Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (17 page)

I wondered sometimes, too, about all those tests I did, and what they might mean. Back at the Approved School, a week after Ginger Beard had left, and before we had cooked up the plan to escape, I'd asked Sister Catherine if I could look at my results.

“You know perfectly well what it says here,” she replied, flapping the pieces of paper he'd given her.

I blinked innocently at her.

“You no doubt got hold of your file and changed the figure,” she continued. “This handwriting is pathetic.”

When I remained silent, she was forced to say, “Should have put something more realistic, shouldn't you? A hundred eighty! Recite some Shakespeare, can you? Explain Pythagoras' theorem? Thought not . . .”

I was biting my nails, I remember, a new habit I had developed to help squash the desire to bite her. My mouth was too full to answer.

“You're a deceitful minx. But no one has an IQ of 180 and certainly not a wicked little heathen like you, Queenie Dove.”

And that was that.

6

My Apprenticeship

T
hat then was my education. I was about seventeen by the time I got out, and had learned plenty. The girls in the Young Offenders place found it hilarious that I was still a virgin and had loads of suggestions for how to put that right. The way they talked (like Stella), I realized that it was
unheard of
for a girl like me not to have been interfered with by
somebody.
Gloria and Beattie and the other Green Bottles must have been protecting me. I mean, Sly Roger. And others besides.

I couldn't wait to meet up with Stella again, and best of all, Bobby. He'd been out a few months earlier. The year was 1950 and boys were looking different: a sort of American style. You know, cut-back collar with large knotted tie, “Boston Slash Back” haircut and a housecoat jacket in light fawn, normally with brown flannels to match. And there were dance halls everywhere, with jiving and no one over twenty-five and a few American stragglers left over from the war, and colored men. There was still rationing—that was a shock, I'd have thought that would be over by now—but things
had
changed, and so had I: despite all that terrible bread and cubes of cheese and sweet tea and the stew with big lumps of pork fat in it, I'd got myself quite a figure. (I've never been one of those women who looks at herself in the mirror and takes everything apart, critical, you know. What a waste of time that attitude is! Young girls today make me sorry for them, always dissecting their own bodies, like they're one of those maps of a cow in a butcher's shop. Me, I take my lead from Gloria. I look in the mirror, slap my lovely fat behind and say to myself: yep, Queenie,
looking good
!)

I had a tiny waist, just like Scarlett O'Hara. (If I pulled the tape hard it read eighteen inches.) I suddenly had hips, making the fabric of my dress stretch in these sexy creases across the thighs. As for that lorry-driving geezer back then calling me “Chesty”—what can I say? I mean, I didn't ask for them. But they don't half draw the eye, and if I left one button on my little cardigan (always bought a size too small) undone and wore the bras that Gloria showed me— these conical numbers that point them like missiles—well, it made me laugh to see men's eyes pop. They just couldn't help themselves, even the nice ones.

Bobby could hardly believe it was me, that time, when I came back home and we went up to our favorite café on Bethnal Green Road to celebrate. I saw at once that he'd changed, too. I didn't know what to say about it. Maybe it wasn't a change exactly, but just a certainty, a solidifying of something that had been there all along. Or more likely it was just that I understood more, you know; that I'd learned after my time inside that such things existed.

Q
ueenie. Would you look at you. All grown up!”

He gives me an awkward hug, and that's as much acknowledgment as we make about the years apart we've just spent. But he's beaming at me, smiling and smiling, and he has a soft dark shadow across his top lip: his first faint trace of a moustache.

“I've got a load of stuff for you at Lauriston Road. Did Annie show you? A blue shirt . . . but I suppose it would be too small for you now. And maybe they chucked them out,” I start telling him.

“Don't worry. I've got this mate: he can get me anything like that.”

I try not to feel hurt. I watch him carefully. Mario brings him a mug of tea, a slice of fried bread, and a huge plate of bacon and mushrooms (“No eggs!” Bobby insists, with a sound of panic in his voice). Mario ruffles his hair and says, “So nice to see your sister back, eh son, she's a beauty, huh? Some nice boy fall for her now, eh?” and beams at me, and nods towards the new waiter, standing at the counter. “Like my nephew, my Tony!” shouts Mario, while the bloke he's pointing to stands behind the stacked plates with his black silky quiff, shoulders stiff with his attempt to ignore his uncle Mario's words.

