The Unknown Bridesmaid

by Margaret Forster

  She would have liked a sister herself, of course. Or a brother. But a sister preferably. Someone she could talk to and who would be an ally against their mother when she was at her most infuriating. They, her sister and herself, could then gang up together, and complain to each other about whatever it was that their mother had said which they objected to. And she would have been able to tell a sister anything. When she considered this, Julia felt there was something just out of reach in her mind which was bothering her and which a sister would have known about in a telepathic way. It was something that Julia wanted rid of, but first she had to identify what this something was. A sister would have guessed. Julia had seen this happen between her mother and Aunt Maureen. Her mother would tell Maureen what she was worrying about. ‘Your trouble, Maureen,’ she would say, ‘is that you can’t see what is happening under your nose.’ And then Julia’s mother would tell Aunt Maureen what indeed was happening, and over Aunt Maureen’s face would spread a look of relief mixed with astonishment. That was what having a sister meant: knowing things about them that they didn’t even know themselves.

  Julia didn’t need to ask the question she had been ready to ask because it was asked by someone who was quicker at attracting the speaker’s attention than she was. The answer was fairly satisfactory, so Julia didn’t feel any need to make the point she’d been going to make about how it was tempting to confuse a child’s evasion of the truth with a calculated piece of lying.

  As she left the hall, successfully dodging several people who she could see were going to come and greet her, her mobile, which she had just switched back on, rang in her bag. She waited until she was outside the building before she answered it. It was from the social worker attached to the case of Gill Boothroyd, apologising for calling her when she knew she was in Manchester but there’d been a new development and she wanted Julia to see Gill again. This was not how things were done, as the social worker knew, and Julia didn’t have to agree, but she did. She said she’d see Gill Boothroyd the next day and asked where she now was. ‘In hospital,’ the social worker said. Julia didn’t ask why. This social worker sounded almost apologetic, though nothing that had happened, whatever had happened, was likely to be her fault. Instead, Julia said she would be at the hospital at ten the next morning.

  There was a mother and a three-year-old girl sitting opposite her on the train, making Julia recall Elsa at three years old. She was the sweetest child, so pretty and lively, an absolute delight. That’s what Julia’s mother called her, ‘an absolute delight’. Julia played all sort of games with her, quite willingly. Hide-and-seek was Elsa’s favourite, but it wasn’t the usual game, in which one person hides and the other seeks. They both hid together, and waited to be missed, waited for the shout of ‘Julia, Julia’ or ‘Elsa, Elsa’ to sound through the house when Julia’s mother registered that she hadn’t seen either of them for a long time. Even when Julia heard her mother, she didn’t let Elsa leave their hiding place. She liked her mother to begin to sound frantic before she let Elsa out of the cupboard or from under the bed. Elsa would yell, ‘Here, here!’ and run off excitedly, while Julia followed on, nonchalantly, and Julia’s mother would eye her suspiciously yet never say what these suspicions might be.

  Whether she did indeed have anything to be suspicious about, Julia herself would have been unable to say. There was something about hiding with Elsa that troubled her. The little girl was so small, so eager to cling on tightly to Julia when they were hiding, shivering with the thrill of it, squealing softly when she heard her name being called. Shh, Julia would whisper, shh, and Elsa’s grip would tighten. To be so powerful was a feeling Julia relished, but she was also afraid of it. But these games of hide-and-seek stopped as Elsa grew bigger. Julia found she didn’t want to be squashed any more into confined spaces with the increasingly sturdy Elsa. She suggested treasure hunts instead. The treasure hunts had a purpose Elsa knew nothing about. Julia wanted to find Reginald’s secret present which she believed Iris must have hidden among her things, her personal things.

  What she wanted to do was to go through the wardrobe and the drawers in Iris’s bedroom, but she couldn’t do it herself. She didn’t feel she could go into the bedroom unless Iris sent her there for something, but the occasion, these days, never arose. Elsa could go there, though. There would be nothing unusual about her going into her parents’ bedroom. But however hard she tried, Julia couldn’t make up a clue in her treasure hunt that would lead to a search of Iris’s bedroom, so she had to change the game. The new game was the dressing-up-as-ladies game, with Iris’s permission to play with her clothes, so long as they were all put back afterwards.

