by Rosie Thomas
‘Go on,’ he ordered her. Julia didn’t need to be asked twice. Sugar stuck to her chin, and jam oozed deliciously.
‘You’re only a kid,’ he laughed, watching her.
‘I’m sixteen.’
‘Exactly.’
He stood up and leaned over the juke box, putting a coin in and stabbing the buttons without reading the tides. The record was Johnny Ray, ‘Such A Night’. Julia sighed happily, and licked her fingers.
‘I love Johnny Ray. Do you?’
‘Nope. It’s girls’ music. I put it on for you.’
‘What do you like, then?’
‘Jazz, of course.’
‘Trad?’
The bands played trad jazz in the packed clubs around the corner. Julia and Mattie could dance to it all night, if they were given the chance.
‘Modern, you goon. Dizzy Gillespie. Thelonius Monk.’
They talked about music, testing each other, until he looked at his watch.
‘Hey, I’ve got to get a move on.’
‘Who do you work for? Do they let you sit in coffee bars all morning?’
He frowned at her. ‘I work for myself, baby. It’s my van. I specialise in supplying anything to anyone who needs it.’ He was on his feet now. ‘I’m a fixer. And I’d better get fixing.’ He turned to go, then a thought struck him. ‘Are you short of money?’
Julia murmured, ‘A bit. Just until tonight. My friend will …’
He put his hand into the pocket of his blue jeans and peeled a note off the roll. ‘Here.’
‘I couldn’t—’
‘You could, and you will. Pay me back when you see me. I’m always around.’
He had reached the door before Julia called out, ‘I don’t even know your name.’
‘It’s Flowers. Johnny Flowers.’ He winked at her. ‘Sounds like a queen, doesn’t it? But I’m not. See you, kid. I’ll leave your bags with Mickey, across the road.’
He left Julia sitting at the table, wishing that he’d asked her what her name was. She watched him handing over her suitcases to the swarthy man behind the red curtain. Julia had liked Johnny Flowers enough to be sure that her bags would be safe wherever he left them. The van’s engine roared, and it rocketed away down the street. Julia sat still for a little while, listening to the juke box and watching the faces passing the windows of Blue Heaven. Then, with the security of Johnny Flowers’s pound note in her pocket, she ordered herself another cup of coffee and another doughnut. Later, she crossed the road again to Mickey’s. He peered at her from a cubbyhole off the entry. The place was very dark, and silent except for the sound of distant hoovering. Not quite non-stop girls, Julia thought. The strip club smelt of beer, smoke and dust.
‘Come for your stuff? It’s down there.’ He pointed his thick finger down behind a shelf of a desk.
‘Um. I wondered if could leave it here for a bit longer? It’s heavy to carry round.’
He looked carefully at her, examining everything except her face. ‘You a new girl?’
‘Er, yeah,’ Julia said ambiguously.
He clicked his tongue in disapproval. ‘Jesus, where does Monty find them? Infant school? All right, leave your gear here. I’ll keep an eye on it.’
‘Thanks.’
Julia slipped sideways out of the door before he could change his mind, or ask her anything else. The first thing she did was to head up Wardour Street into Oxford Street. Then she made her way to Mattie’s shoe shop. Peering through the plate glass window Julia saw her kneeling in front of a customer, with a sea of shoes spread all around them. She was holding a shoe in one hand and the other gesticulated as she talked. The woman listened intently, then took the shoe and tried it on again. Julia saw her nodding. A minute later she was on her way to the cash till, with Mattie bearing the shoes behind her.
Julia waited until the sale was completed and then she slipped into the shop. Mattie stared. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she hissed, and then added in a louder voice, ‘Black court shoes, madam?’
‘You look like a born saleswoman,’ Julia told her.
‘I’m an actress,’ Mattie said haughtily. ‘I can act saleswoman, of course.’
Julia took her hand and pressed something into it. Mattie looked down at the folded ten-shilling note.
‘It’s for your sandwiches at dinner time.’
‘How …?’
‘Tell you later. I don’t see anything I like the look of, thank you very much.’
