Tender

 

The night Elvis came to be at my bedside, I knew it was him, even before he spoke.  He was wearing a shiny white all in one suit, like a babygro; but Elvis’ suit was studded with glittering rhinestones.  Only a millionaire’s baby would wear a babygro like that.  That dark night, as Elvis approached my bed, there seemed to be a glow all around him, like he was lit from within.  He also seemed to be floating, slightly above the deep-pile carpet.  I said, “Elvis, is that you?” the words sticking in my throat, so I could hardly manage to form them.  He said, “It’s me all right, Hon,’” like I had been expecting him. I propped myself up against my squashy feather pillow and he sat down at the end of my bed, shifting my Wombles to one side.  Then, resting his guitar across his knees, he sang a song for me.  It was ‘Love Me tender’.  His voice rose and crooned just like I was listening to a record, but this was no record.  When he had finished, I told him that was probably the best performance he had ever given.  Elvis raised one of his eyebrows, and said, “Sure it was, hon’.”  It was worth every second of what had happened to me, to have Elvis visit me like that. He said he only came to see the poor and the lonely, singing them songs to help them through with their lives.  And he knew how lonely I was, shut up all alone in a two bedroom house in Levenshulme. 

To keep my mind off what was happening to my mother at that very moment, Elvis performed ‘Blue Suede Shoes’, right in the middle of my room, swinging his hips and occasionally throwing in a few fancy steps.  I can remember it now, as if it had just happened.  Elvis moved up and down the length of my little room, the light from the hall catching the rhinestones on his suit every now and then.  I stared at him in wonder.  How did he get to be here, I thought, with me and my collection of Barbie dolls?

And for a little while, I could forget about Mum and what she would be doing. I didn’t have to think about her lying uncomplaining on her back, while a fat man heaved his sweaty body on top of her.  I didn’t have to think about a man whose face was warped with selfish love, pressing his dry, thin lips against hers. I didn’t have to think.

Mum worked at her friend, Mary’s house, along with a few other women, whose names I didn’t know.  When I overheard Mum on the phone to Mary, they’d make jokes about the punters.  They even found the threatening ones funny.  It seemed strange to me. 

 

Once upon a time ago, I thought my mother was the most beautiful woman in the world, like a real life Barbie, with moveable arms and legs.  I imagined people might have thought she was Barbie if they hadn’t heard her speak.  Her voice gave her away every time: smoking tobacco into the early hours had given her a gravely rasp, which men, she promised me, found a turn-on.  But her voice, attractive to men or not, wasn’t the voice of Barbie.  It was the voice of a dragon trapped in a princess body: a spell cast by a mischievous wizard.  I often wished her voice could match the rest of her, the way her outfits always matched.  In tweed skirt and jacket or purple dress and shoes, she came to collect me after school.  I would wait for her, hanging onto the railings like a monkey.  When she approached, other mothers would cluster together in disapproving cliques, as she swayed up the path in something short and clinging and most definitely matching. Then we’d walk home together, my little hand in her big cold hand.  If men in cars wound down their windows and shouted ‘Hey gorgeous’ at her, Mum blew them a kiss, dragging me along behind her sexy stack-heeled shoe walk.  Mum was the height of fashion in 1978 when I was nine and she was twenty-seven.

It was Johnny Oldham who let me know Mum’s voice wasn’t all that separated her from Barbie. 

“Your mam’s a prossie’,” he shouted at me across the playground.  “She’ll do it with any man who’ll ‘ave ‘er.”

 Johnny told me that while I was at school Mum invited men to our house to do disgusting things.  And when they left, they gave her rolls of money, which is why the other mothers hated her.   

Barbie had only one man in her life: Crystal Ken.  She would be married in white, unlike Mum who had no intention of marrying. 

“What about my dad?”  I asked.  “Why don’t you marry him?” 

When I said that, Mum looked at me as if she might cry.  But then she opened her mouth up to let a coarse laugh escape into the grey sky and I could see her teeth: capped at the front, gold fillings at the back, glinting like treasure in a pirate’s chest.  Whenever I mentioned my dad, mum would laugh.  I knew nothing about him, but I had hopes that he was just like Crystal Ken.

