Lottie Project (6 page)

Mother said she would take in washing and do fine sewing for ladies.
Grandmother
and Grandfather sniffed. They took a shine to my sister Rose, who is pretty, and offered her a home with them. It will be one mouth less for you to feed, they said. Mother asked Rose if she wanted to live with Grandmother and Grandfather and she cried and said no. So Mother said we would all stick together.

‘You will be sticking together in the Workhouse then,’ said Grandmother.

Mother stuck her chin in the air and said we would manage fine. But I heard her crying at night. I went to comfort her. ‘We
will
manage fine, Mother, you’ll see,’ I said.

But it has become very hard. Mother washes all day and sews half the night. She has become very pale and thin and coughs a good deal. I am very frightened that she will get really ill in the winter if she keeps working so hard. Frank and Rose and I tried to help out this spring and summer, running errands and selling nosegays and sweet lemonade at the market. But we can only earn pennies. We need pounds to keep us out of the workhouse.

So it is up to me. I am the oldest. I must go and earn money and send it to Mother. There is only one job a girl my age can go for. I must be a servant.

WORK

THE PHONE RANG
. I answered it automatically. Lisa and Angela are always ringing me up – and some of the other girls in our class. I don’t want to sound disgustingly boastful but I am quite popular.

But it wasn’t a girl. It was Grandma.

‘Hello, Charlotte dear,’ said Grandma.

I told a teeny white lie to Miss Beckworth. Grandma always calls me Charlotte, pursing her lips and clicking her teeth. If you’re standing right in front of her you get sprayed with spit. I found I was holding the telephone at arm’s length just in case.

‘Can I speak to Mummy, please?’ said Grandma.

That’s another weird thing she does. I’ve never called Jo Mummy in my life. But Grandma always does. As if Jo is
her
Mummy. Though Grandma treats Jo as if she’s a silly little toddler, not a grown-up woman with a practically grown-up daughter of her own.

Grandma’s voice is so loud it boomed right across the room to Jo. She shook her head in a panic. ‘Say I’m not here!’ she mouthed at me.

She’d been crying and she’d got to that sodden stage where everything is still dribbling. She
fumbled
for a tissue and blew her nose dolefully.

‘I’m afraid Jo’s just nipped out to the shops, Grandma,’ I lied.

‘Don’t be silly, Charlotte. It’s half past seven in the evening,’ Grandma said briskly.

‘There’s heaps of shops still open round here, Grandma. There’s the video shop, and the off-licence, and the Spar down the road—’

Grandma gave a disdainful snort. ‘Please don’t argue with me, Charlotte. I know Mummy’s there, I can hear her blowing her nose. I want to talk to her.’

‘Well, she doesn’t want to talk to you,’ I said – but in a little squeaky-mouse mumble as I passed the phone over.

‘Josephine?’

‘Hello, Mum,’ said Jo wearily, sniffing.

‘Are you crying?’ Grandma demanded.

‘No, I – of course I’m not crying,’ said Jo, a tear dribbling down her cheek.

‘Say you’ve got a cold!’ I whispered, miming a major bout of sneezing.

‘I’ve got a cold,’ Jo said, nodding at me gratefully. ‘Why on earth should I be crying?’

‘Well, you tell me,’ said Grandma. ‘Your father’s just read a most disturbing item on the financial page of his newspaper. It says Elete Electrical have folded.’

Jo shut her eyes and said nothing.

‘Josephine? Are you still there? Is it true? Is it a
nationwide
collapse? You are being kept on until they find a new buyer, aren’t you? And if the worst comes to the worst, they will give you a substantial redundancy payment, won’t they?’

Jo sniffed again but still couldn’t speak.

‘Do say something, dear,’ said Grandma. ‘We’re very worried about you. We’ve always said you’re in a very precarious position. How on earth are you going to keep up the payments on your flat if you lose your job? You and Charlotte can barely manage as it is. We do worry about you so.’

Jo opened her eyes. She stood up straight. She gave one last giant sniff and then spoke.

‘Honestly, Mum, you do get into a silly state. There’s no need to worry. We’re fine. I feel I was ready for a change from Elete anyway. Of course I’ve known for a long time that things have been precarious with the firm – which is why I applied for my new job. I have this brilliant managerial position, and a much larger salary too – so Charlie and I are very comfortably off at the moment. I really must go now, Mum, I badly need to get a hankie, my goodness, this is a terrible cold, I think I’d better have an early night with honey and hot lemon, well, goodbye, thanks for phoning.’

