‘Actually, they’re throat pastilles,’ said the man. ‘Sunny Jim here always likes them.’
I paused, steadying myself. ‘But . . . what about . . . the pills?’
‘Pills?’ said the man. ‘What’s this?’
‘The pills,’ I said to Teddy. ‘The pills.’
He gazed at me with his clear blue eyes. I lunged forward and shook him.
‘What’ve you been eating?’ said the man. ‘You pinched her aspirins?’
I gripped his frail shoulders, digging my nails in. ‘Teddy!’ I screeched, sobbing.
‘Speak up,’ the man told him.
‘Teddy! The pills in my room!’
Teddy paused, jiggling the scissors. Then he said, ‘They’re in the bomb store, stupid.’
‘The where?’
‘The bomb store,’ he said patiently. ‘Under your stupid bed. You’re hurting.’
They were. I fished them out, grey with fluff, and wrapped the twenty-one pills in my handkerchief.
If you think I was too shaken to go out that night, you’re wrong.
Oh, I was shaken; you’re right about that. I could hardly put on my eyeliner. It kept smudging and I had to rub it off and start again. I’d never hated myself so much in my life.
I went into the kitchen and ate a whole tin of creamed rice, scooping it out with a spoon. Some slopped on to the floor.
I was going to the Spread Eagle disco with Naz, a girl from work. Thank goodness the music was too loud for us to talk. I jiggled about, full of rice pudding. After she’d gone I got into a van with two people. We’d shouted a bit at each other in the disco, in the pulsing gloom. They’d had a lot to drink. I hadn’t. The only thing I discovered was that one of them, the skinny one, was a compère at a holiday camp each year. He said it was worth it, for the crumpet. He said he’d had twenty-two last season, sixteen of them virgins. He said it was all to do with the way he held the microphone. He said he had to sing dopey songs for the kids, ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, crap like that.
We were parked near the canal. I could hear the roar of the sluice-gates and the roar of the traffic, farther off. I remember telling myself: this is me, sitting here. I sat numb as a doll, but perspiring too. I kept my mind locked shut; if I closed my eyes I saw Teddy swelling up.
Do what you want with me. That’s what I told myself, lavishly, but I was sure they were too drunk to hurt me. Giggling, they manhandled me into the back, pressing the breath out of me. My spine scraped against a petrol can.
Despite the bragging they didn’t manage it so well; they snorted and swore, they were even more embarrassed than me. An elbow butted my eye. As far as I could feel – and I didn’t want to – one of them stayed as soft as a puppy. I ended up half-buried under a tow-rope, in a litter of unpaid parking tickets, all slippery Cellophane, and soon the other one gave up as well. It was too dark for his mate to know – only I did, and I was really afraid then. I thought he’d get violent with me, because I’d known he hadn’t managed it. So I struggled up and groped for my handkerchief, to blow my nose. But I took out the wrong handkerchief . . . I felt the pills scattering over my blouse, which neither of them had bothered to unbutton.
They let me out at the roundabout. I realized, with a sick sort of satisfaction, that they hadn’t even known my name. I tucked in my skirt and took a breath. Opposite, the AA caravan was shuttered; under the sodium light its tulips, like everything else, were a flat brown.
A week later, when my back had healed, Teddy wandered off as usual. But this time he was driven home by the police. My chest closed when I saw the car bumping up our drive. But there he was inside it, alive. It was one of those blue and white panda cars, and there was a police lady climbing out, holding his hand.
He was as chirpy as ever. They’d found him asleep in a double-decker bus. I knew the bus. You can see it from the road even now, it’s parked in a corrugated-iron shelter just off the motorway. Its owner, a mate of my Dad’s, was a stock-car maniac.
Teddy was really proud about the panda car; they’d let him press the buttons. But the next week, as I’d feared, we had a visit from the social worker. I think she called herself a visitor but she didn’t fool me. She looked different from the lady who came when Teddy was new-born – she was younger and less hairy – but she behaved the same. Her eyes slid pleasantly round the lounge in just that manner. She wasn’t a possible ally now, who might be able to explain things; she was an enemy. I was terrified for Teddy. I was also frightened for myself, and even frightened for my Dad. She gave off authority like a smell.
