by Anne Peile
‘Go on, find us a number from the books.’ While she began to clack at the receiver rest I opened a directory. ‘See if you can find us a teacher’s number, we’ll give them a heavy breather. Try the Latin teacher’s, go on, in the A–D’.
I ran my finger down the columns for the Latin teacher and, in so doing, I found the listing for my father’s name. Crowded into the telephone box on the bright Battersea pavement, where the ornate bricks of the baths threw back the warmth of the sun, I smiled in recognition at the entry on the printed page. I wondered why I had not thought to look before. His address was 33 Oakley Street, SW3.
‘Well, get a move on, have you found it?’
‘Not her. She’s not in here. I’ll try someone else.’
In the afternoon we went to Clapham Junction and roamed the departments of Arding and Hobbs until the millinery assistants told us to leave. Coming out of the side door onto Lavender Hill we saw that a crowd had gathered outside the record store named the Slipped Disc.
‘Let’s have a butchers,’ Alison said, propelling us through the traffic. The singer Desmond Dekker was signing copies of his newly released record. We had no money to buy one but a member of the entourage handed us each a copy. Looking at me, he said, ‘Free – if you give me your phone number.’ I thought he must be speaking to someone else. I looked about me.
‘He meant you, thickhead,’ said Alison as we walked away, ‘God, you’re so slow sometimes. You were well in there. He really fancied you.’
I was dumbfounded. I saw the world from within the outline that people like my grandmother and the games mistresses had drawn around me. They had told me that I was fat and ungainly and unlovely, and therefore, I assumed, I was unlovable. It had not occurred to me that I might ever be found attractive. When I looked in a mirror I always stood to one side so that only half of me was reflected.
‘Strewth, wake up, girl, do,’ said Alison and I felt a lip edge of confident pleasure begin to curl. She was speaking through chunks of nougat, biting off a solid bar, ‘And talking of doing it and all, I might as well tell you, I’ve got a boyfriend now, Beccles. And I’m not really a virgin anymore.’
Stewart Beccles was the tall, serious Jamaican boy from her estate. I was astonished by the nonchalance with which she imparted this admission. Further, I saw that I would have expected my friend to have been somehow changed by such an event, yet she was not.
‘Where did you do it, and when, when did you do it?’
‘On the stairs. Last Tuesday. It’s all right as it goes, you should try it.’
Without delay I began to test the theory that Alison, and by inference, the man from the record company had advanced, gauging in the eyes of men that passed me in the street and in cars, their response to the way that I looked. When I saw how they reacted to me it was headier than any alcohol. I stopped covering myself up with layers of cardigans and coats.
Two days later the council announced that due to the coming of the New Covent Garden market, Alison’s family were to be rehoused to an estate on the site of the old Croydon Airfield. Her mother was delighted, she said that it would be healthier, with green spaces and a residents’ club. I cried over Alison leaving and she cried over Beccles.
My consolation lay in the list at the back of the exercise book. I had written down my father’s address. Now that I could be sure that men liked looking at me I wanted him to see me as well.
Ron was surprised when I offered to brush out his car, ‘What’s this, Bob a Job Week?’
As I walked down the hall with the brush and pan I heard him say to my mother: ‘She’s really bucked up since she lost all that weight. She’ll give her sister a run for her money, looks wise.’
I had offered to sweep out the car because I knew that Ron kept an A–Z in the door compartment. Although I was charged with excitement I set myself first to sweep steadily at the carpet where he flicked his cigarette ash, just in case the two of them were watching me. When it was done I opened out the A–Z on the floor of the car; I found the index and then the page and the location in relation to Albert Bridge. With a surge of happiness for the neatly labelled roads I saw how straightforward it would all be.
A letter arrived to say that my essay had won the competition.
‘What d’you win?’ asked Lin.
‘Book tokens.’
‘Great,’ she said, with sarcasm.
