Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  ‘YOU GOT ANY money saved, Em?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Fifty quid?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Lend it to me.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘It’s to help someone.’

  ‘Can they pay it back?’

  ‘I don’t know. Later maybe.’

  ‘No, Kate, I can’t.’

  ‘You must. It’s a matter of life or death.’

  ‘It can’t be as important as what I want it for.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you. I’ve been saving it to pay for a - for plastic surgery for you.’

  ‘Then it’s already mine, like.’

  ‘In a way, but—’

  ‘Please give it me. Cash, Em. You’ve got to give it me.’

  ‘I’ll get it tomorrow.’

  BOB WAS ILL in bed with the flu, and I went to Butt Street to get some more toy soldiers for him.

  It’s easy. What I do, I’m with them in the back room, and when the damn buzzer goes, I say: I’ll go, very helpful, and as soon as the customer is gone, I nick the box of soldiers into the big pocket of my skirt, and there you are.

  With Em’s money burning a hole in my bag so hot you can almost see smoke coming out, I could buy him a whole army, but I’ll need it all, Sonia says, and also it’s more fun to steal from home.

  When I went, my mother was hanging out clothes in the back yard, with her arms raised and her long back stretched, the way I used to see her in the country - the best times, when it was daylight - with the wind tearing the sheets away from her.

  I had picked up Loretta on my way through, and she was crowing and playing with my hair, her silly face all grins.

  ‘Hullo, Mum.’ I thought I made a nice picture in the little bit of sun that slid between the wall and the bakery chimneys, one any mother would be glad to see.

  ‘Why have you come here?’ she said. ‘You’re not to come here no more.’

  ‘Why not?’ I tried to carry it off, very cool, very casual.

  She was going to say: Because we don’t want you, but she changed it to, ‘Because of the court order.’

  She picked up the rotten fruit basket she uses for the wash and turned to go indoors. I followed her and sat down by the table with Loretta on my knee and began to dab at the crumbs with a wet finger and eat them, which is the only way the tablecloth gets cleared.

  ‘Just come to see how you were all getting along,’ I said chattily. I had to stay long enough to get into the shop and knock off the soldiers.

  ‘A lot you care,’ my mother said. ‘What’s the matter with you? Your skin is all chalky.’

  It flushed red. She had noticed something about me. Why should I care? I didn’t. Not any more. I shifted Loretta a bit to cover my front, not that anything shows yet unless you know me well, and God knows my mother hardly knows what I look like by now.

  Thank God I didn’t tell them about the baby. Molly has been threatening to do it herself if I don’t, but I’ve been putting it off. None of their business. I’ve heard them talk about other girls, without mercy. I’m not going to have them talk about me that way.

  But now I won’t have to tell. Now they’ll never know. No one will. Em and me will start on our beautiful new life together, and no one will ever know.

  The damn buzzer went. My mother was putting the washing-basket up on top of the leaning tower of cupboard, and I jumped up and dumped Loretta on the settee and went quickly through to the shop.

  Foiled, curse it Jasper. It was Dad, home from a long run north by the looks of him, for his eyes were swollen and red from the driving and his mouth wet and loose from what he’d taken to wash away the taste of the road.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here?’

  All right, all right, we’ve been through that. No sense everyone saying the same thing.

  ‘It’s my home.’

  ‘Not no more.’

  ‘Who says so?’ I squared up to him very cocky, with my jaw stuck out and my head on one side. I like to do that because it makes him roaring mad. He took a swipe at me and I slipped through into the back room, and he followed me, roaring like the Zoo at feeding time.

  ‘I thought you weren’t due in till tomorrow,’ my mother said, in charming welcome. The baby had woke up at the noise of him and was crying like all our babies have always done, Tony, Stewart, Loretta, as soon as they wake up and find it’s true.

  She picked him up off the pile of old stuff where he was wedged in the corner and held him, swaying and patting his back without knowing she was doing it.

