The Throwaway Children (3 page)

Not such a very good mother, thought Mavis, then her smile died. I’m not a good mother either. I want this new baby and Jimmy more than I want my girls. And even as she tried to push the dreadful thought from her mind, crush it before it could take root, she knew, in that instant, that it was true. However fiercely she pushed it away, it crowded back. She needed a man, she wanted the baby, and Rita and Rosie were standing in her way.

No, she shook her head hard as if to clear the thought away, no of course they weren’t. Of course Jimmy didn’t mean it. She could talk him round. As for the girls, they’d get used to the idea that they were going to have a stepdad and a little brother or sister.

She left the peace and quiet of the park and walked along the street to Baillies Grocery. Just as she reached it she met her mother coming out, carrying her shopping bag.

‘Hallo, Mum,’ she said.

‘Mavis.’ Lily looked at her daughter carefully. ‘You all right, love?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit peaky.’

‘I’m fine, Mum. Just a bit tired, you know how it takes me.’

Lily nodded sympathetically. ‘Yes, used to take me in the same way. D’you want a cup of tea? You look as if you could do with one.’

Mavis was about to refuse, and then she thought, why not? ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’d be nice.’

They turned away from the shop and walked the two streets to Hampton Road. Once inside Lily put the kettle on. Mavis dropped onto a chair in the kitchen, watching as her mother put away her shopping. She said nothing. Mavis felt safe in the kitchen of her childhood, in the silence that surrounded them. Lily didn’t chatter, or ask awkward questions. She simply put her food away, put cups out on the table and then made a pot of tea. She poured it and waited.

‘I told him, last night,’ Mavis said, at last breaking the silence. ‘About the baby.’

‘And?’

Mavis shrugged. ‘And he was fine about it.’ She sipped her tea. She could feel her mother’s eyes on her, and she went on, ‘A bit surprised, of course, but he likes the idea of being a dad.’ She raised her eyes to meet Lily’s. ‘We’re going to get married… so the baby’ll be OK, you know?’

‘D’you want to marry him?’ asked her mother. ‘Really want to marry him? Jimmy, who knocks you about?’

‘It’s only happened once,’ replied Mavis defensively, ‘and he was ever so sorry. It was only ’cos he’d had a bit to drink. Won’t happen again.’

‘Till he’s had a bit to drink again,’ said Lily wryly. ‘What about the girls? What about Rita and Rosie? What do they think?’

‘They don’t know yet, but they’ll be all right.’

‘You know they’re scared of Jimmy.’

‘So you keep saying,’ snapped Mavis, ‘but they’ll get used to him. They’ll have to.’ Her tone softened a little as she added, ‘They’ll like having a baby in the house, a little brother or sister.’

‘So when are you going to get married then?’ Lily knew it was
no use tackling the question of the girls at this stage. Mavis had made up her mind. Maybe as the days passed…

That evening Jimmy arrived at the house carrying a suitcase. He dumped it at the bottom of the stairs and pushed open the kitchen door. The children were sitting at the table having their tea, and as he opened the door, they fell silent, watching him with wide eyes. He reached into his pocket and slapped his ration book onto the table.

‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Now perhaps I’ll get a decent tea. I’ll put my stuff upstairs.’ He turned back at the door and added, ‘And I want my name on the rent book. Right?’ Picking up his case, he marched upstairs to Mavis’s bedroom.

‘Is Uncle Jimmy coming to stay?’ Rosie asked.

‘Yes,’ Mavis replied. ‘He’s going to be your new daddy.’

‘I don’t want a new daddy,’ cried Rita, jumping up from her chair. ‘I don’t want him. I don’t like Uncle Jimmy. He’s horrid.’

‘That’s enough of that, young lady,’ snapped her mother. ‘He’s coming to live with us, and that’s that.’ Mavis reached over and shook Rita hard. ‘And I suggest you keep a civil tongue in your head.’

‘Why’s he coming to our house?’ asked Rosie.

‘Because we want to be a family,’ Mavis answered. ‘You’ll grow to love him, like I do.’

‘I shan’t,’ stated Rita. ‘I shan’t love him. He doesn’t love me.’

‘Well, he certainly won’t love you if you talk like that,’ said Mavis. ‘Now, finish your tea and go out to play.’

Rita crammed the last of her bread into her mouth and without another word went outside.

‘Can I play out, too?’ demanded Rosie, slipping down off her stool.

‘Just for a little while,’ agreed Mavis, and Rosie darted out to join her sister in the street.

Mavis was glad to see them go. She wanted them out of the way when Jimmy came back downstairs. She could hear him moving about in the bedroom and wondered what he was doing, but even as she got up to find out, she heard his footsteps on the stairs.

