There’s nothing worse than having to eat a plateful of fish and chips after you’ve spent all evening shovelling mountains of the stuff into newspaper parcels. We have the leftovers. The chips are bitter and blackened around the edges and the fish is dry with soggy batter.
Actually, it’s not true that there’s nothing worse than stale fish suppers. There’s plenty of worse things.
Listening to Norma pretending to be all grown up isn’t much fun. I know she’s been married for over six years now, but I don’t know why that means all she has to talk about is the price of butter and the latest recipe she cooked for Raymond. She never used to be so boring. I don’t know why putting a ring on your finger means you have to become a different person. I’d feel sorry for Raymond if he wasn’t such a drip.
Another thing that’s worse than eating a stale fish supper is having to look at the empty place across the other side of the table. It’s been there my whole life, whenever we sit down to eat. There it is. The chair with no one in it. The gaping hole. The place that can never be filled. Joseph’s chair. The son who is never coming home. Look at you all, the chair says. Filling your faces, while bits of me are rotting in the ground all over the French countryside. It’s enough to make anyone lose their appetite.
But worse than all of that. Worse than any of it, is remembering what Jackie said earlier when she popped her head around the door, all breathless and in a hurry.
‘Can’t meet you at the usual time tomorrow, Vi,’ she said. ‘Me and some of the girls from Garton’s are going to see that new film, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But, I’ll see you after, at Ruby’s Café. Yeah?’
She didn’t even bother to look guilty.
Jackie’s my best friend. I’ve known her for ever and she’s the only person who has ever stuck by me; the only person who has ever really got me. If I close my eyes I can see pictures in my head of all the special times we’ve shared; a bit like a photograph album, I suppose. In the first photograph, me and Jackie are only four. We’re spinning our skipping ropes fast; slap, slap, slap on the pavement. We’re singing loudly, hoping not to be the first to trip on our rope.
Fatty and Skinny went to bed
Fatty let a fart and Skinny went dead
Fatty called the doctor and the doctor said
If Fatty lets another fart we’ll all be dead!
In the next photograph, me and Jackie are five. We’re holding hands as we walk through the school gates for the first time. I’m not excited. My tummy has been aching all morning and I need a pee. But I don’t know where to go and I don’t know who to ask. Then, suddenly, before I can stop it, there’s hot liquid running down my legs. I want to cry. I tug on Jackie’s hand to make her look at me. She stops and turns and I manage to whisper in her ear. Without saying a word, she leads me around a corner and behind a row of dustbins.
‘Take your knickers off then,’ she says, as she pulls her own down and steps neatly out of them. They are snowy white with a small pink bow sewn onto the waistband. I wriggle out of my soggy pants and Jackie whips them out of my hand and stuffs them into her coat pocket.
‘Quick, put mine on,’ she orders.
I do as I’m told. Jackie takes my hand again and we walk back around the corner and into a classroom that smells of Plasticine, pencil shavings and new leather shoes, and everything is okay again.
Another photograph, and it’s a bright sunshine day in the playground. Marjorie Black is chanting in my face. ‘Ugly Fish! Ugly Fish! Speccy four-eyes! Speccy four-eyes!’
Jackie throws a stone at her and it slices through the little witch’s cheek. We stand and watch as Marjorie wails and blood drips on to the collar of her daffodil-yellow dress. Jackie’s not allowed out to play with me for days after. The world is scary and empty without her. It feels like loneliness has swallowed me up whole.
I can flick through the pages in my head to one of my favourite photographs. Me and Jackie are eight and it’s the best day ever. They’ve stopped rationing sweets! We go to Miss Suttie’s sweetshop and buy a toffee apple and liquorice laces, black and shiny as tar. The toffee cracks in my mouth and the apple is sharp and crunchy. I’ve never tasted anything so delicious. The liquorice is so sticky that when Jackie smiles at me she looks like an urchin with rotten teeth. On the way home we stop and watch some boys messing about on a bombsite. They shoot at us with their sticks, so we poke out our liquorice-black tongues and show them our knickers.
