Penny For Them

SPRING 2025, SHORT STORY, 2400 WORDS

content warning

childhood trauma, gay slurs

“You look different,” Nan says.

“I’m forty-five, Nan,” I say.

Squinting at me, she takes in my pigtails and my green nail polish and my handlebar moustache and nods decisively, as if the fact it’s been a while is the only thing that’s changed.

Nan looks the same. She’s wearing a white cardigan with pearl buttons over a dress like a floral crimplene tabard, her fingers packed to the knuckles with rings. Her grey curls are done up all perfectly poofy like the Queen’s, and she sounds like Lily Savage.

The Queen and Lily Savage both died this past twelve months. I still can’t quite get my head around that.

Nan’s house looks the same, too. There’s an antimacassar on the arm of the sofa, and balanced on the antimacassar are the TV remote, the cordless phone, and a thick glass ashtray full of stubbed-out fag-ends, all lined up neat and tidy. The paint of the ceiling is a bit yellowed from smoke, but the nets at the window are snowy white. When I look carefully, I can see the painted-over eye-screws dotted around the doorframe, for the big old fake tree to be moored every Christmas with strings like guy-ropes to prevent it from toppling. When I look even more carefully, I can spot a single missed budgie poo stuck to the skirting board like a tiny Liquorice Allsort.

“You want a cuppa?” Nan asks. “We’ve got rabbit stew in the pantry.”

I wasn’t hungry until she mentioned food, but suddenly I am. The memory of rabbit legs floating in broth makes my stomach turn, though. I’m not sure how to navigate this politely.

“We could go out. Make it special.”

I haven’t been to my hometown in years. I have no idea what’s even here anymore. Twitching the nets, I check for rain and see, where the square of scruffy grass in the middle of the close used to be, there now stands a Taco Bell restaurant, replacing the No Ball Games signs and abandoned footballs.

I know it’s a Taco Bell from the red neon that spells out Taco Bell with a flashing sign that mimics a bell ringing, somehow bright even in the dull English daylight. Everything else about it blends in, though, to the dowdy Northern terraces and semis edging the close: low, red-tiled roof and grey bricks, a bit defeated-looking. “We could go to Taco Bell.”

“What’s a Taco Bell, then?” Nan asks, as if she’s not looked out of the window since this shiny new fast-food joint manifested on the green. I let it go.

“It’s like McDonald’s, but it sells tacos.” This is pretty much the sum of my understanding of the place.

Nan doesn’t even blink. “What’s a McDonald’s?”

When are we? I say, “A fast food place, sells hamburgers.”

And Nan says, “Ohhhh, the Wimpy.”

“Yeah. Like Wimpy, but tacos.”

“What’s a taco, then?” Nan asks.

I think. “Like a mince pancake?” I hazard.

Nan raises her feathery eyebrows and gives an impressed little nod. She looks a bit surprised too, like she wasn’t expecting something so appetising. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s get going, then.”

I wait, as she puts on her camel coat with the gold chained Mizpah brooch on the lapel, changes out of her slippers, and checks that her purse is in her handbag. We go out the back door and down the entry, past the little utility room where the fridge and the washing machine live. It’s even worse than I remember, now I’m tall enough to have to duck beneath the spider-garlanded roof. Nan unlocks the side gate, then locks it behind us. The air outside feels staticky, like we’re due a storm, but there’s not a cloud in the magnet-coloured sky. Across the road, the Taco Bell sign winks, come-hither.

“This is nice, isn’t it?” Nan says. We’re installed opposite one another in a diner-style booth, with cherry-red pleather upholstery and matching red piping around the curved edges of the glossy yellow tabletop. It makes me think of hot dogs—mustard and ketchup. The lamp overhead is long and low like the kind you see in pool halls. There’s a vase in the centre of the table, chrome as a flying saucer, filled with purple hyacinths and baby’s breath. She balances her folded arms on her handbag, which is resting on her lap, and looks around. She hasn’t taken her coat off. I shake out of my jacket and fold it on the seat beside me, and after a minute, Nan sets her bag next to her, closest to the wall. She keeps her coat on.

