Now, since Magdalene, Avril can put words to her pain, lyrics to her childhood song. And, what is more, she can share it with friends who understand and support her.
Graham, Graham, Graham. When she was younger, before his name was banned from use in her mother’s house, Graham was the standard by which Avril was judged. ‘Don’t be like Graham, Avril. Please, do something with this untidy room.’
‘If Graham won’t help me I know Avril will.’
‘Just because Graham will only eat chips, doesn’t mean that you should copy him.’
‘Never take money from my purse without asking’—as if Avril would dream of doing that—‘If you need anything, Avril, just say.’
She did say. But she didn’t get it.
And Graham getting away with murder, Graham bringing his friends to the house and teasing fat Avril until she cried and hid herself away when she heard them coming through the front door. Graham hiding in the cupboard in the bathroom while she was on the loo. Graham springing out on her, Graham nicking her savings by smashing that lovely pink china pig, Graham’s little blackmailing scams, Graham twisting her arm in a Chinese burn till she screamed.
And so on and so forth…
Poor Avril grew up terrified of Graham. Why couldn’t they make him behave? Just because he was a boy? If she’d ever behaved like him her punishments would have been grim. And why wasn’t he taken away and locked up? Why did the police bring him home over and over and over again, more secure and triumphant in his wickedness than ever?
Avril must be polite and biddable.
‘Look, our Avril’s a lovely girl, nothing at all like Graham.’
And Avril, in her white socks and shorts, would stand there fatly, smiling.
Was there something in Mother’s psyche that welcomed Graham’s rebellious streak, something connected with a sense of vengeance towards her weak-natured husband?
‘Goodness knows where your brother is now,’ Mother continues painfully. ‘He even had the nerve to pay your father a visit at work, cadging money off him, as usual.’
‘Poor Father.’
‘Poor Father? Poor me more like. It’s always me who has picked up the pieces, tried to smooth the troubled waters. If I’d left anything to your father, goodness knows where we would be now. I dread to think. I really do.’
‘Well, let’s hope that was Graham’s last visit. At last, perhaps, he will leave you alone.’
‘I doubt we’ve heard the last of him,’ says Mrs Stott darkly.
Avril’s small amount of self-esteem has been given a mighty boost just lately by the sudden attentions of Ed Board, the Burleston golf professional. Her unusually cryptic response to her mother might partly be due to this turn of fortune. Add the punch of her two close friends, mix these with the force of Magdalene and it makes a pretty heady concoction.
Ed Board, thirty-eight, with red hair, a paunch and a stiff moustache that she tries to ignore, began his courtship by inviting Avril for a free lesson on the practice ground. ‘You look like a golfer in the making,’ he told her, slapping her soundly on the back.
‘He fancies you,’ said Bernie immediately when Avril shared this odd experience.
‘But he’s thirty-eight.’
‘So? There’s nothing wrong with thirty-eight.’
‘But I don’t know if I like him.’
‘Get on,’ laughed Bernie. ‘Give it a chance.’
So, in the still, warm peace of the following evening, Avril set out with the blessings of her friends. She made her way over the springy turf and puffed through the bramble and long grasses. On Kirsty’s advice she wore a long skirt and a loose, baggy T-shirt. Her shoes were solid and sensible.
‘Hi there!’ called Ed Board sportily; head down, he was chipping away from a transparent tube full of balls.
‘I don’t know a thing about golf,’ said Avril. ‘But I’m willing to learn.’
Before Avril knew it he was behind her, so close she could feel the shape of his paunch, busily positioning her arms. Unaware that she, herself, is an invader of space, she worried that he might be deliberately rubbing himself against her. Was he taking advantage? Bernie would know, so why didn’t she? ‘Head down,’ he ordered, ‘now swing!’
Avril swung, missed and giggled.
‘Don’t worry, that’s bound to happen,’ said Ed gamely. ‘Here we go, try again.’
