Spilt Milk (14 page)

Birdie lit a cigarette and threw the match down on the cobblestones. She sat on a beer barrel in the backyard under the soot-covered elder tree, its white blossoms flecked with dirt. Ancient hopscotch chalk marks she had made as a child, playing for endless hours out here on her own, were still visible at her feet. A train rattled past above her, and she wondered if any of the passengers were looking down onto her backyard. What might they see? A young woman with red-blonde hair waiting for a lover? Oh, the thrill of that idea. She longed to be in love. Perhaps the passengers saw her as a woman already married. A housewife taking a moment for herself. Or perhaps they saw her as she was. Just a skinny, eighteen-year-old barmaid avoiding a family gathering inside.

She stubbed out the cigarette on the brick wall and picked up a pebble, lobbing it onto the hopscotch grid. She hopped and skipped over the squares. Her wedge-heeled sandals threatened to turn her ankle over if she carried on. There wasn’t time for old childhood games anyway. Her cousins and Aunt Lydia were here, and she should go and say hello.

‘Birdie, there you are,’ said Uncle George when she stepped into the kitchen at the back of the pub. He looked relieved to see her. Aunt Lydia and her cousins Roger and Malcolm were sitting at the long wooden table, drinking tea with her mother.

‘Hello, dear,’ said her aunt. Birdie tried to look pleased to see her. None of them was very fond of Aunt Lydia, but there was an unspoken belief that she had been treated shoddily by life and they forgave her time and again, her clumsy comments and judgemental ways. She wore a dark blue velvet dress with a high lace
collar and a string of pearls. Aunt Lydia liked to say she was a psychic, compelled to seek out truths. She studied horoscopes and palmistry. Birdie’s mother said the woman knew nothing but a load of hokum gathered from the silly journals she subscribed to.

‘So now,’ her aunt said. ‘Have you seen my boys? Don’t they look handsome?’

Birdie’s cousins nodded hello. It had been a year since she had seen Roger and Malcolm. They were a couple of years older than she was and, growing up, she had always found their visits once a year in the summer months a kind of torture. Much as she had longed for brothers and sisters, Malcolm was dull and Roger was spiteful. She still remembered him stamping on her woodlouse farm, a project she and her schoolfriend Joan had nurtured one summer, building small barns out of wooden lolly sticks and the discarded sardine cans they’d dug up from the loose soil under the elder tree.

Aunt Lydia began lamenting the times they lived in. She was going to lose her boys to war. She couldn’t sleep at night for thinking about it. But men had to be men. They were going to serve their country, and wasn’t that the downside of having boys? ‘Men have the weight of the world on their shoulders,’ she said. ‘And only mothers of sons understand this. Our mother knew it, didn’t she, George? Having sons is a way of building nations.’

‘I don’t know I built many nations,’ said George. ‘And what about Walter? Where’s the man who’s covering Great Britain in linoleum?’

‘He is away working,’ said Lydia, and Birdie noticed how her aunt coloured slightly. ‘He’s in the north of England at a trade fair this week.’

‘What a surprise,’ said Roger sarcastically, playing with a square metal lighter in his hand. ‘Our absent father is still absent.’

Aunt Lydia’s husband, Walter, was always away. Birdie had only met him once, at her father’s funeral. George had said one time that Walter probably had another family somewhere.
Birdie’s pa used to joke that Lydia had buried Walter under the floorboards years ago.

Birdie felt a stab of loss, thinking about her father. The funeral had been over a year ago, but she still woke most days with a horrible start, remembering all over again that Pa was gone.

Aunt Lydia finished her cup of tea and asked if she might have another. Birdie could see her mother losing patience. She didn’t like people getting under her feet. She was chatty and friendly in the pub, but it was an act really. Her mother was a solitary, private kind of woman. She knew everybody around here, but she didn’t have close friends. She’d never needed them with Pa and Uncle George around. She’d never really needed a daughter either, it seemed to her.

Birdie looked out at the backyard. That was where her childhood had been spent, out there among the beer barrels, an only child playing hopscotch on her own, or turning skipping ropes with Joan while her mother, in her own eccentric way, washed the leaves of the elder tree so that they shone green and bright.

Uncle George put some cash in Birdie’s hand.

‘Take your cousins out and show them around,’ he said. ‘Poor beggars are going off to training camp soon. Give ’em a tour of the city. Get them out from under your mother’s feet, heh?’

