He rubbed my kneebone. As we drew into JT, however, he removed his hand. He was trying to be reassuring; after all, he was twice my age. I think he was trying to seem fatherly.
I kept him off me for two months. He put my reluctance down to my innocence, as I was only seventeen. He had a terrible temper, worse than my Dad. When he spoke to me he used an intimate, soapy voice but underneath it I could hear the irritation held down . . . It was a strain, being nice to me for so long.
One day he called me into the First Class Cold Room. This was where they kept the seafood and the hors-d’oeuvres’ platters. The door clanged shut behind us. In the chill air, his breath was hot on my face.
‘Close your eyes, love, and open your mouth.’ Something small and rubbery was put on my tongue. I chewed it.
‘Ever tasted that before, Heather?’
I shook my head.
‘Quail’s egg.’
He touched my nose with his finger. ‘Know something?’
‘What?’
‘I thought you and me liked each other. Am I right or am I right?’
I shrugged, pretending to be casual, but I felt nervous. He was such a big man, in his uniform. I looked bold enough, with my eyeliner and pert remarks; I wasn’t really, I was helpless. I wished I hadn’t come.
‘Had a nice chin-wag, the other week. How about a drink tomorrow?’
I paused. ‘I’m having lunch with Naz.’
‘What, that Paki? Next week, then?’
He moved away. I heard the rustle of paper. He put a package into my overall pocket, and patted it. He gave my waist a squeeze.
‘Little prezzie,’ he whispered. ‘From Cliff.’
At tea Teddy spat it out.
‘Ugh! All salty.’
‘It’s smoked salmon,’ I said. Strings of dribble hung from his chin. I wiped his mouth. ‘It’s ever so posh.’
‘It’s pooey. It’s pooey and salty and wee-wee.’ Pleased with himself, he bounced up and down. ‘Poo-poos,’ he sang, ‘wee-wees.’
I kept Cliff at arm’s length because he was there. Every day. I couldn’t cope with people when they stayed around, getting to know me. That leather man, Walter; I could just about cope with him because his cases were already packed. Next day I pretended it had never happened. The same with that man at the Holiday Inn.
You could do this in our area because nobody stopped for long. Down the verges was all this litter that people threw out of their cars. What did they care? They would never see it again. Teddy used to scavenge round the lay-bys. Once he came home with a dusty thing that he called a balloon; he got such a slap from our Mum for that. Down in the bus shelter someone had chalked up MARION WASN’T HERE. I knew how she felt.
But I finally gave in to Cliff. He wanted me, he was so persistent. I was flattered and helpless, but through it I felt, rising up, that familiar, prickling sense of power. I was learning how to use that. Oh, I was worthless – nobody in their right mind could ever really want me. But he didn’t seem to realize that. It was surprising, how nobody could tell.
He took me for dinner at the Skyscape Hotel Roof Restaurant. Gone up in the world, hadn’t I, since those days in the yard with the bins. Nobody recognized me, thank goodness, but then staff were always changing in those hotels. I nearly choked on my pheasant bone, though, when I realized that our own pigs would be gobbling our leavings.
‘Something funny, love?’
I shook my head.
‘Not something Cliff can share?’
‘Later,’ I lied, smiling across at him.
Underneath the table our knees were touching. The dim light hid my blushes. You wouldn’t have recognized me, if you’d known me as a little girl. You wouldn’t have liked me. But Cliff wanted me. And once I’d decided it, once I’d changed into this bold gear, with the momentum up . . . Then I could will myself into wanting most men. Things about Cliff that might have put me off – his pompous monologues about himself, his bossiness with the waiters – I blocked them away. I willed them to freeze, just as I’d willed myself, all those years, to numb myself to what was happening.
This large, married man was in my power. During dessert I smiled at him. I moved my knee and slotted it between his legs, pressing it there. His fork shook and the cream slid down to his plate.
What if Dad saw me now? His own little Heth? I avoided Cliff’s eye, urging him to hurry up. He’d be too drunk to notice my heavy thighs; he wouldn’t notice anything about me. In the dark, we wouldn’t even have to talk.
