Barbara

A little story about someone I knew briefly

“Plain. Can’t go wrong with plain….”

Said a grey dishcloth of a woman hovering over a bowl of ready salted.

The working man’s club was perched opposite the council estate, near both the chip shop and football ground. On first glance, the dimpled wine seats and dark wood reminded me of the interior of a gypsy caravan. Nicotine stained anaglypta festered on the walls. There was a pool table and a darts board, a cigarette machine, a function room.

I was there on this particular Friday afternoon in the school holidays because my new mate Mandy was working behind the bar and I’d wanted to hang out with her. Not that she should have been at 15, mind……but that was Rochdale in the 80s for you.

Weekday afternoons would usually drag in this joint. The same crop of weather-beaten faces would prop up the bar bemoaning their losses on the horses or craning over a ‘coffee time’ crossword. Still, it was better than being at home.

When you’re a teenager, isn’t anywhere ?

The men still sported the slicked back Brylcreem creations of their youth, whilst Christmas tree women wobbled their shiny jowls in sync with their weighty diamante earrings. A token bored child rocked on a bar stool nursing the dregs of a flat lemonade with a stripy straw. And there were dogs, always dogs. Usually a nonplussed fat Jack Russell, or a heavy breathing, excitable Staffie being told to ‘put your lipstick away’.

People smoked freely in pubs back then and I hated the way it would sting my eyes and settle in my hair to form a filthy crust. My grandad had smoked a pipe but somehow it had smelled grander, finer. I wondered if perhaps we subconsciously elevated the bad habits of those we loved?

This particular day, there was a wake on. There was an understanding that so long as they were from the estate, it didn’t really matter who showed up, if they knew the deceased or not. It was common place to turn up for whatever was going, free scran and the hope of being bought a few drinks by some poor grieving sod who did know them.

Oh yeah, they all remembered Trevor, Sheila, Maureen, Jimmy, Dave….

More readily after a double whiskey, naturally….

The buffet was a sea of beige and brown, no fancy crudités here. Salmon paste sandwiches cut into triangles was as posh as it got. There were sticks of cheese and pickle (What was the difference between a cocktail stick and a tooth pick, were they interchangeable?), rubbery quiches with rogue shark fins of bacon, and in pride of place, a partially defrosted Sara Lee gateau.

“I said…. you can’t go wrong wi plain”

She repeated. This woman, whose voice had all the joie de vivre of the speaking clock, was addressing me, I realised. Her Old English Sheepdog fringe shrouded her piggy eyes, somewhere between Jilly Cooper and Cousin It. She was probably in her early forties but looked older, her skin reminiscent of the contents of an exotic rock pool; translucent with smatterings of red spider veins, her lips almost disappearing as though a current was sucking them into the recess of her mouth.

I flashed a poor attempt at a smile, at odds with my goth demeanour. Couldn’t she see I just wanted to be left alone, to talk to my friend at the bar?

“Mate of Amanda?”

She enquired, probably on the grounds we were the only ones there between the ages of 10 and 45.

“Yeah”

“Thought you must be. Can’t think why you’d be here otherwise with all these old uns.”

Indeed.

She moved closer and offered a wet clay handshake.

“I’m Barbara anyway……close friend of the family”

Whose family? I wondered as I reclaimed my hand. The deceased…….or Mandy?

“I right enjoy a wake”

She added without shame as she eyed up the sausage rolls.

“I hope you’ve had a bit of something to eat……”

“I didn’t know him”

“No-one cares.”

Truth was, I’d never been a fan of buffets. All those hands and all that breath. No thanks! I mean, maybe if you went first…….but even then you had consider the hygiene standards of whoever might have prepared said feast. No, let this Barbara fill her boots. Feeling myself about to be locked into a dull conversation, I made my excuses and went to the loo, spraying myself liberally with some ‘Exclamation’ to mask the stench of the room and alleviate my boredom.

“Who was she?”

I asked Mandy later when her shift had finished.

