Kate and Emma (11 page)

You don’t understand, you don’t understand. She was still crying and she looked so ugly and awful I had to tell her, You’re beautiful. I ran out then into the street, because I - because I -1—

MOLLY AND JIM and I all moved together. I got to her first and put my arms round her. She was sobbing dryly as if she had been running.

‘We love you, Kate,’ I said. ‘Don’t cry, it’s all right. I love you.’

I LOVE YOU, Kate.

I love you, I said to her in the shop when she was crying and ugly. I was running. I waited behind that bit of wood fence, but she didn’t call me back.

Get your hands off me - let me go! I hate you! There was a black hole in her face and the words coming out of and beating on my hands over my ears where he put his cigarette on me to burn me. We don’t want you and my hand was on fire when I put it to my mouth. We don’t want you and he laughed and I was screaming rot in hell—

ABOUT A WEEK after that hellish night when Kate hit out at me and fell on the floor screaming and Jim dashed a glass of beer on her because it was the first thing to hand, I came out of the subterranean college cloakroom and found Molly waiting for me at the top of the steps. No babies in sight, and no smile either.

I was going to ride to the station on the back of Sean’s scooter, but when I saw Molly, childless, unsmiling, I took the scarf off my head and told him: ‘Don’t wait. I’m not coming.’

‘Why not?’

‘I want to talk to a friend.’

‘Oh.’ He assessed Molly rudely from under his hair, taking in the neat agreeable look of her: good legs, bright colours, no style, and walked away without responding to her friendly smile.

‘Have I spoiled something?’

‘He saves me bus fare. What’s up?’

She took my arm and walked me away from a crowd of people coming up the steps. ‘Have you seen Kate?’

‘Not since I came back to your house to see if she was all right, and she pretended not to remember what happened.’

‘She didn’t come home last night. She’s gone.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know.’ We are standing by the pillar-box, whispering for some reason, although no one was listening on the hurrying street. ‘Yes, I do though, Emma. I think she’s gone home.’

‘To her mother and father? After what she—?’

‘Listen.’ Molly stepped aside for a girl with a bundle of letters, and drew me close to her. ‘Quite a long time ago, she took some coal. She put it in a potato sack and hid it in the toolshed. Ralph
told me. It was there for weeks and now it’s gone. I’m not going to tell the probation officer, but I wanted to see you before I went to her home.’

‘Let me go.’ Molly didn’t know I’d been to Butt Street. No one did except Johnny Jordan.

‘No, I’ll go. I can stop in and see poor old Mr Bluett in the council flats over there.’ It was typical of Molly that even in a crisis, she could plan to kill two birds with one stone.

‘I’ll come with you.’

‘Not a deputation. We might scare them if she’s not there.’

‘Suppose she’s with Bob again?’

‘I thought of that. I could find him. I know where he lives.’

‘Let me. Let me do it all, Moll.’ I am shorter than her, and will never have her sense if I live to be a hundred, but for the moment I felt taller, wiser, in charge. ‘I’ll go to Bob and then I’ll go to her home.’ I was scared, but I would go.

Bob lived on the top floor of a house like Mr Jordan’s: bow-windowed, with a little Swiss porch over the door and a few laths laid into the stucco for timbering, the roof part of a gabled pattern all down the street. Here the pattern was in steps, each identical house a few yards above the other, parallel up the steep hill.

Most of the miles and miles of boarding-houses in London were never meant for more than one family, but the tall, pillared terraces seem to take it naturally. These decorated villas seem more violated by the occupying army of multicoloured lodgers. When I rang Bob’s bell, panting from the climb, it should have been his family home, and a warm round mother like a scone should have opened the door in a floury apron and asked me in.

But his mother was in Belfast and no one ever said anything about his father, so here he was, and the woman who opened the door with a jerk, as if she were at war with the stuck hinges, didn’t smell of baking, and she shut the door half-way when she saw me, to keep me outside.

This must be the famous Mrs Marbles with her passion for offal, who fed Bob on stewed heart and blood pudding. When I asked for him, she said: ‘He’s not here,’ and I thought Oh God, he and Kate have gone, and now there’ll be trouble.

‘Not home, you mean,’ I asked nervously, ‘or not living here any more?’

