Bad Girls Good Women (3 page)

Julia is sixteen years old, Mattie thought savagely. What does bloody homework matter? And I’m seventeen. I’m not going to cry. Not after everything that’s happened. Not just because of these people, with their little, shut-in faces.

‘There was an argument,’ she went on. ‘I came out for a walk. To keep out of the way, you see? And a policeman saw me. He thought I was up to no good.’ She tried to laugh, but it drained away into their stony silence. Clearly Mr and Mrs Smith thought she was up to no good as well. ‘He offered to take me to friends, or relatives. I thought of here. I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me. Just for one night.’

I’m not here because of you. I came to Julia. And what gives you the right to judge me?

‘You’d better stay, then,’ Vernon Smith said brusquely. He left it unclear whether it was for Mattie’s own sake, or in case of another visit from the police. Betty began to flutter about dust and boxes in the spare bedroom.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mattie said. She realised that she was exhausted. To go to sleep, that was all that mattered. ‘Anywhere will do.’

Julia was shocked by Mattie’s appearance. It wasn’t just the bruises, and the oozing cut at the corner of her mouth. More disturbingly, Mattie’s verve and defiance seemed to have drained out of her, leaving her as shapeless as a burst balloon. Julia had never seen that, in all the years that they had been friends.

‘Come on,’ she whispered now. ‘It’s all right. Tomorrow, when you wake up, it’ll be all right.’

She steered Mattie up the cramped stairs, with Betty fussing behind them.

Vernon still wanted to impose his own order. ‘I should telephone your father, at least, to say where you are. I wouldn’t want him made anxious on our account.’ He lifted up a china doll with an orange net skirt from the hall table. The telephone sat underneath the skirt. At lot of things in the Smiths’ house had covers. Even Mr Smith’s Ford Popular, parked outside, had a mackintosh coat.

‘We’re not on the telephone,’ Mattie said.

Betty made Julia go back to bed. In the white tiled bathroom Mattie washed her face with the wholesome Pears soap laid out for her. Her distorted face in the mirror looked older under its tangle of hair. Betty knocked on the door and handed her a bottle of TCP.

‘Put some of this on your poor mouth,’ she said.

The small kindness brought Mattie to the edge of tears again.

She went into the spare room and climbed under the turquoise eiderdown. She fell asleep at once.

In the morning, at six o’clock, Julia came in with a cup of tea. She opened the curtains and looked out. In the early light the row of back gardens was tidy and innocent, its squares of lawn surrounded by pink hybrid tea roses. Julia turned her back as if she hated them.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

Mattie looked away, and Julia climbed in at the bottom of the bed, pulling the eiderdown around her. ‘What happened?’ she persisted.

And then, lying there wrapped in the eiderdown and enclosed by the room’s sprigged wallpaper, whispering so that Betty and Vernon wouldn’t hear, Mattie told her.

Julia listened, with anger and disgust and sympathy mounting inside her. Afterwards, with two bright spots of colour showing in her cheeks, she held Mattie’s hand between both of hers.

‘Why didn’t you ever tell me before?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mattie said. She was crying now, tears pouring down her cheeks and making a dark patch on the turquoise cover. She had told Julia everything, the smallest details that she had kept boxed up for so long. And at once, amazingly, she had felt her guilt lifting. Julia hadn’t cried out in horror, or accusation, of course. Had she been afraid for all this time that it was really her own fault?

‘It’s all right.’ Julia hugged her, making inarticulate, comforting noises. ‘Mat, it’s all right. You’ve got me. We’ve got each other.’

At last, the storm of crying subsided. Mattie sniffed, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.

‘Sorry. Thanks. Look at me.’

‘No thanks.’

They laughed, shakily. Julia was relieved to see Mattie lifting her chin up again. She would be all right. Everything would come back to her, once they had got away. Excitement, a fierce heat, was beginning to boil inside Julia, fuelled by her anger. It was hard to talk calmly as the idea took hold of her.

