Picture a cavernous room decorated in varying shades of 'broon', lit with fringed table lamps while outside rain rattles down the glass like bead curtains. A small chipmunk of a woman in an iron perm and a green check nylon overall is sitting in an arm chair. This is my mother, thirty years ago, when I'm home in Scotland on a visit.
She reaches for her packet of Embassy Regal and lights one. She clicks her lighter shut, nipping a piece of burning tobacco off the end of her cigarette. It drops on to her overall, singeing the nylon. She pinches it between her horny asbestos fingers and rubs the ash into the material.
'Marion, do you mind Senga Watson?' she asks through a haze of smoke.
I look at what I can see of her, blankly.
'No,' I answer, squinting as she blows smoke into my eyes. I shuffle further along the carpet, out of her range but still hugging the warmth of the fire - the room, designed and built by my father who graduated from the Aircraft Hanger Rectangular School of Architecture, is Arctic.
'Sure you do - you must remember her. She lived up Park View near your auntie Irene.'
'No, mum, I don't.'
'Och you do so. Her sister was in your class at school.'
I think back to the freezing, even larger, rectangular aircraft hanger of a classroom in which I spent most of my childhood. It had enormous windows, all running with condensation set high in the once whitewashed brickwork, cunningly designed to prevent us from looking outside. Not that there was anything to see - only flat, barren countryside dotted with clumps of stunted trees which keeled to and fro from the force of the wind like a gang of drunkards coming home from the pub.
Inside we listened to the draughty window panes whistle and watched little drips of water trickle down the wall into little pools here and there before seeping through the splintery floorboards to the classroom underneath. Then we fidgeted and sucked our pencils, and prepared for the exam that would decide our future: Those who passed went to the newly built secondary school in town, while those who failed remained in the village to spend what was left of their school days doing woodwork and cookery - useful skills for a life on the dole.
'Do you mind of her?' my mother persists.
I don't.
'There wasn't any Watson in my class, mum.'
'Naw, naw - her sister wasnae a Watson, she was a lassie Coulter - her mother married again - a chap from Shotts.'
I vaguely remember a washed-out blonde girl whose hair had curled extravagantly in two bunches on either side of her pasty face.
'Who, Jessie Coulter?' I ask. She sat with the Lindas at the back of class while I sat at the front next to a couple of slow, specky boys, all of us nursing the hot water pipe that ran along the wall. I used to kick off my leaky shoes and, scorning chilblains, warm my damp toes on the pipes, tingeing the classroom with the steamy smell of soggy, none too clean laundry. Jessie had plump little legs with the white socks that never wrinkled - while I wore elastic bands to keep mine up and still they slouched around my bony ankles in a sulky, grey puddle.
'Aye - that's right - Jessie - she had lovely hair that wee girl,' my mother says approvingly, then glares at me over the burning tip of her cigarette - three glinting eyes all drawing an unfavourable comparison between the memory of Jessie's shining locks and my own bunch of tangleweed. This was, remember, the Seventies.
'Well then, I do know Jessie Coulter but I can't remember her sister. How old was she?' I ask.
'She was ages with our Nellie.'
'Mum, I don't know any of Nellie's friends - she's about ten years older than me.'
My mother tut-tuts impatiently and leans over to the fire to brush the ash off her cupped hand. She asks me for the ashtray.
I pass her a brass elephant's foot bearing the name of a proprietary cough syrup, a relic from the days when my mother worked in the local chemist's, and one of a pair that stands astride the carriage clock on the mantelpiece.
'You do so know her - you're just not thinking. She used to work in the Co-op Shoe shop, then she left to get married. To a Catholic,' she adds wryly.
This doesn't make it any clearer, but I try to seem interested. 'What about her anyway?'
'Oh, it was a terrible scandal at the time,' she continues 'her mother took i hard when the lassie got pregnant. I remember I met Agnes McGlinchey up the street and she told me...
I try to interrupt. 'But what about this Senga..?'
