By Ted Naughton
Ada
Loves her life.
She can weave a thousand and nine tales,
Drinks gulps of gin and orange.
‘Lemonade? Go onnnn!’
Her glass in my shaking hand.
She’s my aunt.
She knows I’m queer before I do.
Hilarious,
My pain is.
But kind too.
She treats me like one of the girls,
And I adore her.
She screams back at her husband in the middle of the wet street .
Dumps her mister
On the cobbles
Drops one of her heels.
Staggers….
Then changes her name.
Ada passes away,
And Alma appears with her new fit fellah,
She shows him off
And brushes him off.
And goes for another…quick drink.
Yes.
She appalled my mother.
Enthralled me.
My mother huffed at the sight of her.
Jealous at the drama of the woman.
‘Ahh that one,’ my Irish grandad said,
‘Would drink the alcohol off a sore leg.’
My aunt
Alma,
Took my mother out shopping and when they got back
Lifted her frock to show her the roll of silk she’d wrapped around her like Cleopatra on Coronation Street.
Bursting into the men’s saloon hours later in her new summer dress,
My mum’s slithering hiss said it all .
Alma told me of the cocky rent man
Who offered to smear her arrears if she took him upstairs.
‘I didn’t’ she laughed,
Throwing her head back and then looked at me in the eye to make it clear-she did.
I wanted a burly rent man to lead me up to the bedroom to settle the score.
Too.
She knew it. And it tickled her.
Did she laugh at her camp little nephew ?
Did she smirk at my closested shame?
Join in with the sniggers at my self loathing, at my teenage Hell ?
Yes, she did, yes she did. She did.
Ted Naughton (he/him) is a gay poet who lives far, far out in the boggy woods with his rescue dogs and his demons.
