Clover's Child (26 page)

‘S’all right, Barb, you go get your bus and get on home. I’ll probably have to carry her anyway.’

Barb looked at her wristwatch. ‘Shit!’ Her dad would have been expecting her home ages ago.

‘Are you sure, Wall?’

‘Yeah, go on, I know where Reg lives, it’s almost on me way anyway.’

Barb stooped and gave him a big kiss that smacked against his cheek. ‘D’you know, you’re smashing, you are!’

‘Dot!’ Barb shook her friend’s shoulder. ‘Wally’s going to see you home. Will you be all right?’

‘I’m a disgrace, shameful!’

‘Yes you are!’ Barb laughed, thinking Dot was talking about her inebriated state.

It took Wally twenty minutes to persuade Dot to leave the pub and not to spend the night with her head on the table. He placed one arm around her waist, hooked the other under her shoulder and the two of them wobbled along the cobbles like a couple of dancers whose fandango had left them in a horrible tangle.

Dot stumbled, pitching forward and crushing Wally’s winkle pickers at least twice. ‘I think I’m gonna be sick…’

Wally steered his charge up the alley at the end of Narrow Street and pointed her in the opposite direction. Dot bent over, breathed deeply and waited. No sick, yet.

‘Sorry, Wally… Imnotusuallylike this…’

‘No, I know. Don’t worry. I’ve heard you’ve been having a bit of a rough time. Although why anyone’d chuck over a girl like you, I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know either.’ Dot hung her head forward and wobbled on her heels. Wally reached up and caught her arm. She started to cry, doing nothing to stem the flow of tears.

‘I had to let him go! I didn’t want to, he was crying, I could hear him crying through the wall and I couldn’t do anything about it…’

Wally pulled her into his chest and patted the back of her head. ‘Don’t worry about him now, Dot, he was probably just feeling guilty, the bastard! Don’t you feel sorry for him, he’s a grown man – crying, for God’s sake, whasamatter with him? It was his doing in the first place!’

Dot looked up at Wallace Day, her face streaked with tears and mascara. ‘I’m sorry.’

Wally didn’t hesitate, it was the moment he had been hoping for. Leaning forward, he bent his head and pushed his lips against hers. Dot was shocked and jerked backwards, smacking her head against the alley wall. His hand reached up to pull her head away from the wall, to try and make it better. Dot pulled back, banging her head again.

‘Gawd, Dot, mind your head!’

‘I don’t want to kiss you! Of course I don’t!’

Dot retched as her drunken stomach finally decided to release its poison. She turned around and vomited against the wall, splattering her shoes and tights as her tears fell down her face.

Wally Day placed his hand on her back. ‘It’s all right, Dot, you’ve just had a bit too much to drink. It’ll be all right.’

‘Fuck off, Wally! Leave me alone!’ She shoved him with both hands.

Wally placed his hands in his pockets. ‘I was only trying to help you.’

‘No you weren’t. You tried to kiss me, you idiot.’

Dot shook with equal measures of fear and anger. She was sober enough to know that he was supposed to be her best friend’s bloke. ‘How could you do that to me… to Barb?’

‘It’s got nothing to do with Barb!’

‘She’s your girlfriend!’

‘No she ain’t! She’s just some dozy bint that turns up all the time, she ain’t my type.’

Wally stepped forward to take her arm and guide her home. Dot ducked under his arm; she didn’t want his help. Walking as quickly as her quaking legs would allow, she tottered up Narrow Street.

Mrs Harrison took a drag on her fag and for once was speechless.

Dot wobbled past as though her neighbour wasn’t leaning on the door frame staring at her.

She paused before putting her key in the lock; she had never gone home drunk before. She wondered if they would be able to tell. Dot spat on a tissue, removed the smudged mascara from under her eyes and tired to fix her hair. She took a deep breath and opened the door. A more rational Dot might have gone straight up the stairs and into her bed, but this was no rational Dot, this was a Dot with a good measure of gin and orange juice sloshing around in her blood.

Joan sat at the table in the back room with the standard lamp pulled close to her chair; she was sewing a name label into Dee’s gym knickers. Her dad was as usual face deep in the paper.

Dot swayed, but would have sworn she was standing still.