We stumbled into the car. I felt intensely alive; alive down to my toes and my fingertips. He swerved away from the car park, his hand up my skirt. The engine shrieked because he wasn’t changing gear.
‘We’re going for a drive, right?’ he muttered. I nodded, dumbly.
We didn’t get far. I saw the glaring headlights . . . We were on the dual carriageway. Then we veered off, bumping up a lane. We jerked to a halt in front of a gate. My legs were apart; his fingers were inside my knickers. The headlights shone on a sign: Thames Water Authority: No Entry.
He managed to switch off the lights and then we were out of the car. He pulled a rug from the back seat and I helped him, hopping off-balance because of his hand.
I fumbled at his trousers, pulling him down on top of me. Our breath gasped out grey in the dark. In fact it was freezing, but I didn’t notice that until we were finished.
It was then that I recognized the gate. Beyond it, up the bank, lay the reservoir. I’d escaped there, once, when I was little. Mum and Dad had been shouting. I’d run all the way there, and scrambled up the bank . . . I’d lain there panting, watching the water . . . My secret sea, furred by the wind.
Trouble was, of course, that he was there the next day. Cliff, I mean, the chef. There he was, back in his tall white hat. They look comic in them, don’t they? Like pantomime cooks. At lunch-time he was waiting in the corridor but I refused a drink. Later he was waiting beside his crimson car, so I crept round the other way.
Next day he managed to speak to me.
‘Heather, love, listen . . . I know I shouldn’t have . . . Shouldn’t have taken advantage.’ He waited as some people walked by, and whispered, ‘I feel bloody terrible. Am I forgiven?’
I nodded. I hated him seeing me in the daylight. I wished I’d never met him.
‘You’ll come out for a drink?’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t.’
Shaking my head, I hurried away. He didn’t dare grab me in the corridor, with people around.
That afternoon he shouted at Mo, one of his assistants.
‘You stupid bitch!’ he roared. ‘You bloody stupid bitch!’ We could hear him across the room. ‘Bloody woman!’ he shouted. ‘How you got this bloody job beats me!’
Mo burst into tears. He stomped away to the stock room. I went over and put my arm around her.
‘He’s been impossible all day,’ he sobbed, ‘Mr Billings has. See – then I start doing it wrong.’
Her counter was littered with scraps of ham and salami. She’d been punching out rounds of pumpernickel; they lay like black coins all over the floor.
‘I’m all thumbs today,’ she sniffed. ‘Don’t know what’s got into him.’
‘Poor Mo. Here, use my hanky.’
‘You are kind, Heather. It’s not your fault.’
Later, she took it out on her fiancé. He’d come in his car to pick her up as usual. I heard her raised voice . . . Why was he so spineless? Why did she put up with him? She was fed up, she yelled. I didn’t hear the rest because I was on my way to the bus stop, hot with guilt, and the traffic drowned her voice.
Cliff wooed me with giant prawns. Nobody knew about it. I’d find these bulging bags in my locker. At lunch-times, to escape him, I’d loiter outside the building. Indian women, sitting out the lunch-break in their cars, eyed me. The red blobs on their foreheads said: I’m pure. I deserved everything I got.
I took the food home. Dad didn’t peel the prawns; he ate them wh
ole, cracking them in his jaws with a noise like breaking masonry. I caught Mum looking at me, her eyes narrowed. We’d grown so distant that she didn’t ask me where they came from. After all, she’d brought back food herself when she worked in catering. Perhaps she thought I’d nicked it. Teddy was always nicking things; the garage man said that if he saw him in the forecourt shop one more time he’d call the police. Perhaps she suspected a gentleman friend.
I told Cliff that it must stop. He’d get into trouble if anyone found out. I said I wasn’t touching the parcels any more. Next day there was another one in my locker. I left it there and by Monday the smell was so strong that people started avoiding each other’s eyes. Mo couldn’t stand his deteriorating temper; she demoted herself to short-haul lunch boxes.
I found a note in my overalls pocket saying that if I didn’t speak to him he was going to tell Mary, his wife.