Lin and my mother were each and both preoccupied. Problems had arisen with Ron’s wife; she had told him that she needed more money. My mother said that he would have to moonlight at night for a security firm, ‘He’s deadbeat tired as it is,’ she fretted. Lin’s period was late. She was booked for a clinic in the women’s hospital at Clapham South. There was a hard frost and patches of ice remained on the paths of Clapham Common. Lin slipped and broke the urine specimen bottle she had in the pocket of her sheepskin coat. She turned back home and missed the appointment. When she came in her tights were torn and dirty and her eyes like those of a small animal that lives in woodland. I wanted to demonstrate sympathy towards her but I knew that she would repel me. I asked her if she would like a cup of coffee but she said that she would rather have a fucking drink and went to lie down. I returned to my homework which was ‘The Pardoner’s Tale’.
In the evening my mother asked me, ‘You wouldn’t mind, would you, if Ron moved in with us for a bit?’
I thought how horrible it would be; him smoking when he went to the lavatory so that there was the smell there afterwards and often a cigarette end floating in the water of the bowl. The noises from him and my mother, grunting in her bedroom. His grey nylon socks with maroon patterns visible beneath the short trouser legs and the two undisciplined Alsatian cross dogs which he sometimes brought with him.
‘No, of course not,’ I said.
That night I took Dream Days from the shelf and put it under my pillow; next day I took it to school and kept it hidden in my desk. For a time I waited for my mother to notice that it was missing but I do not believe that she ever did.
On the first night of Ron living with us my mother served us fish fingers with instant mashed potato and tinned spaghetti. She must have felt the need to excuse herself for she announced, defensively,
‘I can’t be expected to muck about in the kitchen, not when I’ve been working all day.’
‘You going to wash up for your mum, then?’ Ron asked me as he lit a cigarette and blew a fan of smoke across his smeared plate.
‘No,’ my mother put in hastily, ‘No, she and I will do it together. We need to have a little talk.’
I thought it might be about the Literae Humaniores scholarship. The school had sent home a letter explaining the arrangements for the exam. The tray-shaped draining board, bolted to the side of the sink, was very small, you had to dry things promptly to give the washer-up the space to put the next item down. As I snatched up a plate she asked, ‘Have you thought about getting a little job, on Saturdays maybe? Somewhere down Northcote Road or the Junction. It would be nice to have a bit more pocket money now, wouldn’t it? Now that you’re taking a pride in yourself.’
I was embarrassed on her behalf. Not just for her underlying motivation in wanting me out of the flat more often but because of the sham, flimsy ploy from which she had fashioned her excuse. I wished that she could have done better. The cutlery made the unpleasant, scraping sound that it always makes when picked up from a metal surface in a bunch.
‘All right, I’ll see what I can find. Have you read the letter from school yet, they were asking me today?’
‘Give me a chance, do. They’re always sending some damn thing home from that place.’
I took my homework to my bedroom, it was sines and cosines and quite beyond my understanding. I began shading in the little boxes of the tables with a soft pencil, enumerating the shops along the Northcote Road to which I might apply.
In growing up, and sometimes in after life, if it is lived under personal or other restrictions, there is a bracing sen
se of liberation that comes with the notion of disobedience or of consciously flouting the rules or the recommendations of another person. It is fearful yet exciting, foregoing timidity allows more admiration of oneself and the self as seen by others. Sometimes, on the edge of sleep, dreams came in which I fell, sometimes just over a kerb, sometimes from the great height of a bridge; physicians say that it resembles, fractionally, episodes of petit mal. Always the sensation of falling made me jerk awake, afraid and dry-mouthed, sometimes I wondered how it would be if I let the fall continue, what would I have seen. In the matter of a job, bored and idly doodling on the pages of School Mathematics, the pleasurable realisation came to me that I could consciously discount my mother’s wheedling suggestions of Northcote Road or Clapham Junction. I could go straight across the river to SW3.