'Well, I'm telling you - she married a Catholic, says my mother, indignantly. 'They had a big, fancy wedding - in the chapel of course - Senga wearing white even though she must have been about five months gone - six bridesmaids - a photographer from Edinburgh. In my day we'd never have had the nerve to wear white, though mind you, she was a lovely bride... I gave her a nice wee shower cloth.' she added winsomely, pleased with her own past generosity.
'What the hell's a shower cloth?' I ask.
'Och you know - it's a kind of tablecloth thing - with embroidery - you spread it over your scones and sandwiches to keep them fresh. I got it in Glasgow, at Goldbergs.'
I can't imagine that in 1976, any pregnant, teenage bride, starting off her married life in her mother's spare room, would be giving her husband high tea when he came in from the factory every night and covering it with a 'shower cloth' - but I didn't point this out.
'I still don't know her,' I say.
'Och Marion you're that vague - try and think - she used to pal about with the lassie McNeil, surely you mind her, she used to live round in the Dardanelles, near your granny. She had funny teeth.'
'Emily MacNeill didn't have funny teeth!'
'Don't be stupid. No her - I meant Senga had the funny teeth.'
I shook my head helplessly. 'Sorry mum, I’ve been away since I was sixteen,' I remind her. 'I can't remember - I never knew half of these people.'
'Och you would know this girl if you saw her. She was tall.'
'No.'
'Curly hair.'
'No'
'Dark, curly hair'.
'No, I still don't know her.'
'She wore a yellow anorak'
'Mum, how would I know her by the colour of her anorak?'
'She was in the Rural.'
'Mum, I've never been to anything at the Rural. You don't even belong to the Rural. I really have no idea who you're talking about.' I say firmly, totally fed up with the whole conversation.
'Och you do so.' she rasps angrily then, in victory, her eyes light up. 'I know - she used to take you at the Brownies!'
'The Brownies! God mum, I only went for a couple of months.'
'She used to take you at the Brownies and she went on that camping trip with you. Mind that time you went to Loch Lomond and you came back covered in midgie bites?'
That I couldn't forget, but as for the people I'd gone with... I try to think and remember a fair-haired girl who had shocked us all by having a spectacular fit in the middle of campfire songs.
'Was she an epileptic?' I asked.
'Who?' said my mother.
'Senga Watson,' I am beginning to get really annoyed now. 'Isn't that who you're talking about?'
'Naw, naw, she was Salvation Army - that's why they were that upset when she married the Catholic. Did I no just tell you!'
I sigh loudly. But that did ring a bell. There was another girl with lank, dishwater-brown hair and freckles who had run around blowing her whistle and generally trying to organise us when all we wanted to do was muck about.
'Did she have freckles?' I ask, sure that it must be the same person.
'Aye.' said my mother nodding contentedly, 'Freckles and funny teeth.'
'..and she used to play tambourine with the Salvation Army band?'
'That's right - that's her!' my mother was jubilant. Huston, we have contact.
'Oh so that's Senga!' I say, relieved to have put a face to the name, although her teeth had looked pretty normal to me.
'So, what about her then?.
'Deed!' said my mother with relish.
‘What?’
‘Aye, deed. Dopped deed. Only 32 and had a massive heart attack at the Cricket club dance. Nancy Adamson told me when I was up getting the papers.' She purses her lips and grinds out her cigarette in the ashtray with an air of ghoulish satisfaction. 'Her husband's taking it awfae bad...'
'Well, he would, I suppose.' I murmur.
'Two lovely kids an' all', says my mother mournfully.
Recently divorced at the unseemly age of 21, I know where this is leading - another lecture on marriage and children.
'...and if you don't hurry up and settle down, it'll be too late for you.' Her words cut like a knife through butter.
'Well it's too bloody late for her too as well if she's dead, isn't it?'
'Oh that reminds me,' she peers at me though her half-closed eyes, 'Speaking of Nancy Adamson, do you mind of her daughter?'
and repeat...
I just heard a Peter Kay sketch in which he repeats this almost word for word but with a Northern Accent. I guess it's one of those universal truths. Mothers love reminding you of people you have no memory of just so they can tell you they've snuffed it.