  ‘So that’s it then,’ he said. He put his little cracked suitcase down in the middle of the room, and when he stands like that, with his head forward and his hands hanging, he is more like a gorilla than he should admit to. ‘You have her here when I’m gone, is that it? I thought I told you she wasn’t to come here no more.’

  ‘Think you can stop me?’ I laughed at him, and that did it. He went for me and fell over the suitcase, reeled against the wall, catching himself with his hand flung out, then spun round and took a smash at my mother.

  She turned just in time, or the baby would have got it, and took his hand on the back of her shoulder.

  Loretta began to scream like a cockatoo. ‘Don’t you hit her!’ I shouted, and even as I added my own noise to the menagerie, I saw very clear, like on a screen, the red and white flat and me and Em joking back and forth between the rooms as we got ready for a party, and felt sick and excited at how different it was going to be.

  I’ve always sided with my mother against him, no thanks for it, but she expects it, and now she began to whine, thinking that I was back of her. She put the baby down, moaning to him what a bloody awful dad he had, and he hit her again and knocked her on the floor and she sat there, with her hair come out of the ribbon and hanging over her eye.

  ‘Get the police, Kate,’ she wailed. ‘You saw what he done. Get the police, I can’t stand no more.’

  As I stood there in the stink and filth and hate of their living, a great sickness and weariness came over me, and I said: ‘It’s not my mess. Don’t drag me into it any more. I got out. I’m free.’

  ‘Help me, Kate.’ She was pretending to be hurt, her hand on her empty breast.

  ‘Why should I? It’s your own bloody fault for marrying him.’

  ‘I married him because of you!’ She spat it at me from the floor. T tried to get rid of you, don’t think I didn’t, but I didn’t do it right, and when it didn’t work, I had to marry him. I hate you for it.’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ Dad said. He was leaning up against the broken mantelshelf, paring his nails with the knife she uses for vegetables. ‘Don’t you know who put that mark on your neck? There’s your proof that she tried to kill you before you was born.’

  ‘I wish to God I had,’ my mother said.

  Now there is only Bob left. The dreams are all gone.

  I went to his house, where he lives, and rang the bell. Mrs Marbles opened the door after a while and looked at me, and her thin eyebrows went up like whips because I was shivering and shuffling my feet.

  When I asked if I could see Bob, she said No, with her mouth tight, and was going to shut the door, but I took a pull at myself and said, very grand: ‘It’s perfectly all right. We’re going to be married.’

  ‘And about time too,’ she said, practically delivering the baby with her eyes.

  Bob was in bed, lying quite flat, with his eyes shut and his chin over the patchwork counterpane, rimmed black with beard.

  ‘You brought the soldiers?’ he asked as soon as I came in the door, walking cautiously in case he was asleep. I shook my head and he was quite depressed. He began to pick at the counterpane, but when I sat down on it and took his hand to still it, and said: ‘Let’s get married,’ he cheered up at once.

  ‘Then the baby can be mine too?’ He sat up, excited, with his hair in black points. I hadn’t known he cared th
at much, but he cried, he was so happy.

  I held him tight and said: ‘It’s all right, it’s all right. I’ll look after you. We’ll have a little cottage,’ I told him, ‘with all hollyhocks and birds in the thatch and have currant loaves for our tea.’

  He clutched me and purred, like he does, and it was like that time in the cellar, when we played house. ‘You got any money, Katie?’

  ‘Fifty quid. I’ll buy you a suit to be married in. I’ll buy you a fort, Bobby, and a big box of Life Guards, with silver-plumed helmets and black horses with long black tails with waves in them like a lady’s hair.’

  I was crying too, with my cheek laid on his poor hot head, and it was funny, because his tears were for finding a dream, and mine were for losing one.

  Part Two

  Kate and bob were married in a small grey church crushed between new towering flats like a child in a crowd. Bob’s father was dead and his mother disinterested in Northern Ireland, and so there was nobody in church but me, Jim, Molly, Michael, Ralph, Susan, Carol, Tina, George, Madeleine, Ziggy and the twins.

