The Best in Blountmere Street (The Blountmere Street Series Book 2)

by Arnold, Barbara

  ‘Sitting on a feather, are we?’ Mum asks.

  ‘I was thinking of something funny that happened on the Tube.’

  ‘On the way to that waste-of-time school for jumped-up nobodies and stupid girls who won’t ever amount to anything?’

  ‘It’s not …’

  ‘Glorified skivvies.’

  Dad rounds on her. ‘That’ll do! There’s no need to have a go at the girl. She hasn’t done you any harm.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what to do with my daughter. Mine! Not yours. Are you listening? Not yours!’ Mum’s voice has risen and her eyes are dancing fanatically.

  “Neddy Seagoon here.”

  ‘You thought he was your father, your dear daddy, didn’t you? Well, he’s not.’

  She rises and pushes me in front of Dad. ‘You thought she was premature. You bought it all. I fooled you, didn’t I! Les Dibble’s been bringing up a bastard all these years.’

  “I’m walking backwards to Christmas.”

  ‘Or did you know? Was that why you ruined every chance we ever had? She could be on her way to university now. But you had to stop it. You knew she wasn’t yours and you wanted to punish us both. Well, it’s time she knew.’ Mum rams her twisted face into mine.

  ‘Want to know who your real father is? He knows who he is.’

  “Across the Irish Sea.”

  ‘D’you want to know?’ she demands.

  “Yingtong, yingtong, yingtong, yingtong yingtong yiddle eye po.”

  ‘It isn’t Les Dibble. At least you can be glad about that.’

  Dad moves towards her. ‘Shut your mouth, d’you hear. Shut it or I’ll shut it for you.’

  The tea trolley rocks and rattles into the room and as if she has pulled a veil over it, Mum’s face instantly and at will becomes expressionless, her eyes clouded and secretive.

  ‘Are you all right, Mrs Dibble? We thought we heard some shouting,’ the woman pushing the trolley inquires.

  ‘I’m fine, but my daughter and her … her … need to go home, so I’ll be going back to my room.’ Mum’s voice is modulated, and her manner reasonable. Without looking at us she makes for the door. ‘Bill.’ Her voice is barely above a whisper. ‘What we were talking about. It’s Bill. I thought you might both be interested to know.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Mum never lies. When I was a child she told me that if you so much as thought of telling an untruth, spots would grow on your tongue, large indelible ones, as a reminder that you must always tell the truth.

  Dad and I walk through the asylum grounds with what seems a canyon between us.

  On the way back, the train clicks and clacks a rhythmic tormenting echo of Mum’s words, while Dad smokes one cigarette after another and gazes out the carriage window.

  When we cross The Common on our way home, I dare not look to my right, dare not look at the distant upholstery shop, not even furtively as I usually do, dare not, dare not, in case I see him, even a fleeting, faraway glimpse of him.

  We walk through the high rise maze that is the Cigar Box Kingdom and into the emptiness that had once been Blountmere Street. We enter our flat we’d left only a few hours earlier as father and daughter and now return to as … and return as …

  ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ Dad’s voice is the same. I’d expected it to be somehow different.

  ‘You’d better lay the table.’ He pushes his cap back so that it sits comically askew. I want to run to him, straighten it, as a daughter would, laughing.

  ‘What we got for tea?’ He busies himself at a cupboard.

  ‘Sardines and salad.’

  ‘Let’s be getting on with it, then.’

  I squeeze past him, at the same time brushing him lightly. I hope he doesn’t mind.

  We push the limp lettuce around our plates and pile the sardines to one side.

  ‘Bread and butter?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Right, then.’

  ‘About what Mum said.’ My voice wavers.

  ‘Take no notice of what your mother said. The doctors can tell us she’s getting better ‘til the cows come home, but the truth is she doesn’t know what she’s saying from one minute to the next. It’s a pile of rubbish, so forget it.’

  ‘You don’t … ’

  ‘We’ve got enough to do without worrying over a lot of crackpot nonsense. And if you need anything, don’t be daft and start thinking you can’t ask.’ Dad scrapes our untouched food into a bowl.

