THE H-BOMB GIRL

by Stephen Baxter

  And she hated the fact that her whole life was shaped by two huge wars. The German war had been over before she was born, but people like Mum still wandered around going on about it, as if shell-shocked. And then there was this scary war in the future that they all worried about, and Dad spent his life trying to avoid. Laura thought of it as a wall of hot atomic light that might end her life before she had a chance to live it. She hated living with such a horrible prospect in her future.

  She needed something else to think about.

  She remembered the newspaper Nick had given her. She dug it out of her inside blazer pocket. Mersey Beat—Merseyside’s Own Entertainments Paper—Price Threepence. It was a fan thing, cheap and flimsy and the ink came away on her hands. She flicked through it until she found a small boxed ad:

  LIVE ON STAGE

  DIRECT FROM BOOTLE

  JOHN SMITH AND THE COMMON MEN

  &

  NICK O’TEEN AND THE WOODBINES

  Saint Edward’s College, West Derby, Liverpool 12.

  Sunday 14th October 1962. 6:30 p.m.

  Admission One Shilling. No Bopping or Jiving.

  She was impressed that Nick’s “group” actually existed.

  She wasn’t much interested in music, though. Back in Wycombe she’d been taken to a few concerts by Mum and Dad. But they had been folk music, which was old men in woolly hats with their fingers in their ears, or trad jazz, which was old men in bowler hats belting out show tunes on trumpets. Everybody said trad jazz would be the next big thing in popular music. The sixties would be the “trad decade.”

  As for pop music, she had dutifully listened to scratchy 45s by Cliff Richard and Tommy Roe on her friends’ gramophones, and had tried to do the Twist to “Let’s Dance” by Chris Montez. It didn’t mean much to Laura. In fact the lilting tunes and the popstar boys’ high-pitched voices mooning over their “sweet angels” just annoyed her.

  So going to this concert wasn’t all that appealing. But at the end of the school day Bernadette had offhandedly told her about a coffee club where they could meet on Sunday afternoon. After Mort and his Barbie doll, it sounded a good idea. Any excuse to get out of the house.

  And a chance to make better friends with Bernadette. All day Bernadette had struggled in the lessons, but she was somehow a bit more sensible than the other kids around her. Laura was glad to have her solid company.

  She folded the newspaper up again. On the front page was a grainy photo of another group, four skinny young men in suits, and half of the rest of the page was taken up by a huge ad:

  MONDAY OCTOBER 22ND

  BACK AT THE CAVERN AT LAST

  DIRECT FROM HAMBURG

  THE SAVAGE

  YOUNG

  !! BEATLES !!

  Beatles? She’d never heard of them. Stupid name. She folded up the paper and put it in the rubbish bin.

  Of course the big question was what to wear on Sunday. She started to go through her suitcase.

  Chapter 4

  Sunday 14th October. 10 a.m.

  Another sunny morning. It’s an Indian summer, the weatherman says.

  Hurray.

  Never mind Cuba and nuclear bombs. Today I face the ultimate horror.

  Sunday lunch. With Mum and Dad.

  And It.

  And tomorrow, he’s been putting it off, Dad’s driving back to Wycombe at last.

  She was stuck indoors, waiting for the chicken to cook in Mum’s new cooker, a Tricity Marquise. Dad and Mort sat on the deep velvet-covered settee in the parlour, minuscule glasses of sherry in their hands, not speaking.

  Laura didn’t want to sit with them. She roamed around the house, like a rat in a cage, avoiding the adults.

  The house had cost six thousand pounds. It had been done out by an old dear, the previous owner who had died, and most of her furniture was still here. It was all thick-pile carpets and oatmeal wallpaper; and the whole place stank of Johnson’s furniture polish. In the parlour, walnut bookcases held condensed editions of Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie. The phone was stuck to the wall, an old-fashioned box that you had to put pennies into to make it work. The most fun piece of furniture was a huge cocktail cabinet. When you pulled down the hatch at the front a tray inside lifted up and out, and fluorescent lights switched on.

  The back garden was tiny, just a patch of muddy earth. It had been turned into an allotment. In one corner stood a wooden frame that might be the ruins of a chicken coop.