We were all four at home. She didn’t get far with Mum and Dad. As I said, officials turned them into cowed strangers. My Mum shrank, sallow and watchful. Dad, on the other hand, grew bigger and more tongue-tied. They didn’t seem to belong to me. They sat there, sharing their smokes.
We’d had a postcard about this, so Mum had prepared the house and told me not to put any muck on my face. For once I’d obeyed.
Mum made us some Nescafe. She wore her beige cardigan, buttoned up, with a white collar showing. With a shock, I realized she looked as old as a pensioner.
The lady – girl really – sipped her coffee and said that Teddy was a super kid, he could twist anyone round his little finger. A clink, as she lowered her cup. But that he was also an unusually disruptive influence at school. After consultation, they’d decided to allocate him weekly sessions with the area schools’ psychologist.
‘Nothing wrong with our Teddy!’ Dad’s face was brick-red. ‘Just high spirits.’
He kept his gaze on the carpet. I was blushing too. What would Teddy say, closeted with an expert? Psychologists sucked out the secrets, didn’t they? They drew them out like dentists’ gas. That was their job . . . Especially secrets a person didn’t know that he knew. Those were the important ones.
‘You can’t!’ I blurted out. It was me who’d caused Teddy to become like this. Me and Dad. He’d never really seen anything, but that was irrelevant. He’d been squashed next to us, as a baby. Since then he’d felt it in the air, like an infection, and it was turning him potty.
‘He’s not potty!’ I cried.
‘Heather, of course he’s not.’ She leaned over and put a hand on my arm. ‘I do appreciate your anxiety. It won’t start until next term, anyway . . . He’ll be re-evaluated before we begin.’ She paused. ‘Meanwhile, we need your help too. At home. You see, every child needs some discipline.’ She laughed, hurriedly. ‘I don’t mean physical discipline – “belting them one” – I mean, well, rules and security. That wasn’t the first time Teddy’s wandered off, was it . . .’
‘That’s youngsters for you,’ said Dad.
She turned, smiling. ‘Well, not quite, Mr Mercer. We have been keeping an eye on him, you know.’
There was a silence, then a hiss as Dad stubbed out his cigarette in his saucer.
Soon afterwards the woman rose to leave. At the door she paused:
‘Heather, I wonder if you could see me down to the road?’
I knew, then, what they meant by ‘turned to stone’. I simply couldn’t move.
‘Do you mind?’ she asked.
I turned my stone head slowly from side to side.
‘Do what the lady says,’ said Mum. ‘Where’s your manners?’
Somehow I lifted my stone legs, and managed to get myself into her car. It was raining and the windscreen wipers slewed to and fro. She drove down to the main road and then switched off the engine.
‘I thought it would be nice for us two to have a little chat.’
I watched the drops sliding down the window.
‘Ciggy?’ She offered the packet. I shook my head.
‘Job going OK?’
I nodded.
‘I hear you’ve set your heart on being an air hostess.’
I swung round. ‘How did you know?’
‘Ah,’ she said with a smile. ‘Ve ’ave our methods.’ She paused. ‘Actually, your ex-teacher told me. Melanie Cockerell.’
br />
‘Oh yes.’ I willed this woman to stop. I’d grown just like my parents. I feared the lot of them.
‘Seems a super idea,’ she said, then paused. ‘I just wanted to tell you, Heather, that it’s not just Teddy that we’re concerned about.’
Traffic roared past, shaking the car.
‘I’ve spoken to several people, you see, who know your home environment. They’re all in agreement about this. You’re close to your parents, aren’t you . . . especially your father?’
I didn’t speak. A lorry passed, spattering spray.
‘And fathers like yours . . . well, he is a bit old-fashioned, isn’t he? It’s fathers like him who often find it hard to . . . well, come to terms with their daughters’ maturity.’
I whispered, ‘What?’
‘You’re seventeen, aren’t you, Heather? No longer Daddy’s little girl. But I think he finds that hard to recognize . . . That you’re a grown, sexually mature young woman now.’ She paused. ‘But then, I suppose you’ve been forced into that rather early.’
