Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  ‘Hush!’ Emma’s face was red with embarrassment. ‘Stop talking about that here, Ben Bamford! Suppose somebody heard?’

  ‘Come out with me tonight. Sleep with me tonight,’ Ben said clearly, narrowing his blue eyes and reaching for her hand again. ‘You know what you are, don’t you? There are two words for what you are.’

  ‘Don’t say them!’ Emma pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘You’ve called me that before, an’ it’s not true. It’s a terrible thing to say!’

  Ben, looking like an angel with his golden curls and his round blue eyes, stared straight at her and said it. Slowly and deliberately, not too loud but loud enough to be heard by his mates at the next table.

  With their laughter ringing in her ears, Emma turned and almost ran from the canteen, tears of humiliation and shame pricking behind her eyes.

  And watching her go, wondering what the fair boy could have said to distress her so, Simon Martin felt an illogical urge to leap to his feet and seize Ben by the scruff of his neck, lifting him till his feet swung clear of the floor.

  ‘You were saying, Mr Gordon?’ He composed his face into a listening expression. ‘I have a feeling the discrepancies may lie in the distribution. Could you give me the name of the local transport firm you use, once again? I think I’ll call at their offices this afternoon.’

  Simon Martin was a typical product of the now almost defunct grammar school. Captain of rugger, sixth form prefect, he had left with three A levels, bummed it around Europe for a year, then gone straight into his father’s firm. His accountancy examinations had been taken through a concentrated correspondence course, and the paper qualifications had pleased his father, a self-made man who had started a market stall with his gratuity after serving six years in the army, mostly in the Middle East.

  Not exactly a whizz kid, Simon Martin had an inborn air of assurance, of confidence, of knowing what to say at the right time and exactly how to say it. Not good-looking in a stereotyped kind of way – his eyes were too deep-set and his nose too hawk-like for that. He had married at twenty-six, been divorced at twenty-eight, and was now sharing a one-bedroomed flat in Maida Vale with a girl called Chloe.

  He had never said in so many words that he would not marry again, but when he did, and if he did, it would have to be right. And for the time being anyway, Chloe seemed to be quite happy with the way things were.

  The first thing he did when he got back to the hotel that evening was to pick up the telephone by the side of his bed and dial the number of the London flat. He was wrenching off his tie as he listened to the ringing tone, unfastening the top button of his white shirt, dying for a cigarette, and wishing for the hundredth time that he hadn’t been so firm about stopping smoking six months before.

  He heard the ringing tone, and saw in his mind’s eye the two-toned telephone on the low coffee table in front of the leather chair by the bookshelves. He knew that Chloe would be in from her job as bilingual secretary to the financial director of an export firm in the City. The flat was so tiny that with all the doors open it was possible to see into the cupboard-cum-kitchen and the bedroom leading into the windowless bathroom with its avocado tiles and shower unit.

  ‘Come on, love,’ he muttered. ‘Where are you?’

  He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the bible on the lower shelf of the bedside locker. He wondered if any of the hotel’s guests ever got around to reading it, and tried to remember the last time he had even held one in his hands.

  Some day he would tell Chloe how he sang in a church choir as a soprano with a white ruffle round his neck, he told himself, then shifted the handset to his other hand as the ringing tone went on and on.

  There was no telephone in the house where Emma lived. Once, when her father had been in regular employment for a few years, they had one installed, but it was hardly used, and when the bills stayed unpaid the telephone company sent an engineer to take it away.

  The house was on an estate, built in the fifties from the debris of rows of terraced houses, an identical twin to its semi-detached neighbour, an echo of each pair in the long winding avenue.

  When Emma got in from work that evening, John Sparrow was sitting in his usual chair by the electric fire, with all three bars full on, coughing through his twentieth cigarette of the day, staring gloomily at the television. The announcer’s face was a vivid orange shade, his shirt a bright yellow, and he appeared to be sitting in a snowstorm, but it had been like that for so long that nobody seemed to notice anything was amiss.

  At right angles to his chair the two boys, Alan and Joe, both in the acute stage of mumps, sat close together on a settee with a faded moquette cover, their faces and necks swollen to such proportions that their heads seemed to grow straight from their shoulders. They were gazing at the screen through eyes sunk into feverish slits.

