Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  ‘But you can’t get engaged. Not at sixteen.’ Emma was so tired, so overwrought, so filled with despair, that she was totally unable to get even the priorities right. Her dad going to prison, her stepsister getting engaged to a boy they had never met – what was the difference? ‘I thought you said you just wanted to have fun?’ She rescued the tea bag, dropped it into a mug and poured hot water on it without waiting to boil up the kettle again. ‘What brought this on?’

  ‘I love him, Emma.’ Sharon sat down at the table and curled both hands round the steaming mug. ‘He’s nice, really nice. He has a good job too.’

  ‘What?’ Emma sat down opposite to her, her exhausted face as milky pale as the weak tea.

  Sharon’s blue eyes filled suddenly with unexpected tears. ‘He goes round houses putting them PVC doors and windows in. Everybody’s having them how to save on fuel bills.’ Her pretty face crumpled. ‘Oh, our Emma. Will our dad really have to go to prison?’ The tears overflowed and ran down her cheeks, leaving a trail of navy-blue mascara. ‘How can they put him in a cell with his bad chest? What will he be like if he catches cold? How will they know that he has to have the steam kettle going when he’s bad?’ Pushing the mug of tea aside, she spread her arms wide on the table and lowered her head on to them, sobs shaking her slim shoulders. ‘I didn’t mean it, what I said, I’m not ashamed of him really. Not really.’ She lifted a blotched face. ‘I leave you with it all, our Emma. I go out and leave you with all the work. An’ I’m not really crying now because of… because of our dad. Inside me I’m so happy I could burst. What’s wrong with me? It’s like being glad and sad all at the same time, with me the important one all the time. Perhaps I should start going to church again. I’ve never been since I was confirmed, and I felt proper holy then.’

  ‘Holiness never lasts, love.’ Emma got up and rinsed out the two mugs, then gave Sharon’s shoulder a little squeeze. ‘Come on, chuck. Let’s go to bed. Maybe it won’t look so bad in the morning. Maybe now they’ve got rid of Dad they won’t report it. Some folks are kind….’

  When they were in bed, curled up together like spoons in a box, Emma stared up into the darkness. Sharon engaged to be married. Little Sharon, who a short while ago was at school, a reluctant student, giggling with the boys and walking home with the girlfriend of the moment. Sharon, who could recite the Top of the Pops backwards, and who believed the confession stories she read. Married. Emma sighed and gently shifted her position.

  Where would they live? Certainly not here, there just wasn’t the room. How could they possibly afford to rent even the smallest flat? And this boy who was just a barely glimpsed face beneath a crash helmet. Hardly husband material….

  It had been a stupid thing to do, rushing out like that, hoping and praying that somehow she could have got one of the fitters to remove the stolen parts from the van. If anyone had seen her there in the darkness, beating on the big doors with her fists, she could have got into trouble. And now all she could possibly do was sit tight and pray that a miracle would take place.

  ‘Some folks are kind,’ she had told Sharon, but that sort of kindness didn’t come often. Like Mr Gordon, angry with her for being late – business came first. Profits, accounts that balanced, they were what mattered, and a workman on the make had to be made an example of. She knew that.

  Through the thin wall dividing the two back rooms Emma could hear her father coughing. She heard the springs of his bed creak, and imagined she heard the click of his cigarette lighter.

  ‘Nothing’s happened yet,’ she told Ben the next night. ‘And with every day that passes we can feel safer. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  They had been to the Sporting Club and Ben had played snooker whilst she drank Coke and gossiped in the lounge bar with the girls. Now they were sitting in his shabby car, parked on the spare land earmarked for more council houses before the enforced cuts in council spending. They had moved to the back seat to be more comfortable.

  ‘I blame your dad for leaving himself wide open,’ Ben told her, nuzzling his curly head into her neck. ‘He should have worked it in a pair so that his mate could have covered for him. Anything knocked off should have a double chance. Anybody knows that.’

  Emma sat up straight. ‘You seem to know a lot about it. Ben? You wouldn’t – you wouldn’t get involved in anything like that? Would you?’

  A light from a street lamp showed her his face, his eyes with their stubbly eyelashes glinting with laughter, his wide mouth parted over small even teeth.

