Two Women (23 page)

 

‘Fucking hell, Susan, it’s like being in bed with an elephant. Move over, you fat whore!’

Barry was laughing as he tried to shunt her across the bed and on to what would be her side in future. She rolled over to help him and he laughed again.

Then, looking down at her in the moonlight, his face softened.

‘I’m sorry about today, love, really I am. It was nerves. I drank the Scotch to calm me nerves, see. I wish I’d listened to me mother and left it till the reception.’

He was dragging her out of her dress as he spoke.

‘Life your arse off the bed, Susan, this is hard enough as it is.’

She allowed him to strip her naked. He knelt in front of her and rubbed her belly gently.

‘My little boy is in there, swimming about getting brains and everything, ready to face the world. Bless him, I want to give him everything a boy should have.’

‘It could be a girl, Bal, there are two sexes in the world.’

He laughed.

‘Nah, no way is it a split-arse. It’s a boy, I made sure of that.’

Susan smiled. She loved Barry when he was like this. This was the man she wanted, not the other Barry, the one she was ashamed of, scared of even.

‘I’ll take him up Upton Park, show him football at its best. And I’ll take him to the park and play with him, make him into a man. Teach him to fight, to defend himself, be his own person. Learn him not to take shit off no one without forcing it back down their fucking throats. I will do all that for my son, Susan, because I’ll love him and I know what the world is really like.’

‘I hope he’s a gentle person, Bal, a bookish person. I want him to have an education, be someone. Not like us. You know, taking what we can to survive. I want him or her to have a choice in their lives. Be a good person, better than us and what we come from.’

Barry was quiet for a few moments, thinking about what she’d said. Susan was pleased about this. She wanted him to want what she wanted for their child.

Finally he spoke.

‘Listen,
Mrs Dalston
, if you think you’re turning my son into a fucking poofter then you had better think again. Now you’re getting away with murder here because I fucked up at the church and I know I owe you one. But if ever see my son with a book or anything remotely resembling one I will take your fucking head off your shoulders. Do you understand me? Fucking gentle! You’ll have him playing fucking netball before he knows what’s going on.’

He turned her over on to her belly then and forced her up on to all fours, even though she was trying to stay on her back. Eventually he dragged her around roughly. Digging his fingers into her shoulders, he whispered, ‘Don’t fucking push it tonight, Susan, okay? I ain’t in the mood.’

By the time he entered her she was on auto-pilot and ten minutes later he was finished. Her legs were aching, her shoulders were sore from his rough treatment and her belly was tight and uncomfortable.

Two minutes after he withdrew from her he was asleep. His arm lay across her and it felt like a steel band pinning her to the bed.

Lying there, white, drawn and exhausted, Susan cried again, only this time it was for her unborn child and for a life she realised she had thrown away. The little house was seen now through eyes unblinkered by love as the scruffy dump it really was, even if it was a step up from her mother’s flat.

The rest of her life rose before Susan and the fear it engendered set the child rolling inside her belly as if it too was rebelling against the fate that had sent it to the two people in that poky bedroom.

Caressing it gently, Susan tried to calm herself and the child. She was trapped and she had trapped herself, that was the worst of it. Susan Dalston, as she now was, had sentenced herself to life.

 

‘I mean it, Joey, what’s going on with you and Susan?’

He was drunk, but not so drunk he did not realise he was on dodgy ground here, very dodgy ground.

He decided he would front it out as usual.

‘What you fucking on about now? Me and Susan, what about us?’

June walked across the bedroom and stuck a finger in his face.

‘You heard me. Are you giving her one? I warn you, I was listening today at the window with your mother so remember that before you say a fucking word.’

Joey felt the fright in his chest. He was trying to remember what he had done and said but the drink had had him in its hold and he couldn’t remember much.

‘What did you hear then? A father talking to his daughter on her wedding day. Big deal.’