Several times a week the Latin teacher would seek me out saying, ‘Let’s find ourselves a quiet corner,’ and, her patient manner moderating her suppressed excitement for my opportunity, she prepared me for the scholarship paper. It had been decided that I must continue with the O level subjects as normal and so she borrowed timetable gaps within the ordinary school day; she brought us fruit gums in a box to eat.
Because my mother had not read the letter, placing it instead in the seashell decorated wooden rack on the mantelpiece, I almost missed the scholarship exam. At a morning assembly on that day, I was sitting as usual upon the hard bench, minutely inspecting my nails as teenage girls are wont to do. Our form’s places were beside the honours board, remembering in gilt lettering girls of the ’twenties and ’thirties whose Christian names, Violets and Ethels and Mauds, made them seem irretrievably historic. I sensed some commotion at the end of the row and then, with all heads turned to stare, I was ushered out of the hall.
‘What on earth are you doing here?’ my form teacher asked. ‘You are supposed to be in the exam at half past ten.’
In the corridor the Latin teacher whose face was white and drawn, the form teacher and the school secretary surrounded me in agitation: ‘…Such a privilege’ said one, ‘…there’s only three children in the whole country sitting this paper today.’
Between them they decided that they must not interrupt the headmistress in assembly; a taxi was called and the mufflered driver took me to an institutional building somewhere off Gower Street. He asked if I was being punished for something.
An elderly man in a tweed jacket was to adjudicate; he looked at me as if he expected me to do something vulgar; I sensed it was because I was wearing eye make-up. The other candidates were a girl whose father was at the Ghanaian embassy and a boy whose clothes and manner seemed so outdated that first of all I felt protective towards him. However, when he spoke to me and to the other girl who was so nervous that she seemed about to be ill, he was most assured and patronising. The adjudicator, whose teeth were stained, showed him favour. I did not find the questions to be especially difficult; my teacher had anticipated the content from Books I to VI of The Aeneid and had further rehearsed me in Metamorphoses, Books I to IX. When I put up my hand to request more paper the elderly man was terse. At home I did not tell them that I had taken the exam.
On the Saturday morning when I went to seek work I borrowed the make-up from Lin’s dressing table while she was still asleep. Her mascara was of the block kind, she spat in it to mix it. Sometimes, in consequence, it grew a layer of mould on top which I would clean away, mixing the block freshly with tap water. I considered thus that I was doing her a service by borrowing it.
Lin stirred, bleary. Her latest boyfriend managed a pub belonging to his uncle; a modern premises near Wandsworth Bridge, it had a concrete terrace with tables set beside the river. Lin had stayed late, helping to clear up.
‘Get us a coffee, a frothy one with boiling milk; make sure you really boil it. And chocolate biscuits, if she’s bought any more.’
She sat up for the coffee and eyed me suspiciously. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Just shopping. I thought I might go down Kings Road.’
‘Get you,’ and then, ‘got any money?’
‘No, not really. I can just look, I suppose.’
She regarded me pityingly but then, grumbling as she stretched for her handbag, she gave me two pound notes.
‘Piss off then,’ she said, ‘I’m going back to sleep.’
Half way along the Kings Road I found the Great Gear Trading Company. Once a vast garage premises, it had been converted into an indoor market housing stalls which sold clothing and jewellery and the little bottles of scented oils in which patchouli vanquished all other smells. When I asked about a job a stallholder told me to go and find the manager in the office. The office was very narrow and painted orange.
A man was sitting on the edge of the desk staring abstractedly into the small space. ‘I’m Jimmy McGibbon,’ he replied to my enquiry. ‘Strictly speaking I am an actor, but in between times, yes, I do manage this zoo.’
Jimmy stood up and prowled up and down the narrow space as he talked, hands behind his back. He was very slim with short hair that curled in a fringe like a Roman’s in an epic film; his eyes were pale grey-blue. He moved like a dancer or a boxer. He wore a waisted canvas jacket and a black T-shirt and jeans which were very tight but bulged at the groin.
‘We could do with someone in here. A floater if you like. The stallholders are always disappearing somewhere, leaving things open and unattended. Hang on, music for the masses.’