  Kate’s mother and father must have known about the wedding, because they would have to give their consent. I risked asking her if they would come, and her face closed up, blank as an effigy, blind and deaf.

  Sitting in the dark little church, trying to quiet the fretful twins, I was afraid that they might come after all, blundering in with drink on his breath and a trail of dirty children in hard banging boots. Afraid, yet almost hoping, for I could not imagine being married without one’s parents. I could see myself even loving my mother in the prodigal benevolence of the day.

  But the service was quickly over without them. I was the only one who twisted round expectantly when an old woman in a muffin hat creaked open the church door. Whatever had happened between them, they were dead for Kate, and she was dead for them.

  They are living in Bob’s room for the time being and have been promised a Council flat when the baby comes. ‘Which if you get it,’ Mrs Marbles says, ‘will be entirely due to graft and influence and a crying scandal to the Lord, with so many waiting in vain.’

  It would be hard to find anyone less likely to exercise graft or influence than these two babies, Mr and Mrs Robert Thomas, playing at house in a top-floor front with black and white chequered linoleum on which they play draughts with bottle tops. But Mrs Marbles has seen Mollyarthur, and recognized her with fury as the type who has an In with the Council.

  I don’t go often enough to see Kate and Bob. I tell myself that it is because there is no time, and it’s true that I am all over London at the B.B. markets, here this morning and there this afternoon and die other side of the river tomorrow, like a debt collector. But actually it is because I have been hurt. Hurt and jealous. Empty and cheated.

  I let fly with it all at Molly one day. The sickening let-down, like dropping out of a plane into nothingness. Holding at one moment the exciting promise of being able to do something real and vital, and the next empty-handed, our plans and dreams suddenly not there.

  Molly said: ‘Do you think it could have worked out, how you were planning to live?’

  ‘I know it could. We both knew it.’

  ‘Somehow I don’t believe Kate ever really meant to go through with it.’

  ‘Then why pretend? Why cheat me?’

  ‘Look, Em,’ Molly said, ‘people brought up the way Kate was learn to live for themselves, to survive. They don’t have the same ideas of loyalty.’

  ‘She does. Don’t make excuses for her. She’s ruined everything.’

  I don’t discuss it at home. I told them briefly that, when I found a flat, I was going to advertise for someone to share it, if I couldn’t afford it alone.

  My mother sighed and turned her eyes up under her black fringe, like a drunk man I once saw passing out. ‘Thank heaven you have come to your senses. My prayers have been answered,’ she said with a touch of surprise. She prays away like mad, but never really expects to hear from God because she thinks that prayers are answered with exactly what you pray for, like: Oh God, please give me a bicycle, and here it comes descending from the roof of the church.

  My father said: ‘You haven’t let this girl down, have you?’

  ‘She’s let me down,’ I said, in a dark and bitter voice.

  ‘Be happy, Emmie,’ he said, rather abstractedly. ‘I want you to be happy.’

  When I am with Kate now, she treats me the same as usual, and we are almost the same together as we were before, except that I no longer feel that I can say absolutely anything to her that comes into my mind.

  I don’t quite trust her. Perhaps Molly is right, and she can’t entirely escape her past. I don’t believe it. I believe that the deep sources of the spirit of people can’t ever be touched. You can change at the edges, but where it all comes from, the core, is inviolate.

  That’s why, although I thought that I was through with Kate, I have found that I still love her, and in some odd way still need her.

  She needs me too, God knows. Bob is at the coachworks all day, beating panels, and she has few people to talk to except Joan who occasionally stumps her thick legs up the stairs when she’s off duty to complain about the nursing home, and the woman in the top floor back, who wears tasselled boots with heroin concealed in the heels.

  Kate is getting huge. It sticks out in front of her as if it belonged to somebody else, because her frame is so small. Mrs Marbles shuts her downstairs door ostentatiously loudly when Kate comes through the hall, because she has a rooted distate for pregnant women, even when married. She will turn them out, of course, even if they don’t get the Council flat. This will be her way of getting back at Kate, for Bob, over the three or four years he has been there, has become a sublimation of the son that Mrs Marbles was too genteel to have.