“Oh, just Barbara, from down the road, you’ll soon get to know her”

She explained. She and I had not long since become friends after meeting in an ‘Our Price’ record shop a few weeks earlier. I’d been to her gaff a couple of times. It was situated a two minute walk from my school, a little too conveniently if you had double maths. The estate was rather like a twisted version of Ramsay Street, where everyone seemed to know each other. It was normal for people to either walk straight in or appear at a window grinning inanely or tapping keys. Mandy’s mum and dad were ex publicans and it was clear they were very comfortable with an ‘open house’. It was the complete opposite of my own home and the constant flow of neighbours popping by, made me hanker after a sense of community I felt I’d missed out on. Was this how everyone else lived?

But one person - this Barbara woman - seemed to stand out as being at my friend’s house much more than anyone else.

She’d open the door when I arrived as though she lived there, casual as you like. She’d make herself cups of tea and stay til late at night. To be honest. it was weird. A bit over familiar, you know?

“Does Barbara have a family?”

I asked Mandy one day.

“Nah. Alkie”

She replied, as though alcoholics couldn’t have families.

“Oh….”

I mulled it over. Maybe that was why she had those red patches on her face. I’m sure my mum had told me that alcoholics had those. Hm…..

At first, I just noticed Barbara’s constant presence, but as the time I spent in the house increased, I noticed something else, too. Barbara was always doing something. Or rather, being put to task by someone. Everyone in the house, in fact.

“Nip round’t shop and get us 40 Lambert & Butler will yer Barbara”

Joan, her mum would instruct, slumped in the armchair wheezing into her asthma inhaler.

“Pile of ironing there wants doing, love”

Her dad would state. Or;

“Fancy going round t’chippy for us?”

Barbara’s dopey face would light like a dog asked to retrieve a stick. And every time, she’d oblige.

It was an odd carry on and one I began to feel uncomfortable with.

I’d seen kids do this kind of thing with younger siblings, but to see it happening to an adult was very strange.

With no children of her own, living alone, Barbara was clearly an easy target.

“Oh Ju, she likes it. No-ones making her come round…..….gives her summat to do”

Mandy said when I challenged it.

“She gets bored sitting at home.”

Hm….. Even if she did like it, was it right to exploit that? That was undoubtedly in my opinion, what the family were doing.

The more often I went round, the more disturbing I found it. Barbara was basically an skivvy, exchanging chores for company, for what she thought to be friendship. Barbara would be doing the washing up, folding laundry, putting the bin out. All while Mandy’s mum and dad sat watching telly and puffing away on ciggies.

I struggled with the set up, but at the same time, I liked Mandy’s parents. They were kind to me, let me sit talking in the kitchen til silly o clock, let me stay over. Our teenage years are a time in which our morals are beginning to firm up a little. Was it okay to turn a blind eye to what I observed, seeing as there were so many good things? Like so many other situations, I was sure it would eventually work itself out.

And in an odd way, it did.

One day a few months later, I went round to the house to find it surprisingly Barbaraless.

Had this poor, gullible woman finally seen the light and freed herself from the shackles of being an unpaid servant? A dogsbody?

Sadly, the explanation was more tragic.

“Mandy….where’s….”

I began, my eyes scanning the room.

“Fell downt stairs, pissed the other night. Broke her neck.”

She said flatly. There was a cold indifference, a matter of fact tone to her voice that hit me like a gut punch. She said it as though this sort of thing happened all the time on the estate…. maybe it did. It was clear she’d seen far more of life at fifteen than I had. Perhaps she’d become hardened.

My stomach made awkward twists as I thought of Barbara lying motionless at the bottom of a staircase, alone. Her absence probably wouldn’t even have been noticed til someone had needed a packet of fags the next day.

And not so long after, I found myself yet again, at another bland buffet at the same working man’s club surrounded by faux fans and free loaders.

I took a ready salted crisp in my hand and held it up to the light with reverence.

I noticed the imperfections, the brown veins, black bad bits and jagged edges.

And somewhere, too, I’m sure I saw a little gold.

“Plain, can’t go wrong with plain”