Miriam EDLIN yanked a paper towel from the dispenser and wiped the condensation from the mirror above the mucky wash basin. Tossing the wad of paper into the bin, she checked her reflection. Her nose was shiny. And her hair – straightened earlier with the help of several applications of heavy-duty lacquer – was reverting to the careless waves she spent hours failing to tame.
‘Bing’s shoes are gruesome.’ Frankie’s voice came from the cubicle next to the one Miriam had vacated.
She turned on the tap, letting cold water trickle across her wrists.
‘Mim? Did you see Bing’s shoes? They look like they belong to his dad.’
The driving beat of The Locomotion was coming from beyond the cloakroom door. She pressed her hands against her cheeks, enjoying the shock of the cold. She hadn’t noticed Paul Crosby’s shoes. Her attention had been held by the strip of Elastoplast covering his eyebrow.
‘What’s happened to his face?’ she said.
‘God, I don’t know. And I honestly don’t care.’ The cubicle door opened and Frankie emerged. ‘It’s something to do with this afternoon’s rugby match. I swear he’s keener on groping his mates than groping me.’
Miriam laughed. ‘What are you on about?’
‘Rugby’s just an excuse for boys to touch each other up. It’s a well-known fact.’
Miriam watched as her best friend leaned toward the mirror, fussing with the flicked-up ends of her hair. Scowling and pouting. Checking lipstick and mascara. She’d given up measuring herself against Frankie. Blond hair that stayed where it was supposed to. Neat nose. Slim ankles. Size four feet – D-fitting.
‘Let’s get back,’ Frankie said. ‘Barbara’s been making eyes at Bing all evening. Sly cow.’
On Saturday evenings they came to Betty Hudson’s School of Ballroom and Latin Dance. Not to learn to foxtrot or tango (although Miriam had convinced her parents this would be an asset) but for the ‘modern free’ which came after the soft-drinks break. This boiled down to a selection of singles played, full blast, on an ugly but efficient record player. Hardly cutting-edge stuff but it gave them the opportunity to flirt. To hold sweaty hands. To rub against each other. To become aware of the lumps and bumps that lay beneath their Saturday best. To get a hint of mysteries yet to be revealed.
Although Miriam wasn’t keen on these febrile Saturday evenings, she was conscious that friendships were forged through collective experience. Friday evening youth club. A Saturday job. A place in the tennis team. But she was excluded from these activities because she wasn’t released to join her friends until after lunch on Saturdays. This made coming to Betty’s all the more important. Frankie called her a ninny for putting up with the curfew. Told her she was old enough to decide how she lived her life. But Miriam had watched her father and Danny fight over the self same issues until things became so bad her brother stopped coming home. She couldn’t put them through that again.
The girls linked arms and made their way to the far corner of the hall where the others – Bing, Barbara, Colin, Little Pete, Emms, Lisa and Judith – were standing in a loose circle. The boys were laughing about something, and the girls were laughing because the boys were laughing. Frankie uncoupled herself from Miriam and took her place at Bing’s side, standing close to him, their arms touching.
Neil Sedaka was next up and Frankie took Bing’s hand and dragged him onto the dance floor. Lisa and Judith were already jiving together. They spent hours rehearsing their routine – a sequence of quirky, jerky manoeuvres repeated with single-minded precision and blank faces. Without debate, the rest of the group paired up, leaving Miriam to the mercy of Emms.
Glyn Emms – a gangly, narrow-faced boy with chewed finger nails – had made it known that he ‘wouldn’t mind going out with’ Miriam Edlin. Of course he hadn’t said as much to her. Such propositions were conveyed by a third party (in this case Colin) who acted as go-between until the matter was resolved, one way or the other. She wasn’t flattered by Emms’s attention. He wasn’t desperate to go out with her. He was desperate to go out with a girl. Any girl – as long as she had lips and breasts and something mysterious in her knickers. That’s what all these boys were after. It was demoralising and depressing.
‘Dance?’ Emms directed his invitation over her shoulder, as if he were talking to someone a few feet behind her.
With no good reason to refuse, she nodded and they spent the next three minutes dancing a foot apart, avoiding each other’s eyes. As they danced, Miriam edged nearer Frankie and Bing, grimacing and mouthing ‘help’ when she caught her friend’s eye.
As soon as the music stopped, she pulled Frankie to one side. ‘Keep talking. Don’t let Emms muscle in.’
Emms was watching her, a soppy smile on his face. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘He winked at me.’
‘He’s such a creep,’ Frankie said. ‘I’ll get Bing to warn him off.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. He could tell him you’re… you’re… frigid. That should do it.’
Miriam wasn’t clear what frigid meant but she knew it wasn’t complimentary. To be on the safe side, when the last dance started up – the smoochy number that established pairings for the coming week – she made sure to be in the ‘Ladies’.
They spilled out of Betty’s and headed for the coffee bar next to the bus station. For years and years it had been a seedy little café where people went to keep warm while they waited for a bus. Recently it had changed ownership and had been fitted out with leatherette seats and a flashy Italian coffee machine, and now it was called ‘Presto’.
They ambled along, Miriam and Frankie arm in arm, Bing and Emms lagging at the back, probably discussing her frigidity.
‘Is Bing okay with this?’ she said.
‘Of course,’ Frankie said. ‘My every wish is his command. Besides, he thinks you’re too good for Emms.’