Another favourite photograph is from my fourteenth birthday. Jackie’s given me a present wrapped in pale blue paper. ‘It was the nearest colour I could get to violet,’ she says. I open it slowly. It’s a silver letter V on a thin silver chain. It’s the best present I’ve ever had. Jackie fastens it around my neck then she pulls down the collar of her school blouse and she’s got one too. Only hers is a letter J of course. She looks at me seriously. ‘We must never take these off,’ she says. ‘Never. Or our friendship will be broken.’
There’s some photographs in my head that I don’t like to look at. Like the one of me and Jackie walking out of the school gates for the very last time. Jackie has her arm linked through mine and she’s chattering away like mad. ‘That’s it, Violet,’ she says. ‘Proper grown-ups now, we are!’ She undoes her tie and yanks it from around her neck. Then she skips along the road swinging the tie above her head like a lasso. ‘Yee ha!’ she shouts. ‘Freedom, Violet! Freedom!’
I try to join in. But my tie hangs limply in my hand and my skipping is half-hearted. The truth is, I don’t feel grown up at all. I want to be excited and happy. I want the future to be a bright golden road stretching out in front of me. But all I feel is scared and disappointed – and jealous.
Jackie’s going off to work at Garton’s Glucose factory, as a sugar packer. I want to go there too, but Dad won’t hear of it. ‘Going to work in a factory!’ he explodes. ‘When there’s a perfectly good job for you here? I don’t think so, young lady.’ He wags his finger at me. ‘Family comes first. You know that.’ His face slams shut, like a prison door. And I know that’s that. No golden road. No bright future. Just buckets and buckets of potatoes and cold, wet fish.
‘We’ll meet up every night,’ Jackie promises. ‘And we’ll still have Saturdays. And money to spend now, too! Think of the shopping we’ll be able to do. And all the dancing! It’ll be fantastic, Violet! You wait and see!’
I smile a tight little smile. I don’t want to let her go. I don’t want her to go out into the world without me.
In every photograph in my album, Jackie’s much prettier than me. She’s sort of light and dainty. Everything about her is small and neat and in exactly the right place. She has china doll lips, a nose that turns up at the end just the right amount and eyes like Marlene Dietrich. If she was a cake, she would have been made by a master baker. He would have chosen the best ingredients and weighed and sifted and stirred as carefully as he could. He would have baked the cake for not one minute more or one minute less than was needed and then spent all day icing it to perfection.
I’m more like a plain old sponge cake with a bit of jam in the middle. But I don’t care. Because Jackie’s the sort of girl who’d much rather have a piece of sponge than the fanciest cake in the world. That’s why I love her. And that’s why I don’t want to lose her.
Jackie lives with her nan, Brenda, round the corner from us on Speke Road. She hasn’t got a mum or dad, and she doesn’t like talking about it either. Jimmy Green found that out back in junior school when he teased her and called her an orphan. His black eye lasted a good couple of weeks. Jackie’s not an orphan. But she might as well be. She told me once that her mum died giving birth to her and that not long after, her dad ran off with a leggy blonde. It wasn’t until ages after that I realised Aleggy Blonde wasn’t actually the name of someone, but was a type of someone. ‘I’m only telling you, cos you’re my best friend,’ Jackie had said. ‘But I don’t ever want to talk about it again.’
I don’t blame Jackie for not wantin
g to talk about her parents. Neither of them are ever going to come back. I feel the same about Joseph. I hate it that Mum goes on and on about him all the time. What’s the point? Joseph’s never coming back either. So why can’t she just shut up about him? Sometimes, I wish I could give her a black eye.
Thinking too much about Jackie makes my throat hurt. I love her more than my own sister, but something horrible is happening to us, something is changing and it’s making my heart shrivel with sadness. It’s like when a stone is thrown at a window. At first there’s just a small pit of a hole with a barely-there crack and you hope and hope that it’s not going to get any worse. But then the crack begins to spread and spider out. Then more cracks appear and they grow wider and deeper and suddenly, in front of your eyes, the glass shatters and comes crashing down in long pointed shards that could pierce your heart and kill you. That’s what’s happening to me and Jackie now. I’m just holding my breath and waiting for my heart to be pierced by our broken friendship.
The shop door jangles and I jump.
‘Violet!’ shouts Dad. ‘Where the hell are you?’
