September Starlings (27 page)

But I had changed, had toughened considerably. People like Enid, whose hair and dignity had been removed by high authority, whose mother collected rags and fleas in more or less equal quantities, were beyond caring, and they had dragged me into a state of near-nonchalance. The twins beat me, I clouted them back – it was all a part of the ethos. Tommo stayed aloof and superior, while Ginger worshipped me, stole things for me, put his freedom on the line many a time. Art worshipped me too, but he was just a little brother, a sad waif with strange teeth and a lisp. He was a friend, though, was a part of the gang. I
needed them all, was getting used to people taking notice of me, felt encouraged by their interest. Mother was suddenly less significant than before.

‘Where have you been going?’ my mother asked shrilly.

‘Out.’ I was alone, yet not alone. In the slums of Deane and Daubhill, my mates were behind me. They might not have been visible at this particular juncture, but they held me up, supported the grim campaign I waged against my mother.

She stubbed out another Craven A. It had taken the length of a whole cigarette for her to persuade me to open my mouth in the first place. ‘I am asking you where you go, Laura. Smart answers that tell me nothing are useless.’

I shrugged. Although I had not yet reached double figures in the age stakes, I was righteous about my rebellion. The righteousness sprang from the knowledge that while I was not necessarily right all the time, Liza McNally was definitely wrong on most occasions.

‘Will you say something?’

I eyed her with what probably was dumb insolence. I had learned, from Ginger and under the watchful gaze of Tommo, how and when to kick back, when to speak up, when to be silent. Art was a big help too – when he did bestir himself to speak. According to him, if you said nowt, ‘they’ could do nowt to you. He’d probably gleaned that from films about courtrooms and from life experience. My mother was a member of the ‘they’ who could do nowt. ‘I’ve got friends,’ I said eventually. My tone was dark and sinister.

‘Their names?’ She arched the perfect eyebrows, leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece, looked like Bette Davis in one of her many dramatic roles. ‘I wish to know the names and addresses of all your friends.’

‘Why? Why do you need to know?’ I was finding that if I stared straight at her, if I made my face cold and hard, she glanced away. ‘I don’t know the names of the people you go out with,’ I said, believing this to be a seed of reasonable debate.

I had struck a nerve. She blinked, seemed vague for a second, propped herself more firmly against the dark wood shelf. ‘I am not a child. When I was a little girl, I told my mother everything. My parents always knew where I was.’

I sat down on a dining chair, ignored the look of surprise that had invaded her face when I dared to sit without waiting for the order. During my lectures, I was expected to remain erect and alert unless otherwise advised by present company, present company always being Mrs Liza McNally. ‘How could your mother know where you were all the time? What about when she was out scrubbing the Town Hall steps?’

She swallowed, pushed a lock of hair from her cheek. ‘Who told you about that?’

‘Auntie Maisie.’

‘I ordered you not to go—’

‘Ages ago. She told me a long time ago. Before you … before you upset Uncle Freddie.’

I had overstepped the mark by miles. Her hand was sharp and dry as it whipped across my face, but I managed to remain upright in the chair, did not cower. The skin of my cheek glowed with pain – I could almost feel it swelling, as if it had been stung by a wasp.

Mother stared hard at me, raised a hand, saw that I did not flinch. My stomach was fluttering and threatening to heave as she spoke. ‘Don’t talk about my parents,’ she whispered as her hand dropped. ‘My parents were decent people who worked very hard. It wasn’t their fault that they got no education. My father might have been a great man if he’d been given a chance. Anyway, I listened to them, obeyed them.’ She swallowed again, gulped down her shame. I thought that she was ashamed of being ashamed of her beginnings, but perhaps I was being too generous. Liza McNally was never eager to talk about her poor home background.

My breathing was hurting as it rushed past a constricted throat. She might kill me. She might just do it this time.
Yet I sensed some kind of watershed, as if I had to push for a conclusion, a solution to my problem with her. ‘Auntie Maisie said you were …’ I searched for the word, dug my teeth into it, ‘humiliated by where you lived and that you pretended not to live there. I don’t know why you should worry about things like that. Auntie Maisie said that nothing is good enough for you. So you read a lot of books and followed my dad till you caught him.’ Auntie Maisie had said none of this to me, but had been overheard by Anne, then Anne had furnished me with this delicious ammunition. Sometimes, I was not a nice child. Although rather young to organize my revolution properly, I fired some more bullets anyway. ‘You didn’t do as you were told all the time. You were naughty sometimes, Auntie Maisie said.’

