by Marie Joseph
The worst thing was telling Alan and Joe. Joe turned his little face away, his pointed features set into stiff indifference, but Alan perked up immediately, a shifty pride in his dad obvious.
At first Emma had considered telling them that their father had gone away for his health to a convalescent home for treatment of his cough. Then her natural common sense had asserted itself. If she lied, then there was nothing more certain than that they would hear an embroidered version of the truth from their friends at school.
So she explained carefully, as gently as she could, that their father had taken things from work, had been found out, and was now being punished.
‘What was it he nicked? Cars?’ Alan’s brown eyes lit up.
Emma shook her head and swallowed hard. ‘No, not cars. Just spare parts of car engines, parts hard to come by, so that he could sell them to bad men for money.’ Torn between trying to help them to keep faith with their father and impressing on them that what he had done was wrong, she faltered. ‘It wasn’t exactly what he took. That doesn’t come into it at all. What does matter was that the things weren’t his to take. They belonged to his firm, to his employers, and he had no right to them.’ She raised her voice. ‘So the only way he can be shown how wrong it was is to send him away from us and shut him away for a while.’
There! She had done her best. Emma sighed. And nobody could do no more, as the woman at the sweet shop down the road was always saying.
‘Spare parts!’ Alan’s hoarse little voice dripped scorn. ‘Flamin’ spare parts! Them’s nowt, our Emma. Why didn’t he tell them they was planted on him?’ A surfeit of television cops and robbers serials lent weight to his theme. ‘He could have said some bloke grassed on him.’ The brown eyes screwed up into calculating slits. ‘Or he could have said he didn’t know how they got there. He could have said we nicked them, me and Joe. They don’t send kids to prison. They just give kids a good telling off, don’t they, Joe?’
Joe nodded, impressed as Alan elaborated his story. ‘How big were them parts? Big enough to shove under the bed, or little enough to flush down the toilet?’
Emma could see his mind working feverishly. ‘Dad could have got rid of them when the rozzers knocked at the door. Chucked them through the window or something. He could have. He could!’
‘That’s not the point!’
Emma could not look away from Joe’s averted face, but she knew that somehow she had to get through to him. ‘It was taking parts in the first place that matters. Stealing is wrong.’ She knelt down, and drew Joe to her, and felt him grow rigid in her lightly held grasp. ‘You understand, don’t you, chuck?’
‘Will he have to break stones?’ The small voice wobbled. ‘There was this film on the telly and these men, they had to have chains fastened round their ankles. An’ they could only walk with their legs apart, an’ they went on lorries to chop great big rocks, an’ they had to ask a rozzer before they could take their caps off to scratch their heads. An’ if they were ill, they got kicked….’
‘They were in a chain gang!’ Alan’s voice oozed derision. ‘There are no chain gangs round here. Are there, our Emma?’
To her surprise Emma detected a look of fear in Alan’s eyes. Inadvertently she glanced towards the television screen, mercifully blank for the moment.
‘Look,’ she went on, nodding to Sharon who had just walked into the room. ‘There’ll be nothing like that. Your dad will be locked in a small cell, maybe with another man, and he will have work to do during the day, certainly. But it won’t be chopping stones. Sewing sacks,’ she said, searching her own inadequate imagination. ‘Or maybe even working in the prison library when they see he’s not well enough to do rough work. He’ll have good food, and a doctor will come and see him if his chest gets bad, and in the evenings before he goes to bed he will be able to play ping-pong and watch television. ‘Okay?’
‘Television!’ Alan’s face settled into its normal mask of indifference once again. ‘Jammy bugger!’
‘I’ll stop in tonight,’ Sharon told Emma when the boys were seated in their viewing positions and the tea things had been cleared away. ‘You look awful, our Emma, honest you do. Was it terrible down at the… you know… the court place?’
Emma emptied the washing-up water down the sink and dried her hands on the roller towel behind the door. ‘Well, it was, quite. Dad got a bit upset when they said he had to go to prison, but you know Dad. When he gets upset he coughs and when he coughs he gets more upset.’ She started to put the plates away in the cupboard. ‘I’m scared. I don’t know why, but I am really scared inside. It’s partly the boys and partly our Dad.’
