When she was seventeen, Nula Perkins fell in love with nineteen-year-old Terry Barton, Charlie Stone’s handsome number two. How it happened was like this: she went ballroom dancing with her brother, who got off with the girls while she sat there alone at the edge of the dance floor listening to song after endless song and being thoroughly ignored. Finally Jim Reeves was crooning out the last number of the night – the smoochy one where couples always got together. Couples, but not her. She sat there, red-faced, a failure. Somehow she wrenched herself out of her seat midway through the song and went into the bogs and cried. When she came out, teary-eyed and blotchy, Terry Barton was standing there.
‘Want to dance?’ he asked.
She was so grateful. And she fell for him, right then and there, because with her mousy hair and her big nose she was no looker – and she knew it. Terry was being kind; he’d rescued her from an embarrassing situation.
Of course, he didn’t linger. Once the dance was over he was out the door like a shot, with not a single glance back in her direction. She watched him peel out of there with a group of young men, at the head of which was short, bulky, hard-eyed Charlie Stone. Charlie Stone was always in the lead and, wherever Charlie went, it seemed Terry Barton was never far behind.
Still, Terry had turned her disaster of an evening – and oh yes, she’d seen her big brother laughing at her with his mates and their girlfriends as she sat there, her face burning with shame – into a good one.
‘You want to watch him,’ said her brother Jimmy on the drive home in his cream Ford Anglia, which shuddered as it went round corners. Its heater was clattering and throwing out no real heat at all.
‘Who?’ Nula asked.
‘Come on!’ Jimmy shot her a laughing glance. ‘Terry fucking Barton. He’s in with a bad lot.’
‘What, you talking about Charlie Stone?’
‘Course I bloody am. You don’t want to fuck around with that crowd, believe me.’
‘He’s a good dancer,’ said Nula. ‘Terry.’
‘Don’t get no ideas, our Nula. I asked him to ask you to dance. He did it as a favour.’
Nula shrank into her seat. So Terry hadn’t actually wanted to dance with her at all. And why would he? She was fat, plain and short-sighted – although she refused to wear the NHS specs she was supposed to. She sighed over her dismal life. Their parents’d had both her and Jimmy late. Mum and Dad were Victorian in their attitudes, elderly in their ways. They were plain people; worthy, church-going, spectacled, cheaply clothed. Thick in their heads and around the middle. Jimmy was the same. None of them seemed to have an ounce of drive, none whatsoever. They were in the gutter and were content to stay there. Ambition was a dirty word to them.
But not to Nula.
Nula Perkins might be in the gutter, but by Christ she was looking at the stars. Her life had to amount to more than it did; she’d had a piss-poor education and was now in a sorry excuse for a job on the cake and biscuit counter in Woolies. Her big weekly treat was window-shopping in town with her mates around the market in Carnaby Street and looking longingly in Biba, because she could only look; she could never afford to buy anything and anyway nothing would ever fit over her fat arse.
‘Terry Barton’s sweet on Jill Patterson,’ said Jimmy. He’d plunged the knife in and now he was twisting it. Nula wanted to hit him because she knew it was probably true; she’d seen Terry and Jill in town together recently, holding hands.
‘I could get him off her,’ said Nula, stung; she knew she couldn’t.
‘What?’ Jimmy was laughing at her. Nothing new there. Nula was used to being laughed at. She’d been laughed at her entire fucking life, by everyone but particularly by Jimmy. Four years older than her and wearing an air of smug superiority, he loved nothing so much as taking the mick out of his little sister.
Like on one of their rare family holidays, when she’d been dancing the hokey-cokey with new-found friends: ‘You looked a prat doing that,’ said Jimmy when she came off the dance floor, making her glowing smile instantly wilt to nothing.
Or the time she’d been singing in the church choir, performing a solo for the first time ever; she’d been so proud – and then he’d grinned at her afterwards and said: ‘You were off bloody key, you should have heard yourself. You sounded like a cat caught in a mangle.’
‘You know her? Jill Patterson? Wasn’t she in your class at school? She’s a stunner,’ he was saying now.
Nula felt her cheeks glow hot in the darkness. Yes, she knew Jill. Her of the silky straight blonde hair and lovely blue eyes and fabulous figure. Fucking Jill Patterson. At that moment, as they racketed along in the tinny noisy little car – nothing cool or sporty for Jimmy, he was boring as fuck, they were all, her entire family, as boring as fuck – with her breath pluming out in the cold night air, Nula came to a momentous decision.
Somehow, she was going to change.