Every Good Girl

by Judy Astley

  ‘She’ll need one,’ Angela replied.

  ‘No child of nine needs an agent. They need their childhood. Now wrap up things with Sophie and let me get these girls out of this place,’ Joe said, hugging Lucy and feeling quite desperate to get her back home, to toast, Ribena, normality and Australian TV soaps.

  Chapter Nine

  Joe wasn’t even trying to take it seriously. Nina could see quite easily that the only thing he was trying to do was keep a straight face. Megan, all flowing gentle silk and the calm smiles of the beatifically pregnant, was trying to make sense of what Sophie was telling her in the Malones’ kitchen.

  ‘They want you to be a model? You mean posing for a catalogue?’ Her nose wrinkled in amused disgust. Sophie shoved her hands deep into her pockets and put on a don’t-care face. Lucy marched to the fridge, noisily took out a can of Coke and sat at the table to drink it, pointedly offering nothing to her former friend.

  ‘Lucy . . .’ Nina warned. Lucy pretended she hadn’t heard and continued drinking. Nina decided she could be dealt with later, and firmly. That made two of them to be cross with: Emily hadn’t even come in from school yet, and it was after five. She’d probably claim she’d been revising in the library, pretending she’d completely forgotten she was supposed to be doing the supper.

  Megan continued to look prettily puzzled, overdoing it, Nina rather thought, seeing as the situation wasn’t that difficult to understand. What she was doing was acting the epitome of middle-class flummoxed, when faced with something that was tainted by possible vulgarity. In Megan’s mind, Sophie was clearly only one white high-heeled step away from posing topless in a tabloid newspaper.

  ‘I think they’re getting about a thousand pounds each for this one,’ Nina threw in mischievously, risking a glance at Joe. He winked back at her, understanding.

  ‘Really? Heavens!’ Megan seemed to have got the hang of that bit fast enough. ‘Well Sophie, let’s get you home and after supper maybe we’ll see what Daddy says.’ She turned to Joe and treated him to her biggest smile and her radiantly shining azure eyes. ‘Thanks so much for collecting her from school. I’m sorry she’s caused so much trouble.’ Megan looked nervously at Lucy, and then back to the glowing beginnings of a good-sized bruise on Sophie’s left cheekbone. ‘Girls can really surprise you sometimes, can’t they?’

  ‘Lucy, isn’t there something you want to say to Sophie?’ Nina said.

  ‘Only goodbye,’ Lucy replied smartly.

  ‘That wasn’t what your mother had in mind,’ Joe prompted her.

  Lucy looked up at him, startled. His voice sounded quite hard and angry, tones she hadn’t heard since he’d moved to the flat. He always talked to her and Emily as if being cross just didn’t happen any more. ‘OK. I’m sorry Sophie. I suppose I shouldn’t have hit you.’

  ‘No you shouldn’t,’ Sophie said, reluctant to end the feud. ‘Should be a good bruise though, you can hit really hard,’ she conceded with grudging admiration, rubbing gently at her hurt face.

  ‘It was only one gig, Lucy. No need to take it so seriously,’ Joe told Lucy as soon as Megan and Sophie had gone. ‘In fact, if you’re going to get so chewed up every time you don’t get the job, maybe you shouldn’t do it at all, because it’s a hard and silly business, full of hard and silly people who won’t choose you for all sorts of reasons of their own. I know, it happens to me with music all the time. I can easily spend three days coming up with a demo of swirling guitars for a client only to have them choose something by someone else that’s all sickly violins. You don’t take it personally, you just move on,’ he said.

  He took a swig of the beer Nina had put in front of him on the table. She was washing salad by the sink, turning the radio down to listen to what he was saying. She was glad they had this to talk about, one more thing that put the rather disgraceful scene of their recent sex further to the back of her mind. Joe had made no hint, not so much as a gleam of conspiracy, that he’d done anything more than simply forget about it. Nina’s body hadn’t – her insides tweaked pleasurably and she tried to concentrate on Lucy’s behaviour.

  ‘It isn’t so much that she minded about not getting it that I object to,’ Nina joined in. ‘But the dreadful way she’s treated poor Sophie. Now that was awful. How could you have walloped her like that? It was hardly her fault . . .’

