Limehouse, 1958
Turned out, Dolly was wrong about the safety thing. While Mum sat like a vegetable in the rocking chair up in the bedroom and the younger kids were at school or out playing, things would happen. Mum was becoming more and more cut off from reality. Dad would come in from his job and while usually he just had a wash-down with a flannel, occasionally he would bathe in the tin bath in front of the fire. Dolly would fill the bath for him with endless heavy kettles of water off the stove while he sat at the kitchen table watching her. More and more he was doing this, taking a full bath – and she knew why. She always went off into the sitting room and let him get on with it.
‘Dolly girl!’ he’d call out.
It was the shout that filled her with fear. She would creep to the closed door and say: ‘Yes, Dad?’
‘Come and scrub my back, there’s a good girl,’ he called back to her.
‘I’m doing my homework, Dad!’ she shouted back, although that was a bald lie, she never did homework. If they put her in detention for it – and they did, often – she was pleased, because that meant she wouldn’t have to come home until later. She never wanted to come home, not now.
‘That can wait! Come on.
What else could she do? This was Dad.
Trembling, she opened the door and stepped into the kitchen. In front of the fire, there was Dad sitting naked in the tin bath. He was bulky, hairy. She stood there, undecided, until he looked back at her over his meaty shoulder and said: ‘Come on then, girl. Soap my back for me.’
Dolly thought she might be sick, and if she was sick then she hoped it would choke her and end all this weird, claustrophobic misery and torment. But she went over and took the soapy flannel from his hand and started scrubbing her dad’s back. She kept her eyes firmly on his back, hotly and horribly aware that he was undressed and that this was wrong. But he was her dad and he loved her, didn’t he?
So was it wrong?
She didn’t know, and there was no one she could talk to about it. The teachers? Impossible. A friend at school? She no longer had any friends there, she’d drawn away from people, thinking they might guess her dirty secret and be disgusted with her just as she was disgusted with herself.
Her brothers and sister? No, she couldn’t tell them. They would be jealous of the gifts, they wouldn’t understand. Already Sarah was acting strange with her, being cool and offish. She thought that Sarah might know what was going on, and a hot tide of embarrassment flooded her at that thought. Mum, then?
No. Not Mum. Dolly was Mum’s rival for Dad’s affections, she could see that. And somewhere in her heart she relished it, felt a certain twisted, ghastly pride at the feeling. She wished Mum was normal like other mums, that she wasn’t a head case, that she would be here, really here, and shield Dolly from these things that shouldn’t be happening.
So she couldn’t talk to anyone about it. And anyway, this was Dad, and Dad loved her. She soaped his back, and then he caught her arm and took it down the front of his body. He leaned back in the water and pressed her hand to that long white hard thing that loomed out of the soap suds. Horrified, Dolly thought she might scream but instead she cut off from the here and now and thought of the stained-glass angels in the little church near the primary school she had loved so much, of how happy she had been then, when she had been innocent and untouched; before she knew about the man-and-woman thing and everything had turned bad.
Desperately she tried to blank out what he was doing, moving her hand up and down, faster and faster until his whole body stiffened and she thought he must be having a stroke or something. She hoped he was. Then the hard thing went soft, and finally Dad sighed and relaxed and let go of her arm.
‘You’re my special girl, ain’t you?’ he murmured, lying back, eyes closed.
Dolly hugged her arm, which felt bruised. She let the flannel drop into the soap suds with a shudder of horror. Then she turned, and saw Mum standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching them.