She closed the cupboard door with a bang. ‘What is he going to be like when he comes out? I mean, what if he comes out all bitter and twisted inside him? He’ll be shut up with real criminals, Sharon, and you know how impressionable he is.’ She rubbed at a mark on the door of the fridge. ‘What if he comes home with a grudge against life? I mean, not once has he ever said he was sorry for what he did. He seems to think he only took what was owing to him; that he had done no more wrong than one of his bosses going on his holidays and using the firm’s petrol.’
‘Well, that’s true, isn’t it?’ Sharon was studying her face in the mirror over the sink, touching a spot and worrying over it. ‘It’s one law for them and another for us, isn’t it? I mean, take me and Ricky. What chance have we of getting a place when we get married? We’ll have to live with Ricky’s mum and dad, but they, the bosspots, they don’t have to muck in, do they?’
She tried a lock of hair over her forehead and stood back a little to judge the effect. ‘I mean, take that bloke who brought you home in his car when you got the needle through your finger. Now he wouldn’t have to live with his mum and dad when he got married, would he? I know you’re a bit stuck on him, but be honest, Emma. Even his secretary wouldn’t get time if she wrote private letters on the firm’s notepaper, or took a stapler home for her kids to play with. I reckon our dad had a rotten deal.’
‘I am not stuck on him!’ Emma felt her face flame. ‘Anyway, he hasn’t been in this week, so he’s likely as not gone back to London and I’ll never see him again.’ She felt the need to change the subject quickly. ‘Do you know, I think I will go out tonight. I know where Ben will be, and where Ben is there’s always plenty of laughing going on. An’ I feel my face needs a laugh tonight. Okay?’
‘Suit yourself, our kid.’
Sharon leaned closer to the mirror and began to scrutinize her face once again.
When she walked into the lounge bar at eight o’clock Emma saw Ben sitting with the usual gang at the corner table. He was laughing at something one of them had said, and when he saw Emma he got up and with a mock bow waved her to a seat.
‘Don’t say you’ve been let off the hook for a night? What’s happened then? Sharon decided to renounce her wicked ways and go into a nunnery or something?’ He leaned across and touched Emma’s knee. ‘How did your dad get on? I knew when you didn’t come into work today what day it was.’
‘He got six months.’
Emma said the hated words straight out, not even bothering to keep her voice low. She had decided during the long wait at the bus stop that there was no point in even trying to be circumspect. People would know and people would talk, even if it didn’t get into the paper on Friday. And besides, what was done was done.
She had prepared herself for that, but what she wasn’t prepared for was the sudden silence, the immediate lull in the conversation as five faces, all expressing concern, turned towards her. Mandy and Jill, blue eyes and grey opened wide, and Mike and Jimmy, cheeky grins beneath curly-permed hair subdued as they stared at her. Even Ben watching her carefully as if he expected her to burst into tears.
For that single moment kindness, yes, and more than that, love embraced her, then Ben jumped up and walked with his usual jaunty stride over to the bar, where his sister Patty polished a glass with a glazed look in her eyes.
&nb
sp; ‘A gin and tonic for old Em,’ Ben said. ‘An’ make it a large one, okay?’
He pushed a pound note across the counter and Patty’s fingers closed over it. Her face beneath the hectic blusher looked peaky and lined with strain. She spoke softly.
‘I thought your girlfriend only drank lager and lime?’
‘Not tonight she doesn’t.’
‘Then I’ll keep the change towards what you owe me. Right?’
Patty moved to turn away, but not quickly enough. Like a snake latching on to its prey Ben’s hand shot out and his finger and thumb caught the skin on his sister’s forearm, nipping so fiercely that she only just stopped herself from crying out in pain.
