Читать книгу Hunter’s Moon - Alexandra Connor - Страница 14

Alice had no idea where she was going, only that she had to get out of the home. She crept downstairs after everyone was in bed, stole out of the back entrance, crossed the yard, and climbed over the locked gates. No one saw her. When she jumped down on the other side she felt a rush of excitement. There was no one about, but then a late bus passed by, its wheels throwing up rain from the gutter.

If she was caught there would be hell to pay. She knew that. But somehow Alice didn’t care. What right had old Ma Lees to tell her that she was a no one? How did she know? You are a nobody. No one’s coming back for you … The words drummed into her head. A nobody. No one’s child … It wasn’t true! Alice thought helplessly, walking along the dark pavement and keeping to the shadow of the wall. She had had a mother and a father, everyone did. They must be alive somewhere. Somewhere outside. Where she now was.

But where could she begin looking? She imagined old Ma Lees’ face when she presented her parents to her; when she said, ‘Look, this is my father and this is my mother.’ Oh, she wouldn’t be so spiteful then, Alice thought. Not when she was a somebody, someone’s child, not a foundling to be pushed around.

The rain came down chill with the wind and made Alice shudder. The road which had looked so inviting was suddenly menacing, unfamiliar. A stout woman passed, looked at her curiously and then moved on. Alice paused momentarily outside a pub. The lights were on, the sound of raucous laughter drifting out into the dismal street. A song twanged haphazardly from an out-of-tune piano. Alice pressed her face to the etched glass. Inside she could just make out the backs of the customers, and smell the beer and cheap cigarette smoke. Then someone coughed, and a man staggered out of the door, pushing into her as he made his unsteady way home.

Her parents wouldn’t go to a place like this, Alice thought. They wouldn’t be smoking and drinking in some Salford backstreet pub.

‘Oi, you!’

She turned, startled by the man who had doubled back and was watching her, weaving unsteadily on his feet.

‘Wot you staring at?’

‘Nothing,’ Alice said sullenly, her fear making her belligerent. ‘What are you staring at?’

He leaned towards her, sour-breathed. ‘You nowt but a kid, wot you doing out so late? Waiting for yer father?’

‘My father isn’t in there!’ Alice said heatedly. ‘He’s … rich. He doesn’t come to places like this.’

Unexpectedly the man laughed. ‘Oh, rich, is he? So why are you hanging about Salford at this time of night? You some little princess in disguise, come slumming?’

Biting her lip to control her fear and indignation, Alice stood up to him. ‘It’s nothing to do with you –’

‘I bet he’s just another drunk, propping up the bar in there,’ the man said, his voice slurred. ‘Yer mam sent you to call him home before he spends the rent money?’

‘He’s not like that!’ Alice said heatedly, walking away and then turning. ‘My father’s important and my mother’s well known. A beauty.’

‘Yeah, and I’m Rudolph Valentino,’ the drunk sneered, pulling a half-bottle out of his greasy coat and taking a swig. ‘And the more I drink, the more I believe it.’

Alice hurried off, moving under the viaduct and beginning to mount the steep street. If she was honest, she wanted to double back, but was afraid to meet up with the man again, so she kept walking ahead. Soon she was drenched, her hair dripping down her back, her skin chalk white. Wrapping her arms around herself she hurried on. She then realised that she was lost. The streets meant nothing to her, she had no idea of where she was, and there was nothing familiar in sight. The outings she had had with Ethel had been in daytime and Salford hadn’t seemed so grim then, but under the dim gaslamps the streets looked sour, the alleys gloomy. Disembodied voices and shouts came from behind doors and drawn blinds, the rain drumming on the cheap tin roofs of outside lavatories. Alice was afraid suddenly, stopping and looking round. Where was she going? Did she really think she was going to find her parents this way? When she didn’t know who they were, where they were, or what they looked like?

She had acted like a fool, Alice thought. Here she was out in the cold, lost, and there was no one to help her. No one was even looking for her. Scared, she dug her nails into her palms to stop herself crying and turned, trying to see the viaduct, the only landmark she remembered. But all she could see was a man, the drunk, a way off, walking towards her and, startled, Alice began to run.

It was him! she thought. He would catch her and then what? Her feet pounded on the pavement and then she saw a cobbled ginnel and dived in, catching her breath.

At once, a hand descended on her shoulder.

She screamed.

‘Hey, miss, it’s all right,’ the policeman said pleasantly. ‘What are you doing out and about this time of night?’

Relief was quickly followed by a sense of failure. Her big adventure was a sham. She was just a stupid, lost kid.

‘I … was walking.’

‘Where?’

‘Around.’

‘Around where?’ he repeated, leaning down towards her, his moustached face kind. ‘I think I should get you home, don’t you?’

‘I don’t have a home.’

He blinked. ‘Come on now, there’s no argument that bad that can’t be settled over a pot of tea. Your parents will be worried about you, lass.’

No they won’t, Alice thought hopelessly. ‘I don’t have a real home. I’m at Netherlands.’

‘Ah,’ he said simply, taking her hand. ‘Well, I think perhaps it’s time you were back, little one.’

She wanted to be grown up, but instead Alice held gratefully onto his hand and walked back to Netherlands with him in silence.

Ethel would say afterwards that it was the turning point. When Alice was brought back to the home that night she was cowed and defeated. You could see that all the fight had gone out of her, Ethel told Gilbert. It was hardly worth while Clare Lees punishing her; she didn’t seem to care any more. The petty duties Alice was given she completed without complaint, without resistance. She wouldn’t even talk about where she had gone that night. Or why.

‘Are you all right, sweetheart?’ Ethel asked her a few days later.

Alice nodded. ‘I’m fine.’

Compliance was more worrying than an outburst, thought Ethel.

‘No more running away now, Alice, promise me. It did no good, no good at all.’ She paused to see what effect her words were having, but the girl’s face was bland. What is she thinking? Ethel wondered. Or is she plotting something?

The truth was that Clare Lees’ words had cut Alice to the bone and forced a change in her. It was one thing to be put in a home, quite another for someone to spell out what you already knew. That you weren’t wanted. Alice’s hatred for the principal was absolute, although she wouldn’t admit it to anyone. She would keep her own counsel, that was the only way to survive at Netherlands. But her loathing for Clare Lees burned with such force that she wondered if it shimmered around her like a heat haze.

Clare Lees had crushed her dream. The one thing which Alice had clung to – the hope that her parents, in particular her mother, might come back for her – had been snatched away. Some humpbacked spinster had told her she was a no one and that she never would be.

Well, she would show her! Alice thought. She would show Clare Lees what she was made of. One day she would get out of the home and really find her family. They would explain that it had all been a mistake and welcome her back. They would be rich and she would come back in furs and riding in a new motorcar. She would gloat over Clare Lees and pay her back for every single cruel word.

That was the night that Alice Rimmer grew up.