Camellia

by Lesley Pearse

  'I don't want to lumber you.' Camellia was embarrassed that the girl might think she was being railroaded. 'I appreciate your kindness. I'm not like Dougie. I won't take advantage.'

  'You won't think I'm kind when you see the room,' Bee laughed, but her cheeks turned bright pink as if embarrassed. 'It's a slum. I only offered 'cos I can see you're breaking up inside. Besides, I get a bit lonely.'

  At seven that same evening, once the cafe closed, Bee helped Camellia carry her suitcases up to her room on the first floor. Even though Camellia had been warned about it and was grateful for a bed anywhere, she was still shocked.

  Clothes lay everywhere, and there were dirty dishes on the floor, some with half-eaten food congealed to them. Every drawer hung open; even the single bed was unmade. There were attempts at making it home: a few pop star posters, a green plant in the window and fluffy rug by the bed. But it looked what it was, a place a lonely teenage girl crawled into at night, a place that saw no visitors. It was almost as sad as the flat Camellia had vacated earlier in the day.

  Below in Charing Cross Road the traffic roared incessantly. The smell of fried food trapped in the small grubby room made her feel slightly nauseous and she was swaying on her feet with exhaustion. Her feet were sore, her hands reddened with washing dishes. She had never worked so hard, not even in the sales at Peter Robinson's.

  'I'm a slob, aren't I?' Bee said cheerfully. 'I did intend to nip up here and clear it up before you saw it but there wasn't time. Still you'd soon find out about my slutty ways. Better to face it immediately.'

  Camellia liked the fact that Bee didn't put on a false front. Neither, Camellia realised, did she sit in judgement on anyone. Bee probably knew and understood the West End better than she did. She'd worked in the cafe for four years, and although she was only a few months older than Camellia, she knew all the thieves, prostitutes, pimps, and drug dealers, along with club owners and businessmen. She talked to them, heard all their gossip, yet remained aloof.

  'I don't care what it looks like,' Camellia said. 'While I'm here I'll help both downstairs and up here. I'm just grateful for a roof over my head and a job.'

  'You're an odd bird,' Bee said reflectively. 'I got the idea when you used to come in with Dougie that you were a spoiled rich kid, know what I mean?'

  Camellia sniggered. 'I could tell you some stories about me and my mother that would soon scotch that idea,' she said. 'But we've talked about me and my problems all day nearly. Tell me about your dreams and hopes?'

  'The past is pretty shitty,' Bee admitted, but then laughed as if she intended to turn it into pantomime anyway. 'As for the hopes and dreams, well they're all about getting out of this hell-hole.' She found a tray, scooped the pile of dirty crockery from Camellia's hands and dumped them on it, then whisked it out the door.

  She returned in just a few minutes and began to pick up clothes. 'All I really want is a nice flat and a job where I don't eat all day and stink of chips. I don't think much about knights on white chargers, or men festooning my fat neck with diamonds. Know what my favourite fantasy is?'

  'A librarian who'll woo you with poetry?' Camellia joked.

  'It isn't even a man. It's a room that's all white, with sun pouring in the windows and a single vase of daffodils on a polished wood table.'

  Camellia didn't say anything for a moment. She was stunned not only by the simplicity of the fantasy, but her affinity with it.

  Later as they curled up together on the bed with a cup of coffee each, Bee told Camellia her story, and as she listened Camellia felt she'd found more than a new friend, but a soul mate.

  Bee was an only child. Her father had been a colour-sergeant in the army and her childhood had been spent in many different countries, including several years in Singapore. Until she was twelve and her father left the service she'd thought all children lived the way she did.

  Her father was engrossed in his job, her mother in the army social life. There was a maid who saw to Bee's meals and cleaned the house.

  'It was great,' she smiled. 'Mum was always off playing tennis or at whist-drives, there were loads of other kids to play with. The army organised everything, schools, housing, the lot. Dad was always strict, but then I hardly saw him or Mum really. It was only when they bought the house in Eltham and Dad went to work for the post office that I discovered what the real world was like.'