  The evening wears on. The air is as taut as the rope Dad binds around his ladders. At nine o’clock, an unheard of hour for Dad to go to bed, he retreats to the lean-to and collects a white enamel bucket: his pee bucket. If we had wanted to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, Mum and I had always gone to our outside lavatory. Ladies always use a toilet Mum asserted, but it was different for men. Every night I hear Dad urinating into the pail in sharp spurts. When Mum had been at home, she brought it out of the bedroom each morning and threw its frothy contents down the lavatory.

  ‘I’m turning in then.’ Dad holds the bucket away from me, between himself and the wall, as if tonight it’s too private a thing for me to see, an intimacy only shared by real families.

  The next morning, sunshine draws a pattern on the kitchen floor as Dad washes at the sink. He splutters as he rubs the soapy flannel around his eyes and nose. While I brown the toast, I look out into the back garden. It’s crimson and gold and normal.

  ‘It’s a lovely day.’

  ‘Not bad,’ Dad answers, doing up the collar of his shirt, which he’s folded in on itself so as not to get it wet while he washes. Globules of soap-suds still stick to his earlobes.

  ‘The garden’s looking lovely.’

  ‘Not for long. Those bulldozers’ll make short work of it when they get started.’

  It’s typical of Dad’s morning outbursts. It’s good. It’s a sign we’ll carry on as if nothing’s happened. We’ll ignore what Mum said as if she’d never said it. We’ll discard it forever and always. My burden lifts a little.

  Outside in Blountmere Street, the sunshine banishes the eeriness of the dereliction all around, leaving the street’s history locked behind sooty brick facades, struggling under the early summer sky.

  Across the road standing on the incline outside the block of flats in which he lives, Herbie is waiting for me. One hand shelters his eyes from the sun, while he waves with the other. Normal! Dressed in my everyday secretarial suit, I wave back. Normal!

  At secretarial school, it is an ordinary day. I improve my shorthand speed by three words a minute, type a passable manuscript, and struggle with commerce as I usually do. I eat my sandwiches sitting outside with a few of the other girls under the tree dominating the back of the building. Afterwards, we browse the Oxford Street shops and lick ice creams as we saunter back. Nothing has changed. Everything is normal.

  Herbie has asked me to go to the seaside with him, and I’ve agreed. At least it’ll be somewhere different for the day.

  At Victoria Station, he eases the straps of his knapsack. ‘I’m really glad you decided to take a day off secretarial school. I’ve persuaded Mum to do us a few sandwiches, though I thought once we get there we could have fish and chips. There’s nothing like eating fish and chips at the seaside. At least, that’s what my old man says. Not that he’s seen the sea more than twice.’ Herbie laughs and I laugh with him. It touches something raw in my throat.

  “The train now standing at platform eight stops at all stations to Bognor Regis.”

  We stroll along the platform. As we walk, I smooth my skirt. I hope Herbie doesn’t notice me doing it and how creased it is. Even with my painstaking ironing, after half an hour on an underground train on our way to the main line station, it looks like a piece of Dad’s scrim. Had things been as they were, and not as they have become, I’d have asked Angela if I could borrow her blue sailcloth skirt. If I’d gone to the Addingtons’, however, I’d have run the risk of seeing Bill. A creased skirt
was a hundred times more preferable than that. One day soon, unless I choose never to visit the Addingtons again, I’ll have to see Bill. I try to banish the thought, even as I attempt to banish the creases from my skirt.

  ‘In here. It’s empty and it’s a non smoker.’ Herbie levers me up the step and into a carriage. ‘It’s exciting travelling by train, though I have to confess I haven’t been on too many. What about you?’ he asks as he settles himself next to me. I know he hasn’t sat opposite because he wants to be closer to me.

  ‘We go on the train every Sunday to the asyl … to visit Mum.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I forgot.’

  Why do people always apologise when I mention Mum?

  ‘You haven’t asked why I want to go to Bognor,’ Herbie says, as the houses become fewer and the carriage window fills with blue and green.

