In Her Mothers' Shoes (2 page)

For the last few weeks, ever since Peter had been rostered as conductor on her route, catching the Karori tram from music lessons in town had been heaven on wheels. His jaunty grin as he clicked her ticket, his sarcasm when she climbed aboard – ‘Here comes Miss Marsden College’ – he’d turned journey into something to look forward to, so much in fact that she’d caught the tram on several occasions for no other reason than to see him again.

Now, here she was at the end of the line. Could she go back? Should she?

He took her hand and the touch, the smell of him released that burning sensation once more. Suddenly her courage returned; she let him lead her inside.

The stench was even more throat-catching. She coughed.

‘You okay, love?’ He looked down at her, his face unreadable in the dim light inside. ‘Do you want to stay outside?’

‘No. We’ll get wet. I’ll come in.’

Lizzie remembered how her flute teacher had shown her to breathe through her mouth, to take big, deep breaths from way down below her diaphragm. She opened her mouth and breathed deeply. The smell receded.

The bushes around the sprawling, white-weatherboard pavilion had sheltered several trysts with Peter, sometimes in broad daylight but, from the day that he first kissed her, their hasty, breathless, fumbling encounters had been after dark, outside in the wintry cold. A small nook on the far side of the pavilion, overlooking the cricket grounds, became their hiding place; but this was the first time he’d invited her into the Men’s.

Even the dim light could not hide the peeling cream paint, names scratched on the wall –
Susie
loves
Dave, Sally & Johnny 1949, Griff was here
– dark splotches on the floor, and stains everywhere that didn’t bear thinking about. There was a strange white oval porcelain fixture on the far wall with water squirting noisily down a brown-stained smear towards a plughole. The water stopped.

All she could hear was the rain rattling on the tin roof and the thud of her heart.

‘Sorry, love, it’s not exactly a palace,’ Peter said with his familiar grin.

He pulled off his dark navy conductor’s jacket and flung it on the floor under the hand basin. The silver metal buttons clattered on the hard concrete. ‘Here you are love. A bed fit for a princess. Let’s lie down.’ He hastily closed the door to the single toilet cubicle to her right, took her hand and pulled her down beside him. Below her gym slip, unprotected by the rough serge jacket still warm from his body, her bare legs recoiled from the cold, damp concrete.

Lizzie and her friends had talked about doing “IT”. One was rumoured to have crossed the threshold and done IT, but it later transpired IT was only heavy petting. A bra had been removed, pants had been pulled down, but nothing further had occurred. Try as they might, they’d been unable to discover anything much at all about IT and what was involved.

This time, Lizzie knew for sure that IT was happening. Pants were pulled down and soon afterwards she felt a searing pain between her legs so intense she screamed.

Peter said, ‘Shhh, Jack will hear us.’

Lizzie couldn’t care less about Jack. The pain was unbearable.

If this was IT she didn’t like it.

The rest was a blur. Peter thrust up and down on top of her a lot then cried out ‘Yes’ very loudly, then subsided on her ribs, making it hard to for her to breathe. Everything hurt – her back, her thighs, her calves, her arms – everything that came into contact with the concrete floor. But most of all, it hurt just below her stomach and between her legs. He was breathing heavily, like her brother Jerry did after he’d run all the way home up the hill from the tram stop.

She studied the ceiling. The wire cage around the light had become a mortuary for dozens of moths and spidery bugs with long spindly legs. A large black splodge in the shape of Italy covered the patch between the light fitting and the wall. There was no Sicily.

An embarrassing wetness between her legs trickled down into the fabric of the conductor’s jacket.

She wished she had a handkerchief. She wished Peter would get off. She wished she could get up and walk away. She wished the whole vile experience had never happened.

Perhaps she should say something? She couldn’t think of anything that seemed appropriate.

Peter rolled off her and his jacket, pulled his pants up and produced a cigarette packet from his jacket pocket.

‘Damn, it’s been squashed,’ he said, holding it up. ‘You shouldn’t have made me get so carried away, Lizzie.’ He extracted a cigarette, not at all squashed, and lit it. ‘You want one?’

Lizzie inhaled the familiar tobacco aroma. An hour ago, she’d have said yes. She’d always fancied herself with a cigarette in her mouth, elegant, sophisticated, just like in the advertisements. But she simply couldn’t face another new experience. 

‘No thanks, Peter.’

‘I’d better get back, then,’ he said, blowing smoke all around her. ‘Jack will have turned the tram around and be ready to head back to town.’

She studied his blue, blue eyes, his thick, sandy hair, his handsome, square-jawed face with its strong, slightly crooked Roman nose, his even teeth, his teasing smile. He’d once told her he was an athlete, a sprinter, a champion at the hundred yards’ hurdles, a record-setter on the high-jump. A real athlete.

‘Come on, Lizzie. Time to go.’