Her dad looked up from behind the
Standard
. ‘Look at the bloody state of you. Is that what we’ve got to look forward to now, you coming home in God knows what state, stinking like an old brass? Or am I not allowed to comment on this neither?’

‘Wh’as it to you if I do? It’s got nothing to do with you what I do with my life!’

‘Blimey! At least you’ve found your voice! And you’re right, Dot, it’s got nothing to do with me that you’ve buggered up your life, but if you think you can bring this behaviour over my doorstep, you’ve got another thing coming. How much more do we have to put up with, eh? We used to be a happy family!’

‘Did we? I don’t remember. I’ll never be happy here again, Dad, never. I won’t forget the names you called me and I won’t ever forget that you hit me. You hit me! When I needed help the most, you weren’t there for me!’

‘What did you bloody expect? You nearly destroyed this family and you still can’t see it. Mum lost her job, we nearly lost our home. Do you know what that means? I mean really what that means? If you are in any doubt, my girl, go up the arches by the station. You’ll see families just like ours, with little Dees and old men with dicky chests just like me, they’ll be lying there covered in filth on a pallet, waiting for the cold to do its worst. They are homeless and helpless and we were one step away from that cos of you! And the worst thing is, you still don’t see it. It’s a disgrace!’

Dot wobbled and put her hand on the wall to stop herself from falling. ‘Oh yes, I know I’m a disgrace! I had a spiteful nun telling me how much of a disgrace I was in that bloody place you sent me to. She was wicked and some of the things they made us do were horrific. They took Gracie and Sophie and Simon; I reckon Jude was lucky in some ways. D’you know that they make you take your baby to the people who are going to adopt it and then you have to wheel the empty pram back, like a walk of shame, while your tears fall and your heart feels like it has been ripped from your chest and your tits leak and you can hear him crying and you know he wants you, cos you’re his mum, but you know that you can never ever go to him and stop that crying, not just on that day but never ever for the rest of his life!’

Reg scrunched the paper up and threw it on the floor. Joan looked on, pale and stricken.

‘And what’s the alternative, you cocky madam? Bringing the little bastard back here to live among us? How well would that go down, Dot?

‘Don’t call my son that! Do not! And in answer to your question, Dad, I don’t know how well that would’a gone down, because I was never given the choice! I wish you didn’t give a shit what anyone thinks, cos then I might have my boy!’

‘That’s the problem! You didn’t give enough of a shit what anyone thinks or you wouldn’t have done it in the first place!’

‘Christ! You make it sound like I committed a crime!’

Joan finally piped up. ‘Maybe you did, in God’s eyes.’

Dot turned to her mum, who had been unnaturally quiet at the table. ‘In God’s eyes? Oh please, Mum, how can you say that? You don’t even go to bloody church! You just pick and choose the bits that suit you.’

Joan folded her arms across her chest. ‘You can say what you like, but that doesn’t change the fact that you let us down, Dot, in the worst possible way.’

Dot let out a small laugh. ‘I let
you
down? Jesus Christ, I expected shit from him…’ She pointed at her dad. ‘But you! How could you do that to me Mum? You’ve had babies and you knew what I was about to go through and yet you never said a bloody word, packing me off, nearly due without one single word of advice. And d’you know what, Mum? One word of kindness, just one, would have made the biggest difference to me, far better than giving me a sodding hankie! But no, I got the cold, silent treatment as part of my punishment, part of making me suffer. And all because I fell in love with the wrong man – and I did fall in love, it wasn’t just sex! I loved him! I really loved him.’ Dot’s tears started to fall. ‘And I would have gone to the other side of the world just to be with him. I was going to leave, leave you, this shit hole of a house and this bloody country where people judge and condemn me, when all I am guilty of is falling in love.’

‘D’you think you’re the only one?’ Her mum spat the words. ‘The only girl ever to have had her heart broken over a little crush?’

‘A little crush? I was going to marry him! I had a fucking baby, your grandchild! A little boy that someone else gets to wash, feed, bathe and sing to sleep every night just because his dad had the wrong colour skin! It’s a fucking joke, you think you can sit in a church, say a few prayers and make it all all right? How? How can you justify what you did to me, to us? How can you justify your horrible, horrible views? What kind of church is that?’

‘It’s not just me, it’s the whole world, it’s how it is.’