She was surprised to hear this. As Frankie’s best friend, she was often in Paul’s company but she couldn’t recall ever having a conversation with him. In fact she’d always felt intimidated by Paul – ‘Bing’ – Crosby, the golden boy of the Lower Sixth. As well as being handsome, he was clever. And sporty. And he’d passed his Grade 7 piano exam.
At the coffee bar they squeezed into adjacent booths. Miriam sat with Frankie, Bing and Colin. Emms was on the next table, facing away from her. (Whatever Bing had told him had done the trick.) She wasn’t keen on coffee but she ordered it just the same, spooning in enough brown sugar to offset its bitterness. Again the boys dominated the conversation, making jokes she didn’t always understand but laughed at anyway. It was fun being here in the coffee-scented warmth with her friends, knowing that Bing thought she was too good for Emms.
Frankie nudged her, nodding towards two young men who had come. They were older – perhaps in their early twenties. One wore his dark hair in a ponytail. The other had a moth-eaten crew cut. Both were wearing donkey jackets and the orange boots favoured by workmen and art students. Crew-cut sat at the table across the aisle, reading a tattered paperback, while Ponytail went to the counter.
‘Time for another coffee, I think,’ Frankie said and, manoeuvring past Bing, she went up to the counter and stood behind the young man as he placed his order.
Miriam saw her friend tap the man on his shoulder. He turned around and, smiling, took something from his pocket, swapping it for whatever she had in her hand. She’d asked him for change. Then they were chatting away as if they were old friends. Bing was grumbling about his father’s refusal to pay for driving lessons, talking too loudly, pretending not to notice that his girlfriend was flirting with a stranger.
‘Where’s your coffee?’ Bing said when Frankie returned empty-handed.
‘Changed my mind,’ she said. ‘I’m allowed to, aren’t I?’
Miriam was in her bedroom when the doorbell rang.
‘Someone to see you,’ her mother called.
She hurried down, expecting to find Frankie in the hall. But it was Bing.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘I was getting ahead with some reading for next week,’ she said. ‘Nothing that can’t wait.’
‘Can I get your friend something to drink?’ Her mother directed the question at her as though Bing weren’t there.
‘Not for me, thanks,’ Bing said. ‘I’m Paul, by the way. Paul Crosby. I’m at school with Miriam.’
‘She’s never mentioned you.’
‘Paul does science, Mum,’ Miriam said. ‘We don’t have lessons together.’
‘Ahhh. So you’re going to be a scientist.’
Bing cleared his throat. ‘Actually I’m hoping to become a doctor.’
‘A doctor. Goodness me.’ Her mother’s lips, squeezed in a prim smile, conveyed her scepticism.
Miriam shot her a go-away glare but she stood her ground.
‘Miriam very kindly lent me bus fare the other day,’ he said. ‘I was passing so I thought I’d drop it in.’
He jangled the coins his pocket which appeared to satisfy her mother. ‘I must get on,’ she said and disappeared into the kitchen.
‘I don’t think she likes me,’ he said.
‘It’s not you. She’s the same with everyone.’
Bing ran his hand through his hair. ‘You can guess why I’m here.’
She nodded towards the kitchen where her mother was clattering pans. ‘Let’s go outside.’
She slipped on her coat and they went into the front garden and sat on the wall.
‘Frankie and I have had a bit of a set-to,’ he said. ‘I assumed she would have told you.’
When they’d left the coffee bar she’d seen Frankie and Bing standing in the corner of the bus station and it was obvious they were arguing. ‘No. I haven’t spoken to her today,’ she said.
He swivelled to face her, the dressing on his eyebrow making him look simultaneously heroic and vulnerable. ‘Apparently I’m boring. And immature. And uncreative – whatever that means. Oh, and possessive. I almost forgot possessive.’ He looked up and down the street. ‘Fancy a walk?’
‘Okay,’ she said, suddenly and unaccountably wanting to spend time with this boy whom she scarcely knew.
‘Shouldn’t you tell your mum?’ he said.
It was considerate of him to suggest it, but her mother would probably raise an objection and she didn’t want to risk it.
‘It’s fine,’ she said.
He levered himself off the wall and dropped down onto the pavement. ‘Where shall we go?’
Wanting to prove she had a mind of her own she said ‘Let’s go to Bellevue Park.’
‘The park it is.’ He offered her his hand as she jumped down. ‘Blimey. You’re freezing.’ He pulled a pair of woolly gloves from the pocket of his duffle coat. ‘Here.’
They walked, and talked about Frankie. He wanted to know about the Slattery family and what Frankie was planning to do when she left school. She was surprised how little he knew about her considering they’d been together for months. She answered as best she could, careful not to let slip anything that showed Frankie in an unfavourable light – or herself to be an unreliable friend.
Bellevue Park – a grand Victorian endeavour – dropped down the hill towards the canal. It was a popular destination for a post-Sunday lunch stroll, offering a tropical greenhouse, ponds with water lilies, goldfish and miniature waterfalls, tennis courts and a bandstand. A notice stated that the play area was for ‘under twelves’ but the park keeper was nowhere to be seen and she and Bing sat on adjacent swings, swaying back and forth whilst, all around, children slid and jumped and twirled and yelled.
