It’s a while before Annie mentions Mum again. The war is over—Mr. Churchill says it on the radio—and that day everyone goes up the West End at nine o’clock to shout and carry on, banging bin lids together. VE day is the same day as my birthday so it feels as if everyone is celebrating with me, kissing Americans in their uniforms and climbing up lampposts, sending rockets streaking red into the sky. We sing “Bless ’Em All” and “Pack Up Your Troubles” and “Roll Out the Barrel” and no one mentions Nan or anything sad at all; it’s the one day no sadness is allowed, Gloria says, no matter what you’re feeling, because everybody in this world has lost something, it doesn’t make you special. She holds onto my chin with her finger and thumb as she says this so she can look into my eyes, and she’s smiling, but her look is hard to read. Everyone wakes up the next day with bad heads and Annie says her mouth tastes like the inside of a budgie’s cage, but here they are a few days later, they want to go out again, shout and joke and carry on some more.
“If you’re off to see Moll, we’d better get you some decent clobber,” Annie says to me. I wonder if she remembered it was my birthday: I’m twelve now, and no one really gave me a present, but now perhaps they will.
So Annie takes me to a shop she knows, up the West End. Gloria comes, too, and Beattie Rolls. Gloria looks the business. She has a fox fur on and diamonds on two of her fingers. And she looks fat. Fatter than usual. The fox fur round her neck has a pointy face and eyes and all, and lies there, gazing down at her bosom. I mean, I know from everyone else, from school now I’m back some of the time, or just from the radio that whether the war is over or not these are hard times, that everything is in short supply—chocolate, stockings, eggs, meat, Pond’s cold cream—but it makes no sense to me, they must be lying, because our house is always full of these things. Great piles of them, down in that cellar. I’ve never eaten so well in my life.
Beattie, too, is wearing her good coat—a dark brown velvet with buttons in the shapes of little brown butterflies and court shoes in a glossy chestnut color, a bronze-tipped toe, and a little brown bow, like a box of fancy chocolates. They have four leather bags, exactly the same, and they give me two empty ones to carry.
“Now you just hold them bags and do everything we tell you,” Annie says.
“And don’t say nothing,” Beattie says, drawing on her cigarette.
Saying nothing. My best talent.
So we go into the shop and Gloria keeps opening and closing her coat, and wrapping and rewrapping it all around her, like she’s hot and needs to fan herself. Beattie wanders round, picking up handkerchiefs and silk stockings, chatting to her, offering her cigarettes. And Annie picks up a chocolate brown pinafore dress, in soft wool and holds it up against me. “Would that fit you?” Annie says. They’re talking, talking all the time. They smell powerful flowery, a talcum powder smell; it’s choking me. My heart is pitter-pattering softly; I can see full well what they’re doing.
Then we have to wait in line at the counter. The lady sitting behind it has her hair in a bun with a little net over it, and a cream lace collar on her blue dress, with the tiniest waist I’ve ever seen; the dress has a frill at the bottom and the dress has a sort of fake jacket attached to it. I can’t help staring at that dress, until Annie, behind Beattie in her big saucer hat in the queue, nudges me. “Hold out the bag,” Annie whispers. Then she steps forward to the counter and says in a louder voice, a posh one I’ve never heard her use before: “My niece is admiring the peplum on your dress, dear.”
The lady behind the counter smiles, says, “thank you,” and pats her bun. She has tiny hands, too, as she reaches for the chain to pull the tin down that the money goes into. Annie hands over some notes and coupons from her book and I watch in delight as the tin is yanked up and disappears above us. Then it comes back down again on its chain and some coins appear and the coupons have been stamped.
Annie has bought a pair of Dent’s gauntlet kid gloves, cream colored, with tiny little holes in them in the pattern of a four-leafed clover, very like her other “lucky” pair.
“Oh, there’s your brother!” Gloria says to me, nudging me, quite hard.
“Pop over and tell him we’ll just be a minute . . .” Annie adds.
I know Bobby isn’t over the road, but I know better than to say anything, or even to look surprised. I understand at once what they mean. I’m holding two full carrier bags and I’m given a little push in the back by Beattie while the three women continue chatting coolly at the counter, admiring the gloves, complimenting the lady in the blue dress.
I keep walking. There is a man by the door who opens it for me. I wave my hand, as if I’m seeing Bobby over the road, but my heartbeat is now worse than pitter-pattering; it’s bounding around in my chest, like a puppy trying to leap out of its cage in the pet-shop window. Surely they’ll hear it? Surely that man will notice how white I look, how tightly I’m clutching the bags, not hiding them or disguising them, brazening it out; how hard I’m concentrating on walking normally.
The man at the door coughs. He puts a hand out just as I pass by him and my blood turns to ice. I almost stop, give myself up. I wait, just for a second, and then realize he’s giving me a friendly pat on the head. Like the sort a head teacher gives their favorite pupil.
Outside the shop, I carry on walking. I don’t turn my head or look back. I clutch the full bags and my hands are slippery with sweat. When I think I’m far enough my legs wobble beneath me; they’ve turned to string and will barely hold me up. I stand under a striped awning and wait. Blinkin’ hell, I’m thinking.