  Elsa loved dressing up. Julia chose the clothes for her, carefully picking brightly coloured garments. Luckily, Iris was not only a woman who had lots of clothes but was also someone who never threw anything out. Stacks and stacks of dresses were jammed into her wardrobe and the shelf inside held dozens of hats. The dresses, even the short sixties ones, were too long for Elsa but Julia used scarves to hoist them up and tie round what passed for a waist on Elsa. The scarves came from the dressing-table drawers. Lots of scarves crammed there, chiffon and silk, spotted and striped and patterned, some long and thin, some square, and all in beautiful colours. Julia’s heart beat a little faster when she got Elsa to pull out these drawers. She felt instinctively that they made the perfect nest for a secret present. But she was careful to touch nothing in the drawers herself. ‘You choose a scarf to use as a belt,’ she’d said to Elsa, and Elsa had promptly pulled out all of them so that they fell into a heap on the carpet. But when the drawers were quite empty, Julia saw there was nothing else in them. She folded all the scarves and replaced them. ‘No more dressing up,’ she said to Elsa crossly.

  Gradually, it dawned on Julia that Iris and Carlo were well off. According to Julia’s mother, ‘Those two spend money like water.’ Julia didn’t see how water could be spent, but she took her mother’s point. She went shopping with Iris quite often, because she was useful holding the pushchair (a double one) with the girls in it while Iris looked at clothes. Iris bought a lot of clothes, paying in cash from a purse which seemed to bulge with it. Sometimes she would ask Julia to get a twenty-pound note out for her while she attended to one of the girls. ‘Here, Julia,’ she’d say, handing over the purse, ‘Get a twenty out and give it to the girl at the till for this, will you?’ and Julia would carry out the transaction and bring the skirt, or top, back to Iris, in a bag, together with the change, if there was any. ‘Oh, keep it,’ Iris would sometimes say, and Julia did.

  She wondered if she ought perhaps to tell her mother how generous her cousin was, but decided not to, in case, as was quite likely, she was told not to accept the money. She saved it, week by week. Although there was no such thing as a place where her mother would never look, Julia thought that keeping the money she got from Iris inside an old toy bear she had once been fond of might be safe. Her mother had bought that bear for her and had been pleased by Julia’s affection for it when she was small, and would never throw it away, as she had a habit of suddenly doing with Julia’s discarded things, nor would she whip it away to wash it, another habit she had. So Julia carefully unpicked the stitches round the back of the fat bear’s tummy, took out a lot of the stuffing, and kept Iris’s money inside it. The bear, on a top shelf, would only be touched when the shelf needed to be dusted and Julia’s mother had started making Julia clean her own room so the bear should be safe.

  Eventually, the hiding place inside the bear began to be hardly big enough. Julia was adding to it every week, and not just the money Iris had told her to keep. The first time she took a pound coin from Iris’s purse she hated herself so much that the next time she was given the purse she put it back. The knowledge of the coin in her pocket during the intervening half-hour, going from shop to shop, had filled her with shame, so much so that she found herself trembling and Iris said, ‘Oh, Julia, you look hot, this shop is hot, let’s go out for a bit, would you li
ke some lemonade, we could go to the cafe and have a drink . . .’ Iris’s words all ran together and Julia’s head thudded. The relief when she returned the pound coin was immense. Never, never would she do such a despicable thing again.

  A week later, she took a five-pound note, one of a thick wad of notes inside Iris’s wallet. Iris didn’t miss it. The note didn’t seem to burn in Julia’s pocket the way the coin had. For three weeks after this, she took nothing from Iris’s money, though she had plenty of opportunity. Her own virtue began to please her. She would look at all the money in Iris’s purse or wallet whenever she was told to go and pay for some item and congratulate herself on resisting the temptation to take some more. She thought it a pity that no one knew how honest she was being. But occasionally she succumbed again, filching a note or a few coins to test that Iris was unaware that she was stealing from her. When she did, she immediately missed the glow of virtue that had filled her when she had stopped herself from taking money. But still, she couldn’t give up the habit entirely.

