Faith (3 page)

Laura watched them go. She felt the incident ought to have made her feel powerful and triumphant, but it had quite the reverse effect. What she wanted was for them to like her, so they could spend Saturday afternoons in Woolworth’s listening to the week’s Top Twenty and looking at the makeup. But that was never going to happen now.

She slumped down on the wall of number 12 where she lived, suddenly, blindingly aware that it would take a great deal more than passing her eleven-plus and putting on a striped blazer to overcome the stigma of being a Wilmslow.

She’d been so proud when she got her place at the grammar school, and she thought her older brothers were just jealous when they said she wouldn’t fit in there. Even when it was clear her brothers were right, ever the optimist, she had told herself she’d win everyone around in time.

But she knew now she could never do that. She’d never get invited to one of the other girls’ parties, or home to tea; no one would ever want her around them. She didn’t mind that her parents had no money for the school trip to France, or for ballet lessons, but she didn’t think she could stand another four or more years at school without a single friend.

Until now she had comforted herself when things looked blackest by the fact the teachers said she was clever. She had believed that one day she’d get to be something brilliant like a doctor, a scientist or a lawyer, and then all those who had looked down on her would be ashamed.

But now she could see that Janice and Margaret’s prejudice against her was representative of how the whole world would see her. With a father in and out of prison, two older brothers who showed every sign of going the same way, and home a squalid hovel, she really didn’t have any chance of getting on in life.

Turning her head slightly, Laura looked down into the basement flat and winced when she saw what Janice and Margaret would have seen. Filthy windows, net curtains yellow with age and full of holes, and the dustbins for the entire four-storey house which were kept right outside their front door wafting out a sickly, rotten smell. If they’d seen the squalor inside, they’d have been even more shocked. The shame of it flooded through her, making her feel sick.

Dragging her feet, she went down the concrete steps to face her mother.

‘Where’ve you been all day?’ Mrs Wilmslow yelled as soon as Laura walked in. ‘I’ve been stuck in here with these kids fighting and the baby bawling, I ain’t even had a minute to nip out to buy some fags.’

Laura stood in the doorway of the front room which also doubled as her parents’ bedroom, and her spirits plummeted to rock bottom. No sunshine ever made its way in here, the couch had the stuffing coming out of the arms, and the wallpaper had been up so long that any pattern it had originally had been obliterated. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and smelled as though six-month-old Freddy had a dirty nappy. He was lying on the floor, grizzling. Ivy, the three-year-old, had jam all over her face and a bare bottom. Meggie, who was five, was playing with her doll. The room was a mess, toys, used cups and plates everywhere; even the double bed hadn’t been made.

June, Laura’s mother, was only thirty-two, a small, slender woman with bottle-blonde hair, a muddy complexion and a harassed expression. She still looked very pretty when she did her face and hair, but she rarely bothered with that unless she was going down the pub. She had curlers in her hair now, so she was obviously intending to go out later, but her dress had a tomato sauce stain down the front and she had holes in the elbows of her cardigan.

‘Go and get your fags now then,’ Laura retorted. She was tempted to point out that her mother could have taken the little ones out for a walk and got her cigarettes then, but she bit that back.

‘The kids kept on asking me where you were.’ Her mother’s voice had turned to a disgruntled whine. ‘For all I knew you could have been run over.’

‘Well, I wasn’t,’ Laura retorted. ‘You go and get your fags, I’ll tidy up in here and change Freddy – he stinks.’

It was an odd thing that her mother rarely asked what Laura or her older brothers did when they went out. It was as if she didn’t care other than to feel aggrieved that they hadn’t been around to do something for her. Mark was fourteen now, Paul thirteen, and without any kind of discipline they were running wild.

‘Peel some spuds too,’ June said, lighting up her last cigarette and dropping the empty packet on the floor. ‘We’ll have egg and chips for tea.’

*

Laura opened the window when her mother had gone, and found the reason Ivy had no knickers on was because they were wet, and lying on the floor behind the sofa.