Three lorries passed, spattering us. The car juddered. Then a coach went by, its windows a blur of light.
‘Perhaps I’m being presumptuous. Let me put it like this, Heather. From all accounts, you’ve been taking on a role that young girls shouldn’t have to take on . . . not until they’re much older . . . Until they’re, in a sense, ready for it.’ She tapped her cigarette. ‘Which means that you’ve rather missed out on your childhood.’ She paused. ‘Haven’t you?’
I sat there, stone cold.
‘I mean the mothering role, with little Teddy. The adult role.’
In the silence that followed I realized that it was impossible to speak. My throat had closed up.
‘It might sound funny, coming from me – I’m only twenty-three myself, Heather. But I honestly think that you should-well, have some fun. Like other girls your age.’
Relief had drained my head. I nodded.
‘From what I’ve heard, you’ve been – it seems a curious way to put it, Heather – but too good for your own good. Why not get out more, meet some fellas . . .’ She put on a funny accent. ‘Live it up, down the disco.’
She stopped. ‘Heather, sorry – I see a blush. It’s only a suggestion.’
From then on Dad grew strict with Teddy. When he came home from school, there was Dad waiting. He’d trek across the cabbage field, Teddy in tow, back to the distant tractor shed. Over his tea Teddy would tell me about all the sweets Dad had given him, and how if he was good Dad would raise his pocket money to a pound a week.
Between us, the fair head bent over his plate. He skidded the chips around in his ketchup. As usual, Dad didn’t meet my eye. He knew that I knew the reason for this sudden solicitude. If Teddy stopped getting into trouble, he might not be sent to the shrink.
I did it too. I knelt down with Teddy in his bedroom, the old boxroom next to the veranda, and zoomed his cars across the floor. ‘Ne-naw, ne-naw,’ I whined, making the police noises he demanded. I should have been doing it for Teddy, who I loved more than anyone on earth.
Partly I was. But I was also doing it out of fear for myself.
Chapter Ten
I WONDER WHAT you felt about your first job. Mine meant a lot to me. Yvonne, who worked for a surveyor in Staines, called hers a drag. She was always yawny about things – she was engaged, and yawny about her fiancé.
I didn’t feel like that. But then I didn’t know if my feelings were the usual ones. Most of my class left-school when I did. Perhaps they felt that taut, breathless separateness of sitting in a bus each morning, speeding away from their home.
At work nobody knew where I came from, or that they’d called me Porky at school. They knew me as Heather, in my cap and overalls, just the same as theirs. They didn’t even know my surname. You’d probably call the work repetitive, but for me it was freedom. And it finally changed the physical thing with my Dad.
This didn’t happen overnight, but gradually over that autumn. The best way I can explain is that he stopped presuming on me. My last year at school, when I was learning to use my power, he’d become both meeker and more blustering, but he’d still been sure I was his. And I was his, you know . . . I still am.
But when I became a working girl, this changed. I had my own money in my pocket – my money, not his. More awesome, I had my own cheque book. I paid Mum for my board and the rest I put into Barclays Bank, over the other side of the airport. Believe it or not, Dad had never had a bank account; heaven knows how he was paid for that field, but every other transaction he made was cash or barter. He regarded banks with a mixture of humility and suspicion, as if there might be policemen in there: not for the likes of him.
One night, when Mum had gone to bed early, I was standing at the kitchen sink cutting my fringe. The light was brightest in the kitchen, that was why. He came up behind me. One hand, with its smoking cigarette, touched my hair.
‘You’ll go easy on that,’ he said, ‘won’t you?’
‘Why?’
‘Girls got their hair like that at work?’
‘They’re mostly Asians,’ I said. ‘I told you.’
‘Don’t want you to change.’
‘I’ve always had a fringe, Dad.’
‘Don’t want my girl to change.’
‘I’m not.’
He stroked the back of my head gently.
‘Your Dad misses you, out at work all day.’
‘I was out at school all day before.’
‘Soon be off . . . off to the bright lights. What’ll I be doing then?’
‘You’ve got Mum and Teddy.’
