Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  She would not talk to my father. She bit her lip and hung her head and clenched her fat fists at the sides of her cracked leather skirt, which was as big from hip to hip as from waist to hem. She might have talked to Miss Draper, who has quite a reassuring way with her, like a slow farm animal, but Miss Draper does not often get a chance to ask questions. She writes things in a ledger, and nods or shakes her head, and pretends to compress a laugh if my father makes a joke, and from time to time he leans over and they consult without moving their lips or looking at each other, like television panellists.

  ‘Come forward, Mother,’ my father said. He calls the women Mother because he can’t remember their names, and he thinks it is insulting to stop and look for it on the case notes, although I think it is more insulting to call them all Mother, as if they were in a labour ward.

  The mother talked, a dirge of complaints, and the girl did not look at her. Parents and children hardly ever look at each other in the juvenile court. It is as if each were equally ashamed of the other, although the parents usually do their best for the children, however much they may have threatened them with the Law beforehand. When it actually strikes, they are always ‘So surprised’ at the theft, or ‘Can’t understand’ why he cheated the railway, since he has always been a good boy and had only to ask at home if he was short.

  When my father asked the fat girl whether she wanted to go home, she shook her shaggy head.

  ‘You’d rather live somewhere else, Arleena?’ He pronounced it carefully, as seriously as if it were Joan. A few years in the juvenile court, and you can tackle any name.

  Although the mother had said nothing in favour of her daughter, she now took a step forward, as if she were going to lob the bomb into my father’s lap, and cried, ‘You can’t put her away!’

  ‘We’re not going to “put her away”,’ he said, putting irritable quotes round it, although he has heard the phrase so often that it should not bother him any more. ‘Holly Lodge is a hostel, not a prison.’ He explained the Order that he was going to make, talking to the girl, not the mother, which he always does, even with the morose ones, so they won’t feel that things are going on over their heads.

  ‘If her dad had stayed to his duty, this wouldn’t have happened,’ the mother said, chewing on her spite. ‘Ask me if I’ve had a penny from him since. Just ask me that, if you don’t mind!’

  ‘I do mind,’ my father said, with the kind of shocking urbanity he shouldn’t use here.

  ‘They don’t care,’ the woman said to no one, and followed her daughter out of the court, feeling worse than when she went in.

  Children came and went, frightened, rebellious, unbalanced, shifty. Parents trooped in and out - gangs of them sometimes, if several boys were involved together. The women had bags like week-end luggage, and red hands from waiting in the cold hall. The fathers had belted overcoats like tubs, and were flawless patriarchs who had always upheld the difference between right and wrong.

  A boy had stolen a motorbike because he was bored. A girl had stayed out all night because she was fed up. Another had been lodging with the Indian lodger. A ten-year-old in heels and stockings more ladders than nylon had been to school four times in seventy days. A whiskered Zen Buddhist had picked a pocket. A boy with acne like leprosy had broken probation for the sake of a packet of cigarettes. It was a normal morning.

  My wishing-well boy, scrubbed up a bit and wearing some of the clean clothes so jealously hoarded on the ceiling strings, lied freely and sweetly, while his mother sat back and nodded and smiled, as if she believed him.

  My father, who has a very beautiful smile, lifting like a bird’s wing, his eyes very deeply blue, played along with him, liking him for his sparkle and cheek. He and the boy threw charm at each othe for a while until my father suddenly tired of it, and rapped at the boy that he would send him away to be disciplined.

  The boy backed away as if he had touched fire. My father has done this at home. As children, the excitement of a wild game with him was heightened by uncertainty, and I have seen him romp with a dog and then suddenly slap it hard on the jaw; but I didn’t think he would do it in court, and I was afraid of what would happen.

  Nothing. Smoothly he had substituted Probation even before the Children’s Officer had finished clearing his throat for a polite protest, and I saw that the others in the room only thought he was acting, to teach the boy a lesson. I was the only one who knew it was a flash of cruelty. And the boy knew.