  ‘Isn’t it just a good south coast place to go on a summer day?’

  ‘You’re right, but I chose it for another reason. You see, there’s a Butlin’s Holiday Camp there.’

  The girls at Grigham Road talked about Butlin’s as if it was the most exotic place on earth, but the photos I’d seen of it, with rows of prefabricated chalets looking like the bungalows that used to line the side of the bomb site, hadn’t impressed me. And a voice blasting through a loud speaker calling “Wakey, Wakey” and encouraging all the holiday makers to get up, doesn’t appeal to me as the perfect holiday.

  ‘Do you want to look at it before you book a holiday there?’ I ask. I hope we don’t have to walk round the place for hours. It isn’t what I’d anticipated when Herbie had asked me to go there.

  ‘Nothing like that. Actually, I want to find out about being a Red Coat.’

  ‘A Red Coat? One of those people who run the knobbly knees contests or housie or whatever else they do there? Not you! I thought you were going to be an insurance broker?’

  ‘I’ll sit my insurance brokering exams first, or at least some of them - got to keep my parents happy. And, I suppose they’re right, once I’m qualified I’ll have something to fall back on if this doesn’t work out.’

  Something to fall back on! It could have been a quote straight from a book Mum might have written.

  ‘Why a Red Coat? Do you really want to be one?’

  ‘No, but I said one day I’d tell you what I really want to do.’ Herbie leans closer as the train enters a tunnel. ‘I know Peter Sellers and Tony Hancock didn’t start off as Red Coats, but quite a lot of comedians have, and that’s what I want to be, a comedian.’ The train emerges from the tunnel with a rush of air. ‘Don’t ask me why. I suppose I like making people laugh, or more accurately perhaps I want them to be able to laugh at themselves. To expose sham and hypocrisy, who knows. All a bit heavy,’ he finishes and runs his finger down his lips and on to his chin.

  ‘Have you always wanted to make people laugh?’ I ask, trying not to say something like, “That’s nice” or “How unusual”.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to make you laugh.’ Herbie reaches a hand toward my cheek, then withdraws it. ‘I suppose I discovered what laughing could do when Dobsie was killed in the playground on The Common. Those weeks after his death, I spent hours in my bedroom reliving the things we’d done and I’d laugh, really laugh. Sounds crazy; here were people saying how sad I must be and all I was doing was laughing, but the more I laughed, the more I was able to keep Dobsie alive and the less it hurt.’

  The train stops at yet another station. A woman with two children carrying buckets and spades gets in and Herbie moves further away from me.

  When we arrive, we walk from the station and along the front, lined with hotels with names like Sea Breeze and The Mariner. They are double-fronted and painted white, which I suppose is to contrast them with the blue of the sea and sky, although neither sea nor sky are blue today, more a whitey grey.

  ‘I reckon it’ll only take an hour or so at Butlin’s to make the enquiries I need. I suppose I could have sent away for some information, but I wanted to see the place for myself,’ Herbie says, as we spread a towel on the pebbly beach. Then we undo the greaseproof paper wrapping of Herbie’s mother’s packet of sandwiches, bloater paste, like the ones we’d eaten in the gardens of Tony’s orphanage: me, Mum and Bill.

  ‘Look, why don’t you go on your own? That way you could probably get a half-day pass and spend a couple of hours there without me dragging around with you. It wouldn’t bother me at all. In fact, if you don’t mind, I’d rather stay here on the beach. It’s quite warm, and I’ve brought my swimming costume. I might even go for a swim.’ I think I sound convincing.

  ‘Are you certain? I mean, I didn’t invite you so that you could sit by the sea on your own.’

  ‘I’ll be perfectly all right. And if you go now, we’ll have time for a walk and fish and chips before we have to catch the train back.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’ Herbie begins hoisting his knapsack onto his back. ‘I’ll meet you here in two hours.’ He begins moving away. Suddenly, without knowing why, I call after him, ‘Who am I like, my mother or my father?’

  Puzzled, he turns and calls back. ‘Your mother, I think, not that you’re … well, you’re not … ’

  ‘What about my father? Do I look anything like him?’

