Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  ‘It’s nothing. Honest. Anyone would think the needle had gone through my head, not my finger, and anyway, who told you?’

  Emma had answered the knock at the front door at ten o’clock that night to see Ben Bamford standing there, his fair hair like a halo round his head, his jeans so tight-fitting they could almost have been a second skin. Beneath his brown leather jacket he wore a polo-necked sweater she couldn’t remember having seen before, exactly matching the vivid blue of his eyes.

  ‘You look gorgeous,’ she told him as she let him in. ‘An’ you smell nice too.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘You make me feel like a little brown mouse.’

  ‘Aye, and you look like one too.’ Ben went to stand on the hearthrug, doing a little shufflle with his feet as if the thought of standing still was bothering him. ‘Why don’t you go and get tarted up and we’ll go somewhere? I’ve got the car.’

  ‘At this time?’ Emma raised her eyes ceilingwards. ‘You know about the police coming and finding the stuff?’

  ‘Sure I know. Our Patty’s fella knows the bloke who shopped him. He’ll get three months, I reckon.’

  ‘Even when he’s not fit?’

  Ben pulled her close up to him, sliding a hand down her back. ‘He can walk and talk, can’t he? Then he’s fit to do time. If he stops breathing for long enough when he’s inside, then they’ll shove him into the prison hospital till he comes to.’ He squeezed her thigh and grinned. ‘Anyroad, what’s this I hear about the gaffer’s bonny lad fetching you home, eh? I reckon he fancies you!’

  ‘Oh, Ben….’ Emma pulled away and sat down, moving a pile of ironing to one side first. ‘Mr Martin’s okay. An’ you know something? I think he is really quite shy. No, honest. I told him about my dad and he tried to make light of it, just to make me feel better. He said that the police couldn’t possibly put away everyone they caught, there’s too many doing it. He said when they find out we’re a one-parent family they might just take that into consideration.’

  Ben prissed his mouth up into a mocking pout. ‘One-parent family! Oh, lah-de-dah, are we? A fat lot he knows about the rozzers. You could have seventeen kids and a bedridden wife, and they wouldn’t make no allowances. The stupid git.’ He sat down and drew Emma into his arms. ‘Everybody tucked up in bed, eh? How about a bit of that there then, eh?’ His blue eyes glinted with laughter. ‘Okay then, Em. If you’re scared your dad will come down and catch us at it, let’s go out.’ He jumped up and snapped his fingers. ‘Okay? Five minutes to get ready and we’ll go and loosen up a bit at a place I know. C’mon. That finger can’t stop you dancing. The needle went through your hand, not your bloody big toe!’

  He was so alive it seemed as if sparks flew from him, and as she ran upstairs Emma realized why she liked him so much. He was sunshine in a dark room, life where none existed, joy where there was none. And if he heard her say that, he would just die laughing. She pulled on a pair of blue sateen trousers, struggled into a paler blue overblouse, the bandaged finger making her movements clumsy and slow. Then, with Sharon’s blusher shaded over her cheekbones and her hair loosened from its restricting ribbon, she was ready.

  ‘Sharon’s got her key,’ she called through the open door of her father’s bedroom. ‘I’m going out with Ben.’

  The coughing started as if her words had pressed a switch, but it wasn’t until she was sitting beside Ben in his car that the habitual feeling of guilt crept into her voice.

  ‘I ought to have stopped in. What if my dad wants a drink? What if he …?’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Ben, and pressed his foot hard down on the accelerator. ‘Let him get his own bloody drink for once.’

  The place was a converted barn, a stone’s throw from a pub, and when they went inside Emma had the feeling she had stepped into a dark cave, lit by flashing coloured lights, with music pounding out so fiercely it seemed as if the roof would lift with the noise. As if she had no will of her own, she was sucked into it, excited by the deafening beat, seeing Ben move as if he were part of the music, then joining in, the throbbing pain in her finger forgotten.

  Co-ordinated to the strong rhythm, the strings of coloured lights ran round the huge amplifiers. In front of the disc jockey’s table massive round beams of red, blue, green and yellow crossed and recrossed. When the lights dimmed for a moment, huge spotlights glared, blinding, piercing the gloom, whilst the couples danced, swaying, twisting, jerking with grinding movements like prehistoric figures in an animated frieze.