They urged their swings higher. Leaning backwards, legs extended; bending forwards, legs tucked under. The swings were soon out of synch, and they exchanged snippets of conversation as they flew past each other.
‘I used to come here with my brother,’ she said. ‘Once he got flung off the roundabout and broke his collar bone.’
‘You have a brother?’
‘Yes. Danny. He’s five years older than me.’
‘What does he do?’ he said.
The truth was, she had no idea what Danny did, or where he was. The last time he wrote, he was in California ‘with a group of like-minded pilgrims’. (When her father read this he’d hit the roof.) That was months ago.
‘He’s travelling,’ – as she flew forward. ‘You have two older sisters,’ – as she plummeted back.
‘How d’you know?’
‘Frankie told me.’
He dragged his feet on the tarmac, bringing his swing to a standstill, waiting for her to do the same. ‘How come you two are friends?’ he said. ‘I don’t get it.’
She could ask him the same question but from what she’d just heard he and Frankie weren’t friends. Not friend friends, anyway. So she didn’t, instead describing her first nervous day at grammar school. How she and Frankie had ended up sitting together. How, although they weren’t the least alike, neither of them quite fitted in. Frankie – opinionated and rebellious. She – a bit ‘square’ and from a different culture. How they complemented and supported each other. She told him how she sometimes did Frankie’s homework for her and recounted several of her friend’s crazier escapades, embellishing the stories to make them more amusing. She made him laugh, and she liked that she could do that.
‘Watch out. Parkie.’ Bing pointed at the park keeper who was blowing his whistle and heading in their direction. Grabbing her hand, he pulled her off the swing seat and they ran, laughing, out of the play area, along the terrace towards the bandstand, keeping going until they could no longer hear the shrill whistle.
Monday morning, and the girls’ cloakroom was buzzing with weekend gossip.
‘Guess who I was with last night,’ Frankie said as they were changing into their indoor shoes.
Miriam shrugged. ‘Who?’
‘Remember the guy in the coffee bar? The one with the ponytail?’ Frankie rolled her eyes. ‘And guess what? He’s got a car.’
‘But Bing? You can’t just—’
‘Mim. We’re seventeen. We can do whatever we like.’
Throughout the week, Frankie talked of little else but Gregg. She’d cheated on previous boyfriends but never on Bing – not to Miriam’s knowledge, anyway. She couldn’t help wondering why a man like Gregg would bother with a schoolgirl. But she said nothing, and it was several days before she discovered that Frankie had told him she was nineteen and had a job as a secretary in a solicitor’s office.
‘So what about Bing?’ Miriam said.
‘What about Bing?’
‘He’s bound to find out.’
‘Only if someone tells him.’ Frankie said.

The week trundled by. Miriam saw Bing in the distance – twice – and he smiled and raised his hand but they didn’t speak. When she asked Frankie if she was going to Betty’son Saturday, she came back with a vague ‘That depends.’
‘On…?
‘Whether I get a better offer. And I’ve been thinking, Mim. Maybe Gregg could fix you up with his friend.’
‘Absolutely not.’
Frankie grinned. ‘Only joking. Will you go?’
She’d never gone to Betty’s without Frankie. The other girls could be stand-offish and, when it came to the boys, she lacked Frankie’s confidence.
‘Depends,’ she said.
‘You should,’ Frankie said. ‘You can keep Bing company.’
On Saturdays, Frankie worked on the counter at Swift’s Bakery and, as soon as the Edlins had finished lunch, Miriam went to find her, loitering outside until the shop was empty.
‘Did you get your better offer?’ she said.
‘Indeed I did.’ Frankie glanced over her shoulder and lowered her voice. ‘We’re going to a party. Can I tell Mum I’m staying at yours?’
Mrs Slattery was a careworn woman – nothing at all like Frankie. Mr Slattery had walked out on the family (Frankie had two younger brothers) before the girls met and Frankie never spoke of him. Miriam guessed this went a long way to explaining her friend’s two-fingers approach to life. Danny’s leaving had taken its toll on the Edlins but, if anything, it had made them cling together more tightly. Grow more inward-looking. But it might have been very different had her father been the one to leave.
‘I don’t know…’
‘Come on, Mim. What’s your problem?’
‘My problem? I rather think it’s your problem. What if there’s an emergency and your mother phones my house? And there’s Bing. What if he asks where you are?’
‘What if… what if an asteroid – or do I mean a meteor – smashes into the earth?’
The shop door opened and two women came in, curtailing the girls’ conversation.
Frankie dropped a jam doughnut in a paper bag and handed it to Miriam. ‘I’ll ring you when I finish here.’
The class was ten minutes into the foxtrot when Miriam arrived. She’d hung on at home as long as she could in case Frankie changed her mind.
Pairings for the ‘ballroom’ session were more to do with matching heights than romantic intent. If you didn’t sort yourself out, Betty did it for you. This evening, girls were in short supply and, as soon as she walked into the hall, Betty pushed her towards a boy she’d not seen here before. He was nondescript and had nothing to say for himself but he had a good sense of rhythm and was able to count in his head – quite a bonus. As they moved around the room – slow, slow, quick, quick – she took stock. Lisa and Colin. Judith and Little Pete. Emms, standing in the corner. And was that Bing over there, with Barbara?