‘Auntie Maisie, Auntie Maisie,’ she mimicked spitefully. ‘Stop wandering away from the point. Where have you been when you ought to have been taking your music classes?’

‘Out.’ And thus we returned to square one. Inside, I was scared, but I laughed secretly at her discomfiture, tried to smother my frail misgivings. Yet my own discomfiture was still there, because although I never loved my mother, I was destined to remain uneasy with my feelings towards her.

She lit yet another cigarette.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’

The hand which held the lighted match paused, froze in mid-air. ‘What did you say?’ She yelped as the flame matured and licked a heated tongue against her fingers, then she flung the match away. ‘What did you just say to me?’

I made my eyes cold and hard again. It was easy to do – I just blinked as infrequently as I could manage. ‘Every day – well, nearly every day – I come in here and you tell me how bad I am. That’s all right, but I wish you wouldn’t smoke, because I find it hard to breathe when you are smoking all the time.’ It was as if I wanted to be slapped,
as if I deliberately courted her anger just to see how far she would go.

She darted round the chair and grabbed my hair, forced my head back until I thought my spine would snap. The noise that escaped from her throat was guttural and nasty. ‘Don’t you dare criticize me, girl. I smoke when I am nervous, and your behaviour makes me nervous. This is all for your own good. If you are running about the streets and misbehaving yourself, then you will only bring dishonour to this family.’

It’s hard to know where the strength came from, difficult to work out where I got the courage and the inspiration, but I said, very softly, ‘I don’t bring great fat women knocking on our door.’

She was still tugging at my hair, and her eyes had become frantic, were darting about in her head as if seeking somewhere to hide. The lids dropped for a moment, hid her panic. Mother was afraid because I appeared not to fear her. Had she heard the clamour of my heart, she would have known the terror.

I was tossed aside like a rag doll, came to rest against the door. The brass knob crashed into my temple, filled the room with flashes of colourful light. But I would not fall, would not allow myself to sag.

The silence almost defied description. There was a small fire that crackled and spat, making the smoky atmosphere even more electric and frightening. My mother seemed to petrify, the cigarette halfway to her mouth, her lips parted and slackened by something that looked like a blood brother to astonishment. When she finally moved, it was towards me, the free hand lifted to strike anew.

At times like this, I had always cowered low down to make myself small, to reduce the visibility of target areas like head and neck. Until this day, my hands had covered my face and as much of my skull as they could encompass, so Mother had been very sure of her power, even if her dominance over me had been merely physical. But on this occasion, I did not move, did not even blink.

Her progress slowed itself, and she looked silly with her hand raised above her head. ‘You are … not natural,’ she whispered. ‘You are not my child. I have often said that they must have given me the wrong one.’

My knees threatened to buckle as I steadied myself, but I managed to stand fairly still. ‘I’m Daddy’s,’ I said, the tears dangerously close.

‘Are you? Did he come to your precious presentation? Oh, I heard you telling him off. Let you down, did he?’ As she spoke, she lowered her arm and took a pace back.

‘I am the right one,’ I screamed. ‘It’s you who are wrong, you, you, YOU! Uncle Freddie says that Dad ought to leave you and find a proper life with somebody nice, but Dad won’t leave me. He stays with me. So … so just be very glad that I’m here, that’s all. Because if I wasn’t here, he’d go off and live all by himself in the rooms above the shop.’ My temper slipped into neutral, coasted along with no brake to hinder it. ‘He might even find a nice lady with no cigarettes or red lipstick, somebody who can cook.’

She walked out of the room. Had she stayed, she would probably have battered me to death. The whole of my back had weakened to pulp, then my limbs became affected, started jerking and trembling like saplings in a skittish wind. Breathing was not easy. I had to open my mouth wide, found myself gulping down air that was heavy with smoke. There was no strength in me, so I could not cough. I simply heaved, waited for my legs to return to me, rested until the flashing lights had settled, then I crept out of the house and fled down towards the town.