  At last Mum banged a silly little gong, three inches across. “Lunch is served!”

  They sat down at the dining table. The table was polished walnut, hardly ever used. Mum bustled around in her hostess apron, and served drinks: sweet German wine for the men, dandelion and burdock for Laura, Babycham for Mum. The smoke from their cigarettes curled up to the ceiling.

  The first course was prawn cocktail. Then Mum went off to the kitchen and came bustling back with her brand new hostess trolley with its heated shelves, laden with the main course, coq au vin. Laura knew for a fact she had never cooked coq au vin before. The chicken was like rubber, floating in gloopy sauce.

  Mum had fussed her way through the first course, nervous and chatty, and by the time they were chewing their way through the overcooked chicken she was mildly drunk. “Of course now we’re back in Liverpool we’re not eating lunch but dinner. And later we won’t eat dinner but our tea.” She put on a Scouse accent. “Isn’t it funny?”

  “I saw the vegetable patch out back,” Mort said gruffly.

  “Everybody had them in the war,” Dad said. “We used to eat pigeon pie for Sunday lunch. Rationing only came off—when, love, 1954?”

  “You remember, don’t you, Laura?” Mum said. “When the sweets came off? I remember your little face that Christmas when you ate your first tangerine.”

  Laura, embarrassed, said nothing.

  “You folks had it tough,” Mort said, nodding his huge head. “I won’t deny that. Even though I was stationed over here for most of it, it wasn’t the same for us, we were provisioned from home. We had luxuries. Like stockings and soap. Great gifts, right?” He grinned at Mum.

  Laura saw the look that passed between them. Dad just chewed his chicken, head down.

  “And even now,” Mort boomed on, “half your houses are still bombed to bits, and your food’s still crap—forgive me—and you’re only just getting washing machines and vacuum cleaners. Is it true some parts of England still don’t have electricity? Why, I swear you’re twenty years behind us.”

  Dad looked up, his expression blank. “Of course we are. But we’d be catching up a lot quicker if your government was a little more generous over the war reparations.”

  Mort leaned back and blew smoke out of his pursed lips. “Yeah, but sooner a bill from Uncle Sam than to be owned lock, stock and barrel by Cousin Adolf. Right, Harry?”

  Dad kept his mouth shut.

  Dad groused about this a lot. The Americans had loaned the British a fortune during the war to keep fighting the Germans. Once the war was over, the battered British tried to recover and rebuild, but the Americans wanted their money back. And Britain had to accept American bases all over the country. “We’re just a big aircraft carrier for the bally Yanks,” Dad would say sometimes. But it was his job to work with people like Mort.

  “You’re always going on about the war,” Laura found herself saying.

  They all turned to her.

  Mort shrugged. “Well, it was kind of a big event for those of us who lived through it, missy.” He grinned around his ciggie.

  Dad said more thoughtfully, “You’re growing up in an aftermath society, Laura. Physical, psychological. Everything around you is shaped by the war. I can understand you’d get a bit miffed with that, but—”

  Her mother snapped, almost tearful, “Why are you always so difficult, Laura? I was younger than you when the war broke out. We all thought we were going to die. You children, the first to be born after the war, were precious. Can’t you see that?�
�

  Laura stood up. “But there’s nothing I can do about it, is there? It was all over before I was born!”

  Mum said, “Oh, sit down, you little fool.”

  “I’m full, thanks. You just get on with talking about the dead and gone,” Laura said, and, though she knew she’d pay for this later, she walked out.

  She got her stuff and left the house.

  She was supposed to meet Bernadette at the coffee club, but not until later in the afternoon. She couldn’t call Bernadette. She didn’t have a number, and besides Bernadette didn’t look like she came from a house with a phone.

  On the other hand she didn’t have anywhere else to go. So she walked, to save the bus fare, and to stretch out the time. The day was dull, the suburban streets were empty. It didn’t take her long to reach the coffee club, which turned out to be the cellar of a semi in an ordinary-looking road. It had a hand-painted sign with an arrow pointing downwards:

  The place looked closed, the house empty. But Bernadette and Joel were here, sitting on a garden wall.

