by Jenny Eclair
Things were going to change, she could feel it in her waters, and when she asked Antoine for a light she made sure she steadied the trembling match he held between his thumb and forefinger by clasping the frayed cotton cuff around his bony wrist and looking deep into the chocolate pools of his eyes.
19
The Plan
Southend, February 1962
Two weeks later, Serena was still expecting Antoine to turn up at Keddies. Sometimes, when she left work via the staff exit at the back of the building, she walked all the way round to the front of the store to see if he was waiting there.
She was well aware that the world of punching in and out and regulation exits and entrances would be a mystery to a poet like him, but as for getting the wrong supermarket, that was impossible; Keddies was Southend’s one and only convenience store. Ask any local and they’d point you in the right direction.
Every day for a fortnight she made a little more effort before leaving the house.
‘I can’t see why you need to wear false eyelashes for work, Serena,’ her mother sniped across the breakfast table. She was turning into a right dried-up old bag.
‘Well you never know who might pop by,’ Serena sniped back, swiping the best-looking pair of nylons off the drying rack in front of the stove. Her mother worked as a receptionist at one of the smarter hotels along the seafront, so no one ever saw her legs, and while Serena herself might spend rather too much time boxed in behind her till, she still had cause to roam the shop floor on occasion, finding out prices, fetching a new till roll from the stockroom. She couldn’t go round with great big potatoes in her stockings. Besides, her mother’s legs had had their day, how old was she now? Forty-something, her ankles were puffy and she was grey around the temples, poor cow.
‘Oh, so who are you expecting?’ chimed in Nanna T. ‘King Zog of Albania? Princess Margaret, stocking up on Spam?’
Her grandmother was eating boiled eggs messily. As far as Serena could make out there were at least four of them rolling around in their shells on her plate as Nanna Tipping randomly smacked at them with a teaspoon. Why didn’t she put them in egg cups? Honestly, that woman was the end.
‘None of your beeswax, Nanna,’ retorted Serena, knowing her grandmother would forgive her anything. She enjoyed it when Ida and Serena had words, she loved a bit of conflict, which is why her favourite pastime was watching the Saturday afternoon wrestling on the telly, gleefully shouting at the tiny flickering screen while biting the heads off jelly babies.
Three weeks after first setting eyes on Antoine, Serena had given up hope. She was eating crisps as she crossed Keddies’ car park, and had very recently applied a large dollop of toothpaste onto the throbbing pimple which had emerged like Mount Vesuvius on her chin.
She was still smarting from the very public dressing down Mr Salmon had given her that afternoon, after she’d accidentally short-changed his wife (his wife, no less), by a whole nine pence. ‘Nine pence, that’s nearly an entire shilling,’ Mrs Salmon kept repeating, pointing at Serena, her pale toadlike chin quivering with rage. ‘And not a word of apology, Gordon, oh no, thinks too much of herself to say sorry. I ask you, I don’t know what the world is coming to.’
Serena had been unceremoniously removed from till duties and sent to work shelf-stacking with all the other gormless half-wits who couldn’t be trusted with loose change.
By the time she had finished for the day she was weepy with humiliation and rage. And to add insult to injury, she had snagged her mother’s best nylons on a nail in the stockroom. She could spit, she seriously could.
Her mood improved the minute she spotted him leaning against a lamppost, dressed in black, his pipe-cleaner frame bent into a series of angles.
He looked like he could have been drawn with a ruler: sharp elbows, sharp knees, even his shoes were pointed. Serena could have sworn he was wearing patent leather ballroom dancing shoes, one of which trailed an untied shoelace.
‘You could trip and break your neck,’ she said as he fell into step with her. He seemed to have a slight limp.
‘I think you should run away with me,’ he responded, and the cage around her heart seemed to swing open and her spirit soared. Well, obviously she should, this was the solution and the answer to all her dreams. How many times in a girl’s life did a poet and musician ask her to leave everything behind and set out on a journey into the unknown?
‘Don’t be daft,’ she replied with her mouth, while her guts screamed, Yessss . . . finally!
