23. Aug, 2020

'Just Getting By'

The city centre was empty apart from lights in its monoliths, those glass houses built on the fragility of foreign investment for the wealthy aspirant.  Liz would have liked to throw stones at them, because she certainly didn’t live in one, and couldn’t have lived in one if she wanted to.  She hoped these superior rich people -  so high up they were unable even to see the upturned faces of the local untermensch like her looking up at them - were enjoying their view of arrested development across the city, eye to eye with the gigantic cranes which stood, like idle aliens, all about.  Liz was stuck at home, furloughed and on the brink of redundancy at first and now made redundant from her shop floor retail job, living with her dad, whom she had left trying to fix their broken cooker in the kitchen amid mutterings of,

“Shine a light” and “Jesus wept!”, even his level nature, not given to swearing, under strain.

Neither of them could afford to buy a new cooker and Liz couldn’t afford a flat anywhere now that rents were so high.

Liz had come into town seeking an echo of the former shopping trips she had enjoyed with mum, before mum had left, having met someone else and, seemingly, turned into someone else, for she had little time for seeing Liz now and had moved right away from the area.  Dad was found to have fallen short, lacking that romantic essence that her mother had sourced, by looking for it, in another man.  Liz had met him, a restive and sullen sort, a separater who had made sure that her mum’s attention was fixed where he wanted it to be, on him.  Liz was not impressed and had thought her mother to be brighter than falling for somebody like that, a user, in Liz’s view.  This weakness, as Liz perceived it to be, made her cut off in turn from her mother, although she still yearned, as she did today, for those close times of their mother and daughter shopping trips, enjoying treats and make-overs from the expensive cosmetic counters of Debenhams.

The city centre, though, was dulled with semi lockdown, even the high end luxury retailers, for the splashings out of the city centre penthouse people, being a shadow of their former selves.  Liz found it depressing, rather than being the cheerful outing, even if she had come on it alone, which she had anticipated.  Without the surging crowds pouring through its streets, the buskers, dealers and doorway beggars were its main, undisturbed occupants at ground level.  Town was like Christmas taken down, shabby underneath without the decorations which made it special.

When Liz was walking back up one of the main streets, thinking of heading home to see if dad had fixed the cooker, or it would be toast and something again for tea, her mobile rang.  It was one of her friends, Fran, telling her about a big house party there was going to be that night, illegal in the circumstances, of course, but by now everyone was angry in the cast down, cast out suburbs, one of which Liz lived in with her dad, and they were ready to break out.  Looking up at those great, glass walled high rises towering above her in their forbidden citadels, something deeply anarchic and alienated rose in Liz and she agreed to go, said she was a definite, no question.

She told her dad she was going to see Fran in the park, a permitted excursion, and she left him still gamely struggling on with the cooker, having valiantly produced burgers for them on the 'Joe Foreman Fat Reducing Grilling Machine' he had dug out from the mum junk which was still  under the stairs, this one a legacy of dieting days.  The house party quickly became huge, people climbing over walls to get into it, everybody drunk, high, hectic and dangerously on the edge.  When the police were called, Liz was one of those who, completely out of character for her before, threw glass bottles at them with a ferocity which seemed to come from nowhere.  Among many others, she was arrested and her poor dad, still having failed to fix the cooker, got a call to his door.  Afterwards, Liz was completely unable to explain herself to him.

“There’s no point in going off the rails, love,” her dad had said, adding, in a sentence which seemed to embrace so many things in their lives, “We just have to put up with it.”

“But why do we, dad?” Liz had cried, distressed on so many levels that she was unable to articulate them.  “Why do we?”

And there didn’t seem to be any answer to that.