‘One of these fine days,’ she whispered, blinking back tears of shock, ‘one of these fine days your precious girlfriend is going to find out what you’re really like, Ben Bamford. Then you won’t see her for dust. She’s far too good for you anyroad and one of these days I am going to have you chucked out of my house, if it’s the last thing I do. So help me.’
Then, as Ben walked back to the corner table holding the drink aloft and smiling broadly, the change intact in the pocket of his jeans, Patty picked up the glass and the polishing cloth again.
There was a mark on her arm that she knew would blossom into a bruise, and as she twisted the cloth round and round in the glass she asked herself, not for the first time, how her brother came to be the way he was? How could a man have two completely different sides to his make-up? There was the Ben whom everybody liked, the Ben without a care in the world, who could laugh when there was nothing to laugh about. The brother who could lift his little mongol niece up in the air, tickling her until she cried for mercy, and who had once carried her home from a fairground with her socks and pants in his pocket because she had wet herself.
‘I couldn’t stand to see her uncomfortable,’ he had explained.
Then there was the dark side. The violence ready to take him over, so that as his uncontrollable temper flared he lashed out with his tongue or his fists. Ben enjoyed inflicting pain, Patty was sure of it. It gave him a kick, she could tell.
‘The usual, sir?’
She smiled her wide smile at the tall dark man who had come into the lounge bar from the residents’ staircase. ‘I’ve not seen you for a while, sir. Been away?’
Simon nodded and eased himself on to a stool. He had driven up from London in the fastest time yet, going over and over in his mind the details of his new assignment, trying to forget the scene with Chloe when he had told her about the job up north.
‘It’s not the fact that you decided to move before you told me….’ Chloe had got out of bed and pulled her thin dressing-gown round her. ‘It’s the assumption that I would just agree.’
She had run her fingers through her hair until her fringe stuck out in spikes. I like my job, okay? So surely you could have just asked me whether I was prepared to give it up and follow you. Like some Indian squaw! Me go. You follow! Is that what we’ve come to, honey? Is that what you take for granted?’
‘But you could get a job up there.’ Simon had thumped the pillow. ‘Manchester isn’t exactly a turn-of-the-century village, and with your languages and your secretarial experience….’
‘Stop patronizing me!’ Chloe had been almost beside herself with temper. ‘Look. I am going to New York next month and my boss expects me to go with him. I know the score, Simon – I’ve already written the score! Haven’t you heard of sex equality? I an not some helpless female who has a day off a month when her womb contracts. I’m not always trying to get one over on my boss just because he’s a man and I’m a woman. It is respect, honey, and that is what you are not prepared to show me. Mutual respect!’
The gown had slipped from a bare shoulder, revealing a firm, rounded breast. Simon, reaching out a hand, had it smartly slapped away.
‘How like a man! Sex solves everything! Be nice to the little woman. Do the things to her body you know she appreciates and the problem will go away.’ Chloe had faced him, two spots of colour on her high cheekbones. ‘And when it’s over put your head down on her breast and she will sigh and tangle her fingers in your hair and give you anything. Right, honey?’
‘And you love me?’ Simon swirled the whisky round in his glass as he recalled asking that, and remembered how Chloe had thrown off the green silk robe and got into bed beside him. He drained his glass as he remembered also his inadequacy and the gurgle of her understanding laughter.
‘I’ve pricked the bubble of your masculinity, and you don’t like it one bit do you, honey?’
He had smacked her behind hard and told her she grew more like her momma every day.
‘And have you ever seen a happier man than my daddy?’
Chloe’s arms had held him tight, and he was sure they had fallen asleep smiling.
‘The same again, sir?’
Patty’s cleavage beckoned across the counter. ‘Hear that lot over there? It’s my brother again.’ She fingered the mark on her arm reflectively. ‘He’s in fine form tonight.’
Simon turned and saw Emma Sparrow sitting a little way apart from the rest towards the end of the curved seat. At the moment he noticed her she tucked the strand of hair behind an ear, small, serious, looking about twelve years old, he thought, in her brown velvet jacket over tight cords.
Immediately he walked over, nodded at Ben, recognized one of the girls as a machinist, and smiled down at Emma.
