Kate and Emma (6 page)

‘I put this on.’

‘She’s ashamed of working here,’ Kate said.

‘Oh no,’ I said, too quickly. ‘Of my name.’

That wasn’t what I meant. Not what I meant at all. I meant - oh hell, they should have known what I meant. I shuttered my face into redskin reticence and they collected the children and went away hating me. They wished they hadn’t asked me to their rotten party. I wouldn’t go anyway, even if they had told me where they lived.

Molly sent the postcard to my father at the court, not knowing where I lived. Short, crimped writing, like the baby’s hair, not a pronoun in sight. ‘Forgot say where live. Grove Lodge edge park. Friday evening. Bring gram recs. M.A.’ On the other side was a glazed picture of two kittens in an upturned hat. ‘Anyone I know?’ He gave it to me when I came home. My mother, who is honest about all the wrong things, never reads other people’s postcards, but my father and I do.

‘It’s the – it’s a girl I know at the college. Shan’t go bring gram recs.’

‘Don’t blame,’ he said, taking the card back to look at the kittens again.

Sometimes when I come home at night, he kisses and hugs me as if I were a small child again, galloping in with pigtails and a gym tunic. Sometimes he doesn’t and, if he doesn’t want it, you can’t start it, as my mother must have found out at cost, some time ago.

Standing by his desk, looking down at the narrow grey head which at times you can see as a skull, I again almost told him about Kate, and again I couldn’t. Why not? He is not a snob. Perhaps I was afraid that he would think I had inherited her through him. Taking over where he left off. Trying to help.

Good for you, he would say. Someone her own age can do more for her than anyone. Then it would get to my mother, and she would want to discuss it, picking it to pieces like a dandelion clock, until there was nothing left. She had done this with school friendships, ambitions I revealed, love affairs. I tell her now mostly surface things that sound like my life, and keep quiet about what matters.

There is only one park in that neighbourhood, a bleak stretch of bitter grass with chained swings, a shuttered kiosk humped against the winter, and a few men hurrying along the walks head down to get home.

I walked half-way round it and found Grove Lodge, a monstrous brown brick villa with a motorbike with cowboy trappings in the garden and a lot of windows in unsymmetrical places. Music poured out of the ground floor, and smoke poured out of the fat chimneys, as if the house were half-way across the Atlantic, with the ship’s band swinging.

The bell did not work and there was no knocker, so I thumped. After a while, some of the squeals and feet inside channelled into a clattering run to the front door, and I was in, with two small boys hurding past me down the chocolate-cake steps and into the bushes.

‘Come back in here!’ a woman’s voice called from somewhere, as if she had something in her mouth. They didn’t come, and she didn’t come to see why, so I shut the front door, put my coat on top of a pile of magazines on a chair, plugged in a hairpin and
pretended that I wasn’t afraid of Kate’s motorcycle friends, and of Kate herself in this new environment.

The doors off the hall were shut. The music came deafeningly from the room on the right. I opened the door and went in.

A girl with a nose turned up square at the end like a pig’s was dancing on the linoleum with a boy like a knife blade, his lemon-coloured hair in sidewhiskers, one side longer than the other. Grimly apart, they were dancing in a manner slightly reminiscent of the parties along our road, but more respectable.

A thick girl, the same shape all the way down, was sitting on the floor in front of the fire, her legs stretched out in front of her like deadwood. A pallid boy with a forelock of soft black hair sat smiling in a rocking-chair, legs crossed very high, one thick rubber sole pushing him gently back and forth.

He and the thick girl looked at me. The couple went on dancing, both so concave that you wondered about their guts. Kate stood by the gramophone with her back to the door and pretended not to know that I had come in.

There was nothing for it but to cross the room and say, ‘Hullo, Kate.’

She turned slowly, as if it didn’t matter. ‘What?’

‘Hullo!’ I shouted. The noise was fierce, a crescendo of the battering sounds my generation is supposed to need, which is driving us all a little askew.

The noise died away suddenly to a whimper, the needle slid across the record and Kate said rather sourly: ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’

‘Am I late? I didn’t know what time.’

‘Oh well. You bring any records?’

‘A few. But I don’t know if they’re the right kind.’ They were piano, the only ones I have, people like Garner and Peter Nero playing old stuff in a way Cole Porter never expected.