‘You must use the potty,’ she rebuked her little sister, and found her a clean pair to put on. She stacked up all the dirty plates and cups and carried them out into the kitchen, only to find the sink still piled high with the breakfast things. Groaning, she put the kettle on for some hot water, then heaved all the dishes out on to the table so she could bathe Freddy.

Mrs Crispin upstairs often said June should be ashamed of herself for being such a bad mother, that she was slovenly, lazy and a disgrace. Laura hated the woman for sticking her nose in her family’s business, but she was right.

June Wilmslow
was
slovenly. She seemed unable to see dishes that needed washing, the pile of clothes in a chair that required ironing, and she would walk over things dropped on the floor rather than pick them up and put them away. As for cleaning, she would keep moaning that it needed doing, but that was as far as she got.

Laura had been taught in domestic science that a good housewife should make a weekly timetable to fit in all the work needing to be done. Several times she’d drawn one up for her mother, along with a menu for the week so she could get the shopping all in one go to save her time. But although June agreed it was a good idea, she couldn’t stick to it. What she did with herself all day was something of a mystery, for when Laura got home from school, it was she who was invariably sent out to buy the groceries, or take the washing to the public baths.

Bill, her father, made matters worse. He had been in and out of prison for as long as Laura could remember. Each time he came out he would get work on building sites or something for a few weeks, but he soon went back to his old ways. Most nights he was out drinking and he slept till late the following day, making it difficult for June to get a routine going. He could be generous and jolly when he was in the money, but if there wasn’t enough for him to buy a few drinks or go down the dog track, he was very grumpy and took it out on June.

In Laura’s opinion, however, it was the overcrowded, dark, damp flat that had got her mother down most. She often said wearily that it didn’t look any better even when it was tidy and clean, and that if only they had a garden, a bathroom and an inside lavvy she’d feel like she’d won the pools.

Laura had accompanied her to the council loads of times to try to make them give them a house. Her mother pleaded with them that it wasn’t right that Mark and Paul slept in a room where water ran down the walls, or that the three girls had to sleep in the same bed, because there was no room for another one. But her pleas were ignored.

Laura had overheard a neighbour saying that it was because of Bill going in and out of prison all the time. She said they didn’t want ‘rough’ families living on the new estates.

As if they had special food sensors on their noses, Mark and Paul arrived home just as their mother was frying the chips. They were skinny versions of their burly father, with the same dark brown hair, sharp features and cocky manner. Laura sensed they were plotting something as they looked annoyed when June told them she wanted them to stay in that evening to look after the little ones as she was going down the pub to meet Bill.

‘He had a few quid when he went out to the football this afternoon,’ June said. ‘He’ll go straight to the pub afterwards and if I don’t go and join him he’ll stay out until he’s spent every penny he’s got on him.’

Laura, Mark and Paul exchanged resigned glances. They’d all too often heard their father stumbling in dead drunk late at night, and witnessed the rows when their mother found his pockets empty in the morning. It would make no difference to the amount he spent if their mother joined him at the pub, but at least they came home drunk together, kissing and cuddling like lovebirds. That usually meant their parents were much nicer to them all the following day.

At half past seven June left the house all dressed up in her best pink dress and her hair looking really nice, but she’d no sooner left than Mark and Paul said they were going out too.

‘You tell Mum and Dad and you’ll be sorry,’ Mark warned Laura, giving her a shilling and a Mars bar as a bribe.

Laura was quite happy to go along with this; she didn’t know why her parents always insisted the boys had to babysit anyway, for they were worse than useless with the little ones and nasty to her. She warned them to be sure to get back before their parents or there’d be hell to pay, and felt glad she was to be left alone.

Freddy fell fast asleep the minute he’d had his bottle, and Ivy and Meggie were in bed by half past eight, so Laura had the luxury of being able to lie on her parents’ bed to read with no one to interrupt her.

At half past ten her brothers returned, but they went straight to their room without speaking to her. Laura got into bed with her sisters soon after and was dozing off when she heard her parents come home. She knew they were tipsy because they were laughing, and her last thought before she dropped off to sleep was to hope Dad had had a win on the horses and they’d all get some kind of treat tomorrow.