‘Listen, Mattie, this is what we’ll do. You don’t have to go back there to him. We’ll just go. We’ll leave all of this …’ She waved through the bedroom window, and the gesture took in the bland gardens, the grid of streets with their semi-detached houses that made up the nice part of town, and the sprawling, featurelessly brutal estate beyond, where Mattie lived. It included the High Street, with its Odeon showing
East of Eden
, and the single milk bar with half a dozen teds lounging outside it, the red-brick church that Betty and Vernon belonged to and the Youth Club hall behind it, the grammar school where Mattie and Julia had met, and where they had made their first small gestures of defiance. The gestures had grown as they got older. Mattie and Julia would have been expelled, if they hadn’t been much cleverer than their anxious counterparts.

Julia’s grand gesture took in the whole of the dull, virtuous suburb, and rejected it. ‘We’ll go to London. We’ll find ourselves jobs, and we’ll find a flat. Then we can live, can’t we? We always said we would, didn’t we?’

Up to London was where they went when they skipped off school for the day. They went up on Saturday nights now, when they had enough money to go dancing at a club. It was a glittering, covetable world, distant, but now, suddenly, within reach.

‘We’ve talked about it so often.’ Sitting in the park, with their backs against the green railings. Trailing slowly home from school. Whispering, over slow cups of coffee.

Carefully, Mattie said, ‘I could pack in my job easily enough.’ Since leaving Blick Road Grammar she had worked as a filing clerk in an estate agency, and she hated every minute of it. Mattie wanted to be an actress. She wanted it so much that Julia teased her about it. ‘But you’re still at school.’

‘Bugger school,’ Julia said triumphantly. ‘Dad wants me to be a secretary. Not a typist, you know. A private secretary, to a businessman. Mum wants me to be married to a solicitor or a bank manager. I don’t want to be either of those. Why should I stay at school to do typing and book-keeping? We can go, Mattie. Out there, where we belong.’

She flung her arm in a dramatic gesture.

Mattie and Julia travelled in their imagination together, away from Fairmile Road and the colourless suburban landscape.

‘What about your mum and dad?’ Mattie persisted.

Julia clenched her fists, and then let them fall open, impotent. Mattie knew some of how she felt, but it was still difficult to put it into words. Even more difficult now, because it sounded so trivial after Mattie’s confession. But Julia felt that this little, tidy house wound iron bands around her chest, stopping her breathing. She was confined by her parents’ love and expectations. She knew that they loved her, and she was sure that she didn’t deserve it. Their disapproval of Mattie, and of Julia’s own passions, masked their frightened anxiety for her. Perhaps they were right to be anxious, Julia thought. She knew that she couldn’t meet their expectations. Vernon and Betty wanted a replica of themselves. Julia wanted other, vaguer, more violent things for herself. Not a life like Betty’s, she was sure of that.

‘I’m like a cuckoo in this house,’ Julia said.

They looked around the spare bedroom, and smiled at each other.

‘If I go now, with you, they’ll be shocked but perhaps it’ll be better in the end. Better than staying here, getting worse. And when we’re settled, when we’ve made it, it will be different. We’ll all be equal. They won’t have to fight me all the time.’

It was all
when
, Julia remembered, sitting on the Embankment with all her possessions at her feet, and afterwards, years afterwards. We never thought
if
, in those days, Mattie and me.

Mattie had smiled suddenly, a crooked smile at first because of her broken lip, but then it broadened recklessly. ‘When shall we go?’

‘Today,’ Julia said. ‘Today, of course.’

Later, when Vernon was at work and Betty had gone shopping, Julia gathered her belongings together and flung them into two suitcases. Mattie wouldn’t go home even for long enough to collect her clothes, so Julia’s would have to do for both of them.

There was no time to spare. Betty was seldom out of the house for more than an hour. In the frantic last minute, Julia scribbled a note to her. There was no time to choose the words, no time to think what she was saying.
I’m going
, that was all.

She remembered the carelessness of that, later.

The girls caught the train from the familiar, musty local station. On the short journey they crammed into the lavatory and made up their faces in the dim mirror.

Liverpool Street station seemed larger, and grimmer than it had looked on their earlier adventures. Mattie flung out her arms.

‘The Big City welcomes us.’ But she was looking at Julia with faint anxiety. Julia smiled determinedly back.

‘Not only does it welcome us,’ she announced, ‘it belongs to us.’

To make their claim on it, they rode to Oxford Circus on the underground. When they emerged, Oxford Street stretched invitingly on either side of them.