The foxtrot led on to the waltz, and the waltz to the tango. Everyone kept the same partners. When it came to the half-time break, the boy thanked her and wandered out of the door.
‘Where’s Frankie tonight?’ Lisa said.
She’d rehearsed her story. ‘Babysitting. It came up at the last minute.’
‘Well someone’s pleased she’s not here.’ Lisa inclined her head towards Barbara.
Miriam gazed at Bing, willing him to look her way. Almost at once he glanced at her, smiled and came to join her. She felt dizzy with the nearness of him.
‘I won’t ask where she is,’ he said.
‘She has these mad moments, Bing. I’m sure she’ll come to her—’
‘I don’t want to talk about Frankie.’
Clattering signalled the lifting of the roller shutter and with that everyone began drifting towards the counter where refreshments were on sale.
Bing caught her arm. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
We’re seventeen. We can do what we like.
‘Okay.’
While their friends were buying pop and crisps, they collected their coats and slipped out of the hall. After the sweaty fug, the air was shockingly cold but Miriam’s uncontrollable shivering had as much to do with nerves as with the temperature. Barely speaking, they hurried past Presto, keeping going until they reached the railway station. The café in the ticket hall was still open, picking up trade from late travellers and those with nowhere to go on a cold Saturday night.
‘Coffee?’ he said.
‘I’ve a confession to make,’ she said. ‘I don’t actually like coffee. Can I have tea?’
He smiled. ‘You’re funny.’ He waved away the coins she offered. ‘You get them next time.’
Next time.
‘Before you say anything,’ he said when he returned, ‘I know about Frankie.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s that bloke from the coffee bar, isn’t it? The one with the stupid ponytail.’
She’d got the wrong end of the stick. She was here to lend a sympathetic ear.
‘I went to meet her from work,’ he said. ‘He was in the shop with her. She spotted me through the window. And d’you know what she did?’ He paused. ‘She kissed him.’
Had anyone else been the injured party, she might have excused Frankie. But Bing – it wasn’t on.
‘That’s a rotten thing to do,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what comes over her sometimes. I’m sure she’ll come to her senses—’
‘She doesn’t deserve a friend like you.’
She blushed and looked down. An oily film had formed on the surface of her tea. The station announcer’s tinny voice was reeling off a list of stations.
‘Actually it’s fine,’ he said. ‘You see I went to the shop to tell her it’s over.’
He was no longer wearing the sticking plaster and she could see stitches, like three black spiders, running through his eyebrow. The blemish made his face more beautiful.
‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘I’ve met someone else.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘Can you guess who?’
‘Barbara?’
‘No, silly. Not Barbara. You.’
Instead of catching the bus, they walked. Bing positioned himself on the edge of the pavement, between her and passing traffic. Her father did that when he walked alongside a woman and it made her feel grown up. She was no longer the least bit cold because Bing had his arm around her, holding her close. They talked non-stop. Shop window displays. The chrome on a monster motor bike. An old man walking four podgy dogs. Litter. Whether chips tasted better with ketchup or brown sauce, which led naturally on to the question of vinegar. She liked it, he didn’t.
When she could put it off no longer, she said, ‘What’s Frankie going to say.’
‘About…?’
‘Us. What’s she going to think?’
‘Us has nothing to do with her. She’s made it crystal clear she doesn’t give a toss about me. She can’t expect me to hang around on the off chance she’ll change her mind.’
He was right. But Frankie Slattery wasn’t the most rational person in the world.
‘Shouldn’t we at least wait until you’ve spoken to her?’ she said.
‘Don’t worry. I was always going to be a stepping stone to someone else.’
‘So why did you put up with her?’
‘The same reason you do. She’s funny. Disrespectful. Dangerous. It’s thrilling at first but you can have enough of that sort of thing.’
As they neared the house, she grew apprehensive. Light was filtering through the closed curtains of the living room. Her parents would be watching TV and glancing at the clock on the sideboard. She had to be in by ten-thirty and her father was a stickler for punctuality. Danny used to joke that if he didn’t get in five minutes early, he got a ‘rollicking’ for being late.
They stopped in the deep shadows of the evergreens that framed the front gate. ‘I’d better go in,’ she said. ‘I don’t want my father coming out to look for me.’
‘Now you’re scaring me,’ he said.
He pulled her towards him and kissed her, gently at first and then more insistently, his tongue probing deeper and deeper. A tingle, barely noticeable at first, spread through her body, building and building until it she could think of nothing else.
Next day, Sunday, Miriam heard nothing from Frankie. Neither was she in school on Monday. She’d mitched off before but she’d never been out of touch for this long – especially baffling knowing what she’d been planning for Saturday night. But surely if Frankie had disappeared or anything terrible had happened to her, Mrs Slattery would have been in contact. Most days, the two girls dawdled homeward together, going their separate ways when they reached St John’s Church. Today she stopped at a phone box and dialled the Slatterys’ number. If Mrs Slattery answered she risked a tricky conversation about Frankie’s supposed night at her house. But she needn’t have worried because there was no reply.
Frankie turned up at school on Tuesday with a note ‘from her mother’. Apparently she’d been laid up with period pains – the good old standby. It wasn’t until they were walking home that Miriam had a chance to question her. ‘Where have you been? I was getting worried.’