She was not disturbed by his proximity, in fact she was quite enjoying it, so perhaps that was a clue to his motives. Avril did not feel uneasy in the way the police had warned them as children if you feel uneasy about it, follow your instincts, they are usually right. So Avril did not dissuade Ed Board, and gradually she made progress until she was hitting one ball in three.
How could anyone in their right mind take a game like this seriously, let alone teach it?
‘Jolly good!’ said Ed, encouragingly, now wrapping and unwrapping her hands round the club head until she was holding it correctly. Avril’s guilty feelings made her compare the rubbery head of the club to the staff of an erect penis. Was Ed having similar dirty thoughts? Was he getting a kick out of this? Just as she was beginning to think she was allowing him far too much feely-leeway, he suggested a drink at the bar. ‘It’s a lovely evening still. We could sit outside. I could murder a beer, I don’t know about you.’
‘Well, perhaps not a beer,’ said Avril, relieved. ‘But I wouldn’t turn down a tomato juice.’
‘With a tickle of vodka, no doubt?’ And Ed nudged her rather uncouthly. He meant no harm, he was just one of those ‘touching’ people, probably because of his job.
The sun was setting over the sea by the time they reached the hotel bar and took up positions on the patio overlooking the bay. The fairy lights made chains of bright spangles. The white wrought-iron tables set with flowers added scents to the summer magic. A piano was playing behind them—something from South Pacific, thought Avril ‘Younger Than Springtime’.
‘I’m enjoying this,’ said Ed, nodding and humming along to the tune with a line of foam on his moustache.
‘So am I,’ said Avril.
‘We must do this again.’
‘That would be nice,’ she told him, and he took her left hand and pressed it.
‘You really must understand, Miss Stott, that to receive personal faxes on the hotel machines and in office hours could well be construed as petty pilfering from the company.’
‘Nonsense,’ says the new, vital Avril, turning a flaming puce face towards Mr Derek’s contemptuous one. ‘I fully intend to pay for these two sheets of fax paper, and I’m prepared to work one minute overtime for nothing to make sure you are not in any way affected.’
‘The point is,’ says a nonplussed Mr Derek, taking one squeaky step backwards, ‘that some important message might have been coming through.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Avril follows up, sounding far too much like Mother for comfort, ‘anyone finding the number engaged will simply try later.’
‘I do not like your attitude, young lady.’
‘And you have always been rude to me; right from the beginning your treatment of me has been very unkind.’ Avril is shaking like a blancmange. Behind her back the stubby fingers of one hand are clutched tightly in the other, but she is determined to see this through. ‘And unfair.’
Instant dismissal?
She will now be sacked for insolence and have to slope back home in a cloud of shame. She will unpack in her little bedroom again, ‘The little window where the sun came peeping in at morn’, lie her pyjama case on her bed and have to be down for breakfast at eight. Mother will boil her egg for four minutes, just as she likes it. She will catch up with all the soaps, of which Mother is a reluctant addict, until these simplistic programmes become more exciting than real life itself; the stars her friends, their highs Avril’s highs, their lows her lows. Eventually Mother will find her an appropriate job, nearer to home this time because, in her eyes, Avril will have been tainted by her first taste of fre
edom. The first sign of the family disease will be diagnosed and treated.
‘Well, please don’t let this happen again,’ Mr Derek is saying, regarding her with curious new eyes before disappearing into his office.
‘G-g-gosh!’ exclaims Miss Pudsey with open-mouthed admiration.
‘Good on you,’ says lazy Rhoda. ‘You put that nerd in his place.’
But Avril is so shocked that she nearly forgets the offending fax, and when she does remember she discovers that her hands are still wet and trembling.
Twelve
‘AS I WAS GOING TO St Ives…’
Besotted Belinda from Bath does not sound like a problem-page contributor for nothing. When blond-haired, blue-eyed Belinda scans the cards of congratulations sent to her heroic partner, she stops short when she reaches the one from Bernadette Gallagher.
‘Who the hell is Bernadette Gallagher?’
‘Some girl.’