In the beginning, it had been a huge adventure, and they had felt delighted with themselves. They started by looking for work, and they both found jobs at once. Mattie camouflaged her bruises with Pan-Stik make-up and was taken on as a junior assistant in a shoe shop. Julia had learned to type as part of her commercial course at school, and she presented herself for an interview as a typist in the accounts department of a big store. The supervisor set her a spelling and comprehension test that seemed ridiculously simple.

‘That’s very good,’ the woman told her, looking surprised. ‘I’m sure you would be useful here. When would you like to start?’

‘Tomorrow,’ Julia said promptly.

The words
accounts department
made her think of her father. She had often looked at him and wondered how he could go off every day, year after year, to the same dull, meaningless job. It’s only for a little while, for me, she told herself. Everything is going to happen, soon. After the interview Julia walked out into the street, and she saw the sunshine reflecting off the shop windows like a greeting.
I can work
, she was thinking.
I can keep myself. I don’t have to ask for anything
.

It was a moment of intense pleasure.

Julia could feel her freedom, like expensive scent or floating chiffon, drifting around her as she walked. It was as though she had already travelled a long, long way from home.

When she met Mattie later, they were both almost dancing with triumph. ‘How much?’ Mattie demanded.

‘Eight pounds a week.’

‘And I get seven pounds, ten shillings. Thirty bob more than the last place. We’ll be rich.’

It was more money than either of them had ever had before, and they told each other incredulously that they would have that much to spend every week. They bought some sandwiches and a bottle of cider to celebrate, and picnicked in Trafalgar Square. When they had drunk the cider they sat and beamed vaguely at the tourists photographing the fountains.

‘The next thing is somewhere to live,’ Mattie said.

‘A flat,’ Julia agreed, tipping the bottle to make sure it was empty. ‘Simple, but elegant. Mattie Banner and Julia Smith, at home.’

The difficulties began after that.

They found jobs, but the days until they could expect to be paid stretched awkwardly ahead of them. The landlords of all the flats they went to see demanded rent in advance, and deposits, and the girls couldn’t muster even a fraction of the money. The ones who didn’t ask for money eyed the two of them suspiciously, and asked how old they were. Mattie always answered defiantly, ‘Twenty,’ but even so the rooms turned out to be let already.

They stayed in the cheapest hotel they could find, and scoured the
To Let
columns of the
Evening Standard
every morning as soon as the paper came on the streets, but by the third day they still hadn’t found anywhere that they could afford. The first euphoria began to evaporate. Friday morning came, and as they were leaving the grubby hotel on their way to work, the manager waylaid them. He announced that it was time for them settle their bill to date, handing the folded slip of paper over to them. It came to much more than had reckoned for, and even by pooling all their resources they were only just able to meet it. They were left with a few shillings between them. Julia smiled brightly at the manager to hide her concern.

‘And how much longer are you planning to stay with us?’ the man asked.

‘Oh. Two, perhaps three more nights. Just until we’ve found ourselves a nice flat.’

‘I see.’ The manager examined his nails, and then he said, ‘I’m afraid that I shall have to ask you for a deposit on your room. The weekend is our busy time, you see. We do have to be quite sure …’ He broke off, the picture of regret.

‘How much?’

‘Five pounds. That will cover both of you, of course.’

‘Oh, of course.’

There was a pause. At last Mattie said desperately, ‘We’ll let you know this evening.’

‘No later than this evening, then.’

As they scurried away to the tube station Mattie burst out furiously, ‘He knows we haven’t got it. The miserable bugger.’

‘You can’t blame him.’ Julia was practical. ‘We’ll have to ask them at work to pay us for these two days.’

‘It still won’t be enough.’

‘It’ll be better than nothing, won’t it?’

Mattie grinned at her suddenly. Her bruises were fading, and it no longer hurt her to smile. ‘Don’t worry. Something’ll turn up.’

They parted at Oxford Circus and went their separate ways.

Julia waited until her supervisor came back from her dinner-break, and then mumbled her request.

‘Oh no, dear, I don’t think we can do that. You have to work a full week first. Your money will come next Friday, with the three extra days, which will be nice, won’t it? Otherwise it makes it too complicated for the payroll people, you know. Is there some trouble, dear?’