A Day Like Any Other Read online

  PRAISE FOR ISLA DEWAR

  ‘A realist, observant and needle-sharp, Isla Dewar can be very funny’

  The Times

  ‘The best, the funniest, cleverest, the most enjoyable writer in Scotland today. I can guarantee that you too would enrich your life beyond all measure by discovering Isla Dewar’

  Robin Pilcher

  ‘Dewar has a very sharp sense of humour and writes with a great deal of wit’

  Newcastle Evening Chronicle

  ‘No one can tell a story quite like Isla Dewar’

  Lancashire Evening Post

  ‘A warm-hearted and gifted storyteller’

  Catherine Ryan Hyde

  PRAISE FOR IT TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

  ‘I completely adored this offbeat book, set in Seventies Edinburgh . . . a wonderful, funny novel full of insight in which kindness and love take centre stage – but with absolutely none of the mushiness that implies’

  Daily Mail

  ‘From the opening chapter, intriguingly called “It Never Just Drizzles in Hollywood”, I was hooked, immediately attracted to the three main protagonists Sophie, Martha and Charlie’

  Dundee Courier

  ‘Wit, warmth and charm’

  The Scotsman

  ‘A story with as much heart as drama, and though there are plenty of puzzles for the characters to solve, it is kindness rather than cleverness that leads to solutions in the end’

  West Coast Review

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Isla Dewar’s first book, Keeping Up with Magda, was published in 1995. Dewar found success with her second novel, Women Talking Dirty, the film of which starred Helena Bonham Carter. She contributed to the collection Scottish Girls about Town and has also written for children. Isla’s most recent novel, It Takes One to Know One, was published by Polygon in 2018. Born in Edinburgh, Isla lives in the Fife countryside with her husband, cartoonist Bob Dewar, and a bunch of pheasants outside her kitchen window.

  A Day Like Any Other

  Isla Dewar

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Polygon,

  an imprint of Birlinn Ltd.

  Birlinn Ltd

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.polygonbooks.co.uk

  1

  Copyright © Isla Dewar 2020

  The right of Isla Dewar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978 1 84697 490 8

  eBook ISBN 978 1 78885 290 6

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library.

  Typeset by 3btype.com

  To Ida, who is perfect and deserves a book.

  But then, everyone deserves a book.

  1

  Two Ladies, One with a Stick

  There they go, Anna and George. Two old ladies walking down the street. Nattering. Anna uses a stick, places it carefully to support her arthritic left hip. She wears black jeans, a blue T-shirt under an ankle-length black cardigan and a green silk scarf that hangs down past her waist. She has high-top trainers on her feet. Silver earrings dangle at her neck. She is serious.

  George is in black velvet. Her boots are red, a dazzling shiny red. But sensibly flat (a sad thing for her: she has said goodbye to silly footwear and could weep to slip her feet into something strappy and sexy just one more time). Her lips are softly pink and she smiles a lot. A small pearl hangs on a silver chain round her neck.

  Nobody looks at them. Nobody would guess at the lives they’ve had. Between them they’ve clocked up one hundred and thirty years, three abortions, one miscarriage, four children, ten lovers, four husbands (one gay), a hysterectomy, nine cats, six cars, too many winter coats to mention, wild nights, quiet television evenings, and enough wine to float a battleship. Anna has published three poetry pamphlets. George has held the hands of people slipping from life. They have both mopped up many tears, not always their own. They have known abandoned laughter. They have wept for dead parents and lovers and lost dreams. They have regrets and still nurture a few longings. George has a child gone from her. She weeps for him daily. Yet nobody gives them a second glance. They are just two old ladies walking down the street. One with a stick.