‘
We
, that is your mother and I, heard you apologising to her and trying to get your leg over again, that’s what we heard. You know I know, Joey. Why do we have to go through all this pretence? What I want from you is your word that you will leave her alone in future. No more and no less.’

He was silent still and June began to mock him.

‘ “I love you, Susan. You’re me best girl, you know that.”

Joey sat himself down on the bed and put his head in his hands.

‘Rubbing her belly . . . What’s wrong, Joey? You think it’s yours, do you? I suppose it could be. Then it would be your son and your grandson. That’s one for the record books, eh?’

Joey looked up then, into his wife’s eyes.

‘You’re jealous, ain’t you, June? Because I don’t love you like that and you know it. But is Susan mine, that’s what we have to sort out once and for all, isn’t it? Is Susan McNamara my daughter? I mean, she could easily be someone else’s, couldn’t she, June?’

June shook her head and grinned, showing yellow teeth.

‘You’ve always thought that, haven’t you, right from day one?’

She picked up her drink from the dressing table and gulped it down. ‘She’s yours all right, Joey, don’t you worry about that. It’s Debbie you should be wondering about, not Susan.’

Joey shrugged then, an irritating gesture that made her want to kill him.

‘Maybe I should start giving her one then?’

‘Debbie has too much sense to fall for that with you, mate. Did Susan give in gracefully or did you force her? Only from what she said today, I think you made her, Joey. I think you enjoyed making her do it, to get back at me for leaving you for Jimmy.’

‘Fuck off, June, you’re a pain in the arse. For your information she loved it, it was her who came to me. It’s only since Barry Dalston came on the scene that she’s changed towards me. It was her who started it all off actually. She missed you so she turned to me, we turned to each other . . .’

June began to undress.

‘If this was other people I might believe that. I know what it’s like to be sad, unloved and unwanted. I know that can cause things to happen. I remember someone saying once it often happens after the death of a mother. The husband and daughter turn to each other for comfort and it gets out of hand. But you’re not noble enough to do it for those reasons, Joey. People like that realise what they have done and they stop. You would enjoy doing it to her
because
she was your daughter. You try and pretend you think she isn’t because it makes you feel better. Well, she is yours. All yours. She is totally yours.

‘Only after today, of course, she’s Barry Dalston’s. He’s giving her one now, as you know. You watched them at it today. Me and your mother watched you watching them, so to speak. You’ve broken Ivy. I only hope you can repair the damage you’ve done to her because you could have murdered and she would have stood by you. But not for this. She was in a terrible state, terrified people would hear about it, find out and we would all be labelled child molesters.’

Joey stared at his wife. She was down to nothing but her bra and knickers now and was lighting a cigarette.

‘Do me a favour, June, please.’

His voice was small, quiet.

‘What’s that, Joey? Keep it all quiet, eh? Brush it under the carpet, what?’

He laughed nastily.

‘Give us a call at about eleven in the morning. Some of us have to go to work, okay?’

He jumped into bed and turned on his side.

‘Tell who you like, June, I don’t give a fucking toss. It’s your word against mine and let’s face it, if I lose me rag there ain’t many people going to say it to me face, is there?’

June sat on her side of the bed and looked down at him.

‘Only the Davidsons and the Bannermans.’

Joey laughed again.

‘You wouldn’t tell them, June, you know you’d only be cutting off your own nose, love. Now are you coming to bed? If not, turn off the light and piss off, I’m tired.’

June turned the light off and left the room. She dragged on a cardigan and went to sit in the front room. It was dark but she did not bother to put on the light. Her mind was reeling because she knew this was all her fault really.

She had guessed for a while and she had done nothing. She had found him out and still she had done nothing.

It had made her life much easier, to tell the truth. Plus Susan had made her jealous though she did not know why. She wasn’t pretty in any discernible way, she wasn’t anything really. It was her wanting to be so much better than her mother that really grated. Every time she had picked up a book and become lost in another world she had more or less made June’s life seem unimportant somehow.

Even though she knew her daughter was right, it hurt. Or maybe that was why it hurt. Because she was right.