She didn’t take him home. She didn’t want her grandmother saying peculiar things and anyway it was tripe night and the whole place would stink.
They sat on a bench overlooking the cement-coloured sand and he held her hand and told her how life could be different if they disregarded the rules. He told her that people didn’t have to confine themselves to married units and that there was an alternative way of living in a shared environment with other like-minded people. For a moment she wondered whether he expected her to go with him to Israel and join a kibbutz like Susie and Jimmy, which would be tricky considering she didn’t even have a passport. Then again, according to Susie, neither did he.
She needn’t have worried. ‘Cornwall,’ he said. ‘There are seals,’ he said.
‘But you don’t even know me,’ she said, and he looked into her eyes and in his beautiful husky tones he explained how that wasn’t important, how as soon as they met there had been a spiritual connection and that’s all that mattered. Then he slid his hand inside her coat, up her jumper, between the buttons of her blouse and, delving beneath the webbing of her bra, he pinched her nipple, kissing her as she gasped.
She could have kissed him all night. As it was, when she got home to a plate of cold tripe, the skin around her mouth was ragged and chapped. One day she might have to ask him to shave.
Same time next week, he would meet her in the car park, a friend would pick them up in a car, and they would drive to Cornwall.
‘Maybe bring biscuits,’ he breathed into her hair as he pinched her other nipple, slightly too hard this time, before disappearing into the mist that had rolled in from the sea and shrouded the promenade.
Serena didn’t breathe a word to either her mother or her grandmother. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, she would leave a note, she would even leave a forwarding address if she had one, but it was all so deliciously vague. Cornwall may as well have been Disneyland so far as Serena was concerned. To her it was a far-off fairy-tale place with magical seals, a place where smugglers once hid rum in caves – this much she remembered from school. What else? Cornish butter, they sold that in the shop, which meant there must be cows, cows and a beach, cows on the beach. Serena had a bad dream involving this combination and cried out in the night. ‘It sounded like you were mooing,’ her grandmother reported in the morning. ‘Mooing like a cow, you silly cow,’ and she laughed and did that thing she did with her false teeth, pushing them out and then sucking them back in before they could topple out of her mouth. It was disgusting.
The day after Antoine met her from work she bought a suitcase from the market in her dinner hour and hid it in the storeroom at Keddies. Every day she smuggled in a few necessities from home and added them to the case. ‘You won’t need much,’ he had instructed her. ‘Possessions only drag you down. But you might need a jumper,’ he cautioned.
She packed a Fair Isle sweater and her lucky green V-neck, then over the course of the next few days, she added a cream silk blouse, a striped poplin shirt, a pink satin top, a tweed skirt and two pairs of slacks. The suitcase was bulging before she crammed in a pair of gold slingbacks – it might not be a city, but if Bristol had jazz clubs then surely Cornwall would too.
She decided to carry her underwear in a plastic bag along with a large tin of hairspray and her toiletries.
When the day finally came she woke up late and, in a last-minute panic, she put her bikini on under her clothes. One day, when it got warmer, she would want to swim wi
th the seals.
20
Make Your Mind Up Time
Southend, February 1962
Serena stood in the car park behind Keddies in the rain. She was holding her small suitcase in one hand and the plastic bag full of tangled bras and knickers in the other. She had no umbrella and soon she would be soaked right down to her bikini. She could feel her eyeliner running in small black rivers down her face but she wasn’t crying, not yet.
The lamplights shone a dim sodium yellow, the place was deserted and for want of anything better to do, Serena started counting, counting cows lined up on a beach. By the time she got to a hundred, Antoine would be here. Half past five he’d said, and according to her watch it was ten to six.
Her mum had given her the little Timex when she was fifteen. Ida said she was old enough to have something nice, but it was only plate and some of the gold had worn thin. She’d left a note in her bedroom, propped up behind the alarm clock she’d never have to set for Keddies again. Her mother was working a late shift that evening and as Nanna T rarely attempted the stairs any more, Serena would be miles away by the time the note was discovered.
Dear Mum and Nan, I’m going away for a bit, I don’t want you to worry, I know exactly what I’m doing, I promise.