  From twelve onwards Bee's life took a dramatic downward turn. She found it hard to adjust to a big London comprehensive school, and she was bullied both there and at home. 'I didn't understand why my Mum suddenly became a ratbag when Dad left the army. She'd always been so elegant and cool, and suddenly she was in a tizz about everything. She never stopped moaning from morning till night. She couldn't cope with the simplest things like doing the washing or cooking. Then Dad came home from work and had a go at both of us.'

  Camellia's heart went out to Bee as she heard more. A father, who after a lifetime of bullying men, started taking out his frustrations on his wife and daughter. A spoiled weak mother who resented having her life of ease snatched from her. A couple so wrapped up in their own selfishness and disappointment that they rounded on their only child and used her as a scapegoat for their own inadequacies.

  'It was hell,' Bee said, tears springing to her eyes as she remembered. 'Mum expected me to do just about everything, as well as go to school and cope with homework. I'd never learned to cook, or wash clothes and of course I made a mess of it. Mum would scream at me, then tell Dad what I'd done when he got home. He thrashed me so often I could barely sit down. I was jeered at at school, I was tubby even then and I spoke differently. I got behind with my work and they stuck me in a dumbo's class. That made Dad even madder. I felt so alone, Camellia, can you understand that?'

  'Oh yes,' Camellia sighed. 'I used to hope I'd get seriously ill just so someone would look after me.'

  'I found out how to get attention when I was fourteen,' Bee admitted. She smiled, but there was a bleak look in her eyes. 1 started going with men. Not boys, they didn't fancy me because I was fat, but I used to let the man in the sweet shop near our house grope me in his stock-room.'

  She made the story funny, describing him as a weasel. But Camellia couldn't laugh: the man sounded like the worst kind of pervert. Bee would go into his shop after school, still wearing her uniform and the Weasel would make her open her blouse and take off her knickers and get her to pose for him while he masturbated.

  'He gave me ten shillings each time,' she said. 'He used to call me "his princess". But even though it was seedy and I knew I should be ashamed of myself, at least he really liked me, he used to talk to me afterwards and give me a cuddle.'

  She went on to playing truant from school to spend the day with a travelling salesman she'd met in a cafe, or for sex in the afternoons with a milkman whose wife was out at work.

  'I wasn't allowed out at night, not even to a youth club. I had no friends. So I turned to sex,' she said candidly, turning bright blue eyes on Camellia with such honesty it made her giggle. 'I used to seriously think about becoming a call girl when I left school. It was the only thing I was good at.'

  'Did you run away from home then?'

  'I didn't run. I limped away after Dad gave me a pasting. The milkman's wife found out about me, and confronted my parents with it. All hell broke loose then. Dad cracked two of my ribs, then flung me out.'

  'How old were you?'

  'Fifteen,' Bee shrugged. 'How could anyone throw a girl of that age out the house knowing she had no money or anywhere to go? I got the train up West and I ended up here in the cafe. I was in a terrible state, black eyes, the lot. I ended up telling Cyril the cafe owner all about it, just like you did to me. He offered me a job and a room on a trial basis until I got on my feet, and I never left.'

  'Have you seen your parents since?'

  'No,' Bee's eyes fell. 'I did write to Mum once. I tried to explain how I felt, but she never answered it. She sends me a Christmas card each year, but th
ere's never a letter. I'm over them now anyway. I just don't care any more.'

  Camellia suspected this was the first lie she'd heard all day. Someone as warm as Bee couldn't possibly not care about her parents, even if they were awful to her.

  'Do you – well you know, with Cyril?'

  Bee burst into laughter. 'Hell no,' she said quivering like a blancmange. 'He's a good man, and a straight one, happily married with five kids. If I'd let him into my drawers his wife would've had me in the bacon slicer without a second thought. I was just so grateful for being given a chance and treated like a human being, I've worked like a slave for him ever since. But gratitude runs its course in three years. I want something better now.'

  When they undressed later for bed, Camellia saw why men would be drawn to Bee. Naked she was voluptuous rather than fat, her flesh silky and firm like the women in Rubens' paintings. The combination of her angelic face, fluffy blonde hair and such bountiful curves was womanly and very sexy.