  Closing her eyes Emma allowed herself to become a part of it all. Here there was no chance to think. It was so loud she couldn’t have heard herself think, she told herself. And Ben was like the music ripping across the crowded room, tearing at her senses, so that she was almost convinced that what she felt for him was love.

  Emma shook her head until her long hair covered her face, and when he suddenly pulled her to him, she felt his body, his hips moving against her as if they were making love right there on the dance floor. When the white spotlight came on she saw his face, shiny with sweat, his lips parted over his even teeth, and his bright hair lit to sudden glory.

  ‘Love yah, love yah, love yah!’ The repetitive lyric hammered in her brain. Totally uninhibited now, Emma danced like a firecracker. She was young. Flaminenry, she was only twenty years old! She was no longer Emma Sparrow, trying to be a mother to two young lads who cared for nothing as long as their food was put before them, and the telly was working. And her dad … if he went to prison then it was his own fault. She couldn’t be responsible; no longer could she be responsible for Sharon either. Let her stay out all night with the foxy-faced spotty boy if she wanted to. Tonight was for dancing, for forgetting, for remembering that she was young. Young!

  Tossing the hair from her eyes she saw that now she was dancing opposite to a boy as dark as Ben was fair, that somehow without noticing she had changed partners.

  ‘Crazy!’ he shouted, and swung her up into his arms so that her feet left the floor, whirling her round so that her limbs felt fluid and her body had no substance.

  What happened next happened so quickly that even as Ben hit the strange boy she was still dancing. Then they were on the floor together, with Ben hammering the dark boy’s head into the floorboards as if it were a nail. Showing no mercy, not even when blood spurted from the other’s nose spattering his white tee-shirt with a pattern of scarlet.

  Hands tore at Ben, dragged him off, frog-marched him from the room, whilst other hands pulled the dark boy to his feet, supporting him dazed, ashen-faced and half unconscious.

  ‘You might have killed him.’ Shivering now, the mood of exhilaration snuffed out like a candle flame, Emma followed a glowering Ben to the car. ‘What got into you? Was it the music? Ben? You’re lucky they didn’t send for the police, do you know that? He was only dancing with me, for heaven’s sake. I didn’t know him from Adam, an’ if I had known him I couldn’t have recognized him in there.’

  Without answering Ben started the car so quickly that she had to pull hard at the door to close it as they drove out of the car park at speed on to the main road.

  ‘If I’d had a knife on me I’d have stuck it in him.’

  Emma hunched herself lower in her seat as the car gathered speed, watched wide-eyed as the needle crept up to eighty, and clung to the sides of her seat as Ben took it round a corner on two wheels.

  ‘You know what you are, don’t you?’ His face was set as he crouched over the steering wheel, wrestling with it as if it were alive. ‘You’re nothing but a whoring tease, Emma Sparrow. That’s two fellas you’ve egged on today.’ Ben jumped the lights, heedless of the blare of an outraged motorist behind him. ‘First the gaffer’s son, and now that black-headed devil back there.’ He tore at seventy through a thirty-mile limit. ‘You’d let anybody paw you but me. Anybody, bloody anybody!’

  ‘You might have killed him,’ Emma whispered again as the car shuddered to a halt outside her house. But before she could slam the door with her good hand it
was snatched from her grasp and as she stood there on the pavement, shaking and bewildered, the tail lights of the car were disappearing over the brow of the hill.

  All she wanted to do was to creep upstairs, to bury her head beneath the sheets and blot out the memory of the expression on Ben’s face as he banged the dark boy’s head into the floor. It had been sheer naked aggression, and she shuddered to think what might have happened if he hadn’t been pulled away so quickly.

  But there, crouched in his chair by the electric fire, her father sat huddled into his old brown dressing-gown, smoking and flicking the ash on to the tiled surround.

