Kate and Emma (25 page)

‘Zaran! Zaran!’ Sammy loves him, because of it.

‘Why didn’t you write?’ Emma asked, when I had stopped the child running about like a mad toy and got him on my knee to get some clothes on him.

‘I did.’

‘Not since Emily. That was almost a year ago.’

‘Don’t nag me, Em. I did mean to, but there’s never any - well, you see how we are here. This is a house of hell. I’m paying for something I did in one of those other lives. Remember about the Roman slaves, and that time we were the cavewomen? This was all we could get at the time. We had to get in somewhere. I had a spell at the centre with the kids, as it was. Never again, no thanks. I felt like Mrs Micawber. Even Bob was a welcome sight to me. Even this room. We’ll get out of it. We still owe a bit.’

‘How much?’

‘Not much.’ I looked away. Em was studying me too closely. ‘We’ll pick up soon. Bob’s after a better job. Moll got him in as cleaner at a school, but he couldn’t stand it. Those big cans of garbage, it turned his stomach. He’s in a shop now.’

‘What does he sell?’

‘Nothing exactly. He couldn’t manage the change. No, he - he cleans up, and that. It’s a butcher’s shop.’

‘That sounds worse than the school.’

‘Well, he won’t stick it much longer,’ I said, and he won’t. He could never stand the sight of blood. If he cuts himself, he cries.

‘Kate,’ Emma said, ‘why don’t you put the children in a nursery and get a job yourself. Get yourself—’ she was going to say out of this hole, but then being Em -1 know her so well - she thought: they’re only here because it was the best they could do, so she changed it to, ‘get yourself some new clothes, and make up.’

I fished about on the mantelpiece and found a lipstick stuck in a packet half-full of cigarettes where I’d put it to keep it away from Sammy. He eats lipsticks. Soap too.

‘That better?’ I turned round and grinned at her.

‘Much. Now, the job/

‘I can’t. I don’t feel well enough.’

She stood up. She was actually angry, and I rushed across the room to her. ‘Oh Em, don’t be cross. I can’t help it. It’s just one of those things that happen.’

‘Not every year. Not to people with any sense. You can’t afford to keep two children as it is, and you’re worn out with it. At twenty. You’re getting used up.’

‘I can’t help it, I tell you!’ I was angry too. What was the use of telling me what I knew already? ‘Bob won’t do anything. I’ve asked him - even bought him things, but he won’t. He just laughs. There’s nothing you can do with him.’

‘He should be sterilized.’

‘Oh shut up, Em, that’s dirty.’ I couldn’t help giggling though, because it was funny, the way she came out with it, as if he were a mongrel.

She didn’t laugh. She asked me what was the matter with me, that I didn’t do something about it, and I told her, ‘I’m not going to the clinic’

‘Why not?’

‘They fit you. They can kill me first. At Stinkney they almost did. They had to tie me down. Not that again.’

‘But when you’re pregnant, the doctor—’

‘That’s different. It’s the baby he’s after, not me. Shut up now, will you?’ I couldn’t stand this indecent prying into my life. ‘What business is it of yours?’

‘Can I give Emily a bath?’ Emma said, having looked carefully at me and seen that there was no more to be said.

‘Help yourself.’

‘Where—?’

‘In the sink, where did you expect?’

I scooped the potato peelings and tea leaves out of it while Em boiled up a kettle, and we talked about the times at Moll’s when we bathed the kids and Moll would give us chops for supper if
we did them all. We’d once done eight in fifteen minutes, our record, but of course there was a bathtub and lots of hot water, the way Jim used to stoke that boiler. All of a sudden, I could smell those babies. I’d forgotten children could smell like that.

While she had the baby in the sink, with Sammy sitting on the draining-board, watching her with his round dark eyes that are like Bob’s but more secret, not spilling over like a spaniel, she said, with her back to me, ‘Would you like some money?’

‘No,’ I said. Just like that. No. I could have shot myself, but having said it, I couldn’t go back on it, and I was so angry with myself that I had to try and make her feel she’d insulted me by offering.