‘After the party we went back to his flat. Then on Sunday we drove to London. In. His. Car. It was brilliant. His friends live in a squat. We smoked pot and drank vodka and listened to music. It was the best thing ever.’
Miriam couldn’t see beyond the practicalities of Frankie’s two-night absence. ‘What did you tell your mother?’
‘That your parents were going away, and they’d asked me to stay at yours to keep you company. She thinks the sun shines out of your bum so she was fine with that.’
Miriam gasped. ‘That’s outrageous.’
Frankie ran a few yards ahead then turned to face her. ‘So… do I look different?’
For months Frankie had been preoccupied with losing her virginity. Reading about it. Talking about it. Fantasising about it. All the same, Miriam was shaken by her decision to surrender to a stranger, even if he did have a car and a ponytail.
‘Not really,’ she said.
‘Well I feel different. And that’s because I am different. I’ve been liberated.’ Seizing her satchel by its strap, Frankie twirled around, the buckled bag inscribing a horizontal circle. ‘Sex is a million times better than I imagined.’ She twirled a few more times then let go, releasing the satchel to fly through the air and land with a thump in the middle of the road.
Miriam had spent the best part of two days worrying about divulging her news. But Frankie’s recklessness infected her and out it spilled. ‘Bing’s asked me to go out with him.’
Disbelief flitted across Frankie’s face. ‘And?’
‘And I said I would. That’s okay, isn’t it?’
She grinned. ‘It’s more than okay. It’s perfect.’
They were interrupted by the blast of a car horn as a motorist swerved to avoid the satchel. The din attracted the attention of several pedestrians who watched Frankie saunter into the road, pick up her bag, raise her middle finger to the driver, and saunter back again.
‘Let’s give the nosey old biddies a fright,’ she said and plonked a swift, rough kiss on Miriam’s lips.
Initially her parents’ disapproval of her friendship with Bing amounted to nothing more than a negative undertow. She put this down to their reluctance to accept that she was old enough to have a real boyfriend. Paul Crosby standing in their hall waiting for her, and her flushed cheeks when he brought her home, were proof that she was no longer their ‘little girl’. She hoped that the more they saw of him, the more accepting they would become. He was hard-working, courteous and dependable. He was going to be a doctor, for goodness sake. What more could they ask? But as the weeks and months passed, their resistance stiffened. He rarely made it further than the front door where he was met (usually by her father) with frostiness. It got so that she was on pins before he came to collect her and, to protect him from their hostility, she waited for him in the porch.
His parents, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more welcoming. Julia and Angus Crosby were doctors with a laissez-faire approach to domestic chores, homework, bad language, hairstyles, bed- and mealtimes – matters which obsessed her parents. The family lived in a grand but ramshackle house which hummed with interesting people doing interesting things. If she happened to be there when a meal was in prospect, a place would be set for her at the vast kitchen table. (Never a tablecloth which she found daring and thrilling.) No one interrogated her about school or her plans for the future. No one batted an eyelid when she and Bing went up to his bedroom. The same went for his sisters and their boyfriends, when they were around. She wondered whether, immersed in illness and death, his mother and father understood how important it was to live in the now.
‘Don’t you feel like doing mannish things sometimes?’ she said.
They were in Bing’s room. The door was open, a babble of voices drifting up from the kitchen where a game of brag was in full swing.
‘Mannish?’ he said. ‘Is that even a word?’
‘You know what I mean. Drinking. Telling dirty jokes. Chatting up birds. Seriously. You’re surrounded by women. Me. Your sisters. Doesn’t it get you down?’
‘I love it,’ he said, ‘although now you come to mention it, I feel like doing a mannish thing right now.’
He closed the door and switched off the light. ‘Come here, you.’ His arms folded around her and she breathed in the smell that was becoming as familiar to her as her own. Tangy shampoo. Lanolin from his sweater. A hint of sweat – not unpleasant.
They kissed, the ache she’d grown to crave spreading to her most secret places. Next, as though by accident, his hand brushed the front of her sweater. Back and forth, back and forth, causing her breasts to tingle and her heart to race. (All the time, kissing, her skin getting hotter.) Easing up inside her sweater, his practised fingers undid her bra. He stroked her back, keeping her waiting until, when she thought she would scream, his hands moved around to cup her breasts whilst his thumbs circled her nipples until they were hard and sore and she felt faint. This was their ritual and she had become addicted to it.
‘I love you,’ he murmured and pulled her down onto the bed and they carried on, pressing against each other, their legs entwined and she felt him hard and hot through his trousers. Suddenly he was sneaking his right hand inside the waistband of her skirt, past her suspender belt, moving down, tracing the lacy border of her knickers. Edging closer and closer.
Once upon a time, before she’d experienced this visceral sensation, when sex was something baffling, she’d made up her mind to save ‘below the waist’ for the man she married. Once upon a time, that had seemed so clear-cut, so easily achieved.
‘Stop,’ she murmured, pulling away.
He stopped, his hand resting on her thigh.
‘I want to. Honestly I do,’ she said.
Retrieving his hand cautiously as if removing the fuse from a ticking bomb, he rolled away.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just…’
‘You don’t have to explain, Mim. It’ll happen one day. We’ll know when the time’s right.’ He reached for her hand. ‘Frankie and I… we didn’t go all the way.’
She pictured Frankie’s satchel soaring through the air. ‘I know and I’m glad.’
