do you know your friend if you’re not from here?’ I asked. The young need more questions; they don’t just chat on like older folk do, and they rarely ask anything back.
‘From university,’ she said.
‘So you’re at uni?’
‘Not anymore. But I haven’t really got a proper job and neither has she. We’re both living with our parents at the moment, on zero-hours contracts.’
I nodded. ‘My daughter’s on a zero-hours. Except with her, it’s literally zero; she spends most of her time in bed.’
And then Jo did something. She laughed. And my God, it felt so good to have someone laugh at something I’d said on purpose to be funny and not at something I’d got wrong. It felt so good to have someone hear.
‘I don’t like to be too hard on her,’ I said. ‘The world’s a tough place for you young ones, what with Instagram lifestyles and all that. Our K— Polly can’t go out the door until she’s got her eyebrows on. Honest to God, full make-up when she goes for milk.’ I thought I’d managed a light-hearted mickey-take. I didn’t feel too guilty sending Katie up like that, because Katie’s a pain in the neck.
Jo laughed again. She was thinking I was a nice lady. She was starting to trust me. It’s easy to trust a nondescript middle-aged woman in a cagoule in a way it isn’t to trust a middle-aged man in a dirty mackintosh rooting for something in his pockets, if you know what I mean. As for me, I was finding my sense of humour again. All I’d needed was a little encouragement to get it out of the box and dust it off. A bit of connection.
‘Do you go in for those lifestyle accounts?’ I said. ‘YouTube and Twitface and all that? An influencer, that’s what our Polly wants to be, whatever that is. Do you do that? You know, take a photo of some mushed-up avocado on toast and say hashtag healthy eating hashtag avocado?’
Jo giggled. ‘Sometimes. My friends all do it, so…’
‘Oh, I remember that. When I was younger, if my mates wore wellies on their heads, I’d be up that shed looking for mine before you could say Last of the Summer Wine.’
Jo laughed a lot at that. She shook her head. ‘You’re hilarious.’
She’d never heard of Last of the Summer Wine, couldn’t have done, she was way too young. It was the way I spoke that tickled her, my funny local accent, but I didn’t care. I have quite good delivery. Deadpan is something you earn the right to once you’ve been around the block a few times, another scarce advantage in the shitstorm of the cruel ravages of time.
By the time we reached the end of Norman Road, we were chatting like best friends. It was the first time in years I’d felt confident talking to someone new. I think it was because she was so much younger. And of course, by the way she reacted I could tell she thought I was the bee’s knees. She rattled on and on and on, the way shy people often do once you’ve pressed the right buttons. Wealthy family, judging by the voice, the casual references to holidays in France, the way she said Mummy and Daddy not Mum and Dad, and the village in Hampshire she called home.
We headed down Heath Road to the mini-roundabout, where the town hall stands white and proud in its gardens. We’d been walking for about twenty minutes by then. From the town-hall walls, soft floods bathed the gardens in vanilla light.
‘That’s where I got married,’ I said, pointing to it.
‘Aw,’ she said. ‘Are you still married?’
‘Can’t you tell? Look at the state of me – of course I’m bloody still married.’
Well, she laughed so much I thought she was going to stop breathing or start crying or both. Must be dry as parchment in your house, I wanted to say but didn’t obviously. That would have stopped the connection we were feeling, the connection I’d set out to find. She was hungry, was Jo. I felt the pit of her starvation in my own stomach, the nasty taste of it in my mouth. We were conjoining like those twins you see on the news sometimes; I could feel it.
‘You could feel her hunger?’ Blue Eyes, popping up on me again. Honest to God, I get so lost in what I’m saying, I forget she’s there.