by Marie Joseph
‘If I give you thirty pounds now, then will you keep it for me an’ I will pay the rest off week by week?’ Sharon’s voice came dreamily. ‘I only work a minute away, an’ I can call in.’
The assistant hesitated as Emma opened her handbag and took out a well-worn purse.
‘Here you are.’ She spoke quickly. ‘We’ll take it now. The dress and the veil and head-dress. Okay?’
‘Oh, our Emma.’ Sharon turned to her the minute the dress was off and being packed away in a large oblong box filled with rustling tissue paper. ‘That’s the money we were going on the market with, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have done that.’
Emma smiled and wrinkled her nose. ‘We can eat what bits I can find this weekend, then on Monday I will go to the post office. I’m not without, you know.’
‘But you’ll be skint!’ Sharon’s eyes were round. ‘That will leave you with nothing. I can’t let you do that.’
‘I have done it, love.’ Emma sat down on a small gilt chair, her legs suddenly giving way beneath her. ‘What does it matter, anyroad? Spend and God will send. That’s my motto. Remember?’
And the worry was there, hard and tight as a knot inside her, but now Sharon was past noticing. Standing in a long queue waiting for the bus she held the awkwardly-shaped box in front of her, and when the bus came in already crowded with Saturday shoppers, she stood wedged in between Emma and the back of a seat, her expression rapt and her blue eyes dream-filled.
The boys were out and Sharon was upstairs putting the dress away when Emma, downstairs in the kitchen getting a makeshift meal together, felt the sour taste of bile in her throat. She had skipped breakfast, and now the thin smell of the tea she was pouring into two mugs proved too much. As Sharon came into the kitchen she was leaning over the sink, holding her stomach and retching; the cold sweat breaking out on her forehead.
‘Oh, our Emma. You are ill!’ Sharon was all contrition. ‘I knew you were. You’ve got that sickness bug that’s going round. The girl on the fruit and vegetable counter has got it. She got sent home only yesterday.’ She passed Emma a towel. ‘See, wipe your face with this, then come and sit down and drink this tea. Then you must go to bed and I’ll make the meal.’
With infinite tenderness she led the whimpering Emma over to a kitchen chair and pushed the mug of hot strong tea into her hands. ‘Drink this. You need something inside you when you’re sick. Oh, you do look awful. You’ve gone all green round your mouth. An’ I let you come into town with me and stand about in that stuffy shop and on the bus. You should have said, our Emma. Me dress could have waited.’
It was the kindness that did it. That and the nauseating smell rising from the steaming pot of tea. Suddenly Emma lowered her head and broke into a storm of weeping.
If her mother had been there, if even her stepmother had been there, she would have been immediately enfolded in loving arms, she knew that, but there was only Sharon, kneeling down on the shabby linoleum flooring and pushing the hair back from her face.
‘What’s wrong, our Emma? There is something awful wrong, isn’t there? I know there is something wrong, so tell me. You’re sick to your stomach with worrying, aren’t you?’ She gazed into Emma’s ashen face. ‘It’s Dad, isn’t it? He’s dying, an’ you can’t tell me. He’s never going to come home any more, is he?’
‘I think I might be going to have a baby,’ Emma whispered. ‘Oh, God, Sharon, what if I am? What will we do? What will any of us do?’
There was a moment of silence, a still moment when it seemed the whole world stopped turning. She saw the way Sharon’s eyes dilated with shock, and the way the blood left her face, leaving the blusher standing out on her cheekbones.
‘You what?’ Sharon’s voice was a whisper. ‘You can’t be!’ She stood up and backed away as if to put as much distance as she could between herself and what Emma had just said. ‘Is that why Ben came back? Is that why he went away? Oh, flaminenry … flippin’ flaminenry!’
‘It’s not Ben.’ Emma was addressing her muffled words to the floor now, her head lowered almost to her knees. ‘He never touched me, not like that anyroad.’ She lifted her head. ‘It was someone else, and I can never say. It was just once but I can never say. Not ever!’