Birdie took the brothers greyhound racing at Walthamstow. She won on the tote, backing a handsome black dog whose name, Bed of Roses, appealed to her. Roger won too and bought them fish and chips, which they ate sitting on a bench, celebrating their winnings with a bottle of R. White’s lemonade.

Later that afternoon they saw a Gracie Fields film in the local fleapit, a story of a rags-to-riches factory girl. Roger talked through it, leaning against Birdie, whispering into her ear, making jokes and acting the fool. Birdie tried to concentrate on the film. Roger rested his hand on her knee, his fingers squeezing. She slapped his hand away and he looked pleased with himself.

‘Little wild cat,’ he said, grinning. ‘I like a girl who acts hard to get.’

It was only the thought of dancing that made her agree to go out with her cousins on their last night before they left for training camps. Roger was plain awful. He’d tried to kiss her after the cinema, coming outside with his arm clamped around her waist as if they were courting. When she told him to lay off her, he’d laughed and set off up the street with his hands in his pockets, whistling. He was quite maddening.

Birdie invited her best friend, Joan, to come along. Then, at the last minute, Roger said a friend of his was coming too. A chap called Peter he had met at the army recruiting centre a few days earlier.

That rather threw the numbers. Now there was no time to find another girl to accompany this Peter chap. It was just so typical of Roger to ruin everything.

Birdie set her hair in waves with her curling iron. She put on a green satin dress she’d made herself and matching shoes, and hoped the evening would be a success. She spent a long time over her make-up. Face powder. Red lipstick. A black mascara. Her mother didn’t like her wearing too much make-up, but her complaints were half-hearted. All the girls wore make-up these days. Birdie adored powders and creams and cheek blusher. They made her feel nice and pretty, and with everybody made miserable by all the talk of war, she felt it her duty to make an effort. Uncle George always said a pretty girl cheered everybody’s spirits. He often took her side against her mother, though he made her swear not to say a word.

Joan came upstairs and sat on the bed. She picked a bit of lint off her black checked trousers. Birdie wished Joan would not wear trousers. Trousers were eccentric. Joan’s long mousy hair was in two plaits wound tightly around her head. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on her sleeve.

‘So which one is for me then?’

‘You can have all three,’ said Birdie, pouting into her compact mirror, drawing a Cupid’s bow with a red lipstick. ‘Well, you can have both my cousins anyway. Especially Roger. He’s touched in the head, if you want my opinion. I’m waiting to see what Peter looks like.’

Neither of them had ever had a boyfriend, but they liked to talk like the girls they knew, the ones who were full of chat and cheeky with men.

‘Let’s get our hearts broken at least a dozen times tonight,’ said Birdie grandly as they went downstairs arm in arm.

Joan danced them down the last couple of steps.

‘And we don’t come home until we can say we’re ruined by music, men and too many gin and its.’

Peter, it turned out, was quite nice to look at. He had curly brown hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. His eyes were a dark brown. They had a sparkle to them. Birdie always liked to look at a person’s eyes. She believed you could tell a lot about someone from their eyes. He was slim and tall, and she thought he was the sort who probably played a bit of football and liked cycling out into the country at the weekends.

The dance hall was near the cinema. The five of them paid for their tickets, put their coats in the cloakrooms and went through double doors into a big hall, which was warm and noisy. The band was loud, and already there were dancers and a lovely thick movement of people. Birdie slipped through the crowds and found a space up at the bar.

‘What a dump,’ said Roger.

‘I like it here. I come every Saturday if I can. They have the best bands this side of the river. I want to audition to sing for one of them some day. Uncle George says I could be a professional.’

‘No end to your talents, is there?’ said Roger, sneering at her.

‘What sort of thing do you sing?’ asked Peter.

Birdie blushed. She hadn’t actually sung with a band yet.

‘Well, I’m quite jazz minded,’ she said in what she hoped was a knowledgeable voice, leaning towards him so he could hear her. ‘And I like the crooners. I read the
Melody Maker
every week. There’s always auditions in the back pages. I’ve been to a few now and I haven’t had any luck yet, but I know it’ll happen soon. I can play piano too.’

‘Good for you. I wish you the best of luck. I’m sure they’ll want a good-looking girl like you.’