And soon the Green Bottles are all around me, laughing and hugging me and smiling, and a car slides up beside us and we all pile in. Beattie lifts the bags from my hand, her hat tipping as she scrambles into the car, and all cool has gone: she’s whooping. I recognize the driver, Sly Roger from the butcher’s, and he winks at me, in his driver’s mirror, and tips his cap to the others.
“Queenie! You’re a fucking marvel!” Gloria says, stretching her arms out of her fur coat and shrugging it onto the seat behind her. “Bleedin’ Nora I’m hot!” Gloria says, while Annie tells me that she “never knew you had it in you . . . you’re a natural!”
“She never bat an eyelid, did she, when you said Bobby was there? No need to spell nothing out for that one,” Beattie adds, laughing and lighting up a cigarette, taking off her hat and putting it on the back window of the car, patting at her neat hair with one hand. They rabbit on and on. They bubble away at me. How smart I am, how quick, how butter wouldn’t melt; how pretty in the brown felt beret they’ve given me, hinting at the Brownies, at good girls and uniforms. Annie hands me a bottle of ginger beer and Roger, hearing the top come off, says, “Hey, watch me bleedin’ car!” but the Green Bottles all shout him down and tell him to cover his eyes, because Gloria’s taking her big knickers off. The laughter that greets this remark is deafening, and it’s true, too: Gloria is wiggling in her seat, and pulling down the pale blue nylon pants she’s wearing, and she’s immediately slimmer, her whole shape has changed. The pants are elasticated at the top and around the legs, they’re homemade with rubbish stitching, and they look like giant baby knickers, and suddenly things keep tumbling out of them—strings of pearls, stockings, lipsticks, compacts, even a tightly rolled child’s dress, which I realize is the one I looked at, the chocolate brown wool pinafore dress.
“Should see your face!” Gloria says, and the others shriek and holler some more, while Annie smothers me in a big hug. I see that Roger is looking at us all in his wing mirror and grinning out of the side of his cigarette; he’s just not looking at the road at all. Gloria wants to stop at Harrods. Sly Roger practically knocks a horse down as he skids to a stop, lets us out.
A doorman opens the door to her and Gloria stalks in. A lady steps forward and puffs some perfume at her, and Gloria and I march right into the cloud of it. I’m nearly choking. “I need a lipstick,” Gloria says.
There’s a mood, somehow, like that perfume cloud, all around her. I can tell that Gloria is not like the others. That she doesn’t do it for the same reasons.
She stands at the counter, opening her purse. It’s a gorgeous soft tan suede purse, shaped like a lovely fat apple and with this satisfying clicky swishy catch, gold metal with a crossover snap to it, and I feel such a tick-tick-ticking feeling standing beside her, as she opens it and, shoving aside her coupons, takes out a brand-new ten-shilling note. She’s wearing the new Dent gloves, Annie’s gloves. The smell—the smell of leather and perfume and Gloria and love—wafts down to me, as I stand there, hopping from foot to foot, the blue note flying just above my head, like a flag.
Now you look the business—we can go and celebrate—I’ll take you to see your mum, sugar, I promise, but first we ought to—go see your brother? Ain’t he a kennel boy these days?”
My reward: the Green Bottles take me down the Dogs. And after that, to see Mum at long, long last.
I thought we’d go to the Stow Dogs, with its lovely white front like a big Christmas cake and the curved dog in his red jacket that I’ve gazed at so many times, arching over our heads like a crescent moon; but that’s not the stadium that Bobby works at; he works at Hackney Wick.
“There’s afternoon races at Hackney Wick, and a proper crowd. War might be over. Things ain’t back to normal, thank God,” Dad answers.
So we’re now piling into the same car that slid up to me in the West End a week ago, and we’re off to Waterden Road, only this time it’s Dad who is driving, not Sly Roger, and “Look at you! All suited and booted,” Gloria says to him admiringly, as she climbs in, but he’s just staring stubbornly ahead, teeth clamped on his cigarette; he’s not wisecracking, not smiling.
It’s a squash. Cigarettes and lily of the valley mixed with the perfumed chocolates—rose and violet creams—being passed around from a padded lilac box. I crack one against my tongue and the sweet violet perfume floods out. The taste is a sad memory, strange. Like eating Nan.
Annie has on this emerald green jacket and skirt in bobbly material with flaps on the pockets and a collar of fur, and her hair piled up in not quite such a bird’s nest as usual, she’s curled it into ginger sausages; and Gloria has her fur on again and the cherry-red lipstick, and Beattie is all blond and sparkly with a big diamond necklace and she’s brought her sister Dolly—another of the Green Bottles—and they’re both in black velvet and golden silk blouses, with ruffles frothing out of the buttons at the top and little gold satin flowers on their hats, all cock-eyed at a funny angle (but they say it’s deliberate), and I’m all dressed up, too, in my new dress, the brown pinafore. Gloria did my hair for me and patted powder from her compact on my cheeks and wet a tiny brush on her tongue, dipped it in a square of black she has, and said, “Look up,” and as I did, she brushed it across my eyelashes. She hands me her compact to admire the effect: spidery lashes, like Vivien Leigh. Whenever I blink I can see them: black spots, in front of my eyes.
