Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  There was nothing for it but to cross the room and say, ‘Hullo, Kate.’

  She turned slowly, as if it didn’t matter. ‘What?’

  ‘Hullo!’ I shouted. The noise was fierce, a crescendo of the battering sounds my generation is supposed to need, which is driving us all a little askew.

  The noise died away suddenly to a whimper, the needle slid across the record and Kate said rather sourly: ‘I thought you weren’t coming.’

  ‘Am I late? I didn’t know what time.’

  ‘Oh well. You bring any records?’

  ‘A few. But I don’t know if they’re the right kind.’ They were piano, the only ones I have, people like Garner and Peter Nero playing old stuff in a way Cole Porter never expected.

  ‘Ta.’ Kate took them and put them down without looking at them. It was clear they wouldn’t be played. I should have borrowed some from next door.

  We were all just looking at each other, like dogs, or street gangs sizing up for a fight. Nothing happened. I seemed to have paralysed whatever initiative had before made it possible to put on a record, to start dancing. The boy in the chair had stopped rocking. Pig girl and sideburns stood on the torn linoleum with their little fingers twined. Kate, who is meagrely shaped, looked almost heavy with inertia. To have introduced anybody would have cost her as great an effort as to lift feet nailed to the floor, which they seemed to be.

  If I had said, into the silence: I’m Emma Bullock, it would sound like an indecency, and so would their names, if I forced them to divulge.

  At least she had minded because I was late and she thought I wasn’t coming. I would have turned with an incoherent excuse and run away if it wasn’t for that, and if I hadn’t been dressed right. Kate had put on all her eye paint, and a short tight black skirt, with red tights and the red polo-necked sweater. The log by the fire was in a string-coloured sloppy with what might prove to be a skating skirt when she got up. Pig wore a long barrel sweater, home-knitted and cast on too tight round the hips. I had the black chunky number which makes me look very Aztec, and I had wound my hair round and round my head like knitting wool, and the thick girl had built hers, apparently days ago, into a tottering ginger beehive.

  Give the teenagers a chance, Mollyarthur had obviously said, shut herself in the kitchen, and forbidden the little ones the room on pain of death. So there we were in the square bare room with the chairs pushed against the walls, like strange children shoved into a nursery and told: Play.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Shall we—’ I began desperately. I don’t know whether I would have said Have another record, or Tell our names, or Play Sardines, but suddenly, as if I had pressed a button, Kate dropped the needle back on the record, the boy with the lemon hair leaped into the air crying, ‘Hit it!’ and was away with pig, Kate pulled the other boy out of the chair and galvanized him into loose-jointed action, and I was so invigorated by the relief from paralysis that I almost bent over the log girl with my hand in my waist and said: Shall we dance?

  Instead, I sat down beside her, and she told me behind her hand, which is the way she said everything, with little digs of the elbow that her name was Joan, dig, and she worked with Kate at the nursing home - what on earth did they do among the old ladies being starved to death for their annuities? - that the rocking-chair boy was called Bob, sniff, and the other two were Kevin and Sonia, old friends of Kate’s, dig dig, well, it takes all kinds.

  No one asked me to dance. No one talked to me, although I tried. Even Joan had nothing more to convey behind her hand. Between records, the boys were completely silent, with clodding feet in prehistoric shoes, and Kate was featureless in her Queen of the Nile make-up, wishing she had not asked me, for she couldn’t be friendly with the others there, and with me there, she couldn’t let go with them.

  Would it hurt her more if I stayed or left? Who cared anyway? Thank God I hadn’t said anything at home about coming here, so I wouldn’t have to face: Well, how did it go?

  IT WAS AWFUL. The worst party I’ve ever been at. Not that I’ve been at any except those brawls at the Teen Club, with Mc-Donovan blowing his whistle.

  Because I’ve never had a birthday party, nor even a birthday - but Molly knew because of the date on my papers - she was bound I should have one.

  I said O.K. When Molly’s got an idea, you may as well go along with it. Who to ask? Don’t lose touch, she said, so I asked Sonia, that I used to go with at school, and since you can’t ask her without Kev, I asked him too.