  2

  Tonto Was a Woman

  They’d met, George and Anna, when they were nine years old. George’s family had not long moved to a house four doors down from Anna’s family home. Two days after arriving George took her beloved yellow bicycle out of the garage while her mother, a social worker, and father, a maths teacher, unpacked. She cycled to the end of the road, turned and cycled back. Three times she did this and on the third return journey she met Anna riding an identical yellow bike. They stopped. Stared at one another. For a sliver of a moment it could have gone either way – friends or enemies. They chose friends. Yellow bikes were all it took. In days they’d formed a gang. They called it the Two Yellows (it was a small gang) and it was dedicated to helping the poor and needy, world peace and the downfall of Dorothy Pringle, who lived in the next street, had blonde curly hair, pink socks, always did her homework and always got ten out of ten for the arithmetic.

  Over fifty years later the Two Yellows were still talking, reminiscing, laughing, opining on the ways of the world and squirming with embarrassment at their youthful stupidity.

  Anna envied George one thing – her name. It wasn’t just that George was called George. She’d been named after a specific George – one of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. ‘I want to be called after someone from a book,’ Anna had said to her parents. They’d looked bewildered and shrugged. They weren’t readers.

  ‘Breck from Kidnapped. That would have been excellent. Breck after Alan Breck, you know.’ They didn’t. ‘Or Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird. You could have called me that.’

  Well, they might have if they’d heard of the book, but they hadn’t. Besides, they associated the word ‘scout’ with a boy’s organisation and Baden-Powell and campfires and woggles. It didn’t seem like an odd name for a girl, it seemed like an odd name for anybody. But then Anna was a difficult child. She questioned everything – the way her mother made soup, why she had to go to Sunday School, indeed why she had to go to school at all, the clothes they bought her, the food they ate. Sometimes they wondered if they’d been handed the wrong baby.

  George envied Anna one thing – her fearlessness.

  It was always Anna who led the pair in adventures and mischief. She organised their apple scrumping afternoons, encouraged their shoplifting trips to Woolworths, where they took pencils and sweets from the pick’n’mix. She brought cigarettes to their secret place behind her dad’s garden shed. George was the one who smoothed troubled waters when they got into trouble. She stopped Anna eating too many stolen apples. ‘Diarrhoea,’ she warned. In time, she pointed out the dangers of smoking. She curtailed her cider intake so she could keep Anna upright and onto a night bus home. But sometimes she couldn’t stop Anna overdoing things.

  Anna wanted to be a poet, a vet, a nun (it wasn’t a God thing, she briefly fancied she’d look cool in the outfit) or an actress. By the time she was fourteen the poet ambition was winning. She favoured rhyming verse. Her favourite words were ‘whisper’, ‘chrysanthemum’, ‘joyous’ and ‘verdant’. She hadn’t mana
ged to put any of these in a poem. Her masterpiece to date was ‘The Tonto Syndrome’. Tonto was her hero, a gentle misunderstood man. She felt the Lone Ranger was mean to him. He had the shiny white horse and the silver bullets and never shared. And at the end of every episode someone always asked, ‘Who was that masked man?’ Nobody wondered, ‘Who was that mild-mannered trustworthy Indian fellow?’ It just wasn’t fair.

  *

  There was a poetry revival going on at the time. A few pubs hosted poetry happenings. Angry young poets would stand and shout their work to a drunken audience. Anna wanted to join in. ‘Poetry should be shouted,’ she said. ‘People need to hear it.’ She planned to go to a wild extravagant poetry pub night. George said they were fifteen, they wouldn’t get in. Anna said they would, and ‘We’re not going to drink’ (they were at their cider consumption peak and planned to indulge in serious swigging afterwards). ‘We’re just going to do a bit of poeming. Well, I am. You’re my roadie. You carry the notebook.’

  On the night, a Thursday, they plastered on Anna’s mother’s lipstick and mascara, slipped from the house and ran to the bus stop. Forty minutes later they were in the pub, a small one in the Grassmarket, feeling out of their depth. The thick smell of booze, the noise, the laughter, the people staring at them, the barman pointing to the door telling them to get out, it was all overwhelming. They were asked how old they were.

  ‘Eighteen,’ said Anna.

  The barman snorted.