  I didn’t want to stay any longer. I caught my father’s eye and tilted my head at the door, and he raised an eyebrow which meant would I lunch with him, and I put my hand on my waist which meant I wasn’t eating today, and I was just getting up to slide out of the door behind him when the girl came in.

  The Warrant Officer had her by the arm, as if she had tried to run for it outside. She shook him off, with a quick sideways look of pride on her small blunt face, and went to stand in front of my father with the toes of her thin shoes exactly in line, as if she had been there before.

  I was half out of my chair, but I sat down again. She was another Care or Prot., a little younger than me, short, with a childish figure, and not very clean. Her lips were almost as pale as her skin, her wary eyes were ludicrously pencilled, and her chopped saffron hair had been roughly back-combed into an attempt at a good shape. Her legs were bare, the light hair on them standing out with cold, and her clothes looked as if she had snatched them off a younger sister.

  She stood staring through my father and biting her nails, although there was nothing left to bite.

  ‘I saw you two weeks ago, didn’t I?’ My father had his hands clasped on the table and his head slightly tilted, trying to put her at her ease, because she was rigid with antagonism.

  ‘Yes.’

  The children never call my father Sir, although most of the parents do, either from right or ingratiation.

  ‘And you’ve been at Pinkney House. Let’s see what they say about you. “Fairly cooperative as long as everything goes her way … poor attention to work, either daydreaming or sulking … slightly aggressive.” Yes, well.’ My father laid down the Remand Home report and looked at the girl over the top of his glasses before he took them off. ‘Not very good, is it?’

  She shook her head, keeping the immature chin tilted up.

  ‘You were remanded to Pinkney because your parents weren’t here last time. Why weren’t you here, Father?’

  The man had a stubble of greying hair like the top of a barrister’s wig, and flat, elliptical eyes too close together above a brutalized nose. He licked his lips and put his hands on his knees truculently, with the thumbs outside. ‘I couldn’t get off work.’

  ‘Stand up.’ The Warrant Officer nudged him, and he stood reluctantly, folding his short arms for comfort, which made him look more uncomfortable.

  ‘Did you ask?’

  ‘I’m on the vans, see.’

  My father raised one eyebrow, and decided not to pursue it. ‘And the mother - where is she?’

  ‘She couldn’t come. Look, she’s got the kids, and the shop too. How could she come with Kate not there to see to it?’

  ‘If Katherine were at home, there would be no need for anyone to come here,’ my father said mildly, and the man’s belligerence bounced back at him unused, and reddened the folds of bristled skin above his shrunken collar.

  Katherine. Kate. She attracted me. Why? She was undernourished and grubby and childish, and a policewoman had found her with a much older man in a place known as a Club, for want of any other label. It was not sudden attraction, not something jumping out excitedly from yourself like a flying-fish at the outspoken call of a stranger. It stayed within myself. There was no discovery. I seemed to know her quite well. When the other girls had stood there, with the same kind of story, I could watch, listen, try to imagine what it was like to be them and to have had their kind of life. With her, it was oddly as if I knew.

  This has never happened to me before, with wom
en or men. I have fallen in love in a flash, committing myself utterly to devotion. I have liked girls instantly, if they looked at me with pleasure instead of appraisal. With Kate, it was different. She looked at me without moving her head while her father was telling mine what a bad girl she was. Her eyes were pale blue, unsuited to the Cleopatra make-up. She looked at me for a second as if I were the only familiar thing in that courtroom, then slid her eyes back and shut them, the lashes flickering.

  She stood with her head up and her hands clenched white as her father told a one-sided story which sounded good to him, but to no one else. She would not speak, even to my father, and I wondered if he realized that the tilt of her head was not aggressiveness - favourite Remand Home word - but plain hydrology, to keep the tears from spilling over.

  Why didn’t they leave her alone? She had set her mind on silence. If she spoke, she would cry, and she had set her mind against the defeat of tears.