  Emma went through into the kitchen and saw without surprise that the stainless-steel sink was piled high with plates and cups. She stood in the doorway and addressed the backs of three unresponsive heads.

  ‘Where’s Sharon?’

  ‘Upstairs getting ready.’ Her father said this without moving his head a fraction, the only movement about him being the spiral of smoke ascending from his cigarette.

  ‘She might have put the kettle on.’ Emma went back into the kitchen, pushed the sleeves of her green sweater up to her elbows and turned on the hot tap. The frustrated rage that sometimes caught her unawares rose up, revealing itself by the way she clattered the cups on to the draining-board. Then her natural sense of the ridiculous asserted itself. ‘Learn to co-operate with the inevitable.’ Where had she read that? She couldn’t remember, but if fitted. Oh, yes, it fitted all right.

  Women’s suffrage had been supposed to put a stop to inequality. Chinese women no longer had their feet wrapped up, but because she was the only woman in the family, apart from Sharon dolling herself up upstairs, it was taken for granted that she would see to the house. Alan was ten and Joe was eight, but already they were accepting the roles they considered life had fitted them for. Emma remembered her stepmother shuffling round the kitchen on swollen feet, handing her husband his pot of tea.

  ‘Sugar in, love?’ he would say. ‘Stirred?’

  Emma opened a large-sized packet of beefburgers, laid them in rows underneath the grill, set a tray of ‘oven-ready’ chips into the cooker, then shook frozen peas into a pan of boiling water. So much for marrow bones stewed till they set into jelly, and rice puddings cooked slowly with the nutmeg settling into a brown toffee crust on top.

  ‘Do you think you can manage to eat anything?’ she asked the silent viewing pair on the settee, and two thick necks inclined slightly forward in the affirmative.

  After checking that everything was boiling, grilling and heating up at the same time, Emma ran lightly upstairs.

  ‘You might at least have tidied the kitchen, our Sharon.’

  The small fair girl applying eye make-up in front of the dressing-table mirror winced as the mascara brush caught the corner of an eye. At sixteen, Sharon had the delicate prettiness of a cameo, with a figure that belied the stodge she was forced to eat.

  ‘There’s a ladder in your tights,’ Emma told her, and she whirled round to see.

  ‘Shit!’ she said, and the word exploding from the rosebud mouth sounded so incongruous that Emma burst out laughing.

  ‘Well, that makes a change from “flaminenry”, but love, do you have to go out tonight? Alan’s been sick in bed, so there are his sheets to do, then there’s the ironing, and I promised myself I would at least try to tidy the bedrooms.’

  Emma pulled at the ribbon holding her hair back, then pushed the long fall of brown hair behind her ears. ‘I don’t mean to nag, love, but I can’t… I can’t do it all. And Dad’s been drinking again. I can smell it on him, and where does he get the stuff from, for Pete’s sake? And what time did he come home from work? He looks as if he’s been sitting in that chair all day.’

  Sharon was ex
amining her young face critically in the mirror again.

  ‘Oh, why do I always get a flamin’ spot on my chin when I’m going somewhere special? I look awful, and don’t tell me I don’t because I do.’ She unscrewed a tube of cream and dabbed at the almost invisible spot. ‘It’s not with eating the sweets at work because I never do.’ She applied more cream, rubbing it in with her little finger. ‘A woman came in today and bought three pounds of caramels. Just imagine! Three flamin’ pounds of caramels, an’ she wasn’t spotty. Fat, but not spotty.’

  ‘Where are you going, Sharon?’

  Emma sat down on the edge of the double bed, pushing aside a tangled collection of tights, bras and tiny briefs. ‘How old is he, this Ricky? Does he know you are only sixteen? Why don’t you bring him in and let us have a look at him?’

  ‘We’re going out Bolton way to a sporting club. We’re soon there on the bike.’

  Sharon turned round, as pretty as a Victorian doll in a lace-trimmed box, her small breasts straining against the ribbed pattern of the too-tight sweater dress.

