of a smart three piece suit, again not the sort of thing you’d expect round here, the other market traders mostly adorned in faded stonewashed jeans and ill-fitting t-shirts which strained over stomachs I guessed were too often filled with burgers, samosas and doughnuts from the other stalls.

  “I think,” I told him, peering at the rich assortment of goods strewn across what looked like a mahogany table, “I think this stuff might be a bit rich for my blood,” deciding that honestly the gentrification of East London may just have gone too far.

  “You might be surprised.”

  The man’s accent sounded as though it didn’t come from round here, although to be fair in Walthamstow it wasn’t uncommon to hear voices originally from faraway lands. Very much a community of the world, East London, although lately I heard all the posh people who couldn’t afford Islington or Hackney were socially cleansing the area of foreign voices again, poor foreign voices anyway, so who knew how it would sound in a few years. His voice seemed to originate a universe away from here, rather than a mere continent, and as he approached I looked into eyes which seemed as deep as a well in the desert.

  Tearing my eyes from his, I cast my gaze across the sort of wonders which to my untrained peepers wouldn’t have looked out of place in the British Museum: phallic gold icons, a silver and gold necklace in the shape of a snake, emerald inlaid eyes seeming to watch me as I sought something I could afford. A blade, rusty and jagged, tinted brown with what looked like faded blood.

  “What do you buy the woman who has everything?” I queried.

  “Aside from penicillin,” the merchant responded, his thin wide, reptilian lips barely parting, as he completed an old gag my Dad used to make whenever he complained how hard it was to buy for my so very particular Mother. He's always telling jokes my Dad. Whilst Mum looks more and more like a joke would crack her head open in two.

  “Does the person you are buying for have everything then? Can you truly think of nothing else she needs?”

  He asked me this question so seriously I felt obliged to consider it, to try to answer honestly.

  “She, needs,” I thought for a moment, considered before answering that she could do with a dose of her own medicine, “to remember what it is for a moment to be studying ten subjects, whilst navigating a torrent of hormones and trying to cope with life. Th
at’s what she needs. A good dose of understanding. Empathy.”

  The merchants face seemed to darken.

  "Empathy? That can be especially expensive. Some people have so little consideration for others, but there is a way, a dangerous path, for her to see how you feel."

  "I'd like that, she thinks of no-one but herself,” I told him, but admitted, “although she'd say the same about me."

  I hadn’t seen him move, but the trader was now on my side of the table, holding a beautifully engraved box in his hand, telling me in his soft voice, “please, look inside this container.”

  “I, I really don’t think I can afford this,” I stammered, holding the gift in my hand, “I actually think I should go,” but it suddenly dawned on me he was no longer there.

  In fact, I was no longer there.

  Instead of standing in a Bedouin tent at the rough end of longest street market in Europe I was sitting on the floor outside the train station, clutching the small metal box and wondering how I’d got there, whilst two of the remaining catcallers stood nearby pointing and leering at me.

  ***

  Now, I reckoned I’d been on something of a journey to find her that present, and although I could see the misunderstanding, the Mexican Day of the Dead is all about re-birth right? Fabulous Fifty. Life begins at fifty and all that. Surely she doesn’t think I’d…

  But then, her voice rises querulously as she pushes it into my hands, actually screaming at me, I see it in my head; I know she does too; a brightly coloured skull, with green and red vines growing at speed through the cracks, out of its eye socket. I can smell burning candles and something else too; a meaty odour, and for a moment I think I can see the whole universe, the whole of time maybe, even outside of time, then skull plants a surprisingly gentle kiss on my lips, surprising because it didn’t, you know, have lips.

  Then I blacked out.

  Jacqui

  We were all totally freaked out.

  They were rowing, as usual. God, when are they not?

  I keep thinking that one or both of them would learn to chill out eventually, probably Franny, to be honest, since June’s strings had been wound close to snapping since forever I could remember, but I may be hoping in vain.

  Even when she was little, June and Mum were constantly on the edge of exploding into all-out war.

  She always says they were Russia and America in their prime, although I reckon you could throw a little North Korea in for good measure. Although back in those days you always had the sense she was a good hug away from being at ease with herself. Could you imagine Russia and America hugging back in the midst of the cold war? We could dream.

  Our Father was Canada.

  Genteel, intelligent, charming even, but in the end not really part of the story. A massive man, so tall he regularly had to bend his head to avoid scraping it against ceilings, almost dropping to his knees to pass beneath doorways, yet so slender, frail, that you worried about him on windy days, but just too dull and nice to count as part of the action. Then one day he just disappeared.

  Where to, no-one ever found out. One morning we woke and he was gone. We threw out his empty over-sized armchair three months later. I wonder sometimes, if he's still out there not being part of the story somewhere else, or if he found another place, a calm island where he could be at home without the broiling turmoil in which we lived.

  I’m a little bit Canadian myself, and in truth none of the rest of us were really ever part of the main story arc. It was always them. Russia and America plotting mutually assured destruction.

  These days it’s Franny and June at war.

  June was haranguing the poor girl over the present she’d got her; a gorgeous little pendant, really expensive looking. Honestly, I was a bit worried she might have shop-lifted it, it looked priceless somehow, certainly more than the fifty pounds I’d given her.

