‘You fuckin serious?’ Dulcie said. ‘Don’t you even fuckin know what the fuck it’s on about?’
‘Fuck,’ the Teaser said. ‘It don’t make no fuckin sense, that’s all.’
‘Fuckinell,’ Dulcie said. ‘Right. So there’s this woman, then, right? And she’s the queen. And her husband’s fuckin slung her in prison, all right? And it’s because she’s got fuckin pregnant and he reckons the kid ain’t his. So when it’s born he fuckin takes it, right? And he gets this geezer to dump it in the forest to get fuckin ate by wild bears and that, all right?’
‘Fuckinell,’ said the Teaser. ‘Fuckin bears? Get fuckin real, all right, Dulce?’
‘Fuck,’ Dulcie said. ‘It’s like up my cousin’s last week. Fuckin Michelle. She’s thirteen and she’s fuckin pregnant and she reckons she wants to keep it, right? But her dad – that’s me mum’s bruvver – he reckons he’ll fuckin sling her out by the neck, so she fuckin comes crying to me mum.’
‘Fuckinell,’ said the Teaser. ‘So what’s your mum supposed to fuckin do about it?’
‘So me mum she gets this gynae bloke from up the hospital where she works, right? He has a look at her and he goes’ – here, Dulcie assumed the gynae bloke’s Mister Posh voice – ‘ “No, no, the girl’s not pregnant! Good Lord, no! She appears to have something of a polyp in the uterine wall. A small irregularity. Perfectly harmless, but I’m afraid it will necessitate an immediate douche and curettage.” ’
‘Fuckinell,’ said the Teaser, after a pause, and she sounded a little perplexed. ‘So what the fuck was the matter wiv her?’
‘Well, it’s a scrape, you moron,’ Dulcie said, somewhat heavy on innuendo. ‘He give her a fuckin scrape. So what d’you fuckin reckon was the fuckin matter wiv her, then?’
‘Fuckinell,’ said the Teaser. ‘I dunno. But what he give her a fuckin scrape for, if she weren’t fuckin pregnant?’
‘Fuck!’ Dulcie said. ‘Forget it, all right? Just fuckin forget it. And there’s the fuckin bell. Fuck. And now I need to have a wee. Go on. I’ll see you inside.’
Christina found this conversation so pertinent to her present needs that the skin on her arms had come out all over in goosebumps. On each goosebump a hair was standing up at a right angle to her skin. She emerged cautiously from the cubicle into the vacated sink area and waited, trembling slightly, for Dulcie to come out. They washed their hands together, side by side. Their eyes met in the glass and each stared, unblinking for a moment, into the reflected eyes of the other. Then they turned and made the contact direct.
‘Excuse me,’ Christina said. ‘You don’t even know me –’
‘You’re American,’ Dulcie said.
‘Well,’ Christina said, ‘sort of. I was. I don’t know. Listen. There’s really no reason why you should want to do me a favour –’
‘What favour?’ Dulcie said.
‘That gynae person,’ Christina said. ‘Do you think I could possibly arrange to have an appointment with him?’
‘Fuck,’ Dulcie said, and she sighed deeply. ‘Me and my big fuckin mouth.’
And that was how it began. And, while everything else in the immediate aftermath had seemed to misfire most terribly, the friendship with Dulcie had flourished and prospered. The friendship with Dulcie was heaven.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Christina said, once the theatre attendant had denied them access to their seats on grounds of lateness. ‘Now I’ve made you miss the second half.’
‘I don’t reckon you want to see it,’ Dulcie said. Her voice sounded sagely for her years. ‘It’s all about that baby, isn’t it? The one that was supposed to have been got rid of. It’s all about how she grows up beautiful and marries the prince and all that.’
Christina sighed. ‘Would you like something to eat?’ she said. ‘We might as well go somewhere comfortable.’
They sneaked out, like conspirators, into the London City streets and found a small pub, squeezed between high-rise office blocks. It served them with waffles and Cokes.
‘ “Exit pursued by a bear”,’ Dulcie said wittily, and she drank her Coke through three straws.
‘This is about my sister,’ Christina said. ‘It’s not actually me who’s pregnant.’
‘Oh yeah?’ Dulcie said, sceptical.
‘No, really,’ Christina said. ‘It’s my sister. She’s sixteen and she got raped. The thing is, I’d need to lie to her. That routine about the polyps and all that. Like you were saying about your cousin.’ She stopped abruptly. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. As I said, you don’t even know me.’
