‘But I feel a bit bigger.’ She tapped her chest, blushing. ‘Did yours do that?’
Her mother hesitated. She was always a bit awkward talking about intimate things, secretive even. When Pamela had first seen tampons in plain sight in a friend’s bathroom she’d been shocked. ‘Not really. They were tender sometimes.’
‘When did your periods start?’
‘I was fourteen like you.’
‘But they stopped really early?’
Her mother cleared her throat. Pamela began to feel embarrassed. She should never have asked.
‘I had a problem with them.’ Her mother shrugged. ‘I had to have an operation and that was the end of all that.’
‘So you wouldn’t be able to have any more children,’ Pamela said slowly.
‘Yes,’ her mother said quickly. She jumped to her feet and began clearing the table. Pamela didn’t try asking any more. If the trouble was something that ran in families then her mother would have told her all about it, she was sure, if it was something important that would affect whether Pamela could have children.
Joan
‘Scarborough?’ George had said incredulously when she had told him about the house. ‘You can’t bleedin’ well live in Scarborough!’
‘’Course I can. I can post you things, get the train now and again. I’ve had enough of London, George.’
‘How can anyone have had enough of London, I ask you? This is where it’s all happening, girl.’
‘I’ve made my mind up.’
She had to get out. Seven years it had been, since she got that number one. Seven years of parties and clubs and the endless frenetic activity. Too many flings with too many strangers. It had been wonderful at first. And when ‘Swing Me’ followed ‘Walk My Way’ up to the top of the charts she had basked in the glory. Two number ones. There were nights at the Palais and others at all-night clubs. Times when Ray Davies from the Kinks or John Lennon and David Hockney, the artist, and Twiggy fresh from the cover of Vogue, and David Bailey, celebrity photographer, would be there. All the beautiful people. As the months went by it got harder to keep up. She was using uppers to stay awake and Mogadon to knock her out at bedtime. Speed and cocaine and god knows what for parties. Her hands shook now, in the mornings, and she had begun to feel edgy. She’d lost weight and with it her energy. Some weeks ago she had woken up in bed with a strange woman and been unable to recall anything of the night before. Worst of all she hadn’t written a decent song in months. Oh, she’d still been working, and George had sold most of them but they weren’t a patch on her best, on what she knew she could do. When Jimi Hendrix died, Joan felt a stab of fear. A month later Janis Joplin died too. That could be me, she thought. If I don’t get my head straight. Or she could just mess up, become more mediocre until she was a has-been. There were lots of them in the clubs and bars, talking about their heydays to anyone with half a mind to listen. She didn’t want that. Leaving London was about survival.
‘If you want me to, I can find a new agent.’
There was the merest whisper of alarm in George’s face. Joan winked.
‘Bugger off, Joan.’ He pulled out a bottle of pale ale, removed the cap with his teeth. ‘Where the bloody hell is Scarborough, anyway? Do they have running water and electricity up there?’
Pamela
Malcolm. He was very nice. But nice was the best she could come up with and it wasn’t good enough. She’d met him at work, he was based at Stockport but the bank had brought him in when the flu epidemic affected staff at her branch in Northenden. It had been easy to say yes to a date. She’d even been excited about him for a while but now . . .
The hairdresser moved her over from the basin to the vacant chair. She’d fancied a pageboy cut but it was impossible with wavy hair like hers so she just kept it long and had the split ends trimmed every so often. Least it was a good colour, a glossy black. She didn’t have to mess about colouring it with Harmony or Inecto to get an effect.
She had sensed Malcolm edging towards a proposal, imagining her ensconced in some nice, new semi in Heaton Mersey, just round the corner from his parents. Mrs Suburbia. Like Thelma from The Likely Lads on television. Ironing his shirts and having babies and making love twice a week laying flat on the bed with the lights out. He was so dull, so unimaginative. He thought prawn cocktails and a bunch of flowers were the height of romantic courtship. Or maybe that was the problem: he wanted romance – safe, dull, predictable – and she wanted passion. She wanted sex to be daring, challenging, naughty. It was so unsexy with Mal. Always the same routine, like brushing teeth or something. She fantasised constantly and she wanted to try out some of the milder ones but she couldn’t see Malcolm taking her up against the wall or making her kneel on the floor and entering her from behind or chasing her and catching her.
She groaned. And she certainly couldn’t imagine him letting her tie him up and tease him or shagging her in the shower. Crikey, even saying shag to Malcolm would be a challenge.
She glanced up at the mirror and wondered whether to try blue mascara to bring out the blue in her eyes.
The last time she had tried to vary the routine, waiting till he was as excited as he ever got then whispering that she wanted to get on top, she had felt his body stiffen and his penis soften. She’d tried to salvage things by staying where she was and saying yes, more, yes, Malcolm lots of times until he got back into his stride. Then Friday night they’d been back at The Steak House facing the same old evening and she’d had to stop it. She had watched him walk back from the gents, straightening his tie. She had waited until they were in the car before she told him.
‘Malcolm, I’m sorry, I don’t want to carry on seeing you.’
There was a clumsy silence and she heard him exhale loudly.
‘Is there any particular reason?’ He retreated into formal tones.
‘Not really.’ She could not be ruthlessly honest and hurt him. Why be so unkind?
‘I just don’t think we’re right for each other.’
‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘Is there someone else?’
‘No.’ Not yet.
‘I’ll drive you back.’