  I didn’t know Molly knew about Bob, but of course she’ll have read the reports and things where it tells about me and him going off - my whole life laid bare for the world to see - so she was bound I should ask him. The funny thing about her is this. Everyone else thinks it was bad that I ran away with him. Old Moll thinks the bad thing is that I ran away from him, in Charing Cross Road. I sometimes wonder why they let her be a foster-mother. She doesn’t think like any mother I know. If she’s trying to buy me by never criticizing, even when Matron came in person to complain about my work, she’s wasting her time. I belong to no one.

  Never did to Bob. He knew that, so he bears no malice. He told me he saw the Horse Guards after I’d gone, and spent all day in Hyde Park waiting to see them come back, before he went home.

  Joan has never liked me ever since I first set foot in the nursing-home kitchen and caught her at the shortbread, but she had asked me to Sunday dinner with her people - boiled mutton, never again - so Molly said I had to ask her.

  Not much of a party, but there it was. I’d never had one, and if I hadn’t been all steamed up about it, I’d never have invited the Bullock girl.

  She is a bit queer, mind you, because there’s no need for her to work in that market, though she told Molly she likes it, but she is - different. Different to what? To everyone. I’ve never met anybody like her. She has all this bunch of hair, and at the shop it was hanging like a rope, so thick the kids could have swung on it, and she’s the kind you don’t waste a month getting to know each other, like I and Bob when we used to stand on the iron bridge and watch the roofs of the trains because we couldn’t think of anything to do.

  With her, you like know her at once. I felt that in court, though I thought that was part of the dream, because the whole lot was hazy. Doug was like that too. As soon as he said: ‘You going anywhere, or coming somewhere with me?’ in that crazy Aussie voice, I felt all right with him.

  I must have been daft to ask her like that, but I never thought she’d come anyway, not after the way she looked when we left. It hadn’t been right to ask her. I’d been wrong thinking she isn’t the same as all the rest. She is. She couldn’t possibly be friendly with someone like me, with Butt Street written all over them, too thick for Grove Lodge to ever wipe off.

  Molly said she’d come. I knew she wouldn’t. When it was an hour after the others had got there, then I knew she wouldn’t.

  For a moment when she did, I wanted to rush across the room and grab her, but I’ve never done that to anyone in my life, and it wasn’t the time to start, with Joan sitting there like the Beast from Outerspace, and Sonia looking at everyone as if they were something the cat did.

  So I kept my back turned, because she was late on purpose to make me think she wasn’t coming. She came over, and she had these corny records, nothing anyone ever heard of, and she looked smashing, I mean that. She’s ugly really, feature by feature, but that hair like yards of thick toasted silk is really something, and so is that square black sweater. My beloved red was suddenly all wrong. I’ve got to get a loose black turtleneck, and I’ve got to let my hair grow.

  And then suddenly the party was all wrong too, and I wished she hadn’t come. Why had she? To make fun of us? To show us up? The others just stared at her, and we were all dumb like our own funeral.

  It hadn’t been what you might call gay before, but whatever it was, she had ruined it, and I hated her for that, although it was my fault for asking her. Molly’s fault for letting me. Kev’s a
nd Sonia’s fault for being so, I don’t know. Poor Bob’s fault for sitting there with that silly smile, and falling all over me when I made him dance. Joan’s fault for whispering things about me to Emma.

  Emma. Whoever heard of a name like that? I ask you. Emma’s fault for being there.

  If that’s a birthday party, I’d not missed a thing. I was ready to throw the whole thing up, when all at once there was a shrieking and yelling and the door burst open and some of the kids crashed in in their pyjamas and shouted we’d all to come into the room.

  The room is the one at the back of the house looking over the Park where we do everything, and there’s no space in there for five more people, that’s why Molly had shoved us in the playroom. The room is the centre of this house, the only place I’ve ever felt really safe in, but I didn’t want Emma to see all the laundry and the babies and the animals and that awful moulting bird and the come and go at the round table - there’s always someone eating, day and night - and the walls chalked over any time anyone feels artistic, because that can’t be the way she lives, and I want to be her equal.