“It’s all right, yeah.” They’re piping in some cheesy old pop, and I can recite every lyric but not for the life of me remember the artist. Rancid nostalgia fists my guts. Too many happy songs make me sad now. I want the past, but when I reach for it, like tearing down a sun-faded poster, it comes apart in my hands. I don’t think it was ever what I wanted. I don’t think it was ever even real. I look around, too. “I can’t see any menus.” But a server wearing a white apron and a white smile is approaching our table.

“Would you like popcorn shrimp?” the server asks. He has very attentive eyebrows.

“What’s popcorn shrimp when it’s at home?” Nan says. She gets her fags out of her bag and I’m about to say something about the smoking ban. But then I remember the smoking ban probably hasn’t happened yet.

“I reckon.” I think of popcorn chicken. “It’s shrimp in like, breadcrumbs. Or batter. Then they fry it.”

“We used to get shrimp at New Brighton on the front. Fresh caught that day. They were beautiful.” She enunciates every syllable for emphasis, bee-you-ti-full, exhaling a smoky breath and tapping her ash into the pressed metal ashtray that was suddenly there all along on the bright laminate tabletop.

I remember the last time I got seaside seafood. I think it was at Parkgate. I was about seventeen and it was cockles in a paper cup with a plastic chip fork and it had me sprinting in and out of the loo right through that night’s episode of The X-Files. They used to sell them in the pub as well, back then, a guy coming round with a tray full of seafood like that’s what teenagers want with a pint. We called him the Fishy Man. Hey, Fishy Man, get your fish away from me. Him and the guy who sold single plastic-wrapped red roses from a bucket. Boys, buy a rose for your lady. Those paper cups make me think of medicine doses, now. I push the thought away. The next one crowds in to take its place, rattling like a bottle on a production line.

The night before my grandad died, he’d given me a handful of change to spend. Silvers and coppers. For argument’s sake, twenty-three p. The day after, he was gone. Nan had woken up next to him in the morning, heart attacked. The perfect fairy-tale death you fantasise about—passing away peacefully in your sleep. Well, perfect for him, anyway. My mum said gravely to me, “You must never spend that money.” I put it…somewhere. I was eight.

“That’ll be twenty-three pence, please,” the server says, sunshinely. When I look in my wallet, none of my bank cards are there, but there’s the exact change, in ’80s money, the coins big and thick, with the Queen’s face all young and glam.

“It’s what he would’ve wanted,” Nan says, like she knows what I’m thinking. And it’s true. I know he’d rather me have spent it on snacks than kept it stashed away until it became un-legal tender, even the memory faded. People want things to stay the same. But things can’t stay the same. That’s the only certainty in life.

I wish I knew what else he’d rather. I think about him laughing at ballet dancers on telly, and tiny me laughing along with him. “Who’s the poofter with the big packet?” That one sticks in my head, the exact intonation he’d use at the budgie. “Who’s a pretty boy, then? Who’s a little bugger?”

“I am,” the budgie would reply, in a voice like radio static.

I’m named after him. My grandad, not the budgie. Who’s a pretty boy, then. Who’s a little bugger.

I am.

These memories are outdated. If he’d lived long enough to see me grow up, maybe he’d have changed, maybe he wouldn’t. I can’t reconcile those aspic words with my grandad who (I know. I’m told. I choose to believe.) loved me. When you’re a kid, people tell you how you feel. And you don’t know any better, so you just believe them. You like a girl character? Oooh, you fancy her! You like a boy character? You want to be like him when you grow up! Vice-versa. Whatever. Grown-ups could have told me pink was blue when I was little and I’d have just accepted it and repeated it back. So I never knew why things felt off, like I’d sidestepped a millimetre outside of myself and was constantly hovering to catch up, laughing along with Grandad at that queer little man on Are You Being Served?.

Even though we’re frozen in time at our final moment (leave an impression! Make it count!), if it had all played out to this point, there’s a chance it would still be okay. The server is still standing there, smiling patiently. I pass the coins over, like Charon’s obol. The dead stay dead. Until they don’t.

Nan nudges me with her elbow. “What are you getting?”