I sigh. Here we go again. Another joyful Friday evening. I gather up the pile of newspapers and take them through to the shop. The fryers are already bubbling and spitting. Dad’s face is already red and shiny and Mrs Robinson is already standing at the counter with her purse clasped in her hands.
It’s busy this evening. I’m glad. There’s no time to think about Jackie. It’s just smile and greet, smile and greet. Scoop of chips. Large cod or small? A shake of salt, a dash of vinegar. That’ll be two and six please. By the time the last customer has rattled the door closed behind them (Mr Carver – I gave him the meanest piece of cod because he’s a mean old bugger; always shouting at the kids around here) my hair is sticking to my forehead and my apron is covered in grease where I’ve been wiping my hands down it all evening.
I just want my bed now. I want to close my bedroom door, draw the curtains tight and shut out the whole world. I want to settle back on my pillows and pull the blankets over my knees. I’ll keep the light on, but I’ll push my dressing gown against the bottom of the door, so when Mum comes up the stairs she won’t see the strip of light and yell at me to, ‘Switch that off, Violet! We’re not made of money, you know!’
Then I’ll pick up my book and find the page with the corner turned down. It’s a new book, by an Irish writer called Edna O’Brien. I had to order it in especially from the library and it took ages to arrive. The book’s been banned in Ireland. There’s been a right old uproar. The priest that lives in the same village as Edna O’Brien even burned a copy. I wanted to read it to see what all the fuss is about.
Miss Read gave me a funny look when she saw it in my weekly pile. Her ink stamp hovered over it. ‘Are you sure your parents will be happy for you to read this, Violet?’ she asked.
‘They don’t mind what I read, Miss Read,’ I said. ‘And besides, I’m sixteen now.’ I glared at her. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so rude. But it worked anyway, although she brought the stamp down so hard I thought she’d break it. The book’s called The Country Girls and it’s about two best friends, Kate and Baba. They’re just like me and Jackie. They share each other’s secrets just like we do. Although me and Jackie never took our knickers off and tickled each other. Perhaps that’s why they banned it in Ireland.
‘Here,’ Dad grunts at me. ‘Take these out back before your mother starts hollering.’ He shoves a tray, stacked with the evening’s leftovers, into my hands. It’s heavy. I groan, but more from the thought of the evening ahead than from the weight of the tray. Kate and Baba will have to wait.
Mum’s bustling about, buttering bread and making sure Norma and Raymond have enough tea. ‘Oh good,’ says Norma when I put the tray down on the table. ‘We’re starving.’
‘All right, Violet?’ asks Raymond.
He’s got a new jumper on. It’s the colour of English mustard and the stitches are loose and baggy around the collar. I reckon Norma’s been knitting again.
Mum puts the plate of bread and butter in the middle of the table and starts to share out the fish and chips onto the waiting plates. Norma picks up her napkin and spreads it out on her lap. I snort. ‘Didn’t know we were dining at The Ritz,’ I say under my breath.
Norma looks at me sharply. ‘So, Violet,’ she says. ‘Got yourself a boyfriend yet?’
‘Why would I want one of those?’ I say. I pull a face at Raymond. ‘I might end up having to get married and then my life would be over.’
Norma sniffs and carefully picks up a chip from her plate with her red-painted fingernails. ‘Just wondered,’ she says. ‘Only I thought you and your friend Jackie did everything together.’ She pops the chip in her mouth and slowly licks her fingers.
‘What do you mean by that?’ The words are out before I can help it and Norma’s lipsticky lips curl into a smirk, just like I knew they would.
‘Only, we saw her the other night, didn’t we, Raymond?’
‘Who?’ he says. He shakes a flurry of salt all over his supper. ‘Pass the vinegar, will you, Violet?’
‘Jackie,’ says Norma, as I slide the vinegar bottle across the table. ‘We saw Violet’s friend Jackie the other night, didn’t we? Coming out of the dance hall. With some fella all over her, don’t you remember?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ says Raymond. He drenches his fish with vinegar. Norma’s eyes light up with triumph. My cheeks burn. She might as well have slapped me in the face. She’s like vinegar, I think; she sours everything.
Mum joins us at the table. ‘Jackie’s got a boyfriend, has she?’ I can almost see her ears waggling. ‘You never said, Violet!’