‘I’m going out,’ he said as he met her in the hallway.

‘What about your tea?’ she ventured as he opened the front door.

‘I’ll have it when I come in.’

When he had gone, she went upstairs to her room. The wardrobe door stood open and half her clothes had been pulled out and dumped on the bed. His were still in his case, but Mavis realized that she was expected to hang his up for him in the space he’d made, and she set about doing so, sorting and rehanging her own meagre wardrobe to accommodate his.

While she was busy upstairs, Rita came in from the street. She had seen Jimmy leave as she and Maggie had been trying to teach Rosie to skip.

‘Back in a min,’ she’d said and leaving Rosie with Maggie, she’d darted back into the house. She could hear Mum upstairs so she crept into the kitchen. Quickly she opened the drawer of the dresser, and there he was. Her daddy, smiling out through the cracked glass of his frame. She’d discovered the photo some days earlier, when looking in the drawer for a pencil. Quickly Rita pulled the frame open and slid Daddy out from under the glass. She looked round for somewhere to hide him. She could still hear Mum moving about upstairs, so she couldn’t risk taking him up there. There was nowhere in the hall to hide him, so she opened the door to the front room. They never used the front room, well, only at Christmas when Gran came, so he wouldn’t be found in there. She picked up the cushion from what had been her daddy’s armchair and slid the photo inside its cover. Then she put the cushion back and slipped out into the street again. Daddy was safe now. She didn’t want another dad; her daddy would always be her daddy. If Uncle Jimmy moved into the house, well, let him, but he would never, ever, be her dad.

A few weeks later there was a loud hammering on the front door and Mavis, opening it, was surprised to find her mother on the doorstep.

‘How did that child get that cut on her forehead?’ demanded Lily. ‘How come Reet’s got a black eye?’

‘She… she fell off her stool last night,’ faltered Mavis. ‘She hit her face on the gas stove.’

‘Hit her face on the gas stove,’ echoed Lily scornfully. ‘I don’t believe you. There’s much more to it than that.’

‘She fell off her stool…’ Mavis began again.

‘Knocked off it more like,’ asserted Lily. ‘By that Jimmy, I bet. You shouldn’t have him in the house, Mavis. I’ve told you before. He’s bad news. He knocks you about—’

‘No! No, Mum,’ Mavis burst out. ‘Who said that? Has that Rita—’

‘He knocks you about,’ repeated Lily, ignoring her interruption, ‘an’ he knocks the girls about, and whatever you say, he’s going to go on doing it. Men like him always go on doing it.’

‘Mum, it wasn’t like that. Reet fell off her stool. You know what she’s like. She was fidgeting… she’s always fidgeting, you know she is. An’ she fell off and hit her face, poor little kid.’ Mavis’s eyes challenged her mother to disbelieve her and Lily looked a little less certain.

‘That’s what she said—’ began Lily.

‘Because that’s what happened, Mum. Did you see her on the way to school?’

‘Yes, they were just going in.’

‘Look, Mum, I was just leaving. I got to be at Mrs Robinson’s in twenty minutes. Walk with me to the bus, eh? I must go or I’ll be late.’ She edged her mother towards the front door, and Lily allowed herself to be eased out of the house and into the street. Mavis closed the door behind her and, taking her mother firmly by the arm, began walking towards the bus stop.

‘Sorry, Mum,’ she said, ‘but I mustn’t be late. The cleaning takes me a bit longer these days and I don’t want Mrs Robinson to turn me off. I was going to come and see you when I’d finished. Jimmy’s going to the registry office today to get the wedding sorted. You have to put your name on a list for three weeks or something… not sure quite what, but Jimmy knows and he’s going to do it in his dinnertime.’

‘You really want to marry him, Mavis?’ asked Lily, trying to walk more slowly. She wanted to talk to Mavis, to have things out with her, but knew that here in the street wasn’t the place.

‘Yes, I do,’ Mavis asserted. ‘He’ll make a great dad.’

‘Oh, Mavis, you know—’

‘Sorry, Mum, here’s my bus.’ Mavis stuck her hand out to hail the bus and scrambled aboard as soon as it stopped. She turned back, looking at her mother still standing on the pavement. ‘I’ll come in and see you tomorrow, Mum. Tell you the wedding date and that.’

The bus began to draw away, and Mavis moved inside, waving to her mother through the window.

Lily watched her go with distinct misgivings. She remained unconvinced that Rita had simply fallen off her stool. No, Jimmy Randall had something to do with it. Jimmy Randall was not good news, not good news at all.