Everyone is shrieking and laughing. The noise is deafening. It seems to go on and on, the celebrating, everyone happy and shouting for no reason. Bobby says they’re Raving Bonkers. Bobby seems in a bad mood all the time these days and the only thing I can think is that he’s jealous. Jealous of the way the Green Bottles treat me, jealous of the fact that I stayed home and he went to Ely, even though that’s stupid, because it was him who wanted to go.
Now our car is crawling along the Waterden Road; we’re going to have to get out and walk, there’s such a crush outside the stadium. Crowds make me nervous these days, but there’s no point in saying so. No one wants to talk about Nan, or be reminded of her, and even though Beattie and Dolly lost someone in the tube that day, too, another sister I think, they won’t talk to me about it. I haven’t seen Bobby since this morning. “What do you want to go with that lot for?” he says, when I tell him I’m off with the Green Bottles to the Dogs finally.
He’s been working at the Dogs on Saturdays and any other day he can bunk off from school. He’s one of the youngest, but he takes it really seriously, being a kennel boy, he likes it, but I do hear him whining sometimes, arguing with Dad about it, and I realize that Dad and Uncle Charlie are asking Bobby to do things, and Bobby doesn’t want to.
This morning he was in our bedroom, all important, eleven years old and getting ready to go to work, laying out his money on the bedspread, ten one-pound notes. When I go to touch one, he put his hand over mine.
“Hands off of my money! I earned that. You go and get your own.”
Bobby’s quirks are getting worse. Like he’s convinced the color yellow is unlucky, and if I wear a yellow dress he pulls a face and scowls at me and tells me to burn it and wear something else. The notes lay there, lazily, flatly, like they didn’t care if I touch them or not.
“I only want to look,” I told him crossly. “I don’t need your blinkin’ money. The Green Bottles will get me jellied eels or anything else I want.”
He snorted, gathered up the notes.
“Got any tips?” I asked him.
He looked funny then. Like he couldn’t make up his mind what to tell me. Or maybe, thinking about it now, what he was going to do. I’ve puzzled about it, and the look he gave me, and tried to remember the exact words. He didn’t sound unfriendly, suddenly. “British Girl. She’s a grand bitch. A railer.” That was the first bit. And then something like: “But never put nothing on her. No matter what anyone says. No one knows what will happen. Never listen to Dad.”
“I never listen to Dad,” I said. Although being such a daddy’s girl, of course that wasn’t true. I’d always believe him the cleverest. Especially about dogs.
Now I’m thinking about how different Bobby seems since coming back from the farm, and why that might be. He acts like it was me who wanted to be apart from him, when all the time it was his choice to go there and it’s me who should be feeling rejected. And he’s so superstitious, and sometimes acts like I’m unlucky. (I think this is his horrid way of blaming me for Nan.)
He likes to use all these new dog terms to dazzle me, make me feel left out. Scrubbers, graders, railers, fliers, wide runners. He doesn’t seem such a little boy anymore; he likes throwing back his head to drop these Phosferine tablets into his mouth—he says they give him “pep”—and he’s still trying to follow that Jimmy around, the freckle-faced boxer one. He nicks Dad’s Brylcream to stick down his hair but he’s still so small—and I know it embarrasses him. He even smells different since working at the kennels: the dusty fur smell, the dog hairs and dog drool clinging to his clothes. His ears stick out worse than ever. Gloria calls him Toby Jug and tugs on one whenever she passes him. Then he blushes a hot red and I always feel sorry for him again, remember he’s my brother.
I can’t see why he couldn’t give me an answer about which dog to put money on, and why he acted funny when I asked him. It’s his job, isn’t it? Now we’re pulling up next to a long queue of people outside the Hackney Wick stadium.
“Head for the stand and I’ll go park the motor on Cassland Road,” Dad calls to Annie as the car door opens, and we spill out onto the street to join the crowds.
“Why’d he bring the motor anyway . . . using up his ration?” Beattie asks, pressing down the ruffles at her throat and trying to stop them from exploding up over her mouth. Dolly laughs at her sister.
“Why d’you think? Flash Harry . . . he’s only sorry he can’t park it in full view!” Dolly says, flicking her sister with her gloves, then fixing her hat again, to make it even more cock-eyed, just like a flying saucer lying there, and they tilt their heads together and giggle. I follow the others. We’re drawing every eye in the crowd towards us. Old men are laughing, calling out things and sidling up to Annie and the others; young men in uniforms, opening their cigarette boxes like they’re about to blow kisses from their palms, moving in close with flaring matches, close enough to gaze into the eyes of whichever of the Green Bottles they want to snap up.
“Queenie! Hold onto me, sugar,” Gloria says, taking my hand as we go through the gates. Annie’s sausage-head and twig figure in her green skirt-suit disappears in the crowd of caps and shoulders but Gloria doesn’t click fast enough in her high courts to catch her. I wonder for a minute why it’s Annie, not Gloria, who is Dad’s girlfriend, when Gloria is so . . . sparkly and bubbly and sort of more alive. When Gloria is the one I like best. Maybe Dad doesn’t like makeup and big bosoms, I decide. He likes girls to be plain and simple, like Annie. Or slim and pretty the way Mum is, not all lipsticked and saucy.
