to St Marys, calls Pete Bunch out and gives him what for. Barge, naturally, is working as back-stop.
It is all very humiliating. The man is four foot nothing. Bunch laughs in his face (or the clean air above it) and poor Barge is obliged to step in and steady things. In the process, he loses the tip of his tongue, a slightly ironic injury, really, considering the fact that his tongue hitherto had always been too long and hence slightly lispy. Now it is slightly short and the net result is not – you stupid dreamer! – a miraculous cure of his former difficulty, but one of the worst speech impediments in the whole northern hemisphere: with the added bonus of a future literally dripping in spittle and indignity (french kissing? Out of the picture).
Wow.
That Pete Bunch could really sock it to ya.
Epilogue
You might think Poodle would be grateful for her family’s intervention in this island drama. You would be wrong to think so. She is livid. She will never forgive Barge for losing his tongue on her account. She will never forgive Big for being so small. She will never forgive Mo for buggering off to America just at the juncture when her moral guidance skills were most needed, and the whole, damn family, more to the point, for being so strange and weird and different and tall and kaftan-ridden and freakish and poor and lean and curly.
She falls, henceforward (has the girl not an ounce of originality?) into the leathery arms of Donovan Healy. He has volunteered to ease the pressure for a while by getting Poodle off the scene in some kind of phoney, bull-shitty couriering capacity.
And that is how Poodle becomes Healy’s whore. But there is a price to pay. And Poodle won’t be paying it. She has been burned. She has been spurned. The bitch, as they say, has truly turned.
Shortly after, we stagger back to the mainland, our numbers cruelly depleted: Mo-less, Barge-less (the poor boy can’t even talk for three months after, then there’s the infection), Poodleless. A mournful, slightly moth-eaten rag-bag of a family. Feely, Patch, Big and me.
Appendix
She had lovely breasts, dammit. That’s the worst part, really. Tiny chocolate-button-tipped conches, soft as a moth’s wing, pale as a priest’s kiss. Lovely breasts.
So screw that infuriatingly gormless, over-bitten, cod-fishing Peter Bunch to hell and back, I say.
Chapter 3
I’d hate you to have me down as the world’s greatest ever L. S. Lowry fanatic – the man couldn’t interest me less – but I must get something off my chest about how sick and disgusted I feel over the treatment doled out to this silly, scratchy, mother-loving, messed-up art-genius in his dirty old home town of Pendlebury.
Pendle-where? Ah, precisely. You see the rudimentary facts of the matter are these: initially Lowry dwelled a life of infinite contentment in Victoria Park (a smart, suburban area of Manchester, vastly Pendlebury’s social superior), before, rather tragically, his dad’s oxtail soup business went all to seed and a move down-market became horribly obligatory.
Let us not for one moment pretend that it was the dream of Lowry’s life to end up living in a mill-ridden shithole with nothing to recommend it bar a whole host of spindly cats, rheumatic brats and cockroaches. No, sirree.
That said, the man soon set out, singlehandedly, to steam-iron this god-forsaken buttock of a place into the annals of Art History. No one can deny that Lowry put Pendlebury on the map with his bad brush and his keen eyes and his soft oils. He made it matter. He gave it soul. He offered it a shot in the arm of much-needed bloody integrity.
And as he did so – records maintain – he was the absolute living epitome of patience and politeness and calm, sweet modesty. He weren’t no fat-head or bully or big-gob. Quite the contrary.
(Okay, the man had some serious mental health issues. He was still a virgin aged eighty. He was chronically depressive. Wanna make something of it?)
So how do you imagine this beleaguered little area goes about thanking L. S. for all his crucial Northern Realist creativity?
‘They laughed at me for thirty years in Pendlebury,’ quoth he. To be laughed at for thirty years! L. S. Lowry. Laughed at by those wank-ridden tosspots in Pendlebury. Those smug, piss-infested, self-righteous, small-minded, ill bred bastards. Those losers. Those fools. Those inconsequential small town scumbags.
You know what? Sometimes it feels pretty damn hard for a six-foot girl giant to love the world.
(So I lied about the oxtail soup business. That’s hardly the point, is it?)
Yes, yes, yes, I am a truly, irredeemably, unapologetically moo-faced, big-blotched, large-arsed, yank-my-udder Friesian (how can I deny it?), but I do have some inkling as to how poor old Poodle felt over the Bunch disaster. Humiliated. Small. Cast-off. Ugly.… And the strange thing is, I miss her. For a short while the sweet May sun suddenly shines just a little less brightly on our tiny, ten-acre almost-island.
Oh please. You actually believe this stuff? Jesus H! I’m so full of shit my ears are dripping. Miss the bitch? Are you kidding? I’m in my fucking element. It’s like I’ve suffered for sixteen years with a dose of Bell’s Palsy, and suddenly it’s lifted. It’s gone. I am no longer disfigured by the shadow of my nasty sibling’s shallow, sulky, arse-aching misery. I mean, this girl made Ian Curtis look like Zebedee.
At last, at long last, I am free (You really expect me to mourn the brief bliss which has suddenly entered our once-dark world with all the unexpectedness of an exotic fungus sprouting on a once-putrid pile of manure? What do you take me for?)
I am buoyant. I can boss Patch into performing all the kitchen chores. I can mess with little Feely’s head then send him straight to bed. I rule this damn ten-acre patch with a rod of cod.
I spend my days peering into rock-pools, fishing, swimming in the cove, snarling at tourists, flirting (pathetically) with local yokels and marching around this dilapidated Art Deco hotel like a six-foot Queen Tut in carpet slippers.
I’m still painting pottery. We’re doing a concession of Thatcher mugs: mustard-yellow hair, sharp blue eyes. We are part of the zeitgeist, so why oh why do I feel so oooooh… grubby?
Come on. I’ll get over it.
Then, out of the blue, with no prior warning, something rather peculiar happens. Over breakfast. For some reason, on the morning in question, we are partaking of our victuals in the snooker room. Huge table, covered in a thick sheet of protective plastic. Dark green walls, no windows, but all the vital central action carefully low-lit by a long, rectangular fluorescent strip which hangs over the table like some kind of gratuitously industrial extractor fan. It’s a magical chamber; fuzzy-edged, subterranean, bruised, mysterious.
We all have our stools and sit perched upon them, miles apart from one another, like dirty-etched characters in a Rembrandt painting; half-lit in the dark-light. The room reeks of damp.
This is where Patch has chosen to serve. No one says anything. It is her decision. She’s twelve. If we make too much of it she gets to think she’s interesting or something.
I am wearing my cheap, synthetic nightdress
