And Your Girl Can Sing

Chapter 67: Julia

"Mimi, can I ask you a question?" the small boy asked, carrying an Enid Blyton book under his arm as he walked down the stairs towards Mimi, who was also reading in the living room. John did run about and play in the yard like other boys his age, but he also spent a good deal of time in his room, reading and writing and painting. Reading about Mrs. Hilton, mother of Pip and Bets of the Five Find-Outers had made him wonder about his own family.

"Yes?" Mimi raised her eyes from the book she was reading, waiting expectantly. John continued. "Why do I call Julia Mummy and you Mimi even though you act more like a mummy?"

"Well," Mimi thought a minute before answering, running her thumb over the spine of her book. "You couldn't have two mummies, could you?" she responded in typical older-person logic.

John considered this. "I suppose," he said at last. In some ways he wished he could call both of them Mummy. Calling Mimi mummy maybe would make her seem more like one. She was more like... a hospital nurse, efficient. John knew he was well cared for physically, but at some points he wished life at Mendips was more like life at the houses of his friends when he went to visit. A mummy—and a daddy, even—people eating together, playfully teasing one another, other children squabbling over who had to wash up after supper. 

But there was consolation in his Uncle George, and it was no small consolation. Even though John sometimes wondered why he had a "substitute" set of parents instead of his real ones, Mimi and George did their best to make sure he knew he was loved. In the early days George would take John with him around Woolton on the milk cart, showing him off to customers as if he were his own. Uncle George would also give him kisses, a rare form of affection only seen between the two of them in the house. They even had a name for it—giving squeakers! How strange, he thought. George and Mimi were like night and day. He wondered how Mimi felt when she saw them flying paper airplanes in the back yard or hugging and laughing or when George brought him contraband sweets or when they read the Liverpool Echo together, picking and sounding out words that was the spark for his love of reading. He wanted to do the same with her, but she would probably dismiss it as unnecessary.

Which brought him back to Mummy. It was nice when Mimi had finally allowed him to see Mummy again as much as he liked. Previously, he had practically three—three! homes since he knew the Smith sisters operated as a team, helping to look after each other's families, and thus he could go where he pleased between their families: Aunt Harrie, Aunt Mater, and Mimi—and now there suddenly was Mummy, Julia. He was allowed to see her again. As a child, John didn't seem to remember much of being passed around competing would-be parents like a parcel, but one day he remembered asking Mimi about Mummy, only to be told, "Your mummy and daddy... fell out of love," and he soon forgot about Alf, almost like he was dead. Why remember his father? He had a family, several, really.

As he grew, so did his relationship with Julia. Julia taught him banjo and he would visit her house whenever any musical inclination took hold of him. "None of that common sing-song stuff in here," Mimi would say in response to his first request for a musical instrument, a piano, but Mimi would oblige his interests in other ways—dressing him up as an Indian with feathers and lipstick whenever they played cowboys and Indians. Every summer he would go up to Edinburgh with his Aunt Mater and his cousins. He loved being around these strong women, he looked up to them and thought the world of them. The growing freedom of entering Julia's house began to tug on Mimi's fear of losing John: if she and John had an argument—not cleaning his room, she throwing out his drawings and poems—he had the freedom to storm off to Julia's, throwing dark hints at Mimi of the possibility of his leaving for good. At Julia's, though, he was aware that she wasn't fully his anymore. His stepsisters Julia and Jackie naturally encompassed Julia's attention and it made him uneasy.

And then George suddenly died. Uncle George who was his first real playmate, who acted as a father figure to him, who was brave enough to take his side against his wife when she and John would get into one of their explosive arguments, passed away from a sudden hemorrhage in the liver. John was away in Scotland with Aunt Mater and Uncle Bert at the time and when he came back, excited to see her and George, and she told him quietly, he went up to his room. He didn't know how to feel at first, but if there was any crying to do, he would do it on his own—he had been taught and raised by Mimi's Nothernisms to muddle on, don't show emotion, and keep your chin up. In the end when his cousin Leila was sent to keep him company, they both burst into hysterical laughter and felt very guilty afterwards. It was the same laughter John used on the disabled and sick. He wondered why he couldn't cry when Mimi told him.

Time passed. John became a teenager. Fads arrived—Teddy Boys, Rock n' Roll, Elvis, bloody hell—Rock n' Roll! It would get John and every teenager across England's blood pumping like nothing else could—and Julia was there for it all, showing her utmost support of her son's interests. Julia actually loved Elvis, finding him dishy to look at, and relished all the ways he was upsetting the generation whose values had so oppressed her. He found out Julia was so like him. Skiffle too—when it came, Julia found she had a head start in her knowledge of the banjo. The guitar, however was in fashion, and mother and son found a compromise in tuning the top four strings of the instrument to the banjo so she could teach him the chords.

Guitar, guitar, guitar. It was like a disease. Julia was the one to buy him his first guitar, obtained by mail order. And when he formed his own skiffle group, it was she who taught and sang the traditional Maggie Mae with him—every word: "No more she'll rob the sailor / or be fucked by many a whaler." Mimi (bless her soul, she didn't know about Julia's lessons to John about Traditional Liverpool chanties) didn't allow a record player at Mendips, so John took the records to Julia's. At her house most band practices of the Quarry Men were held as well. She made the space theirs, accompanied by cups of tea and cigarettes and laughter.

Julia, Julia, his mother, or was she? She seemed more like a flirtatious aunt, but he loved her and her comfortable demeanor, her trill-seeking, risk-taking ways. And then the worst thing happened. The worst possible thing could have happened. She wasn't his mother anymore because from the moment that the bloody sedan hit her and her body flew into the air she was gone. And he didn't find about it from Mimi, or even a family member—he found about it from the fuckin' policeman, who knocked at the door and asked if he was Julia's son. It was the worst thing when they had been getting along so well throughout the past few years, finally repairing their mother-son relationship they had missed out on during the first few years of John's life. He wasn't even there when she was hit! It was Nigel Walley who walked her to the bus stop and then—and then—

Don't. The fallback was the practice he had observed all his life: keep a stiff upper lip. Males do not show emotion. And thus the pain of losing Julia had not been shared yet, bottled up for so many years. When he saw silent tears well in Mimi's eyes, though, he would put his arms around her and say, "Don't worry, Mimi, I love you," but as the days and months went on, he continued to attempt to anesthetize them: beers and alcohol, resulting in verbal abuse on his friends and those who knew him. Art college brought about a new released of freedom; students had their own flats and used the f-bomb as liberally as they wanted, usually absolute taboo in polite society. But he missed Julia unconsciously, missed her all the time because he never got to spend the amount of time he wanted with her before she was taken so abruptly away from him and he couldn't express his feelings except to the very select few, Arthur Ballard and Stu Sutcliffe, Arthur who had found him pissed out of his mind in the elevator after too many drinks at the pub near his college, he was only aware later that he had been in a blind rage for the past few years, and was he better now—

he—