Читать книгу Good Bad Woman - Elizabeth Woodcraft - Страница 10

I had forgotten to switch off my alarm. At seven thirty the voice of Sue MacGregor, joking with a sports reporter on Radio 4 brought me into consciousness – seven thirty on a Saturday. The sports reporter was giving the racing selections for the day: Loyal Boy in the three fifteen at Chepstow. It was seven thirty on a Saturday. I was disgusted. I needed a drink of water. I put the light on and looked blearily round my bedroom. My bedroom was fairly disgusting in its own right. Clothes everywhere, blobs of dust on my chest of drawers where I keep my hairbrush and my collection of small earrings for court and I could see a spider’s web up in the corner above the bed. It was still dark. It was seven thirty.

Was this a sign? A message that if I got up now and cleaned the flat then I could spend the rest of the day slobbing around?

I made a bargain with myself. If I did the vacuuming in half an hour I could have a blueberry muffin from the freezer for breakfast, back in bed.

‘It’s a deal,’ I said aloud and twisted out of bed. My whole body ached and my eye throbbed. For a moment I couldn’t think why I felt so terrible but the memory came flooding back and filled me with despair and alarm and a nagging worry. Hoover therapy seemed as good an idea as any.

As I dragged the machine from its place at the back of the cupboard I greeted it like an old but distant friend. I clicked the Motown Dance Party cassette into my Walkman, slipped the Walkman into the pocket of my dressing gown, switched on and started. I vacuumed, I dusted and I put bleach in the toilet. I was just wiping round the window frames, singing along with the Velvelettes, ‘He Was Really Sayin’ Somethin”, when I noticed the red light flashing on the answer machine. There had been no messages when I came in after my adventure the night before. Someone had rung me while I was cleaning. Yet another reason why housework is a bad idea. You clean, you miss phone calls. I rest my case.

I pressed the playback button. There was a long silence.

‘Bugger,’ I shouted. ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’

I rang 1471 and was told that the caller, who had rung twenty minutes earlier, had withheld their number.

Miserably I made my coffee, heated the blueberry muffin and went back to bed, but the muffin stuck to the roof of my mouth and the coffee grains floated to the top of the cup and niggled against my teeth. I hate missing phone calls. To take my mind off the frustration I began to worry at the quick crossword of the day before. Slowly I relaxed and had even got as far as referring to my Thesaurus when the phone rang.

I snatched it up and breathlessly said, ‘Hello?’

‘Oh, Frankie, that was quick. I didn’t even hear it ring.’

It was my mum.

‘Did you ring me about half an hour ago?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ring you that early on a Saturday.’ She explained that she had one or two Christmas presents she had to buy (it was October after all, she reminded me) and she wondered if she could come and stay.

I walked with the phone into the bathroom to clean my teeth. That’s the effect she has on me.

I caught sight of my reflection in the mirror. I had a black eye. How would I explain that to my mother?

‘I’m going out,’ I said desperately.

‘That’s all right, I’ve got a key.’

‘No, I mean tonight.’ It wasn’t true, but something might come up. ‘I might be in really late.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll make up the bed and switch on the TV and it’ll be just like home.’

I sighed. I don’t know why I even bother to try. If my mum wants to come and stay, my mum will come and stay. I thought it best to wait and tell her about the black eye face to face. She’d only worry.

‘I’ve got a black eye,’ I heard myself blurt out.

‘A black eye? Why, whatever have you been doing?’

I looked at myself again and my mind went blank. ‘I walked into the door,’ I said. ‘The bedroom door,’ I explained, adding detail to make it sound true. ‘I switched off the hall light before I switched on the bedroom light and I forgot.’ I wasn’t taken in, was she?

She sighed. ‘Well, as long as you don’t have a friend who has one just like it.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, thinking of the owner of the pock-marked face with its sly grin, unsullied by bruise or cut, but with hopefully fatal internal injuries. ‘I don’t fight, Mum,’ I said, thinking, Not very well anyway.

‘I’d hate to think it was in the genes,’ she said, obviously thinking of my father’s uncle, who had a reputation for assaulting his women friends.

The consolation was she didn’t think I was the victim. But then, which was worse? To be the victim or the aggressor?

‘I don’t think it’s a genetic thing, Mum, I just have a black eye. It happens.’

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

At least the house was tidy.

The phone rang again. It was Lena.

‘Did you ring me about half an hour ago?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t ring you that early on a Saturday.’

‘Where are you ringing from?’ I asked. ‘I thought you were in Paris.’

‘I’m back. I came home early,’ she said, too brightly.

‘Where’s Sophie?’

‘Oh, she’s still there.’

‘Are we having coffee then?’ I asked. ‘The Blue Legume in twenty minutes?’

‘That would be great.’

‘I’ll bring the brandy,’ I said and rang off before she burst into tears. She and Sophie, what a pair.

