The madam was dead a long time ago, had a stroke at the City Varieties when they were filming The Good Old Days. All dressed in her Edwardian finery and dead in her seat. No one noticed until the end. Tracy had wondered if they’d caught it on camera. They wouldn’t have shown a corpse on TV in those days, these days they probably would.
No, not the ghost of the dead madam, it was that actress from Collier. That was why the face looked familiar. The one who played Vince Collier’s mother. Tracy didn’t like Collier, it was a load of crap. She preferred Law and Order: SVU. The actress who resembled the Cookridge madam looked older than she did on screen. Her makeup was a mess, as if she’d put it on without a mirror. It gave her a slightly unhinged air. The woman was obviously wearing a wig. Perhaps she had cancer. Tracy’s mother, Dorothy Waterhouse, died of cancer. You get to over ninety and you’d think you would die of old age. They talked about treating it with chemo and Tracy had objected to wasting resources on someone so old. She had wondered if she could sneak a DNR bracelet on to her mother’s wrist without anyone noticing but then her mother had surprised them all by actually dying. Tracy had waited so long for that moment that it felt like an anticlimax.
Dorothy Waterhouse used to boast that Tracy’s father had never seen her without make-up, Tracy didn’t know why as she gave the impression of never having liked him. She put a lot of effort into being Dorothy Waterhouse. Tracy instructed the undertaker to leave her mother au naturel.
‘Not even a bit of lippie?’ he said.
Electricity everywhere. All the bright shiny surfaces. Long time since everything was made from wood and lit by firelight and stars. Tracy caught sight of herself in the plate glass of Ryman’s, saw the wild-eyed look of a woman falling over the edge. Someone who had started out the day carefully put together and was slowly unravelling during the course of it. Her skirt was creased over her hips, her highlights looked brassy and her bulging beer belly stuck out in a mockery of pregnancy. Survival of the fattest.
Tracy felt defeated. She glanced down and picked some lint off her jacket. Things could only get worse. Photo Me, Priceless, Sheila’s Sandwiches. She could hear a child crying somewhere – part of the soundtrack of shopping malls the world over. It was a sound that was still capable of piercing the shell like a red-hot needle. A group of listless teenage hoodies were hanging around the entrance to City Cyber, jostling and shoving each other in a way that passed for wit amongst them. One of them was wearing a Halloween fright mask, a plastic skull where his face should be. It unnerved her for a moment.
Tracy might have followed the youths into the shop but the screaming child was moving closer, distracting her. She could hear the child but she couldn’t see it. Its distress was startling. It was doing her head in.
Regrets, she had a few. Quite a lot actually. Wished she’d found someone who appreciated her, wished she’d had kids and learned how to dress better. Wished she’d stayed on at school, maybe gone on and done a degree. Medicine, geography, art history. It was the usual stuff. Really she was just like everyone else, she wanted to love someone. Even better if they loved you in return. She was considering getting a cat. She didn’t really like cats though. That might be a bit of a problem. Quite liked dogs – sensible, clever dogs, not stupid little lapdogs that fitted in a handbag. A good big German shepherd perhaps, woman’s best friend. No burglar alarm could better it.
Oh yeah – Kelly Cross. Kelly Cross was the reason for the screaming child. No surprise there. Kelly Cross. Prostitute, druggie, thief, all-round pikey. A scrag-end of a woman. Tracy knew her. Everyone knew her. Kelly had several kids, most of them in care and they were the lucky ones, which was saying something. She was storming along the main drag of the Merrion Centre, a woman possessed, anger coming off her like knives. It was surprising how much power she radiated, given how small and thin she was. She was wearing a sleeveless vest that revealed some tasteful trailer-trash bruises and a set of prison tats. On her forearm, a crudely drawn heart with an arrow through it and the initials ‘K’ and ‘S’. Tracy wondered who the unlucky ‘S’ was. She was talking on her phone, mouthing off to someone. She had almost certainly nicked something. The chances of that woman walking out of a shop with a valid till receipt were almost zero.
She was pulling the kid by the hand, wrenching her along because there was no way that the child could keep up with Kelly’s furious pace. Imagine, you’ve not long learned to walk and now you’re expected to run like an adult. Occasionally, Kelly jerked her off the ground so that for a second the kid seemed to fly. Screaming. Nonstop. Red-hot needle through the shell. Through the eardrum. Into the brain.
Kelly Cross parted the throng of shoppers like an unholy Moses striding through the Red Sea. Many of the onlookers were clearly horrified but no one had the nerve to tackle a berserker like Kelly. You couldn’t blame them.
Kelly stopped so suddenly that the kid kept running forward as if she was on elastic. Kelly thumped her hard on the backside, sending her into the air as if she was on a swing and then, without a word, she set off running again. Tracy heard a surprisingly loud middle-class voice, a woman’s, say, ‘Someone should do something.’
Too late. Kelly had already stomped her way past Morrisons and out on to Woodhouse Lane. Tracy followed her, cantering to keep up, her lungs ready to collapse by the time she caught her at a bus stop. Jesus, when did she get so unfit? About twenty years ago probably. She should haul her old Rosemary Conley tapes out of the boxes in the spare room.
‘Kelly,’ she wheezed.
Kelly spun round, snarling, ‘What the fuck do you want?’ A faint glimmer of recognition on her venomous face as she glared at Tracy. Tracy could see the wheels ticking round until they came up with ‘copper’. It made Kelly even more enraged, if that was possible.
She looked worse close up – flat hair, grey corpse-skin, bloodshot vampire eyes and a junkie edginess to her that made Tracy want to step back but she held her ground. The kid, tear-stained and mucky, had stopped crying and was staring slack-mouthed at Tracy. Made her seem gormless but Tracy guessed adenoidal. Her appearance wasn’t helped by the green caterpillar of snot crawling out of her nose. Three years old? Four? Tracy wasn’t sure how you told the age of a kid. Maybe it was from their teeth, like horses. They were small. Some were bigger than others. That was about as far as she was willing to go in the guessing stakes.
The kid was dressed in various shades of pink, with the addition of a little pink rucksack stuck on her back like a barnacle, so that the general impression was of a misshapen marshmallow. Someone – surely not Kelly – had attempted to plait the kid’s stringy hair. The pink and the plaits signalled her gender, something not immediately obvious from her podgy, androgynous features.
She was a small lumpy kind of kid but there was a spark of something in her eyes. Life perhaps. Cracked but not broken. Yet. What chance did this kid have with Kelly as her mother? Realistically? Kelly was still holding the kid’s hand, not so much holding it as gripping it in a vice as if the kid was about to fly up into the air.
A bus was approaching, indicating, slowing down.
Something gave inside Tracy. A small floodgate letting out a race of despair and frustration as she contemplated the blank but already soiled canvas of the kid’s future. Tracy didn’t know how it happened. One moment she was standing at a bus stop on Woodhouse Lane, contemplating the human wreckage that was Kelly Cross, the next she was saying to her, ‘How much?’