  ‘Oh, Em.’ He shook his head from side to side. ‘Course I wouldn’t.’ He pulled her close and tangled his fingers in the soft weight of her hair. ‘I wouldn’t get caught, if that’s what you mean, but everybody’s on the fiddle. Your dad’s too old, that’s his problem.’ He slid a hand inside her coat. ‘The defence will say it was what they call a desperation offence, him being sick and trying to keep his family together. You’re acting as if he was one of them bank robbers carrying a gun. What he’s done’s nothing, Em. Oh, forget it and relax.’

  ‘Have you take anything from work, Ben?’ Emma took hold of his wandering hand and pushed it firmly away. ‘Because if you have, you’ll get caught.’ She wriggled free. ‘That’s why Mr Martin is up from London. It’s all over the factory. Ben! Those dresses, the skirts and jackets, they cost seventy pounds to buy in the shops. Do you know that? They’re high-quality stuff, Ben, not trash. And the satin blouses, they’re seventeen pounds each. Mrs Kelly told me. A girl singed one when she was pressing it, and Mr Gordon had her in tears. Ben! You’re not even listening to me!’

  She could feel his heart thudding, and his mouth searched sweetly for her own. He was clean-smelling, and even as she tried to push him away there was a part of her not wanting to. After the glum atmosphere in the house, with her father sitting chain-smoking, the television blaring, and the boys fighting and pushing at each other on the settee, it had been heaven to get away from it all. To laugh and be accepted as Ben’s girl, to share in his obvious popularity, to feel young and carefree, and now to respond to his kisses.

  ‘Please, Em, let me… oh, please.’ He was moaning now, his hand underneath her skirt, persistent, moving.

  ‘Bloody tights,’ he said, then groaned as she moved and pushed him away.

  ‘What’s wrong with you? You’re not normal, do you know that? I wouldn’t harm you, Em. I’ve got some rubbers. I know what I’m doing. Why won’t you trust me? Why have you to be different? An’ you’re not one of them frigid birds, so don’t pretend different.’

  He was sulking now, searching his pocket for cigarettes as Emma straightened her skirt and pulled her sweater down, trying to tuck it back into the waistband. She could feel her heart beating wildly and felt a sudden urge to pull his head down to her breasts and hold him there as she stroked his thick hair.

  That was all she wanted really – to hold and be held. To assuage the hopelessness she felt for the way things were. But that was naïve, even she knew that, and maybe Ben was right, maybe she was abnormal.

  ‘Perhaps you’re one of them that only fancies other women,’ Ben said, and she laughed, then immediately was serious.

  ‘I couldn’t. Not here.’ She tried to explain. ‘Not in the back of the car with folks walking past over the road.’ She buttoned her coat. ‘I’m not a prude, Ben. I feel what you feel.’ She sought for the right words. ‘Maybe not as bad, but I … oh, if I decided to do that, I would have to have thought it through. I would want to feel that there was something real between us.’

  ‘You mean like me asking you to marry me?’

  ‘Not even that. But more, well, more of a relationship.’ She rubbed at the steamed-up window, turning her face away from him. ‘I don’t mind, but I know you go out with other girls when I have to stay in. An’ if ever we made love proper, then it would have to be just you and me. For as long as it lasted, anyway.’ She reached for the door handle, despising herself for the next question, but asking it just the same. �
�Do you … with the other girls you go out with? I mean … do they?’

  ‘Every man Jack of ’em,’ Ben said, coming to join her in the front of the car, his good humour completely restored, his blue eyes sparkling with mischief.

  ‘Oh, Ben ….’ Emma shook her head in mock despair. ‘I never know when to believe you. Not about what you’ve just said, nor about … well, about what goes on at work. Sometimes I think it’s just big talk, then I’m not sure.’

  ‘Then you’ve nowt to worry about, have you?’ Ben said, as he let in the clutch.

  ‘You come to a stage,’ Emma told herself, ‘when you just can’t worry any more. It’s there, the worry, but somehow it has got pushed to a numb part of your mind. Another week, say, and if nothing happens, then Dad has got away with it.’

