by Rosie Thomas
He made room for her at the scrubbed worktop and she tried to copy him, but her fingers felt thick and stiff and the meat slithered awkwardly in her fist.
‘No. It’s like this,’ he said, and put his hand over hers. The knife moved, neatly severing the lean meat from the fat and glistening connective tissue. Felix’s skin was tawny against Julia’s whiteness, but his touch was light and dry, deliberately without significance.
Mattie and Julia speculated about him in private.
‘Do you think he’s queer?’ Julia asked. They could usually divide men up between them. Most of them went for Mattie, with her seemingly uninhibited voluptuousness, but Julia had her share of admirers too. But Felix was mysterious, fastidious, uninterested in their messy femininity.
Mattie considered. They weren’t sure, either of them, that they had ever seen a real homosexual.
‘No. He can’t be, can he? They’re all like this.’ Mattie stood with one hand on her hip, the other dangling limply. Her face puckered up into a faint simper and Julia laughed.
‘Felix isn’t one, then.’
One afternoon he found them lolling on Mattie’s bed reading. Mattie had the Stage folded carefully so that she could read every column, and Julia, with her head propped on one hand, was reading Gone With The Wind. She went through phases of burying herself in books, creating her own temporary oblivion inside an imaginary world.
Felix took out his sketch pad and drew them.
When he had finished he let them look at the pencil sketch.
There was a moment’s silence as they looked at themselves as Felix saw them. Mattie was all loose, blowsy curves, her bare thigh showing between the flaps of her dressing gown, her hair rolling over her shoulders. Beside her Julia was angular, darkfaced and scowling.
‘You haven’t made us look very pretty,’ Julia said at last.
‘Is that what you want to be? Pretty?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, you aren’t. You’ve got more than that, both of you. You’ve got style, although you don’t know how to use it yet.’
They forgot their momentary pique and scrambled at him. Mattie locked her arms around him, affectionate, just as she would have been with Ricky or Sam. Julia hung back, only a little.
‘Show us, then, if you’re so clever.’
‘I might.’
Julia retrieved the drawing and smoothed the creases out of it. She pinned it carefully over the tiny black cast-iron fire grate in their bedroom.
That night, the three of them went back to the Rocket Club. Before they went out the girls presented themselves for Felix’s approval.
‘Too much stuff on your faces, as usual,’ was his verdict. So they rubbed the make-up off again and, giggling, let him reapply it. Julia kept her eyes turned down as he worked on her face, inches away.
When he had finished they stared at the result in the bathroom mirror.
‘Naked. As though we’ve just got up,’ Mattie declared.
In fact they just looked younger, and less knowing. As they really were, Felix thought, instead of how they wanted to be.
‘What about the clothes, then?’
They had picked through their outfits with care, but Felix only glanced at them and shrugged.
‘You should buy one good, simple thing instead of five shoddy ones. That’ll take time.’
‘That’s stupid. Cheaper things mean you have more to wear,’ Mattie protested. But Julia suddenly saw the point. Felix himself owned hardly any clothes. He had just two jerseys, one black and one navy-blue, but they were both cashmere. His trousers and jacket were well cut, on fashionable but subdued lines, and his shoes were expensive, glossy Italian slip-ons. He kept them well polished, and he put them away with shoe trees in them when he took them off, instead of letting them lie where they fell on the floor. Julia thought Felix always looked wonderful, and she recognised the contrast with her own and Mattie’s reckless scruffiness.
That was the beginning of Julia’s longing for exquisite, expensive, unattainable luxuries.
‘Enjoy yourselves,’ Julia called out. ‘My God, I wish I had my time over again.’
They headed for the Rocket, three abreast, with their arms linked.
The cellar welcomed them like a second home. The girls abandoned themselves to the music, to the frenetic jiving, to the packed mass of bodies and the overpowering heat. Felix held himself apart for a moment longer. He had spent so many solitary evenings in places like this that it was disorientating, for an instant, to find himself possessed by Mattie and Julia. Yet in the past, sometimes, he had longed for company on his lonely expeditions.