  ‘We’re not here to drink. I’ve come to read my poems,’ Anna said.

  The barman said, ‘Out.’

  ‘My poem,’ said Anna, ‘is about Tonto. It is about the sorrow of the Indians and women. Tonto, though you may not know it, was a woman.’

  And the barman said, ‘Out.’

  ‘I am going to read my poem. I won’t touch alcohol.’

  The barman said, ‘Out.’

  George cringed. She wanted this to be over. She wanted to go home. It was early, six-thirty, the pub was fairly empty, but the few people who were there stared.

  Anna had perused every person present and decided there wasn’t a single poet among them. She imagined poets to have long hair and beards (if male) and to wear tight jeans or baggy corduroy pants. Old poets would be bald and have rimless glasses. She decided that if there were no poets here, the people watching must be poetry lovers. They would hear her poem.

  ‘My work is about Tonto, a man who suffered as women suffer. He was servile. The Lone Ranger wasn’t very nice to him.’

  The barman said, ‘Out.’

  It occurred to George that she and Anna did not look like eighteen-year-olds. They looked like fifteen-year-olds who had slapped on too much make-up so they’d look older. Suspecting the thick make-up made them look like clowns, she backed towards the door.

  The barman came out from behind the counter, strode across the room, opened the door and pointed to the street. ‘Out.’

  Anna took the notebook from George and waved it in the air. ‘You will be sorry. One day you will blush to recall you denied the world the first hearing of my poem, “The Tonto Syndrome”.’

  The students in the corner cheered. The old man at the bar supped his beer and stared.

  And the barman said, ‘Out.’

  Back in the street, heading for the bus stop, Anna said, ‘Philistine. The man is a philistine.’

  George wasn’t so sure. She felt overly made up and foolish. In fact she wasn’t keen on poetry. She’d spent too many wearisome hours learning ‘View from Westminster Bridge’ by heart. She worried Anna would become a famous poet and children in generations to come would have to labour over ‘The Tonto Syndrome’. But probably not.

  They went upstairs on the bus hoping their favourite seats at the front would be available. They were. The bus was quite crowded. The two battered up the aisle and sat down.

  ‘I should have been allowed to read my poem. I’m a poet,’ said Anna.

  George agreed. ‘Poetry belongs to the people.’

  Anna gripped her arm. ‘You’re right. It does. People deserve to hear poetry. All sorts of people.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said George. ‘Rich people, poor people, professors and that, authors, plumbers and ordinary people like the people on this bus. Poetry needs an audience.’

  Anna turned and considered her fellow passengers. They were mostly silent, gazing ahead or staring out of the window at the passing world. ‘These people here could do with a poem. They are here and they look bored. A captive audience for me to entertain.’ She took the notebook from George and turned to face the crowd.

  ‘Good evening. I am Anna MacLean and I’m a poet. Thank you for coming this evening. I’m going to read you my latest work. “The Tonto Syndrome”.’

  Silence. Passengers exchanged looks. The atmosphere was of bewilderment. Someone said, ‘Huh?’

  ‘I believe Tonto was mistreated by the Lone Ranger. He was used in the way women are often used and mistreated by men. In other words, Tonto was a woman.’

  A man leaned forward, clutching the back of the seat in front. ‘When you grow up a bit, darlin’, you’ll find he wasn’t.’

  People laughed. A woman called out, ‘Will you sit down? I did not get on this bus to listen to poetry.’

  Anna ignored her. ‘“How did Tonto get his jollies? Please pause and consider that. No late nights in caffs. Cold beer and laughs. He slept rough on a celibate mat.”’

  She took a breath and looked round. The faces looking back at her were blank. She didn’t care. She was especially proud of her ‘celibate mat’ reference. ‘Celibate’ was a new word to her. She’d been introduced to it by Arthur Watt, who sat next to her in French. He’d also told her two other words she needed to know – lesbian and nymphomaniac. She’d asked what these words meant. Arthur had winked and said, ‘You know.’ Anna then knew that he didn’t. She’d looked them up in the family dictionary when she got home. ‘I didn’t know there were words for these things,’ she’d said.

