Emma Sparrow

by Marie Joseph

  Even their sex life was inadequate now. It was quick, and although Simon always apologized he was asleep so fast she reckoned he couldn’t have been all that sorry. In a while her insides would be all dried up like those of an eighty-year-old woman, and when he touched her it would be like touching an orange left to dry on a sunny window ledge.

  And they weren’t even married!

  ‘There are times when I get to thinking about Ellen,’ she said slowly. ‘There are time when I can understand just why it was you broke up.’

  Simon took off his spectacles and stared at her with dark eyes suddenly defenceless. ‘Why bring Ellen up, for Pete’s sake? I thought you were different. She wanted a nine-to-five bloke, and you knew from the beginning I wasn’t that.’

  ‘Were you doing sums when you screwed her?’ Chloe heard herself say the crude word she never remembered saying before, but wanting to hurt she saw that she had succeeded.

  ‘Don’t talk like that!’ Simon’s face flushed red, and she knew she had hit him and made him angry, and the knowledge excited her so that she went on:

  ‘What would you do if I decided not to come back from America? What have you decided to do if I do come back? Anything? What are you Simon? A typical Englishman? Because if you are, then give me a full-blooded son of Uncle Sam!’

  ‘I am trying to balance these accounts,’ Simon said calmly, then put up a hand as a tightly stuffed cushion edged with gold braid hit him square in the face.

  After that they went to bed and made love, but although he tried to make it last it was over almost before it had begun, and he knew he was too tired to try a second time.

  He drove her to the airport on the appointed day and watched her go through the gate, tall and loose-limbed, with her grey pleated skirt swinging against her long legs. He went outside into the May sunshine, and as he drove back to the flat he saw men without topcoats, and women in ice-cream coloured polyester suits pushing prams with babies sitting up, their heads bared to the warmth in the air. But the next day it started to rain again, and the town settled back into its blanket of grey mist and overriding gloom.

  A few days later, waiting to ease his car from the short road outside the flats into the main stream of morning traffic, Simon glanced sideways and saw a small group of people gathered on the pavement. The lights were taking an interminable time in changing, and as he stared he saw Emma Sparrow being helped to her feet by a woman in a yellow plastic raincoat. A push-bike lay on its side, wheels spinning, and a boy with tousled hair was obviously arguing, waving hands about as he demonstrated what had happened.

  The lights changed to green and Simon was forced to drive on, but signalling left he pulled into the side of the road and parked the car.

  ‘She walked straight out in front of me!’ the boy was saying. ‘Stepped off the pavement without looking. I didn’t stand a chance, honest!’ No one was taking the slightest notice of him, and as Simon approached he picked up the bike and stood helplessly, his young face white with shock.

  And if he was pale, Simon thought, then Emma’s skin tone was transparent. Her knee was gashed, and blood trickled down into her torn tights. It was raining, as usual, and her short jacket and skirt were splashed with mud. Simon could see that she was close to tears.

  ‘It’s all right.’ He spoke in the tone of voice an officer might use dismissing his men. ‘This young lady is a friend of mine. I’ll see to her.’

  ‘It weren’t my fault,’ the cyclist said again, and Emma raised her eyes to Simon’s face.

  ‘No. It wasn’t his fault, sir. I was trying to run across the road to catch the bus when it stopped round the island. I had started to walk because I had already missed one, then this one came down the hill and I didn’t think.’ She put a hand to her forehead and swayed. ‘I’m okay now, honest.’ She touched her nose and winced. ‘It’s not broken, is it, sir?’

  ‘A wonder she wasn’t killed.’ The stout woman in yellow plastic had disappointment etched on every line of her fat, flat face as she sensed that the little drama was almost over. ‘He was belting down so fast he knocked her right out into the road, and if a car had been coming as she lay there in the middle, well, I shudder to think. My sister was once knocked off her feet by a boy on a bike and she has walked with a stick from that day. Arthritis set in,’ she told the dwindling audience.