  ‘I’ve never been much good at telling who people look like. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘It’s just that someone who used to live in Blountmere Street said I was … that I … looked like my father.’ I run my tongue around the roof of my mouth feeling for lie spots.

  ‘If they think so, then perhaps you do.’

  I wait until Herbie has disappeared from view before collecting up my things, hurrying along the seafront and into the town. Someone in a shop might know; someone who has children, or who, at any rate, might have something to do with them and who might know Tony. After all, he always wanted to come to Bognor. Maybe it’s where he’s ended up. I glance in various windows until, in a beach wear shop, I see a woman I estimate to be in her early forties. She might have children who are or have recently been at secondary school.

  ‘Can you tell me if there’s a secondary school here?’ Bognor doesn’t seem big enough to have more than one secondary school. The woman nods and draws a map on the back of a bag with illustrations of bikinis and sunglasses on the front. ‘Follow the arrows I’ve drawn and you shouldn’t have too much trouble,’ she smiles. ‘Trying to find someone, are you?’

  ‘An old friend who I think has moved to Bognor.’

  ‘Good luck. Bognor’s not such a big place, so if she’s here you stand a good chance of finding her.”

  ‘It’s a boy. His name’s Tony,’ I add. ‘Tony Addington.’

  The woman closes her eyes, then shakes her head. ‘No, sorry. I can’t recall anyone called Tony Addington.’

  With the help of the map, I find the secondary school easily. I enter the building and tap on the door of a small room, where an office assistant brags that she doesn’t have to look at any records to know that a Tony Addington isn’t or hasn’t ever been at the school. In the eighteen years she’s worked in the office, she prides herself on being able to recognise the names of every one of the pupils who have attended during that time. There’s a public school a mile or so away to the right, she says, putting a finger under her nose and raising it upwards to indicate the school is a snooty one. ‘He might have gone there,’ she says.

  How ironic if Tony had gone to a public school, when I had been delighted not to attend one.

  The grounds of the public school remind me of those surrounding the asylum and of the orphanage Tony had been in, as if all institutions employ the same gardener. The school secretary adjusts her pince-nez. She studies my crumpled skirt, and begins sorting through a filing cabinet crammed with grey files. I glance at my watch.

  ‘Yes, here it is.’ The woman waves a file above her head. ‘Anthony Adson.’

  Something inside me rises then plummets. ‘No, I’m looking for Tony Addington. He’d be sixteen
now.’

  ‘Let me see.’ She half extracts another file. ‘This boy would be twenty-five; not such a boy, really.’ She continues for another ten minutes, grumbling about the time my enquiry is taking. ‘It looks as if your friend isn’t or never has been at this school, a pity really because it would have done him good. He would have learnt how to write letters and keep in touch with his friends, so that they didn’t have to come searching for him and wasting my time.’ Imperiously she dismisses me.

  I arrive back at the seafront with fifteen minutes before Herbie is due to arrive. I clamber down onto the beach and extract the towel from my bag. Hitching up my skirt above my knees, I undo the top two buttons of my blouse and using my bag as a pillow I recline on the pebbles.

  In retrospect it had been a stupid idea. There were dozens of beaches in England and choosing Bognor because Tony had once said he wanted to go there was a strange reason to go traipsing round schools. Anyway, the seaside assumption was based on a mind image that was now browning and crumpling at the edges like an old photograph. It was a picture I could have conjured up from anywhere: a sparkling sea, a seamless stretch of sand, flouncing hills and a few sheep. It had been a picture straight out of a story from one of Mum’s Woman’s Weeklys and not bit like Bognor.

  I wriggle to get more comfortable on the pebbles. My problem is I’m too gullible. I’d believed the image, just as I’d believed everything Mum had ever told me. Now I no longer know what truth is. I rub my forehead, then move my hand backwards across the top of my head, trying to create a shelf inside my cranium on which I can store all my confusion.

  ‘Got a headache?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You were rubbing your head and I wondered if you had a headache. Too much sun.’

  Herbie is standing over me. He looks elongated like someone in a crazy mirror.