  Bernadette was in what looked like her school uniform, save for her blazer, but with thick black mascara and lipstick on her face. She wore bright pink stilettos that looked a foot high, and her dirty blonde hair was heaped up in a spectacular beehive. Joel was wearing his red hat, a battered old suede jacket, and baggy corduroy trousers.

  “Not open yet,” Bernadette said.

  “I can see that,” Laura said.

  “So what you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Nowhere else to go,” Joel said.

  “I hate Sundays,” Bernadette said. She didn’t seem either glad or irritated to have Laura turn up. She looked at Laura shrewdly. “Have you got any money?”

  Laura didn’t have much, but more than the others. They pooled what they had, and counted carefully through the coppers, sixpences and shillings.

  “We could go to the flicks,” Bernadette said.

  “Where?”

  “How about the Abbey?”

  “That’s Wavertree,” Joel said.

  “We could get a bus.”

  “Not enough money. Unless we bunk it. Anyway you’d wait for ever for a bus on a Sunday. It’s only a couple of miles. Let’s walk.”

  So they set off, through Sunday afternoon streets. Smoke curled up from chimneys, and through open windows you could smell roast dinners. There were few people around. The odd dog-walker, boys playing football. Once a couple of little kids followed them down the road, staring at Joel. Joel just put up with it.

  They saw a few knots of teenagers hanging around corners or bus stops or telephone boxes. There were places to go, church youth clubs where you could play table tennis or learn the quickstep. But there were no shops open, the pubs and coffee bars closed, nothing to do at home, nothing on the telly until the evening.

  “I hate Sundays,” Bernadette said again.

  The cinema was a big modern place called the Cinerama. They had a choice of Summer Holiday, a musical featuring Cliff Richard riding around in a double-decker bus, or Dr No, a movie about a new spy called James Bond. Laura voted for Cliff, but Bernadette made puking noises, and they chose the spy.

  The cinema was packed. They didn’t have enough money for popcorn, so Bernadette swiped some Mars Bars and Milky Ways from the foyer. Laura ate hers guiltily.

  The movie was about a debonair British spy taking on an evil half-Chinese warlord who was sabotaging American atomic missiles. It was colourful and fast-paced. At the end they all came spilling out, blinking in the still-bright afternoon.

  “Well, that was dead good,” Bernadette said. She made some quick repairs to her lippy using her compact mirror. “That fella in his suit, the casino, the posh cars. I bet there were a few wet seats in that cinema by the end.”

  Laura pulled a face. In fact she hadn’t liked Bond. She quite enjoyed spies, like Dick Barton on the radio, and The Saint on the telly. But something about Bond’s cruelty, he shot unarmed people dead without a qualm, reminded her of Mort.

  “I did like the spy business,” she said.

  “Like where that old biddy had a radio transmitter hidden behind her bookcase?”

  “The simple stuff. Where he put talc on his briefcase to see if anybody messed with it. And stuck a hair across that cupboard door to see if it had been opened.”

  Joel snorted. “Boy scout stuff. Didn’t you ever read The Secret Seven?”

  Bernadette laughed. “Did you?”

  He looked away.

  Bernadette said, “You know, I hate the war with the Nazis. Everything the wrinklies moan about. Rationing and bombed-out houses. You kids today don’t know you’re born. But if James Bond is what the Third World War is going to be like, it’ll do. Radios and spies and satellites.”

  Joel said, stern despite his limp and his huge red hat, “Nuclear war would not be like that.”

  Bernadette laughed at him. “You saw the movie. They got contaminated by radiation and just showered it off!”

  Joel shook his head. “That movie was a joke. You can’t shower off radiation. Nuclear war would be hell.”

  Laura asked, interested, “How do you know?”

  Bernadette grabbed the lapel of Joel’s battered suede jacket and turned it over. He was wearing a badge with a symbol, a circle with an upside-down Y inside. “See that?” she said, sneering. “CND.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,” Joel said.

  “Posh students and Labour MPs, all jazz and science fiction, marching about in London,” Bernadette mocked. “Ban the bomb!”