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud, don’t look like that, our Emma. I always wear a helmet. Ricky’s got one specially. He’s nice, honest he is.’ She pouted. ‘Oh, flaminenry, I know I am mean. I can feel myself being mean. I don’t like myself all that much.’ She came and pressed her lips against Emma’s cheek, leaving the imprint of a perfect cupid’s bow. ‘An’ I know I look like a punk or a tart, but Ricky likes me this way. I just want to have fun, can’t you see? Soon I’ll be getting married, then I’ll be like Mam was, slopping around in slippers with kids yelling, and nappies soaking in a bucket.’

  ‘Married!’ Emma got up quickly and backed towards the door. ‘You have to be joking! You’ve got years and years before you need to think about getting married. I haven’t given up hope myself yet!’

  Downstairs, she served the silent trio round the television, eating her own meal with Sharon at the kitchen table, a table that was no more than a flap let down from the wall. She saw the way Sharon kept turning her head, obviously listening for the sound of a motorbike in the road outside, and the way her hand holding her fork trembled a little as she raised the food to her mouth.

  Emma tried to remember the way she had been at sixteen, but it seemed a lifetime ago, not four short years. She had been a child at that age, surely? A thin child in a navy-blue skirt and blue blouse, walking home through the park with her books in a plastic bag, that being the only acceptable way to carry them that year.

  Boys? Oh, they had been around of course, but her attitude to them had been one of disgust, especially when they whistled at her. She had taught herself to walk stiffly without wiggling her behind, and she had grown her hair long so that it covered her face.

  But even then the boys had always seemed to win. With monster bikes bought on their dads’ credit cards, tearing round the roads as if to show that the whole world belonged to them. And they didn’t have the curse either. Emma rubbed the small of her back and, as the front door slammed behind Sharon’s flying figure, got on with the washing-up.

  Next time round she was going to be a fella, she told herself. Definitely.

  Simon Martin rang his Chloe again after dinner, getting no reply, then worked steadily on the papers brought from the factory until ten o’clock. Then he went downstairs to the bar and ordered a whisky and soda from a barmaid who looked as if she had materialized from a strip cartoon – high-piled hair tortured into intricate swirls, scarlet jersey-top showing rounded breasts in imminent danger of popping out of the neckline, and eyelashes sticky and beaded with navy-blue mascara. Simon warmed to her at once.

  The lounge bar was fairly crowded, but as nobody was buying rounds at that moment, Simon went into what Chloe would have called his ‘chatting-up routine’.

  ‘A bit on the quiet side tonight?’

  The barmaid leaned across the counter, causing Simon to draw in his breath sharply. ‘Yes, sir. This is alius a slack night. Must be summat good on the telly.’ She smiled, showing teeth like ivory piano keys. ‘There’s nowt keeps them out quicker than a serial on about royalty. Specially if it rakes a bit of muck up. If somebody wrote one about Prince Andrew’s sex life it would clear this place out quicker than what a dose of salts would.’ She jerked her head in the direction of a table in the corner. ‘And that lot’s not drinking bitter lemons either, and I should know because one of them’s my brother. That one snogging with the girl with red hair.’ She sniffed. ‘Find the money to spend like it grows on trees our Ben can, but ask him to give me his money of a Friday, and it’s like trying to get it from a Jew with no arms.’

  She glanced at Simon’s black hair and aquiline features and clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Trust me, sir. I hope I haven’t put my big foot in it.’

  Simon laughed, turned and recognized the fair boy he had seen arguing with the girl Emma Sparrow in the factory canteen at lunchtime. Ben was nuzzling his chin into the neck of the red-haired girl, pretending to be unfastening the buttons of her blouse.

  ‘That your brother, then?’ Simon turned back to the bar.

  ‘For my sins. He lives with me, and oh, he’s all right, really.’ She wiped invisible spillage from the counter. ‘You don’t come from these parts, do you, sir?’

  Simon shook his head. ‘Another whisky please, and get one for yourself.’

  ‘Ta very much.’ Patty Bamford, unmarried mother of a mongol girl of four, now living with a man who knocked her about when he drank too much, went reluctantly to serve a customer at the far end of the bar.