She had never once cared that Joey was doing things to Susan that a father had no business doing to his own child. Well, she admitted to herself, she
had
cared but for the wrong reasons, always the wrong reasons.

She was jealous in case Susan affected the part of him June herself could never affect: his heart.

She was frightened he loved Susan properly. Cared for her more than he cared for his own wife, the mother of his children. The child he was taking to bed she had given birth to for him.

Why did she not care what he was doing to that child, their daughter? What was missing inside her that she still did not really care, was just glad that Susan was out of the house, out from under her roof?

All the other women had been nothing, she knew that, had always known that. Until Susan she had been sure she was the only person Joey McNamara had ever really cared for or needed.

Now she was not so sure.

Susan was not a bit of strange, as he referred to his other amours. Susan was his daughter, his child. His own flesh and blood. Was that the attraction?

June curled up on the sofa and lit another cigarette, its red spark the only light in the room other than the subdued shadowy glow of the street lamp outside.

It was chilly now, the treacherous cold that summer brings at the start of a fine day. She heard the dawn chorus, the little birds chirping away. Their noise would be drowned out soon by the traffic.

It was Sunday, the day of rest. People would sleep off hangovers, go up the pub or cook huge meals no one really wanted to eat.

She heard the clack, clack of her other daughter’s shoes as Debbie walked along the balcony towards the front door. Heard her key in the lock and her footsteps stumbling through the doorway. Getting up, she helped Debbie, who was drunk and practically incapable, into her bedroom. She stripped her off and Debbie fell asleep.

June looked down on to her sleeping daughter’s profile. She was pretty in a funny, cheap sort of way, but her body was stumpy and heavy like her father’s. She looked pretty only because people always looked at her then Susan, and compared them with each other.

As June gazed down at her she was aware that her husband had come into the room. Looking at him, she whispered. ‘Fancy some of Debbie now, do you? Or is there something else I don’t know?’

Joey pulled her from the room. Shutting the door none too gently, he bellowed, ‘Get your arse in that bed, woman, and shut the fuck up.’

June did as he said.

Not because she wanted to do it but because she was cold and tired. When he reached for her she was amazed at how she responded to him. If was as if they had been parted for years and had just come together after all that time. After missing one another, wanting and needing one another. They made love till the sun was high in the sky and their bodies were slippery with sweat. Yet not once did either of them utter a word.

Afterwards they slept in each other’s arms, something they had not done for years. June was at peace with herself and did not know why. All she did know was that she was glad. It was as if Susan had lost out somehow and she had won.

Though what exactly she wasn’t sure.

Chapter Twelve

Susan felt tired and irritable, it had been a long day. Married for only a month, and eight months pregnant, she was beginning to realise the extent of the work involved in keeping the house nice, cooking her new husband meals and having a heavy weight dragging her down from the moment she woke to the moment she went to bed.

But, all in all, she was enjoying herself.

Their wedding was now part of East End folklore. People had talked about it for days, all laughing and joking and making remarks. Susan had taken it all in good part and endeared herself to neighbours and friends alike. Her home was spotless, her washing was done regularly, and her step and her windows shone like beacons before the passing women.

Unlike her next-door neighbour, Doreen Cashman, who lived like a pig, let her kids run in the street and spent her days smoking fags and gossiping, Susan was accepted by the older women and taken to their hearts.

Susan, though, liked her new neighbour.

Doreen was a slut with long bleached yellow hair, a cigarette permanently dangling from her lips and a mouth like the Blackwall tunnel.

But she was funny, hilarious even, and Susan found her a good sort.

Barry, however, couldn’t stand her and made that fact very evident. Doreen did not care a hoot. She gave as good as she got, which did not endear her to him at all. She was the type of woman he referred to as a brass, and she
was
a brass in that she did moonlight as a prostitute now and again then told the world what she had done. Even the older women laughed at her antics when they were in the mood. Susan thought her a character, someone with personality, life pouring out of her.