  ‘What time do you call this? And where’s our Sharon?’ He was far from drunk, but by no means sober. His voice was petulant and his eyes sunk deep into bloodshot slits. ‘Is this what’s going to happen when they put me away? The both of you out till all hours, and them two lads left in the house alone? And Alan’s been smoking, did you know that? Pinched the money out of your purse, the little bugger.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘Smoking at ten years old! What’s the world coming to, I’d like to know?’

  Emma sat down on the settee, clasping both hands together to stop their trembling. ‘Don’t worry about Sharon, Dad. I’ve met the boy she’s going out with and he’s harmless enough. It seems his parents are all for him having a steady girlfriend, and most nights Sharon goes round to their house. He’s a little boy, Dad, honest. He doesn’t look much older than Alan. Really.’ She tried to smile. ‘My guess is they’re just playing at courting like a couple of kids. Sharon will have lots of boyfriends before she settles down, for all her talk of getting married. Stop worrying, Dad, and get back to bed. Come on.’

  Pushing himself up by the wooden arms of the fireside chair, John Sparrow got to his feet, and shuffled towards the door. With a hand on the knob he turned. ‘Aye, well. You’re a good lass, Emma. An’ I know you’ll see to things. Aye, you’ve alius had your two feet on the ground, right from a little lass.’ He began to cough. ‘But I’ve had me chips, love. If they put me away it will finish me off. I can feel it here.’ He thumped his chest, and with the cigarette held loosely in his fingers began to climb the stairs, leaving Emma staring into the comfortless glow of the electric fire.

  Four

  ON THE DAY before John Sparrow faced the bench in the local magistrate’s court in Lancashire, Simon Martin was facing his father in the office of the Acton branch of Delta Dresses, with a scheme he had in mind.

  ‘Okay, so the Bolton factory is three times the size of this one; okay, so it’s been taken over by an astute Ugandan Asian, but it’s a challenge I would very much like to take up, Dad.’ He walked over to the window and stared down into the car park. ‘This mail order contract means big business, and I’d like to settle up there. Truly. If I bought a house part-way between Delta Dresses and the Bolton factory, I could easily commute between the two.’ He grinned. ‘They need a guy like me and, well, you know me when there’s a challenge. You can manage without me down here, and the Bolton deal was that we supply the staff, so where’s the problem?’

  Bernard Martin, a big man with a florid complexion, with all his son’s business acumen but a little less of his charm and finesse, was frankly puzzled.

  ‘You amaze me, son. I thought when you had sorted out the problems at Delta Dresses you would have been all too ready to come back down here.’ He reached for his pipe and busied himself with filling it. ‘Now you tell me you want to live up there?’

  He pressed the tobacco down with a practised thumb. ‘You always said London was the only place to be for culture and what have you.’ He struck a match. ‘Besides, what does Chloe have to say about all this? Are you going to tell me now that you’re going to get married again?’ He went on without looking up. ‘You’re not going to make the same mistake twice, are you? I seem to remember that one of the things Ellen objected to was you putting the job first.’

  ‘Chloe doesn’t know about it yet. I haven’t discussed it with her. I wanted to sound you out about it first.’ Simon turned back to the window again, away from the calculating gleam in his father’s eyes. It wasn’t like his father to bring his private life into business discussions, or even mention such things at all. Simon knew that although his living with a girl was accepted with equanimity, the old man kept what he really thought strictly to himself.

  ‘You like Chloe, don’t you?’

  The words were out before Simon realized he had said them. For the life of him he didn’t know why he had said them. He bit his lip, annoyed with himself. What was he seeking, for God’s sake? An assurance he didn’t need?

  Bernard Martin puffed thoughtfully at his pipe. This was where he trod warily; this was where he measured his words, if he had any sense. As if he were applying a slide-rule to each bloody letter.

  This young man asking the loaded question was not his young son who had gathered sports trophies and A levels at school as if they were just there for the gleaning. This was not the determined lad who had eventually – when he’d put his mind to it – sailed through his accountancy exams as easily as if he had set the bloody papers himself.

  This grown man staring moodily out of the window was not the fiercely independent eighteen-year-old rebel who had taken off for Europe with a knapsack on his back, either; sleeping rough in Yugoslavian mountains and tramping across Greece, living in caves, or so he had made out, then playing his guitar in seedy cafés for the price of a loaf of bread.