‘Please!’ I whispered. ‘Don’t! You told me she’d divorce you, and what about your kids? It’s mad!’
‘It’s you.’ He gripped my shoulder. ‘It’s you who’s driving me insane.’
We were standing in the bakery larder. Behind us were shelves of tarts; it was May, so they were strawberry tarts, winking red in the gloom. He pulled me against him.
‘Just one little drink, Heather. Have pity on me.’ His voice was as plaintive as my Dad’s. ‘No harm in that . . . Just one little drink, like old times.’
‘Let go, Cliff. Please! It’s over.’
‘I wasn’t any good at it, you mean.’
‘I told you, it’s nothing to do with that.’
‘Not as good as your other boyfriends?’
‘I haven’t got any. Please! Someone’s coming.’
I pulled away and he readjusted his hat.
Five minutes later, when I was back at my counter, I looked across the room. There he stood, bellowing. When he turned away I saw a splash of red on his white jacket. It looked as if he’d been stabbed in the back. Then I realized that he’d just been squashed against one of the strawberry tarts. It stayed there all afternoon; everyone was too nervous to tell him.
Two weeks later he was fired. They’d found him fiddling the books.
‘Whole lobsters!’ Naz’s eyes rolled. ‘Mr High and Mighty. Remember him shouting at Mo when she ate a vol au vent? And he’d been pocketing all that, for his own little self. Big self.’
None of us ever saw him again. A new chef came, and I told myself that Cliff had never happened. Perhaps he’ll read this. But I still don’t know if he’d understand.
My daydreams were of flying far away. But my real dreams, at night, were harder to control. They were the ones I’d had as a child. I was falling, farther and farther, down into a hole that I knew had no bottom. Around me was a thick orange mist. Sometimes there were ledges on the way down, and floorboards, but when I grabbed them they broke off in my hand. I knew they tore my fingers but I didn’t feel any pain. I’d shout out and hear my own voice echoing. Sometimes I heard someone knocking and I’d be trying to get up there to reach him, through the thick air. Once, I knew that it was Jonathan . . . But the mist was too heavy. As I tried to claw my way up, through air, I knew I was still falling.
Then I’d wake up, sweating, and hear the drainpipe knocking against the wall. Tap, tap, it called. When Teddy pulled it down the knocking stopped; but the nightmares went on. I’d try to stay awake long enough to stop them returning, but nowadays that no longer worked.
Thank goodness I had employment; not all the people from my school were so lucky. At work I forgot the nights. But during slack moments, when my meals were crated, they rose up again and with them rose the taste of my childhood. Then that big room echoed and the clunk-clunk of the arriving crockery became the knocking that I hoped I’d forgotten.
One Sunday afternoon Oonagh came to our bungalow; Oonagh with the weaselly face and peppermint breath. She’d minded me when I was little, from time to time, and she’d minded Teddy. That Sunday she brought along a small girl called Winnie, who she was minding now. It was a warm day in May, soon after the events I’ve described at work, and I was outside sunning my legs. Mum and Oonagh were indoors, having one of their long, confidential conversations.
Teddy was busy with one of his drainage schemes, heaping mud into long sausage-walls. Winnie was six; someone had tied back her brown hair with a ribbon. She was inspecting the place, easing her way through the nettles.
I closed my eyes. Light blurred and danced against my eyelids. She was talking to the hens like I used to do, ticking them off. She could be my own, small self. Then I heard her foot on the caravan step, which creaked as usual, and her voice muffled inside.
‘Here’s our little house, Teddy. You wash your hands.’
Near me, Teddy grunted.
‘Wash your hands, it’s lunch-time,’ she called, her voice clearer, at the doorway.
‘Had me lunch.’
‘No, in here. Come on.’
My eyes closed, I said, ‘Go on, Teddy. Play with her.’
At last I heard Teddy’s dragging footsteps, then both their voices inside.
‘Who are you going to marry?’ she asked.
‘Not eating that, I’m not.’
‘Just pretend to. Then you can have some ice cream.’
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
‘S’not ice cream.’
‘I’ll tell you who I’m going to marry. I’m going to marry my Daddy. Finished your ice cream?’