She said this without pausing, absolutely gabbling the last bit and then slamming the phone down quick. Then she took the receiver off again, so that Grandma couldn’t call back.

‘What?’ Jo said to me, wiping her cheeks with the cuff of her shirt.

‘You know what! You told her one socking great lie,’ I said admiringly.

‘Well, I couldn’t stand her going on and on like that.’

‘But she’ll find out that it’s not true,’ I said.

‘I’m going to
make
it come true,’ said Jo. ‘You’ll see.’

All the tight feeling in my tummy untwisted. It was OK. Of course Jo would get another job, easy-peasy, simple-pimple.

She was up early the next morning, hair washed, all made up, blouse fresh on, skirt carefully pressed. When I woke up she was walking up and down the bedroom, practising.

‘Good morning. My name’s Jo Enright. I’ve been the manageress of a large shop for the last year but now I feel it’s time for a change. Are there any new job opportunities in your company?’ she asked our bedroom wardrobe, shaking the sleeve of her dressing gown.

‘Good morning. I am Mr Wardrobe. Yes, Ms Enright, you can come and manage my clothes for me and I’ll pay you a million pounds a week,’ I said from under the covers.

‘Charlie! You didn’t half give me a fright!’ said Jo, finding my tummy through the duvet and tickling it.

‘Don’t make me laugh! I need to go to the loo. I’ll wet the bed, I’m warning you,’ I giggled, rolling around.

‘Well, get up and go, you lazy thing,’ said Jo, trying to tip me out. ‘Come on, you’ll be late for school. And I thought this new teacher of yours is dead strict?’

‘You’re telling me! Lisa and Angela and me didn’t feel like playing boring old rounders yesterday so we hid in the girls’ toilets. We’ve done that heaps of times and no-one ever thought a thing about it before, but Miss Beckworth came looking for us, right into the toilets, and when we all hid in a cubicle she peered underneath the door and said, “Will the girl with six feet please come out of this toilet immediately.” We thought we were really in for it, but she said she’d hated games at school too and as she’d already picked the two rounders teams we didn’t have to play just this one time and we thought
great
– but do you know what we had to do instead? Run round and round the playground without stopping for the entire lesson. We were absolutely
knackered
. And every time we ran past her and begged for mercy she said brightly, “Aren’t you lucky to be taking part in
my
rounders game, girls?” She’s so . . . slippery. You can’t suss out what she’s going to do next. Every time you get ready to hate her she’s funny and then when you start to think she’s an old softie she plays a trick on you.’ I was in the bathroom by this time, sitting on the loo.

‘She sounds a good teacher,’ Jo called. She
followed
me into the bathroom. ‘Do you think I look a bit older and more professional with my hair up? Yeah, I think so. Help me pin it up at the back, eh?’

She’s usually great at fixing her own hair but her hands were all fumbly this morning, and she couldn’t eat any breakfast because she said she was too nervous.

‘You’ve got to eat something. You don’t want to faint dramatically in the middle of a job interview,’ I said.

‘Maybe I won’t
get
any interviews,’ Jo said. Then she stopped and took a deep breath. ‘No. I’ve got to think positive. Right, Charlie?’

‘You bet. Good luck, Jo,’ I said, hugging her.

I hoped and hoped Jo would get a job that day. She went into town and she walked round in her high heels with this big bright smile on her face, going into all these different shops and introducing herself and asking and then nodding and walking out again, over and over, all day long. She came home and she kicked her shoes off and she howled. But then I made her a cup of tea and rubbed her feet and she stopped crying and the next day she tried again. And the next.

A shop selling weird way-out clothes was advertising for staff but they said Jo wasn’t wacky enough. A big store wanted a sales assistant for their ladies’ dress department but they said Jo wasn’t mature enough. A snobby shop selling designer clothes made it plain Jo wasn’t posh enough.

‘This is hopeless,’ said Jo, sighing.

She tried record shops, but she didn’t know enough about modern music. She’d been too busy bringing me up to dash down the disco. She tried bookshops, because she likes reading, but the only shop with a vacancy was full of all these studenty boys in jeans making jokey remarks, and the one with the scruffiest hair and the grubbiest T-shirt turned out to be the manager and although Jo said he was friendly it was obvious she didn’t fit.