But Gloria was undaunted. She took an evening job in town, as well as her daily cleaning shift; and when she became pregnant again she hid it, wearing a girdle right up until the eighth month, so that she could keep earning money. When her second son was born she took in mending work and ironing too, so that the house was always filled with the steam and the smell of other people’s washing. The dream of a house in the Village had become increasingly remote; but at least in White City there were schools, and a park for the kids, and a job at the local laundrette. Things looked good for Gloria, and she faced her new life with optimism.
But two years of unemployment had wrought a change in Peter Winter. Once a charmer, now he’d grown fat, spending his days in front of the TV, smoking Camels and drinking beer. Gloria was carrying him, much to her resentment; and unbeknownst to her, by then she was pregnant once again.
I never knew my real father. Ma seldom spoke of him. He was handsome, though. I have his eyes. I think Gloria secretly thought that he might turn out to be her ticket out of White City. But Mr Blue Eyes had other ideas, and by the time Ma learnt the truth, her ship had sailed for sunnier shores, leaving her to weather the storm.
No one knows how Peter found out. Perhaps he saw them together somewhere. Perhaps someone talked. Perhaps he just guessed. But Nigel remembered the night he left — or at least, he said he did, though he can’t have been five years old at the time. A night of broken crockery, of shouted oaths, of insults — and then the sound of the car starting, the slammed door, the squeal of rubber on the road — a sound that to me always conjures up the smell of fresh popcorn and cinema seats. Then, later, the crash, the broken glass, the howl of sirens in the air —
Of course Nigel never heard all that. That was the way she told it, though; that was Ma’s version of the tale. Peter Winter took three weeks to die, leaving his widow pregnant and alone. But Gloria Green was tough. She found a childminder in White City and simply worked harder, pushed herself more, and when she left her job at last, two weeks before the baby was due, her employers took a collection that raised a total of forty-two pounds. Gloria spent some of it on a washing machine and banked the rest, to make it last. She was still only twenty-seven.
At this point I think I might have gone home to my parents. She had no job, hardly any savings, no friends. Her looks, too, had begun to fade, and little remained of the Gloria Green who had left Red City with such high hopes. But to crawl back to her family — defeated, with two children, a baby and no husband — was unthinkable. And so she stayed in White City. She worked from home; looked after her sons; washed and ironed and mended and cleaned, while all the time she was searching for another escape, even as her youth left her and White City closed around her like a drowning man’s arms.
And then Ma had a stroke of luck. Peter’s insurance paid out. Turns out he was worth more dead than he’d ever been worth alive; and finally, Ma had some money. Not enough — there was never enough — but now she could see a light ahead. And that piece of good fortune had come along just as her youngest entered the world, making him her lucky charm; her chance at the winning ticket.
In certain parts of the world, you know, blue eyes are thought to be bad luck, the sign of a demon in disguise. But to carry a blue-eye talisman — a glass bead on a piece of string — is to divert the path of malchance, to send back evil to its source; to banish demons to their lair and to bring good fortune in their place —
Ma, with her love of TV drama, believed in easy solutions. Fiction works to formula. The victim is always a pretty girl. And the answers are always right under your nose, to be revealed in the penultimate scene: by accident, or perhaps by a child — tying up all the loose ends in a pretty birthday-party bow.
Life, of course, is different. Life is nothing but loose ends. And sometimes the thread that seemed to lead so clearly into the heart of the labyrinth turns out to be nothing but tangled string, leaving us alone in the dark, afraid and consumed with the growing belief that the real action is still going on somewhere without us, just around the corner —
So much for luck. I came very close. Almost close enough to touch before it was taken away from me. It wasn’t my fault. But still she blames me. And ever since, I have tried to be everything she expects of me; and still it’s never quite enough, never enough for Gloria Green —
Is that what you feel? says Clair, from Group. Don’t you think you’re good enough?
Bitch. Don’t even go there.
You’re not the first to try it, you know. You women, with your questions. You think it’s so easy to judge cause and effect, to analyse and to excuse. Do you think you can fit me into one of your little boxes, a neatly labelled specimen? That, armed with a few choice details, you can pencil in the rest of my soul?
Not much chance of that here, ClairDeLune. You people really have nothing on me. You think I’m new to this game? I’ve been in and out of groups like yours for the greater part of twenty years. As a matter of fact, it’s kind of fun: recalling childhood incidents; inventing dreams, spinning straw into fantasy —
In this way, Clair has come to believe that she knows the man behind the avatar. Fat Chryssie — aka chrysalisbaby — also thinks she understands. In actual fact, I know more about them than they could ever know about me; knowledge that may come in useful some day if ever I choose to exploit it.
Clair thinks she is trying to help me. I think she is in denial. Clair’s therapeutic writing class is really nothing but a disguised attempt at amateur psychoanalysis. And Clair’s online fascination for all things damned and dangerous suggests that she, too, feels damaged. I’m guessing an early experience of abuse, perhaps by a family member. Her fixation with the actor Angel Blue — a man so much older than herself — suggests that she may have daddy issues. Well, of course, I can sympathize. But it’s hardly reassuring in a lecturer. Plus it makes her so vulnerable. I hope it doesn’t end in tears.
As for Fat Chryssie’s interest in me — it seems to be purely romantic. Well, it makes a change from her usual posts, which normally consist of a series of lists detailing her calorie consumption — Diet Coke: 1.5 cals; Skinny Cow: 90 cals; nacho chips, lo-fat cheese: prolly about 300 cals — punctuated by agonizing monologues on how ugly she feels, or interminable pictures of skinny, fragile Goth girls that she refers to as thinspiration.
Sometimes she posts pictures of herself — always body shots, never the face — taken on a mobile phone in front of the bathroom mirror, and encourages people to rant at her. Very few indulge her in this (with the exception of Cap, who hates fatties), but some of the other girls leave ana — love, or saccharine messages of support — Babe, you’re doing great. Stay strong! — or half-baked advice about dieting.
Thus Chryssie has acquired an almost evangelical faith in the properties of green tea as a metabolism booster, and in ‘negative calorie foods’ (which to her mind include carrots, broccoli, blueberries, asparagus and many other things that she rarely eats). Her avatar is a manga drawing of a little girl dressed in black with butterfly wings growing out of her shoulders, and her signature line — at the same time hopeful and unutterably sad — reads: One day I’ll be lighter than air . . .