DeLorean befuddled Time. Her real name was as plain as her life, but she was a rather exotic creature. She had been a lovely baby, the only girl and the youngest after two boys. The trouble was that the boys didn’t like her loveliness, especially one of them who would sneak to her cot and pick chunks out of her face when no-one was looking. Then one day he hit her over the head with a metal toy car, leaving her permanently brain damaged – making her grow up to be ‘backward’ as my mum described it.
The car from ‘Back to the Future’ that I’ve named her after wasn’t yet known to me when I first met DeLorean, because the film hadn’t come out yet. I met her in the equally futuristic year of 1984. I was 8 and she was 20 (but apparently 8 in her mind), and so we were set up to play together. I was instantly drawn to her. She looked a bit like Glenda Jackson with dark bobbed hair, and she twitched her head like a ‘Planet of the Apes’ ape, with a big, heavy, often open mouth to match. She carried with her invisible elements of the era she was born, a kind of Una Stubbs teenagerish gingham front-tie crop top with rolled up jeans rolling about in a haystack, or a young housewife making a bed in one of my Ladybird books. Despite these being in her essence, she was in fact wearing the child’s clothes she may have had when she was the age of her presumed maturity now, adorning a big hunched body with hairy legs going into her ankle socks.
I’d always imagined myself to have dark bobbed hair when I was 20, so it was almost like my future self combined with my own child’s mind had taken corporeal form. Except she didn’t really have a child’s mind, she was brain damaged. And we didn’t really play; I just went with her every time she had to make another round of tea.
Her mum was my mum’s older ex-stepsister, Ann. She had recently come back into my mum’s life owing to some adult drama and intrigue that I can’t divulge here, but it was imposed on my mum, and she dealt with it by trying to like it. Ann was like a good-looking version of Margaret Thatcher, all peach and pearlescence, flowery blouses and talcum powder. However, her marzipan coating formed over a spiky frame; she used to prick my mum with pins.
“You haven’t finished it,” said DeLorean, referring to the dreg of tea in my cup. In my world, it was normal to leave a dreg of tea, but in her world you were supposed to drink it. I was scared she was going to make me drink it, and because I was so taken in by her, I would have, even though the thought of drinking cold tea has always horrified me. Luckily it seemed she was merely making a statement and she went straight ahead and popped a tea bag on top of the dreg (this still disturbed me a bit). She then had an idea. We should get our mums to give us some money and we should go to the shop to buy my mum a card.
On the way home my mum started ranting, “They use her as a bloody skivvy!” which is very much what my mum used to be in between pin pricks. Then I got told off because I’d allowed DeLorean to get her a card when it was Ann’s birthday! “Bloody embarrassin’” it was. Of course, that’s why we had visited, I’d forgotten about that.
Poor DeLorean, perhaps being 20 and 8, she’d got a bit confused as to who her mum was, as well as what birthdays were all about.
She was matter-of-fact while I was excited as we procured these funds. I think we said we wanted some sweets and they fell for it, so off we wandered to the shop, which was safe of course because DeLorean was 20. We came back with an old-fashioned card of pink and yellow flowers. I have no idea what we wrote in that card but we proudly presented it to my mum, and then shortly after the visit came to an end.
