Stay Dead (3 page)

There came another miscarriage.

Another stillbirth.

Edie seemed to shrink into herself, become like a shadow. She lost weight and her face was pale with misery; she was no longer the pretty, engaging and hopeful girl he’d married, and
Sam felt cheated.

‘I don’t know what the fuck you want from me,’ he raged at her. ‘You’ve got a bloody good earner looking after you, you’ve even got help around the house
now Dolly’s getting older. What the hell do you want?’

Edie never answered that question openly, but in her head she did: she wanted him to leave her alone. She wanted him to go out one day and never come home. That was what she wanted, and if
she said as much he would kill her stone dead. So she didn’t; couldn’t. Worn out by the misery of endless pregnancies and bloody miscarriages and devastating stillbirths, she stepped
back from the world. And in her heart she grew to hate him, her Sam, once her best love, her only love. All that had turned to dust.

Limehouse, 1955–57

When she was ten, Dolly Farrell considered running away from home. She was at primary school with her friends, and she liked primary school and never missed a day because it
was much nicer than home. The school was a small Catholic-funded centre of education, and it looked like a church; in fact it had been built in the same year as the Victorian church just up the
road, beside the recreation ground with its huge, terrifying slide for the kids to play on.

For Dolly, primary school was an escape. It felt safe and there were big brightly coloured posters up all around the room she sat in every day, saying A is for Apple (a big rosy-red apple to
illustrate) and all the way through the alphabet to Z is for Zebra (a striped horse on this one). Even the teachers she hated weren’t too horrible. Mrs Lockhart took the kids for maths and
clonked you on the head if she felt your work wasn’t up to scratch. Mr Vancy, who taught English, lobbed a rock-hard oblong blackboard duster at you if you chatted at the back of the class
during lessons; and Dolly, who didn’t much care for education, was always chatting at the back of the class with her mates Vera and Lucy.

Dolly loved being a milk monitor and handing out the bottles from the crates to the younger kids, and having biscuits at break time, and the meals were okay, even if the cabbage was boiled to
fuck and the custard was thin as cat piss.

She liked the priest, Father Potter, who came in every Friday and gave the kids a sermon in assembly. He played lovely classical music to them, saying in his super-posh voice that he wished
them to learn a love of fine things, of beauty, and to go out into the world the better for it. She liked walking along the road in a crocodile-line of two-by-twos with all the other kids, one
teacher at the front, another at the back, all the way to the church to sing hymns about praising the Lord.

She didn’t think she had much to praise Him for, not really, but she liked being in the church, she liked the stained-glass windows and the big angels with their luminous green and red
feathered wings and the dumpy little cherubs with floaty hankies over their bits; it felt safe.

Then one day it was Lucy’s birthday and she and Vera were invited back to Lucy’s house for tea and cake. Lucy’s house was in between Dolly’s and the school; Dolly
would call in there in the mornings, trailing her younger sister and her brothers behind her – eight-year-old Nigel, seven-year-old Sarah, little Dick and the youngest and frailest boy,
Sandy, the poor bastard, who was always smothered in pungent Vick and goose grease over the winters to keep him from catching colds. Neither the Vick nor the goose grease seemed to prevent illness
in Sandy, but Mum gave it a go when she was well enough to bother, which wasn’t often; so usually the task of greasing him up fell to Dolly.

Dolly and Vera and Lucy had a whale of a time at Lucy’s birthday tea, and Vera went home clutching a slice of sponge cake in a brown paper bag. A few minutes later, Dolly trailed out
the door. Her brothers and sister had gone on home earlier, straight from school, and now the light was starting to fade as the sun set in the west, lighting the winter sky up like a huge
apricot-coloured lamp.

Dolly stared at it, thinking it was the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. Clutching her bag of cake, she sighed and started homeward, and was passing the recreation ground when she saw
the slide there. She ambled over, pulling out cake crumbs from the bag and eating them, and calculated that she had time for a go on the slide before going home.

But what if she didn’t go home?