‘She sounds like more than that, Dom. She sounds like something dead serious.’
‘It was ages ago, don’t go on.’
‘She’s working down here, at the Burleston Hotel. Why would she come down here?’
‘She probably followed me. She had the hots for me, if I remember rightly.’
‘Well? Are you going to see her?’
Dominic rolls over in the large lumpy bed in a ground-floor room at the guest house that is his home until September. He strokes Belinda’s forehead and bites his lips; there is a teasing gleam in his eye. ‘I might do. What’s it to you?’
Belinda pouts. ‘I wish you wouldn’t act like this, Dom. I don’t think you realize how much you hurt people. You and I are sharing something now that is very, very special and it’s really sick to talk that way…’
‘Shut up and turn over.’
Embroidered with flowers like a tapestry cottage, Dominic’s little guest house—four fishermen’s cottages knocked into one—is huddled in a cobbled street leading down to a paint-by-numbers harbour. Where have all the fishermen gone, a stranger might well ask. The mullioned windows let in the scents of wild wisteria and window boxes, fish, chips, burgers and garbage strung around every alley by viciously marauding seagulls.
Against these alluring backdrops the godlike Dominic has posed for photographs, given interviews and received all the accolades he so richly deserves. Even the mother of the rescued Melanie, while grieving over the death of her husband, can be comforted by remembering him as a valiant hero who died attempting to save their baby.
‘It’s a bugger,’ said Justin Mellor, the surfer deep in his cups during one of the many glowing, long-lingering celebratory nights. Belinda leaned over to listen, the juke box was too loud for conversation in this pub. You had to shout to be heard. ‘It’s a bugger, the poor sod died well in his depth. If only he’d put his legs down.’
‘Well, why did he die, then?’ slurred Belinda, not too sober herself, ‘if he was in his depth?’
‘Could’ve been Dom’s karate chop. Could’ve been cramp.’ Justin belched and closed his eyes against his own hazy smoke. ‘Could’ve been that the poor bastard’s lungs were already filled up with water.’
Justin Mellor, whose one aim in life is attaining world fame as a surfboard champion, has since departed to Aussie land, there to take part in a competition, all costs covered by some private sponsorship.
Since then, Belinda once asked Dom casually, ‘Did you take karate at school?’
‘Yep. But I gave it up. I was just too good at it.’ And he gave her a gentle high-kick to the ribs.
In the comforting dark of his whitewashed room, behind the drawn gingham curtains, when the moon-kissed sea whispers softly and the drunks have all gone home—at around about four in the morning—Dominic has been known to weep, held safely in Belinda’s arms. ‘Jesus Christ, if I hadn’t been drinking I might have been able to save them both.’
‘Don’t, Dom,’ comforts Belinda in her most motherly fashion. ‘Don’t do this to yourself. You saved another human being, a little girl, a baby, you have achieved more in your life than most people achieve in the whole of theirs. And the father was a fully grown man, and drowning; he could have killed you both. You had to leave him and go for the child, you know you did. Everyone knows you did.’
‘I know that,’ sniffs Dominic. ‘But I’ll never forget that poor man’s face and the way I had to fend him off. I’d had two lagers, two cans of wine—that’s the equivalent of half a bottle—and before that, at lunchtime, I had a Tequila some Yank insisted on buying me.’
‘But nobody knows this, Dom.’
‘I know,’ Dom weeps again, great, dry, sobbing gasps pass through him. ‘Don’t you sodding well understand, I know. And I can never forgive myself.’
‘How could you behave in this way, Candice, you could have lost us the author; you could have lost the firm thousands, let alone the kudos of handling her.’
Candice Love jangles her bangles in a nervous show of contriteness. It is as near as she can get to an apology.
‘You knew bloody well what might happen to this novel and you deliberately and deceitfully tried to deal with it yourself, leaving me completely in the dark.’ Rory’s velvet voice rises until it reaches rasping proportions. ‘What if you’d fucked up? Who do you think you bloody well are? We’re not in this for personal acclaim, in case you hadn’t noticed. We’re supposed to work as a team! Jesus Christ, Candice, you must have known you couldn’t carry this through on your own. Once someone else had read this it was bound to cause a sensation.’
