The Real Thing (3 page)

There. It was all gone. Her breasts, she knew from the book, would have milk, but she would put on a tight bra and fill it with cotton wool. She would manage. In this house, her home, they did not see each other naked. Her mother hadn’t come in for years when she was having a bath, and she always knocked on the bedroom door. In Debbie’s flat people ran about naked or half dressed and Debbie might answer the door in her satin camiknickers, those great breasts of hers lolling about. Debbie often came in when Julie was in the bath to sit on the loo and chat… Tears filled Julie’s eyes. Oh, no, she certainly must not cry.

She stuffed the bag with the bloody pads and her dirty clothes in it under her bed, well to the back. She would get rid of it all very early in the morning before her parents woke, which they would, at seven o’clock.

She went down the stairs, a good little girl washed and brushed, ready for the night.

In the living room her parents were silent and apart in their two well separated chairs. They had been crying again. Her father was relieved at what he saw when he cautiously took a look at her (as if it had been too painful to see her before), and he said, ‘It’s good to have you home, Julie.’ His voice broke.

Her mother said, ‘I’ve made you some nice sandwiches.’

Four thin slices of white bread had been made into two sandwiches and cut diagonally across, the yellow of the egg prettily showing, with sprigs of parsley disposed here and there. Hunger sprang in Julie like a tiger, and she ate ravenously, watching her mother’s pitying, embarrassed face. Why, she thinks I’ve been short of food! Well, that’s a good thing, it’ll put her off the scent.

Her mother went off to make more food. Would she boil another egg, perhaps?

‘Anything’ll do. Mum. Jam … I’d love some jam on some toast.’

She had finished the sandwiches and drunk down the tea long before her mother had returned with a tray, half a loaf of bread, butter, strawberry jam, more tea.

‘I don’t like to think of you going without food,’ she said.

‘But I didn’t, not really,’ said Julie, remembering all the feasts she had had with Debbie, the pizzas that arrived all hours of the day and the night from almost next door, the Kentucky chicken, the special steak feeds when Debbie got hungry, which was often. In the little kitchen was a bowl from Morocco kept piled with fruit. ‘You must get enough vitamins,’ Debbie kept saying, and brought in more grapes, more apples and pears, let alone fruit Julie had never heard of, like pomegranates and pawpaws, which Debbie had learned to like on one of her trips somewhere.

‘We aren’t going to pester you with questions,’ said her mother.

‘I’ve been with a girl. Her name is Debbie. She was good to me. I’ve been all right,’ said Julie, looking at her mother, and then at her father.
There, don’t ask any more questions.

‘A girl?’ said her father heavily He still kept his eyes away from Julie, because when he looked at her the tears started up again.

‘Well, I haven’t been with a boyfriend,’ said Julie and could not stop herself laughing at this ridiculous idea.

They were all laughing with relief, with disbelief … they think I’ve been off with a boy! What were they imagining? Julie contemplated the incident in the school cloakroom with Billy Jayson that so improbably had led
to the scene in the shed with the dog. She had joked with Debbie that it would be a virgin birth. ‘He hardly got it in,’ she had said. ‘I didn’t think anything had really happened.’

Probably Billy had forgotten all about it. Unless he connected her leaving school and running away from home with that scene in the cloakroom? But why should he? It was four months after they had tussled and shoved and giggled, she saying, No no, and he saying, Oh come on, then.

‘Are you going back to school?’ asked her mother carefully. ‘The officer came round last week and said you still could. There are two terms left. And you’ve always been a good girl before this.’

‘Yes, I’ll go back,’ said Julie. Seven months-she could manage that. She’d be bored, but never mind. And then … This was the moment she should say something more, explain, make up some lies, for they both sat staring at her, their faces full of what they had been feeling for the long five months she had been gone. She knew she was treating them badly, refusing to say anything. Well, she would, but not now, she was suddenly absolutely exhausted. Full of hot tea and food, she felt herself letting go, letting herself slide … She began to yawn and could not stop. But they did not suggest she should go to bed, and this was because they simply could not believe they wouldn’t get anything more from her.