After a while, Mum got the job at Mary’s house.  She preferred to work there, rather than bring men to our home and have them turning up at all hours whenever she didn’t want them. By now Mum had stopped pretending she was living off a big win on the pools.  When she set out to Mary’s house, she would try and kiss me goodbye, enveloping me in a cloud of perfume, as she grabbed hold of me.  But I always turned my face away from her bright red glistening lips.

“Don’t be like that, love,” she’d whine. 

“Why can’t you have a job like other mums?”

“Plenty of mums do what I do,” she’d answer crossly, before slamming the door.  She’d leave me standing on the stairs, glaring at the top section of the door, which was made of bobbles of glass, like transparent pebbles: their curves distorted anything you saw through them.  Mum looked like a vague blur of colours as she stalked off down our front path.  She wasn’t like my mum at all.  She was like a painting done by the least artistic children at school.

Mum’s job bought me everything a nine- year-old should want.   But I would have happily gone without the new dresses and the T.V. and the yellow desk for my bedroom.  The aloneness in the house was everywhere when she left me at night.  I was weighed down with a great sadness as darkness fell.

But then Elvis started to visit.  As soon as I had gone to bed, I would wait for him to appear in his glowing light, like an angel.   I’d lie back on my feather pillow, accepting sleep, as his soft voice soothed me, like a consoling hug.  He would sing any song I requested: ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, ‘Teddy Bear’, ‘If I Can Dream’, while his long fingers strummed the melody on his guitar.  He even played me a couple of new songs he’d written after his death.  He’d end his set by saying, “See you later, alligator,” as I was floating off into dreams, and then he’d be gone, as suddenly as he arrived.   Elvis was all I had to look forward to.

 

One morning, Mum casually asked what I had done the previous night.

“Elvis came to see me like usual,” I said, almost without thinking.

“You what?” Mum’s spoon, piled high with cereal was poised halfway to her mouth.  “You what?” she said again, blinking in disbelief, as she set the spoon down.

“Nothing,” I said, biting a half-moon shape into my toast.

“Who’s Elvis?  Does he live round here?” she asked sharply, gazing at me from eyes surrounded with purple and blue bruises, like a messed-up palette.  That morning, with her hair straggly and her face mashed up, she looked about as far from Barbie as you could get.

“He’s dead,” I replied.  “You should know, you cried when they found him.”

          “The dead Elvis came to visit you?” she sneered.

          “He often does.  He sings me songs when you’re not here,” I told her stubbornly.  I willed myself not to cry, which is what I wanted to do.

“You were imagining it,” my mother said.  But her forehead was furrowed into unconvinced creases. “You always did have too much imagination,” she continued, snatching away the plate with my crusts on and putting it in the washing-up bowl.  Briskly, she cleared the rest of the table, throwing tea bags in the sink and her uneaten cereal in the pedal bin.  When she had finished, she flounced out of the kitchen, her pink dressing gown floating behind her like a witch’s cape.

“I know it was you, Elvis,” I muttered into my hands. 

 

That night, Elvis wore a different suit when he visited.  It was dark blue, like a beautiful sky, and covered in pearls and silver sequins that had been carefully stitched on.  It was not a suit I had seen him wear before, even when he was alive.  I told him the sequins were like stars.  The next morning, I found some of those sequins scattered on my bedroom floor. I picked them out of the carpet and put them carefully in my jewellery box, with my other special things. Inside the box, I had placed a picture of Crystal Ken and my engraved silver bracelet, which Mum had got for me when I was born.  It adjusted so I could still wear it.  Eventually, Mum said I could pass it on to my own children, if I decided to have any.  I didn’t intend to have any, until Barbie had had hers, but I didn’t bother telling Mum this. I laid the sequins on the Crystal Ken picture.  As I was doing this, Mum appeared at my door.  She looked tired.  Makeup improved her dramatically and she didn’t wear it at this time in the morning.           

“What are you doing?” she wanted to know.

“Nothing.”

“Elvis visit last night?” she asked, trying to sound casual as she drew the belt on her dressing gown more tightly in at the waist.

I shrugged my shoulders and picked up one of my Barbies.  I’d been plaiting her hair before I’d noticed the sequins. 

