Authors: Monica Dickens
‘Why wouldn’t you help her?’
‘I told you. The children are my job. Whether the parents are sick or sadistic - that’s someone else’s job to find out.’
He got up suddenly. ‘I’m glad you came.’ He bent and kissed me. ‘I wanted to do that as soon as I saw the car and knew you were here. I stood on the step outside pretending I couldn’t find my key, trying to get up the nerve to kiss you. Then I didn’t dare, because you looked cool and beautiful.’
‘Would you rather I looked the way I did in your court? I’d sat up all night on the train from Scotland.’
‘How is Joel?’
‘I don’t know. It’s off.’
He glanced at Benita, but she didn’t indicate that I had already told her. ‘I’m sorry, Emma.’
‘That’s why I looked such a wreck that day. You were ashamed of me.’
‘No.’
‘Why did you look at me like that when I came in? What had I done wrong? You looked as if you were terribly hurt.’
‘I was. I was expecting to see a stranger involved in this nightmare thing. When I saw you, it hit me hard that you’d been going through all that, perhaps the worst experience of your life. And I didn’t know.’
‘You thought I should have come and told you?’
My father shook his head. ‘I had lost the right to that. That’s what hurt.’
So Miss E. Bullock, case worker, wasn’t quite dead after all. There was something I knew I had to do.
Kate hated her mother. The mother had rejected her utterly, from the moment of conception right up to the final moment when she drove Kate away for ever with the truth.
And the wicked fallacy about the birthmark. Part of her treatment will be plastic surgery, I think. If she ever tells the doctors what she told me, that would be the first thing they would do for her. That’s what I’d do, anyway. Dr Bullock, psychiatric counsellor.
They might cut out the ugly dark red stain from the back of Kate’s neck, but how could they cut out the dark hatred from her heart? Only one person could do that.
I went to Butt Street one dingy afternoon, when the wind was playing cyclones with waste paper and old drifts of grit, and the dustcart was whining and clanking down the middle of the street, exhaling a sharply active smell in the street of old quiescent odours.
When I went into the shop, Kate’s mother was talking to a pinched woman who had soapflakes and scouring powder and ammonia and bleach ranged on the counter as if she were going to fight all the dirt of London. They were only discussing prices when I went in, but they both stopped and looked at me as if they had been plotting against the Government.
I waited by the scarred ice-cream freezer until the customer had paid and gone out.
‘Yes?’ Kate’s mother said. ‘Is there something you want?’
‘Can I talk to you?’ I had not rehearsed what I would say. I knew that wouldn’t work, because what I said would depend on what she said, and there was no way of guessing that, even though Johnny had told me she was better and happier. He had also told me that I was wasting my time, trying to get her interested in Kate, but he doesn’t always have to be right.
She did look slightly better. Well, slightly different. She had cut off the sad, inadequate swatch of faded hair in favour of a basic bob and bangs, too young for her. The overall she wore was pink instead of blue, but equally shapeless and badly laundered. There was no new vanity in what she had done to her face, because she had done nothing. Her thick, slack skin was an airless indoor casualty, and her pale eyes so lacked expectancy that it was almost worth crying out: I’ll give you five thousand pounds for the whole shop! to see if you could spark them.
Johnny’s improvement must be in the soul, or else she has slipped back.
‘Can I talk to you?’
‘You’re talking, aren’t you? You selling something?’
Sal-va-shun! I should have brought my horn.
‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’
‘I don’t think so.’ With my hair in a good thick doughnut, and the tent of my blanket coat, I didn’t think she could recognize the raw young Emma who had tagged in here with the Cruelty Man, almost five years ago.
‘I’m a good friend of Kate’s,’ I began, and instantly her face shut up. As if I had said: I’m a homicidal maniac, she moved sideways to the door at the back of the shop, opened it a crack and called, ‘Dick!’ still keeping her eyes on me.
He came out, Kate’s father, short and greasy and belligerent, with that punched-up nose spread half over his face. You can see Kate in her mother, not in her father.
‘It’s about Kate,’ his wife said grimly.