But did she? Did she actually know what she was doing? She hadn’t pictured it like this, leaving in the dark and the rain. She’d pictured him arriving on a horse, a black stallion like Black Beauty, that was the picture she’d had in her head.
‘A friend’s place,’ he’d said. ‘A big old house, with turrets and a croquet lawn.’
‘Posh?’
‘Yes.’
Oh God, what if it was haunted? She believed in ghosts and that sort of thing. Serena shivered in her patent boots, which were meant to be showerproof but weren’t. She was so cold she almost wished she’d worn her nan’s old gabardine, rather than a silly thin leatherette jacket. Trying to find some shelter from the rain, she moved closer to the wall and kept counting, only this time more slowly. She had been lied to before by mean-faced men out for one thing, but Antoine hadn’t struck her as that type. Then it hit her, that Antoine might not realise he’d been lying: what if he thought he was telling the truth? Susie’s big concerned face loomed up in her subconscious: ‘ . . . he had a massive nervous breakdown’.
Bloody hell, what if she had fallen for the ramblings of a madman? What if he didn’t turn up and she had to return home, and fry Spam fritters for her grandmother – because that’s what she did on the nights her mother wasn’t home and she had to take over: deal with the tea, keep the fire going and put fresh newspaper down in the budgie’s cage.
Bring some biscuits, he’d said, and she’d bought a packet of lemon puffs during her tea break, but she’d left them in the ladies and now she was hungry and it was raining and her bones were damp with cold and fear.
If only there was some way of getting back inside the supermarket. It was so frustrating knowing that only a few feet away lay aisles and aisles of edible goods. Why hadn’t she planned this better? A picnic, that’s what was needed on a long car journey; a loaf of bread and some cheese would have been a good idea, maybe some sliced ham and a fruit cake. No wonder Antoine hadn’t shown up, he must have realised how useless she was. A better woman would have made a shepherd’s pie and put it in a container ready to heat up once they got to Cornwall. Serena had heard the married women talk in the canteen at work. ‘The key to a successful relationship,’ Big Joyce from the cut meats counter said, ‘is gravy. Sex and gravy, that’s all men want. And the occasional pork pie.’
God, she’d have killed for a pork pie.
A car swung round the corner, spraying Serena with filthy water as it splashed through a puddle before screeching to a halt in the middle of the empty car park.
Soaked now to the eyebrows, Serena approached the vehicle with caution. It was a Mini. Good job he’d told her that a small suitcase would have to suffice. She peered into the driver’s window, where a fat ginger-haired man sat stuffed like kapok into a tweed overcoat behind the steering wheel.
The driver wound down his window and a snub-nosed girl with a face full of freckles leaned over his shoulder from the back seat and fumed into his ear, ‘I bloody told you, you can’t trust him as far as you can throw him – the girl’s here, but he’s not, and if you think she’s having the front seat while I die of claustrophobia in the back, you’ve got another think coming.’
And with that the girl manoeuvred herself into the front of the car and climbed out of the passenger door.
‘Well, get in,’ she instructed Serena, tipping the seat forward and gesturing into the back of the Mini. Seeing Serena hesitate, the girl put her hands on her hips and barked, ‘If you’re coming, get in, because we can’t hang around here like cheese at fourpence, it’s perishing out.’
As Serena dutifully climbed into the back seat she noticed that Miss Bossy Boots 1962 was wrapped up in a big sheepskin coat. Maybe she could ask to borrow it, until her things dried out.
‘I’m Karl,’ the driver announced. ‘With a K.’
The passenger door slammed shut.
‘And I’m Sandy,’ added the freckly one. She would be quite attractive if she smiled, thought Serena, but Sandy’s mouth was firmly set in disapproving mode as she lit a Peter Stuyvesant without offering anyone else one and proceeded to tear Antoine to shreds. ‘I do hope you weren’t expecting to be an item,’ she threw over her shoulder at Serena. ‘Antoine doesn’t do relationships, hasn’t got enough space in his head what all the other voices. Anyway, we can’t wait for him, bloody car’s been overheating since Chelmsford, if we don’t keep going we’ll never make it.’