  ‘Why did you run away?’ my father asked her again, and Miss Draper’s stomach rumbled sharply, like a school lunch bell. ‘Don’t you like it at home?’

  Leave her alone! She pressed her pale lips together, and the tears glistened along the absurdly blackened lashes.

  ‘Never comes home.’ Her father began to whine through the battered nose, seeing his last chance to get a hearing. ‘We can’t do nothing with her. She never comes home, and that’s the truth. Eleven, twelve at night—’

  And she suddenly cried out, as if it was being wrung from her by torture, ‘What is there to come home for!’

  I WON’T CRY. I won’t. They’re not going to win that way and think I’m sorry.

  I’m not sorry. I’ll do it again, if they make me go home. It was all right with Bob, though two nights in that cellar was enough. With Douglas, it was the first time I felt grown up, when he talked to me about the sheep, and the pavement burning your feet.

  All the time I had to stand there - and the Spanish Inquisition had nothing on it, believe me - they thought I was listening to what was being said, and the report from Stinkney and that. But all I was thinking of was holding on and not crying. They would have loved me to cry, don’t doubt it, sobbing all over the court like a sinner at a Billy Graham rally, so I wasn’t going to give them that pleasure, with their eyes looking pity at me, and the careful kindness, and that woman bogey with her jolly manner. It’s no wonder she chose the Force. What else could you do with those legs?

  All but one girl. I didn’t know who she was, and I wasn’t that interested, but she didn’t seem to belong there in that yellow coat, and her hair was coming down in a heavy brown loop at the back and she didn’t want me to cry.

  I could see her not wanting it. She was on my side. Well, the others were too, of course, in their way, but it’s a different way from hers and mine. Theirs is organizing people. Ours is just wanting to be let alone and see what comes next.

  Why ours? I knew as soon as I came into that room, among the solemn, kindly stares, that she was my sort. She isn’t as pretty as me, unless you like that big-boned squaw type. But she looked at me, not with that case-worker look they all get - understanding, but watch your step - but truthfully, as if she was showing me herself.

  I’ll never see her again, I daresay, but it helped, her being there. It helped me not to let go and give them a reformed delinquent. It helped me not to cry, and so I stood there and held on to that while Dad bellyached on, and the beak tried to be fatherly, and my mind floated off away like it does if you concentrate on something physical, like beating your hand with a hairbrush and whirling it round till little points of blood start up all over it. Bob and I do it sometimes to see who can bleed most.

  I should have held on longer though, and not broken out like that and yelled at them. I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t going to say a word, just let them do whatever they wanted with me and not give them the satisfaction of knowing whether or not I minded, though if they had sent me back to Stinkney, I’d have gone in with Lynn and her lot and really showed them. But while I was standing there holding the damn tears and floating off down that road that curves away round a corner I never get to, I could hear Dad steaming up to that self-righteous bit about all they’ve done for me, and I suddenly came back to it all in a rush. The hopeless ugliness and the way we all fight round and round like animals in a cage and the voices and the shop door buzzing and the mouse droppings and the milk sour and the damn baby wetting in my bed, and I had to yell.

  It shocked them. The noise suddenly in the small room. Not what I said. That was no news. A women in a suit she’d knitted herself got up later and told how she had been to our home and what it was like. It was a bit much, hearing her say words like filth and slovenly - after all, it was our home - but Dad said never a word, and the old piece who is one of the magistrates but not allowed to talk kept sneaking looks at the clock. It was getting on for one. That’s the time they go for their dinner, you’ve got to consider that. So they wrapped the thing up.

  After I’d yelled out like that and shocked the plaster off the walls, I did cry, but only for a moment. Tears came gushing out like when the kids get the fire hydrant open, but I knew that if I just let them fall without putting up a hand to rub at them, they’d stop. They did, and I felt better, like letting a bit of gas out of your stomach to relieve the pressure.