‘Ta.’ Kate took them and put them down without looking at them. It was clear they wouldn’t be played. I should have borrowed some from next door.

We were all just looking at each other, like dogs, or street gangs sizing up for a fight. Nothing happened. I seemed to have paralysed whatever initiative had before made it possible to put on
a record, to start dancing. The boy in the chair had stopped rocking. Pig girl and sideburns stood on the torn linoleum with their little fingers twined. Kate, who is meagrely shaped, looked almost heavy with inertia. To have introduced anybody would have cost her as great an effort as to lift feet nailed to the floor, which they seemed to be.

If I had said, into the silence: I’m Emma Bullock, it would sound like an indecency, and so would their names, if I forced them to divulge.

At least she had minded because I was late and she thought I wasn’t coming. I would have turned with an incoherent excuse and run away if it wasn’t for that, and if I hadn’t been dressed right. Kate had put on all her eye paint, and a short tight black skirt, with red tights and the red polo-necked sweater. The log by the fire was in a string-coloured sloppy with what might prove to be a skating skirt when she got up. Pig wore a long barrel sweater, home-knitted and cast on too tight round the hips. I had the black chunky number which makes me look very Aztec, and I had wound my hair round and round my head like knitting wool, and the thick girl had built hers, apparently days ago, into a tottering ginger beehive.

Give the teenagers a chance, Mollyarthur had obviously said, shut herself in the kitchen, and forbidden the little ones the room on pain of death. So there we were in the square bare room with the chairs pushed against the walls, like strange children shoved into a nursery and told: Play.

I cleared my throat. ‘Shall we—’ I began desperately. I don’t know whether I would have said Have another record, or Tell our names, or Play Sardines, but suddenly, as if I had pressed a button, Kate dropped the needle back on the record, the boy with the lemon hair leaped into the air crying, ‘Hit it!’ and was away with pig, Kate pulled the other boy out of the chair and galvanized him into loose-jointed action, and I was so invigorated by the relief from paralysis that I almost bent over the log girl with my hand in my waist and said: Shall we dance?

Instead, I sat down beside her, and she told me behind her hand, which is the way she said everything, with little digs of the elbow that her name was Joan, dig, and she worked with Kate
at the nursing home - what on earth did they
do
among the old ladies being starved to death for their annuities? - that the rocking-chair boy was called Bob, sniff, and the other two were Kevin and Sonia, old friends of Kate’s, dig dig, well, it takes all kinds.

No one asked me to dance. No one talked to me, although I tried. Even Joan had nothing more to convey behind her hand. Between records, the boys were completely silent, with clodding feet in prehistoric shoes, and Kate was featureless in her Queen of the Nile make-up, wishing she had not asked me, for she couldn’t be friendly with the others there, and with me there, she couldn’t let go with them.

Would it hurt her more if I stayed or left? Who cared anyway? Thank God I hadn’t said anything at home about coming here, so I wouldn’t have to face: Well, how did it go?

IT WAS AWFUL. The worst party I’ve ever been at. Not that I’ve been at any except those brawls at the Teen Club, with Mc-Donovan blowing his whistle.

Because I’ve never had a birthday party, nor even a birthday - but Molly knew because of the date on my papers - she was bound I should have one.

I said O.K. When Molly’s got an idea, you may as well go along with it. Who to ask? Don’t lose touch, she said, so I asked Sonia, that I used to go with at school, and since you can’t ask her without Kev, I asked him too.

I didn’t know Molly knew about Bob, but of course she’ll have read the reports and things where it tells about me and him going off - my whole life laid bare for the world to see - so she was bound I should ask him. The funny thing about her is this. Everyone else thinks it was bad that I ran away with him. Old Moll thinks the bad thing is that I ran away
from
him, in Charing Cross Road. I sometimes wonder why they let her be a foster-mother. She doesn’t think like any mother I know. If she’s trying to buy me by never criticizing, even when Matron came in person to complain about my work, she’s wasting her time. I belong to no one.

Never did to Bob. He knew that, so he bears no malice. He told me he saw the Horse Guards after I’d gone, and spent all day in Hyde Park waiting to see them come back, before he went home.