A muffled roar came from the card-players downstairs. Hard to believe there was a world beyond this room. She turned on her side. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark and she could make out his profile and, on his bedside table, his alarm clock, the hands clearly visible against its white face. Twenty-to-nine on Saturday evening. The image of her parents, settling down to watch television, flashed, uninvited, into her head.
In the spring and without warning, Danny turned up. For a while they were all on their best behaviour. Her mother fussed, offering to wash his clothes, churning out plates heaped high with what she insisted were his favourite meals. Her father was more guarded, clearly waiting to see why his son had chosen this moment to return. Conversations skimmed the surface, veering away from anything that might prove provocative. With Miriam he was overly polite. The five years between them, a chasm when they were children, should have mattered less now but it seemed as unbridgeable as it had ever been. She longed to get him alone and ask him where he’d been and what he’d seen. But he spent a great deal of time in his room with the door shut and, when he came downstairs, her parents were always around.
They made it through four whole days before the first barney. Her father asked Danny whether he went for regular dental check-ups. Harmless on the face of it, but perhaps not the thing to ask a son who’d left home because his parents were ‘suffocating’ him with their attention. The row progressed rapidly from the bad impression caused by decaying teeth to the folly of smoking, Danny coming out with, ‘What’s the point of making old bones? Look at you two. Are you happy?’
The second row began as small talk over their evening meal. An elderly neighbour had died a few months earlier and, that morning, an estate agent’s board had appeared in the front garden.
‘We’ll be getting new neighbours,’ her mother said.
‘I hope they’ll fit in,’ her father said. ‘We don’t want any trouble.’
Danny looked up from his plate. ‘Trouble?’
‘Well, this is a respectable neighbourhood. The wrong type of people could be detrimental to house prices.’
‘Define “the wrong type of people”,’ Danny said.
‘You know quite well what I mean. People who play loud music. Or have hordes of children.’
‘Funny cooking smells,’ her mother murmured.
‘Ahhh. I get it. You mean foreigners.’
‘Well. Outsiders don’t understand how we do things.’
Daniel shook his head. ‘Given this family’s history, I’d have thought you’d be more understanding – compassionate – towards outsiders as you call them.’
‘You don’t understand.’
‘I do. That’s the problem. You’re a bigot, Dad.’
Her mother sniffled into a handkerchief and her father looked as if he might have a seizure. Miriam felt sick. She wanted to scream at them to stop it. Instead she ran upstairs and shut herself in her bedroom.
Later that evening, Danny knocked her door. She was lying on her bed trying (and failing) to focus on Middlemarch.
‘Can I come in?’ he said.
She sat up, pushing her skirt down to cover her bare knees. ‘Of course.’
‘How’s it going?’ He drew up a chair, as if she were an invalid, he a visitor.
‘D’you mean school? Or…’
‘I mean life. How’s your life? Are you happy?’
Nothing for days and suddenly he was asking if she were happy.
She drew her legs up and clamped her arm around them. ‘I’m okay. Well. Okayish.’
He raised his eyebrows, encouraging her to continue.
‘They expect too much of me,’ she said. ‘Not academically. That’s not a problem. It’s like they messed up with you and now they’re pinning their hopes on me.’
‘Hopes of what?’
‘Turning into a carbon copy of them, I suppose.’ She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead on her knees. ‘I wish I hated them. It’d make things so much easier.’
‘Poor Mim. I’m sorry I landed you in it.’
‘And now you’re going away again, aren’t you?’
‘I can’t stay here. You can see that, can’t you?’ He was silent for a few seconds and she could see he was making his mind up about something. ‘Can I trust you with a secret?’
She looked up. ‘You’re not dying are you?’
He gave a sad smile. ‘We’re all dying. The important thing is how we live. We have to be true to ourselves.’
‘Frankie’s always telling me that.’
‘Then you should listen to her.’
‘It sounds a bit selfish to me. What if being true to yourself hurts the ones who love you? That doesn’t seem right.’
‘If they really love you – you, not their idea of you – they’ll want you to be happy.’
‘Mum and Dad do love you. They were devastated when you left. Mum cried for days. I know they’re quick to criticise. Especially Dad. But you can’t expect them to approve of everything you say and do.’
‘I’ve never asked them to approve. But they’ve never even listened to my side of things. You and I don’t exist merely to fulfil Dad and Mum’s ambitions. It’s not selfishness, it’s self-preservation.’
More than anything she wished he would lean over and hug her or squeeze her hand, or do something physical to prove that he was her brother and that he cared.
‘So what’s this big secret of yours, anyway?’ she said.
He dug in his shirt pocket and brought out a photograph. It showed a woman with olive skin and lustrous black hair. She was holding up a chubby, laughing baby.
‘Who are they?’ she said, although she already knew.
‘Ava and Pearl, my wife and daughter. What d’you think?’ He might have been showing her a picture of his new car.
You’ve abandoned me twice, that’s what she thought. What hope she’d had of his coming back to save her had been snatched away by this Ava and Pearl.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ she said.
‘I needed to do it in person,’ he said. ‘That’s why I came.’
‘So why haven’t you?’
‘I had this crazy idea that they’d have mellowed. Dream on, as they say.’
‘You will tell them though?’
‘After all that stuff about “outsiders” and funny-smelling food?’ he said. ‘Can you imagine their reaction? No. They don’t deserve to know.’