‘Isn’t ice cream.’
‘There, I’ll wash it up. I’m marrying my Daddy, when I’m grown up, and we’re going to have three children. Two boys and one girl. We’re going to call her Sadie.’
‘I can whistle now.’
Teddy made whistling noises, off-key.
‘My Daddy can whistle,’ she said. ‘He gives me piggy-backs, my Daddy does. He lets me clean his spectacles. He doesn’t let anyone else. Can you whistle “Puff the Magic Dragon”?’
‘Enemy approaching!’ His flat, walkie-talkie voice. ‘Enemy attack!’
‘I can sing it. “Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea” –’
‘Enemy attacking! Uh-uh-uh-uh.’ His machine-gun noise. ‘Uh-uh-uh. Bang! Splat!’
‘“– and wallowed in the autumn mists –”’
‘Lie down, you’re dead.’
‘I’m not!’ she cried.
‘You’re dead.’
Part Three
Chapter Eleven
IT’S SO ODD talking to you, whoever you are, and having no reply. If I knew who you were, of course, I wouldn’t be telling you all this. But by now I’m wondering about you. It’s the hushed centre of the night . . . Not a sound. The whole world is asleep, men, women and children . . .
You’ve been with me a long time. You might have got bored ages ago, or disgusted. In fact, I don’t like some of this story myself. But you can always switch on the telly instead.
I’d like you to know one thing. Far more difficult than listening to this story is telling it. After all, it’s what happened to me.
I worked at JT for a year. I thought it might make a difference with my Mum, that I was a working girl now. When I was at work, distanced, I could almost imagine us back home, being companionable, putting up our feet and moaning about our bosses . . . What he said to me, and I said to him, and would you credit it? Home looks simplified when you’re away from it, You can arrange it into lamplit scenes to suit yourself, with the right questions and answers, with nobody too busy or embarrassed. You can imagine yourself saying anything.
I had all these conversations like stored reels of film, ready in my head. At work they unrolled, soundlessly, to the accompaniment of the Tannoy and the clump of the meat slice. I asked Mum all the questions I’d never dared. Flickering dreamlike through my head, and for some reason youthful and tender, she gave me the answers I needed.
This evaporated, of course, once I stepped indoors. I remember one evening when I arrived home late. She was st
ill up, darning her tights – she’s the last person I’ve known who actually darned them.
‘What sort of time is this?’ she said. ‘And you needing your sleep.’
‘I’ve only been with Mo.’ It was true. Mo’s fiancé’s friend was a night guard at the freight depot and we’d sat in his booth drinking lager.
‘And looking so cheap,’ she said.
Usually she didn’t notice when I came in. She’d be absorbed in the telly, or she’d be in her bedroom. The night I came back from that van she didn’t say a thing. Yet here she was getting all normal, and irritable, and motherly, when I hadn’t been doing anything wicked at all. Sometimes I wondered: is she deliberately blind?
‘Don’t like you looking common,’ she said. ‘Gives the wrong impression.’
‘Who to?’
‘Them. You know.’ She jerked her head towards the wide world outside.
‘Men, you mean?’
She pursed her lips. ‘Don’t you trust them. All them things they say . . . can’t be trusted.’
‘I don’t trust them.’
She glanced up and said sharply, ‘Well, you should. You’re only seventeen.’
I would have smiled at the illogicality – she was as bad as my Dad – but I wanted to ask her something.
‘What about Dad?’
Her needle stilled. ‘What about him?’
‘Did you trust him?’
She paused, and drew the stitches tighter. ‘Don’t you say nothing against your father. Won’t hear of it.’
I gazed at her, feeling the usual disappointment. I wanted her to speak the truth. If only, just once, she would confide in me. After all, she confided in Oonagh.
‘Never strayed, not your Dad.’
‘Didn’t he?’
‘Don’t you be pert –’
‘I’m not being pert!’ I cried out.
‘That’s not nice talk . . . You know it isn’t.’
You see, they closed ranks, her and Dad. Even though they seemed to have nothing to say to each other . . . Even though they’d never got on.
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