‘But you’ll have to say! You will have to do something!’ Sharon’s voice was high, almost bordering on hysteria. ‘An’ it doesn’t happen the first time. You’re all right the first time.’ She was indignant. ‘Anybody knows that!’
‘Then anybody’s wrong.’ Emma got up stiffly and going over to the sink poured the tea away, as Sharon followed to stand right behind her.
‘Listen! Listen to me!’ Sharon sounded full of indignation. ‘I don’t think you know what you’re saying, our Emma. You’re sure that you – with whoever it was – you’re sure that you went all the way?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘But if you’ve never….’ Sharon was like a mother forcing herself to ask her thirteen-year-old daughter questions she could hardly bring herself to put into words. ‘Listen. Emma? What time of the month was it? Just after, just before, or in between? It could matter, honest.’
‘About a week before.’ It was Emma clutching at unlikely straws now, and they both knew it.
Sharon sighed. ‘That’s the dangerous time.’ She twisted her stepsister round to face her. ‘Did you … did he use anything?’
‘No!’ Emma was shouting now. ‘It wasn’t like that. I told you. If it had been planned then I wouldn’t have done it, would I? I’m not that stupid!’
Then, as if realizing just how stupid she had been, Emma leaned over the sink so that her forehead was resting on the taps, and began to cry again.
‘I’m making you some coffee.’ Sharon lit the gas underneath the kettle again. ‘You must get something warm inside you.’ Emma heard the familiar sound as the lid of the coffee jar spun round. ‘And come and sit down. You don’t want to be like that if the boys come in. They’ll be able to see you have been crying, but we can tell them it was because my dress cost so much and you don’t know how you are going to manage. You can tell them you spent the food money and now your conscience is pricking you.’
Emma glanced at her quickly, but saw that Sharon was being totally serious. The four-year age gap between them had shifted so that now it seemed as if Sharon was the older sister and Emma the younger.
‘You must wait till you’ve missed for the second time, then go and have one of them pregnancy tests. You can send a sample away, or get a kit from the chemist. A girl at work did one on herself not long ago and it was negative, but she was that dead bothered she had another go just to make sure.’
The kettle came to the boil and the water was sloshed over the coffee granules in the bottom of the mug, then milk added with the same abandon. Sharon’s face was screwed into lines of determination, and her small nose pointed and peaky with worry. She passed the coffee to Emma and told her to get it down.
‘Then if the test is positive you will have to go down the doctor’s and tell him you will go off your chump if you have to go on with it. Tell him the boy who did it has gone off and you’ll never see him again….’ Sharon interrupted her own narrative as what she had just said struck home. She gripped Emma’s shoulder hard. ‘Our Emma. You will have to say who it was. Doctor Entwistle knows us. He sees to Dad’s cough and Joe’s throats, and he gave me a diet sheet for me spots only a week ago. If he thinks you’ve been with someone married or something – oh, Emma, you have to say! People will say awful things if you don’t say.’
She stared down at the top of Emma’s head. ‘An’ you’re not like that. I’m the worst one. I’m the one who should be sitting there, not you.’ She started to cry, then dashed the tears away with the back of a hand. ‘You’ll have to make out to the doctor that if he doesn’t send you for an abortion you will kill yourself. Remind him about Dad being in prison an’ the boys running wild, and me being a big trouble with stopping out late and everything. Make him see.’
‘Make who see what?’ Alan burst into the kitchen with Joe only a step behind him. ‘Where’s the tea, our Emma? We’re going out again right after. Somebody’s let us ride his bicycle, an’ Joe sits on the seat and I work the pedals. You should just see us go!’ He glanced round the kitchen. ‘Where’s our tea, then? We have to go right back or he will change his mind, won’t he Joe?’
Alan had noticed nothing but the fact that his meal wasn’t either being fried or grilled, with Emma standing by the cooker as usual, pushing the wayward strand of hair back behind an ear. It was Joe who broke in with a tremor in his voice.
‘Why has our Emma been crying? Is somebody dead or something?’ His face was filthy, and his tee-shirt had parted company with his jeans, with their frayed bottoms hanging over the top of his grubby sneakers. ‘Our Emma’s been crying, ’asn’t she?’ he said again.
