Jonathan Coe - Number 11

‘Yes!’ said Alison, barely able to get the word out, as she was by now doubled up with laughter herself. ‘Oh my God, the way you looked just then!’

‘My God, I didn’t know what you were doing! And now this … It’s like … What is it like? What’s it made of? It’s like plastic.’

‘Of course it’s plastic. They don’t make them out of wood any more, you know. I’m not bloody Long John Silver.’

‘But … what happened? How long have you had it?’

The bus staggered its way through Kings Heath and along Swanshurst Lane as Alison told her the story. Passengers came and went, the bus changed drivers at Acocks Green, but the two students were wrapped up in each other, and took no notice.

‘When I was ten,’ said Alison, ‘I kept getting these pains in my leg for no reason. Really bad pains that wouldn’t go away. We moved to Birmingham round about then so I was going in for hundreds of tests at the Queen Elizabeth and in the end they diagnosed me with this very rare thing called Ewing’s sarcoma, which is a really aggressive kind of cancer. I was on chemotherapy for months but in the end that wasn’t enough and they told me they were going to have to cut the whole thing off.’

‘Shit, that’s terrible.’

‘Well, the alternative was kind of worse, wasn’t it? Here I am, after all. Alive and kicking.’

Selena couldn’t work out at first whether this was a joke or not. When Alison’s smile made it clear that it was, she gave a relieved laugh of her own.

‘Do you want to see it?’ Alison asked now. ‘It’s very realistic.’

She rolled the left leg of her jeans almost up to the knee to expose a section of prosthesis which did indeed have the convincing look of flesh and bone.

‘The knee doesn’t look quite so good — I’ll show you that later,’ said Alison, rolling her trouser leg down again, ‘but otherwise it’s all right, isn’t it? They even matched my skin colour. When they’re ready to make the leg they give you a book of samples and you have to flick through all the different skin tones, just like you were choosing a carpet or something.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘No. I could have had one white leg, if I’d wanted to. How cool would that have been? I could have been a living example of ethnic diversity.’

Alison explained that the cancer had been so aggressive that the surgeons had had to perform a transfemoral amputation, above the knee. This meant that her left leg was lacking all the motor power of the knee joint — one of the strongest joints in the human body — so she could still only take stairs, for instance, step by step, one stair at a time. Nonetheless, on level surfaces, where there were not too many people around to impede her progress and get in her way, she was able to walk with perfect confidence.

‘How long did it take,’ Selena asked, ‘before it started to feel … you know, natural?’

‘Oh, it never feels natural,’ said Alison. ‘Never has, never will. But learning to feel — I don’t know — comfortable with it didn’t take too long. I worked with a physical therapist: in the hospital at first, and then after that she started coming to our house. That went on for a few months. Stressful time for everyone, very stressful. This guy I was telling you about — Steve — my mother’s boyfriend, he was around at this time. In fact that was when he showed his true colours.’

‘Was he not very supportive, you mean?’

‘Not really. He started shagging the physical therapist.’

After a second or two they both started laughing again at that, it sounded so ridiculous. In any case it was easier, for Alison, to laugh about it than to remember the real agony of that time, when all her own hopes had seemed to lie shattered around her, and in the face of Steve’s betrayal her mother turned into a wreck who drank herself to sleep most nights and seemed to age ten years in as many months. She really, really didn’t feel like seeing him again tonight.

‘Hey, look,’ she said to Selena, quietly now, ‘you couldn’t come with me to the pub tonight, could you? Safety in numbers, and all that. Only it’ll be the first time I’ve seen him in about seven years and I could do with having a friend there, to stop me doing something stupid.’

*

Outside The Spread Eagle, Alison laid a warning hand on Selena’s arm and said: ‘She’s white, by the way.’

‘Who?’

‘My mum.’

‘So?’

‘Some people are surprised, that’s all.’

‘I think I can handle it. As long as she doesn’t have two heads or something.’

‘You know what I mean. I just thought you’d probably be expecting …’

‘Alison — stay cool. Everything’s cool. You need to calm down a bit.’

‘I know. OK.’

Alison nodded her head, and took a few deep breaths, composing herself, trying to find her centre of gravity. She held out her hands, palms downwards, and pushed down as if on a pair of invisible parallel bars.

‘Right,’ she said, after a few moments of this. ‘I’m ready.’

They went inside.

Steve seemed to have lost most of his hair since Alison had seen him last, but apart from that, he looked very much the same. He kissed her on the cheek and gave her a big hug and she had little option but to put up with both of these things. When he went to the bar to get their drinks she could not help noticing how her mother’s eyes followed him appraisingly, longingly: and yet she was probably the only person in the pub who would have given this balding, potbellied figure a second glance. Alison did her best not to betray her feelings but inside she was letting out a long, deep sigh of resignation. It was going to happen all over again. Life was all too predictable sometimes.

Another example of this sad truth presented itself just a few minutes later. Her mother went to say something to the girl behind the bar. She was pointing at the little shelf of CDs that were kept there to use as background music, and Alison knew exactly what was coming next. Val’s sole top-twenty hit (from twelve years ago) was included on any number of compilation CDs and, sure enough, before long she had persuaded the girl to slot one into the CD player and search forward for the relevant track. Over the pub’s PA system the familiar keyboard riff soon blasted out, broken up by an offbeat drum pattern, providing an angular but catchy backdrop to Val’s strong, plangent melody, with her three fellow bandmembers oohing and aahing behind her in competent close harmony.

With an apologetic but proud smile at her companions, Val wandered back over to their table. Just in time to hear Selena say:

‘Ooh, I love this song.’

‘Really?’ Her surprise was obvious. ‘You know it?’

‘It’s one of the first things I can remember hearing. My mum used to have it on in the house all the time.’

‘I wrote it,’ said Val, and watched thirstily as a respectful amazement transformed Selena’s face.

‘ You did? You wrote this?’

‘Yeah. That’s me singing. I’m that Val Doubleday.’

Selena didn’t actually recognize the name; it was the name of the band that was remembered by those who remembered the song at all. All the same, she was impressed; more impressed than even Val could reasonably have hoped for.

‘You sang this on Top of the Pops , yeah? I remember the little dance routine.’

‘Oh, God … We practised that for days. ’ She set off down a well-worn path of reminiscence, recalling how Louisa, the fourth, blondest and prettiest member of the group, had developed a mental block about their simple dance moves and they’d had to spend the best part of a week in a London dance studio with an increasingly exasperated choreographer. Alison had heard the story many times before, and recognized by now that it took the form of a classic humblebrag: the underlying message being that the four of them may have been ditzy and naive but at the same time, they had been serious players, with the resources of a powerful record company behind them. It was dull having to listen to all of this again, but still, it gave her mother pleasure to tell the story, so she listened with a patient smile on her face and didn’t interrupt.