Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  A baby had been crying all the time in the back room, and she muttered impatiently and went through, telling Mr Jordan he could see Loretta, she supposed. I followed, although I wanted to go away, because I didn’t know how to feel. I had thought I would feel hatred, as Kate had when she was here. Had she been here? I tried to imagine her traipsing sullenly into the shop at the flat summons of the buzzer, deterring customers with her lower lip, slopping the sherbet powder messily into the penny bags, waiting for the something wonderful that never came in from that despondent street.

  What kind of woman had made Kate into what she was when I first saw her? I didn’t understand. This was only a woman with no joy of life, muttering back and forth between the buzzer and the baby, picking the baby up and rocking it with uncaring, unfocused eyes.

  The father was out, which was a good thing. ‘He doesn’t like you coming here,’ she told Mr Jordan. ‘I told him you was helping me with Loretta, trying to get her into the special school and that, but he’ll not have it that she needs help.’

  Loretta was about five, perched on the arm of the collapsing sofa, her mouth open, dribbling a little. When she held up her arms to me, raising them together, like a doll, I picked her up and she clung and giggled and made strange words.

  She was rather lovable, but then she wasn’t mine. How lovable would she be day after day when you were poor and tired and had a baby and two boys with running noses and graveyard coughs whining and fighting in the few crowded rooms that crouched round the dud little shop? She was wet, she had torn out her hair round the edges, she couldn’t talk properly, her dull eyes and dropped jaw made her look what she was. Why, if this man and woman were going to ill-treat a child, why not this poor idiot, their failure, instead of Kate who was quick and clever and full of an unused love which she had never dared to express, even as yet to me?

  Kate’s mother did not ask us to sit down, and there was nowhere to sit anyway that wasn’t piled with rubbish; so we stood while Johnny Jordan patiently tried to persuade the woman to let him take Loretta for examination himself, since she obviously wasn’t going to.

  The buzzer sounded and she cursed and went out, putting the baby down on the floor, where it began to scream and crawl under the sofa, butting its head against the sagging springs. When she came back, she said: ‘Bloody nerve. Two sticks of gum.’ She was really angry. It must be a brave neighbourhood child who would trade his pennies there. Why didn’t she sell the shop? Who would buy?

  The room we were in was no more tempting, with its broken furniture and the oilcloth on the table covered with the remains of several meals. The ugly, coughing boys played in the foul yard outside, throwing pebbles at the railway wall. When they had begun to fight in the slot of kitchen where a soup of underclothes broke grey scum bubbles in a saucepan, she had turned them out, suddenly tense with irritation, as if she couldn’t stand much more.

  At times she drifted vaguely off, incapable of moving her body or mind. Standing biting at the quicks of her stubbed nails, she fumed at the baby, who was now half under the sofa, roaring into the dust, but did not move to pull him out. She would neither agree to let Mr Jordan take Loretta to the clinic, nor promise to take her herself. Her eyes dreamed dully, then sprang alight with rage at the buzzer or the rowdy boys. She looked like a woman who might suddenly scream and run out, leaving the whole mess. Why not? She should never have got into it.

  When Johnny Jordan finally gave up, and nodded to me that we should go, she said sharply: ‘You’d best not come here again. I don’t want you coming here no more.’

  ‘Because of your husband?’

  ‘Because of me! I don’t want you snooping here, with your staring girl, whoever she is. Going to make her living off other people’s bad luck.’

  ‘And Loretta?’ Mr Jordan stood his ground, rocking back and forth in his well-cleaned shoes, as he does when he is under fire.

  ‘She’s our business. You let her be.’ She took her from me roughly, but the smell stayed with me, and the dribble on my jacket. The child was soaking, and she made a face and put her down on a peeling leather stool, and Loretta climbed down, crowing angrily, leaving a dark patch.

  ‘Someone else will come, if I don’t. She’ll have to—’

  ‘Why don’t they let us alone? I’ve got four good kids and we’ve never had no trouble. Let us alone, can’t you?’ Loretta and the baby matched her rising voice, and the two boys pressed noses white against the window to see what was up. ‘If you don’t get out, he’ll catch you,’ she shouted, throwing her voice wildly at the walls, ‘and I’ll not answer for what he does.’