‘Hello there,’ he said.
Emma blushed furiously whilst the rest of the group exchanged uneasy glances. Ben merely stared as he sat with shoulders bent and hands clasped between his knees in an attitude of insolent rejection.
‘Would you mind if I joined you for a moment or two?’ Simon sat down on the very edge of the red plastic seat next to Emma and spoke quietly to her.
‘I’ve been away for a few days. Is there anything new about your father? I expect he’ll have heard by now about the….’
Ben said something out of the side of his mouth and the little group exploded into laughter, but Emma answered the question as if they were alone, speaking with a grave quiet courtesy.
‘It was today. He got six months, sir. They said he must be made an example of, that what he was doing must be put a stop to.’ She lowered her head. ‘He took it badly. I think in his heart of hearts he believed they would never send him to prison for doing what he thought of as nothing to get steamed up about. Something trivial.’
‘And do you think it was trivial, Emma?’
She bit her lip. ‘Sins come in different colours, sir, in my book. It depends who’s deciding which shade is the darkest. There was a woman who came up in court before my dad, and she only got a suspended sentence for battering her baby senseless. But there’s no point in being bitter. What matters now is getting through the next few months till he comes home. Then I suppose he will need a lot of looking after.’
Simon had to remind himself of the age of this girl, talking to him with the wisdom of a middle-aged woman who had long ago accepted life for what it was. Not a shred of self-pity, just a determination to be getting on with things the way they were. And yet her face was the face of a lovely child untouched by worry.
‘I am staying up here,’ he told her, as the rest of the little group exploded into loud laughter again. ‘So I will be looking round for a house or a flat.’
Emma nodded. ‘And your wife, sir? She wants to come up here?’
‘I’m not married,’ he told her, mesmerized by the long dark eyelashes as they drooped against her pale cheeks. ‘My girlfriend isn’t keen on the idea, but she will come eventually.’ He grinned. ‘She’s the type who has to make a token objection.’
‘I see.’
‘Time to go if you want a lift, Em.’
Rudely Ben jerked his head towards the door, swaying with ill-concealed arrogance, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his jacket, blue eyes steely cold.
For a moment Emma seemed to hesitate, then with an
apologetic glance at Simon she got to her feet and nodded. ‘Okay.’
Simon waited until she had disappeared through the swing doors then, with a brief goodnight to Patty behind the bar, walked swiftly out of the lounge, took the stairs two at a time to his room, swinging the key from his hand.
Outside in the car park Emma had no fancy words for what she had to say to Ben. She knew that his rudeness had stemmed from a deep-rooted inferiority complex; that like a child he had been showing off, broadening his accent and making it clear that he didn’t think much of Mr Simon Martin trying to be friendly.
‘If you’re going to drive like you did the other night then I’m going to wait for a bus, no matter how long it takes.’ A gust of wind caught her hair and lifted it away from her neck. ‘Ben? Listen. Today has lasted long enough for me. I’d just like to go home in one piece and get to bed. Okay?’
So just to show her Ben drove at less than thirty miles an hour, sitting bolt upright, arms stretched out before him, clutching the wheel like a man of eighty plus who knows his driving should rightly be behind him. Cars hooted as they tried to overtake, but Ben was enjoying himself and refused to drive any faster.
He was just like a child, Emma told herself, an overgrown schoolboy. And the thought softened her face, so that in that moment as they drove majestically down the wide arterial road she came close to loving him.
When Emma saw that the house was in darkness she knew that for once Sharon had been sensible and decided to have an early night. Still playing the fool, Ben handed her out of the car and drove away bolt upright in the driving seat, arms held straight before him on the wheel.
She opened the door, stepped into the tiny square of a hall and saw, in the glow from the electric fire, Sharon and the foxy-faced Ricky entwined on the hearthrug.
Even before she turned to run in acute embarrassment up the stairs Emma’s mind had registered the face that her stepsister and her boyfriend were completely naked, their clothes strewn around them in careless abandon.