‘If I answered every meddlesome question put to me,’ Mrs Marbles said, sighting down her thin red nose as if I were a rabbit, Td have time for nothing else. There was a girl here only yesterday with a whole impertinent list. Why should I tell her what brand of washing powder I use? If you’re one of those, you’re wasting your time, for I’ll not disclose the secrets of my sink.’

‘Oh, I’m not. I’m a friend of Bob’s.’

‘A good friend?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then, you should know where he is,’ said Mrs Marbles triumphantly and shut the door.

It was clear that Bob had gone, and she was covering, not for him, but because she wasn’t going to be caught not knowing. Or had she been bought off with the bag of coal to foil pursuers? If Kate was with Bob, she wasn’t at Butt Street, but I had told Molly that I would go there, so I must. I would ask loudly for something in the little shop, and if Kate was there, by some freak, she would hear my voice and come out.

I was striking off again down the hill into the western sun that was pinkening the villas and the faces of the children in the street, when a voice hooted, ‘Em!’ at me, and there was Bob.

He hurried across from the other side of the road without looking at the traffic, and grinned and waved at a car which squealed to a stop.

‘Hullo, dear,’ Bob said, standing in front of me with his hands hanging and his head on one side. ‘Fancy meeting you here. This is my street.’

Bob always uses the possessive adjective, like a child. My street, instead of Where I live. I read it in my paper. What’s for my supper?

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’ve been to the house. She told me you weren’t there, and I was afraid - I thought—’

‘Meeting at my works,’ Bob said, in his bustling, trade union voice. ‘Very important. You come to get me? Are we going to the pictures then?’ He and Kate and I have been to the cinema a few times, which he adores, sitting between us, with his eyes
bulging at the screen and his mouth full of nuts and chocolate. ‘Where’s Katie then? Didn’t she come with you?’

Thank God. He wasn’t capable of having her hidden away somewhere without giving it away.

‘Bob, where can we talk?’ The pavement was full of running children and home-going men pressing up from the station, and the street was full of old cars and puny vans struggling up the hill in low gear.

‘What do you mean?’ Bob almost never talked. He listened.

‘Can we go up to your room?’ At the idea of trying to sneak past Mrs Marbles, watchdog at the secret sink, we both laughed. So we walked for a bit and I told him Kate was gone, breaking it with a gentle tact, which was quite wasted since he didn’t even show distress.

I tried to find out if he knew anything, but all I could get from him were a few irrelevant things about Kate, and something vague about the Australian, which I could not get him to remember. In the end we got on a bus and rode to a place behind a tiled public house where the buses end by running into different concrete slots for each route number. I told him that if I didn’t find Kate, she would fetch up in court again and so would he if he knew anything about it.

I thought he was listening to me, but he was watching the buses come in to the terminus, and when I said: ‘Tell me the truth, Bob,’ he said: ‘Isn’t it a marvel how each bus knows which hole to go into?’

He had taken a little tin soldier from his pocket as we sat in the empty bus, and his hands were never still, turning the toy over and over, stroking it, tapping it with a black nail, following its outline with the tip of a wondering finger as if it were a lover’s face. He was tired of me because we were not going to the pictures after all. He either did not take it in about Kate, or else in the world he has always known to be missing is not a crisis.

When I left him, I said: ‘I’ll let you know,’ and he said: ‘About what?’

Big dreaming idiot. Why couldn’t he have known where Kate was? Now I had to go on. The walk with Bob, the ride on one of the homing-pigeon buses, the frustrating conversation had all been
to put off having to do what I had known all along was inevitable.

It was getting dark. It was getting late. Now I would have to go back to Butt Street.

THE DAMN BUZZER went like a bluebottle just as we were having supper. Dad swore and Tony copied him and my mother said: ‘Shut up that, you little bastard,’ so I said something worse and he and she both turned on me.

It was just like old times, and I wondered how long I could stand it this trip. I’d thought it would all be different. Shows what stupid ideas you get, from a distance. I’d thought I’d come back and say: ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ and she’d take me in and say: Don’t worry, and understand why I had to come home.

Instead she spoke first, before I could get a word in. ‘Why have you come back?’