  Mr Jordan put on his cap, which he had been holding behind him, as he rocked imperturbably from heel to toe. T thought he’d be on the road,’ he said, with his hand on the door knob.

  ‘He lost his job, if you want to know. I don’t know where he is, except he’s not out looking for another.’

  As we went through the shop, a woman came in from the street with a plaid shopping-bag. She stared at us, and then looked out of the window over the dusty packets and went out again quickly, to tell a neighbour perhaps that something was up.

  No, it was because she had seen Kate’s father coming. We met in the doorway. From behind, I could see Johnny Jordan’s broad shoulders tensing for a fight, but the man was so drunk that he just pushed past us and into the back room, kicking open the door. A hand slammed it shut and, as we left, we heard the voices rising and the baby screaming and Loretta wailing like an animal.

  Neither of us said anything. We drove out of the street, the woman with the plaid bag staring after us, and a small boy pitched a stone. Mr Jordan hummed without a tune, frowning. He didn’t speak until he was stopping the car by the station. ‘Sorry you came with me?’

  I didn’t answer, and he looked at me and his eyes opened in surprise as he saw the tears in mine. ‘What’s the matter?’

  If only one could cry inside oneself, silently letting go without trace. Not with your face swelling up hot and your nose filling up like a blocked drain and your mouth pulling down. I wasn’t going to bawl in his ear and look disgusting and have to go into the station like that.

  I wanted to cry, but since I couldn’t let myself cry, I let myself tell him. ‘I know the girl who ran away from there,’ I said. ‘She’s my friend now.’

  ‘And now you’ve seen what she ran from?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not that. I had to see that. I - oh Johnny—’ If he had been my father, I would have flung myself all over him, sobbing, wanting his arms round me, his murmur. ‘Her mother never said her name. She never mentioned her. I’ve got four kids, she said. We’ve never had no trouble. It’s as if Kate had never been.’

  My voice cracked, so I didn’t say any more. I wondered if he would tell his wife I was hysterical. When I fumbled my way out of the car and managed to thank him, he said: ‘Thank you,’ and called me Emma.

  WELL, I KNOW now. That magazine article, it all matches up. Check with your doctor, it said. What do I need with a doctor? I’m seventeen.

  The thing is, I don’t know whether to tell Bob or not. He’s such a kid himself, it hardly seems fair. You’re supposed to be bitter against the man. Don’t feel bitter, the magazine said. But I don’t. I feel sorry for him, really, because he won’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do either, so I’ll wait and see. I’ll ask Sonia, though I doubt she’ll talk to me after the party. I could ask Noreen if she’s out of the Remand Home. She’d know if anyone would.

  I can’t tell Molly. I’ll never tell her. People who are married are so bloody righteous. They can do it every night and good luck to them. Me and Bob - just that one night, and bad luck to us.

  If it hadn’t been that I was baby-sitting, it wouldn’t be so bad, but that she’d not forgive, with the kids all over the house and Michael not even asleep, I don’t think. And I disobeyed her. She’d mind that even more.

  She’s got this thing about trusting people. I don’t make rules for you,
she said, that second week after I began to talk to her. I just tell you how I’d like you to behave, and then I trust you. That’s why I didn’t bolt again, I suppose, although I still had it in my head to go back and look for Doug. He was well known round those parts where he took me.

  She trusted me not to have Bob come when she and his Lordship were out, so I can’t tell her. She knows about when I ran away, because she’s read the reports and that monster at Stinkney would be sure and put in his bit, you can bet on that. In any case, when a boy and a girl shove off, it’s obvious what for, and I don’t suppose anyone would believe that when I ran to Bob that night and chucked stones at his window so old Marbles wouldn’t hear the bell, I never thought of that.

  Nor he. After all, if that was it between us, we’d had plenty of chances last summer, on the common and that. He came with me so sweet, never stopped to ask why, just came.