  Kate and I don’t believe she was ever married, actually. We went through her sitting-room once when she had gone out and untypically forgotten to lock the door that leads to the back part of the house where she lives. No pictures of any male Marbles there or in the vestal bedroom, where the photographs are all of women looking like aunts or grandmothers. The ones who are dead have a black moiré bow tacked to a corner of the frame. Most of them are dead, and high time too, from the looks of them.

  There is a snapshot of Bob stuck into the kidney-shaped mirror over the gas fire in the sitting-room. Bob at a holiday camp, snapped by the crowded pool, looking rather deprived in a pair of striped bathing-trunks, with not even the sense to push back the wet black hair plastered over his forehead when he saw that he was going to be photographed.

  She still tries to feed him titbits, luring him into the kitchen with offers of chicken liver and pig’s fry when he comes home from work. But Bob is loyal to Kate and always takes the plate upstairs, and they share it with the cat that came in from the roof one day and stayed.

  Kate is hungry all the time. She can cook well enough, but she can’t do much with the little hot-plate, so they eat things like meat pies and sausage rolls and cold shop-made rissoles.

  One day at home, when we were between pregnant girls and my mother and I were doing the cooking, I made mounds and mounds of macaroni cheese for some reason. It was good, but we could not possibly eat it all, so I took some in a pie-dish to Kate.

  When I rang three times, which is their signal, I heard Mrs Marbles’ door open and then Kate’s feet running heavily on the stairs. She is always delighted to see me. She never has anything much to do, and she throws her arms round me as close as she can get to me, and I forget that I am supposed to be still disappointed with her.

  Bob was home, and we would all have macaroni cheese for supper, if she could warm it up. ‘Oh, Mrs Marbles—’

  The door beyond die stairs, which had been ajar, closed softly as she spoke.

  Kate stuck her tongue out, went down the hall and knocked. The door opened at once, revealing the five foot two of printed-cotton disapproval that was Mrs Marbles in her lounging wear.

&
nbsp; ‘Could I use your oven for a few minutes?’

  ‘The pressure’s been very low all evening,’ Mrs Marbles said guardedly.

  ‘I only want to heat something up. It’s for Bob.’

  ‘All by himself he’s going to eat that?’ Mrs Marbles eyed the big dish which Kate was resting on top of the baby, and then sighted past her down the hall at me.

  ‘It’s only Emma.’ I seldom heard Kate so polite and wheedling. ‘You’ve seen Em before.’

  ‘Yes indeed. She tried to take my census. I told her. I told her straight out.’

  ‘She’s got a new job now,’ Kate said soothingly, for we have never been able to eradicate the first impression of me as a field worker for market research. ‘She takes care of people who are dying from cancer of the lung, and she’s been on duty all day without a meal. So may I?’

  ‘That’s different then.’ Mrs Marbles stepped aside and let Kate in with the pie-dish. She is dead keen on lung cancer. She once reported a man who merely took out a cigarette and looked at it wistfully in a non-smoker, and Bob has to smoke sitting on the window ledge with his head out into the street, because she can smell tobacca through the keyhole, even though they never let her into their room.

  I have a vast handbag, which I bought last year when we flew to Spain, to cheat that girl in the fore-and-aft hat who weighs the luggage, and I had it this evening with beer bottles in the bottom, wrapped in newspaper. It is absurd to be so afraid of Mrs Marbles, because she can’t put them out until the baby comes, and probably not even then if they sit tight, but the landlady trauma is part of the game that Kate still plays with life. If you live in lodgings, there is always an ogre downstairs, so Mrs Marbles has to be it.

  She is only playing at being married to Bob. She treats him like a pet, giving him caresses or orders according to whim, and talking about him when he’s there as if he could not understand more than a tone of voice. If he makes a sensible remark, which he does at times because he has taken to reading other bits of the newspaper besides the sports page and the comic strips, now that he is a man of status, she either turns it into a joke, or repeats it with amused wonder, like a mother with a bright baby.