On a shelf there was a stereo system, he took out a Leonard Cohen LP and set it upon the turntable. Although we could watch the revolutions, we heard no music in the office; distantly it began through the speakers outside in the market space.
‘You’re very beautiful. Do you ever think of having any contacts done?’
‘What are they?’
‘You know, publicity photos, talent stuff, modelling and so on?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t look so worried. I’m not trying to get it on with you or anything. I’ve had my orgasm today already, thanks. It’s just my agent’s always asking me to be on the look-out for any fresh-faced talent on the Kings Road. So, you’re still a schoolgirl then, are you? I bet you get a lot of tedious gits asking you about your gymslip. Do you still get taught Shakespeare at school nowadays?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good thing, I suppose.’ He was abstracted again, watching the record turn with music that we could only faintly hear.
I waited for a time and then asked, ‘May I have the job?’
‘Course you can, if you want it. Start next week.’
Out in Kings Road I turned left, in the direction of Oakley Street. I wondered what my father did on Saturdays. All around me were men of more or less the right age, many as a part of couples; he could be one among them. Walking in front of me there was a man and a woman with a girl child and a boy child. They were perhaps ten and twelve years, the boy was quite staid but the girl, hanging on to her father’s hand, danced and jigged about like a puppet. They paused, waiting to cross Shawfield Street, I stopped behind them. The girl turned and looked at me and I saw, in her smooth round face, how desolate I would be if I found that my father had other children. She had a freckled nose and for a second I wanted to hit her. In order not to follow the family any further I turned and crossed over Kings Road. In doing so I saw that a hamburger restaurant named the American Dream had a postcard in the window advertising for part-time waitresses. I assessed the dual advantages of having a job here as well as at the market; I could spend more time in Chelsea close to and looking for my father and less time at home, with Ron now in residency.
The restaurant smelt of coffee and onions and cigarette smoke. A few tables were occupied, in the window there sat the two manageresses, Julie, who was heavily built with backcombed hair and Cleopatra eyeliner, and tall, thin Renata who was Austrian.
‘We’ll interview you now,’ they said.
‘Can you carry three plates at once?’
‘I’m not sure, I�
��ve never tried, I don’t think.’
‘It’s easy,’ Renata fetched three plates and held one in each hand and one rested on her extended arm. ‘See? Three is good, four like this is chancing.’
‘Okay,’ I was surprised to find that I could do it too.
‘You’ve passed,’ said Julie ‘The pay’s crap but you get to keep all your tips. We give you a T-shirt and you have to wear your own jeans. Make sure they are tight, especially on a Saturday night, and then you’ll get all the home going footie fans tipping better.’
As soon as you turn into Oakley Street you can see, far away at the river end, the pillars of Albert Bridge, promising like a proscenium arch. The street itself, and the pavements, are wide, the houses tall. I established that I was on the odd numbers side. I saw that number 33 had a green door and a series of bell pushes; above it there was a balcony with iron work. That first time, when I looked at my father’s house, I blushed with guilt. I felt sure that somewhere eyes must be upon me, watching me spy and able to read my most private thoughts, but there was nobody to be seen.
I took the bus across the river almost every day, either to work or simply to walk in the area closest to Oakley Street. When my school day ended I rushed to change my clothes in the noisome lavatory block where once I had been afraid of the bigger, smoking girls who crammed into a cubicle and passed between them a single cigarette. In Kings Road I had bought narrow-legged vintage Levis from the Jean Machine shop and platform boots which added five inches to my height. My hair was very long and straight and shiny. I used a small round pot of gloss from Mary Quant to make my lips shine too, like glace kid. One afternoon, when I was hurrying through the school gates for Northcote Road and the 49 bus my English teacher stopped me. She had doggish features and was round-shouldered in her twinset cardigan.
‘Where are you off to in such a rush?’
‘For the bus, I have to go to work.’
She regarded me with some regret. ‘Here is where you should be working, Susanna, this is such an important time for you.’