I felt I was red in the face, and went and bent over the bed and started straightening it out, feeling my legs trembling and tense. I get stiff with anger sometimes, and wonder what’s happening to me. But it’s nothing new. It’s just that I’ve got more to be angry about now. I remember when I had to stand up in that courtroom, the first day I ever met Em, and she was in that yellow coat, and my dad was stood there telling lies about me and I still thought my mother would come, though I knew she wouldn’t, I was stiff then. Rigid with fury. That’s why I yelled out at them, and Em’s father frowned as if he was in pain. I yell now, sometimes. Bob puts his fingers in his ears and so does Sammy, copying him. It’s rather sweet.

‘Where are your books?’ Em asked me.

‘I sold them.’

‘I’ll get you some more. You can’t live here without anything to read.’

‘I’d sell them.’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘If I didn’t, Bob would.’

‘He used to be so proud of what you read. When he made you the bookcase at the flat, he said, “Katie’s going to show me how to read them.”’

‘He can read all right.’ I didn’t want to think of cosier days when I used to read to Bob sometimes, and he’d sit with his eyes on my face like a child, marvelling at the story. ‘Books are a luxury.’

‘They’re not.’

‘You wouldn’t understand.’

I’d never said that to Em, but if it hurt, she didn’t show it. She got the baby dressed and washed off Sammy’s face, and then she wanted me to get dressed and she’d take us all out for a meal.

‘Emily can’t eat a meal,’ I said.

‘Don’t be stupid. Give her a bottle first, or whatever she has.’

She’s getting very bossy, is Em. I don’t know who she thinks she is, coming into my flat and ordering me about as if I was a case history and she was one of those hens Marge Collins has in her place all the time, shoving her around and telling her how-to budget. Just because she’s got everything and I’ve got nothing, she wants to patronize. There’s no difference between her and me except my rotten bad luck. You wait, Emmaline Bullock. It could happen to you. Then you’ll know why they call it getting caught.

IT IS QUITE awful. Worse than I expected. Much worse. It was bad enough when she was at the Council flat and had started to let go of all the things that had begun to mean something to her. But this - a house of hell, she said, and though I hadn’t expected to find her in Belgravia, I hadn’t expected it to be as bad as this.

I remember, ages ago, the first time I went out with Johnny Jordan, after we had been to see that scoured-out woman with all the children, and the little boy who had leaned his scabby head on my chest. He said then that poverty was a disease. They keep slipping back, he said, like malaria, and I thought he was wrong, but now I am not so sure. There is something about that dreadful room where Kate and Bob and the two children try to live, something that reminds me, most sickeningly, of Butt Street.

It is in a different part of town from her old haunts, but no better. Somewhat worse, if anything, for this is a neighbourhood where immigrants of all nations have come precariously to roost, bringing with them their less savoury habits from home.

Kate’s street is a long, tall terrace, marked out for slum clearance if there is any sanity in the Ministry of Housing, but still inhabited to the hilt. It was a sodden, sunless day, standard for London, but
the Africans and West Indians looked as if they could never get used to it. They looked miserable, the women did, their strong faces already as pinched and shrewish as cockneys’. Besides the shrill swarms of children, most of the houses had overflows of people on the steps or leaning against the railings. Kate’s house on the corner had a monstrous jelly-fish woman squatting on the ground-floor balcony, like a doll over a telephone. She turned to say something disparaging to someone inside, and I went up the steps under her eye, giving her my enigmatic profile, the jaw slightly out.

There had been bells once, but now only rusted sockets. No buttons, and the cards alongside washed anonymous by the weather. One of the peeling double doors, tall and narrow as a coffin lid, was ajar, so I went inside and stood uncertain in the sour, turnip-greens hall. Molly had only given me the house number. She had said it was a flat, but it looked as if it was going to be even less of a flat than that honeymoon eyrie on the top floor of Marbles’.

I knocked at the first door off the hall, which still had an embossed brass hand-plate and had probably led to the dining-room in the good old days. A child with what looked like chicken-pox opened the door, and a voice came from over the back of a large leather sofa, If that’s the Prisoners’ Wives’ Aid, come on in.’

‘I’m looking for Mrs Thomas.’

‘Why look here? Upstairs,’ said the prisoner’s wife. ‘First door on the left.’

At the bend of the staircase was a small alcove, where two women were talking outside a frosted-glass door, with someone whistling behind it. The women stopped talking to watch me come up, and moved their heads round and upwards as I passed and climbed on, like chickens mesmerized in front of a white wall.

