Three Blind Mice by
Caron Freeborn (2001)
Recommended by Naomi
This weekend, family has
been high in my mind.
My uncle died. He was a
gentle, gentle man. That gentleness is the main thing I recall right now (well,
and that he ate his tea very slowly, which became something of a standing joke
among the relatives – ah, those little foibles, always jumped on and
exaggerated in a family). I’ll be going back to Norwich for the first time in
nearly two years, and seeing people I haven’t seen for even longer, not since
my own father’s funeral in 2006. That’s how family goes as you get older, I
suppose. If you don’t have children of your own, the word becomes ever
increasingly synonymous with rot and loss. Slowly, those people who knew you as
a barely-formed, instinctive thing depart:
the character you were before self-consciousness, before wanting to impress
friends and lovers, before the branding iron of the day-to-day burned the skin.
What has this to do with Three Blind Mice? Nothing, really. It
has a family in it, the Spences, but then most books have a significant family in
it somewhere, even if it is one in
absentia. It is about a working class family, but the differences between
the Spences’ version of working class and the Leeches’ version of working class
are such that I might as well compare my family to the Tudors. The Spences live
in the East End, call each other the c-bomb all the time, and indulge in the
odd bit of arson and GBH. We, er, didn’t.
Although Three Blind Mice is more thoughtful than a TV show such as Shameless,
I do get a little edgy with works like this. When class is a central part of a
book – and it often is with working-class authors, in a way it normally isn’t
for other classes – it’s a difficult thing to get right. As Jude wrote in Week Fourteen, Jeanette Winterson is very skilled at honestly unpicking her roots
while managing not to stereotype, or to come across with a massive chip on her shoulder. I also think the first series of The Royle Family did this very well.
Apart from the major signifier of their house décor, identity was
expressed incrementally, via tiny details. My favourite vignette is where
Twiggy comes round to the house, to flog some cheap Wash ‘n’ Go; he says it’s ‘like in the shops, but there’s Arabic
writing on the bottles.’ Most families can relate to incidents like these. Another
example is the brilliant scene where Nanna Royle gets giddy at seeing a woman
from Droylsden undergo a makeover on This
Morning (‘Droylsden’s only ten minutes from me’). Nannas from Lancashire to
Berkshire might do this. Taken individually, the incidents of The Royle Family are widely relatable;
taken together, they paint an effective and human picture of a family who are,
both economically and culturally, working-class.
At a time when the
working-class is demonized by government, one could argue that it’s harder to write
these natural depictions. Caroline Aherne and Craig Cash might, in 2013, think
twice about creating Jim Royle. They may, for example, worry that they were
propagating the myth that all people on benefits are ‘scroungers’, or simply
think that an audience would not sympathise with a family who didn’t
do much paid work, but who did watch a lot of telly.
Caron Freeborn was writing
Three Blind Mice at the time when the
grating Guy Ritchie fad for working-class gangsters was still flaring, and
her book bears the mark of this. The main plot – which, until the end, is
mainly a framing device for the issues she wants to explore rather than acting
as a strong spine to the book – is debt collection gone awry, violent
confrontation, stool pigeons and fall guys. This, in itself, is pretty Mitchell-brothers-in-Eastenders fare, but what Freeborn does
well is – as in The Royle Family – humanizing
the Spences through tiny details. I particularly enjoyed Darren (or ‘Spence’, the
brother, and main hard nut of the book) and his almost constant observations of
life’s minutiae.
Ben got a Mars out. Unwrapped it slow, more than what
was natural.
Fucking nail varnish though – that white stuff what made
out like it weren’t meant to show, but it was.
Rosie, the spiky sister,
is the main focus of the book. Much of the story concentrates on her
relationship with Alex, a rather earnest middle-class substance misuse worker.
About a third of the way through, the dynamic between the pair is explored.
She offered him the glass, but when he went to take it,
instinctively she refused to let go; he swore under his breath but leaned
forward to sip as she held it. Rosie wiped her thumb across his lips.
‘Thank
you’.
Soon, their
domination-submission dynamic is expressed sexually. Freeborn writes this
aspect very believably; it’s far from the millionaire-in-sex-dungeon stuff.
Instead, it’s often messy and instinctual, Rosie and Alex getting off on
everyday circumstances such as muddy walks as well as via their more theatrical
situations. Curiously, few of these scenes are really sexually explicit. I wonder, if Freeborn
was writing Three Blind Mice in a
post-Fifty Shades world, whether she
would have written (or been encouraged to write) in a more detailed and overtly
erotic prose style.
The hurt gleefully suffered by Alex
is in contrast to the fate of the most interesting character in the book for me,
Ben. Ben is Darren’s friend, and has been in love with Rosie for as long as he
can remember (although has never got anywhere with her). He’s not a
particularly pleasant person – racist and sexist, to start with – but has
flashes of self-awareness and real poignancy.
At this rate, him and Spence’d end up two lonely old gits, off down
The Mice every night with no-one giving a toss if they got off their heads.
Mixed up with Darren in the
shadowy criminal netherworld, he suffers a horrific facial injury. Unlike the
middle-class Alex, he’s not playing at pain, and nor can he cover up his
wounds.
He touched the scars. Felt horrible, they did, like he
was growing extra skin, with lumps underneath it. Him and Spence had took the
piss something chronic out of Paul Carter for his acne at school, even now he
was called Crater Face. They’d call him [Ben] something soon, if they never
already.
[…]
‘Rosie, what do they call me?’
She never made out for one second like she didn’t know
what he was on about.
‘Frankenstein,’ she said. Looked right at him. ‘Franky.
Won’t be long before they’re calling you it to your face.’
Like my uncle with his
leisurely eating habits, then.
Ben’s own family comes second very much to how
he feels about Rosie and Darren; they are his people, his safe space in the
world, even though his involvement with them ends up being far from safe.
And that’s, I suppose, how
I want to wind up this rather rambling post, a post that (sorry) has been far
less about the book and far more about my own tricky few days. For Naomi has
been a very good friend to me over the last near-decade. Absolutely unshockable, she rallies round during difficult times, and her
help does more than to tackle the problem in hand. I’ve always believed in
myself that extra half an inch after a conversation with her.
For years now I’ve seen more
of friends like Naomi than of any family member. So, friends, family: the
distinction is a matter for semantics.