  ‘Was,’ Lucy grunted, ‘She did it on purpose. You should’ve seen her.’ Lucy strutted about, miming being Sophie. ‘She took her hair out of its ponytail and fluffed it all out, like this, and then started wandering around, you know, like waiting to be noticed. And then they did. Notice her, and call her in. You wouldn’t believe her, going “What, me?” all pretend surprise.’ Then Lucy grinned happily. ‘Anyway, her mum and dad won’t let her do it so it doesn’t matter really.’

  ‘Well there you go then,’ Joe agreed, but looking at Nina. She too had her doubts that Lucy was right. Megan would probably love a paid-for mid-pregnancy break in Barbados. Who wouldn’t? She looked at the clock – quarter to six. ‘Where’s Emily?’ she asked vaguely, wondering if she should be worrying properly by now or should just carry on blaming teenage unreliability. Emily was, after all, supposed to be the one at the sink washing lettuce.

  Emily had had a terrible day. What should have been the stuff of fulfilled fantasy, the unexpected meeting with Simon in the road outside school, was a complete nightmare. Bloody Nick, bloody bloody Nick she chanted to herself as she cut across the edge of the Common from the bus stop. She was really late, all that hanging about in the library waiting for thick dumb slapper Sadie Phillips to finish with the French poetry translations. From the many and confusing hours that separated now from morning, she recalled something about promising to do supper. That was something else she hadn’t got right, and Mum would be really furious, going on like she always did about it being a household of three perfectly capable women, well, two and a half, so why should she be the one who had to do everything.

  As she strode furiously, she kept tripping on clods of grass broken up by ponies from the riding school. Some she kicked angrily, wishing each one was Nick’s shin, some she stamped hard into the ground, wishing it was his possessive, bad-timing head. She shifted her heavy bag from one shoulder to the other, regretting that she hadn’t stuck to the main pathway where it was easier to walk. It was a miserable gloomy early-darkening day like a throwback to winter, matching her mood. She thought of Glaswegian Mrs Keiller pointing this out with great excitement in Eng. Lit. as a ‘classic example of pathaytic farlacy’. Bloody Nick choosing that very moment, that moment full of glorious potential, to come bounding across the road and pick her up and swing her round as if she was some sort of cuddly toy that he owned. There they’d been, she and Chloe, just getting to the bus stop, just slowing down at the bit where the hedge hid them from school and you could light a cigarette with nobody seeing, and there was Simon in his car. He wasn’t driving anywhere, he just sat there on the double yellow line, waiting.

  Emily marched over the Common huddled into her coat, remembering the lurch inside her as she recognized that it wasn’t just a coincidence: Man-Date’s instructions actually worked. ‘With subtlety and guile, it is easy to let a man know where you’ll expect him to come and find you, etc.’ She’d managed quite easily to drop the name of the school into the conversation when she’d met him. She hadn’t had to resort to subtlety and guile at all. It had been one of those silly teasing things, him treating her like a little girl in front of her dad, ‘And which school do you go to then?’ and she’d told him, and he’d said, ‘Oh well I’ll have to come and meet you at the gate some day, carry your books.’ She’d thought by the end of his sentence he’d probably already forgotten what she’d said, even though she’d been craftily specific, making a joke about the cigarette hedge. And bloody Nick, stupid brainless Nick, had come racing up, just as she was getting close to Simon’s window and he was winding it down and smiling and something that really mattered and would always be rememb
ered was going to be said. Nick had grabbed her from behind and swung her up and kissed her ear, kissed her in that way that must have looked like she wanted him to do that, that he usually did it. She’d shrieked like someone of, oh God, she groaned miserably, like someone of Lucy’s age. Simon had probably thought she was totally pathetic and just as juvenile as Nick.