He had company now, he told himself, whether he liked it or not. He sometimes resented the invasion that these girls had made into his home, and their noisy, shrill, intrusive presence in the tidy flat. But they had done more for Jessie in a matter of days than he had been able to do himself in a year. He was grateful for that. And almost in spite of himself he liked them for themselves too, consolidating the way that he had been drawn to them from the beginning.
‘Come on, don’t stand there,’ Mattie ordered him. ‘Dance with me.’
Felix took hold of her, feeling the peculiar softness of her flesh under his fingers. He was glad that it was Mattie first. She was completely foreign to him, the whole scented spread of her, and in a way that was easy for him to deal with. He could treat her like Jessie, with affection that kept her at a physical distance, even in the tiny flat.
It was Julia who disturbed him.
He watched her narrow hips as she went up the stairs ahead of him, and he found himself wanting to reach out and touch the knobs of her spine when she bent her head and exposed the nape of her neck.
Felix had no idea what girls expected or understood, and he was incapable of making the movement that would bring his fingertips to rest on those fragile bones. His uncertainty made him try harder to be impersonal, to keep the space between them cool and clear and neutral.
Felix knew that he was a coward.
Across the room, with a flickering candle throwing odd shadows upwards into the hollows of his face, Julia saw Johnny Flowers. He was wearing a black leather jacket over a white vest, and he saw her at the same instant. He shouldered his way across to her.
‘Like I said, I’m always around.’
‘I’ll still have to owe you your pound. I haven’t got it.’
Julia and Mattie spent everything they earned, instantly. Everything that was left over from the much-needed rent went on clothes.
Johnny Flowers grinned. ‘Dance with me and we’ll call it quits.
The next afternoon was Mattie’s first half-day. She had had to wait her turn for a weekday afternoon off, and it had seemed a long time coming. Now it had arrived, she knew where she must go.
Without telling Jessie and Felix, without mentioning it even to Julia, she made her way back on the tube to Liverpool Street station. At the clerk’s little glass porthole she bought a ticket, a day return. She tore the ticket in half at once and she put the return portion in the pocket of her blouse, next to her heart, like a talisman. At the same time she smiled, privately and bitterly. It wasn’t so easy to escape that a small oblong of green pasteboard could achieve it for her.
The estate, lying baldly under a grey sky, was exactly the same. Mattie walked the familiar route, trying to pretend that her breath was coming easily instead of in panicky gasps.
The house, when she came to it, looked the same too. The windows were closed and the stringy curtains were drawn, but that was nothing unusual. No one had remembered to open them, Mattie thought. Then she opened the front door. She smelt stale air and sour milk, and listened to the oppressive silence.
A different fear swelled up, bigger, threatening to choke her.
Ted wasn’t here.
None of them was here. Where were the children, and what had he done to them?
She half turned, not knowing whether she was going to stumble on into the house
or turn and run, and then she heard a sound. It was completely familiar, a tinny rattle and then a plop. It was a record, falling from the stack poised over the turntable of Ricky’s prized Dansette.
‘Ricky!’
A clatter obliterated the first tinny bars of music, and Ricky appeared at the boys’ bedroom door.
‘Mat?’
He hurtled down the stairs, a skinny boy of fifteen with Mattie’s hair, brutally cut so that it stood up in tufts all over his head.
‘Are you all right?’ she demanded.
He hugged her and they clung together, briefly, while Mattie stared fiercely at him.
‘’Course. Where’ve you been?’
Relief was making Mattie shake. ‘Where is he?’
Ricky knew what she meant, of course. ‘He’s out. He’s working, unloading crates at the Works. What are you shivering for?’
‘Nothing. It’s all right. Come on, let’s have some coffee.’
‘Bit of a mess in there,’ Ricky warned her.
The kitchen was a morass of dirty pans, plates and food. The smell of sour milk was almost overpowering.