They were waiting for me on the open-air market. Tommo, careless as ever, had struck a pose on an empty stall, his expression aloof and magnificent. He was the real boss of the gang, the brains behind all our wickedness, though Ginger provided weight, voice and muscle. Tommo rarely addressed the group, preferring to brief Ginger privately before each assembly. But it was strange how we all came together as if responding to some
magnetic force. Nobody seemed to state properly where we should be, when we ought to arrive at a certain place, yet we would turn up as if driven by an unseen hand, would simply arrive, nod at each other and meld together into a single unit of mischievous humanity. Though Tommo remained detached for most of the time, seemed to be amused by half the things we did.

‘Yer on a job, Lo,’ announced Ginger without preamble. ‘Down near t’ station.’

I gulped, swallowed a mouthful of air. This was to be my proper initiation, then. I had not been ‘on a job’ yet, a job of my own. I had served my apprenticeship as a mere labourer by helping to carry stuff from one disused air-raid shelter to another, from Ginger’s back yard to Art’s coalshed. ‘What are we doing?’ I asked.

Tommo nodded, gave Ginger the awaited permission. ‘Yer’ve got fer t’ stand on Trinity Street,’ said Ginger.

‘Why?’

Enid simpered, cast a veiled glance in the direction of her hero, Ginger Nelson. ‘’Cos yer’ve lost yer busfare ’ome.’ The twins fluttered quite frequently, were both in hot pursuit of Ginger’s affections. But Ginger’s heart was mine. Enid and Irene knew it, I knew it, while Ginger remained blissfully uncomfortable in my presence. If Tommo was aware of any of this, he kept it where he kept most things, in a place that never showed in his eyes.

‘Can yer cry?’ This came from Irene, the other twin. I could tell the difference now, because their shorn heads had reseeded themselves, and the vegetation was dark brown on Irene, a lighter brown on Enid.

‘I can cry.’ Well, I supposed that I could. And I had to look right, had to do the right thing in front of Tommo. He seemed to be a very judgemental person, very quick with a sniff and a raised eyebrow when one of us failed to meet standards that he had never bothered to lay down in the first place. ‘I can pretend to cry,’ I added lamely.

He sniffed now, jumped down from his throne of weather-beaten and splintered wood. ‘You’ll cry,’ he said
coldly. ‘I’ll guarantee it.’ His English was quite good, though he seldom used it. Tommo’s father had been an altar boy, had even been a candidate for the priesthood till Tommo’s mother got the better of him. According to Ginger, there were books in Tommo’s home. Not magazines, not romances like my mother’s collection, but proper books with a lot of pages and leather covers. Also according to Ginger, Tommo was a ‘jeenyus’.

Tommo made me cry. On the railway bridge, he thumped me on the chest, pinched the backs of my hands till they glowed with pain, hit me across the mouth with an oustretched palm. While he did these things, he smiled. The smile was almost gentle, almost kind. He even remarked on a handprint left by Mother, asked if I had been a naughty girl at home. If only I had remembered the expression on Tommo’s face, the serenity, the calm, then my life would have been so different … But I had something to prove, so I did not flinch, though my tears ensured that the evening was a success.

I worked the 45, 46 and 47 buses, the ones that stopped outside the ladies’ toilet on Trinity Street before driving off up the moor to decent houses. After an hour and a half, I had collected 3s 7½d, because I was quite good at being a little girl who had lost her fare. Back on the bridge, Ginger was sulking. I felt sure that he had tackled Tommo about the beating, and I felt sorry for my staunch red-haired friend. I gave him the money, but it was grabbed quickly by Tommo.

‘Divide it,’ I said. I felt stubborn and strong, because I had defeated my mother, had refused to let Tommo break my spirit, had collected the day’s booty. Although Tommo fascinated me, I knew that he needed fetching down a peg or two.

Tommo looked at me, swept his arrogant eyes the length of my body. He smiled again, then gave the five of us sixpence each. It was not good enough. I walked to the edge of the bridge and tossed my handful of coppers through the iron trellis. Everyone except Tommo
screamed at me, berated me for throwing money onto the rails. Tommo remained as still as a statue. He knew why I had committed the foolish deed, but he simply smirked and walked away.

‘I hate him,’ I said softly.