Bobby looks Tony up and down, then slowly straightens his hair, using a comb from his back pocket and the mirrors above the wood-paneled walls, to make sure it's just so.

I notice Bobby carefully touching everything, whispering the numbers to himself, and counting. I notice him looking at the formica tabletop, which is almost a shade of yellow, though it might pass for cream. I want to ask him: how was it then, in borstal? We heard so many stories about the beatings. Stella knew a boy in borstal, too, and he told her about another boy who once messed his pants on a long training exercise, a long walk, and the screw made him take them off, there and then, and rubbed his face in it, so that he was covered, stinking, and you could barely see his eyes for the brown shit, all over his face.

I try not to think of this, as it's making me want to be sick. And it's not just Bobby's quirky superstitions I'm worrying about; it's the other thing that frightens me more. Surely they beat him for that, if not the screws then the other boys. Or did they encourage it, is that where he learned it, was it forced on him? This bit doesn't ring true, though. I know my brother and I remember now, sipping at my tea, watching him carefully, the way he was already doting on that older boy, Jimmy, that Irish boxer boy, and liked to mope around after him, and Robby, too, the boy he absconded with, there was something about him . . .

“I'm boxing you know, down at Repton Boys Club,” Bobby says, as if he is reading my mind. His mouth is stuffed with the bread he's chasing round his plate, mopping up brown sauce.

“Great,” I say.

“And I've got me some work, too.”

Bobby glances around the café. The place is heaving, every seat filled. The customers are mostly known to us, and definitely known to the owner, who shouts things every five minutes like, “Geoff! Need a top-up? Maria, was that three sugars now, darling, or four?” The door is open to the street to try to ease the smoky atmosphere, but it's still one big swirl of cigarette smoke and hot gusts of frying fat. From a lorry parked outside, a man traipses in and out of the café carrying boxes raised on his shoulder—tomatoes, oranges—which he stacks behind the aluminum countertop, where it's Tony's job to slam the keys of the till and pay him. I notice Tony looking my way, glancing from under very black eyebrows and then glancing back, not wanting me to see that he's clocking me. I sip my tea and allow myself a teeny smile.

“Who ordered a weak lemon tea? Was it you, Billy Boy?” shouts Mario to someone else. He seems to battle through the fug of sizzling fat in the air to land the mug of tea on the table.

“Yeah . . . there's a firm I'm fixing up some cars for,” Bobby says.

“Cars? But you can't even drive!”

He looks miffed then, and pushes his chair back, replacing his knife and fork really,
really
carefully. Like he's going to be inspected on it: the exact placing of knives and forks on plates.

“Paddy's teaching me. He's a grease monkey. He works in a garage down Hackney Wick owned by the firm. You remember Paddy?”

I don't, but I pretend to, for the sake of easing the conversation again, of making things smooth between us. I want to say it's OK, it's all OK with me, whoever you are and whatever you do, but instead I beam at him, and grin and grin, and try to show him with my eyes how much I've missed him and how glad I am to be back.

“Hear anything? About . . . Mum, I mean?” Bobby asks.

A plate crashes noisily behind the counter. There's a second's silence and then the hubbub starts up again. I look down at my mug and count to five. I don't know about you, Bobby, but I get by
not
thinking about Mum, and not wanting to hear anything about her.

“Annie said she'd been and gone and had an accident in there. Set fire to her skirt with a fag or something,” Bobby continues, watching my face carefully.

“How does Annie know anything about Mum?”

“Gloria. Gloria visited Mum, she said . . . Mum was in a bad way . . .”

“No,” I reply, after a long pause, spilling sugar onto the table from the spout on the container as I check it's working, and casually stirring my tea. Round and round. “I haven't heard anything at all about Mum. I know she's still there. That's all.”

“Well, we've had ourselves a taste of it now, ain't we? Nuthouse, hospital, borstal, prison, all the same . . .”

A tremor runs through me, now he's mentioned her name. I push my mug away. Mario is onto me at once, asking if I want a refill, but I quickly shake my head.

“What do you think of Gracie?“ I ask Bobby, changing the subject. “Proper little madam, don't you think?”

And the mood is shifted by the sudden shouts from Mario, that the “Old Bill's outside, everyone, everybody parked nicely nicely? Everybody all righty?”

Bobby and I take it as our cue to get up and leave.