  Her face, washed once a day, with blusher rubbed into the cheek bones almost every hour, was as clear and unblemished as if she spent a small fortune keeping it so. Her eyes were bright blue, bold eyes, but lowered now as she poured herself a ginger ale.

  ‘There goes a real gentleman,’ she was telling herself, stealing a sideways glance at Simon as he sipped his drink. Not like her brother or the fella she was living with. Posh, not too posh, but with a twinkle in his eye all the same.

  Patty reached for a cigarette, the blue eyes suddenly bleak. An’ if she thought she stood half a chance she’d be twinkling right back at him. She would that an’ all.

  When Simon finally got to bed there was still no reply from the flat down in Maida Vale. And when he rang first thing in the morning, there was still no reply.

  So Chloe had stayed out all night…. Well, he had no hold over her, and it was a free country.

  Simon was waiting for the lift to take him up to Delta Dresses when Emma Sparrow came round the corner, cheeks flushed and brown eyes anguished above a long white knitted scarf wound twice round her throat.

  ‘Have you got the time, sir? Please?’ She held a hand to her side. ‘Got a stitch with running. The bus went past full and I’ve run all the way.’

  ‘Ten past eight.’ Simon pressed the bell and waited for the sign to operate, but nothing happened. He pressed it again.

  ‘Oh, no! It sticks sometimes if somebody at the top doesn’t shut the doors properly.’ Her words came out in breathless ragged jerks. ‘Excuse me, sir, but I’ll have to run up the stairs.’

  ‘Stay where you are!’ Simon demanded over a disappearing shoulder. ‘You can’t run up four flights of stairs in that state. Stay right there!’

  The stairs were steep and uncarpeted, but he took them two at a time, and as she had said the lift was there on the top floor with the doors open. He stepped quickly inside, and as it reached the ground floor and the doors opened, he almost pulled Emma inside.

  ‘Pipped at least ten people on the way up,’ he told her. ‘Must be all that running I’ve been doing in Regent’s Park.’

  Emma smiled briefly. She was still as taut as a violin string, standing there with her eyes raised as if she would will the lift to go faster.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ She spoke without looking at him. ‘That was a very kind thing to do, sir.’

  For a startled moment Simon thought she was going to cry. He couldn’t take h
is eyes from her. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. There was something about this factory girl that reached right out to his emotions. Vulnerable, that was the word. Vulnerable and yet somehow fierce. Determination was in the line of her lifted chin, and he wanted to tell her that even if she had been a minute or two late he would have seen that it didn’t matter.

  He found himself wanting to stretch out a hand to her, to tell her that nothing in the world was worth the terrible anxiety he could almost feel emanating from her tense little body.

  ‘It’s not just the fear of being late, is it, Emma Sparrow?’ he wanted to say. ‘Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?’

  And if he had, how foolish he would have been. He had never been on a management course but the first thing his father had taught him was that the gulf between management and staff can on occasions be narrowed, but never crossed.

  ‘Thank you, sir.’ Emma rushed forward as the lift doors opened, one hand already extended to the clocking-in machine on the wall outside the glass-fronted office.

  Not one of them had got up that morning. Not the boys, still sick and sorry for themselves, but not too sick to eat the toast she had carried upstairs. Not Sharon, who lay humped over to her side of the double bed refusing to budge, nor her father, leaning on one elbow and coughing through the inevitable cigarette.

  ‘You’ll lose your job, Dad.’

  Emma felt a twinge of shame now for the way she had stood there, bullying, shouting, hearing her voice shouting and not being able to stop herself. ‘You’ve had so much time off, they’ll sack you, and then where will you go?’

  ‘There’s other firms wanting drivers.’ John Sparrow drew smoke down into his lungs, then coughed till his eyes ran tears. ‘Besides, I got the sack anyroad. Sent me home yesterday.’ He held the cigarette neatly between finger and thumb, staring down at it morosely as if regretting the loss of the inch he had smoked.

  ‘Dad!’ Emma had dug her nails into the palms of her hands to stop them snatching the burning cigarette from him and stubbing it out in the big glass ashtray by the side of his bed. ‘You can’t have lost that job! Not already! Not after them taking you on knowing you had a record? And why do you smoke when you must know it’s killing you? Why?’