But there was nothing she could say. She looked at her father, that cautious, greyish, elderly man, sitting heavily in his chair. At her mother, who seemed almost girlish as she sat upright there in her pretty pale blue dress with its nice little collar and the little pearl buttons down the front. Her grey curls were sprightly, and her blue eyes full of wounded and uncomprehending innocence. Julie thought, I wish I could just snuggle up to Mum and she
could hold me and I could go to sleep. Surely this must have happened when she was small, but she could not remember it. In this family, they simply did not touch each other.

Full of the clarity of her exhaustion, and because of what she had learned in the last months, she saw her parents and knew that-they cancelled each other out. Debbie would say there was something wrong with their chemistry. They did not disagree. They never raised their voices, or argued. Each day was a pattern of cups of tea, meals, cups of coffee and biscuits, always at exactly the same times, with bedtime as the goal. They seldom went out. They saw very few people, only each other. It was as if they had switched themselves off.

They had been old when she was born, was that the trouble?

At Debbie’s people shouted, kissed, hugged, argued, fought, threatened, wept, and screamed.

There were two bedrooms in that flat. Debbie had given her the little one to herself. She was supposed to make herself scarce when Debbie came in with a man, a new one, but not when Derek was there, Debbie’s real boyfriend. Derek joked a lot and ordered Julie about. How about making me a cup of tea, getting me a drink, making me some bacon and eggs, what have you been doing with yourself, why don’t you get yourself a new hairdo, a new dress? He liked Julie, though she did not like him much. She knew he was not good enough for Debbie.

Soon Debbie would get rid of him. As she had the man who once owned the flat and took a percentage of what she earned. But Debbie had found out something bad about him, had put the screws on, got the flat for herself, worked for herself. Julie had seen this man just once, and he had given her the creeps. ‘My first love,’ Debbie joked, and laughed loudly when Julie grimaced.
Derek did not give her the creeps, he was just nothing! Ordinary. Boring. But the man Debbie had gone to New York with was a TV producer. He was making a series no one had heard about in England, not good enough to sell here, he said. This man was more like it, but Julie thought Debbie would get rid of him too, when something better came up.

All these thoughts, these judgments, so unlike anything ever said or thought in her own home, went on in Julie’s mind quite comfortably, though they wouldn’t do for herself. Debbie had to be like this, because of her hard life. This included something bad that Debbie had never talked about, but it was why she had been so good to Julie. Probably, just like Julie, Debbie had stood very late in a railway station, pregnant, her head full of rubbish about how she would get a job, have the baby, bring it up, find a man who would love her and the baby. Or perhaps it had been something else to do with being pregnant and alone. It was not she, Julie, who had earned five months of Debbie’s love and protection, it was pregnant Julie, helpless and alone.

Oh, yes, Debbie was fond of her.

Sometimes she spent the night in Debbie’s big bed because Debbie could not bear to sleep alone. She got scared, she said. She could not believe that Julie wasn’t frightened of the dark. Debbie always crashed straight off to sleep, even when she hadn’t been drinking. Then Julie cautiously got up on her elbow and bent over sleeping Debbie, to examine her, try and find out… Debbie was a big handsome girl. Her skin was very white, and she had black shiny straight hair, and she made up her lips to be thin and scarlet and curving, just right for the lashing, slashing tongue behind them. When she was asleep her face was smooth and closed, and her lips were ordinary, quite pathetic Julie thought, and there was wear
under her eyes. That face showed nothing of why Debbie said to people coming into the flat who might notice Julie the wrong way, ‘Lay off, do you hear? Lay off, or I’ll…’ And her scarlet lips and her black eyes were nasty, frightening.

But if Debbie woke in the night, she might turn to Julie and draw her into an embrace that told Julie how little she knew about love, about tenderness. Then Julie lay awake, astounded at the revelations this big hot smooth body made, and went on making, even though Debbie was off to sleep again. She never actually ‘did anything’. Julie even waited for ‘something’ to happen. Nothing ever did. Just once Debbie put her hand down to touch the mound of Julie’s stomach, but took it quickly away. Julie lay entangled with Debbie, and they were like two cats that have finished washing each other and gone to sleep, and Julie knew how terribly she had been deprived at home, and how empty and sad her parents were. Suppose she said to her mother now. Mum, let me come into your bed tonight, I’m scared, I’ve missed you … She could just see her mother’s embarrassed, timid face. ‘But Julie, you’re a big girl now.’