  She started on her second verse and chose not to meet the eye of anybody who was looking at her. The puzzled, slightly irritated expressions put her off. ‘“Were you filled with lust and greed? I want a shot on the shiny white steed.”’

  A woman a few rows from the front shouted, ‘Will you be quiet! I’m trying to have a conversation here.’

  Anna ignored her. ‘“Did you cry, ‘Lone Ranger, cool it’? Gimme gimme a silver bullet.”’

  George looked at her best friend; saw the notebook was held in trembling hands, heard the nervous trill in Anna’s voice and the eyes brimming tears and marvelled. That’s what fearlessness looked like – a person stepping through their dread to do something extraordinary. Reading a poem to passengers on the top deck of a bus, for example. For the rest of her life George would know that this was the moment she started to love Anna. Anna would be her best pal for ever and ever.

  The woman stood, stepped into the aisle and said she was going to fetch the conductor. ‘You are disrupting the peace.’

  She returned with him a few seconds later. ‘This child is making a menace of herself, disturbing us all by reading poetry.’ She spat out the last word. ‘Poetry, for heaven’s sake, on a bus. What have I done to deserve this?’

  The conductor assured her, ‘You have done nothing, madam. You have a right to an untroubled bus ride. No poetry.’ He turned to Anna. ‘Please sit down.’

  ‘I’ll sit when I’m finished. I have twelve more verses to go.’

  ‘You’ll sit now or you’ll get off the bus.’

  ‘I’ll read my poem. You can’t tell me what to do. It’s a free country.’

  ‘It may be a free country but it’s not a free bus. It’s my bus and you’ll get off.’

  ‘I’ve paid my fare. I refuse to get off.’ Anna was vehement.

  ‘Off.’ So was the conductor.

  George got up and made her way to the platform. Anna followed. She thought she heard someone clap. Back on the pavement Anna asked George if she h
ad any money to pay their fare on the next bus. She hadn’t.

  ‘We’ll have to walk then,’ said Anna.

  ‘I’ll be ages late home. I’ll get hell. I hate walking.’

  ‘I know. But that’s a poet’s lot. We’re misunderstood. You’ll see when you write poems.’

  ‘God, Anna, I’m not going to be a poet. To hell with that. I’m going to be a nurse.’

  *

  Walking towards her car, a yellow Mini, George said, ‘I’ve been remembering you and your first reading. The bus especially.’

  Anna said, ‘Ah yes. A splendid failure. My first, not my most spectacular. But a very fine failure, I have to say. Actually, I was shocked when I found you didn’t want to be a poet. I’d thought everyone wanted to be a poet.’

  ‘How foolish you were. But on that bus I loved you. I thought you were fantastic. I was jealous but at the same time wanted to be your best friend for ever.’

  ‘And you were. You are,’ said Anna. ‘The Two Yellows live.’

  ‘Prepare to die, Dorothy Pringle.’

  ‘The things we were going to put her through. The torture. Drowning her in a vat of school semolina, for example. Where were we going to get the vat?’

  ‘Where were we to get the semolina?’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Anna. ‘I always thought she looked pale and unfinished.’

  ‘She was quite the sports queen. A star of the hundred-yards hurdles,’ George said.

  Anna scorned. ‘Belting down the track she looked like a wet scone in knickers.’

  ‘I see you haven’t lost your poetic touch.’

  ‘Never,’ said Anna. ‘Truthful and succinct always.’

  The day was cloudy, not cold enough for a coat, and not warm enough for bare arms. Cardigan weather, Anna called it. She moved along the pavement, measuring her steps, watching the ground beneath her feet. ‘Damn, this talk of Dorothy Pringle has made me lose my walking rhythm. It’s one step with good leg followed by step with wonky leg and stick. I just did good leg and stick, meaning that wonky leg has to go it alone without back-up.’