W
hat eased the feelings, the prickle that Bobby talking about Mum started, was one thing: a trip up the West End to practice my art. It took a while before I dared. Months went by, and I itched to go. I waited until after Christmas, until a day when I thought I might explode if I didn't. Money was tight, of course. I'd been living off what Bobby gave me, and living at Lauriston Road with Dad and Annie and that whiny, spoiled princess, Grace, sharing my old bedroom with her. I had coupons but I decided to leave those at home. I had another way to get the things I needed. Makeup. Clothes. That sort of thing.

On the bus there, I could hear that screw in my head, telling me that I was my own worst enemy, but I shook it off, thinking: only if I'm caught. Which I won't be.

Pancake makeup. Satin blouses with pussy-bow neckties. Department stores where my old gift for spotting the shop walkers had not deserted me, and my talent for subtly rolling the clothes really really neatly and walking confidently to the door with them in my bag was as strong as ever. Eyelash curlers. Eyebrow pencils. Nylons. I wore a coat with big wide sleeves, and piled corsets and stockings up them until I could get to a loo and put them in the bag. These were the days before cameras and electronic tags. These were the days when department stores were the most glamorous places you could hope to be.

After I was back in the habit, it was easy. To stockpile the stuff I needed, to make the change into life on the outside. One time I got involved in a long natter with a girl on the makeup counter in Harrods about cold cream—stocks were low, I think she was trying to keep us entertained—and when she was distracted for a moment by another customer I managed to slip a little tub of Elizabeth Arden face cream into my bag.

It would have been nice to go with Gloria or Beattie or some of the other Green Bottles, but those days were over. They had gone their separate ways, or perhaps got themselves boyfriends, or, in more than one case (Josie and Dolly), were inside, doing time of their own. I hadn't seen or heard from Gloria, either.

What I remember now about those trips on my own was standing in the ladies' powder room in Harrods afterwards, leaning against that cold tiled wall, my hands trembling. I remember dipping a finger into that fondant pink cream, and thinking: it smells like freedom. Or perhaps, to be more accurate, I just thought: never again. This is the life for me. And I dabbed myself with a nicked bottle of the most expensive perfume in the world in those days, or so it was always said; from a lovely shiny black bottle with a red cherry top: Joy
.
I'd wait until the shaking in my body calmed down, or until I heard the cubicle door next to mine swing and knew someone else had come into the powder room. Then I'd walk out with a spring in my step, smelling of money and Joy, in a way that would make Gloria proud.

S
hame your brother's a rooty toot. A fruit. He's gorgeous.”

Stella, of course, doesn't mince her words. I think about denying it, but decide not to bother. It's not as if Bobby can hear her. We're in a noisy underground dance hall at the Angel Islington. Bobby is here with his colored friend from the boxing club, Landy. We like the way that new places have sprung up since we've been away—mostly coffee shops—but Stella has yearnings to go up the West End, where the men she says are “more dangerous” and where it's
really
happening. This place belongs to another era.

“Too many local boys and old-time spivs here,” Stella decides, drawing on her cigarette and lounging against a pillar so she can watch the dancers. Behind the dancing space is a raised platform with an eight-piece band. Stella's annoyed because we've been here ten minutes and no one has yet asked us to dance. She only wants to dance with a colored fellow anyway and there's only a handful here, because she's heard they're the best, definitely the best dancers.

“Not him,” I say, pointing to a tall one in an Air Force uniform, trying to jive. “Look at him: he's got two left feet.”

“Everyone says it about the blacks, Queenie. It ain't just me. They're naturals.” She has to shout above the band.

“Just because everyone says it, don't make it true.”

At this point, a man steps our way. He's been walking round the circle of girls at the edge of the room sizing us up. Stella pushes herself forward and sticks her tits out, nudging me and making it as clear as she possibly can that she fancies him. I recognize him at once from the café in Bethnal Green: Mario's nephew Tony. Our eyes lock as we acknowledge with a sort of embarrassment that we know one another, and his look seems to say that yes, after all, maybe his uncle was right and I might well be a beauty. Tony takes his hand out of his pocket and grinds his cigarette on the floor. Then he just leans forward and taps me on the shoulder: my signal to dance.

We slouch together onto the dance floor, and I'm aware of Stella's angry flouncy gesture, as she swishes her hair over her shoulder and narrows her green eyes: watching our hopeless efforts to dance with each other. A bit of shuffling; Tony puts his hand in the small of my back once; we stare again into each other's eyes, and give up.