Serena looked at her watch. She could still get out, they could drop her at the next set of lights. If the signal turned red, she would simply demand that she wanted to get out, there was still time to get home before her mother read the note, there was still time to fry Spam fritters and get the chip pan out, she could change into clean dry pyjamas, the flannelette ones she hadn’t been able to squeeze into her bloody silly little suitcase.
Sometimes, by the time she got home, her nan had already peeled two big potatoes and all Serena had to do was cut them into chips with the crinkle chip cutter and drop them into boiling fat, open a tin of peas, butter a couple of slices of white bread, fetch the ketchup and Bob’s your uncle. She might even be able to return the suitcase to the market.
By tomorrow she could be back at Keddies, ignoring the winking boy on wet fish and putting her pools money in.
Oh God, what if her syndicate won the blinking pools and she hadn’t put her subs in? That would take the bloody biscuit that would. Yes, she would get out at the lights round the corner. She would simply inform the two strangers that she had changed her mind and wanted to go home for her tea.
Only the car didn’t stop because the lights were on green, the moment was lost and in that split second, as the car sailed through the lights, Serena decided to hell with it, she was eighteen years old and it was time she had an adventure. She could always come back. There was bound to be a train she could catch. As for money, she had plenty, what with cashing in her post office savings and her Christmas work bonus, plus the fiver she’d found in Bronwen Jackson’s coat pocket that time when the cloakrooms had been empty. Poor Bronwen had cried her eyes out. ‘A fiver,’ she sobbed, ‘a whole blinking fiver!’ They’d all had to open their handbags for Mr Salmon to inspect. As if she’d have put the fiver in her purse – it was tucked under her foot; Salmon would never have the nerve to ask them to remove their nylons.
And then there was the till money, all the sixpences she’d been stashing away for months now. Her mental arithmetic was admittedly poor, but there were perks to being notoriously bad at your job, and those perks came in the shape of pilfered coins, loads of them – plus the occasional note when she dared.
The money was all safely stashed in a pink nylon quilted toilet bag that her mother bought her for Chr
istmas. Ida had filled it with bath cubes and a pumice stone for making her feet all dainty in the bath. Serena had left her nan the pumice stone on the side of the bath. Ida usually managed to push her mother up the stairs once a week for a proper soak and a hair wash.
‘You’re quiet,’ snapped Sandy. ‘Don’t tell me you wish you weren’t coming, cos we’re not taking you back now. And by the way, there’s petrol money to take into consideration.’
‘I’ve got cash,’ responded Serena.
‘Oh good,’ replied Sandy, ‘because Karl and I are brassic. So what do you say we pull over for fish and chips before we get too far off the beaten track?’ And with that Karl tugged down hard on the steering wheel and the car came to a halt outside the Tasty Friar on the edge of town. ‘Come on then,’ Sandy demanded, reaching round and holding out her hand to Serena. ‘Cough up. The least you can do to say thanks for the lift is buy supper – we’ll talk about the petrol money later.’
Silently Serena handed over a crumpled pound note. Greedy bitch better not order any extras. ‘I’ll just have some of your chips,’ she muttered, and Sandy flounced off with a ‘suit yourself’ and a warning to Karl not to cut the engine.
Left alone together in the tiny car, Serena tried to think of something she could say to the mass of bundled-up stranger in the driver’s seat, but it was Karl who broke the silence.
‘So, have you been before?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she replied.
‘I go for the birds,’ he told her. ‘Nests and eggs, that sort of thing. I’m interested, you know, in ornithology.’ His bug eyes met hers in the rear-view mirror. ‘Sea birds in particular.’
‘Like seagulls?’ she ventured. ‘I’m always terrified one’s going to shit on my head. I mean, I know it’s meant to be good luck, but it’s not really, is it, not when you’ve had your hair done.’ And she laughed to show that she was joking and that she was a good sport, but he dropped his gaze and stared through the window at the fogged-up door of the fish-and-chip shop until Sandy reappeared with a bundle of newspaper parcels and a man by her side.