  I summon thee to heaven or to hell, and he came.

  I was still shivering then, and sick at my stomach, but when he came down grinning like a loony in his socks, and put his arms round me with his shoes in his hands in that cat cemetery she calls a front garden, it was better. I forgot then, for a time. We were two lovers eloping and old Marbles was the wicked stepmother. She’s after us! We kept hollering all down the street. All is lost - run for your lives! When we were in the Underground, we were secret agents. We picked out who was spies and who wasn’t. The man in the bowler, he was an agent too, from the C.I.D., so of course he knew us, though he never moved a muscle, so well trained. He couldn’t acknowledge us because of that Commie woman who was pretending to read, but watching us all the time. She was a man dressed as a woman really. Her legs had all hair on them.

  When we found the cellar under that old bank they were knocking down - they’d taken the money out long ago - we played it was our house. I was a bride and I made Bob carry me in over the pile of bottles, though he didn’t understand why, because he doesn’t read stories. But if I tell him it is so and this is what they do, he does it. He’s as good to play with as Tony used to be before he got old enough not to do what I said.

  We divided it all up into rooms, laying out stones, and where the workbench was, that was the kitchen and we ate the meat pies in there and shared the bottle of Coke. Bob wedged up the broken chair with a bit of wood, and that was our sitting-room, and he sat back with his foot wagging and his cigarette on his lip while I knocked the picture out of the frame, and that was the T.V.

  I stuck my face through it and sang for him and joked a bit, but I was running out of fun and I knew I’d sob and howl pretty soon, because it was all coming back over me, cold and sick, and I knew that even if we played games for the rest of our lives, it would always be there. I couldn’t shut it out, so I sang the God Save for him and made a face like the Queen sitting on that horse and went into the corner we’d said was our bedroom and laid down on the sacks.

  Bob came and stood over me and said: ‘Why are you shivering, Katie?’ and I said it was because I was cold, because I couldn’t tell him. So he laid down too, close to me, and after a while it really was cold. We’d been daft not to bring more clothes, but there wasn’t time.

  I was still shivering when he put his arms round me, and I don’t know whether it was the cold or the despair, but anyway there it was, and with a boy like Bob, so sweet and childish, no one is going to tell me there is anything wrong to it.

  They didn’t at the Home, I’ll say that for them, but then they thought it was Douglas, and not my fault. It was still cold afterwards. More so, and we both cried. Then I told him stories till he went to sleep, and I did too, in the middle of Sir Lancelot, and we only got out just in time before the workmen started on the upstairs.

  The next night it was better, because we had the blanket, but that was almost the end of the money, after we’d had some food. We didn’t think much about what we’d do. If Bob didn’t go back to the factory Monday, they might not take him back at all, but he’d get something else, for he’s clever with his hands, you’d never think it. We played House again, and we’d been married for years, and all the kids asleep - I made them out of bits of rags wrapped round stones - and then when we were laying down again, I got a giggling fit and said: ‘If we go on like this, it could be a real one, not stones.’ But it didn’t seem to matter then, so of course it wasn’t. So of course then after, in my room at Molly’s when I never thought about it at all, then it was.

  But magazines don’t know everything. How can they know about me?

  In the morning, it was Sunday, so we stayed in bed and talked about who would go downstairs and make the tea and bring it up. That made us want the tea, so we had to get up and walk miles till we found a place that was open.

  Bob wanted to go on playing we were mother and father taking the children to church (he was brought up rather nicely), but I felt pretty rotten then, and tired and cold and hungry, and he said: ‘Your strawberry’s gone all blue.’

  I’ve never minded him talking about it, for some reason, though if anyone else dares - even one of Molly’s kids, her own or the rejects - they’d get their teeth kicked in. Moll never would. Nor Em. Last thing Em would ever do. We’ve never talked about it, though God knows we’ve talked about everything else in the world and out of it. I’ve never had a friend like her.

  It may be that she doesn’t see it. Has never seen it. Perhaps it isn’t there. I can’t feel it, and if I don’t use two mirrors, I can’t see it. If I can’t see it, it isn’t there.