  I am a sometimes thief, Julia decided. That was not so bad.

  Gill Boothroyd had her right arm in plaster and a bandage round her head. She opened her eyes when Julia, accompanied by the social worker, walked in, and then closed them again. The social worker, Maggie, looked at Julia and raised her eyebrows. Julia nodded, and Maggie left the room. Julia sat down beside the bed, and waited. She didn’t attempt to say anything to Gill.

  A nurse came in, announcing that she’d come to do obs. ‘How are you feeling now, Gill?’ she asked. Gill, clearly reckoning that it was not a good policy to ignore the nurse as she was ignoring Julia, said that she had a splitting headache. The nurse, wrapping a blood pressure cuff round Gill’s arm and sticking a thermometer in her mouth, said she would see if Gill could be given some more paracetamol but that meanwhile she should keep as still as possible, head wounds were nasty things. When the nurse had left the room, Julia quietly unhooked the clipboard hanging at the end of the bed and looked through the notes. The patient was reported to be ‘very quiet’ and ‘unresponsive’, but her temperature and blood pressure readings were steady. Julia put the notes back. The clipboard made a slight rattle as she put it back, and Gill opened her eyes.

  ‘Just looking at your notes,’ Julia said.

  ‘None of your business,’ Gill said.

  Julia, who had been briefed before she came into the room, knew how Gill had received a head wound and how she had broken her arm. She’d been pushed out of a window when caught breaking into a warehouse to steal an iPad. The security guard thought she was a boy, and when she tried to make a run for it, and to exit through a window, he had lunged at her and pushed her when she was already half out of the window. His torch had hit her head, and then she’d been cut by the glass, and he wouldn’t have been so rough if he had known the intruder was only a girl.

  All for an iPad. There had previously been a fight with the foster-mother over a bag she’d stolen, and now these injuries, all to try to get an iPad she couldn’t possibly afford and wanted so much.

  ‘Gill,’ began Julia . . .

  VI

  THE FIRST, CRUCIAL, interview came at an awkward time, just as plans were being made to do with the centre being moved to different premises, but Julia’s boss said of course she should attend, in view of its importance. She went for it eagerly, considering herself good at interviews, and intrigued to discover what form it would take.

  When she arrived, she was given a hypothetical case to study, the sort of case which apparently came before magistrates quite regularly, and then she was asked questions about it by a panel of six people. Most of these questions were straightforward, to do with her political affiliation, but when they moved on to her reaction to the case she’d been given to study they became harder to answer. What, she was asked, was her response to the mythical defendant having sworn at, and spat in the face of, a policewoman? She said that of course though this was offensive the police were probably used to it and knew how to deal with it. She felt this hadn’t been a wise answer. Two of the panel frowned. Then she was asked if she had any prejudices. Yes, she said. She was prejudiced against anyone showing a lack of respect for others in public places, and gave as her example a man she’d seen, on her way to this interview, urinating against a wall in full view of children going to school. She was also prejudiced against those who played music at a deafening level, and against people who were bad-mannered and rude. But these kinds of prejudices were, it seemed, commonplace and wouldn’t obstruct her in her duties if she became a magistrate. The panel was more interested in prejudices to do with race, religion and class. She was able to state she believed she had none.

  The check-up was, Julia was sure, unnecessary, but she kept her clinic appointment too, the same busy week, and was duly discharged after she’d been looked at by a very young and nervous junior registrar who issued warnings against sunbathing and tanning salons which Julia didn’t need.

  ‘Probably the damage to your skin was done years and years ago,’ this doctor said. ‘Did you live abroad in the sun when you were growing up, or go on holiday somewhere hot?’

  ‘No,’ said Julia, ‘I grew up in Manchester, and we had no holidays abroad.’