A powerful smell of vinegar floats up to me from someone’s fish and chips and my stomach rumbles but I’m shunted along and there’s no moment to stop and beg for a bag of chips or a little bag of shrimps. Gloria is leading me to the tea bar in the standing area. A big mass of old men in camel coats and hats are all swarming like a beehive. She’s lost the others but she doesn’t seem to care; she wants to buy me a soupy thick mug of tea, brown as the River Lea, and find out what Bobby said when he left the house this morning.
“Come on, you can tell your best Green Bottle, your old friend Gloria, can’t you? I know they know. I know Bobby would of told you. Is he working for London Joe’s gang then or is it your dad?”
I take a big gulp of tea and yelp where it scalds my tongue. I’m thinking over what Bobby said, and why I was muddled.
“Where’s your dad now, eh?” Gloria says. “He ain’t looking out for us, is he? He’s just thinking of hisself, doing his own little bit of business . . . me and you, we should stick together.”
I look around for Dad and see his hat in the distance, amongst a crowd of men’s shoulders. A few moments ago he pressed a coin into my hand and said, “Be lucky, darling.” I sip the thick tea and my nose is crowded with Gloria’s perfume and the tobacco and salt and excitement in the air, and I wonder which of the Green Bottles is the best way to get to see Mum: Annie or Gloria?
“Well, Bobby . . . he did tell me something,” I begin.
“I knew it!” Gloria squeaks.
She twirls me around, trying to steer me away from the crowd at the tea bar and towards the bookie’s pit.
“But, Gloria, if I tell you, will you promise—”
“Port and lemonade, girls?” butts in an American with a newly shaved chin, like a shiny side of boiled ham. He’s smiling a toothy grin at Gloria. “Sherry, honey? What can I get you?”
Gloria shakes her head smartly without even glancing at him and crouches down beside me again. She seems very surprised.
“OK, what is it? You little—you’re a right one, ain’t you?”
“Can I go visit Mum?”
Gloria straightens up. She squeezes her fur coat a little tighter over her cleavage, and the silver locket she wears slithers between her huge bosoms.
“Gawd—in that place? Are you sure? But you’d better be right then, and be quick, too. Your dad ain’t going to give me the nod, that’s certain. Always has his favorites, does Lucky Boy . . .”
And so I tell her what Bobby said. That he started to hint that British Girl was a good bet but then he seemed to change his mind and told me not to bet at all.
“Bobby’s lost his bottle,” Gloria says, mysteriously.
I do know that Bobby’s been doping dogs for weeks. He loves to tell me his tricks: a straw in one of the dogs’ eyelids so that it blinked throughout the race, or chloretone wrapped up inside the sausage of another one. Tying up the dog’s balls. Feeding them just before a race slows them down; that’s the easiest way. Chloretone is usually for travel sickness in people, but it makes the dog’s blood pressure rise when it first shoots out, Bobby says. They look good at first, but soon fade.
“So. It’s whether Bobby does what he’s been told or not? That’s a toughie. Must of told him to dope all the others.”
I don’t know what she means. I wish I’d been concentrating when Bobby talked to me, instead of wondering why things weren’t quite the same between us since . . . since that day in the Bethnal Green shelter.
“No one can resist your dad, know that, Queenie? I don’t know what it is about that fella. Luck of the devil.”
I wait by the tea stand, wondering at this, while she flounces down to the bookie’s pit, nearly tripping over herself to get a bet on before the traps come up. “You’re sure?” she asks, coming back, staring at me. I’m not sure, so I shake my head but she accepts this, and turns to look at her race card.
I don’t like trailing behind her now to watch the race. I’m wondering about what she said about Dad: that no one can resist him. Women do usually like him, they look at him, it’s true, I’ve noticed that. I glance over at Dad, talking with a bookie. I wish Dad would look my way, flash the full beam of his smile towards me and ruffle my hair and snuggle my head towards his shoulder.
As the lights dim and the buzz of people quietens to a sizzle, all eyes pinned on the traps lifting and the dogs exploding out of them, I’m still puzzling over Bobby and Dad and me and how it got to be so complicated. I’m wondering if I did the wrong thing in telling Gloria, but I hope she’ll keep her promise.
Five out of the six races have run. It’s the sixth coming up and the dog in trap two, wearing blue, thank God, Bobby’s lucky color, is British Girl.
Gloria slipped away minutes ago to place her bet. Dad is staring at his race card and smoking one after another cigarette, trying to seem casual and playful and at the same time, not really bothering to talk to anyone, or answer Annie’s questions. We’re milling close by the track, all of us (except Dad) eating shrimps with our little wooden forks and chatting, hemmed in on all sides by the shoulders of men in uniforms and GIs and the jewel colors of the women’s jackets; the sudden laughter and excited shouting. Gloria is busy plucking the heel of her shoe from the grass and doesn’t look anybody else in the eye. Dad keeps his nose in his race card but he looks up when Annie says, “The Flying Squad’s here. NGRC. Did you reckon on that?”
She says it nastily, crossly, and Dad looks up, pretending to be unbothered. He puts a finger in one of her sausage curls, which has unraveled and is bouncing down around her ear.