  I don’t mind about Bob, because he’s such a child and when he says things that would hurt from anyone else, they don’t hurt, because he doesn’t mean them to.

  He took my hand and squeezed it, which hurt because I was cold. ‘I love you, Katie,’ he said, and it sounded so queer, coming from him, that I laughed. He thought it would make me feel better, I suppose, but it didn’t.

  When he said after breakfast: I’m getting a bit sick of this,’ he wasn’t running out on me, he was just saying what he thought. But I’d been thinking ever since the start of that Sunday morning that I’d have to push off on my own. Bob is all right, but you can take just so much of him. He wasn’t young Lochinvar, and I didn’t fancy any more nights in the cellar, so when he said that, tripping over the kerb in Charing Cross Road, I said: ‘So am I,’ and ran for that bus that was just starting up, and he stood rooted. I never will forget his face.

  I wouldn’t do that to him again. I see now that it was mean, although at the time I just did it without a second thought. That was the Before-Molly me. I’m nicer now, God help me, for I can’t let the poor good woman think her efforts have been in vain. She never gives up on anybody. That’s why I can’t tell her. And I can’t tell Em, because I never had a friend like her, and I never shall again, if she leaves me.

  They don’t know, and if I don’t say anything, it will go away. Like when I used to see the Hood at night in the attic. If you pull the covers over your head and don’t call out (who’d come anyway?), it will go away.

  SPRING EXAMINATIONS WERE coming up at the college, and I was in a mild panic that I would fail and disgrace our bit of the family, and put Uncle Mark to the test of whether he was employing me for myself or for the clan.

  I took no days off and no more long lunch hours. I took books home, those terrible books written by people with made-up Christian names who have never seen a supermarket, let alone a live customer. I studied some nights, and on the others I was busy being in love.

  It didn’t last very long, but while it did, it was incandescent. He was German (one more I couldn’t bring home to my mother), with the romantic name of Gerhart.

  He was a student too and we met every lunch-time and after work, and walked dreamily about and kissed on benches and in doorways. When you see someone else doing it, it’s repellent. When you’re doing it yourself, it’s All the World Loves a Lover.

  Gerhart took up all my free time and all my thoughts, including when I was supposed to be working. The on
ly picture I had of him was creased and torn at the corners from too much handling. I showed it to my father and said: ‘I am in love.’ I can say that to him when I have had some wine and must talk or burst, and he will take it equably and not refer to it again if I don’t want to. If I said it to my mother, she would either get in too deep and start worrying it like a rat, or say: That’s all very well, but how will you feel about him five years from now? With someone like Gerhart, you are not even sure you’ll know him five days from now.

  While it lasts, however, it is consuming, and there is nothing else. Love is supposed to make you sweeter, kinder, a more ‘fully realized person’. Actually, it makes you terribly self-centred. The Gerhart kind of love does anyway. When I got Mollyarthur’s postcard, I realized with a shock of guilt that I hadn’t been near Grove Lodge for almost a month, and had hardly thought about my friends there. I had written to Kate when the exam scare started, and then I met Gerhart in a banjo cellar where I had lost my cousin Derek in the noise and smoke, and that was it.

  The postcard and the death of Gerhart came at the same time. We suddenly realized we had nothing to say to each other, having gabbled our life stories too exhaustively too soon, and the girl with the glaucoma eyes who had been warming herself at the outskirts of our fire came into her own.

  When I got to the station that night, I telephoned home to ask someone to fetch me. My father came, although he was working, because of the sound of my voice. In his presence, I tore the photograph up into little pieces and dropped them with gracefully fastidious fingertips out of the window of his car.

  ‘Now dust off your hands,’ he said, so I did, and I felt very empty, not specifically for Gerhart because I didn’t want him now, but for what he had supplied. At home, my father poured me a whisky, and my mother said, ‘At her age, David,’ but I am almost nineteen, for God’s sake - nineteen! and handed me the postcard, picture up, to show she hadn’t read it.