Sharon spoke quickly. ‘She’s been a bit upset because there’s nothing tasty for the tea, because I went and spent the money on a dress to get married in. So now you know.’
After a moment of disbelieving silence, Joe hurled himself forward like a stone from a catapult. The years of insecurity since his mother died, and the abrupt withdrawal of his dad’s presence from the house, plus Emma’s strange unaccountable behaviour of the past weeks, had all taken their toll. Throwing himself at her, he butted her chest with his hard little head, then buried his face in her shoulder. His hoarse voice came muffled.
‘I don’t like it when you cry, our Emma. It doesn’t matter about the tea. Me and Alan will have jam butties.’ He lifted his head and searched her face. ‘An’ water to drink. We don’t mind. Honest!’
‘Speak for yourself, our Joe.’ Alan hitched up his own slipping trousers with an expression of disgust. ‘Why couldn’t Sharon get married in the dress what she’s got on? Who cares about a flippin’ old wedding, anyroad? She’ll look a right soft ’aporth dressed up fancy. I’m not getting married. Ever!’
Emma pushed Joe away from her and stood up, suddenly the Emma they could rely on once again. She managed a smile.
‘There’s no need for jam butties. Things aren’t quite that bad. I’ve just had a smashing idea.’ She winked at Joe, then reached for the frying pan and took a carton of eggs from the shelf. ‘How about pancakes? It’s not pancake Tuesday, but who cares? Pass me the flour and bottle of milk, then hang about a bit an’ they’ll be ready. No, not that milk, Sharon. That’s today’s. We will use the other first, okay?’
And as their eyes met, Sharon nodded to show that the unspoken message had been received and understood. For the time being at least she was to keep Emma’s terrible secret. Comforted by her stepsister’s apparent return to normality, she put the plates to warm and told the boys to wash their hands at the sink.
Who was to say that a miracle wouldn’t happen? And who was to say that Emma wasn’t imagining that what had happened was as bad as all that? She nodded to herself. Emma had always been a bit slow when it came to boys. She probably hadn’t a clue what had really taken place. Just look how she’d got in a state about finding Ricky and her on the rug that time. No, everything would work out right. It had to. Flaminenry, it had to. For all their sakes.
Leaving Emma furiously beating the eggs, flour and milk into a frothy batter, Sharon ran upstairs. The big cardboard box from the bridal shop was lying on the bed, and somehow she didn’t want to even look at it. She had been going to take the beautiful dress out to admire it and hang it in the wardrobe underneath a plastic wrapping from the cleaners. She had been going to try the veil on, and the little wreath of white roses intertwined with orange blossom. She had been going to try the effect with her hair done differently, all smoothed back behind her ears.
But now … everything was spoilt.
Emma, the one person in the whole wide world she had thought incapable of doing such a mad crazy thing, had got herself into the sort of trouble Mam used to be always going on about.
Emma, the sensible one. Serious, clever Emma, who could have gone to college if the money had been there. Emma, who always had her nose stuck in a book, going with someone nobody knew about. It was so unreal, it just couldn’t be true. Could it?
‘Shit!’ The word exploded from Sharon’s rosebud mouth as she lifted the box and pushed it underneath the bed, kicking it right under until it completely disappeared from sight.
‘Flaminenry! Why couldn’t it have been me? Nobody would have batted a flamin’ eyelid if it had been me. Why not me?’
She asked the question aloud, totally unselfish for perhaps the first time in the whole of her young life.
‘Bloody hell. Why not me?’
Ever conscious of Sharon’s watchful eye on her at home, Emma dragged herself somehow through the days that followed; telling herself that tomorrow she would go to the doctor’s, or the day after, or the day after that; dreading the confirmation of her fear, and hoping against dwindling hope that she could be mistaken.
She wasn’t sick again, and though she examined her breasts carefully behind the locked bathroom door there were no signs that anything untoward might be happening.
She went to the library, and in the medical section surreptitiously read through the symptoms of pregnancy: blue veins on the breasts, twinging discomfort in them, an urge to pass water more frequently, morning sickness. No, no and no. Nothing but the cessation of her periods, and anyone could miss once. Anyone.