‘Well, I do now,’ Dulcie said. ‘You’re Chris the Angelfood-cakemix and I’m Dulce the Jackpot. Would you like us to shake hands?’
Christina looked at her gratefully. Dulcie was so radiant, she thought; so beautiful; so incredibly strong and sure. However had she got like that? They were both the same age, after all.
‘She’s very brainy, my sister,’ Christina said. ‘And she’s got this fantastic voice. People expect her to do great things. Go to music school. Something like that. Get into Cambridge, maybe. Go to Harvard.’
‘Cambridge?’ Dulcie said. She spoke as though Christina had just told her that her sister was destined for planet Mars. She took a large mouthful of waffle. ‘Blimey,’ she said, once she had swallowed it. ‘If it was me I reckon I’d probably have it. Have the kid, I mean. But Cambridge. Fuck. I dunno. Listen. My mum will probably go ape-shit, but I’ll find out that gynae bloke’s name if you like.’
The whole thing, Christina had assured her new friend, would be as easy as blowing soap bubbles. The plan could not fail to run smoothly. Pam was currently so vague and undirected that it would be the simplest matter to arrange all things around her.
The sisters were to go to Granny P’s for the first two days of the Christmas holidays and, after that, their parents were to join them. The whole family, including Alice’s mother, on this occasion, were to join Grandma Angie for a rural Christmas in Tuscany.
The posh-voiced gynae bloke had duly undertaken to see Pam during those two days. He had required no small sum of money in advance, and Christina, in order to oblige him, had cleaned out almost all the savings that Granny P had accumulated for her in the Bristol and West Building Society. It would all be completely worth it, however, since the gynae bloke would make an examination and pronounce Pam to be not pregnant. He would then follow up with an immediate D and C.
Since Christina had returned from London offering the gynae bloke as an alternative to a pregnancy testing kit, she saw no reason why Pam should discover the man was not altogether upfront. No. Pam would surely be happy to believe him – especially since she habitually imputed to others her own high standards of integrity and truth. Then, within two hours, she would be discharged and unencumbered. She would be ready to live again, all over. She would cease to be that pale, silent shadow.
Granny P, too, had been easily duped and was all too happy to release the girls for what she imagined to be a shopping spree in the jollier parts of the metropolis. She had even pressed two twenty-pound notes into the palm of each girl’s right hand.
‘Come along, dears,’ she said. ‘I’ll drive you to the station. Now, where did I put those car keys?’
And then the worst thing happened. Alice and Joe came early – two days early and unannounced. Pam had just gone to pay a last-minute visit to the bathroom. ‘Frequency’ was an ominous sign, according to the manuals and booklets that Christina had begun to thumb through, somewhat furtively, in bookshops. Granny P was still casting about for her car keys when there came an assertive knocking. Christina, who responded to it, was confronted by a sight that was to her as bizarre as it was unwelcome. Although the month was December, her father stood towering before her in skinfit shiny black lycra. He wore long cycling shorts and a cycling jersey with a logo that said ‘Giordana’. In his hand he was holding a black cycling helmet.
Alongside him, looking slight and girlish, stood her mother, not dissim
ilarly attired. Alice was shivering slightly and had pulled a short, polypropylene fleece about her narrow shoulders. In the background, dressed in outsize brushed-jersey shorts and looking quite a lot like Captain Pugwash encased in a barrel, was none other than Father Zachary Levine, whom Christina had last seen at thirteen, fleetingly, on an aeroplane. He was busy locking a mint-green road bike to two similar vehicles that leaned against Granny P’s garden wall. All of the party, she noted, were wearing cycling shoes.
‘Hi, sweetheart,’ Joe said effusively, his voice filling the porch, his elongated, sinewy body showing up splendidly in the black, skinfit lycra. Christina felt dwarfed beside him. She suffered his wholehearted embrace, tense with unexpressed panic. Then, releasing her, Joe moved on into the room.
‘Valerie,’ he said, and he strode forth, hands outstretched.
‘Dearest,’ Alice said quietly, giving Christina a hug in her turn. ‘We’re rather ahead of schedule. I hope that’s not a nuisance for you. Your Papa has had us bicycling through the length and breadth of the British Isles.’