‘Just because it’s how it is does not mean it is how it should be!’

Reg was not done with his part in the discussion. ‘Very profound, Dot, but this is the real world!’

‘Do you think I don’t know that Dad? Do you think after what I’ve been through, I have some sweet little fantasy about life? I’ve got a son in this world that doesn’t even know I exist. How is that fair? Why should he be denied his proper mum and dad just because you had a problem with his dad’s skin? Think about it, Dad, both of you; play it back in your head and think about that for a minute. How fucked up is that?’

‘He left you, Dot.’ Joan spoke quietly yet forcefully; it was time it was said. ‘He left you without so much as a by your leave. That is not what people that love you do. I know that you are angry and you can try and lay the blame on my shoulders if it makes it easier for you, but I ain’t the one that buggered off at the first sniff of a problem. Whether you like it or not, the fact is you gave him what he wanted and he left you. And now you are paying for that.’

‘He wanted to marry me.’ Dot slid down the wall, her legs crumpled like paper beneath her body. The shouting had cleared her head, she felt nearly sober.

‘Did he? Did he really? Think about it, Dot, did he really?’

There was a pause while the three mentally reloaded. All were exhausted, wanting the confrontation to end, but they knew that this was possibly the only chance to get it all out and put it to bed.

‘No matter what Sol did to me, Mum,
you
let me down, you and Dad, but especially you. I don’t even mean telling me what to expect about giving birth or anything like that, which would have been kind, but you knew what it was like to fall in love with a baby, you knew what was going to happen to me and yet you didn’t give me one word of hope, nothing to prepare me for having my heart ripped out, nothing. And I will never ever forgive you for that.’

Joan leant over and tried to hold her daughter. ‘I’ve suffered too,’ she said. ‘D’you think I wanted to see my family torn apart like this? D’you think this is how I pictured you having your first baby?’

‘Mum, if there’s a scale of suffering, I’m at the top, trust me.’

‘Get away from her, Joan.’ Reg was clenching his fists now. ‘Listen to yourself, Dot.’ She looked up at her dad. ‘You are one selfish cow. Since when did it become all about you? When did you become the most significant person in this family, Dot?’

Dot slid back up the wall and stood tall; she smoothed her coat against her body and pushed her hair behind her ears. ‘From now on I want you to call me Clover, not Dot. A dot is something small and insignificant and I am not insignificant, because I am someone’s mother and that makes me something amazing.’

As she turned and left the room, then padded up the stairs to her bed, her parents exchanged a long look of incomprehension. This was it, she had finally gone proper doobleedin’lally.

* * *

Two weeks had passed since the showdown. And while it had been painful for both parties to give and receive such honest opinions, it had helped to clear the air. The atmosphere was no longer heavy with unspoken insinuation, sentences were no longer stuttered from dishonest mouths as everyone edited and whispered their words. Dot had stopped skulking in the hallway, embarrassed and awkward. She was not back to her chatty self, she never would be, and her demeanour was that of someone who lived with a heavy burden, but she certainly felt better having voiced her grievances and exorcised some of the horrors of Lavender Hill Lodge. In some small way the family could now move forward, albeit a different family to the one that used to live at 38 Ropemakers Fields. Everyone understood now just how fragile the ties of family life were, how they could be severed forever. Dot had learnt that the certainties of her youth – knowing that her mum and dad would always be there for her, no matter what – were unfounded. She now knew that they would only be there for her if she did and said what they expected, within their accepted boundaries. She envied Dee her ignorance, her assumption that her mummy and daddy would fix everything.

Dot was woken by the clinking of cutlery and the banging of drawers. Popping on her slippers, she sloped down the stairs and headed for the kitchen.

‘Pass me the best tablecloth, Dot.’

Joan spoke as though her daughter had been present all morning and had not only just appeared, with mussed hair and still in her pyjamas. Dot yanked open the drawer in the sideboard and pulled out the white linen cloth with the pressed-out lace pattern along its border. The cloth they used for Christmas lunch, birthday teas, Easter Sunday, wakes and other special occasions. After which it would be boil-washed, ironed, starched and returned to the drawer for its next appearance – and that was today, apparently: January 14th 1962; not a date of note, as far as Dot could remember.