  She stopped walking and shook her head from side to side, hard, like Genghis when he’d got grass seeds in his ears on his walk. She was trying to get the hot damp feeling of Nick’s breath out of hers. The path was even darker now, this last bit where all the overgrown shrubs were. Everyone complained that the blackthorn never got cut back properly from the path. No-one walked there at night, not ever, except once a march of cross women claiming the right to be wherever they wanted to be. Even they’d been in a safe pack of about ten. Emily didn’t care where she was. She cared only about where she wasn’t, which was in Simon’s car. Now his mouth somewhere near her ear (like all over her neck) was something to think about, even if it wasn’t going to happen today, if ever now. Off he’d driven, with a sly little I-can-see-how-it-is grin, which was just so unfair, because he couldn’t. And she wouldn’t hang around and wait for the bus after that because it would have been humiliating, standing there with Nick going ‘And who was that then?’ and daring to look stroppy.

  ‘Hey girl, come here.’ Emily was dimly aware of a man’s urgent, muffled voice hissing into her thoughts. Fuck off was her first mental reaction, angry at being intruded upon. She was in a mood for being alone and brooding, not for conversation of any sort. The blackthorn shuffled and shook and out into the path stepped a tallish man in a long coat, with his hands in his pocket, giving Emily the immediate impression of a coffin-shape. Emily almost giggled, so like the classic flasher did he look. If he’d appeared like that in a movie, she and all her friends would have sneered and yawned at the cliché. He wore a knitted black balaclava helmet, the sort the little boys at Lucy’s school wore to play SAS games in, and a long brown riding mac, all flaps and buttons and so many pockets that nobody needed. She waited for him to speak, a look of bored challenge on her face.

  ‘Play with this?’ he mumbled softly, the hands in his pocket pulling his coat open. Emily stood still and scarcely breathed, staring at the scarlet penis, straining stiffly from the opening in his trousers. It didn’t look like Nick’s, which was cool and pale and almost inclined to be aloof. This looked angrier, frantic, hot. For a silly muddled second, she thought it was just a stubby painted stick, false party-trick flesh like those hands that people shove up their sleeves to drop on the floor and astound their friends with. The man’s right hand now gripped it and pulled harshly at the skin and a low sound rumbled from him. Emily stood still, watching and waiting. Her mind was as frozen as her body, but clamouring to get in was the thought that perhaps she should run, scream, shout, anything.

  ‘Touch it, come on, touch it,’ the man pleaded. She stared at the black wool where his face should be, looking for clues that he might have some soul. ‘Just look then, bitch, just look, look,’ he demanded, breathing hard and stepping nearer. The gripping hand was working so fast it seemed blurred. Emily started to back away, but then he was there, breathing on her, his hand gripping her arm and clutching her against him and trapping her against a tree. She could smell stale cigarette-breath, and the waxiness of the coat. Her back could feel every ridge of oak bark scraping as he pushed against her. She kicked out as hard as she could but her legs felt like pieces of foam rubber, incapable of making an impact. Then it was over, wetness like a slug trail glistened over the surface of her skirt but there was fresh cool air between Emily and the man. He looked smaller then, somehow collapsed and feeble, backing away, fumbling and stumbling.

  ‘You fucking stupid wanker,’ she yelled to him angrily. ‘You wouldn’t even have cared if I’d been some little kid, would you? Selfish, evil git.’ She turned then and ran, racing off the path and crashing through brambles and hawthorns to get to the road. ‘Don’t follow me, don’t let him be following me,’ she pleaded to whatever deity was listening. She didn’t feel the scratches of the branches, or the misshapen roots twisting her feet off balance. She felt nothing but the need to run till she reached her own road and dashed past a surprised Henry on his way home. ‘Hello Em, seen a ghost?’ he quipped, flattening himself against his gate as she hurtled past.

  ‘Drop dead!’ she yelled, with the last breath she could spare from her aching lungs.

  ‘Hello darling, where on earth have you been, we were starting to—’ Nina began as Emily flew into the kitchen. She and Joe and Lucy watched as Emily, still gasping for breath, hurled off her stained skirt and tights and threw them out of the back door. She started to tremble and then to cry, falling onto the sofa and curling herself tight into a corner, her head down among the cushions.

  ‘Whatever’s happened?’ Joe sat beside her and tried to gather the sobbing girl to him. She wrenched herself back quickly and cringed away, further into the corner. Lucy instinctively moved herself out of the way, over to the door and stared, a thumb that hadn’t been sucked for five years finding its way to her mouth.