“Relax . . .” He glances down at me, and then moves closer, to whisper something in Annie’s ear.
“ . . . it don’t stay in the system . . . they can’t test for it,” I catch.
“That what Bobby says? Or do you know?”
I notice that Gloria is holding her little wooden fork in midair, closing her mouth thoughtfully around a shrimp and listening.
“He’s a dead cert. Mad March Hare. He’s like Mick the Miller—he’ll be a Derby winner one day,” Dad says, loudly, lighting up one of Buster’s Du Maurier cigarettes. I glance at him. Surely he’s not betting on Mad March Hare? It’s British Girl he’s meant to bet on, isn’t it? Then I wonder if he just says this to fool everyone, so the odds remain high, so no one bets on the real dead cert.
Dad’s only pretending to read his race card. He lights another cigarette, shakes the match, grinds it under his foot. Sweat, a fine coating, shines along his forehead and his nose.
Suddenly, I understand Gloria’s comments perfectly. In some dim place I think I did all along. It’s Dad who’s been putting Bobby up to it. And the only really chancy thing is whether Bobby did what he was told today, or thought better of it. Let Dad down. I feel certain I know which.
“I didn’t put my money on nothing! Can I, Dad? Just the tote. Please, Dad.”
“No—shh—come on, the hare’s running.”
The crowd starts up the Derby roar. It’s such a quick thing, a race. There’s barely time to see the flash of ghostly dogs with their colored jackets—I’m stuck between the furs and leather of the dog men and women anyway—but one thing I do see, as they shoot round the bend, is that the dog in the blue, the dog out of trap two, British Girl, she’s flying, she’s leaving the rest way behind and Gloria can barely hide it, how hard she’s trying not to look excited.
Mad March Hare, trap five, orange jacket, limps in fourth. Not quite last. He’d started off so well but there’s no mistaking it. He definitely fades.
I glance at Gloria, who is staring at me and biting her lip until the lipstick comes off on her teeth. And I sneak a glance at Dad. He’s beaming. His face is lit up, like the sun. He flutters his race card to the wind; all the fun, all the jolly-boy let loose in him. He’s off right away, towards the bookie’s, towards the paying-out booths. Then he’s back, still grinning and trying not to grin, and giving my arm a squeeze and grabbing hold of Annie.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says, shoving through the crowds ahead of him.
He’s so far ahead that I don’t see it. Gloria has disappeared; I think nothing of it—she must have gone to the Ladies.
Then suddenly she’s back, and instead of looking happy, she looks at me so sadly that I know at once something frightening has happened. She puts a hand on my shoulder and keeps pushing me through the crowd, towards the exit, and I only turn around to say once, “Where’s Dad?” before I realize that once again, someone has been snatched from me.
“Don’t fret, sugar, just keep walking towards the car,” Gloria says.
Uncle Charlie drives us home in Dad’s car, in a choked silence.
Gloria had been to collect her winnings, and at that point, she says, she saw them. Dad and two undercover detectives ahead of us, suddenly bleeding obvious, in their new camel coats, smoking their cigars, trying to blend in. A couple of kennel boys with them, including Bobby. Gloria had blocked me seeing them, hustling me towards the car with Annie and Uncle Charlie.
The car is full of hushed half sentences and strange conversation.
“You think Bobby’s gone and grassed? How’d they connect it to Tommy?”
Bitter remarks burst from Annie, then Beattie, like traps opening: “The bastard, the stupid bastard!” “I’d like to wring his jug-eared little neck.”
They’re sure it’s Bobby’s fault and that, somehow, it’s no accident either. That Bobby got himself caught and along the way grassed up Dad and the trainer, too.
I go over and over the conversation with Bobby, in my mind, trying to remember his instructions. I glance at Gloria, at her now, her profile beside me, the little brooch shaped like a sea horse in diamante on her collar. She’s a proper little actress, like Mum said of me once. She’s trying to act sorry about Dad, and sorry about Bobby, and maybe she is, but she’s full of deceit, too: her face tells me that.
What did Bobby mean for me to do? He definitely said, “No one knows what will happen. Never listen to Dad.” Don’t put money on. But it seems like Gloria and Dad won, so Bobby must have changed his mind. Or maybe, as Gloria said, Bobby meant to disobey, but in the end, just couldn’t resist Dad. Luck of the blinkin’ devil. It’s such a puzzle that my head spins, and I sit beside Gloria, at least relieved that she doesn’t join in when Annie and Beattie say horrid things about Bobby.
Bobby wouldn’t grass, would he? He’s still family, even if he is in one almighty sulk. And he’s not stupid either . . . so how could he get caught? And where are they now, Dad and Bobby? Gloria says it’ll be Shoreditch Station. “Let’s pray they ain’t got nothing on them,” she says. Gloria’s winnings—I glance at her again and she is glowing—how much are they? How much did Gloria win?
Climbing out at the house, Annie leans at the driver’s window and says to Uncle Charlie, “Tommy won’t squeal. I can’t speak for that young Toby Jug. But I know Tommy.”
Annie clicks unsteadily towards the house, beckoning me to follow. Gloria stays in the car with the others. I gave her a wave, a flutter. Gloria seems scared; she stares straight ahead.