On the bus, Mavis sat back against the seat for the five minutes to took to reach her stop. She realized that all her muscles were tense and she made a conscious effort to relax. She wasn’t sure she’d convinced her mother about Rita’s black eye, but for now, she’d avoided her questions. She had breathing space to decide what she was really going to do. Tomorrow she’d have to face her questions, but by tomorrow she’d have a wedding date and with luck Lily would be carried along on the tide of preparation.

Last night had been awful. Rita had refused to eat liver for her tea and Jimmy had lost his rag and knocked her off her stool. She’d smashed her face against the corner of the cooker, opening a cut on her forehead, and with a slam of the door, Jimmy had stalked out, leaving Mavis to deal with the blood and two screaming kids. She’d sent them both to bed, furious with Rita for provoking yet another row, and subsided into a chair, burying her face in her hands in despair. She was six months pregnant, always exhausted, and Jimmy still hadn’t kept his promise to marry her. He’d moved in, but no wedding date had been set.

When Jimmy finally came back home Mavis was slumped in her chair, half asleep. She started awake as he came in and plonked himself down opposite her. Now he looked across at Mavis. ‘Right,’ he said, as if they were already in the middle of a conversation, ‘tomorrow I’ll go to the registry office and you can go to the council and tell them you need a home for your kids.’

Mavis looked at him blankly for a moment and then echoed faintly, ‘Registry office?’

‘To sort out a date for our wedding. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, oh Jimmy, yes, of course.’

‘And you can go to the council and get your girls took in.’

‘Took in where?’

‘How do I know? They have orphanages, don’t they? They have to now, with this new welfare.’

‘But they’re not orphans.’

‘Half orphans, they are. They ain’t got no dad.’

‘But I want you to be their dad.’

‘Well, I don’t want to be, do I?’ rasped Jimmy. ‘And what’s more, they don’t want me to be, neither!’

‘They don’t know what they want,’ began Mavis, ‘they’re too young to understand—’

Jimmy cut her off. ‘Your Reet understands all right. She don’t want me in the house, and I don’t want her. Simple as that. She’d be happier living somewhere else. I expect she’ll get adopted, and she’ll be far better off adopted than living with us.’

‘Adopted!’ croaked Mavis.

‘Well, Mav, there it is. We’ll get married just like you want to, and you, me and the baby’ll be a family.’ He heaved himself to his feet. ‘God, I’m tired. Heavy work on the building site. Come on, upstairs.’

In the morning Jimmy’s parting words had been, ‘I’ll go to the registry office in me dinnertime. All right?’ He gave her a hard stare and added, ‘An’ you’ll do your bit, right?’ Mavis had nodded. She knew she couldn’t cope on her own any longer. She needed a man, a man who came home with a wage packet every Friday. A man to take care of the things men do take care of about the home. A man so she wasn’t lonely any more. She had Jimmy. And if the price of having him was sending her daughters away for a while… well, it wouldn’t be forever, would it? Increasingly it was becoming a price she was prepared to pay… for the sake of the baby. She hadn’t quite decided, she told herself, but it couldn’t hurt if she went to the council offices to see the welfare after she’d finished at Mrs Robinson’s, just to ask. Nothing definite.

At half-past twelve, Mavis left Mrs Robinson’s and walked the half mile or so to the Market Square. There, on the far side, were the council offices, housed in a grim, grey stone building, but today, with the sun shining on its windows, it seemed to Mavis to be more approachable. A sign, she thought to herself. A sign she should go in.

She crossed the square and taking a deep breath, mounted the steps and pushed her way through the heavy glass doors into the entrance hall. To one side was a reception desk, manned by a harassed-looking woman, typing. Mavis approached and the woman paused long enough to say, ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m looking for…’ Mavis gulped and tried again. ‘I’m looking for the children’s department.’

‘Second floor, on the right at the top of the stairs. Room 21.’

The woman returned to her typing, and Mavis turned away. As she looked round to find the staircase, she glanced back through the glass doors at the sunlit square beyond.

I don’t have to do this, she thought. I can walk out of them doors, and everything’ll be like always.

Like always. No man in the house. A baby coming. No regular money. Reet behaving like a sullen little brat, fighting with Jimmy; Rosie starting to copy her. Shouting and screaming and hitting. If Rita wasn’t in the house there’d be peace. If Rita wasn’t in the house Jimmy couldn’t hit her. Rita would be safer somewhere else. And if Rita wasn’t in the house Jimmy wouldn’t get so angry and take it out on her, Mavis. It would be better for everyone if Rita wasn’t in the house… including Rita. Mavis turned and went up the stairs to find Room 21.