The Four of Us

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘Then come and keep me company downstairs,’ her mother said, sounding abjectly forlorn.

  ‘OK. But you have to watch Ready, Steady, Go with me.’

  ‘I always do watch it,’ her mother said, surprising the socks off her. ‘Cathy McGowan reminds me of Primmie. She’s always so bright and zesty.’

  Kiki, usually always moody and sulky in both her parents’ presence, erupted into giggles. Long-haired Cathy McGowan was known as Queen of the Mods and that was hardly a title that fitted Primmie.

  ‘Come on, Mummy,’ she said, drawing her mother to her feet and sliding her arm companionably through hers, an action so alien she couldn’t remember when last she’d done it. ‘You know what Cathy McGowan always says when the programme begins. The weekend starts here!’

  ‘Evening, Mrs Lane. Thank you for letting us stay the night,’ Artemis and Geraldine chanted in unison as they trooped into the house a little after six o’clock the following day, each carrying an overnight bag.

  ‘That’s fine,’ Kiki’s mother responded, far more animated than usual, ‘there’s no problem as long as you don’t want me to go with you to the play. An amateur production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a joy I can easily forego.’

  Laughing and saying nothing, in order not to have to blatantly lie about their plans for the evening, they clattered up the stairs after Kiki.

  ‘Where’s Primmie? Isn’t she here yet?’ Artemis asked as she dumped her overnight bag on one of the twin beds.

  ‘Nope. We’re meeting her at Bickley Station at half past six. What have you brought to wear, Artemis? We need to look as if we’re seventeen if the evening’s to be a success.’

  Artemis clicked open her overnight bag, turfed out a pair of pyjamas and, from beneath them, rather hesitantly lifted out a sleeveless, fuchsia-pink mini-dress. ‘It’s a Mary Quant,’ she said before anyone ventured an opinion. ‘Daddy bought it for me to wear at my cousin’s christening. It isn’t micro-short, but it is OK, isn’t it? I mean, I will look at least seventeen wearing it, won’t I?’

  ‘It’s ravishing,’ Geraldine said, adroitly fudging the issue of exactly how Artemis, whose legs were just as plump as the rest of her body, was going to look wearing it.

  Artemis, always anxious for Geraldine’s opinion, beamed with relief. Behind Artemis’s back, Kiki pulled an agonized face. Artemis was quite obviously going to look a disaster and Primmie almost certainly would look no better, though for different reasons.

  ‘I did offer to lend Primmie something to wear,’ she said now to Geraldine, ‘but she wouldn’t have it. She said she had a new crocheted top with a scalloped neckline.’

  ‘And what is she going to wear it with?’ Geraldine asked dryly, well aware, as all three of them were, that money for clothes was in short supply in the Surtees household. ‘Her school skirt?’

  ‘Probably.’ There was irritation in Kiki’s voice. Why Primmie was so adamant about not borrowing any of her clothes she couldn’t imagine. It made no sense. And if Primmie turned up at the Two Zeds looking like a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl then the rest of them were going to find it exceedingly difficult to pass as seventeen-year-olds, no matter how stylish their clothes or how much make-up they wore.

  ‘Are we really going to have to put our clothes in carrier bags when we leave the house?’ Artemis asked, fretting over yet another aspect of their evening of freedom. ‘If my dress is put in a carrier bag it’ll get terribly creased.’

  Kiki sucked in her breath, about to blow her top at such nit-picking carping.

  ‘It’ll be OK if it’s folded properly,’ Geraldine said swiftly. ‘And I’ll do the folding, so take that anxious look off your face or you’ll get frown lines, Artemis.’

  As Artemis rushed to take a look at her forehead in the dressing-table mirror, Kiki gave a hoot of laughter, her irritation vanishing. ‘I bet we wouldn’t have to go through all this palaver if we lived in Rotherhithe,’ she said, flopping down on the bed next to Geraldine. ‘Primmie only has to endure it because we do. She says all the friends she went to junior school with go out at night pretty much when they want to – and not only are there more coffee bars in Rotherhithe than there are in Bromley, but there’s a working men’s club there as well.’

  ‘A working men’s club?’ Artemis turned away from the mirror. ‘A working men’s club? Why on earth would you be interested in a place like that?’