‘So why are you telling me?’ she said.
‘In case anything happens to me. It’s important that someone knows Danny Edlin has a wife and child.’
‘You’re unbelievable,’ she said. ‘You’ve dumped your secret on me and now you’re going to disappear again. Can’t you see what an impossible position this puts me in?’ Her anger flared. ‘You’re selfish and cowardly. Fuck off back to America. I’ll be fine.’
Danny left and, overnight, her parents aged ten years. It had been bad the first time but lingering somewhere in the background had been the hope of reconciliation. This time there was none. His absence tainted the household with the bleakness of bereavement. Indeed there were times when she wished he had died. At least then they could have talked about him. Because they didn’t. Not to her anyway.
The new neighbours – a middle-aged couple – moved in. He was a bank manager and she did ‘good works’ of some kind. They kept themselves to themselves and Miriam wasn’t aware of any weird cooking smells coming from the house. Despite this, her parents treated the world as an increasingly hostile place. Everyone, and everything, was conspiring against them. They went out only when it was necessary. Her mother fretted about every little thing. Their conspicuous misery piled pressure on her to be a dutiful child. To compensate for their prodigal son. It wasn’t fair. Nevertheless, she did her best to please them because, in spite of everything, she loved and pitied them.
Frankie dyed her hair the colour of Ribena and moved on from Gregg to his crew-cutted friend, Andy. Most afternoons she went straight from school to Andy’s flat which meant the two girls rarely walked home together. Frankie had stopped pretending she was nineteen and Andy was doing his best to persuade her to leave school. The friends’ worlds were diverging. But Miriam’s life was made bearable by Bing.
As she grew more dependent on him, her parents’ opposition became even stronger. He wasn’t welcome in their house; they didn’t like it when she went to his. They dreamed up reasons why she must stay in, or why she had to be home early. She became convinced they were spying on her, sneaking in to her room looking for clues of… what she wasn’t sure. She took to leaving her desk drawer slightly open, not sure whether she was pleased or not to come home and find it as she’d left it. They said mean things about the Crosby family’s ‘bohemian’ lifestyle hinting that, by associating with them, she was risking her reputation.
Had the Crosbys treated her like that she would have given up, but Bing took it on the chin. ‘They’re vile to you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why you bother with me.’
‘Well, whatever they say and whatever they do, I’ll keep turning up.’
When life at home became intolerable, she dreamed of joining Danny in America. After the bust up with her parents, he’d disappeared without saying goodbye, but when she opened Middlemarch she found a sheet of paper with his address (964, Harding Street, Fairfield, CA – she’d committed it to memory before destroying the evidence) and the sentence ‘For your eyes only.’ She’d resisted for a whole month before writing to him. Her letter was short – a bit about school and her new Joni Mitchell album. In a PS she’d added ‘best wishes to Ava and Pearl’. She’d used Frankie’s address in the hope he would reply. But she’d heard nothing.
End-of-year exams done, the freedom of summer stretching ahead, she and Bing were foraging for raspberries in the Crosbys’ jungle of a garden. The day was humid, the air alive with flying insects. Bing’s T-shirt was stained with raspberry juice. His hair, damp with sweat, was curling at the nape of his neck and, in that instant, she was overwhelmed with love for him.
‘Here.’ He was holding a perfect raspberry between his thumb and forefinger. When she opened her mouth, he dropped it on to his own tongue and they came together in a raspberry-flavoured kiss.
The garden baked in the sultry heat and before long they were lying on the grass, hidden from the house by a dense box hedge.
This was the right time.
Her father arranged for her to spend August with his sister, Adele, in Boston. Most girls would have given their eye teeth for such an opportunity but Miriam had reservations about spending a month away from Bing. Her parents behaved as if in agreeing to go she’d done something clever and as a reward they bought her several outfits and a new suitcase. Their being so keen to send her to the same place as their missing son was bizarre. She’d checked the map. Thousands of miles separated Boston from Fairfield but at least she’d be on the same landmass as Danny – assuming he still lived in America. (He never replied to her letters.)
On the day before she left, she and Bing made love three times. Her parents thought a crowd of them were hiking to the local reservoir. His parents were at work and his sisters who were somewhere in the house failed to notice what was going on. (‘They’re probably up to the same thing,’ he said.)
Her aunt and uncle couldn’t have been kinder. And her cousins – older than she – went out of their way to include her in whatever they were doing. She did all the right things. Saw a baseball game at Fenway Park. Drove around in an open-topped car. Drank milk shakes, played tennis and went to the ‘movies’. The weekend after she confessed to a passion for The Great Gatsby – the book and the man – they drove her the two-hundred-odd miles to Long Island. She missed Bing. But there was so much going on she didn’t have time to mope.
Bing demanded to hear every detail of her stay in Boston and she found herself underplaying it, not wanting him to think that she’d had too good a time. He kept returning to the boys she’d encountered while she was there. Worrying away at it. Names. Descriptions. Whether any of them had tried to get off with her. This irked her and culminated in their first ever falling out.
‘You said you didn’t mind my going,’ she said.
‘I didn’t think I would.’
‘Don’t you trust me?’ she said.
‘Of course I do. I just can’t bear to think of you even speaking to another man.’