  She was at a stripping machine, carefully guiding the braid trim round the collarless neck of a jacket, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly and the unruly strand of hair falling forward over her face. ‘Maybe, just maybe, at Dad’s place there is a kind man with a Father Christmas mentality, who has decided to overlook the spare parts in the back of the van.’ It was tricky work, but long practice still left her active mind free to wander. ‘And Ben. It would be just like him to let me think he was on the fiddle, just as he tries to make me believe he’s God’s gift to women. And you can’t love him or you would be gnashing your teeth with jealousy at the very thought. No, you don’t love him, but if you stopped seeing him, how dreary life would be. He’s generous and fun, such fun to be with, and maybe he really likes you fighting him off all the time. If what he says is true about the other girls he goes out with, then at least you’re a change. And they say a change is as good as a rest.’

  Simon Martin, wandering round the big workroom, saw her bending over the circular machine, and had to restrain himself from walking over to stand by her chair. He was leaving early that day to drive down to London for the weekend, but he felt again the illogical desire to speak to Emma Sparrow and offer help where he was not even sure that help was needed. He said her name quietly to himself, and thought how it suited her. Brown and small, with that soft wing of hair partly concealing her lovely face. She stuck out from the rest of the girls like a flower on a muck midden.

  ‘On Monday we’ll have the invoices out, going back for the past two years,’ he told Mr Gordon. ‘But I don’t see how we can cut staff yet. Not with the new set of orders in.’ He grinned. ‘The country is supposed to be in the doldrums, but it seems that women can still find the money for high-quality clothes.’

  ‘They say that northern women don’t know how to dress, but I know better.’ Harry Gordon’s smile was like that on a wicked grinning gargoyle. ‘Make some of your London lot look as if they’re dressed by Oxfam. Aye, Lancashire women know a bit o’ good when they sees it right enough. Mind how you go. There was fog forecast on the motorway, but not till you get past Birmingham.’ He pushed a heavy pair of horn-rimmed spectacles back up the bridge of his nose. ‘That’s another thing you London lot have wrong. Weather. It might be a bit windier up ’ere, but at least we can breathe. Like living in a sauna down yonder. No wonder tha’s all pasty-faced.’

  Simon pressed his foot down on the accelerator, keeping the car at a steady seventy down the M6 and on to the M1. He had telephoned Chloe to say he would be back about eight, but when he let himself into the flat in Maida Vale he thought at first it was empty.

  ‘In here, Simon.’

  Chloe’s voice came from the bedroom, and when Simon walked through from the living-room she was sitting up at the side of the bed, reaching down for her shoes with the guilty expression of a housewife who has been caught resting when she thought she should have been rushing around with duster and polish.

  ‘No meal for your lord and master?’ Simon waited until he had kissed her with lingering thoroughness before he asked the question. ‘I drove straight down without stopping, and I only had a cheese butty at lunch time. I’m starving.’

  There was no need for Chloe to apologize, but she started explaining in a rather breathy voice that she had been kept late at the office, that the tube was so crowded she let one go and waited for the next. That she had been too tired to do the weekend shopping, that she had thought maybe they could do it together in the morning and go out to eat that evening….

  ‘But of course we’ll go out, love.’ Simon took off his jacket. ‘Just let me get out of this suit and into something a bit more casual and we’ll go right away.’ He went into the avocado bathroom, leaving the door ajar so that he could talk through the opening. ‘Okay, are you, love?’

  ‘Why do you ask that?’

  He moved back from the washbowl to see Chloe sitting on the dressing-table stool, doing nothing. Staring at herself and doing absolutely nothing. He frowned. ‘You’ve never asked me how it went yet.’

  ‘How what went?’ Her voice sounded flat and unlike her.

  Simon ran the hot water in the green bowl and began to lather his hands. ‘My trip to the land of tripe and onions.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Pretty good. I like the friendliness, and the warmth. The lack of reserve and the sincerity.’ He slipped easily into dialect. ‘When they call a spade a spade up there they don’t mean it’s a bloody shovel.’

  No reply from Chloe. No laugh. No nothing. Just the back of a head viewed from the half-open door as she sat still before the dressing-table mirror.