  Nor was this the lad who had married too young a girl who was such a bad cook she could burn a bloody cup of tea. A girl with a face so covered with a fall of long hair he had only glimpsed her eyes once or twice.

  No. This was a grown man facing some sort of crossroads, and not knowing which road to take.

  Suddenly the love and the pride he felt for his only son caught at Bernard Martin’s throat, so that he was glad of the pipe in his mouth, and the concealing cloud of smoke.

  ‘Since you ask me then, yes, I do like Chloe,’ he said carefully. ‘She’s a bright girl with a lot going for her, but I can’t see her somehow giving up that well-paid job and her trips abroad to settle down in a semi-detached up north – because that’s all you’ll be able to afford at first – washing filthy nappies and peeling spuds.’

  He failed to see the way his son’s back had stiffened, as he warmed to his theme. ‘That’s what your mother and me have often talked about. Grandchildren.’ He chuckled. ‘I remember your mother rushing you to the doctor when you swallowed a milk-tooth, certain it would have pierced a lung or something. And I remember where the doctor told us to watch out for it, and where, sure enough, it appeared.’ He puffed contentedly. ‘Then, when you wanted to take off after you left school, how we worried you might end up in a Turkish gaol suspected of drug smuggling.’

  He slapped the desk with the flat of his hand. ‘And look at you now, standing there and asking for the chance to work so hard there’ll hardly be time left to eat and sleep.’

  Simon turned round, his eyes narrowed. ‘Who said anything about grandchildren? Who said anything about even getting married? I thought we were talking about the possibility of me talking over the northern side of things, not my domestic set up!’

  Bernard Martin got heavily to his feet.

  ‘Let’s go into the meeting, son,’ he said.

  ‘Can I see my father now, please?’

  Emma Sparrow asked the question humbly. Policemen always made her feel humble, though she wasn’t sure why. ‘Will I be allowed to see him before … before he goes away?’

  The policeman murmured his reply, one eye on the busy courtroom below the public gallery. ‘Not till the court finishes, love. Then you’ll be able to see your dad for a few minutes.’ He inclined his head. ‘They’ll be looking to him, love. It wasn’t a proper faint, not really. Lots of men, bigger than what your dad is, collapse when they are sentenced. You go back to your seat, till this lot’s over and done with. Okay?’

  Emma tiptoed quietly back to her s
eat and sat down. The light-oak panelling and the high-backed benches reminded her of the Methodist chapel she had attended as a child. But the chairman of the bench hadn’t ranted and raved about hell fire the way she remembered some of the lay preachers doing. He was a mild-spoken man, with a noble Jesus profile, and he had listened with great care to what the detective constable and the clerk of the court had told him about John Sparrow’s case.

  From where Emma sat she had only been able to see the back of her father’s head, and the way his fingers had gripped the front of the dock. He had looked strangely bereft without his cigarettes.

  ‘You and your kind are a disgrace to the community at large,’ the chairman had said, leaning forward so that the light caught the sheen of his silver hair. ‘You were warned and warned again about what would happen if you abused the trust placed in you by your employer, and this time I have no option but to sentence you to….’

  And when the morning’s session was over and she was taken down to see him, he cried as if his heart would break. Great gulping sobs, with his mouth wide open and the tears dripping from his weak chin.

  ‘All this has come about because of Mam getting herself killed. It started me off wrong, Emma. It was the shock. The drink and the shock.’ He stared at her, pleading for understanding. ‘It was being told like that, with a neighbour knocking at the door and telling me Mam was lying in the street. Nobody could be the same after that.’

  He wobbled his lower lip, the thin whippet lines of his face dropping into the familiar violin-shaped mask of self-pity.

  Emma gazed back at him, helpless, ashamed of her embarrassment, not knowing what to do.

  ‘It will soon pass, Dad,’ she said at last. ‘Six months is nothing. You know what Mam always used to say: it will all be the same a hundred years from now.’

  But at the mention of her stepmother, the tears spurted from John Sparrow’s eyes like a shower, and Emma allowed herself to be led from the room.