The thought entered her head and for a moment she felt a lift of the spirits, like those mighty angels’ wings had gently pushed her upward. The thought of that . . .

Oh, the thought of that was wonderful.

When she thought of home, she thought of Mum sitting slumped and staring into space in a chair at the dirty kitchen table, of Dad roaring about the place the worse for drink. It made her guts
crease up in anguish. She would never be able to invite Lucy back to hers for tea, that was for sure. She would be too ashamed. It would be all round the school in no time that she lived in a
filthy hovel with cockroaches crawling around the floor and you wouldn’t want to eat your tea there or even touch anything in the bloody place, it was all sticky and grubby with
filth.

Dolly tried to help her mum around the house, she really did. But with five kids and two uncaring adults, the place was a tip. And now they’d started giving her homework and saying that
soon she’d be off to big school, so she had to be prepared to work harder.

God, angels, are you listening? she wondered as the sky deepened to rose-gold. Streaky charcoal clouds drifted through it, like thick pencil-marks on a page. How the fuck can I work any
harder? Don’t I work hard enough now?

She was the one who had to get her younger siblings ready for school in the mornings; she was the one who had to get in from school and cook something for the family. She was the one who did
just about everything there was to do, and more besides.

Through it all Mum just sat there, ignoring the housework, barely even touching the food Dolly put in front of her. The doctor had given Mum some pills, but they didn’t seem to be
working. Every morning when the kids set off for school, Edie would be slumped at the kitchen table, and when they got home she’d still be there, in the same chair, as if she hadn’t
moved an inch all day. And Dolly thought she probably hadn’t.

Dolly finished off the cake, screwed the bag into a ball and threw it down. Then she climbed up the slide, ten steps. It had taken her years to overcome her fear of the slide; it was slippery
as polished glass going down, and you shot off the end of it in the most fearsome way. If you weren’t careful, you’d fall awkwardly and break your leg – it had happened last year
to one of the younger kids. And Dolly didn’t want to break her leg.

But then, if she did she’d be taken to hospital, and that would be good, better than home. Wouldn’t it?

It was nearly dark now.

Dolly released her grip on the hand-holds at the top of the slide and whizzed, flew, cannoned down it and whirled off the end almost laughing, breathless, exhilarated.

‘Dolly!’

She stiffened. Turned. Dad was pacing toward her, coming quick, and there was something angry about every short, bandy-legged line of his body. Suddenly all the magic of the day dropped away
as if it had never been.

He bent over, enveloping her in the smell of Old Holborn and gamey unwashed clothes. She thought he might be reaching for the bag she’d tossed on the ground, but he wasn’t. He
grabbed her arm, hurting her, and bent and slapped her hard across the legs, twice. It stung like hell and she let out a cry.

‘What the fuck are you doing, worrying your mum like this?’ he shouted. ‘Come on!’ he said, and started dragging her off the field and back to the road, back to
home.

For a while, she’d almost felt free.

But it didn’t last long.

It never did.

Dolly hated secondary school. The primary had been nice, tucked in near the church. It was small. But big school was just that: too damned big. She didn’t know anybody
there because Lucy and Vera were put in the top stream and to her embarrassment she was put in the bottom, along with all the other no-hopers who had home troubles or who never paid attention in
class.

OK, she admitted it; she’d never worked much at primary school. She’d mucked about and enjoyed it; it was a relief to be at school and not at home. Now, she was paying the price.
Lucy and Vera had somehow cracked on, worked harder than her; but then, they had good backgrounds, nice parents. She didn’t.

Well, Mum was nice, to be fair. She just couldn’t cope, that was all. Edie was under the doctor now, taking a lot of pills and sometimes she’d be carted away in an ambulance. Dad
had gathered the kids together the first time and told them that Mum was getting some treatment for her nerves, that it would help her, make her better.

For a while, it did. It was usually about three months, Dolly reckoned, before the wheels came off the truck in Mum’s brain once again. Then it was just her sitting in the chair all
day, crying, and then it was off in the ambulance for another course of ‘treatment’.