The music got too loud to talk without shouting, and they stood side by side, watching an auburn-haired woman in a white satin dress that clung to her hips singing ‘The Lambeth Walk’. Birdie wondered if Peter might ask her to dance. She crossed her fingers behind her back and made a small wish that he would. The music grew louder. More dancers took to the floor. She saw the chap from the electricity shop dancing with a girl. The other week he’d asked Birdie to dance and said she had the nicest eyes he’d ever seen. She’d acted haughty with him, showing she wasn’t impressed, but still, he had drawn her in with the comment and she hoped he’d ask her again tonight.

‘I’m off to powder my nose,’ she said, and crossed the dance floor. She walked past the man and gave him a smile, but he didn’t notice her.

‘Having fun?’ a woman asked Birdie as she touched up her lipstick in the ladies’ toilets. It was the singer. Birdie could see she’d had a few drinks. Working behind a bar, she recognized drunks easily. The woman must be in her thirties, a long way past her prime, yet she was still beautiful. Her auburn hair was waved and held off her face by a diamanté hair slide, curled in the style of the day. Her clinging satin dress was sleeveless, and her slender shoulders were pale and powdered. Birdie’s mother would have said she was the wrong sort.

‘You were wonderful tonight,’ she said to the singer. ‘I thought you were outstanding, really.’

‘Did you? Well, thanks, kiddo.’

‘I want to be a singer like you one day.’

‘Is that right? My name’s Kay. Kay Kelly. Let me guess. You’re a telephonist out with the girls, or a typist maybe?’

‘I’m a barmaid. I sing in the pub on Friday nights.’

‘Well, you follow your dreams while you can, love. You’ll meet a nice boring man one day and have to settle down and forget all about singing then. It’s what most of us want, isn’t it? A bit of security and a nice home. A couple of kiddies. But meet some wrong ’uns before all that. Bad men are more my kind of style. Got to have a bit of fun, heh? You won’t be innocent for long, dear. Men can’t stop themselves.’

‘A girl can always say no,’ Birdie said, backing away.

‘Oh, she can,’ agreed Kay. ‘But why should she? That’s the question. Why the bloomin’ hell should she? Us girls have got to have a bit of fun, heh?’

Birdie watched her sashay out of the room. ‘My name is Kay,’ she said to the mirror. ‘You gotta have a bit of fun.’ Her face stared back at her. Her grey eyes, her mouth with the slightly too full upper lip. She swung open the powder-room door, feeling the heat and the noise of the dance hall wash over her. Kay was right. A girl should enjoy herself. The chap from the electricity shop was dancing with a different woman now. A peroxide blonde who looked like a film star. Greta Garbo. They moved together with a slow, secretive kind of focus, swaying back and forth. Birdie watched them until she couldn’t bear the sight of them.

‘Dance with me,’ Peter said when she got back to the bar.

She wasn’t sure she’d heard him right, but he took her hand and pulled her through the dancers. Birdie curved her arm around his neck, the way she imagined Kay Kelly might dance with a man.

Peter was a sportsman, he told her, his lips touching her ear. He didn’t fancy going into the navy much, but he’d failed to get
in with the collar-and-tie set in the RAF. He played cricket and tennis, and last year he’d hiked in Europe.

‘You’re a great little dancer,’ he said, pulling her close.

In the shifting bodies, Birdie caught sight of Joan dancing with Malcolm and was glad. Often she and Joan ended up dancing together. Up at the bar Roger, standing on his own, radiated bad humour. He really was the most hateful man she knew.

The next time she looked, Roger was picking a fight. She saw him and then he was gone from view as Peter swung her round. Then there he was again, throwing a punch. She and Peter stopped dancing. The evening was over.

They found Roger outside in a side street, throwing up into the gutter.

‘For God’s sake,’ said Malcolm. He had his arm around Joan’s waist. ‘For God’s sake, Roger, you bloody fool.’

Roger looked down at the gutter.

‘Fuck it. I’ve ruined my shoes.’

Peter laughed loudly. ‘What’s going on, Roger?’

‘That’s the problem. Nothing is going on.’ Roger grabbed Birdie’s arm. ‘Why didn’t you dance with me? Do you think you are too good for a bloke like me? Is that it? A bloody barmaid acting like Lady Muck. You make me sick.’

Malcolm pulled him away.