  ‘Because if you’re with a member they let you in under the age of eighteen,’ Geraldine said, intervening between the two of them yet again. ‘And because they have entertainment, singers and comedians …’

  ‘And amateur singers and comedians,’ Kiki said, bouncing from the bed, impatient for it to be time for them to set off to meet Primmie. ‘In the north, amateur singers can become very well known by singing in their local club. Here, the only place there’s a remote chance of being able to get up and sing is in a couple of coffee bars in Bromley. Which is why tonight is so important. There’ll be live music tonight at the Two Zeds, and whatever the group playing there I’m going to do a number with them.’

  ‘But they’ll have a singer, won’t they?’ Artemis, as usual, sounded bewildered. ‘Why would they let you sing with them when they’ll have a singer already?’

  ‘Because I’m going to sing with them whether they want me to or not.’

  ‘And what if they throw you – and us – out?’ Geraldine asked, an eyebrow quirked.

  Kiki’s grin almost split her cat-like face in two. ‘They won’t do that, Geraldine. Not when they hear me. Tonight is going to be a historic occasion. Tonight, Kiki Lane is going to make her public debut, even if she has to chain herself to the mike in order to do so. It’s going to be a blast and absolutely, utterly, searingly unforgettable!’

  Chapter Six

  The evening at the Two Zeds had certainly been everything Kiki had promised it would be. Even two weeks later the memory of it was, for Artemis, sickeningly vivid.

  She yanked off the dress she had put on only five minutes earlier, searching her wardrobe for something that would make her look less fat, wondering why, when she was about to go with her father and Primmie to see a show in the West End, she was again brooding about what she always thought of as ‘the Bromley nightmare’. It hadn’t started off disastrously, despite her tension and nerves. At first, when they’d changed out of their school uniforms in the loos at Bickley Station, it had been fun. Giggling fit to burst they’d tarted themselves up with all the make-up they’d been able to lay their hands on. Geraldine’s contribution had been her mother’s lipstick and her mother’s perfume. The perfume had been OK, but the lipstick had been bright red and crashingly old-fashioned.

  Geraldine hadn’t thought it old-fashioned, though. When she and Kiki and Primmie had opted for the Max Factor pearlized pink lipstick that Kiki had bought out of her spending money, with Kiki rudely telling Geraldine that she couldn’t wear the red, because only old women wore red, Geraldine had merely quirked her eyebrow and said, ‘Really, Kiki? Just watch me.’

  Hauling a tapestry skirt out of her wardrobe in the hope that she might look less of a porker in it than she had in the dress, Artemis wondered why it was she could never respond to Kiki’s acidly sharp remarks in the languid, indifferent way Geraldine always did. No one, not even Kiki, ever got the better of Geraldine. And when the four of them had finished plastering make-up on, it had been Geraldine – who had been much lighter-handed with it than the rest of them – who had looked head-turningly sensational.

  Kiki had looked mesmerizingly hip – which was the effect she had wanted. Wearing knee-length black boots, a black and white zigzag-patterned shift dress given extra shape by the cotton wool stuffed down the bra she’d borrowed from Geraldine, a black leather baker-boy beret on her flame-red hair and with her eyes soot-dark with the help of lashings of black eye liner and mascara, she had looked years older than her actual age.

  She, Artemis, had also looked years older than she was and, until
they had reached the Two Zeds, she had thought she looked sensational. Her fuchsia-pink mini-dress was an original Mary Quant – and how many people in Bromley coffee bars were wearing one of those? She’d got electric-blue eye shadow on her eyelids and had borrowed a pair of her mother’s bat-wing false eyelashes, which Primmie had glued on for her. Her hair had been long enough for her to anchor high on the top of her head and then back-comb into a chignon of large looped curls held in place by hairpins. She’d been wearing fairly high-heeled sandals, and, of all of them, she felt that she definitely looked the most sophisticated and that her fears of being left on the sidelines, if they should achieve their aim of meeting up with some boys from St Dunstan’s or Dulwich College, were groundless.