A splintering sound, quickly followed by her mother’s scream, woke her later. For a moment she thought it was a burglar, but when she heard her father swear and make a dash down the passage to the kitchen and the back door, she realized it had to be the police.

All at once there was angry shouting from both front and back doors. Ivy and Meggie woke up and their alarmed cries added to the tumult. Clearly her father had been caught, for there were thuds and scuffles as the police hauled him back up the passage past her bedroom door.

‘What are they doing to Daddy?’ Meggie asked, clinging to Laura in alarm.

‘It’s only his friends having a drink with him,’ Laura lied.

The police often came here for her father, but they had never broken in like this before, or come at night. In fact when she was little she thought they really were her dad’s friends because they just sat and talked to him. Even on the occasions when they took him away in a police car, it had never been frightening, and mostly Dad was back within a few hours, making jokes about it.

But it
was
really scary now. She could hear furniture being overturned; Mum was crying and Dad was bawling and swearing. Then she heard one of the police shout at her father to tell them where the gun was or he’d rip the flat apart.

Terrified, Laura grabbed her little sisters tightly and pulled the covers over their heads. But heavy boots tramped down the passage again, this time into her brothers’ room, and judging by the sounds from there, they were ransacking it.

‘I don’t know where it came from,’ she heard Mark shout a few minutes later. ‘It ain’t nothin’ to do with me.’

Laura assumed that meant the police had found a gun in their room, and clutched her little sisters even tighter into her arms. Freddy was bawling his head off in the front room, her mother was shouting abuse at the police, and again and again she heard scuffling as if her father was trying to fight them.

Suddenly the light in her room snapped on. ‘Come on out, girls,’ a big policeman with a red face said as he pulled the covers off them. ‘We need to search in here too.’

With Ivy in her arms and Meggie clinging around her waist, Laura watched helplessly as the two policemen pulled the mattress up and looked under the bed, dragging out old toys, colouring books and bits of rubbish. They knocked over Ivy’s potty as they were doing it, and the pee ran all across the lino.

What’s this?’ one of the policemen said, pulling out a shoe box tied up with string.

‘I don’t know,’ Laura said truthfully, for she hadn’t seen it before.

The man cut the string with a pocket knife and opened it, and to Laura’s shock it was full of banknotes.

She gasped, for she’d never seen so much money in her life. A ten pound note was a rare sight to her, but this was bundles of tens and twenties, and as the box was stuffed with them, there had to be hundreds of pounds.

‘Who put this here?’ the red-faced man asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ Laura said again, and suddenly she felt as though she was going to be sick. ‘I didn’t know it was there.’

‘Don’t you lie to me,’ he said, coming right up to her and bending so he could look straight into her eyes. ‘How old are you?’

‘Twelve and three-quarters,’ she replied.

‘That’s old enough to know what’s right and wrong,’ he said. ‘Tell me when your dad put it here.’

‘I don’t know, I didn’t see him put it there.’ She began to cry then. ‘It could have been there for weeks. That’s all old stuff under there.’

The policeman ordered her back into the bed and left the room with the box in his hands, and suddenly the commotion and angry raised voices subsided. Laura couldn’t hear what was being said because Freddy was crying so loudly, but she thought she heard her mother pleading with the police. Unable to bear it any longer, she got out of bed, just in time to see her father, Mark and Paul all being led out of the front door in handcuffs.

‘You can’t take the boys,’ her mother sobbed. ‘They’re only kids – look how frightened they are!’

Laura had never seen the boys look afraid of anything before, but they certainly were now; their faces were like chalk, and they were trembling. But the older plain-clothes man showed no sympathy. ‘In a reform school they might get straightened out,’ he said to June. ‘Now, get back to that baby and stop him bawling before he wakes the whole neighbourhood up.’

There were six policemen in all: three led their prisoners up the basement steps and the last three followed laden with boxes and a long object covered by a sack.