Joe had turned jovially to his daughter. ‘I guess you’re really surprised to see us?’ he said.
Christina paused and swallowed, endeavouring to digest his unacceptable good humour. ‘I’m really surprised to see you,’ she said. Sarcasm was gnawing at the edges of her voice.
Then Zachary Levine made his entry and introductions became a necessity. Granny P blinked in surprise at the fat priest, who had stepped forward and taken her proffered hand in not one, but both of his own. She had some idea that men of the cloth were never parted from their cassocks, rather in the way that children assume kings always sleep in their crowns.
And then it was that Pam entered the room.
‘Pam and I are going to London,’ Christina said, rather too quickly perhaps. ‘You’ve caught us at a bad time. Say, we’ll see you guys this evening.’
‘Hey,’ Joe said, ‘hold it, Chrissie. Now wait a bit. What’s the rush?’
‘The rush,’ Christina said, gritting her teeth, ‘is that we have a train to catch. It leaves in ten minutes and we don’t intend to miss it.’
But something was happening to her sister that Christina was powerless to subvert. Pam made a rush upon her father and clutched at him now, as if she were drowning. All the emotion that she had not seemed to possess, was issuing from her person in gigantic sobs and tears.
‘Oh, Papa,’ she said. ‘Oh, Papa. I’m so relieved to see you. Oh, Papa, hold me, please. Oh, Papa, something so awful.’
‘Pam!’ Christina said in horror. ‘Stop it and come away! Come now!’ She made an attempt upon her sister’s sleeve, but it was altogether ineffectual. Pam seemed not to be aware of her. Instead, Christina tried bashing at her father’s upper arm. ‘Let her go, you manipulating bastard!’ she said. ‘Just look at what you’ve gone and done to her!’
Joe paid no attention. He was far too busy stroking Pam’s hair and holding her head against his chest. ‘It’s okay, sweetheart,’ he was intoning quietly. ‘Sweetie-pie, it’s going to be all right.’
Christina aimed a kick at his shin. She felt once more like that cross little ant that had once used to tickle his knees. ‘Pam!’ she yelled. ‘If you don’t come now I swear I’m going without you! I’m going and I’m never coming back!’
Joe looked up at her over Pam’s head. Then he chose to address his mother-in-law.
‘What the hell is going on around here?’ he said.
Poor Granny P looked astonished. ‘The girls were going to do a little shopping,’ she said. ‘In London.’
‘Shopping?’ Joe said.
She nodded. ‘Christmas shopping.’
Pam looked up and sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘Oh, Mama,’ she said. ‘Oh, Granny P. Oh, dear Father Zachary, please. Forgive me, but there is something that I’ve really got to tell you.’
It was then that Christina accepted that she had lost her sister. The acceptance endowed her with greater clarity and self-control. She strode in silence to her grandmother’s front door. Then she wrenched it open.
‘Chrissie!’ Alice cried, noticing too late. ‘Dearest Chrissie, wait!’ But Christina had crashed the door shut behind her. She ran through the small front garden with its dead brown hydrangea heads and its little wintry spears of bulb shoots. She passed through the gate and out into the street where, with extraordinary good luck, she noticed that a taxi was pulling away from a house some five doors down. She called out wildly and gesticulated, and succeeded in flagging it down. The driver zoomed into reverse and stopped alongside to receive her. It was just as Alice, having taken possession of her mother’s car keys, had made it as far as the gate. Then the taxi bore Christina to the station.
Once she had arrived at Waterloo, she took the precaution of removing her jacket and stuffing it into a plastic bag. She pulled her beret low over her telling blonde hair and left the station, head down, walking briskly. She had the idea that her father would, by then, have brought on his heavy guns and that several uniformed police officers would be there at the turnstile to greet her.
From the safety of a phone box out in the street, she called the gynae person and cancelled Pam’s appointment. Then she made her way to Dulcie’s house.
Dulcie got her a cup of tea and listened to her story.
‘I’m not going back,’ Christina said. ‘I swear it, Dulce. I’d rather beg and steal. I’m telling you. I’ve run away from home.’
‘Give me a break,’ Dulcie said, refusing to get too excited. ‘Running away in a taxi? Fuckinell, but it’s all right for some.’
The commotion of Christina’s arrival had roused Dulcie’s mother from her bed. She had been resting after a night shift at the hospital, where she worked as a geriatric nurse.