‘I don’t have to tell you everything,’ I mumble. I can’t eat now. I feel odd, as though someone has shoved their hand down my throat and is trying to pull my heart out. It’s like I’ve been told the worst news ever.
‘You all right, Violet?’ says Norma. ‘You’ve gone all pale. You want some vinegar on those chips? Hey, and look. Like my new earrings? Raymond bought them for me.’
I look down at my plate. There’s oil congealing in the folds and bubbles of batter. ‘I’m not hungry,’ I say. I stand and push my chair back. ‘I feel sick. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.’ I hurry to the door.
‘Nice to see you, too!’ Norma shouts after me.
‘Cow!’ I hiss at the staircase walls. It’s cold in the bathroom and smells of mildew and Mum’s damp girdles that are hanging over the bath to dry. I take off my glasses and splash my face with water. When did Jackie start going to dances? Since when has she been interested in fellas? And when did she stop sharing her secrets with me? I swallow hard.
She’s bored with me, I think. I’m not exciting enough for her any more. I’m just the dull girl from the chippie, the girl with no future. I put my glasses back on and study my face in the mirror, but there’s nothing there worth describing. Pale skin and a splatter of freckles. Plain and ordinary; nothing too big and nothing too small. Nothing to notice. And all of it framed by frizzy brown hair and a pair of National Health specs. I remember walking home from the optician’s with Mum, on the day I got my first pair of glasses. I was only four. I remember Mum tugging on my hand and telling me to hurry up because I was dawdling. But I wasn’t dawdling, I was looking around in wonder. It was like someone had polished the whole world. Everything was so bright and clear and shocking. It was the first time I saw that trees had leaves, that the pavement had cracks and that Mum had wrinkles on her face. It was a miracle.
But then Norma went and ruined it all in her usual fashion. ‘You do know, don’t you, Violet, that men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses?’
She’s always been a cow.
I pull my glasses off again and rub my face dry with a towel. I rub hard, wishing I could rub out my features and find a new set of prettier, more exciting ones underneath. It doesn’t happen, of course. I look just the same, except now my skin is a horrible shiny pink. I should hav
e seen it coming with Jackie. I should have known I was never enough for her. I’m usually so good at knowing what people are thinking.
‘Violet!’ yells Mum from downstairs. ‘We’re waiting for you. Norma and Raymond have to go in a bit.’
Good, I think. Let them wait. I lock the bathroom door. If anyone comes up, I’ll make retching noises and pretend I’m really ill. I sit on the toilet lid and watch the tap dripping. Mum doesn’t shout again and no one bothers to come up. I don’t know what’s worse; if I’d been forced to go back down, or being ignored like this?
Plink, plink, plink. The leaking tap is getting on my nerves. I’ve never thought about it before, but looking at how the drips of water have stained the enamel a dirty yellow, I realise that the tap has been dripping all my life. I count how many plinks there are in a minute. Thirty. Then I try and work out how many drips there might have been since I was born. It’s a long, complicated sum and I have to keep starting again at the beginning. Before I can work out the answer, it suddenly strikes me that Joseph would have known this dripping tap too. He probably had his first shave in this sink. He would have washed his hands in here for the last time, before he went off to be killed in the war. For some reason that makes me really sad and I have to lift my glasses to wipe my eyes.
A door bangs downstairs and I hear Norma thanking Mum for a lovely supper. ‘Bye, Violet!’ she shouts up the stairs. ‘Hope you feel better soon!’
‘Good riddance,’ I say under my breath. I dart from the bathroom and across the landing to the safety of my room. All I want is to be left alone with my misery.
The Country Girls is lying on the floor next to my bed. I read a few pages, but the more I read the more I realise that Kate and Baba’s friendship isn’t the perfect thing I thought it was. Baba is a bitch and a bully and Kate lets her get away with it. Baba is mean and spiteful and poor Kate begins to lose everything. Now her mother is dead; drowned in a river. I throw the book back on the floor. I want to climb into the pages and over all the words to find Kate and tell her that I’ll be her friend and she doesn’t have to put up with being pushed around any more. I wanted their friendship to conquer the world, like I wanted me and Jackie to conquer the world. But Baba isn’t true and loyal and neither, I realise, is Jackie.
V for Violet Page 2