I said: ‘I got fed up,’ because I knew then I couldn’t say: I’m going to have a baby and if Molly finds out she’ll have me put away.

I’ve heard about those places they send girls. No thanks.

Loretta was the only one who was really pleased to see me. The boys don’t care, and Dad and Mother - well, they didn’t exactly throw me out, but they made it clear this was no place for me. They wanted to send me right back, but I said: ‘Let me stay a couple of days and get my breath.’

They’re afraid they’ll get into trouble, since I’m on probation. Ever since the court, she said, there’s been people snooping, bothering, fussing about Loretta. She’s afraid the Cruelty Man will come back, although she fed his ear for good last time, him and some girl who was with him. She had a long hank of hair, my mother said (that stuck in her throat because although she wears hers down, which she shouldn’t at her age, it never grows past her shoulder blades). A bloody great long hank of hair, she said, and it made me think of Em. I’d die before I’d let her see any of this. I felt queer because I don’t know where I belong any more.

It’s stupid to keep the shop open so late, but it’s the time for
cigarettes, after the men get home and find the old woman’s smoked the lot, so they send one of the kids out for that, or for something she’s forgotten, and they have to come to us because everywhere else is closed. Nice way to do business. You only get the customers when they’re desperate.

We were having supper, so in the end, because I was nearest the door, it was me got up to go into the shop when the buzzer rang.

As soon as I saw her, I knew. It had been her came with the man. She knows him. I should have guessed when my mother said that about the hair, only I was seeing her too clearly at Molly’s then. Not here. Spying on me, sneaking in. How dare she?

‘Hullo, Kate,’ she said.

‘Hullo yourself.’

SHE WAS GOING to turn back into the room behind, but I grabbed her. ‘No, Kate. Talk to me a minute.’

She looked over her shoulder, then shut the door on the grumbling hubbub within and stepped behind the counter, just like her mother had done.

‘I’ll talk to you,’ she said, leaning forward on her fingertips. ‘I’ll talk to you about spying here behind my back.’

‘I didn’t know we were coming here,’ I said, my mouth dry and my stomach contracted in the alarm of being found out. ‘I mean, when we came, I didn’t know it was your family. Don’t you believe me?’

‘No.’ Kate was too practised with lies not to recognize mine. ‘Well, you saw, didn’t you? You saw what you wanted. What did you have to come back for?’

‘To find you.’

‘What made you think I’d be here?’

‘It’s your home.’

She made a face. ‘I haven’t got a home.’

‘Molly’s worried,’ I said, ‘and I was too. Come back with me, Kate. There’ll be trouble with the court if you don’t.’

She didn’t say anything. She leaned on the counter and stared at me, but she was still Kate, still my friend, so I went forward and put my hand over hers, the child’s hand with the bitten finger-nails, and asked her if she was going to have a baby.

I have never seen Kate spit. She spat then, and it hit my hand. Then she called me a bloody social worker and went into the back room.

Kate had to go back to Molly’s of course, since the court had placed her there. Her parents didn’t want her anyway. She had to go back to work too, and I wished, as I had many times before, that I could get her out of that unlovely dead-end job and into something worthwhile.

Mollyarthur was ill. ‘I’m never ill, I haven’t time.’ She fought it for long enough to make herself worse, and finally collapsed on the bed and into a sleep which had been owing to her for years.

I went every afternoon to help. I’d do anything for Molly. Anyone would. I was there one day, mopping the kitchen floor, with three of the children sloshing about barefoot in the soapy water. The knocker on the front door thudded like doomsday and I paddled down the hall in my bare feet, the children trailing after me like a brood of ducklings.

The woman on the doorstep had a pug nose and a bulldog jaw and a yapping terrier voice, dog all over. She asked for Molly and when I said she was ill, she stepped into the hall without being asked and said: ‘Then you can give her a message for me. Are you the maid?’

I said: Yes, although with a brief child’s apron that said Mother’s Little Helper and my hair screwed up on my head in a lopsided ball with two knitting-needles which Carol had thrust through it, I didn’t look like a maid anyone would ever employ.

‘You can tell her it’s about Katherine,’ the dog woman said, humping her large brown plastic bag higher under her arm, as if the children were pickpockets.