  ‘OK Joe, let me. You could make her some tea,’ Nina suggested quietly. She knelt in front of Emily and took one of her hands. It felt stiff and cold. Nina was frightened, scared for whatever Emily had been through. She coaxed her gently, ‘Come on Em, tell me, has someone hurt you?’

  ‘No,’ Emily muttered. ‘But on the Common there was just this man.’ She lifted her head and stared at the floor. Nina waited, and Joe clattered about with the kettle and cups, things falling over out of control as his own hands shook.

  Gradually Emily told just enough of what had happened and was persuaded of the need for the police to be called.

  ‘Let me, I’ll get them!’ Lucy said, reaching for the phone.

  ‘No. I’m doing this,’ Joe said, unwrapping her fingers from the phone. ‘Thanks,’ Nina said, looking up at him. There were tears glistening in his eyes, something she hadn’t seen, she was sure, since the day Lucy was born. I do wish he still lived with us, the spontaneous thought came into her head, the words as clear as if she’d stood alone in an empty theatre shouting them out loud.

  Graham was very tired. Every patient on the shift seemed to have weighed at least twenty stone. The nurses had all been snappy and rushing. One very old man had fallen asleep and gone sideways half out of the wheelchair while Graham was finding out whether it was the fracture clinic or just normal orthopaedic to take him to, and it had taken three of them to load him back in again. ‘If it wasn’t Fracture before, it will be for sure now,’ the young Irish charge nurse had muttered humourlessly and Graham had known it was all his fault.

  No-one had asked him how Mother was, and Jennifer had gone home early the night before saying she had tights to rinse out. She’d had that hard-done-by look that Mother liked to put on when he’d forgotten some little thing, like not putting the cups the right way round on the hooks or the time he’d brought home that bread with the little bits of dried tomato in. He’d liked it but she’d said it wasn’t good and that foreign flour tasted odd.

  While Jennifer was off home washing her underwear, he’d got into bed with hot chocolate and his aircraft log, quite glad to have the chance to catch up with some recent numbers that he hadn’t had the chance to put in. Sleep was tricky with no-one in the house to blame for the strange little creaks and squeaks. The cat, like him, had its own unshakeable routines and slept in its kitchen basket. It wasn’t allowed upstairs. Graham kept waking and thinking there was someone on the stairs. ‘It’s just the house settling,’ Mother used to say when he was little, and he lay in the dark thinking about her saying that, and thinking about how back then he used to clutch the satin cuff of her dressing gown and rub it between his thumb and his bottom lip. Social Services were sending someone round soon, to check for enough stair rails and that there was something non-slip for the bottom of the bath. Graham had got it all organize
d.

  His shift, the early one that he preferred, had finished now but Jennifer’s hadn’t and he wondered about going up to the ward and seeing if she fancied something to eat when she got off later. Apart from visiting Mother, he didn’t like going to the wards unless he was actually working. He hated that spare-part feeling, hanging around by the nurses’ desk waiting for one of them to stop bustling and ask what he wanted – you couldn’t just go wandering about looking for the right one, everyone in the beds stared. Jennifer might be doing the bloods, or the teas or some very personal tending behind a curtain. He took his jacket out of his locker, extracted a 2p coin from the pocket and flipped it. Heads Jennifer first, tails Mother. Mother won (nothing new there, he thought vaguely) and he set out for the Care of the Elderly department. They used to call it Geriatrics, he recalled as he went, which he considered a word of some distinction. Then there’d been the phase when everyone pretended that old people were exactly the same as everyone else: if you’d had appendicitis, it didn’t matter whether you were seventeen or seventy, it was the same illness. Except that it wasn’t. When you were seventeen and went home, your mum looked after you and you got better in a week or so. If you were well over seventy like Mother, then after hospital you were a weak and unreliable convalescent and never quite the same again. He’d heard enough patients’ relatives muttering that next time it was likely to be the last, curtains, all that.

  Monica now ruled the ward. Over the dawn-light breakfast she’d terrorized the young assistant who brought round the food and tried to distribute it as silently and stealthily as possible. She was terrified of Monica who kept a beady critical watch over her and grumbled as if the eggs should have been prepared by Albert Roux.