‘What about her?’ He kept his hand on the knob of the curtained glass door, to show that his attendance at this conversation was ephemeral.
‘She’s had a very bad time,’ I began. ‘She—’
But her mother cut in with, ‘You think we don’t see the papers? I’ve been ill ever since last week, just thinking about it.’
‘That’s right,’ Kate’s father said, nodding his battered head— he has what looks like ringworm scars on his greying scalp. ‘Very ill, she’s been, with her nerves.’
‘If the people round here ever got to know that was her,’ his wife said, ‘I’d kill myself.’
What I had come to say was getting more hopeless every minute, but I blundered ahead and said it. ‘I thought perhaps you would see Kate, after she comes out of the hospital.’
‘See her!’ the father said. ‘I’d better not.’
‘I mean, perhaps you could help her. Perhaps you could—’ Had I expected them to sob gratefully and beg to be taken to Kate?
‘I thought you might want to take the little girls for a bit,’ I went on and the mother leaned forward on the old lozenge linoleum of the counter and said, ‘Leave us alone, do you hear? We’re all right. We’ve got our own kids. We’ve got our business and my husband is in work. If she told you to come here, you can go right back and tell her I wouldn’t stoop to help her if she raised her hand from the stinking pit of hell.’
‘A devil,’ her father said. ‘A devil, that’s what she is. We read about it.’
‘To think of her doing that to that poor innocent little child,’ her mother droned. ‘Can you wonder we don’t want nothing more to do with her?’
‘No,’ I said dismally, and I went back to Johnny’s to tell him that he was right again, rot and blast him, and E. Bullock was wrong.
It is almost a year since Jean was killed, but he and Nancy still aren’t able to fill the emptiness of the house. It even looks empty from die outside. The same curtains are there, and the green window-boxes waiting for spring, but it’s not the same. Jean’s bicycle always used to lean in the side passage. Nancy’s generation doesn’t bicycle in London.
I had been to see Kate, and when I went to tell Johnny about her, he was still out, although it was late enough for him to be home.
‘He works too hard,’ Nancy said, more like a wife or a mother
than a daughter. ‘Since Mum died, he’s been driving himself. He makes calls till all hours. He’s hardly ever at home.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Well, I do. It’s rather lonely.’ She is enough like her mother to make it very painful to see her bright-skinned face not rounded with secure pleasure, but getting a little heavy and serious.
‘You’re a good girl, Nancy.’
‘I’m not. I’m bitter and horrible. When I hear about these kids my age rejecting their mothers - they talk about it at school, “I saw through her when I was thirteen” - I could do murder. That’s one reason I have to get out. They’re so babyish. They pile up their hair and stuff their bosoms, but they’re still kicking and screaming like two-year-olds in a playpen. I’m not going back after the exams, whether we move or not.’
‘Are you going to move?’
‘I suppose. The man who will take over here is recovering from an operation. I hope he has a relapse. I don’t want to go and live with the Grants.’
‘It won’t be so lonely for you.’
‘I’d rather be lonely here. I don’t think Mrs Grant and I are going to like each other. She’ll be big and domineering and try to teach me how to do things I already know.’
When I asked her if she had seen Mrs Grant, she said No rather miserably, and didn’t want to talk about it any more, so we played cards until Johnny came home.
He was tired and depressed. One of the schools had reported bruises on a kindergarten child, but the family had skipped yesterday, owing rent, and Johnny had been following up false leads, trying to find them for hours.
We talked about Kate. Bob is out and working, and Mrs Evans is getting them a flat, but that’s not the end of it. That’s just the beginning. Kate is one of the reasons why Johnny doesn’t want to leave. Kate and her children and all the other bedraggled families who have become a part of his life. It won’t be easy for the new man to go into house after house, flat after foetid flat, and hear, ‘Where’s Mr Jordan then?’ and see the faces drop.
‘But Kate will have you,’ Johnny said, ‘unless you change your mind about your American.’