‘Yes.’ Sitting up, she grabbed her underpants, which had wrapped themselves, bright white, around her left leg. Acutely aware of her inelegance, she wrestled them across to her right leg, hooked them over and pulled them up. Horrified, she could see a red stain spreading across the crotch. Maybe she was getting her period? What a terrible time for it to arrive. Peter noticed it at the same time.

‘Oh God, look at that. You’re bleeding. A bleeding virgin. You might have told me.’ He laughed coarsely. ‘Bloody hell, you’ve bled all over me jacket.’ He grabbed it from under her, opened the cubicle door and dashed inside, grabbing fistfuls of toilet paper, wiping away at the back of his jacket. The toilet paper turned pink.

His uniform was ruined, and it was all her fault.

‘I’m sorry, Peter.’

‘You should have told me. I had no idea you were a virgin.’

Neither did I, Lizzie thought, but didn’t say. Why was he making such a fuss about it? There was the Virgin Mary they taught you about at school. Did she bleed between her legs too? Maybe it was something to do with not having done IT before? She tried to recall if one of her friends had said anything about bleeding virgins, but drew a blank.

Peter took his jacket over to the basin and splashed water on the stain. Lizzie escaped into the cubicle and shut the door.

‘Don’t take too long in there,’ he called after her. ‘We’ve got to go.’

She grabbed the toilet paper – there were just a few leaves of the coarse Jeyes paper left in the container – and stuffed them in her pants, pulled down her gym frock and did up her blazer.

Peter was hovering in the doorway.

‘Come on, let’s go.’

She followed him into the night. It had stopped raining. Hurrying to keep up with him, she splashed straight through the car-park puddles, getting her school shoes wet. They reached the tram. Its red and cream paintwork shone from the recent rain-washing; its blunt nose faced towards Karori and the city; its sign above the front window read Newtown Depot. Through the open front door she could see Jack watching her closely.

‘You’re still here, Jack? That’s good of you.’ Peter and Jack laughed like conspirators. Lizzie could hear a new tone in Peter’s voice, almost triumphant, as if he’d won the hurdles. Jack nudged him as he jumped nimbly aboard and brushed past the driver. He was grinning.

‘About time, Pete my boy. I was going to go without you.’

‘You wouldn’t do that. You’re not allowed to.’

‘Don’t you believe it. I’ve driven without a conductor before and I’ll do it again if I have to.’

Peter turned to Lizzie, hanging uncomfortably back from the tram’s lights. ‘You want to come back in the tram as far as your street? No charge, of course.’

‘Yes, please.’ She didn’t want to be parted from Peter now, not for a minute and dreaded the moment when she would have to get down off the tram and say goodnight.

‘Climb aboard then.’

She pulled herself up the steep, high iron step, trod carefully along the grooved wood floor, slippery from the rain, and perched uncomfortably on her usual wooden slatted seat. But this time Peter didn’t come back to sit beside her. Instead, he was talking animatedly to Jack, stopping frequently to roar with laughter. Lizzie couldn’t see what was so funny. She didn’t feel at all like laughing. She wanted to be cuddled, to be told everything would be all right. She shivered. Jack usually left both front and back doors of the tram wide open, even at this time of year. She hadn’t noticed until now, though, just how the wind whistled through.

She shivered from the cold and from fear. Fear of consequences. Would Peter lose interest in her now, like Julia had said? Would he try to avoid her next time she caught the tram? And why was he ignoring her now and cracking jokes with Jack instead? And why was she bleeding? Her period wasn’t due for another two weeks.

Julia would know. Julia knew everything. Well almost everything. Julia had brought that book to school:
You and Your Body
it was called, with page after page of line drawings of girls with small breasts – not at all like hers, which only just fitted into her new Maidenform bra her mother had been so embarrassing about in the middle of Kirkaldies’ ladies fashions.

‘My daughter is growing so fast, she needs a new brassiere again,’ she’d said to the saleswoman.

Lizzie had cringed, wishing she’d stayed in the shoe department trying on those baby louis heels. It was bad enough having the biggest-size bra in the class without having to go another size up.

The girls in
You and Your Body
didn’t have to worry about getting an outsized bra. Their chests had two firm little semi-circles with neat dots for nipples, and they didn’t have any unsightly hair between their legs like hers. She and Julia had giggled over that – over how unrealistic the pictures were.

‘They don’t look like us at all,’ Julia said.

‘I wish I was that slim.’ Lizzie held up the picture.

‘You are.’

‘Not like that.’ She pointed to the tiny semi-circles.

‘You’re lucky.’ Julia looked down at her emerging bumps. ‘Boys like them big like yours.’

Julia always knew that sort of thing.

Julia had said that once you’d done it, once you’d gone all the way, they didn’t want to know you. Was that true? She stared at him, scared. She couldn’t believe he wouldn’t want to see her again now they were so close, now she’d done what he wanted of her.

Lizzie looked out the tram window at the wet street glistening under the street lamps. If only she knew as much as Julia. Would she have gone all the way with Peter? She doubted it somehow. Julia was good at talking about daring things like going all the way, but she lacked the daring to do it.