And then poor Candice, whipped like a dog, had to account for the third time for all her actions since reading page one of the manuscript of Magdalene.
At the high-powered offices of Coburn and Watts the morning has been spent frenziedly trying to repair any damage the lone Candice might have caused. Handled correctly, this author will make a fortune from book rights and advances alone.
Candice’s painful downfall was caused by the immediate interest shown by the four publishers to whom she had sent copies of the debut novel. The first two replied the following morning, one even arrived at the office by taxi and, unfortunately, met RC on the stairs only to discover he knew nothing about the book. The first action taken by Rory was to dish out extra copies to four more publishing houses and he knows damn well that the faxes and phones for the film rights will soon be buzzing. The North American rights should be huge.
The biggest film deal he has clinched for an author is a staggering $8 million record-breaker, and he reckons he can do the same here.
‘So come on, Candice,’ Rory grabs her when he has a spare second, Rory the dynamic hunk who Candice has lusted after for years without even a suggestion of returned eye contact, so that she is beginning to suspect the worst, ‘tell us,’ drawls this literary Adonis, ‘what is this phenomenon like?’
Candice, with the stuffing knocked out of her, must somehow redeem herself in the eyes of her influential boss, otherwise she’s out of the publishing world for good with no chance of getting him into her bed. ‘She is nineteen, Irish and beautiful.’ And I wish I was her, she might well have added, aware of Rory’s fetish for authors.
‘Has she any idea of the situation?’
‘No, her expectations are limited. She’s a barmaid in a hotel. The best job she has ever had was stripping in a Liverpool nightclub. I think she is surprised that her novel has attracted any attention at all.’ Candice thinks back to the girl with the green, excited eyes. ‘But she is ambitious. Loads of charisma and energy. I’d say she was the most perfect author that any publicity department could dream of.’
‘Better and better,’ says Rory, twiddling with the orchid in the button hole of his black velvet jacket.
‘Married? Involved?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘Not that you know of? Christ! Candice! This girl is one hot property; she’s young and needs to be carefully handled. I would go down to Cornwall myself, but I need to be here to deal with the bids.’<
br />
‘I could go.’
‘You’ll have to.’ The faxes are whirring, the phones are bleeping and Rory’s egg sandwich has gone dry on his desk. ‘You can fly to Penzance in the morning. Kavanagh needs to be warned right off about media interest, fakes and scavengers.’
Back in the bar at the Burleston.
‘And who the hell are you?’
‘You don’t know me, but my name is Belinda Phelps, Dominic’s friend.’ When Bernie stares blankly back the girl assumes she needs to remind her, ‘You wrote to him. You sent him a card with a personal note?’
‘A private note.’
‘OK, OK.’ The blonde bimbo looks round, her black leather miniskirt sliding with her as one. ‘Can we go over there sit in the corner?’
Bernie is not allowed to sit in the bar while on duty, but Charlie seems to be coping well and this is an emergency. Belinda has the word ‘urgent’ in neon across her peeling forehead.
‘This is all rather sensitive, you understand.’
‘I haven’t got very long,’ says Bernie.
Belinda, her wide eyes paler than any recognizable blue, starts off in a conspiratorial manner, as if the two women are on the same side. ‘Only Dom is going through a really hard time just now.’
‘Yeah?’ Bernie is trapped, brain whirling, she can see nothing clearly. She is forced to light up a fag. She can’t sit here doing nothing with her hands and she has an aversion to olives.
‘You might imagine he is in his element, what with all the publicity crap, but underneath he’s going through hell because he believes he ought to have been able to save them both.’
If only Bernie could snap herself out of this semicoma. She is already nervous about Candice Love’s arrival in the morning. The fax said nothing more. And now, baffled, she still fails to see what this is leading up to. ‘Save them both?’
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