Anne and Len slept in twin beds stretched out parallel to each other, the night table between them.

There were tears in Julie’s eyes, and she did not know it, but then she did and looked quickly at her mother, then her father, for they must not know she would give anything to cry and cry, and be comforted and held … But they weren’t looking at her, only at the television. They had switched it on, without her noticing. Now all three of them sat staring at it.

On the screen a woman announcer smiled the special smile that goes with royalty, animals, and children and said, ‘At eight o’clock this evening a newly born baby girl was found in a telephone box in Islington. She was
warmly wrapped and healthy. She weighed seven pounds and three ounces. The nurses have called her Rosie.’ Hot waves of jealousy went through Julie when she saw how the nurse smiled down at the little face seen briefly by Julie in torchlight, and then again through the sleet outside the shed. ‘The mother is urged to come forward as she might be in need of urgent medical attention.’

It was the late news.

Surely they were going to guess? But why should they? It was hard enough for her to believe that she could sit here in her pretty little dressing gown smelling of bath powder, when she had given birth by herself in a dirty shed with only a dog for company. Four hours ago, that was all!

‘Why don’t we have a dog. Mum?’ asked Julie, knowing what she was going to hear.

‘But they are such a nuisance, Julie. And who’s going to take it for walks?’

T will. Mum.’

‘But you’ll have finished school in July, and I don’t want the bother of a dog, and I’m sure Len doesn’t.’

Her father didn’t say anything. He leaned forward and turned off the set. The screen went blank.

‘I often wonder what Jessie thinks,’ he remarked, ‘when she sees something like this on the telly, I mean.’

‘Oh, leave it, Len,’ said Anne warningly.

Julie did not really hear this, but then she did: her ears sprang to life, and she knew something extraordinary was about to happen.

‘That’s why we were so worried about you,’ said Julie’s father, heavy, grief-ridden, reproachful. ‘It’s easy enough to happen, how were we to know you weren’t-’

‘Len, we agreed we wouldn’t ever-’

‘What about Auntie Jessie?’ asked Julie, trying to take it in. A silence. ‘Well, what about her. Dad? You can’t just leave it like that.’

‘Len,’ said Anne wildly.

‘Your Auntie Jessie got herself into the family way,’ said her father, determined to say it, ignoring his wife’s face, her distress. His face was saying. Why should she be spared when she’s given us such a bad time? ‘She wasn’t much older than you are now.’ At last he was looking straight at Julie, full of reproach, and his eyes dripped tears all down his face and on to his tie. ‘It can happen easy enough, can’t it?’

‘You mean … but what happened to the baby? Was it born?’

‘Your cousin Freda,’ said Len, still bitter and obstinate, his accusing eyes on his daughter.

‘You mean, Freda is … you mean. Auntie Jessie’s mum and dad didn’t mind?’

“They minded, all right,’ said Anne. ‘I remember all that well enough. They wanted the baby adopted, but Jessie stuck it out and had it, and in the end they came around. I still think they were right and Jessie was wrong. She was only seventeen. She never would say who the father was. She was stuck at home with the baby when she should have been out enjoying herself and learning things. She got married when she was a baby herself.’

By now Julie was more or less herself again, though she felt as if she’d been on a roller coaster. Above all, what she was thinking was, I’ve got to get it all out of them now, because I know them, they’ll clam up and never talk of it again.

‘Didn’t Uncle Bob mind?’ she asked.

‘Not so that he wouldn’t marry her, he married her, didn’t he, and she had a love child he had to take on,’ said her father, full of anger and accusations.

‘A love child,’ said Julie derisively, unable to stop herself. But her parents didn’t notice.

‘That’s what they call it, I believe,’ said her father,
all heavy and sarcastic. ‘Well, that’s what can happen, Julie, and you’ve always been such a sensible girl and that made it worse.’ And now, unbelievably, this father of hers, whom she had so feared she ran away from home, sat sobbing, covering his face with his hands.

Her mother was weeping, her eyes bright, her cheeks red.

In a moment Julie would be bawling too.