  ‘Thank you for your kindness.’ Simon took Emma by the elbow and walked her over to the parked car.

  ‘In you get.’ He grinned. ‘No, your nose isn’t broken, just skinned. Now sit tight. Okay?’

  He slid behind the wheel and drummed his fingers on the handbrake. ‘Right! One thing’s certain. You can’t go into work like that.’ He glanced briefly at Emma’s white face, then down at her mud-splashed jacket and skirt. He was angry because this girl, this strange vulnerable girl, was upsetting the tight schedule of his planned morning. An early morning meeting with Harry Gordon, quarter of an hour with the mechanic to warn him that he would have to find another job if the machines he’d repaired kept breaking down, then off to the other side of Bolton to a management conference, where he was taking the chair, as finance was top priority on the agenda. He slapped the wheel with the flat of his hand.

  ‘Look, Emma. I am in one hell of a hurry this morning…. Tell you what – my flat’s just two minutes away. I’ll take you there so you can clean up a bit, then I’ll pick you up on the way back from Bolton and run you into work if you feel up to it. If not, I’ll drive you home. Okay?’ He started the car without waiting for her reply.

  He was to ask himself afterwards why he hadn’t taken, say, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour longer to run her home? But then his morning’s schedule would have gone awry: that eventuality was unthinkable.

  ‘I could drop dead on the floor, and if you were on your way to a meeting you would cover me with a sheet and still go,’ Chloe had told him, more than once. ‘Sometimes I think you are programmed, like a computer. Let the sky fall down but you’d still make for the meeting, wouldn’t you, honey?’

  And afterwards Emma was to ask herself why she hadn’t insisted on either going back home or on to the factory? But there was something about this man that made her feel different, even sitting beside him in his car with her skirt all muddy and the skin off her nose.

  So, like a lamb to the slaughter, she allowed herself to be led into the flat. Mrs Kelly had told her, with significant glances over in his direction one lunchtime down in the canteen, that Mr Simon’s girlfriend was living with him now.

  ‘American, I believe,’ she had said, as if that put Chloe completely beyond Mrs Kelly’s own particular pale. ‘They’re not married, not that that seems to matter nowadays.’

  So Emma, expecting to see the tall elegant girl she had met at the infirmary, looked round the flat in surprise.

  ‘The bathroom’s through there,’ Simon said, glancing at his watch. ‘And there’s the bedroom. My friend’s away, but she won’t mind you using her things. There’s some antiseptic in the cabinet, and towels in that cupboard. Okay?’ He backed towards the door. ‘I’ll be with you before lunch, but if you do want to go home just pull the door to. Right?’ He opened the door. ‘And now I must dash. Sure you’ll be okay?’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ Emma said aloud as soon as the door had closed behind him. Not ten minutes before she had been on her way to work. Late as usual because Joe had told her at the last minute that his throat hurt and she had had to peer down his mouth and feel his forehead, then run upstairs to tell Sharon not to let him go to school if he didn’t perk up a bit.

  ‘He’s shamming again,’ Sharon had said, closeted in the bathroom washing her hair when she knew she would have to go to work with it wet. ‘I’ll sort him out. Not to worry.’

  Worried and anxious, Emma had run from the house, missed the bus, started to walk, then half way there had seen another bus coming down the hill; stepped off the pavement, and wham! She sat down in the nearest chair and taking a tissue from her handbag dabb
ed at the blood congealing now on the grazed knee. There were bits of grit sticking to it, and the pain made her feel sick. And as she felt sick she remembered that she had had to leave her breakfast slice of toast on her plate when Joe refused to get out of bed.

  For a minute she considered getting up and just walking out of the flat. She was sure she could manage, and she might be able to catch a bus – and if people stared, then they would just have to stare. She stood up and gave a small moan as the injured knee pricked with the pain of a thousand needles. Her tights would have to come off that was for sure, and the knee would have to be washed. Uncertain of herself, embarrassed even though she was quite alone, she sat down again and stared round the room.