‘No.’ I have not told him the whole reason about that. I have not told anyone, and I haven’t yet seen Tom again since we rode in the taxi, hanging on like desperate rock climbers. I can’t. I’m afraid of what he’s going to say.
‘I think it - it’s pretty good, how you’ve stuck by her,’ Johnny said diffidently. He has almost as hard a time throwing out a compliment as an insult.
‘We took a blood oath,’ I said, and Nancy asked, ‘What’s that?’ coming in with soapy wet arms from the room at the back. ‘Is it cutting wrists? A girl did that at school to someone and then wouldn’t do it to herself. There was blood all over the cloakroom.’
I told her about the hairbrush ritual that Kate had taught me. ‘You do it with people you make a promise to. People you’ll always stick by.’
‘Let’s do it now. You promise that you’ll always stick with us, even if we get swallowed up by big domineering Mrs Grant. Here, I’m washing brushes with the socks.’ She brought in a stiff hairbrush and gave it to me. ‘Not me, my hands are wet. Do it with Daddy. I want to see you do it’
Johnny and I looked at each other, then smiled and shrugged, because we were only doing it to please Nancy. We stood up, and I banged on my hand and started whirling my arm, and then he banged on his, very hard, so that the beads of blood began to spring out at once, even before he whirled it. When we put the backs of our hands together, he suddenly grabbed my hand with his other one, and pressed it very hard against his as the blood mingled.
‘Blood comrades.’
‘Blood comrades,’ he said, and neither of us was smiling.
‘Once,’ I said, ‘when I was in London, I telephoned you. It was a time when nothing seemed to matter very much, and I didn’t care what happened. You were out.’
‘Once when I was in America,’ Tom said, ‘I telephoned you. Twice. There was no answer. I was going to try again, after the week-end, but I had a cable from London. Sheila was in the hospital and I had to come back.’
‘Is she all right now?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ he said, as if I were an acquaintance inquiring politely about his wife. ‘She was very ill. She’s - well, she’ll never be as strong as she was.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I began, but he said, ‘For God’s sake, Emma, drop this. I’m offering you everything. I should have said this long ago. I should have married you long ago. I was too afraid of hurting her. So I hurt you instead. But I know now that nothing matters except you.’
‘It’s too late.’
‘It’s not.’
‘She’ll still be hurt. More so, if she’s not well.’
‘I don’t care. I’ve had my purgatory. If I die tomorrow, they’ll have to let me straight into heaven. Why have you stayed away so long?’
‘We promised.’
‘You did. A promise to your father - what does that mean? He broke his promise to you, didn’t he? And got away with it. Why can’t you?’
Why can’t I? Oh God, why can’t I?
THERE IS ONE of the nurses here, name of Diller, a great huge woman like a Russian discus thrower, and she’s one of those men who get themselves turned into women. I’m sure of that. When they chopped her, they forgot to chop off the moustache.
She is cruel to me, because she is a sadist. That’s why she took this job. But everyone else is all right. So is the food and having time to sleep, so I may pretend I’m not cured of whatever it was I’m supposed to have. I’ve forgotten now exactly what it was.
There’s this doctor, he gives me cigarettes and we talk for hours. He doesn’t seem to have much to do, so we talk about my mother and the old days, which he says is all right to do, although I’ve always thought those dark things were better left to rot in secret.
Emma was in yesterday, and I sent her down the corridor with a made-up question to have a look at the faggot. She
agrees. It is a man, but we shall say nothing. Some of the poor old girls they’ve got in here haven’t seen a man for years except the doctors, who are all black or eunuchs, so even just the moustache is better than nothing.
Emma told me about a little girl of five whose mother beat her with a strap. They had been looking for the mother for days. She’d gone to ground. But the kid turned up on Mr Jordan’s doorstep one evening. All by herself, no one knows who took her or told her to go there, and Emma says her back was all up in welts, and bleeding. She had to cut the vest away when the doctor came, and he found she had two ribs broken as well, and some teeth knocked out.
Can you imagine a woman doing that to a kid? She’s a sadist. So is Nurse Diller. She makes lampshades out of human skin.
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Monica Dickens
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