‘You go call your folks directly,’ she said, her Caribbean speech rhythms in marked contrast to those of her daughter. ‘Come on now, dearie. You give me your gran’s phone number. Chrissie girl, I tell you, you’ve got to speak to your da.’
‘No,’ Christina said. ‘Excuse me, Mrs Jackson, but you don’t understand. See, I don’t want him to find me, that’s the whole point. Pam doesn’t know about Dulcie. She doesn’t know about either of you. And if I were to tell my father – well, you don’t know him, that’s the problem. He’s sort of the Demon Ego on legs. Sort of number one hell hound. And he’s angry with me. He’ll barge in here and throw his weight around. He’ll probably end up dragging me out by the hair. He’s six foot six and he keeps himself in shape –’
Mrs Jackson laughed. Then she cast her eyes to heaven. She had the air of one who could grapple any person into a straitjacket.
‘You pick up that phone right now,’ she said.
But the fact of the matter was that, when Christina finally did so, there was nobody available to answer. Could it really be, she thought, that they had all run away from home?
Alice, having narrowly failed to intercept her daughter’s flight to the railway station, had watched the train gather speed with no small degree of anxiety. She had no idea where Christina was heading, nor whether she meant to return. Alice had been unable to make herself hurry back to the house where, whatever the cause of poor Pam’s distress, the matter had already been effectively co-opted by Joe. That was usually the pattern whenever it came to things concerning Pam. Papa’s girl; Mama’s girl. Curious how Pam had always been more of a stranger to her, Alice thought sadly, given that it was she who had been so close to Pam’s wonderful mother.
She bought herself a cup of railway coffee and drank it slowly in the car park. Then she returned reluctantly to the house, where she felt herself every bit as irrelevant as she had anticipated. Joe and Pam sat cosily together, drinking coffee and talking. Pam appeared quite composed. She rose and kissed her mother and offered her a cup of coffee.
‘How are you feeling, my darling?’ Alice said.
‘Oh, so much better,’ Pam said. ‘Really so much better.’ She and Joe exchanged glances. ‘Would you, Papa?�
�� she said. ‘Please. I can’t. Not all over again.’ She was ceding to her father the obligation of telling her story to Alice.
Pam, it materialized, was pregnant as a consequence of rape.
Alice gasped, horrified. ‘Rape?’ she said her voice emerging as a shriek.
‘Keep your voice down, Alice,’ Joe said. ‘Your mother is at last getting some rest. She has been in quite a state, I assure you.’
‘Sorry,’ Alice said. ‘A state. Yes. Rape. Please go on.’
‘Drunken schoolboys,’ Joe said. ‘Probably. It was too dark for Pam to be quite certain.’
‘Boys?’ Alice said. ‘Plural? But God in heaven, my dearest! Pammie, how appalling! Pam, my baby. My angel one, why didn’t any of us know about this? Tell me, does Roland know about this?’
‘He will do before too long,’ Joe said grimly. ‘I just fixed up to hire a car. Pam and I are driving down there. We ought to be there by two o’clock.’
‘This is dreadful,’ Alice said. ‘And Chrissie? What was all that about Chrissie?’
Pam then came to her enlightenment, in a muddling sort of fashion. ‘Mama, Chrissie really meant well,’ she said. ‘She’d arranged for me to see a doctor. A private doctor in London. Look, Mama, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to upset her. I was too upset myself. It was just that when I saw Papa – well – everything fell into place. I sort of knew what I needed to do. I knew what Chrissie had been getting at. I’ve been acting weird lately, Mama. I’ve been a real drag on Chrissie. She’s kept on doing her best for me. She’s kept on trying to persuade me that I’m most probably not really pregnant. But all along I’ve sort of known that I was. She was only trying to help me.’
Pam looked up and smiled faintly at her mother. ‘Where is Chrissie, by the way?’ she said. ‘She didn’t really take off, did she? She didn’t really go for that train?’
When Alice left the room, it was so that Pam should not see the fall of her tears. She ran into Father Zak, however, who was crossing the hall, having just come from upstairs. He had assisted Alice’s mother to bed, as he explained, but she had found it hard to settle. He had been out to buy her a particular brand of favoured headache pills and he had filled a hot water bottle for her. Finally, he had taken her a nice cup of tea which he had expediently laced with a hefty slosh of Glenlivet. He now recommended the same for Alice and he offered to make it for her.
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