‘Who’ll I be talking to then? . . . Get so lonely, see. With no one to give me a hug.’
‘Can you shift a bit? You’re in my light.’
He shifted, and there was a silence.
‘Fine as yours, once, your Mum’s hair. Wrap it round my finger, I would, tight as tight . . . all sparkling . . . You’ll be off, lovely-looking girl like you. They’ll be making you manager.’
‘Hold on, I’ve only been there three months.’
‘Brains like yours . . . sky’s the limit.’
‘Haven’t got much brains.’
‘No time left for your Dad.’
I’d finished snipping. I turned round.
‘No time left for a hug,’ he said.
‘Of course I’ll have time.’ I put my arms around him. I didn’t fear him now; I felt guilty, because I wanted his words to be true.
‘I’ll be getting your blouse dirty.’
‘Don’t worry. We wear overalls to work.’
‘Don’t want you mussed up, do we?’
He pressed his face against mine and released me. He asked so little of me. That was how we were, now.
That was early January. Next morning I was travelling to work. Each year they put up Christmas trees outside the factories: three big ones outside Delta Flexed Products, six along the roof of Abercorn Computers, one giant tree in the Sheraton car park. The bus stopped outside Dataloop Systems. People shuffled off, coughing and wheezing. I rubbed the glass. Men stood on the roof of the factory, disconnecting the neon sign which had blazed ‘Dataloop Wishes You a Merry Xmas’. I watched the script being lowered. Down in the forecourt, more men were winching down a tree.
‘Six months to go,’ said the woman beside me.
‘Pardon?’
‘Six bloody months, till me summer hols.’
The tree fell into a lorry. All these years I’d counted the trees from Dad’s van. Now my childhood was over, at last. I was a wage-earner and I was starting to feel like a visitor in my own home. In that stuffy bus I was breathing the sweet, sharp scent of freedom.
‘Six months, day in, day out,’ she said.
‘Gruesome,’ I lied. ‘What a gruesome thought.’
You might not realize it, but there’s a public road runs right across the airport from one side to the other; a road with bus stops and all, for people who work in the a
rea. Passengers like you, with flights to catch, drive through that tunnel to the terminal buildings. Remember how desperately I’d run along there once?
The road I’m describing, the one I took each day, isn’t used much because its sign says ‘Maintenance Areas’, which puts people off. But in fact it cuts right across, from the A4 one side to the A30 the other. It’s a wide, empty road, like a road in a dream. It crosses the incoming runway. As the big planes roar down so close, you think they’ll strip off the bus roof like a plaster and leave you staring into space. But the shadow moves over you, and the bus shakes, and three hundred people will be watching the tarmac rise to meet them, tense for the bumpety-bump of Britain.
The place where I worked stood beyond the airport, out along the dual carriageway, between Rank Xerox and a building site. JT Catering was a brick box. Its air-vents breathed out curry fumes. Oriental airlines were some of its customers, that’s why. It was mostly women who worked at JT; they came from the estates out beyond Hounslow and they were nearly all of them Asians. Their husbands dropped them off on the way to work; they’d hurry across to the entrance, these ladies, clutching their overcoats around their flapping saris; it was always windy because of the traffic. Some of them drove themselves in Datsuns and Toyotas; three women together, giggling as they bounced on to the verge, to park.
JT had contracts with lots of other airlines; it prepared their meals. I worked upstairs, the first weeks. You have to keep your wits when you’re sorting cutlery. The clatter was deafening and it was so steamy that by lunch-break my mascara was down my cheeks. Outside, vans delivered crates of soiled plates. They were pushed through a thick plastic flap. Then they rattled along to the washing-up. Turbaned men stood there, in the mist. I never saw the dirty plates; I never knew what the passengers left on their trays, up there in the sky. By the time it got to me it was clean and slippery-hot. I had to sort out each knife, fork and spoon, according to the airline emblem stamped on its handle; then I slotted them into cellophane sheaths, ready for the next flight.
The days passed in a clattering blur. I forgot everything about myself. It was like school, it was so bright and normal, but it was more restful than school because I didn’t know any of the people. Besides, most of them talked in their Indian languages.