First door on the left. A passage led away on either side of the staircase. It would depend which side you were coming from. A door at one end was open on a roomful of steam. I thought it must be the bathroom, but when I got closer, it was a three-cornered bedroom, with a kettle boiling away like mad on a gas ring on the floor. In the doorway of this Turkish bath appeared a short dark man with very wide trousers, raggedly cut off, a shirt without
a collar, not the same thing as a collarless shirt, and huge brown melancholy eyes the shape of teardrops, drawn in close to a beaked nose.

‘I’m making tea,’ he said. ‘You want some?’

‘No thank you.’ Our Miss Bullock, field worker, should not be afraid to go anywhere, but he looked desperate enough to dismember me and steam me like salt beef. ‘Mrs Thomas?’

‘Katie.’ He smiled widely, and of course he was not a slaughterer, but Kate’s good neighbour, who gave her cups of tea when she was low. He took me to her door, knocked for me, bowed and slipped away in his grey gym shoes before she opened the door.

The last time I saw Kate, her pale hair had hung to her shoulders, brushed and cared for, for she had always been vain, even in the worst times. With her hair cut, and tousled as if she had just got out of bed, she looked unnervingly like the Kate I had first seen, the hapless urchin of my father’s court. She wore boy’s striped pyjamas, stained at the cuffs and ankles and gone at some of the seams, with a crumpled mauve chiffon scarf tucked into the neck.

I had forgotten how small she is. When I put my arms round her, it was like holding a child. She is bonier, and her face is thinner and drained of colour, like a ghost of Kate.

The baby is as plump and healthy as if it had stolen her strength and blood. The little boy, Sammy, used to be square, but he has elongated, and his legs are like props for a bird. When she took off the preposterous nightdress and I saw his ribs and swollen stomach, I asked her if he had been ill. She said casually that he was always ill, on and off, and the doctor said he was the type who never put on weight.

He has big black round eyes that stare at you without blinking, and his hair, which is downy, like a new growth, is all on the top of his broad skull, which makes him look like a dwarf tribal Indian. He is naughty. Even at two and a half, you can see him being naughty on purpose, watching her to see how much she’ll stand. When I took him on the bed and he upset the ashtray, he ducked, even before she swung her arm at him. The duck came with the mishap, instinctively, and I am trying not to think about what I saw in his eyes.

Some of them keep slipping back, Johnny Jordan said. You can only help them so far. She has slipped back. She is still my Kate. She always will be, till death, but she is slipping back, like someone sinking in a bog, and I can’t pull her out. She won’t even hold out her hand for me to try. She wouldn’t take money, or even a meal. I tried to talk to her about the babies, but she made me feel like a prying spinster, looking for a vicarious thrill out of someone else’s sex life, so I shut up.

For a while we were close, almost like we used to be, but then we were miles apart, and she tried to make it seem as if I were the one who was aloof, when it was really her shoving me away.

When she asked me, just before I left, why I had come home now when I had said I would be gone two years, I didn’t feel like telling her. I had thought I would. One of the things I had thought about, riding here on a bus filling up as it approached with increasingly squalid people, was that I would be able to tell her about my father and that she would understand what he had done to me.

I had only had Alice for those few days, and Derek briefly on the terrace before Aunt Millicent fussed him inside to provide a forgotten date for Gran. I had no one to talk to, no one to say they were sorry for me, because they were too busy being sorry for my mother. I was sorry for her too, and I tried to show it, although she kills demonstrativeness stone dead in its tracks; but at the bottom truth of my soul, I was sorrier for myself.

‘What’s the matter?’ Kate asked, when I made an evasive answer, because she knows me too well.

So I told her. If I was looking for sympathy, she had none to give. She hardly seemed to listen, and then she shrugged her shoulders and said: ‘Been a good thing if my dad had done that years ago. We was always better off when he wasn’t home. Safer too. The day I run off with Bob, you know, he burned me with his cigarette. Deliberate.’

‘God, Kate, you never told me.’

‘I’ve never told anyone. I’ll never tell anyone what she did to me either. Never anyone but God the day I die, so they’ll be sure and chuck her into hell if she’s sneaked into heaven past the guards.’

‘What did she do?’ Kate has never talked about her black childhood. It is the only thing we have not shared.