Older, I think. Sadder. “Huh?”

“To eat!” Nan looks between me and the server and gives him a twinkly smile.

“Oh. Yeah. Ah.” What did I just pay for while I wasn’t paying attention? “Tacos, I guess?” There are probably a dozen different variations on tacos on the menu. The server just smiles, as if he understands exactly what I need. He nods, turns with a flourish, and walks away.

Nan watches him leave, with mild interest. “Do you think he’s a bit…?” She doesn’t do the camp hand gesture, but the tone is enough, so familiar it’s almost, in a weird, sick way, nostalgic.

“You know I’m a bit?” I say.

Nan rolls her eyes. “I’m not daft.”

I think I knew that she knew. But it still creeps through me like anaesthetic, numbing my lips and freezing my tongue. She says, “You know I’ve been dead for—what is it, nearly forty years, now?”

I feel dead, too. I will my tongue to move. “I know, Nan.”

“Time doesn’t half fly.”

It does. Even when you’re not having fun, it does. I feel half-here, half-somewhere, drifting in the space in-between the knowing and not-knowing. Send help: I’ve fallen asleep and I can’t get up. “And what do you, you know. Think. About it? Me?” I ask her.

Nan slides me an amused look. “What do you care what a dead lady thinks?”

That’s the bones of it, isn’t it? Why do I care? “Because I don’t want you to hate me. To have hated me. To hate who I became. Who I am. Who I will be.” Who I always was, it just took me a while to understand it, piecing together clues and impulses like some experimental escape room in the dark. Waiting for someone to tell me I’m not wrong, not sick, not a freak. Waiting for some kind of permission from God knows who, or who-knows’s God. Or grandmother.

“I don’t hate you, chuck.” Nan says.

“But would you have hated me?” I don’t say, back then or, if you hadn’t died, but she seems to understand.

“Now, how can I answer that? Nobody can tell what might have been, if things were different,” Nan says. Then, “But no. I wouldn’t have hated you. I wouldn’t ever have hated you.”

I nod, wondering if I’m going to cry. I find it hard to, these days. Do I want her to love me, or do I want me to love me? I wipe my eyes with my fingertips anyway.

“That’s posh,” Nan says, changing the subject. She’s looking at the ring with the big garnet on my first finger. She takes my hand and I suddenly feel like, yes, I might cry, actually.

“You can have it,” I blurt out. I have the sudden clear memory of loving a turquoise costume ring of hers, and her giving it to me, far too big for my tiny kid fingers. She’s probably the reason I developed a socially inappropriate jewellery addiction.

Reading my mind again, she says, “Looks better on you, love. You always did like your tranklements.”

“So did you.” The past tense hovers over us. The hour is getting late. I wonder when Taco Bell closes, whenever we are. Do they shoo folk out at six, or like old-fashioned last orders at eleven—you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. Is it open all night, like a drive-thru, or a diner in a Tom Waits song?

I don’t want to go home. But I can’t stay here.

“We should go.” I say.

Nan tuts. “I haven’t had my taco yet.” But I know she agrees. She’s reaching for her handbag to tuck her cigarettes back inside.

The overhead light seems to dim, reflecting yellow in the chrome of the little vase in front of me.

I don’t like cut flowers. They make me feel sad. But I’m suddenly sad that no boy is ever gonna buy me a cellophane rose from a bucket in a pub. I’m sad for all the might-have-beens and missed tricks and opportunities lost and stolen. I’m sad for the might-bes and the maybes and the not-yets, too. Perhaps I’m just sad. These flowers, though—I pluck a jaunty stalk of hyacinth out of the vase—they’re never going to wilt. Leaning across the table, I gesture to Nan.

“Instead of the taco. A souvenir from home.” I thread the flower into the buttonhole on her lapel, next to the Mizpah brooch.

I try to dig a space in amongst the sad for another feeling to take root.

Nan looks down at the purple petals, then at me, and I catch myself trying to memorise the look, and stop myself sternly. Live in the now. “Penny for your thoughts?” she asks.

I smile at her. Live, now. “They’re worth a lot more than that,” I say.

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