. If she sticks around in Berko, what sort of Christmas will it be? A shitty one, like all the rest . . the four of them. . at each other’s throats on the day itself, eating and eating solely for something to do. Eating and eating. .’til you’d be grateful to be hauled up by your tail an’ gutted by Hooper: all that turkey — all those roasties, sprouts and that plum-fucking-pudding — all of it plummeting down in a. . saucy white whoosh! Then, come Boxing Day, Mumsie’s pals’ll pitch up — the Deacon, Jeff ers, the Duchess, Miss-fucking-Marple, and that ultimate twat, Kins — all of ’em getting veinier and fatter by the year, and clinking with them the crap booze left over from their own miserable festivities: Sandeman’s port, Emva Cream sherry. . and Bols bottled vom’. They’ll float in the telly’s searchlight on the greenish surface of their own rank piss-artistry. Kins’d probably bring presents for Moira’s kids as well. He tried to be fair. . But it’s stark-raving obvious, Hughie said, you’re his favourite. — Which made no sense, ’cause it was Hughie who was at the Grammar — Hughie who could have proper conversations with Kins about free collective bargaining. . and all that bollocks. Last Christmas Kins had given her a pair of Snoopy earrings. . solid silver, granted — but fucking Snoopy! It took all she had not to fling ’em back in his stupid red face — a face that balloons out of the hole in the hull. . right now! Worms in its eyes! Hooper rears back, his flippers cycling in the bubbling turmoil. — Genie lights her roll-up and angles the smoke towards Mumsie out of sheer spite. She remembers how she pawned the earrings in Hemel on New Year’s Eve. . got a fiver, spent it on five blues and five tabs. — What we’re dealing with here, Hooper says, is a perfect engine, an eating machine. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks. . Genie thinks: Little sharks is fair enough — little sharks ain’t too much trouble, specially little sharks with a future. . Not the sort who get stuck behind the bus shelter with their liquorice bootlaces — but this kind: who hang out at lovely parties in the sand dunes, strumming guitars, painting flowers on their cheeks. . smelling the woodsmoke, lying back in the reedy grass wearing Val Doonican woollies, getting up only to. . drop their knickers — luvverly. — Genie pokes her rollie right at Mumsie’s eye and hisspers, Who’ss my dad? Their faces are lit up by the bright doomed summer of Amity Island, and Mumsie lisspers back, Whoever ’e ith e’th a creepy cunt. — The tarmac bakes Jeanie’s feet as she crosses the road from the cottage to the canal-side. There are red poppies in the grass and she has flowers drawn with felt-tip on her cheeks, flowery inserts in her jeans and a complicated flowery pattern all the way up the calves they cover. She’s a flower child. . Jeaniefer — Juniper rides a dappled mare . . Some days she’ll step straight on to the deck of a passing narrowboat and ride it as far as she feels. It doesn’t matter if it’s one of the Lime Juice-run boats, a BCA dredger or day-trippers who’ve to wrestle their way through every lock — nobody minds. Grizzled old bargees chuck her under her butter-loving chin — bobble-hatted Fionas make her milky tea in their busy-lizzy galleys. When they pass through the towns and villages, they all peer in the back windows of the tip-tilted houses propped up by drain-piping — out in the country they all listen to the fat coils of electricity substations humming in the meadow grass. The boats go slower than you can walk — your thoughts go slower than your senses. Bye-bye. . Whenever she feels like it, Jeanie steps off and waits for a boat going back the other way. — One time Jeanie had a scrap with Mumsie and ran away to real London on a cement barge coming back empty from Birmingham. The decks were thick with powder, and clouds of it blew back behind them in the breeze. . Dudswell. . disappeared into dust. The bargee talked about the Big Freezes, how they’d done for his sort. He sang out the names of the locks as they came upon them: Old Ned’s Two Locks, Wider Water Lock, Berko Two Locks, Broadway Lock, Winkwell Three Locks, Slaughter Lock, Fishery Lock. Jeanie had hopped on board straight after breakfast, and the whiter her school pinafore dress grew with dust the happier she became. It was mid-afternoon when she picked up her satchel and skipped away along the overgrown and collapsing tow path. The bargee asked if she knew where she was, or where she was going — and Jeanie said she was off to see her nan, ’cause that’s the sort of thing she knew proper kids did. She’d no idea where she was — only that this was the city and she was overawed by the huge squat chimneys hunching over the hundreds and hundreds of rooftops she saw from the canal bridge. She stopped a man in the road and asked him what the chimneys were for, and she thought he said they were cool towers — but she couldn’t be sure ’cause it was a busy road and the traffic was roaring past. She walked up the road towards the cool towers — on either side there was a waste land of shrubbery, gravelly piles, big puddles and broken old train carriages. It didn’t seem very cool. People looked at her funny ’cause she was still all dusty — dusty and hungry. Past the cool towers she reached a busy high street, and she looked in the shop windows for a while, but there was only the same sort of stuff as in the Berko shops, besides she didn’t have any money. She walked on, tiring now, her socks slipping sweatily down to her ankles. . againannagain. It was boring, London, with street after street of houses all the same, all looking dead and lifeless. She began to feel scared — maybe there was no one here? Maybe it was a city of the dead, and the zombies were massing in the back gardens, waiting to come out and get her? In a long road somehow duller than all the rest Jeanie couldn’t stand it any more — she had to know if there was anyone real here, anyone alive. She blundered through a gate and pressed her face against a front window. There were one, two, three, four men in the room and a boy lying face down on a mattress. Jeanie was so shocked — ’cause they were definitely alive — she stood there, breathing on the window. What were the men doing? Had they murdered the boy on the mattress? One of the men, who was sitting on a sofa, looked at her and his face was all mad and scared — like he’d seen a ghost. . like I’m a ghost! Then he shot forward off the sofa, and Jeanie tore herself away from the window and ran, and ran, ’til she couldn’t run any more. Then she asked someone the way back to the canal. — Another time there were real proper hippies on a beaten-up old motor-cruiser. They’d hair down to their arses and Afghan coats smelling sweetly of. . goat’s piss. They made a big fuss of Jeanie, delighted by her hand-drawn trellises, rubbing their grubby fingers up her brown ankles, her paler calves, her white thighs. They tied up and took Jeanie and rugs up into one of the dry botttoms. Two. . three. . four. . She nested blue and buff egg-pebbles in twists of straw while they hooked their hair behind their ears and cooked up ’shroom tea in a sooty pot and gave it to her in a plastic cup off the top of a thermos. This. . I re-mem-ber-member: getting home long after dark, although it was broad daylight in her head, which was full of the wind-strummed contrails of Luton-bound jets. Mumsie was sitting in the Chesterfield armchair reading out suicides to Hughie from the Gazette: Missus Jeanette Little, aged twenty-seven of Fantail Lane, Tring, was found dead by firemen in her gas-filled kitchen — kitchen towels had been used to plug up the gaps in the door. . They were so much in love . . Mumsie and Hughie, that they didn’t notice her come in and slump down on the rug: elves, roped together with golden thread, were climbing up the inglenook. Jeanie wondered at. .