  But the kids rushed us down the hall, and Kev was shrieking: ‘Hit it!’ and jumping at the ceiling, and Ralph had a hold of me and tugging, and Donna pushing from behind, and when we got past the stairs and to the door, someone flung it open from inside, and there it was. My birthday.

  The room was half-dark, just the fire, and the nightlights. It was all decorated with coloured paper like Christmas, and bells and silvery things and the birdcage all hung with leaves and little bright shiny balls. All the toys and clothes and carpentry and stuff were in the shadows, even the ironing-board had gone, and on the round table in the middle of the room, instead of the sauce bottles and the last person’s dirty mug, there was this huge great cake with seventeen candles on it.

  Someone pushed me and I went up to the table. All the kids stood in an arc behind it with the candle flames like pinpoints in their eyes, and Tina had on that long nightdress and her voice all filling up her mouth like cake, and the boys not shoving and giggling, singing dead earnest.

  Happy birthday, dear Katie, they sang. Happy birthday to you, and my heart came right up through my chest as if I was going to cough blood.

  THE BIRTHDAY PARTY was the beginning of the real friendship between Kate and me. After Molly had broken her down with the cunning staging of the cake and those heartbreaking children in the candlelight, she dropped the shield and dagger she’d been carrying round like a Roman Legionary, and risked enjoyment.

  She had to wash her face after the emotion of the singing. When she came out of the kitchen scrubbing at her face with a dish-towel, Sonia said, ‘You’ll have to do up your eyes again,’ but Kate said, ‘Who for?’ and stood on her head up the wall beside one of the small boys who was relaxing there, with his pyjama jacket fallen over his face.

  Mollyarthur’s husband is the hale, shock-headed kind, like a man in an advertisement for pipe tobacco. He has a loud slow voice with a few West Country vowels, and a laugh out of all proportion to the joke. Ha, ha, ha, he goes, ho, ho, at almost anything I say, and makes me feel I have a rare wit. Kate walks wide round him as if he were going to rape her, but he is as mild as bread, and accepts all the extra children stoically, as if it were a disease that Molly had.

  There was a cottage piano in the corner shadows, with panels of painted swains and ladies, and its hammers and wires exposed. After the food, he played, nodding rhythmically over his square pelted hands, and we sang old easy songs with the children. Sonia and Kevin told each other it was corny, and soon roared away on the cow-punching motorbike, and when the children had straggled off to bed like the Lost Boys going up the tree-trunks, we sat on the floor and told ghost stories.

  I was afraid to go home after the one Kate told about the Claw - she has seen every horror film ever made - so Bob walked me to the station, for what that was worth. He is like a great amiable child, with his shambling walk and his gullible grin, and if he really ran away with Kate, as I seem to remember someone saying in court, they must have been like Hansel and Gretel.

  ‘Well, how did it go?’ my mother asked me next morning, and I forgot where I was supposed to have been, so I said I liked it, which was the truth, and that I had made a new friend, which was also the truth.

  ‘Let’s hope this one lasts longer than Hugh.’ Docketing her ideas as she does, my mother expects girls of my age to be exclusively concerned with the opposite sex.

  ‘She’s training to be a nurse,’ I said, although I knew by now, because Kate and Joan had let go profanely about the nursing home, that they were only unwilling drudges who washed and scrubbed and swabbed and soaked and rinsed all day long in the unending battle against senile incontinence.

  I go to Mollyarthur’s quite often after work. I am not in love just now, and the girls I know are away at college with utterly liberated morals, or married to television actors, or engrossed in some much more interesting job than mine. No one is training for retail grocery, and they have never been very real friends anyway.

  At Grove Lodge, which looks better as the winter begins to loose its hold, Donna left when her mother came out of prison, but the twins have come to take her place, sad balding three-year-olds who have never had enough of anything, food or sleep or fresh air or love. If Kate and I will put the children to bed, Molly will give us kippers or chops for supper. If not, it is all the left-overs thrown in a frying-pan with eggs broken in the middle, which isn’t bad either.