  I’d given them their answer, and I had stopped being afraid of crying, so I could take some interest in things, and look at the girl in the yellow coat again, but she was leaving. She was going out a door at the back and I thought well, you ruddy sod, deserting me, though I was nothing to her, nor she to me.

  But it just shows you. So I felt dead rotten then, and I let myself listen to what they said, and answered Yes, which surprised them, since I’d been labelled unco-operative, and we all parted friends, and Dad went out the door we came in.

  I’d never looked at that door, not once the whole time, although I still thought, even at the end, that my mother would come. She didn’t. Why should she? Miss Reid took me out the other door, which didn’t lead into the hall, but it didn’t matter. I knew she wasn’t out there.

  I SPENT THE afternoon in a cinema, and found that my father had gone home on an earlier train, because the car was not at the station. Our house is not far from the railway - it’s not far from anywhere, for that matter: you can hear the neighbours breathing on a quiet night - so I would just as soon walk, although it is mostly on a main road, between two Medway towns.

  As soon as you step up on our black drive, you can see the view dropping away beyond the hedge. The fields and the little common where the gorse is blocked in like a schoolroom print in the spring cannot be built over. Only the Ministry could despoil the wood beyond and the single, perfectly shaped chestnut-tree in the middle of the empty meadow.

  It is absolutely pretty and I dislike it absolutely. A pose? All right, but when the hundredth visitor has stood on the terrace, dutifully exclaiming and wondering where the drinks are, the view begins to purr and simper. The Green Belt, for God’s sake. A narrow green girdle of Socialist niceties, a feeble attempt to disguise what they have let London do to the Weald and the Thames Valley and the spurs of the Chilterns.

  Only twenty miles from London, the visitors exclaim, and all this country! A cheat. If you rode a horse into the valley and up the meadow on the other side, you would be into the washing lines of the Estate before you were really galloping.

  My parents were lucky. They bought this house long ago, when people were more relaxed about the Green Belt, and this was not exclusively the best view twenty miles, etc., etc. Prices all along our road are very high now, and my father could get twice what he gave, and he might have, five or six years ago, and escaped. But he is losing initiative. He is losing the dream with which he beguiled me. Or perhaps he never truly had it.

  Our neighbours are mostly richer than we are. It is quite social, with the same people ait all the parties, and a proportion of adultery, like a pale imitation of O’Hara suburbia, be
cause the gin is weaker.

  The teenage parties are as dull as the grown-up ones, for different reasons. The host parents are conscientious about Being There, which means they go upstairs and hang over the banisters trying to hear something lewd, like the mother in Peyton Place.

  When I went into the house and draped my yellow coat over the acorn end of the banister, my mother was in the little room off the hall, drinking sherry out of a glass she couldn’t get her nose into and reading a novel by the fire.

  The drawing-room is hard to heat, so we sit in the little room when we are alone. Not that we sit together very much. After dinner, my father, who often brings work home, goes to his room upstairs whether he has work or not, and my mother reads with her dark sculpted eyebrows up, making little noises like a sleeping pony. I sometimes try to watch television, and when she begins to ask: How can you bear to watch that trash? I go up and read in the bath with my hair draped over my breasts like wet seaweed.

  When I have finished training and have a proper job with Uncle Mark, I shall have a flat in London. She doesn’t know yet, and we’ll let that battle keep. Often I think I can’t wait so long, but until I’m earning, the only alternative is marriage. Who with? None of the people I have loved so far have loved me. Some of them didn’t even know me.

  ‘This is a ghastly book,’ my mother said.

  I used to say: Why read it? I don’t any more.

  ‘All the people are so worthless. Why must one read about worthless people?’ Since books nowadays aren’t written about the kind of people she considers worthwhile, it’s hard for her.

  She said that I could have some sherry - if she knew what Derek and I put away when we go out - and I invented a few clean and poignant things about the morning, because the truth makes her talk about bringing back the birch, and then my father came in, which was what I’d been waiting for since I fumbled out of the courtroom with my hair coming down.