  There were books everywhere, and a record player, and rows of cassettes and records in an open cabinet. It wasn’t the sort of room she would have expected the smart Chloe to have wanted to live in, but it was nice. Cosy and a bit crowded with furniture, but nice…. Emma glanced at the small table by her side piled with books. Not paperbacks, but real books. She twisted round to see the title of the book on top, and saw with surprise that it was one she had taken from the library only the week before. It gave her a small feeling of identification to think that Mr Simon had the same taste in reading.

  Limping painfully, she went through the door he had pointed out and found herself in the bathroom. Still unsure of herself she sat down on the candlewick seat cover and took in her surroundings.

  His razor was there, on the tiled surround of the bath, and he had showered because the wall was still wet with drops of water and his towel, cream with a brown border, was over the bath. There was a robe hanging behind the door, white and fluffy, and on a low painted cabinet were two flasks of talcum powder, a bottle of hand lotion and a box of tissues.

  Slowly Emma peeled off the torn tights, took one of the tissues, dampened it and began to clean up the grazed knee. Feeling like an interloper, she opened the cabinet on the wall, then closed it quickly when she saw the shelves were filled with jars of cream, bottles of skin lotion and a packet of Tampax. She bit her lip. Okay, so she could get blood poisoning or worse, but not for anything was she going to open that cupboard again. For the first time she felt anger at the cool logic of the man who had brought her here, a virtual stranger, and told her to make free of his home.

  He demoralized her. Yes, that was the right word. She should have insisted on going home. She wasn’t badly hurt. Flaminenry, as Sharon would have said, she could have had her knee seen to from the first aid box at the factory, and by now she could have been sitting at her buttonhole machine as if nothing had happened.

  Suddenly she looked up and saw her reflection in the mirrored door of the high cabinet. And what she saw made her recoil.

  If her knee looked a ghastly mess, that was nothing to her nose. Carefully she prodded the end, wiggled it about a bit, then winced as the grazed flesh burned in protest. Her face was green. Not white, just green, and the swelling on her nose seemed to have pushed her eyes up into slits. She was a monster, an ugly monster, and that was why he had brought her here. He had been sorry for her. He had wanted to spare her the stares of the girls at the factory, but being the sort of man he was he had not told her just how awful she looked.

  Emma never cried. She couldn’t remember the last time she had cried. Not even when they had taken her father away, or when Ben had threatened her…. Even when Mam died her tears had been more a moistening of her eyes and a choking in her throat because of the boys.

  But now she was alone. For the first time she could remember she was alone in a house where there was no one to catch her giving way. It was all too much. Everything was too much. The coping, the anxiety, the wondering what could possibly happen next. Working, shopping, trying to keep the house clean and the boys decent for school. Wondering if Sharon was doing the right thing, asking herself if there was anything she could do about it. Scheming so that the money went round. Never asking for help. Not having anyone to ask for help.

  And now, seeing herself in the mirror, looking on the outside as she felt inside – torn and bleeding, defeated, ugly, as if a great steam-roller had come and flattened all the spirit out of her.

  Head bowed, she staggered from the bathroom through a door into a bedroom with a double bed with the covers hastily thrown over it. Sobbing, wailing, hearing herself wail and wanting, in a perverse way, to go on making that dreadful sound as if all the tears had been saving themselves up for just this moment.

  She threw herself down on the bed and let the grief take over.

  ‘First you tell me the mechanic isn’t going to turn up, then I get a phone call to say the meeting at Bolton is postponed!’ Simon faced an apologetic Harry Gordon in the small office. ‘Okay, so the bloke’s got a throat bug. Okay, so two of the directors at Bolton are down with the same thing, but that’s my day messed up properly.’ He snapped his brief-case shut. ‘And now I have to go home to collect the papers I thought I wouldn’t be needing till tomorrow!’