Outside, looking between the cliffs of high buildings, Julia could just see trees in the distance. She remembered that it was Hyde Park, the sanctuary that they had failed to reach last night, and the greenness drew her. She walked towards it, slipping through the skeins of traffic at Marble Arch, and then crossing on to the grass. It was brown and parched by the sun, but the softness was welcome after the hot, hard pavements. She walked on, under the shadow of the great trees, until the roar of traffic in Park Lane diminished to a muffled hum. Water glinted coolly, and Julia guessed that the wide stretch of lake must be the Serpentine. There was a scatter of green canvas deckchairs under the trees overlooking it. She sank down in one of the chairs and paid threepence to an old man with a ticket machine. Then she closed her eyes and listened to the faint rustle of leaves over her head.
It was the first comfortable, solitary moment she had had to consider what had happened since leaving home.
She found herself wondering what her mother was doing.
It was easy to picture her. Perhaps she was dusting, picking up the ornaments from the tiled mantelpiece, very carefully, dusting each souvenir and china knick-knack before putting it back in exactly the same place. It was as if the house was always being made ready, cleaned and polished, for some big occasion that never came. Even the furniture, the settee and chairs with their cushions set at exact angles, seemed to wait tensely for inspection by guests who never materialised. Hardly anyone every came into the house, and when she was a little girl Julia was puzzled by her mother’s anxiety in the midst of their eventless lives. She was always being told not to make a mess when she played.
Don’t do that, Julia, it makes such a mess.
Betty wanted her to play neatly, setting her dolls out in rows. Julia’s own inclinations were for sand, and water, and poster paints that sent up plumes of brightly coloured powder when she poured in the water to mix them.
Once, Julia remembered, she had come home from a birthday party with a packet of shiny, coloured stars. With childish cunning she had hidden them from her mother, and then one afternoon she had shut herself into her bedroom and stuck them all over the wallpaper. They looked wonderful, like fireworks, jets of cobalt blue and scarlet against the insipid pink roses. Betty had grown suspicious, and she had forced the door open just as Julia was pressing the last gummy stars into place. Betty had flown across the room and started pulling them off, but the glue was surprisingly strong and it brought little star-shaped fragments of paper with it. Those that did come away left black marks.
Betty was angrier than Julia had ever seen her.
‘You little vandal,’ she hissed at her, and Julia recoiled in shock and surprise.
‘They looked pretty,’ she protested. ‘It’s my bedroom.’
‘Don’t you ever do that. Why do you spoil everything? Why do you?’ There were white flecks at the corners of her mother’s mouth, Julia remembered. ‘It isn’t your bedroom. Your father and I have given it to you, and you’ll keep it how we want it. Look at it now.’ Betty pointed at the wreckage of Julia’s fireworks, and then her face collapsed. She was crying, helplessly. Suddenly Julia caught a glimpse of her mother’s grown-up fears. She half-understood her struggle to keep everything that was lurid, and threatening, and incomprehensible, at bay with the semi-detached walls of their house. For an instant she understood what it must be like to be grown-up and still afraid, like Betty was.
She had run to her mother full of sympathy, but Betty was good at holding on to her anger and she had pushed her away. They had
spent the rest of the day in silence, and when Vernon came home from work he turned Julia over his knee and smacked her with a slipper.
There must have been dozens of other times like that, Julia thought, and plenty of times when she had deserved whatever they had doled out to her. But that was the time that she remembered. Perhaps because of the embrace that Betty had rejected. Perhaps because of the glimpse of her mother’s fear.
Sitting in her deckchair, with the sun warming her face and arms, Julia remembered the old men on the Embankment. In the middle of her own night terrors she had recalled her mother’s too. Betty was afraid of everything, afraid that if she let any little detail out of place the long slide might begin, and leave her with nothing. Was that why she wouldn’t allow her daughter anything new, or different, or dangerous?
In the night Julia had determined I won’t let it get me. Not the darkness, nor the fear of it. And she had survived.
I won’t live like Betty, Julia promised herself. I won’t be afraid, and I can risk everything, if I have to.