  To some extent I blame myself for causing the row, although you never do know what will push June over the edge, but I suppose I should have guessed the skull pendant would do it.

  So, all of a sudden the Mexican band, silly bloody hats included, who were playing in the corner started to go all quiet while Franny and June begin laying into each other at the heart of the party, Franny giving as good as she gets for once, both gripping the skull, screaming at one other, each telling the other about all the things the other didn’t understand, about, whilst this round little man called Martin begin flapping about and blustering, “calm down dearies, calm down,” then Boom! they're both down on the floor. Spark out.

  I say Boom! Because, although there was no actual sound, for a moment I felt buffeted by a sonic wave.

  The round man seemed rocked by it too and dropped to his knees at the sensation, a befuddled look covering his face.

  We moved them both onto nearby couches, and eventually they began to stir, but were delirious for the rest of the night. Drama queens the pair of them, so we poured them into a Black Cab and set them off home with June's fat Facebook friend as chaperone.

  Franny and June

  Oh my god, my head. What happened?

  PART THREE

  “Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well.”

  ― Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin

  June

  My head throbs, and the left side of my face feels like I'm having a stroke, so I pull open a drawer and pop the small container with the Zomig inside. You're meant to take them at the beginning of a migraine, whilst this one is already going great guns, but it can't hurt, can it?

  I only vaguely recall getting home last night. I wasn’t that drunk, was I? Then it comes back to me and I wince as I remember the disagreement; about a small cruelty which seemed enormous at the time, magnified when viewed through the lens of the ice clear vodkas I'd been necking.

  Children and their insensitivities with regard to the aging process.

  They seem to forget the same wolf is hunting them down too.

  They’re just a few steps away from being snagged themselves but they seem so carefree. Don't they realise? The wolf tastes them on the air. But no, fickle youth watch me in the sights of the beast and considers themselves protected; they don’t realise it will never cease to be hungry. We’ll get eaten first, sure, but the monster is licking its lips in anticipation of its next meal before it’s even finished this one.

  Oh god my head.

  I wonder sometimes how I would know if I were to actually have a stroke, the symptoms being so similar to the electrical life-pausing headaches which visit me with lunar regularity.

  Last week my doctor told me cheerfully that if the hot flushes I'd been experiencing lately were the onset of that final indignity, the change, then the increasingly head crunching pains I still experienced could drift off into the realm of memory.

  "You're lucky," he told me confidentially, "men who get them, get them forever, but you've got an inbuilt off switch."

  I don't feel lucky.

  But, as I drop back onto my firm comfortable bed, I realise the Zomig is kicking in at super speed this morning. They're usually normally pretty good, but this is extraordinary. I haven’t had one of these fug's pass so quickly in years.

  The change kicking in? Who knows, but I pull myself up, feeling good, so good. Even my knees appear strong today. I may go for a run. I take a deep breath, clear and strong; I stretch, as I do every day, loosen up tired joints, but for once there are no aches or cracks.

  Recently, I noticed each time I rose from a chair I groaned audibly a little at the effort and I've been trying in vain to contain the exclamation, but the exhalation wasn't present today.

  I look at my mirror, covered, as is my preference, with a black drape, consider removing it to take in this new vision of fifty year old beauty, life starting anew, but worry the spell will be broken. I might feel 18 today, but that old face gazing back will disavow me soon enough, so I settle for a few yoga warm up positions and listen to the strains
of a Bach Violin concerto on Classic FM.

  Maybe life does begin at fifty? I assumed this was just something they said. At forty years old I had a crazed five-year-old tearing up the house and no time to contemplate aging. Most of us did, my friends, that is. We all left having kids so late, so fifty was supposed to be the new forty. Or was sixty the new fifty?

  Do we ever get there?

  Am I there now? The radio is now playing Sleepers Wake, appropriately, I think, but in between the pipes I think I can hear something, someone. I lower the volume a touch and listen. I can hear sobbing; deep pitchy cries, like Franny but not like her, so I turn the radio off completely to be sure.

  I ought to check, to run to her, but although I know it sounds selfish I don't move and pause a second longer, just to savour this feeling before it is ripped from me by my melodramatic daughter's latest tragedy, then make my way down the bright hallway, approaching her half-opened door with a curse in my heart but an attempt at a smile on my face.

  ***

  She's balled up on the floor, wrapped in the clothes strewn across the bare boards like a denim and cotton carpet, looking like a human fist, pressed against the mirrored door of her wardrobe, and for a moment I wonder how she can live like this, how she can bear it, but I chase the thought away. She's my little girl, I tell myself, I need to see what is wrong, so I touch her shoulder, gently, surprised for a moment at the tension I feel there.

  I try to tug her round, draw her to me, but she resists, her body wracked with shakes but surprisingly strong.

  "What's wrong, is it your little," I stumble a little here, my voice sounding somehow, off-key in my head, "is it your little boyfriend, my dear?"

  Slowly she turns, then I see what is wrong, look into her eyes and realised that overnight she has aged, terribly. Why - she looks exactly like me before I add the layers of paint which I call my face these days. How could this happen? Why would this happen?

  The poor child.

  But then I look up and see her mirror on the wall, rimmed with pictures of beautiful people pressed into the frame and the catch my own reflection.

  My heart rises like a zeppelin.