‘That’s ridiculous. In a few weeks you’ll be in London and I’ll be in Manchester. How’s that going to work if we don’t trust each other?’
‘Don’t rub it in. The moment you’re out of my sight, I know some bastard will snap you up.’
‘You don’t have much faith in me, do you?’ she said. ‘Besides if we’re going down that route, I could point out that you’ll be spending your life examining naked women. Prodding and poking their breasts and fannies. How d’you think that makes me feel?’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Oh, I see. I’m being daft and you’re being rational.’
Without waiting to hear any more she ran home and spent a miserable afternoon in her room. When her mother called her for supper, she said she wasn’t hungry.
Around seven-thirty the doorbell rang and, recognising Bing’s voice, she hurried to the top of the stairs. He was in the hall and her father was telling him that she was in bed, unwell and unable able to talk to him. Bing was wearing a suit and had a perfect parting in his hair. Aside from the bunch of daisies in his hand, he looked as if he were on his way to a job interview. He glanced up and gave her a tentative smile, and with that her exasperation dissolved. In a moment of recklessness, with her father looking on, she planted a kiss on Bing’s freshly shaven cheek. So there.

Her mother gave her a notebook with family recipes and instructions for washing woollens. Her father coached her on the correct way to write a cheque and clean her shoes, and warned of the repercussions of attending student demonstrations. When neighbours asked if she were looking forward to university, she murmured assent, and put the whole business out of her mind.
Their parting had been a mirage, flickering on the horizon. If they mentioned ‘leaving home’, it was as if it were going to happen to two characters from a book but when a cabin trunk appeared in the spare room, and a cheque book addressed to Miss Miriam Edlin turned up, there was no escaping the reality. They would be living two hundred miles away from each other. (She’d checked in her father’s AA book.) They would spend weeks and weeks apart. And this would continue for years and years. University felt like a punishment not an opportunity.
Bing’s term started a week before hers. They’d planned a romantic ‘last evening’ but, due to a last-minute crisis at the surgery, his parents had to drive him up to London a day early. They ended up saying goodbye on the pavement outside the Crosbys’ house, whispering pledges of love whilst his father packed his stuff into the boot of the car.
They exchanged explicit letters which they wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to read. Miriam kept hers in a wooden box, its lid inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She read them, in chronological sequence, every night when she got into bed, wallowing in the misery of separation, tears boosting their potency.
It became obvious that letter-writing didn’t come easily to Bing. He struggled to find new ways of saying that he missed, loved and desired her. As the weeks rolled by, she couldn’t escape the fact that his letters were becoming repetitive. When a letter arrived, she scanned it for something fresh, informative. An account of his meals. Or a description of a lecturer. An amusing or bizarre incident – he was a medical student, for heaven’s sake. Most of all she longed to hear that he hated his course and his fellow students. But he rarely touched on these matters. I miss you, Mim. I love you. I can’t wait to make love to you. Yes. She knew all that. There must be things he wasn’t telling her. Parties he’d been to, people – girls – he’d met. How readily doubts crept in when they relied on words to convey complex feelings.
They lived in halls. There was a system for phone calls but it involved Bing ringing the warden’s office where the minion on the switchboard directed the call to the correct floor. From there on it relied on a random inmate picking up the phone and coming to find her. A similar process applied when she phoned Bing. If the phone outside her room rang, Miriam always picked up. But there had been the odd occasion when, on discovering it wasn’t Bing, she’d replaced the handset, depriving some poor girl of her phone call. When they did make contact, their conversation – a succession of tentative questions, halting answers and miserable silences – petered out in peep-peep-peep as the money ran out.
Half way through the term, she went to London. The journey was time-consuming. A chunk of her grant went on a new dress – he said he liked her in blue – but, surrounded by his worldly friends, she felt overdressed, provincial. The visit had been arranged for weeks, yet he seemed surprised when she turned up. He asked what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go. She’d been to London only twice before and could suggest nothing, and they wasted hours drifting aimlessly and irritably, spending money they could ill afford. Bing persuaded one of his friends who lived in a flat, to let them sleep there. Their bed was a couch in the living room. She had nowhere to leave her things, nowhere private to undress. The others in the flat looked at her as if she were an exhibit in the zoo. It was humiliating and uncomfortable and, to be honest, she was relieved when her train pulled out of Euston.
They limped on towards the end of term, Miriam hanging on to the hope that things would revert to normal once they were on home ground. She’d read that soldiers returning from battle were reluctant to talk about their experiences. To begin with, they were like that – not knowing how to pick up the threads; each shielding the other from something they wouldn’t understand. But within days they were back in step. Miriam was re-absorbed into the familiar chaos of the Crosby household, whilst her parents made no attempt to conceal their displeasure that she and Bing were still together. They spent hours in his bedroom, ‘listening to records’. (This fooled no one. More to the point, it shocked no one, and Angus Crosby proved this by leaving a bumper pack of condoms on Bing’s bedside table.)
There were Christmas parties and New Year parties with the old crowd from Betty’s. Little Pete, Barbara, Colin, Judith – they’d all changed a little but the changes were tempered with affection. She even felt warm towards Emms – although that might have been the cider. And there was Frankie, when she wasn’t busy with her new man. Friends were as good as family. Certainly easier. She had nothing to prove and that was a great relief.
Then term started, and the whole thing lurched off kilter again.