  There hadn’t been any boys from St Dunstan’s or Dulwich College there, though – and with good reason. Packing the Two Zeds to capacity and spilling noisily out on to the pavement had been a whole convoy of bikers. Chrome-encrusted Harley Davidsons had jammed either side of the High Street and the rock music blasting from the inside of the coffee bar had been deafening. To say that it hadn’t been what she had been expecting was the understatement of the year. She’d been hoping to meet a boy who went to one of the two public schools in the area. Instead, she’d been faced with a situation so appalling she’d completely panicked, coming to a dead halt, struggling for breath like a beached fish.

  ‘Come on, Artemis,’ Kiki had said exasperatedly, pulling on her arm so hard a scattering of hairpins had flown loose. ‘We’re supposed to be making a sensational entrance.’

  ‘I’m not going in there!’ she’d gasped in strangulated horror. ‘Not when it’s full of all those … those …’

  ‘Bikers?’ Geraldine had finished for her, helpfully. ‘I can’t say I like the look of them myself, Artemis. Why don’t we go somewhere else, Kiki? There’s another coffee bar further down the High Street. I don’t suppose it’ll have live music, but there’s a jukebox and it’ll be groovy in a way Artemis and Primmie can cope with.’

  As she buckled the belt of her tapestry skirt, Artemis remembered how grateful she’d been that Geraldine had made it obvious that Primmie, too, was just as horrified as she was by the sight of the dozens of fearsome-looking youths milling about on the pavement.

  ‘Oh, thank you, Geraldine Grant,’ Kiki had said with sarcastic venom. ‘Thank you very much! Can I remind the three of you why we’re here? We’re here so that I can get up and sing with a group and strut my stuff. Singing along to a jukebox isn’t on the agenda, OK?’

  ‘We’re here,’ Primmie had said with steel in her voice, ‘to have a fun night out and to meet some boys. Those aren’t boys in the Two Zeds. They’re bikers and we’re fifteen years old. I think Geraldine is right. We should go somewhere else.’

  ‘You go somewhere else if you like,’ Kiki had stormed, looking as if she’d like to throttle her, ‘but I’m not! I came here because it’s the only place I know where I stand a chance of making an impression with a rock group. Now you can either come in with me and give me some support, which is what friends are supposedly for, or you can jolly well sod off.’

  ‘Hey, girlies. Come and join the party,’ a leather-jacketed youth called across to them, drawing the eyes of other youths in their direction.

  ‘Don’t worry! I am!’ Kiki shot back brazenly and then, facing her and Primmie and Geraldine, she’d said, ‘Well, are you coming or aren’t you?’

  ‘We don’t have much choice, do we?’ Geraldine had said dryly.

  ‘We can’t leave you to go in there by yourself. We’ll go, but we keep together. Right?’

  ‘Right,’ Primmie had said grimly.

  She’d said nothing. To have refused to enter the coffee bar with them would have meant her having to get the train back to Bickley on her own and would have been an act of cowardice none of her friends would ever forgive or forget. Miserable, trying to keep in the middle of their little group and not look too conspicuous, a difficult task considering her exotic hairstyle, she’d gritted her teeth and walked with them into the Two Zeds.

  The next two hours had been unremittingly awful. There’d been other girls in the packed coffee bar, of course, but they’d all been dressed in either scruffy jeans and denim jackets or black leather trousers and leather bomber jackets.

  A horrible creature with a crucifix hanging from one ear had tried to pick her up and, when Geraldine had come to her aid and told him to ‘shove off and leave Artemis alone’, he’d begun making fun of her name, calling her Fatimis-Artemis.

  Tears of humiliation had burned the backs of her eyes and then Geraldine had inadvertently made everything worse by fishing a packet of cigarettes from the bottom of her bag. ‘Let’s light up,’ she’d said. ‘It’ll make us look groovier.’

  They’d all tried their hand at smoking before, but the experiment hadn’t been an unqualified success. Only Primmie – of all people – had successfully inhaled. Now, grateful for any crutch that would make her look as if she couldn’t care less about the nickname the biker had given her, she took a deep, experienced-looking breath inwards when she lit up. The result had been catastrophic. She’d coughed and choked and struggled for breath, her eyes streaming, her mascara running in rivers of black down her cheeks. To make it worse Kiki had said wryly, ‘A ciggie isn’t making Artemis look very groovy, Geraldine. And she’s going to look even worse if she’s sick.’