‘Ricky …’
‘I know. Look, it doesn’t matter. Me and Sam’ll get around to it. It doesn’t bother us, you know.’
It didn’t, Mattie thought. And she had left them. So she had no right to come back and fuss about details. She cleared a space and filled the kettle, rinsing out two cups from the filthy stack. There was no fresh milk so they drank their coffee black, sitting out on the back step and looking across the hummocks of dandelions to the backs of the next row of houses. Ricky told her what had happened. A woman had come from the Council, a bossy woman with papers. Ted had refused to see her at first, telling Ricky and Sam to say that he was out, but she had come back, and then she had simply sat down to wait for him. She had looked at the house, and she had talked to Marilyn and Phil.
In the end Ted had appeared. Ricky and the others had been sent out of the room, but they had heard Ted shouting, and then mumbling. The woman had gone at last, and Ted had come to find them.
‘He looked,’ Ricky said, groping for the words, ‘he looked like Phil does when someone’s pinched her sweets, and then yelled at her for creating.’
Mattie knew that look of her father’s. Unwieldy anger, too big for him, subsiding quickly into cringing weakness. She had seen it that last time, here in the kitchen, with the kettle whistling. Only when he looked at Mattie there was something else, too. That hot, anxious longing. Mattie wrapped her fingers round her coffee cup to stop the shudder.
The woman from the Council had announced to Ted that there was evidence of neglect. Either the young ones must go to live with a relative, in more suitable circumstances, or a place would be found for them in a council home.
Ricky relayed the details with matter-of-fact calmness. He had worked out a way of living for himself, Mattie understood. Ricky would be all right, and Sam too. Sam was the family survivor, happy so long as he could play football on the scuffed fields beyond the estate. The younger ones, the girls, were living with Rozzie.
‘They’re okay,’ Ricky said. ‘It’s better than here.’
‘I know that,’ Mattie said heavily.
‘The council woman asked about you. Dad said you’d done a runner. He didn’t know where to, and didn’t care either.’
Mattie stood up quickly and put her cup with the rest of the dirty dishes. It seemed a pointless gesture to bother to wash it out.
‘I’m going to Rozzie’s to see them. Walk round there with me?’
Rozzie lived a mile away, further into the estate. They walked together, past the effortful gardens bright with zinnias and lobelia, and the rows of windows guarded by net curtains. Rozzie’s house was almost identical to the one they had just left, but better kept. The window frames and the door were painted maroon and there were marigolds growing under the windows.
Rozzie opened the door to them. Her flowered nylon housecoat hardly buttoned up over her stomach. She was eight months’ pregnant and her two-year-old son, runny-nosed, peered out from the shelter of her skirt. She didn’t smile.
‘So you’re back, then?’
Mattie nodded. Her sister had every right to be sullen, and Mattie had been expecting it. Rozzie was nineteen, and she had had to marry her car mechanic boyfriend two and a half years ago. The enchantment with one another had worn off almost before the wedding, and now they were confined here together with their baby. Then, suddenly, they had found themselves responsible for Rozzie’s little sisters, as well. ‘Just to see that you’re all right.’ Mattie added awkwardly, ‘And to say I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry?’
There was a silence, and then Rozzie jerked her head. ‘Well, you’d better come in. Phil? Marilyn? Mat’s here.’
They had been in the garden at the back, and they came pelting through to leap on to Mattie. She hugged them fiercely, pulling them close and burying her face against them.
They were well, and they looked happy enough. That was something.
For half an hour, they took all of Mattie’s attention. Then suddenly they were off, taking the little boy and Ricky with them. Mattie and Rozzie sat in the kitchen, drinking more watery coffee. The house was bleak and under-furnished, but it was clean. Mattie suddenly thought of Felix’s flat, with its simple, definite style and the bright touches of pottery and exotic Soho vegetables. She had got away, after all, and Rozzie hadn’t. Guilt dropped around her, weighty and sour with familiarity.
‘Do you need money?’ she blurted out. ‘I can send you my wages.’