  Even though Camellia was exhausted, she lay awake in the sleeping bag long after Bee had fallen asleep in her bed. Anger at Dougie had replaced the smarting pain she felt earlier in the day and with it came the need for revenge.

  'I'll show him,' she told herself. 'One day he'll come back to London and I'll have it all. I'll cut him dead and walk away and he'll regret everything.'

  On 6 January, the girls paid off a taxi at 14 Oakley Street in Chelsea and, in fits of high-spirited giggles, proceeded to carry their belongings down the steps to the basement flat.

  It was a raw, grey day, the wind coming right off the Thames with an icy force that lifted their coats and blew their hair every which way.

  'This is the moment.' Bee put down the last of the boxes and cases outside, blew a trumpet like fanfare on her fist, then took out the key, waving it in front of Camellia. 'Now which of us is going to carry the other over the threshold.'

  'Well, I'm not carrying you,' Camellia retorted. 'Let's just go in together!'

  They had left the cafe for good. Just seven long weeks since the day they had met, they had the flat of their dreams.

  It had come about from Bee overhearing a conversation between two men in the cafe. One was the tenant of this flat, tied by a long lease, and he wanted to get out of it quickly because he'd been offered a job abroad by the other man.

  They were discussing putting an advertisement in the evening paper. As Bee listened she heard the tenant say he wouldn't ask for much key money as that would make it quicker.

  Camellia had known Bee for less than a fortnight at that point and she'd already been surprised at how quick on the uptake the other girl was. But the speed she acted on that overheard conversation was phenomenal. Somehow Bee managed to approach the man, admit she'd been listening and ask him if she could have the flat. Within half an hour the man had agreed to let her have it for two hundred pounds, providing she could supply the right references to his landlords.

  When Bee announced what she had done and admitted she had only ten pounds in the bank, Camellia thought she was crazy. She could see the attraction of it: the rent of the place was only ten pounds a week, and it had two bedrooms and central heating.

  'But how on earth are we going to get two hundred pounds by the beginning of January?' she had asked, feeling almost faint at the thought.

  But Bee had that worked out too. 'We'll get jobs as hostesses in a club,' she said. 'I know it will be hard, but we can make it. I know the right man to ask for a job. He fancies me and you'll blow his mind.'

  Camellia had always assumed nightclub hostesses were really prostitutes, and said so.

  'They aren't,' Bee said emphatically. 'They are just there to get men to drink more and they get ten pounds a night. It will be a doddle. It's coming up for Christmas. Every bloke stuck in London will be happy to hand over a few quid to drink with us. All we have to do is look pretty and make them feel important.'

  There were setbacks: they didn't have the right kind of flashy dresses and it was a shock to discover they actually had to ask the customers for their ten-pound hostess fee. But they found a compromise. Camellia stole the dresses from a shop in Regent Street and Bee, who didn't find it so embarrassing to ask for money, asked Camellia's clients for her.

  They were soon to discover it wasn't quite as much fun as they expected. The male customers were usually middle-aged and dull, and it was exhausting working all day in the cafe, then having to get dolled up to spend half the night, chatting brightly, dancing and encouraging businessmen to drink. They fell into bed at three or four in the morning, only to be up by eight and start all over again. But they stuck at it. They wanted the flat too badly to care about being tired.

  Now they'd left the cafe they intended to continue as hostesses until something better turned up. As Bee had said at the outset, it was one of the easiest jobs going.

  'How did you get the money for the legal fees,' Camellia asked as they swept into the flat arm-in-arm. They hadn't expected to have to pay a solicitor, and had been horrified when he asked for twenty-five pounds. Bee had said she'd see to it but until now Camellia hadn't got around to asking how.

  'Don't ask,' Bee laughed, tossing back her hair and running around the empty lounge like a child.

  Camellia looked at Bee sharply. She could guess how. Bee had gone out one Sunday night with a man she met in the club and she hadn't come back until Monday morning.

  'Well don't ask how I got this then.' Camellia pulled a roll of notes from her pocket and tossed them to her friend. 'But it's just as well we were both naughty as there aren't any beds!'