But when the second time came and went she sat at her machine like a small pale ghost, working mechanically. She walked the surrounding streets instead of going into the canteen, staring into shop windows and seeing nothing but her own anguished face.
She walked as if her feet hurt, as if she were four times her age, refusing to admit to herself that it was the feeling of love she felt for Simon Martin that was making her postpone what she knew to be the inevitable.
It was his baby inside her. This man whom she had loved from the moment she first saw him in the office at the factory, sitting there with his long legs stretched out and watching her with that amused twinkle in his dark eyes. If it had been what Sharon believed it to have been, a careless abandoned few minutes spent with someone she cared nothing for, then it might have been different. She was far from stupid, far from impractical. Life since Mam was killed had taught her just where her feet rested, and that wasn’t just flat on the ground, it was two feet underneath!
She wasn’t merely Emma Sparrow, a girl twenty years old who could decide to have her baby and bring it up with help from Social Security and visits from the Welfare ladies. She had no religious scruples about what she knew she had to do. There was just the hard fact that when her father came out of prison he would need care and cosseting. John Sparrow wasn’t the type of man who, having learned his lesson, would move heaven and earth to find a job straight away. No, he would need a shoulder to lean on, heavily; always had done and with Mam gone, her own shoulder was the only one available.
And Simon Martin wasn’t the insensitive kind of man circumstances seemed to have proved him to be. Their love-making hadn’t been merely an indulgence in selfish passion. She knew that too. The tenderness had sprung from some deep well of need inside him, and without really knowing him, loving him but not knowing him, Emma was sure she was right.
Listlessly, she walked back to the tall red-brick building, scorned the lift and ran up the stairs, taking them two at a time, still willing a miracle. She locked herself into one of the toilets, then crept back to the buttonhole machine to try to lose herself in the monotonous automatic process of making endless buttonholes in endless button trims.
‘Looking forward to Saturday, Emma?’
She jumped as if suddenly shot in the back, to see Mrs Kelly standing by her side clutching an in-tray filled with wage packets.
‘If this weather keeps up we should have a right grand day out.’ Mrs Kelly’s eyes were friendly beneath the fiercely drawn-on eyebrows. ‘You look as if you could just do with a spot of sea air. It might give you
a bit of colour, love.’
‘Saturday?’ Emma blinked as if the word were unknown to her. ‘Saturday?’
Eileen Kelly thumped the in-tray down on the work table, glanced quickly back at the office and, finding it deserted, hitched herself up on to a corner of the table. She tucked her chin into the pussycat bow at the neck of her blouse and spoke softly. ‘What’s up with you, Emma love? I’ve been watching you lately and my guess is there is something bothering you. It’s not that cheeky Ben Bamford, is it? Mrs Arkwright tells me he’s turned up like a bad penny again, just when I was hoping he’d gone for good. He’s all teeth and charm, that one, with nowt to back it up. He wants seeing off, he does.’
‘I never see Ben these days, Mrs Kelly.’ Emma pulled a fresh piece of material towards her and slid it into position, but the older woman persisted.
‘Have you really forgotten what Saturday is, love? The girls have been talking about nowt else these past few days. The shop down the bottom has run out of suntan lotion from what I’ve heard tell, though that lot from up the Khyber Pass won’t be needing none, will they?’ She took a list from the patch pocket on the front of her denim skirt. ‘You paid up weeks ago, but I’m surprised you’re not bringing a boyfriend. There’s quite a few husbands coming, including mine, and that’s an achievement I might tell you, getting him off his backside of a Saturday.’ She scanned the list, running a finger down the names.
‘I must say it’s decent of the high-ups weighing in with the cost of a fish-and-chip dinner, then a boiled ham and salad high-tea.’ She glanced again at the glass-fronted office. ‘Mr Simon was all for it. He says an outing like this is good for morale. It’s an American idea apparently, letting the workforce do all the planning, then adding the management’s contribution.’ She picked up the tray and started to walk away. ‘So shake the mothballs out of your bikini, love, and give the boys a treat, eh?’