She should have been able to turn to her mother at a time like this, but she couldn’t. Edie scarcely talked or moved or took any interest in anything these days. Talking to her was like talking to a wall. You got just as much sense out of either one.
To Dolly’s utter shame and humiliation, it was Dad the doctor talked to after his visit to her sickbed. She watched the two men conversing out on the landing, glancing back in at her, and she saw the exact moment when Dad got the news; she saw all the colour leave his face in an instant, and despite her own shock and devastation she felt a stab of evil gladness. It shocked him, did it, what he’d done to her? Well, good.
After the doctor left, Dad came back upstairs. All the kids were out at school. Edie was off having her brains adjusted, there was only the two of them in the silent messy house, this awful place that had become Dolly’s own private corner of hell over the last few years.
He came and stood at the end of the bed and he looked awkward, his eyes shifting around the room, as if trying to avoid fixing on Dolly, lying there in the bed. Maybe he was disgusted too, like the doctor.
But he did this to me, she thought.
Sam’s lip was curled like there was a bad smell under his nose. She’d let him down, she could see that, and somewhere inside her that hurt; he was her dad, and she loved him. But she hated him too, and now the hatred was growing stronger, like this thing he’d planted inside her.
‘The doctor said . . .’ she started, and she had to stop, she didn’t know how to go on with it. Embarrassment flooded her cheeks with red and she faltered to a halt.
‘I know.’ His eyes wouldn’t meet hers. It was almost comical, only it wasn’t very bloody funny at all, really, was it? Not when you got right down to the facts of the matter.
‘We’ll sort it out,’ he said, and without another word he turned and left the room.
One week later, Dolly was still in bed, feeling fragile. Timid little Sarah came in with soup and tea and chatter, as she did every day, doing her best to keep Dolly’s spirits up.
‘This flu’s a bugger, but you’ll be better soon, don’t worry,’ she said.
Then Dad came in from work that evening and said: ‘It’s all fixed up, we’ll go tomorrow.’
His eyes were doing that slip-sliding thing again, going around the room, not looking at his daughter, and he was sweating. Fix what? wondered Dolly. As soon as he’d gone, her hands wandered to her stomach, feeling the slight alien curve of it. She’d seen pregnant women; she’d be like the side of a house soon, and there would be things to buy, nursery stuff, she supposed. That must be what Dad was talking about. And at least this thing inside her meant that he wouldn’t touch her any more; there was that to be thankful for.
The next day Dad stayed off work. Dolly got up, ate breakfast, spewed it back up, then cleaned herself and they caught the bus over to Aldgate. Maybe there was a shop there with kids’ stuff, she didn’t know and she didn’t ask. Dad didn’t talk to her on the journey and Dolly was glad of that. She felt both queasy and numb, all at the same time. The numbness, the distance from the real world, had started the first time he’d played the man-and-woman game with her, and it had stayed.
When they got off the bus, they walked a couple of streets along lines of identical Victorian semis. Dad opened the gate of one called ‘Swanlea’ and Dolly trailed after him up the little chequer-tiled path, feeling almost faint. Dad knocked on the door and in a minute or so it was opened by a middle-aged woman so heavily made up it looked like she was wearing a clown’s mask. Her eyes were huge and fringed with blackened lashes. Her darkly tinted red hair, all the life coloured out of it so that it had the texture of a Brillo pad, stood out around her face like a frazzled scarlet halo.
‘Mrs Averly?’ asked Dad.
‘Yeah. Mr Farrell, is it?’ she said, fag in hand. She squinted first at him and then at Dolly. ‘Come in then.’
They moved into a grubby hallway that stank of cabbage and cat piss, and the woman shut the door behind them.
‘First things first,’ she said, and held out her hand.
Dad rummaged in his billfold and pulled out a fiver. He placed it in her hand, and she nodded with satisfaction and quickly tucked it into her bra.
‘That’s fine. You can wait down here.’ She turned to Dolly. ‘Come on then, girl, up the stairs.’
This wasn’t a shop with baby clothes. Bewildered, Dolly followed the woman up. They went into a tiny box room; inside there was a fold-up bed stashed against the wall, hectic violet wallpaper with sprigs of heather rampaging all over it. In the centre of the room, on the scuffed and worn purple carpet, was a yellow washing-up bowl steaming with warm water and frothy with soap suds. Beside it was what Dolly recognized as an enema, and an open packet of Omo.
‘We’ll soon have you straight again,’ said the woman, crossing to the fold-up bed and stubbing her cigarette out on an overflowing ashtray perched there. ‘Don’t you worry.’
Dolly had no idea what she meant, but she was a kid and this ugly gorgon of a woman was an adult; it wasn’t her place to question.
Then the woman turned back to her with a thin smile. ‘Right then, lovey. Slip your knickers off and stand over the bowl.’