She shivered a little, trying to imagine, looking ahead, beyond herself. But the sun made coin-bright circles under her closed eyelids, and that was all she could see.
After the stars, or perhaps all along only she couldn’t remember it, rebellion came naturally to Julia. As she grew older, there were more and more things to kick against. Looking back, the years seemed to stretch behind her as a long, entrenched battle against Betty’s strictures. In by eight. Bed by nine. Homework done on the day it was set. Julia challenged her on everything. They disagreed about her clothes, her make-up, the music she played, the hours she came in and went out again, and the places she went to. Betty and Vernon were proud that Julia had won a place at the girls’ grammar, but Mattie and Julia hated the place. They played truant and did no work, but even so Julia always came out near the top of her class.
The fights were tiring and boring, and Julia nearly always won them because she fought from strength. Betty was always forced to retrench and then capitulate.
And when Mattie came along, Julia had a natural ally. Mattie was an equally natural focus for the Smiths’ disapproval. She came from the despised estate, while the Smiths clung to the middle-class isolation of Fairmile Road. She wore her skirts too short, and too tightly belted so that they showed off her surprising breasts. And then there was the defiant mass of her hair. It was Mattie who produced the first Outdoor Girl cake mascara for Julia to try out, and quick-witted Mattie who yelled back at the boys who whistled at them in the High Street. But it was still Julia who was the leader, Julia had the ideas, and the determination to carry them out.
Betty had once said, with a sadness that Julia couldn’t fathom, ‘You’re not a bit like me.’
She could see her so clearly, in the house that gave Julia claustrophobia. A thin, small woman with a scarf knotted around her head to keep the dust out of her hair. Always stooping to tidy something away, or smooth a crease, or straighten an edge, her head bent so that the knobs in her neck stood out, the corners of her mouth always turned down.
I’m sorry, Julia thought. I couldn’t stay there with you. When Mattie came, after what Mattie had told her, the idea of escape had seemed so magnificent, so obvious and so enticing. There had been no alternative. No question even of waiting. With a single gesture, Betty and Fairmile Road and all the rest had been left behind her.
And yet, in spite of everything, Julia missed her.
I’ll come back, she promised. When I’ve got something worth showing you. You can be proud of me then, if you like. The words sounded grand in her head and she offered them to her mother in expiation.
Vernon was different. Julia had been afraid of her father, or of his slow-burning, malevolent temper. Betty was afraid of him too, she thought. She remembered how her mother cooked his tea, watching the clock all the time so that the food would be ready at exactly half past five. They ate their meal in silence while Vernon read the newspaper and Betty watched his plate, and the clock ticked far too loudly.
Julia didn’t miss Vernon at all.
The sun and her comfortable chair were making her feel drowsy. Her thoughts turned from her own home to Mattie’s. When she had first met her, years ago, Mattie had asked her home to tea. Julia had never ventured on to the estate before. The vast expanse of it startled her. There were thousands of houses, all the same, looking as if they had been dropped from the sky in endless lines. There were no trees to suggest that anything had existed there before the houses came, no corner shops to break the monotony. Mattie’s street was identical to all the others, but her house looked more neglected. The sooty patch of front garden was cluttered with junk and rusty bits of machinery.
Mattie flung the door open. ‘You’d better come in. Don’t take any notice of anything,’ she added, with an odd fierceness.
Julia couldn’t have avoided noticing the noise, and the smell of frying onions. There seemed to be children squirming everywhere, Mattie’s four smaller brother and sisters. Mattie picked the baby up and flung her in the air until she hiccupped with delight. In the kitchen Mattie’s eldest sister was standing at the stove. Mattie didn’t ask, but Rozzie announced, ‘He’s out.’
Mattie’s anxious fierceness disappeared at once. ‘Make yourself at home,’ she said hospitably.
Julia looked round. Every surface in the room was piled up with broken toys and dirty clothes and open packets of food. She had a brief vision of her mother’s kitchen where every jar had its place and the floor was rinsed down every day with a solution of bleach.