  ‘Now, come on, love. What’s it all about?’ Simon waited until they were sitting opposite each other at a corner table in the Greek restaurant, just a few minutes’ walk away from the flat.

  ‘What’s all what about?’

  Chloe was breaking Greek bread into small pieces, tearing at it with fingers trembling. Simon felt a sinking feeling beneath his ribs. He waved the wine waiter away telling him to come back later, then, reaching across the cutlery and the red candle in a brandy glass, he took Chloe’s hand in his own.

  His Chloe was a big, smiling girl, easy to know and easy to live with. The daughter of an English father and an American mother, she had a slow, attractive drawl in her voice and a disconcerting way of voicing what she considered to be unpalatable truths about herself. ‘Look at me, honey,’ she had once said to Simon. ‘Practically boobless, and with freckles on my back as big as saucepan lids. Hair like a frizzed-out Jesus freak, and teeth as big as tombstones.’

  ‘Fishing for compliments again?’ Simon always said when she was in that self-disparaging mood.

  But now her distress was genuine. The green of her silky polo jumper, worn beneath a smock-like brown and green dress, accentuated the pallor of her face, and her eyes when she raised them were shadowed and ringed with dark lines that owed nothing to her eyebrow pencil.

  ‘You’re pregnant.’ Simon nodded and smiled. ‘So it wasn’t the dose of ’flu you had three weeks ago making you miss.’ He squeezed her hand lying listless in his own. ‘So – we’ll get married. Come on, love. Don’t look like that. You knew it was just a matter of time. Chloe? You didn’t think I would throw you out and send you back to your momma, surely? I’ll go and see about a special licence or whatever you do, and we’ll be married next weekend. You don’t want a big do with your parents flying over from the States and two friends from the office in primrose yellow, do you? You always said that when we got round to it we’d have a quiet trip to a Register Office. Suits me, love. You know that.’

  The waiter brought two small plates of fried whitebait and arranged the fish knives and forks before moving away. Simon picked up his fork and motioned to Chloe to do the same.

  ‘Come on, sweetie. You have to eat for two now. Okay?’

  He wasn’t sure how he felt. One part of him was excited, exuberant almost. The thought of being a father tickled his male ego, even though he was already accepting the fact that a lot of adjustments would have to be made. The flat with its one bedroom and no hall to park a pram in was far too small. With the money he was still paying to Ellen, his
first wife, and the difficulty of getting a mortgage when there was nothing to sell, he’d be hard pushed. He trickled lemon juice over the tiny silver fishes. Still, they’d manage, and maybe his old man would help out a bit. Simon imagined the look on his father’s face when he told him he was going to be a grandfather and smiled, suddenly excited again.

  He was totally unaware of the fact that Chloe was sitting quite still, making no move to pick up her fork, just sitting there watching him, with an unfathomable expression in her eyes.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to jump up and kiss me, or even call for a bottle of champagne or something? Or are you too busy totting up a balance sheet in that computer mind of yours?’

  Chloe’s tone was light; she was smiling, but the smile was at variance with the despair showing on her face. She leaned forward a little. ‘I’ve read books where the expectant father goes white with shock, then gets down on the carpet and buries his head in the expectant mother’s lap. I’ve even read them where he slaps the little woman around the face, calls her a stupid, careless bitch, then goes out and gets drunk.’ Her smile was brilliant. ‘But I don’t recall ever reading one where the father-to-be does private sums in his head, then trickles lemon juice over his supper whilst telling her that things will work out, at the same time as urging her to do that crazy thing and eat for two.’ The smile vanished. ‘My God, Simon. If ever I’d had any doubts whether what I did was the right thing – not that I had – they’d have disappeared right now.’ To her dismay, the tears she had not shed welled up in her eyes and ran slowly down her cheeks.

  ‘What did you do, Chloe?’ Simon knew the answer before he asked the question.

  ‘I had an abortion, Simon.’

  Her chin was held high as she made no attempt to wipe away the tears.

  ‘That was why you could not reach me by telephone at the beginning of the week. Because that is where I was. I stayed over one night, and came home the next day. The second day mooching round the flat, then back to work. Oh, yes, it’s as simple as that.’