  ‘Oh well then,’ the doctor said, ‘it’s a mystery.’

  One of many, thought Julia as she left the dermatology clinic. Her childhood seemed full of mysteries, most of them trivial, some important, none now able to be solved. A child’s memory, she had long ago discovered, was no more reliable than an adult’s. A child of eight, so near to their past, could not always recall it vividly. They would have to wait until they were eighty to remember suddenly in absolute detail events that happened when they were four or five.

  ‘I’m not going back to Karen’s,’ Gill Boothroyd said, ‘I’d rather be put back in the home. I’m not going back to her. I’m telling you, I’ll just run away. I’m telling you.’

  ‘I heard,’ Julia said, ‘I was listening.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘You’ve been in the home already, Gill. I’m sure you remember what it was like.’

  ‘Nothing wrong with it.’

  ‘Is that why you ran away at every opportunity?’

  ‘I didn’t mean it. I just wanted out. But there was nothing wrong with the place. I want to go back, I don’t want to go to Karen’s.’

  ‘There’s a problem,’ Julia said. ‘Karen wouldn’t have you back anyway—’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘– and you’re too old now for Hilltop House. Where would you like to be placed, ideally?’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘If you could choose, where would you choose to live?’

  ‘With my mum.’

  Julia looked at the girl steadily. Gill’s mother was in prison. Gill knew that. Julia knew Gill was waiting for her to say, does that mean you want to be in prison? Gill held her gaze for a while, and then said, ‘But she’s in Holloway, so why did you ask that when you knew what I’d say and why I couldn’t be with her?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure you would say you’d like to live with your mum.’

  ‘Anyone would.’

  ‘No, they wouldn’t, not if things had been tough when they lived with their mum before.’

  ‘They weren’t tough. What’s tough anyway? They were all right.’

  Again, Julia kept quiet and met Gill’s look. The bandage was off her head now, with only a neat line of stitches showing where the wound had been. Some of her hair had had to be shaved off but this small patch hardly showed. Someone had washed Gill’s hair and now it settled gracefully around her sullen face.

  ‘You’ve got beautiful hair,’ Julia suddenly decided to say.

  ‘You softening me up, or what?’ said Gill.

  ‘I was just admiring it and thought I’d pay you the compliment.’

  ‘Then don’t,’ Gill said. ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like it. It isn’t your business, it isn’t your job, going on about my hai
r,’ and she imitated Julia saying she had beautiful hair, sneering.

  ‘I think,’ Julia said, ignoring Gill’s tone, ‘you’re going to be reckoned too young for any sort of hostel, though that might suit you best, give you some independence.’

  ‘Are you talking to yourself?’

  ‘I’m just thinking out loud about possibilities.’

  ‘Then don’t bother. I won’t have any say in it anyway. They’ll just put me where they want.’

  ‘You’re still at school,’ Julia said. ‘What would you like to do when you leave next year?’

  ‘Like?’ Gill said. ‘What’s like got to do with anything?’

  ‘No harm in thinking about it,’ Julia said, knowing she was irritating the girl with her deliberately charming smile. ‘What kind of work do you see yourself doing?’

  ‘I don’t. I don’t care. There aren’t any jobs anyway. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘You’re a bright girl,’ Julia said, ‘or so some teachers have said. You’ve got some brains, apparently.’

  ‘Apparently,’ Gill repeated, sneering again.

  ‘But you don’t use them.’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘And mine.’

  ‘How the fuck is it yours?’

  It was the first time Gill had sworn in her presence though there was plenty in the notes about her filthy language and constant use of the F-word. Karen, the foster-mother, said Gill hardly opened her mouth without attaching this word to everything she said. But Julia let it pass. It had been said without heat, in an incredulous voice, not an angry one. ‘Your brains,’ she told Gill, ‘and your refusal to use them are my business. It’s my job to work out why.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ Gill said, almost laughing now, ‘this ain’t real.’

  ‘It is,’ said Julia, ‘very real. When you hit Karen, you knew the consequences. It was deliberate. You’d thought it all out.’