He didn’t speak again. He drove her home and sat staring out at the road while she thanked him and got out. She felt lousy. She watched him drive off and stood on the pavement for a moment. She breathed in and smelt freedom. She had escaped.
And tonight she would celebrate. With good friends and probably too much to drink and some new outfit from the shop where she was headed as soon as her hair was done.
Two years later Pamela was on a training course at a conference centre near Rhyll. On the Friday night she spent much of the evening chatting to a trainee from Somerset, a man called Will. On the Saturday evening she slept with him and again on the Sunday morning. That afternoon they said good-bye. She went home exhausted and exhilarated. It seemed like the perfect arrangement – excitement, physical attraction, the mystery of strangers, the delicious opportunity to present herself however she wished. No boredom, no commitment, no complications.
Lilian
‘Mum, Mum?’ Pamela Gough raced through the house, dropped her keys and bag on the table. ‘Where are you?’
‘Out here.’ The voice came from the back of the house.
Pamela hurried through the kitchen and into the tiny stone-flagged back yard, ducking to avoid banging her head on the low door. Her mother was sitting on the old director’s chair reading the Manchester Evening News. The headlines were all about the riots at Orgreave Colliery, there’d been a pitched battle between the police and the miners and their supporters. Lilian’s father had been a miner and she was glad he wasn’t alive to see what was going on now.
She turned to her daughter, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.
‘I got it, Mum, I got it!’ She beamed with delight and thrust the piece of paper forward. ‘I can’t believe it!’
‘Oh, wonderful! Oh, Pam, well done!’ Lilian read the letter, speaking the final sentences aloud. ‘And have great pleasure in confirming your appointment as Manager at our Bradford Westgate Branch. I will be sending you details of our relocation package in the near future. Oh, Pam.’ She smiled up at her daughter, narrowing her eyes against the brightness of the sky.
‘Bank manager,’ Pamela said, catching her lip between her teeth and widening her eyes in an exaggerated fashion.
‘Not before time,’ Lilian pointed out. It was Pamela’s fourth shot at a branch of her own. Each time the disappointment of rejection had dealt a severe blow to her confidence. She couldn’t do it. She was a woman and women never got the jobs. She wasn’t good enough. She kept a bright functional front up at the bank but was unable to sustain it at home and Lilian was witness to the silences, the weary defeat in her posture, the lack of appetite and the inability to sleep.
Lilian suspected that losing Peter had hurt the child irreparably; she had adored Peter. She remembered the pair of them building castles from wooden bricks, sprawled on the floor, conferring, two heads of black hair. And racing along the sands at Criccieth, Lilian at the finishing line or judging the long jump. How on earth had he learnt to be a father like that when his own had been so remote?
Lilian also worried that her own deep unhappiness had been transmitted to Pamela. No matter how hard she had tried to continue to provide a warm, happy home for the two of them, in the quiet times of the night, in the privacy of her prayers and in the stock-taking of birthdays and New Years, she acknowledged that life had dealt her a cruel hand and that she was not happy. The best she could summon was contentment; that she was well, that Pamela and she were so close.
Endlessly she wondered how different it would have been if Peter had lived. A silly game. They would have stayed in the old house instead of moving to this little terraced house in Fallowfield, though it was a godsend for Lilian’s work, only a stone’s throw from the postal sorting office. There might have been more children, a brother or sister for Pamela . . . She shouldn’t think like this, always wanting too much. That’d been her trouble all along. Not that she had wanted frivolous things; just a husband, a family, a nice home, close friends. But what was normal for others obviously wasn’t in God’s plan for Lilian. So she had lost one baby, then another, and a third. Then Peter. Pamela remained the light of her life, she could literally feel her heart grow warm each time she saw her, but even that love couldn’t erase the sadness she carried within her.
‘You aren’t sure, are you, Mum? I could talk to them about commuting.’
‘Don’t be silly. You must go. It’s what you’ve been waiting for, working for. There’s a regular coach, or the train. You can come back for the weekend whenever you like. I’m so proud of you, Pamela.’
‘I said I’d meet up with the girls later. Make a night of it.’
She nodded. ‘Put the water heater on, you’ll want to wash your hair, won’t you? Do you want tea?’
‘We’ll be getting fish and chips later. But I’ll get a butty now. Do you want one?’
‘I’ll do it.’ She folded the paper up. She would save it for later, when she was alone. There’d be a lot more of that now Pamela was moving. Time she got used to it. She would not be maudlin, she admonished herself. Not like those parents who clung to their children and wouldn’t let them go. Peter’s mother had been a bit like that. Stiff with her when they were courting and downright cold about her grand-daughter; anyone getting close to Peter was seen as a threat and earned her disapproval. Times past, she thought.
She busied herself with slicing bread and warming the teapot. Determined to deny the fearful flurry of questions about the future beating inside her, the panicky refrain, Now what will become of me?
Pamela
Learning to sail had been like coming home. The bank had sent management on a team-building weekend to the outward bound centre in Snowdonia. Pamela was the only woman and there had been plenty of innuendo among her friends about how much fun she might have with a dozen footloose men.
But it was sailing she fell in love with. There was something about the challenge of using the wind to travel the water and the undeniable kick she got from discovering she had real aptitude that reinforced the simple elation that she felt with the water flowing beneath her, the breeze in her hair and the smell of brine.
Towards the end of the course she’d asked Felix, the instructor, about any other opportunities. ‘You’ve got the bug!’ He grinned.