That night I can’t sleep at all. Our bedroom, overflowing already with Bobby’s nightmares, is now swarming with fresh ones. I suddenly remember one of our teachers, telling Bobby off, ages ago, at Lauriston School, for scrumping apples from a garden. “You’ll end up in borstal, my boy, that’s where you’ll end up.” She said it not like a warning, but a fact. Sometimes I wonder why they do this all the time, why teachers and grown-ups do it and how on earth they expect us to fight it. Fight the picture they have for us, like a tunnel, a route they’re carving out in the earth for us to crawl along. We picture it, too, when they say it, of course. How else does the future happen? “You’ll end up in borstal. Mark my bloody words.”
He did, too. Not then, but later. He got off with a warning, after the day at the Dogs, but Dad got six months. And I got my promise: I got to see Mum.
Gloria arrives with no warning, and no explanation. The doorbell goes: Gloria is there. She’s wearing a hat, I see it through the bubbled glass window in the door, and as I open it, she’s standing on our step, blotting her red lipstick on a folded piece of paper, pulled from a neat little pack.
She looks over my shoulder and she seems nervous. “Annie in?”
Yes, Annie is, but I tell Gloria that I’m all alone, and she seems relieved, tells me to get my coat, and hurry up, she has George the Greek waiting.
George, she explains as we climb in the car, has kindly agreed to take us to the station. A great stink of cigar smoke nearly suffocates me as I open the door, but from Gloria’s mood—tense, quiet—I somehow know that I’m to say nothing and so I smother my coughs in the sleeve of my coat.
At the station she leans over to kiss George the Greek lightly and tell him with a wink that she’ll pay up later. He turns his curly head to watch us both go and suddenly winds down the window to shout in his powerful accent: “Yes, you will, baby—with knobs on!”
It’s such an odd remark that Gloria and I suddenly put our heads together and giggle as we run for the platform. I’ve worked out what a brass is by now. I’ve figured out that all the Ten Green Bottles do it when it suits them, although Gloria, being proud and vain, is the one who’d like me to believe otherwise.
On the train she’s sober again, and drawing on her cigarette and checking that the corridor is empty before closing the door again and sitting back down beside me.
“Now, Queenie, you done good. You never told a soul, and that’s the only reason I’m doing this for you.”
Yes, a deal, I understand those.
“God knows Annie wouldn’t thank me, and your dad would skin me alive.”
He would, too. I know that.
She snaps open her crocodile-print handbag with a loud click to put her cigarette case away, and find the slim white holder she likes to use to smoke. I peep inside her bag to see if the lovely suede purse is in there, and Gloria softens and offers me a comb and tells me to make myself look respectable.
“I’m doing this for Moll,” she says. “Not that she deserves it. No, she fucking well don’t. Excuse my French. But—a deal’s a deal. You’ve no idea how hard this was, Queenie. I had to write to the Medical Superintendent. I’ve had to cadge money off of George the Greek. You mind you’re grateful to me, you hear?”
I do, I am. I nod hard, flipping the comb to the floor by accident and folding over to pick it up. But I’m scared now, too.
The train rolls on and the chimneys and bricks roll into fields and once, a shinning fox—flashing into a hedge and disappearing. Once, Gloria says, “You didn’t go to the trial, then?” and I say, “What trial?” and she shuts her mouth, fast, and when she opens it again there’s a little smear of lipstick on her top teeth. I ponder this for a moment, wondering if she means Dad’s recent trial (no, no one ever takes me to those) or something else.
The last thing she says as we get out is the thing that troubles me most. She understands at last, she says, that no one has told me anything; no one ever tells children anything. I suppose she is trying to prepare me.
“How old was she then? Your baby sister—Vera?”
“I don’t know.”
“Was she older than a year? Thirteen months? Had she had her first birthday?”
“Yeah. I remember her birthday. Nan knitted her a hat. I made the pom-pom, you know winding it round cardboard. It was pink with orange flecks—”
“Gawd. Over a year, was she? That’s a shame. That’s why. Under a year would of been better . . . it’s a different law, then, see?”
I don’t see, but I know better than to ask. We’ve now walked from the little country station all overgrown with brambles and with a lonely feel, all horrible blackbirds pecking at empty fish and chip newspaper, and dog-ends, and have walked up a hill. Now I realize, staring up at the big fortress of a building in front of us, that if Gloria had warned me today, if she’d told me we were coming, I’d have said I’d changed my mind.
It looks like a whole town, not one building. It has high walls and two towers and sort of iron-railed balconies and walled gardens. Is it a hospital? It looks like a prison. The only big building I’ve ever seen is Ely Cathedral. This is bigger. And dark. And no one would ever want to make a model of it. I glance up at the windows, see the bars, and my eyes immediately spring with tears. I have never thought to ask, at this point, why no one took me to visit Dad whenever he was away; but now, at this moment, I decide that they’re quite right never to think of it, never to speak of it, never to ask me. I don’t want to visit. I don’t want to be here.
“Did you tell your brother you was coming?”
This surprises me. I didn’t tell Bobby, no. And I don’t know why.
“Don’t you think he would of wanted to come, an all?”
Yes. I do think that. It’s just . . .