Slowly I put on some jeans and a faded black sweatshirt. My muscles were creaking. I wondered if I had overdone it. Physical assault followed by housework, not a good combination. As I bent to lace up my Doc Martens my eye twinged, reminding me I should wear dark glasses. I went to the sunglasses shelf on my bookcase. In front of three volumes of Stone’s Justices’ Manual of 1992 and two volumes of Rayden on Divorce lay twelve pairs of sunglasses, most purchased on holiday because of my habit of forgetting to pack the pair I bought last year.

After five minutes fussing in front of the mirror I had chosen a groovy round wire-rimmed pair that looked as if they came from the thirties and convinced myself that the black eye was scarcely visible. I nearly broke my neck going down the steps of my house because the lenses were so dark, but it was a bright sunny day and I got used to them.

I walked down to Church Street and found Lena already at a table in the gloom of the small café. I stopped in surprise. There was something about her that made me feel I was looking at a reflection of myself. She was wearing dark glasses, but then I realised she was also wearing an old jacket of mine which I had put out for a charity shop. It looked so good on her that I suddenly and intensely wanted it back, till I remembered it had never looked that good on me. With the great jacket and her thick black hair, caught back in a ponytail, you’d never have thought she was ten years older than I was.

‘Frankie, darling, what has happened to your eye?’ she exclaimed as she leaned over to kiss me. ‘Tell me in a minute,’ she said, picking up her large wallet from the table and heading to the counter to order the coffee. She had obviously weighed up who was more deserving of sympathy and had decided that, superficially at any rate, I was.

Lena and I had known each other for almost eight years. We’d been really friendly for seven, ever since the infamous sixties night, when I’d gone into the toilets to be tragic over Kay and, instead, found Lena grimacing into the mirror, swigging determinedly from a hip flask. Her on/off girlfriend, Sophie, had just danced past her, very obviously on with someone else.

‘I wouldn’t have minded,’ she had said through gritted teeth, her dark fringe flopping into her eyes, ‘but that other woman is wearing a shirt exactly like the one I put in a bag of stuff for Sophie to take to the Oxfam shop. Bloody cheek.’ So we left the toilets together and danced all night long. We even danced the Twist, which is not something I normally do.

The day after that I rang her to see if she was OK.

‘Do you want to go to the pictures?’ I asked. ‘Then we could go out for dinner and trash our girlfriends.’

‘Oh, Frankie, what a pal you are.’ She grinned down the phone. ‘That sounds great. What shall we go and see?’

We wanted a film with wit and women, which we felt were missing from our lives. There was a Cary Grant retrospective at a small cinema in Soho and we went to see His Girl Friday, to pick up a few tips on being suave and elegant, and then we went to Chez Gerard in Charlotte Street, for the set menu. As we sat spreading anchovy butter on French bread we had shared our life histories.

They were remarkably similar. We had both grown up on council estates with parents who had wanted us to do better than they had.

My dad was an old Teddy Boy and my mum had had a beehive and wore American tan stockings, even on their wedding day. She and my dad went to the local dance hall together and jived to Bill Haley and Eddie Cochran. But when Tamla Motown came in in the sixties my mum swapped her allegiances and became a mod, while my dad naturally became a rocker. After that my mum went to dances with her girlfriends, and on the odd occasion she took me. I have no real memory of it but apparently once she took me to see Wilson Pickett at the town hall. She loved the big trumpet sound of ‘Midnight Hour’ but Wilson Pickett was late and she only dared listen to two songs before running all the way home with me asleep in her arms. Perhaps that was the night the music seeped into my blood stream.

By 1969 they were separated and Dad moved to a flat round the corner. My mum trained to be a primary teacher while my dad carried on working in his car-repair workshop. I saw him regularly and there wasn’t too much wrangling, not that there was much to wrangle about, but they both had solicitors and had to go to court a few times. I think it was the mystery of all the legal correspondence and the dressing up for the days in court that made me decide to study law.

I looked over at Lena as she smiled and chatted with the young man behind the counter. Lena had danced her way out of her estate, and eventually became a teacher of modern dance. You could tell by the way she moved. She was an inch shorter than me and her hair had one or two dashing streaks of grey. But the main difference between us was that she always made people feel that they were the most interesting person in the world. That’s how she always knew what was going on. People told her everything.

‘My darling, I thought I was feeling bad, but you look terrible,’ she said, putting two large creamy coffees down on the table. ‘I was going to suggest we go to that new bar this evening, the one that’s just opened off the City Road. To cheer me up. But you might not want to go out, looking like that.’

‘I would love to go out,’ I said, ignoring the implications of her comments. ‘My mum’s coming up.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Why? Ashamed to be seen out with me?’

She hesitated. ‘Of course not. It should be good. There’s a band too.’

‘Oh God, you didn’t say there was a band. They’ll play modern music really loudly.’ My brain was clicking. ‘Oh, I don’t know, I can’t bear to stay in with my mum, not on a Saturday. What would it say about my life?’ I took a small bottle of brandy from my inside pocket and held it up.