Joan has never liked me ever since I first set foot in the nursing-home kitchen and caught her at the shortbread, but she had asked me to Sunday dinner with her people - boiled mutton, never again - so Molly said I had to ask her.

Not much of a party, but there it was. I’d never had one, and if I hadn’t been all steamed up about it, I’d never have invited the Bullock girl.

She is a bit queer, mind you, because there’s no need for her to work in that market, though she told Molly she likes it, but she is - different. Different to what? To everyone. I’ve never met anybody like her. She has all this bunch of hair, and at the shop it was hanging like a rope, so thick the kids could have swung on it, and she’s the kind you don’t waste a month getting to know each other, like I and Bob when we used to stand on the iron bridge and watch the roofs of the trains because we couldn’t think of anything to do.

With her, you like know her at once. I felt that in court, though I thought that was part of the dream, because the whole lot was hazy. Doug was like that too. As soon as he said: ‘You going anywhere, or coming somewhere with me?’ in that crazy Aussie voice, I felt all right with him.

I must have been daft to ask her like that, but I never thought she’d come anyway, not after the way she looked when we left. It hadn’t been right to ask her. I’d been wrong thinking she isn’t the same as all the rest. She is. She couldn’t possibly be friendly with someone like me, with Butt Street written all over them, too thick for Grove Lodge to ever wipe off.

Molly said she’d come. I knew she wouldn’t. When it was an hour after the others had got there, then I
knew
she wouldn’t.

For a moment when she did, I wanted to rush across the room and grab her, but I’ve never done that to anyone in my life, and it wasn’t the time to start, with Joan sitting there like the Beast from Outerspace, and Sonia looking at everyone as if they were something the cat did.

So I kept my back turned, because she was late on purpose to make me think she wasn’t coming. She came over, and she had
these corny records, nothing anyone ever heard of, and she looked smashing, I mean that. She’s ugly really, feature by feature, but that hair like yards of thick toasted silk is really something, and so is that square black sweater. My beloved red was suddenly all wrong. I’ve got to get a loose black turtleneck, and I’ve got to let my hair grow.

And then suddenly the party was all wrong too, and I wished she hadn’t come. Why had she? To make fun of us? To show us up? The others just stared at her, and we were all dumb like our own funeral.

It hadn’t been what you might call gay before, but whatever it was, she had ruined it, and I hated her for that, although it was my fault for asking her. Molly’s fault for letting me. Kev’s and Sonia’s fault for being so, I don’t know. Poor Bob’s fault for sitting there with that silly smile, and falling all over me when I made him dance. Joan’s fault for whispering things about me to Emma.

Emma. Whoever heard of a name like that? I ask you. Emma’s fault for being there.

If that’s a birthday party, I’d not missed a thing. I was ready to throw the whole thing up, when all at once there was a shrieking and yelling and the door burst open and some of the kids crashed in in their pyjamas and shouted we’d all to come into the room.

The room is the one at the back of the house looking over the Park where we do everything, and there’s no space in there for five more people, that’s why Molly had shoved us in the playroom. The room is the centre of this house, the only place I’ve ever felt really safe in, but I didn’t want Emma to see all the laundry and the babies and the animals and that awful moulting bird and the come and go at the round table - there’s always someone eating, day and night - and the walls chalked over any time anyone feels artistic, because that can’t be the way she lives, and I want to be her equal.

But the kids rushed us down the hall, and Kev was shrieking: ‘Hit it!’ and jumping at the ceiling, and Ralph had a hold of me and tugging, and Donna pushing from behind, and when we got past the stairs and to the door, someone flung it open from inside, and there it was. My birthday.

The room was half-dark, just the fire, and the nightlights. It
was all decorated with coloured paper like Christmas, and bells and silvery things and the birdcage all hung with leaves and little bright shiny balls. All the toys and clothes and carpentry and stuff were in the shadows, even the ironing-board had gone, and on the round table in the middle of the room, instead of the sauce bottles and the last person’s dirty mug, there was this huge great cake with seventeen candles on it.

Someone pushed me and I went up to the table. All the kids stood in an arc behind it with the candle flames like pinpoints in their eyes, and Tina had on that long nightdress and her voice all filling up her mouth like cake, and the boys not shoving and giggling, singing dead earnest.