‘Where’s your mum?’ she asked. As soon as she had said it she knew that it was tactless. But Betty was such a fixture in Fairmile Road, with her dusters and her sewing and the Light Programme on the wireless, it was hard to understand the absence of a similar figure for Mattie.
‘She’s in the hospital,’ Mattie told her expressionlessly. ‘She’s given up.’ She waved her hand at the mess as she spoke, so that Julia might have thought that it was just tidiness Mrs Banner had given up on.
‘It’s ready,’ Rozzie announced.
They took their places at the table. Mattie hoisted the baby on to her lap and fed her with spoonfuls from her own plate. The children ate ravenously, and in between mouthfuls they asked Julia dozens of inquisitive questions. Mattie made up silly names for the teachers and the other girls at their school, and Julia turned them into impromptu rhymes. Everyone laughed uproariously. The atmosphere in the steamy room was cheerful, in spite of the mess and the variety of smells. The liver and onions tasted good, and the small portions were helped by piles of potatoes.
It was different from everything Julia knew about.
‘I liked it at your house,’ she said afterwards, and Mattie beamed at her, surprised and pleased. That first afternoon made a bond between the two girls that grew steadily stronger. When Mrs Banner died a year later, Mattie turned to Julia for comfort, and it was Mattie who reinforced Julia in her depressing battles with her parents.
But she never told me about her father, Julia thought.
Not until this week.
If it had been wrong to leave Betty so abruptly, it was unquestionably right to have come away with Mattie. Julia felt a sharp pull of love and sympathy and admiration for her. That, at least, was right.
And now they were here, and there would be no going back.
Together they would make it.
Sitting in her deckchair, frowning a little, Julia fell asleep.
‘I’m half dead,’ Mattie complained.
‘You’ll revive. It’s Saturday night.’
‘Easy for you to say, when you’ve been snoring all afternoon in the park.’
Julia met Mattie outside the shop at closing time. ‘I’ve sold fourteen pairs of shoes. The supervisor says I’ll get a bonus. There’s a perfect pair of black stilettos, you’ll love them. Shall I put them in the back for you?’
‘Don’t try and sell me your shoes, kid. I don’t need ’em.’
‘So how much have we got?’
With Mattie’s three days’ pay, and what was left of Johnny Flowers’s pound note (‘Why did you let him go?’ Mattie demanded. ‘He sounds just what we need.’) they had almost five pounds. They felt like Lady Docker.
‘Food,’ Mattie said decisively.
They made straight for the nearest fish and chip shop and ordered double portions of everything.
‘That,’ Mattie sighed later as she folded up the last triangle of bread and butter and bit into it, ‘was the best meal I have ever eaten. You’re right. I have revived.’
‘So what shall we do?’
‘We—ll. We could find somewhere to stay the night …’
‘Or we could go dancing, and then we needn’t go to bed at all.’
‘You’re right.’
‘Stick with me.’
It was still early, and they dawdled arm in arm along Oxford Street, then Julia steered them south into Wardour Street.
‘I’ve just thought. Where are the suitcases?’
‘We’re going to get them. This way.’
The strip joint had done its best to shake off its depressing aspect ready for the night’s trade. The coloured bulbs were lit, and flickered bravely. The lights were on inside too, and Mickey was wedged belligerently in the doorway behind a placard reading THE SAUCIEST SHOW IN TOWN.
He spotted Julia at once.
‘Here! Monty doesn’t know nothing about no new girl.’
Julia smiled, trying to dazzle him with charm.
‘I’m sorry. It was a mistake. Can we just take our cases out of your way …’
But Mickey was staring at Mattie. ‘Now you,’ he said, ‘are the sort of girl Monty always goes for. Looking for a job, are you?’
Mattie stuck her chin out. ‘Not your sort of job. Thanks very much.’
Julia retrieved the luggage and they retreated.
‘Come back any time you fancy,’ Mickey yelled after them. ‘You with the hair.’
They turned the corner and then stopped, giggling.
‘I can’t leave you alone for a single day, can I?’ Mattie teased. ‘Without you getting involved in a strip show. Fancy earning your living by taking your clothes off for a crowd of dirty men.’