Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

looking nice. Mrs Winterson had been decorating. She was expert at measuring and putting up wallpaper. My dad's job was to mix the paste, cut the lengths of wallpaper to her directions, then pass the sheets up the ladder so that she could drop and hang them and dust out the air bubbles with her big brush.
    Naturally, the operation had her signature-style on it. As a compulsive-obsessive it had to be done until it was done.
    I came home. She was up the ladder singing ‘Will Your Anchor Hold in the Storms of Life’.
    My dad wanted his tea because he had to go to work, but that was all right because it was ready and in the oven.
    ‘Are you coming down, Connie?’
    ‘Not till I'm done.’
    My dad and me sat in the living room eating our mince and potatoes in silence. Above us was the whisk whisk of the wallpaper brush.
    ‘Do you not want something to eat, Connie?’
    ‘Don't mind me. I'll just have a sandwich up the ladder.’
    So the sandwich had to be made and brought to her and passed up like feeding a dangerous animal in a safari park. She sat there, with her scarf on to keep bits out of her perm, her head just at ceiling height, eating her sandwich and looking down at us.
    Dad went off to work. The ladder moved round the room a bit but she was still up it. I went off to bed and when I got up for college the next morning, there she was, with a cup of tea, up the ladder.
    Had she been there all night? Had she got back up when she heard me coming down?
    But the living room was decorated.
    Janey and I were both dark-eyed intense types though she laughed more than I did. Her dad had a good job but there was a worry that he would lose it. Her mother worked and there were four children. She was the eldest. If her dad did lose his job she would have to give up college and start work.
    Everybody we knew used cash and when you had no cash you had no money. Borrowing money was seen as the road to ruin. When my father died in 2008 he had never had a credit or debit card. He had a building society account for savings only.
    Janey knew that her dad had a loan and that a man came round for the money every Friday. She was frightened of the man.
    I told her not to be frightened. I said there would be a time when we would never be frightened again.
    We held hands. I was wondering what it would be like to have a home of your own where you could come and go, where people would be welcome, where you would never be frightened again . . .
    We heard the front door open. There were dogs barking. The door into the living room was shoved open. Two Dobermanns ran in growling and pawing and backing up. Janey screamed.
    Behind the Dobermanns was my mother's brother – Uncle Alec.
    Mrs Winterson had decided that I would come back to the house. She knew I would climb over the back wall. She had paid a neighbour to telephone her at the boarding house in Blackpool. The neighbour had spotted me, gone round to the phone box, phoned Blackpool, and spoken to my mother. My mother telephoned her brother.
    She loathed him. There was nothing between them but loathing. He had inherited the motor business from their father, and she had been left with nothing. All the nursing of her mother, all the years of looking after Grandad, cooking his meals, washing his clothes, had left her with nothing but a miserable house and no money. Her brother had a thriving garage and petrol station.
    He told me to get out. I said I wouldn't go. He said I'd go if he had to set the dogs on me. He meant it. He told me I was ungrateful.
    ‘I said to Connie don't go adopting. You don't know what you get.’
    ‘Drop dead.’
    ‘You what?’
    ‘Drop dead.’
    Slam. Straight across the face. Janey was really crying now. I had a split lip. Uncle Alec was flushed, furious.
    ‘I'll give you five minutes and I'll be back in here and you'll wish you'd never been born.’
    But I have never wished that and I wasn't going to start wishing it for him.
    He went out and I heard him get in his car and start the engine. I could hear it running. I ran upstairs and got some clothes, then I went into the War Cupboard and pulled out a load of tinned food. Janey put it all in her bag.
    We went back out over the wall so that he wouldn't see us. Let him storm in again after his five minutes were up and shout at nothing.
    I felt cold inside. I felt nothing inside. I could have killed him. I would have killed him. I would have killed him and felt nothing.
    *

    At Janey's her parents had gone