Gloria grabs my hand in her leather gloves and snaps towards the gates. I somehow know from the way she does it that she’s thinking I’ve been mean, and I have, I know I have, but Bobby’s sulky at the moment and to tell the truth: I want something just for myself.
We fill out a visitor’s book—or Gloria does. She gives Mum’s maiden name—Windsor. Is she pretending to be related? That must be it. Mum’s sister, maybe. A lady comes, with a heap of heavy keys, a lady in a uniform who looks to me like a nurse. Like the nurse that other time, the one who called Mum a dipso. There is a tiny little Indian man shouting at the entry desk: he wants to see his wife. “Shh, sir, please,” the lady on the desk says, but he doesn’t stop.
Gloria is asked to empty her pockets, and show inside her handbag and when they spy matches, the nurses tut and say that matches aren’t allowed in the visitors’ room. “In case . . . you know,” they say, looking pointedly at me.
“How’s she supposed to light her fags then?” Gloria sounds annoyed.
“We do it. We have matches. And there’s a special brick for striking. Safer, you know . . .”
We’re hurried away and another door is unlocked; we all wait in the cramped space while this is done, and then we burst into the visitors’ room. Every time a key is turned and a door opened, I expect her to be there. Mum. I expect her to look just as she did, or just as she does in my dreams of her. With her hair all in auburn curls, on top of her head, wearing stockings and straight seams. I’m working hard on this, on picturing this, on this lovely statue I sometimes see, that looks like her, in Homerton. Instead some weird smell keeps wafting up to me, a frightening petrol smell, or is it gas? A smell of that day, the day I failed to steal enough milk to keep us all together—and then suddenly here she is. And it is her, and she looks beautiful, but fatter and softer, and in a big tent-like dress made of dark brown material, and not like Mum at all.
Two nurses—both men, one with grey curling eyebrows like the barber at the Clip Joint on Well Street—are either side of her. As if propping up a giant doll. They bring her to our table, which is a small green table, like a card table, and they put her on a chair. Her head sort of dives forward just as if she is really a doll and they’ve dropped her. I think she’s going to hit the floor, face first. But instead she grabs for me.
I hadn’t expected that. I haven’t said a word but now a little “ow!” squeezes out of me and I almost pull away as she does it. I have to make myself sit still. She’s sobbing. Her body shakes and her wet mouth is in my hair, her hot breath all over me.
I sit frozen and long for someone to peel her off.
Gloria’s kind voice finally does it. I feel Gloria’s fear, crackling beside me; she’s murmuring, “Moll—how are you, gel? There now—calm down, gel—let her breathe now, Moll, there you go . . .”
Mum does at last release the lock on me and looks up. Behind her head are some drawings done by children. Piles of games—Monopoly, Scrabble. Mum gives me a weird grin.
“There she is. My big gel! Take a look at you. All grown up. Where’s your brother? Where’s Bobby?”
I should have known she’d ask for him first. A little stab, under my ribs. Is that why I didn’t tell him? Didn’t want to share her.
“Where’s the baby?” she carries on. “Was it your dad as brought you? Or Ida . . .”
I glance terrified at Gloria. “Keep mum she’s not so dumb” pops into my head. What does Mum know about Nan? What should I say?
“Another day, Molly.” Gloria rescues me. “You’re only allowed two visitors at one time . . .”
“Huh?”
Mum glances around as if expecting someone else, then slumps back into her seat. Her face is wet and Gloria offers her a handkerchief, which she takes and then flaps against her face, the way you’d slap a face you wanted to wake up.
“Darlin’!” Mum says, suddenly.
It’s an odd sound, her voice. It comes out in a blurt, as if not from her mouth but somewhere else, like a voice from a film. Darling. That’s not what I hear. I have such a clear bright picture of her, from a time in our kitchen, standing with that leaflet in her hand, the one about evacuation, and sending your kids away and fanning her face with it, saying, “Shall I then, shall I send ya?”
I’m not your darling. You never loved me. You never even think about me.
I must be the wickedest girl who ever lived, to think such a thing. I want to cry.
A couple of feet away a chair scrapes horribly as two nurses settle down beside us with notebooks. Later, Gloria, on the train home, says to me, “Never give you a minute’s privacy, did you see that? Every word we fucking said.” But then she just glanced over, a fierce look, narrowing her eyes.
“Got any fags?” Mum asks, now, abandoning the crumpled hankie and instead slapping the table, groping towards us. Her hand is fatter, too. Her fingers puffed up, and the skin grey.
“All right if we smoke, then?” Gloria asks the nurses, lifting her eyebrows. The one with the eyebrows, the barber one, gets up, strikes a match on a brick by the window, and, cupping it with his hand, walks over to us, lights Mum’s cigarette. Gloria seems thrilled that Mum’s shown a bit of mischief, any of her old spark. I think Gloria is more shaken than she’s letting on. I swallow down tears and smile brightly at Mum, at anyone who might be looking my way.
The room fills with the smell of Player’s cigarette tobacco. Almost, for a second, if I close my eyes, I can believe I’m there again, things are back how they were, with Mum, sloshing her rum around in her coffee cup, Dad reading The Greyhound Life, baby Vera snoozing by the fire, the Children’s Hour rumbling away on the radio in the corner, and Nan knitting . . .