  She had been very sick. Primmie had taken her into a disgustingly dirty toilet where she’d retched in blessed privacy until she’d got the smoke out of her lungs.

  By the time the two of them had reluctantly squeezed their way back to where Geraldine was waiting for them, Kiki was already up on the small podium and was well into a number that had a beat like a sledgehammer.

  ‘How come she’s been allowed to sing?’ she had asked Geraldine, grudgingly admiring of Kiki’s ability to always get her own way.

  ‘God knows – the biker with the crucifix in his ear has taken a shine to her and he’s the group’s roadie. The only number she knows that they know is “Dancing in the Street”, which didn’t best please her. She wanted to do something more R&B. Still, she’s got the voice for it and she looks every inch a pop singer, doesn’t she?’

  ‘She does if the cotton wool stays in her bra,’ Primmie had said with anxiety.

  Artemis stared musingly at her reflection in her dressing-table mirror. Ever since the night at the Two Zeds she’d been on a crash diet and had already lost six pounds. As she studied the size of her breasts in relation to her emerging waist, she knew one thing for an absolute fact: Kiki would kill to be able to fill a bra the way she did.

  Satisfied with the look of the tapestry skirt and the pie-crust collared blouse she was wearing with it, she picked up a purple suede coat and hurried downstairs to where her father was waiting for her.

  ‘You look sensational, Princess,’ he said, beaming at her and stubbing out a cigar in a conveniently handy rose bowl.

  ‘Thanks, Daddy,’ she said, hoping their daily cleaning lady would attend to the cut-glass bowl before her mother saw its contents.

  ‘Come on, then. Let’s be on our way.’

  Her mother wasn’t coming with them to the matinée. It was going to be just her, her father and Primmie, and the car they would be going in was the Rolls. Being driven in the Rolls through the back streets of Rotherhithe was not an experience she relished and was one she knew that Primmie hated. ‘I’ll meet you and Artemis at the theatre, Mr Lowther,’ Primmie had said, valiantly trying to avoid the crushing embarrassment of having the Lowther Rolls glide to a halt outside her council home.

  Her father, however, enjoyed cruising in grandeur the mean narrow streets where, as a child, he’d run wild with his arse hanging out of his trousers, and wouldn’t hear of Primmie making the easy journey from Rotherhithe to the West End by public transport.

  As Artemis slid into the front passenger seat she reflected that the most astonishing thing she had ever experienced had been
her father telling Primmie’s parents that he’d been born only a couple of streets away from where they lived. Until then, she hadn’t known that her father had been born and bred in south-east London. She had always believed he was born and brought up in Berkshire.

  As the powder-blue car slid down the drive she tried to imagine what her life would have been like if her father had never wheeled and dealed his way out of the narrow cobbled streets of his youth, and couldn’t. The prospect was just too vile. The only thing she could imagine was that, if they had lived near to each other, she and Primmie would have been friends, just as they were friends now. Primmie, who was always so steadfast and supportive and who never lost her temper or threw emotional scenes.

  The Rolls began to gather speed and she remembered the one time Primmie had thrown an emotional scene. It had been the night of the Two Zeds nightmare when, on their way home from Bickley Station, an already horrible evening – horrible for her and Primmie, at any rate – had grown far, far worse.

  They’d arrived at the station to find the loos locked – which meant they couldn’t change back into their school uniforms. Hoping against hope that they were going to be able to sneak into Kiki’s house without being seen, they had begun the walk to Petts Wood from the station.

  Kiki had been noisily euphoric, walking along the edge of the curb as if it were a tightrope, over the moon at how successful her evening had been, full of how Ty, the hideous creature with a crucifix dangling from his ear, was going to meet her in Bromley on Saturday afternoon.

  Geraldine had been serenely indifferent to the ghastliness of Kiki doing any such thing and had taken her shoes off and was walking along the pavement barefoot. Primmie was rubbing her eyes, complaining that they were still stinging from cigarette smoke. She, Artemis, had just wanted to be in bed. Her high-heeled sandals had been crippling her, she’d lost so many hairpins there were more curls toppling loose than were still secured on the top of her head and one of her false eyelashes was so askew she could barely see where she was going.