‘We always need money, Barry and me. But Ted’s giving us plenty for the girls. Guilt money, isn’t it?’ They both knew that it was, of course. It would last for as long as he could hold on to the job. ‘You keep your wages. Until your plans work out, that is.’ Rozzie was teasing her, and they both laughed.
It was the right time for Mattie to leave. She didn’t want to stay to say difficult goodbyes to the younger ones.
‘Give them a kiss for me,’ she said abruptly. ‘Tell them I’ll be back to see them as soon as I can.’
She left Rozzie lighting another cigarette. The Orioles, ‘Cryin’ in the Chapel’, was on the wireless.
Mattie walked quickly, with her head up. The old widower in the house on the corner was cutting his square of grass and the scent of it mixed with the faint smell of flowers from the gardens. She looked past him as he paraded carefully with his mower, and she saw a man coming round the corner.
It was her father, and he saw her in the same instant. Mattie whirled round, looking for somewhere to run to, and he saw that too. He came towards her, past the old man and the patchy gardens. He was carrying a white paper bag, and there was a bottle under his arm. It wasn’t whisky, she saw. It was Tizer. He was bringing pop and sweets, an offering for his children.
He came closer, never taking his eyes off her, and then he stopped. He was so close that his body almost touched hers. Mattie stood rigidly.
‘You were going to run off, without even speaking to me. I’m still your dad, you know.’
There it was, the old, cajoling mock-severity. But less sure of itself now. There was wariness in his face. He was afraid, but he was still greedy. Mattie knew, and she shrank from what she remembered. He was guilty, and too weak to stop himself from compounding the guilt.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she whispered.
‘Where to? You’re here, aren’t you? You set the welfare people on me, didn’t you?’
She tried to square up to him. ‘I couldn’t leave Marilyn and Phil with you.’
‘Mat, what do you think I am?’
She knew him so well. His anger fronting his pathetic desires.
‘I know what you are,’ she said quietly.
She felt a momentary, viciously physical hatred of all men. But it was gone as quickly as it had come.
‘I wanted to say I was sorry, but you haven’t given me the chance,’ he said.
The
creases in her father’s face touched her, and the sight of his big hand, dirty from work, still gripping the pop bottle. She loved him too, and she was exhausted by the obligations of love that pinioned her here amongst the boxy houses.
‘I’ve got to go.’ She was shouting, and the old man on the corner peered towards them.
Ted stared at her, stupidly. ‘Go where? I thought you were back. We can’t manage the place without you. We …’
‘You’ll have to manage. All of you.’
I’m not giving myself to you. I’m not going to sink down like Rozzie. I won’t. I can’t. I deserve better than that. I’m free now, aren’t I? In her head she was already running, the words pounding with her. I’m free, aren’t I? Ted hadn’t touched her, but she felt as if she had to wrench herself out of his grasp.
‘I’ll come and see the kids when I can.’ Mattie was breathless with the effort.
‘What about me?’ Like a baby, his face puckering.
‘Nothing about you. Don’t you understand? Nothing.’
She broke past him then, and started to run. Her legs carried her around the corner and away. She ran as far as she could and then walked, not wanting to stop and wait for a bus, all the way to the station. She took the return ticket out of her pocket and held it in her clenched fist, the torn edge of it digging into her palm. The train came almost at once and she climbed into it and stumbled to a seat. The dust puffed out from the cushion behind her head.
Sitting there, watching the backs of the houses and the factories and warehouses peel away past her, Mattie promised herself, I will do it. I’m going to be successful, and rich, and happy, and I won’t let that place pull me back again. None of the things that have happened matter at all, from now on. Only the things that are going to happen.
She felt the resolution stiffening her, as if her spine was a steel shaft. She leaned forward to peer through the grimy carriage window, as if she could see more clearly what was coming.
The party was originally Julia’s idea, but Mattie seized on it with insistent enthusiasm. She seemed to light on everything now, Julia noticed, making whatever they did important just by concentrating very hard on it.