“Well?” she asked.

“Dunno,” I mumbled.

Mum tightened her lips, and closed the door, too softly.

 

It was a Saturday, so I was allowed to watch television in the living room.  I curled up on the sagging sofa, and Mum brought me a boiled egg and cup of tea.  She was trying to make an extra effort to be pleasant, but I wasn’t sure why.  I suspected she didn’t believe what I had told her about Elvis, although she didn’t accuse me of lying then, or at any other time.  Mum was usually busy on Saturdays.  She liked to do the washing and get it hung out.  But that day there didn’t seem to be any washing around.  After a while, she came and sat beside me on the sofa.  I hoped she wasn’t going to start in on one of her lectures, and spoil what I was watching.  I could feel her eyes boring into me, while I concentrated on the telly.

“I do love you, you know,” she said gently.

I didn’t bother to reply, because on the telly, a pie-throwing contest was taking place.  Mum sighed.  She hated children’s Saturday morning television; she said it was silly.

That evening as the gold-plated clock on the mantle piece in the living room, moved to six, I expected Mum to go upstairs; get ready for the evening ahead.  The television in the corner of the room, became a blur.  I watched the handles on the clock move slowly, specifying the seconds and then the minutes.  The tick of the clock filled my head.  I caught my mother looking at me, looking at the clock.

“I’m not going, she said.  “I’ve told Mary.”

My reaction was numbness.  It wasn’t what either of us had expected.

“I thought you’d be pleased,” she snapped.

“I am pleased.”

 

In bed, I waited for Elvis like usual.  But Elvis didn’t appear.  I could feel my eyes fluttering shut, like butterfly wings.  But I forced myself to keep them open.  I waited and waited for his familiar glow.  I wanted to hear his voice, lulling me into restfulness.  Instead, Mum appeared in the doorway: a tall dark shape.

“Still awake?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

She went downstairs to get me aspirins crushed in a glass of warm milk.  It was a remedy she was convinced worked better than anything else for insomnia.  I didn’t want to drink it, but she towered over me, and I knew she wouldn’t leave until I had managed to swallow the very last drop.  Mum was back, eager to re-assert her authority and Elvis was gone.  He was no competition for my mum.

 

The following day, I found Mum in the living room, surrounded by stuff we had collected over the years: dolls I had neglected, clothes I had grown out of, dated outfits that mum didn’t wear any more.  She was shoving everything into bin bags.

“Thought we’d have a clear out,” she said, on seeing me.  “Anything you’d like to add?”

I shook my head.

“Pass me those albums,” she said, as I moved past a huge pile of them.  There was an Elvis album on the top.

“What you getting rid of that for?” I asked, pointing at it.

“Old junk – never play it anymore.”

          “But you cried when Elvis died.  You said he was the king.”

“Just pass it here,” Mum snapped.

I ignored her and stomped into the kitchen.  From the fridge I took a carton of orange juice.  I was pouring myself a glass, when I heard Mum switch on our record player.  It was a noisy machine and groaned as the stylus lifted.  I heard the needle hit the record and then the record crackled and there was Elvis singing.  Just like he was with me in his shiny white suit.  I finished my drink and went into the living room.

“Thought I’d give it a last play,” Mum explained to me.  “But then it’s going,” she added harshly.

I nodded.  When the first song had finished I said, “I don’t suppose my dad looked like Elvis, did he?”

Her face softened.  “Nope.”

“Crystal Ken?” I tried hopefully.

“Him neither,” she said with a laugh.

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

Mum shrugged.  My dad had no importance in her life and therefore, none in mine.

“And you’ve definitely no pictures?” I tried, although I had asked her this too many times to mention on previous occasions.

“I’ve nothing of him, except you.”

“And I bet that’s enough of a reminder,” I said coldly.

I walked to the door, intending to slam it hard behind me.  But then Mum said, “Oh, hang on a minute, you can have this for yourself.” 

I turned around quickly, my heart thumping in my rib cage, thinking she’d be holding a photo.  Instead, she took the Elvis record off the turntable, slipped it back in the sleeve and handed it to me.  I could hardly manage to thank her.  I felt like I had been given a consolation prize.