‘What do you think they do?’ asked Sandy, the youngest, eyes wide with terror. ‘Do they strap her to a table or something, inject her with stuff . . . ?’

‘Plug her into the mains, that’s what they do,’ said Dick, looking quite excited.

‘No, they don’t,’ said Dolly, although it was true, more or less. Dad had told her, because she was the eldest and she was his special girl, his favourite, that the
treatment Mum got at the hospital was electric shock therapy. But Dolly clouted Dick upside the head because he had a big mouth and couldn’t he see that Sarah was frightened?

‘They do! Straight into the fucking National Grid,’ persisted Dick, rubbing his ear and grinning.

‘It’s a very mild thing,’ said Dolly firmly to Sarah, although she knew different. She had seen her mum brought home after those ‘sessions’, babbling and crying
in a state of confusion and vomiting her guts up. Sarah hadn’t seen any of that. ‘It’s hardly a shock at all. And it puts things right in Mum’s brain.’

But they all knew that the treatment had no long-lasting effect. It was just Mum. She couldn’t help it.

Dad still had his job on the railways, but he was off the wheeltapping now. They’d made him a shunter, put him in with a new gang of men. He was doing well, so at least they never went
hungry.

Dolly tried to keep the house tidy, but being naturally untidy herself, and hating housework, she found that she just couldn’t manage it.

So their house was dirty. Often, the kids went unwashed and their clothes were threadbare and filthy. Sandy wet the bed; he was nervous, highly strung like Mum. But so what? None of the
families in their street were much different. All around them on the council estate there was junk piled up in front gardens, mange-ridden dogs endlessly barking, grubby kids sitting out on the
front step watching the world go by when they should have been at school, studying.

Nobody around here gave a flying fuck about education, about making a better life for themselves; it was just the way it was. Vera and Lucy were exceptions to the rule. Around here, you knew
your place, you didn’t go giving yourself any stupid airs and graces, trying to be all la-di-dah. Try to make something of yourself and you’d get laughed at or beaten up, or
both.

For the boys, the future probably held a job on the railway like Dad. Nigel, the eldest boy, was prudish and formal; he hero-worshipped his little strutting bantam-cock of a father, and was
sure to follow in his footsteps. For the girls, there would be marriage and kids.

But whenever Dolly looked at Mum, she wondered about that. Marriage and kids? It hadn’t done Mum any fucking favours. Everyone was talking about how the actress Grace Kelly had found
her prince, like in a fairy tale; she’d married Prince Rainier the Third of Monaco.

‘Gawd, innit lovely?’ all the girls were saying.

It was in all the papers, it was even on the telly, they said, the actual honest-to-God ceremony had been filmed.

Dolly was pretty sure that she wouldn’t want to go down that road, not now, not ever. She was troubled by her own feelings about it, though. What else could a girl do? Men earned the
money, women had the babies. It was set in stone. But the very idea of it turned her stomach.

Sometimes Dolly thought it started when she was ten, just before she considered running away. But no. Actually, when she really thought, it started a year or so before that,
with him giving her little gifts.

Whenever she thought about it in later life – and mostly she tried not to – she always thought of the story about the frog put into cold water that was heated until it boiled to
death. Had it been put in boiling water to start with, it would have jumped out. But death was slow, insidious; it crept up on the frog and lulled it; and that was how Dolly’s downfall came
about, too.

The first time Mum went away to get her ‘treatment’, Dad brought Dolly a box of chocolates.

‘Got to spoil my best girl, haven’t I,’ he said gruffly, shoving the gift into her hands. ‘Don’t tell the other kids, they’ll all be wanting stuff, and
that’s just for you, because you’re special.’

Dolly was delighted and flattered. She felt important, because Mum was away and she was in charge of the house, even if she was a lousy cook and an even worse cleaner. She tucked the
chocolates away in a recess of the wardrobe in her and Sarah’s room, and ate them whenever the others weren’t around.