  I am her sixth foster-child, since Kate refuses the title, and Mr Arthur, whose name is Jim, groaned and said it was getting worse than a Remand Home.

  ‘Don’t hurt Emma’s feelings,’ Molly said. ‘If you had been taught to shoplift by a stepmother who chained you to the bed at night, you’d be delinquent too.’

  He laughed ho, ho, because it is his nature, but he only plays card games with us, not this game. One of the things we do is inventing gruesome backgrounds for this sixth foster-child. It doesn’t bother Kate; in fact it was she who started it, and she who keeps throwing in macabre details like burnings and starvings and babies abandoned in sewers, which have a faint smell of truth under the Gothic exaggeration.

  One of Molly’s friends who heard us at it, told Molly that it was in bad taste, in view of … and made a mouth.

  ‘You mean me?’ Kate called from the kitchen, where she and I were doing Michael’s arithmetic for him while we discussed my youth under the white slavers.

  ‘Oh no,’ the friend said quickly, and Molly said: ‘We weren’t talking to you anyway. You run your life, I’ll run mine,’ which always makes us shriek with laughter, very childish. But we are childish, romancing and dramatizing and making up exotic things which might have happened at the supermarkets or the nursing home, and crimes the nurses have committed (Kate detests them all), and marvellous things that are going to happen to us when we are famous and adored, and impossibly marvellous men who are going to come charging into our lives: always older, lean, sardonic yet tender, the kind who don’t exist.

  The only thing that comes charging is Bob, who wanders across the Park from time to time and sits in a chair and eats raisins until he is told to go home. He seldom talks, unless you get him on to soldiers, which are his dream. He still thinks that one day he will be in the Army. He has been rejected already, but he does not understand why. He thinks it was because of his feet, and he wears supports inside the cumbersome rubber-tyred shoes and does pushups on his toes when he is standing, which is only when there is nowhere to sit down.

  When Kate and I are off on a saga, he will sit and listen peacefully, throwing raisins into his smile and occasionally asking a question about people who don’t exist, as if they were real. Kate treats him like a child, and calls him Molly’s seventh baby, since there are enough fosters, but I never see her touch him or look at him as if there were anything between them or has ever been.

  We are getting so that we can say anything to each other. We talk about ev
erything that is in our heads, without pausing to think if it’s safe, as you do with people who are friends of circumstance, or friends of convenience, not friends of choice. The only things we cannot talk about are the purplish-red mark she carries like a yoke on her neck, and we never talk about her home, and the misery that drove her away and that keeps her from going back.

  ‘Moll is stuck with me,’ she says, and Molly says Good, and starts to plan how we’ll arrange the furniture for the wedding and whether Jim shall take Kate to church in a hired car or the old brown Ford with ribbon streamers.

  I think that may be why Kate started to concoct all the horrors about me, to foil discovery of any of her own, like a child babbling about dragons in the shrubbery so that no one will look at the trampled flowerbed.

  I am leading a somewhat secret life, almost like a furtive love affair, because I cannot describe Grove Lodge at home without my mother thinking that I am slumming, although she would make an effort to be pleased at what she called bravely my ‘unusual choice of friends’ when I brought the Nigerian home from the college.

  And my father? I am going to take him to Molly’s soon and show them to him, and show him off to them.

  I find myself wanting to include him more in myself. Although I have this secret life, which is making me happy and is exciting, because Kate and I discover things about each other all the time, and I am watching her grow towards what she might have been if her life had been different, I want him too. I want to do things with him, grab him, keep him. He slipped away from my mother years ago, but I am not going to let him slip away from me.

  When I was a child, our closest times together were out of doors. I wore out one shoulder carrying his golf clubs, and later he taught me to use them. He taught me to ride, and tennis he taught me, although I was always too slow. I was a lumbering child. People called to me: ‘Straighten your knees!’ but it didn’t help. He was not expert at anything, but he could do everything fairly well. He taught us all, including himself, to sail, and he taught Alice and Peter and me to swim, and we soon swam much better than he did, which was why he hadn’t been able to get to Peter when he was going out in the Poldhu current.