  Bee stopped in her tracks as she caught the money. She leafed through it and frowned. They had both confided all their past misdemeanours to one another. But Camellia had promised never to pick another pocket or steal clothes, and Bee had promised never to take money for sex.

  'That drunk American when we left the club last night?' Her expression was a mixture of admiration and fear. 'You nicked his wallet while he was trying to chat you up?'

  Camellia nodded. 'He was too far gone to remember what day of the week it was. Serves him right for fetching after young girls.'

  'But there's almost two hundred pounds!'

  'I hit the jackpot,' Camellia giggled. 'All right I know what you're thinking. I promise I won't do it again! As long as you don't go swanning off to any hotel rooms either.'

  Everything was forgotten as they explored the flat.

  'Isn't it just perfect?' Bee ran from room to room, opening gleaming white doors and touching windows. 'A bedroom each, a proper lounge where we can entertain.' She raised one eyebrow at Camellia.

  'It's heaven.' Camellia sat down on the carpeted floor and pulled out her cigarettes. 'He's even left the curtains and cooker, bless him.'

  Despite the grey January day outside, the whitewashed wall in the small yard beneath the street reflected light into the big windows of the lounge. A smart grey carpet covered all the floors, all the walls were painted white, and there were fitted wardrobes. All it needed to make it homely was a bit of furniture and some pictures on the plain walls.

  'Ten measly quid a week!' Bee flung herself down on the floor by Camellia. 'Can you imagine saying to a taxi driver, "Oakley Street, Chelsea, by the river". They'll think we're bleedin' heiresses!'

  'Shall we go and find some second-hand beds?' Camellia grinned. 'And a polished wood table to put your vase of daffodils on?'

  Bee's eyes welled-up with happy tears. She'd forgotten she'd told Camellia that dream. She couldn't begin to say how much it meant to her to have a real friend, a home and a new start. But then she was sure Camellia felt exactly the same way. 'With two hundred quid in the kitty we can have the table, daffodils, beds, and some booze to celebrate.' She reached out impulsively to hug her friend. 'But first let's get my record player plugged in, then it really will be home.'

  Chapter Eight

  1969

  'We should get proper jobs.' Camellia's voice held little conviction. She lay back
on the settee, dragging deeply on a large joint.

  'Such as?' Bee asked from her position on the floor.

  'I don't know,' Camellia let the inhaled smoke out slowly through her nose. 'Lavatory attendants?'

  The girls had been living in Oakley Street, Chelsea for nearly eleven months. Bee had had her twentieth birthday that autumn, and Camellia's would be next month, just before Christmas.

  Outside in the street it was cold and dark, even though it was only four in the afternoon. A strong wind was blowing leaves, bus tickets and sweet wrappers down into the basement area outside their front door, but inside it was snug. The central heating was on, Bobbie Gentry's hit single 'I'll Never Fall in Love Again' was on the record player and they were preparing for the night ahead.

  Bee sat on a floor cushion, propped against the settee, wearing a fluffy pink dressing gown, rollers in her hair, flapping her nails as she waited for the shocking-pink varnish to dry. Camellia, still in jeans and a red jumper, was waiting for the water to heat again for her bath.

  'I always fancied being a lavatory attendant when I was a kid.' Bee hugged her bare knees with her arms. 'I could see myself in one of those crossover pinnys, a little room of my own with a fire, a comfy chair and a couple of geraniums in pots, just nipping out now and then to check no one had laid a huge turd and forgotten to flush it.'

  'But what if they'd laid it on the floor,' Camellia grimaced as she exhaled.

  'I'd get a gadget made to scoop it up at arm's length!' Bee laughed, looking round at her friend lying behind her. 'Stop hogging that joint, I've hardly had any of it.'

  Camellia passed it over, then lay back again, hands tucked behind her head, singing along with the record. They had only bought it yesterday and they'd played it incessantly.

  Every month or so since they moved into the flat, they discussed the need to get real jobs, but they rarely got beyond opening an evening paper and ringing round a few vacancies. Aside from their lack of qualifications and the fact that they could only expect to earn around sixteen pounds a week in a regular job, compared with ten pounds a night at the Don Juan Club, they were trapped by the ease of their lives.