‘Great,’ she said, and I poured a slug into her coffee. Then I lifted the bottle to my lips but thought better of it.

‘Yes, do come,’ she went on. ‘But I will just say one thing. Those sunglasses are a little odd and they don’t actually cover up the blue and purple bits. Are you going to tell me what happened, or am I going to have to drag it out of you?’

‘It was a client.’ I didn’t want to tell Lena, I felt there was a need for secrecy, confidentiality, discretion. Perhaps I’d been doing the job too long. She looked at me amazed.

‘A client hit you? Why, because you lost? I didn’t realise clients got that unhappy with their barristers.’

‘Actually, it was the client’s husband,’ I said wildly. ‘There was a bit of a to do outside court. I don’t really want to talk about it.’

‘What did the police say?’

‘Well, I haven’t actually told them because it was partly my fault.’

‘Frankie,’ she said sadly, ‘violence is never the victim’s fault. Which court was this?’

‘I shouldn’t say any more.’ I sneaked back behind professionalism. ‘The case is ongoing.’

Lena nodded sagely and I turned the conversation to safer matters. ‘What happened in Paris?’

Lena told me how they had arrived at the Gare du Nord and argued because Sophie had wanted to sit in cafés all day while Lena had wanted to visit as many museums as she could. Then things had got more personal and Lena had had to leave. ‘She called me a tourist!’ Lena gasped.

I knew I could not afford to say, ‘Well, you were.’

‘What am I going to do with my mum?’ I asked.

‘She could come with us tonight.’

‘Lena!’

‘Just a thought. What about Columbia Road tomorrow morning? She could buy some plants to take home.’

We finished our coffee and wandered down Church Street, window shopping in the secondhand shops. It was hot and sunny and we were half looking for a new table for Lena’s kitchen (she had just reorganised her flat) but half looking for outfits for the evening. In a small shop selling pine furniture and altar cloths was a large cardboard box full of shoes. Most of them were the same style, dull black and gold slingbacks, but one pair had three-inch heels, sharply pointed toes and neat stud buttons up to the ankle.

‘Perfect club wear!’ Lena exclaimed.

‘They’re 37s,’ I said sadly, feeling like an ugly sister who knows that even if she sliced off the tips of her toes they would never fit. Not that I would ever have worn them, but they were such a bargain at £3. The pair! Lena on the other hand was bouncing with excitement since 37 was exactly her size.

‘Come on, Lena, you can’t wear those. They’re far too femme for you,’ I said.

Lena sighed, as if I was spoiling her fun. ‘As you and I have discussed on many occasions, Frankie, the headings Butch and Femme are merely a shorthand and superficial description of the myriad ways women express their sexuality. And clothes are the least helpful indicator of how a woman feels about herself. I have a leather jacket, you have a leather jacket, and we are sometimes described as butch, but then Kay has a leather jacket and Sophie has a leather jacket, and they are undoubtedly femme. What conclusions can we draw from that?’

‘That we’re all very boring people. But those are really femmy boots.’

She tried them on and she couldn’t walk in them so they went back in the box.

By the time we’d slipped into Fox’s Wine Bar for a small glass of white wine and some haddock pâté and then gone into the book shop on the High Street for something uplifting and topical to read and discuss, it was gone four o’clock. It was time to prepare myself mentally for my mother’s visit. I sauntered back home, thinking positive thoughts, planning a little more washing up and general tidying, and bought a small bunch of white and orange freesias to perfume a small part of my living room, in her honour.

As I turned into Amhurst Road I could see a taxi outside the house and a short bulky figure getting out. It was my mother in a large fake fur coat.

‘What do you think?’ she said, twirling in the street.

‘It’s astonishing,’ I said, paying the driver and picking up her two cases. ‘You’re early.’

‘Freda next door was going into town and offered me a lift to the station. Anyway I thought it would be nice to have a bit of time with you – and your black eye – before your big night out.’

Fortunately, for both our sakes, she didn’t mention the eye again. Instead we spent two hours drinking tea while my mother brought me up to date on all my relatives who lived near her in Colchester: two aunts and their husbands, and one unmarried uncle. Then I heard about the neighbours and the parents of old friends of mine who still lived nearby. By now we were on gin and tonic. When we got to the antics of the couple who were the holiday replacements for the people in the newsagents, I left my mum to watch Blind Date while I went into the bathroom to prepare for the Queen of Sheba, as the club was known.

‘Now don’t you worry about me,’ she said, looking up from the Guardian TV page, as I slid my wallet into my inside jacket and decided against wearing a coat. ‘There’s not a lot on television tonight, but I’m sure I’ll find something. Can you get Channel 5 here?’

‘Not very well,’ I said, and pointed to the pile of Rock Hudson and Doris Day videos I had dug out from my collection specially for her.

‘Oh, you know me,’ she said, ‘I can never work a video. I’ll be all right, dear. Off you go and enjoy yourself.’ She patted my hand bravely and I stomped out of the house, rage and guilt steaming off my skin into the cold night air.