Instead of here, going back, on the train, remembering. Gloria sniffing beside me, patting my hand occasionally, saying, “It’s the drugs, you know. She can’t help it. They keep them drugged to the eyeballs like that; that’s why she’s that fat.” And then suddenly, in a snort: “She was always such a beauty, your mum, such a fucking beauty!”
I stare out of the window, gently shaking off Gloria’s hand on mine. Nan used to read tea leaves sometimes, for a laugh. Swilling the cup around, tipping it up, poking with her finger amongst the soft black sludge. “I see a ship,” Nan would say. “That’s you, Bobby, going on a long journey.” Or: “There, see. One day your ship will come in.”
Always a blinkin’ ship, it was. Why did she never see this?
The train slides through a tunnel and instead of green and trees it’s my own face for a second in the black glass: my snub nose, my freckles. No, I can’t remember anything more about Nan. She’s fading, like a ball of wool unraveling until the last thread comes away and in the end there’s nothing there. I close my eyes and sleep for a second or two but jerk awake suddenly. As I open my eyes I see myself—I think it’s me, it’s a girl my age, or is it another girl?—standing right in front of me, staring at me. A sick feeling creeps over me. Whoever she is, she’s wearing my red flannel nightie with the drawstring ribbon at the neck, and behind her is the chest of drawers in my bedroom, dragged open, as if she’s been looking for something. I don’t like the way this girl is peering at me, so I squeeze my eyes shut to get rid of her, and open them again—stare out of the window. The track smears into a wobbling line in front of me.
Then at last there’s just Gloria again, and the green outside the window changes to the burnt and splintered city with its jagged pillars, its piles of charred bricks. I stare down at the railway track. It doesn’t feel as if we’re traveling along it. It feels like it’s chasing us, just out of reach.
In the end, I wished I’d never gone. I felt so guilty that I had to tell Bobby about it, a week or so later, and he just shouted at me. He said Mum was a dipso and an Alka-Seltzer and he didn’t care that no one took him; then he burst into tears. The visit spoiled my ability to picture Mum the way I wanted to as well. I wanted to picture her like the statue of the Immaculate Heart of Mary on the church in Homerton on Kenworthy Road. That statue had eyes like Mum’s: eyes that were glancing down, sarcastically, as if she wanted to laugh. Passing it always made me think of her.
You know it never ceases to amaze me how little information that people—adults—see fit to tell children. That really was it. The end of our explanation about her. The end of the subject. She loomed large for us, she was a statue with sarcastic eyes and a stone heart carved on her chest that colonized our dreams, but honestly, she could never be mentioned.
I spent more and more time with the Green Bottles, and Bobby, being a boy, somehow couldn’t, and that’s when our lives seemed to divide, along strictly boy/girl lines. Bobby spent time with mates he’d made at the Dogs, or trailing Jimmy the boxer, or just watching at the ring of the Repton Boys Club and bunking off school. Dad and Annie had some “news,” they told us, one day, all smiles and secret looks; they were expecting a little baby brother or sister for us.
We thought of Vera, and said nothing.
I was supposed to be at big school by then and Bobby, too, but most of the time we both bunked off. I thought of Nan telling me to look after Bobby, and not get separated from him, and I tried, but the boys Bobby wanted to be with were a bit scary to me, and wouldn’t let me hang around them. And he didn’t like to be in school.
One day about a month later I heard from Annie that Bobby had been nicked for stealing an air rifle. He had to go to court and of course no one paid the fine for him, so that made matters worse. Dad was away at that point, doing his time for his part in the dog-racing fixing, and money had dried up. I can’t now remember the sequence of events—I remember a bright autumn day near Bonfire Night when Dad returned and took me to the brand-new Lesney’s factory in Hackney Wick to show me where the matchbox toys were made, and said, wistfully, “Think your brother’s too old for a matchbox car these days?” and I agreed that I thought he was. So Dad said he’d get one for the new baby when it came, instead.
Then there was the day—a day when the weather perked up and daffodils appeared at Vicky Park—that Bobby nicked a bike and cycled past the Jewish Boys Club on Fordham Street and got nicked by two coppers who recognized him. He abandoned the bike and tried to run and they chased him easily and caught him, and tumbled him to the ground, where one held him down while the other administered some good old British justice.
Oh, in those days you could do what you wanted to tearaways; you could get them in the car with a kindly “Come on, son, let’s be having you,” and once in you could pin their arms behind their backs and say to your mate, “Right, I’ve got him, let the little bastard have it!”
By the time he got to the police station Bobby had bloodstains all over him, but the arresting officers just shrugged, as if to say, “Well? How’d you expect us to bring him in?”
Bobby was in court the next morning, and fined a pound or two. This fine wasn’t paid either—who had a pound to spare, when every penny was needed for the new baby?—and so his old schoolteacher at Lauriston finally got what she predicted: her picture for Bobby came true. Bobby was taken to an Approved School in Hertfordshire. When—a year later—he absconded from there one night with his new friend Robby, he ended up at the police station again, and from there was taken to the Allocation Center at Wormwood Scrubs, where borstal boys awaited their fate.