  “It’s more than that,” Joel said quietly. “People just don’t know. They’re stupid, like you, Bernadette.”

  Laura asked, “Don’t know what?”

  “About what would happen if war came. People aren’t told. That’s what CND are campaigning for, for people to be told. And to get rid of the bomb.”

  “Tell that to Uncle Joe Stalin,” Bernadette said cheerfully.

  “Stalin is dead,” Laura said. “There’s a man called Khrushchev now, in charge of Russia.” Crooss-chov.

  “You’d know, wouldn’t you?” Joel said.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “That Key you wear around your neck. I looked it up.”

  “Where?”

  “CND has found out a lot of stuff. We’re like plane-spotters.” He leaned close, his big red hat ridiculous on his head. “I was right. The Key does come from a Vulcan. A V-bomber, a nuclear plane. It’s an enabler that a pilot would use. A bit like an ignition key on a car. With that Key, if you knew what you were doing, and you knew the right codes and such, you could start up a V-bomber, and fly off and bomb Moscow.”

  Wow, Laura thought. No wonder she would be arrested if anybody knew she had it.

  Joel stared at her. “You didn’t know all that, did you?”

  Bernadette turned to Laura. “Good stuff, Posh Judy,” she said respectfully.

  Laura blurted, “My dad gave it to me. Bern—just don’t tell anybody.”

  Bernadette studied her. She seemed to be making a decision. She could make Laura a friend, or use her secret as a way to impress others. “OK,” she said at last.

  “Bus!” Joel yelled.

  They were a hundred yards short of the stop. Bernadette and Laura got there in time, panting, laughing, and then held the bus while Joel limped up.

  Chapter 5

  By the time they got back to the Jive-O-Rama it was after five and the Sunday afternoon daylight was going.

  There were a couple of scooters parked outside the club, perky, bright machines. Joel lusted after these. “That one’s a Lambretta GT200. And that is a Vespa GS160. Very, very cool…”

  The house itself looked as dead as ever, but the garage door was open, to reveal steps down to the cellar. Lurid pink light glowed, and music thumped out, a fast, heavy beat.

  Led by Bernadette, the three of them clatter
ed down the stairs. At the foot of the staircase a little boy sat behind a table, with a roll of tickets and a plastic cup full of change. He looked Chinese. He was only five or six. He held his hand out. “Shillin’.”

  Bernadette handed over the money. “Here, Little Jimmy, you money-grubber.”

  Joel scratched Little Jimmy’s scalp. “Some doorman you are. Mucky as a dustbin lid. What will you do if a bunch of Teds turn up looking for a ruck?”

  “Bash them.” He showed white teeth, grinning, and waved tiny fists.

  They passed the kid, and walked into a packed cellar full of music and glaring light.

  “It’s chocker,” Bernadette said. “Stay close.” She led the way, squeezing through the crowd towards the counter.

  The decor was bright-red plastic and rubber plants. In one corner a huge gleaming jukebox blared out a fast track. There were probably only fifty people down here, Laura thought. But this “club” was only a cellar, made to look bigger by the bright coloured spotlights on the ceiling, and cheap mirrors screwed to the walls. The air was a fog of sweat and perfume and cheap aftershave, all laced with the stale tang of ciggies.

  Laura had never been in a crowd like this. The boys’ clothes ranged from jazzed-up school uniforms to fancy Ted or Mod outfits. The girls wore beehive hairdos, slacks or skirts, with black mascara and bright lipstick. There were a few beatnik types, in black polo-neck sweaters and thick Buddy Holly glasses. Some of them were dancing in the tiny space by the jukebox, but most were sitting around Formica-covered tables, nursing half-drunk coffees. It was impossible to tell how old anybody was. They all talked loudly, in bright, brittle Scouse accents.

  The jukebox music was exciting, with a pulsing guitar riff and a hammering drumbeat. Laura had never heard anything like it before.

  Behind the counter a cheerful Chinese man was working chrome machines that dispensed espresso coffees and milkshakes. He was helped by a thin, depressed-looking woman.