  Mrs Kelly lowered her head and watched from beneath black drawn-on eyebrows. So Mr Simon was like all the rest – nice as pie till somebody or something upset his precious schedule. She sniffed and rolled a piece of headed notepaper into her typewriter. Well, at least it showed he was human and not just an extension of the works like the sewing machines out there. And she for one wasn’t going to feel sorry for Mr Gordon. Not her. He was just the same. Let something go wrong and he always took it out on someone. But then they were men. Puffed up, know-it-all men who went to pieces when they couldn’t have their own way. She sighed. Well, she had got one at home like that, so she should know.

  ‘I’ll work at the flat this morning,’ Mr Simon was saying as he walked from the office. ‘You know where to find me if anything crops up.’

  He was so angry he slammed the car door with a crash that reverberated all round the asphalt car park. What he did not realize was that the burning frustration at the collapse of his minute-by-minute planned day had triggered off an anger that had been simmering inside him since the night he had been beaten up. Five days, he told himself, five days after being kicked half way to death he had been back at work. And now he would have to cancel appointments and postpone meetings until the managing director at Bolton decided he was fit to toddle into the office. He signalled right. Delays cost money, and when money was in short supply, when finance was balanced on a tight string, leaving no surplus for mistakes or tardy decisions, he would be the scapegoat when the company foundered on a reef of its own making.

  He was actually part way up the hill leading to the flat when he remembered Emma Sparrow.

  The tears had done nothing to ease her desolation. Now she felt so lethargic that it was as if she moved under water, pushing with her legs against a heavy swell. Glancing down at them and seeing the blood and mud caked on her knees, she went into the bathroom and turned on the hot tap, letting the water run over her hands.

  The feeling of being an interloper had gone. All she wanted to do was to lie back and let the soothing heat wrap her round. And if the scented bath oil she was trickling in belonged to another woman, so what? She was tired of always being the one to think before she acted, weary of being the conscientious one who tried to set an example to her family, who saw her as merely a provider and a substitute mother.

  Life had kicked her in the teeth once too often, and this morning she felt she could take no more.

  Emma lay back and closed her eyes.

  Simon wrinkled his nose the minute he opened the door. It was a familiar scent, and for a startled, unthinking moment he thought that Chloe was back. He looked into the bathroom and saw Emma’s clothes in a heap on the floor, walked into the bedroom and stopped abruptly.

  This small girl, naked but for the cream and brown bath towel slipping from her shoulders, was not Chloe. This girl was so sweetly rounded, so exquisitely formed, with bare pink-tipped breasts above a waist as narrow as a hand’s span. Her long brown hair, loosened from its
binding ribbon, fell round her poor swollen face…. She had been crying, and as he went towards her she lifted a face so anguished that with an instinct as natural as breathing Simon held out his arms.

  And the caring concern on his face was too much. It was so long since Emma could remember anyone looking at her like that. Not mother, father, not even Ben with his expressions of teasing affectionate laughter or frustrated passion, had ever looked at her like that.

  Like a child she slid her arms round his neck. The towel slipped to the carpet. When she felt the touch of his hand on her hair she turned her face to his for his kiss.

  There was so much to give. All of Emma’s past was in that kiss. All the secret crying for love, for tender dominance from this man she knew now had filled her dreams since the first moment she saw him.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ her mouth was saying as it opened beneath his. ‘I don’t know you, but I love you. How can that be?’

  Her warm soft naked body was pressed against his. She was moving as if to get even closer, and when they moved over to the bed Simon had no recollection of how they had got there. Had he carried her, or had they moved together as if in a drifting dream?

  All he knew was that she was lying beneath him, that he was tearing at his clothes, kissing her throat, her breasts, feeling the soft pink nipples harden as his mouth and tongue caressed them.

  ‘Oh, God,’ he moaned. ‘Oh, my little sweet love.’

  He was possessed; he had never dreamed he was capable of such intense rampaging emotion, and she was clinging to him, wrapping her legs round him, holding him, so that when he entered her the small cry she gave only added to his overwhelming excitement.

  And yet, even though his sporadic love-making with Chloe had been unsatisfactory and swift, now it was as though he moved with such tenderness, such overpowering glory in his maleness, that he could not get enough of her.