Free The Private Parts of Women by Lesley Glaister Page A

another woman? What if they didn’t want me back?
    I could not sleep last night, and today, to occupy myself, to keep myself away from Trixie, away from the temptation to flee again, I went to Blackpool. The train was almost empty, February isn’t a Blackpool sort of month. The tall buildings along the front sulked. It had snowed in Lancashire and heaps of it slumped against the fronts of the gift shops. OPEN AT EASTER or CLOSED TILL EASTER said curled signs in the windows. The red and white-striped canopy outside a café where I stopped for coffee had torn with the weight of the snow that melted through in long, sloppy drips. I found one gift shop that was open. A man in an anorak sat by a fan-heater, eating Jaffa Cakes and watching snooker on a black-and-white television. He jumped when I entered.
    All the bright things looked sad: faded plastic buckets and spades, a net of swirly plastic balls, foam-rubber flip-flops, a half-inflated porpoise. I stood looking at a rack of dirty postcards – man with bulging swimming trunks holding fish, busty woman in bikini saying, Oooh what a whoppa ! man pulsating with pride – gulping back the tears that tried to come. Robin would have loved this shop. He would have wanted to buy something, anything, it didn’t matter what. He always wanted a bit of wherever he went to keep, my Robin.
    I bought two sticks of rock, gaudy pink with white inside and the word BLACKPOOL running through it in red letters. The man took my money morosely, hardly taking his eyes from the grey balls rolling on the grey table. He said nothing and neither did I. For a minute I felt a sort of complicitous misery that was nearly cheering.
    I went out of the fusty, almost-warmth of the shop into the blade of the wind. I crossed the road to the beach. I wore a thick sweater, a long wool coat, a woollen hat that the wind wanted, sheepskin mittens and a long scarf, but still I could feel the wind on my skin that tightened and goose-pimpled. My nipples were screwed up so tight they hurt, my ears ached and the gold of my earrings burnt cold through the perforations in my ears. Tears ran from my eyes, not of true sorrow, but only of sorry-for-myselfness. The tide was out and the beach vast and flat and empty but for a minute figure in the distance with a prancing dog.
    The brown sand was powdered with white snow which scrunched more softly under my boots than the sand. Sometimes the wind snatched up a handful of the snow and flung it in a gritty flurry in the air. I walked towards the sea where the sand was wet and brown. As I walked, each footstep blanched the sand and then, when I turned to look the footprint had filled with water. The sea moaned. Despite the wind it was not very rough, the waves were small and messy. It was no colour but grey and the foam was yellow. Gulls flew and blew like so much litter in the sky.
    I took shots of the pattern of my footprints in the sand, the snow footprints on the drier sand, the closed-up shops, the juxtapositions of lilos and snow, the torn canopy outside the café, I unwrapped a stick of rock as I walked back to the station. There was a small grey picture of Blackpool. The pink was sticky on the Cellophane. I sucked hard at the sweet mintiness as I walked until I’d sucked it into a long sharp point. It made my tongue sore. The word BLACKPOOL slid back in tiny red distorted letters where it was uncovered by my sucking.
    And now I’m back. Now what?
    Sometimes this house feels like a cage. It is night again. I’ve eaten fish and chips and drunk a pot of coffee. Stupid, now I won’t sleep again. I went to Blackpool this morning because I couldn’t sleep last night. I only went to sleep as morning came and then something woke me, suddenly, and I didn’t know where I was. It was as if something had come loose and I couldn’t catch it. Like trying to catch a dream but I was trying to catch what was real. And then I remembered. It was