“Did anybody order pizza?”
Cathy had leaned round the door to see what Jack was on about, looked blankly at her husband for an instant and then shrieked.
“Aaah! Fucking hell, what have you done?”
She rushed to Mick’s side, taking his head gingerly between her hands, turning it gently one way then another as she tried to see how bad the damage was. Their youngest son, Joe, wandered in serenely from the kitchen, taking off his zip-up jacket. Slightly built and blonde and at eleven years old easily much cuter than his older brother, Joe looked quite a bit like Mick had as a child, at least according to the same authorities (including Mick’s late mother Doreen, who should know) that said Jack looked like Alma. Joe, like the young Mick, was quieter than his elder sibling, hardly difficult since Jack’s voice had not just recently broken but had melted down like a reactor and was heading for the centre of the Earth. With Joe, although he didn’t broadcast on the china-rattling frequency or at the volume of his elder brother, you could tell that every bit as much was going on inside, and that most probably it would be every bit as bonkers, if less loudly advertised. Hanging his jacket on a chair, Joe gazed across the room at his dad’s altered countenance, then simply smiled and shook his head as if in fond exasperation.
“Did you get your blowtorch and your shaver muddled up again?”
While Cathy pointedly suggested that both Jack and Joe piss off upstairs if they weren’t being any help and Mick tried not to undercut the seriousness of his wife’s rebuke by laughing, he reflected that this wonderfully protective smart-arsed callousness with which his kids would greet potential disaster was most probably the fault of him and Alma. Alma, mostly. He remembered when Doreen, their mum, was diagnosed with cancer of the bowel and had called her grief-stunned son and daughter into her ward cubicle to have a serious talk about how everything should be arranged. Taller than Mick in her stack heels, Alma had bent down to deliver a conspicuous stage whisper in his ear. “You hear that, Warry? This is where she’s going to tell you you’re adopted.” They’d all laughed, especially Doreen, who’d smiled at Alma and said “You don’t know. It might be you who was adopted.” Mick believed that in life there were times when the entirely inappropriate was the only appropriate response. Perhaps, though, it was only him and Alma who thought that way. Mostly Alma.
Cathy, once she’d been assured Mick’s new complexion wasn’t permanent or otherwise life-threatening, had switched her inner thermostat up from compassionate concern to moral outrage. So, why wasn’t there a label on that drum? Why hadn’t his employers even called to find out how he was since Howard brought him home from casualty? She’d fumed about it for an hour then phoned Mick’s boss, who had at least learned first-hand from the chat what it was like to have a drum of poison go off in your face. When at length it was out of Cathy’s system and she’d dropped the probably red-hot receiver back into its cradle, they’d decided to have dinner and as ordinary an evening as they could manage. As a plan this worked quite well, despite the fact that Mick’s deformity gave things the feeling of an Elephant Man family video reel.
Dinner was tasty and appreciated and passed by without event. During the main course, Cathy turned reproachfully to Jack and scolded him about his eating habits.
“Jack, I do wish that you’d eat your vegetables.”
Her eldest son gave her a look of condescending sympathy.
“Mum, I wish women would fall at my feet, but we both know it isn’t going to happen. Let’s just face it and move on.”
Halfway through pudding, little Joe — if only they’d have named his elder brother “Hoss”, Mick suddenly thought, ruefully — had broken from his customary introverted silence to announce that he’d decided what he’d like to be when he did Work Experience next year: “A fridge.” Mick, Cath and Jack had all looked at each other worriedly, then gone on eating their desserts. It was a fairly normal dinnertime, as those things went.
After they’d done the washing up, Jack said he had the second series of Paul Abbott’s Shameless which was out on DVD, and asked if they could watch it. Since there wasn’t much of interest showing on terrestrial or Sky, Mick had agreed. Besides, he didn’t get to view a lot of television, what with getting up so early in the mornings, and although he’d heard Alma and Jack discussing the new sink-estate-set comedy, he hadn’t seen it yet. He’d got the rest of the week off from work, most probably as a result of Cathy’s phone call, and so could afford to sit back with a beer and take it in. If nothing else, it would be a distraction from the frightening train of thought his family had interrupted by arriving home. Although the sitcom’s sense of humour was notoriously grim, he doubted it was grimmer than a memory of dying in the Boroughs at the age of three.
It was the second season’s final episode they watched, Jack having seen the others previously. Though Cathy shook her head and tutted, wandering off to get on with some chores around the house, Mick thought the show was pretty good. From what he’d overheard of Jack and Alma’s fierce debate about its merits, Alma hadn’t liked it, or had liked it only grudgingly, but then Mick’s sister would find fault with almost anything that wasn’t her own work, as if on principle. “Like Bread with STDs”, that had been one of her off-hand dismissals. If Mick understood the gist of Alma’s doubts about the programme, what she didn’t like was the portrayal of the working class as having inexhaustible reserves of strength and humour in adversity, with which they could laugh off the gruesome deprivations of their genuinely dreadful situation. “Families like that,” she’d say regarding the show’s central clan, the Gallaghers, “in real life the old man wouldn’t be such an ultimately loveable disgusting drunk, and every train-wreck that he dragged his family through with him wouldn’t end up in a heart-warming group cackle. That thirteen-year-old girl with the supernatural coping skills would have been shagged by half the married blokes on the estate for alcopops. The thing is, people watch a show like that … and it’s well made, well written, funny and well acted, I’m not arguing with that … and in a funny way it reassures them about something that they shouldn’t feel so reassured about. It’s not okay that people have to live like that. It’s not okay that terms like sink estate are even in the language. And this plucky, mirthful underclass resilience, it’s a myth. It’s one the underclass themselves are eager to believe so they don’t have to feel so bad about their situation, and it’s also one the middle class are eager to believe, for the exact same reason.” As Mick now recalled, on that occasion Alma’s diatribe (which had been vented, it must be remembered, at her fifteen-year-old nephew) had been terminated when Jack ventured his own counter-argument: “Jesus, Aunt Warry, lighten up. They’re only puppets.”
Mick was more or less on Jack’s side there. At least in Shameless there was a more honest picture of existence in the lower margins than in shows like Bread, with or without the STDs. And how could Alma honestly expect a situation comedy to reproduce her own bleak and consistently enraged view of society? It would be like an episode of Are You Being Served? by Dostoevsky. “Mr. Humphries, are you free?” “None of us are truly free, dear Mrs. Slocum, unless it is in the act of murder.”