it? But I’m not. See you, kid. I’ll leave your bags with Mickey, across the road.’
He left Julia sitting at the table, wishing that he’d asked her what her name was. She watched him handing over her suitcases to the swarthy man behind the red curtain. Julia had liked Johnny Flowers enough to be sure that her bags would be safe wherever he left them. The van’s engine roared, and it rocketed away down the street. Julia sat still for a little while, listening to the juke box and watching the faces passing the windows of Blue Heaven. Then, with the security of Johnny Flowers’s pound note in her pocket, she ordered herself another cup of coffee and another doughnut. Later, she crossed the road again to Mickey’s. He peered at her from a cubbyhole off the entry. The place was very dark, and silent except for the sound of distant hoovering. Not quite non-stop girls, Julia thought. The strip club smelt of beer, smoke and dust.
‘Come for your stuff? It’s down there.’ He pointed his thick finger down behind a shelf of a desk.
‘Um. I wondered if could leave it here for a bit longer? It’s heavy to carry round.’
He looked carefully at her, examining everything except her face. ‘You a new girl?’
‘Er, yeah,’ Julia said ambiguously.
He clicked his tongue in disapproval. ‘Jesus, where does Monty find them? Infant school? All right, leave your gear here. I’ll keep an eye on it.’
‘Thanks.’
Julia slipped sideways out of the door before he could change his mind, or ask her anything else. The first thing she did was to head up Wardour Street into Oxford Street. Then she made her way to Mattie’s shoe shop. Peering through the plate glass window Julia saw her kneeling in front of a customer, with a sea of shoes spread all around them. She was holding a shoe in one hand and the other gesticulated as she talked. The woman listened intently, then took the shoe and tried it on again. Julia saw her nodding. A minute later she was on her way to the cash till, with Mattie bearing the shoes behind her.
Julia waited until the sale was completed and then she slipped into the shop. Mattie stared. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she hissed, and then added in a louder voice, ‘Black court shoes, madam?’
‘You look like a born saleswoman,’ Julia told her.
‘I’m an actress,’ Mattie said haughtily. ‘I can act saleswoman, of course.’
Julia took her hand and pressed something into it. Mattie looked down at the folded ten-shilling note.
‘It’s for your sandwiches at dinner time.’
‘How …?’
‘Tell you later. I don’t see anything I like the look of, thank you very much.’
Outside, looking between the cliffs of high buildings, Julia could just see trees in the distance. She remembered that it was Hyde Park, the sanctuary that they had failed to reach last night, and the greenness drew her. She walked towards it, slipping through the skeins of traffic at Marble Arch, and then crossing on to the grass. It was brown and parched by the sun, but the softness was welcome after the hot, hard pavements. She walked on, under the shadow of the great trees, until the roar of traffic in Park Lane diminished to a muffled hum. Water glinted coolly, and Julia guessed that the wide stretch of lake must be the Serpentine. There was a scatter of green canvas deckchairs under the trees overlooking it. She sank down in one of the chairs and paid threepence to an old man with a ticket machine. Then she closed her eyes and listened to the faint rustle of leaves over her head.
It was the first comfortable, solitary moment she had had to consider what had happened since leaving home.
She found herself wondering what her mother was doing.
It was easy to picture her. Perhaps she was dusting, picking up the ornaments from the tiled mantelpiece, very carefully, dusting each souvenir and china knick-knack before putting it back in exactly the same place. It was as if the house was always being made ready, cleaned and polished, for some big occasion that never came. Even the furniture, the settee and chairs with their cushions set at exact angles, seemed to wait tensely for inspection by guests who never materialised. Hardly anyone every came into the house, and when she was a little girl Julia was puzzled by her mother’s anxiety in the midst of their eventless lives. She was always being told not to make a mess when she played.
Don’t do that, Julia, it makes such a mess.
Betty wanted her to play neatly, setting her dolls out in rows. Julia’s own inclinations were for sand, and water, and poster paints that sent up plumes of brightly coloured powder when she poured in the water to mix them.
Once, Julia remembered, she had come home from a birthday party with a packet of shiny, coloured stars. With childish cunning she had hidden them from her mother, and then one afternoon she had shut herself into her bedroom and stuck them all over the wallpaper. They looked wonderful, like fireworks, jets of cobalt blue and scarlet against the insipid pink roses. Betty had grown suspicious, and she had forced the door open just as Julia was pressing the last gummy stars into place. Betty had flown across the room and started pulling them off, but the glue was surprisingly strong and it brought little star-shaped fragments of paper with it. Those that did come away left black marks.
Betty was angrier than Julia had ever seen her.
‘You little vandal,’ she hissed at her, and Julia recoiled in shock and surprise.
‘They looked pretty,’ she protested. ‘It’s my bedroom.’
‘Don’t you ever do that. Why do you spoil everything? Why do you?’ There were white flecks at the corners of her mother’s mouth, Julia remembered. ‘It isn’t your bedroom. Your father and I have given it to you, and you’ll keep it how we want it. Look at it now.’ Betty pointed at the wreckage of Julia’s fireworks, and then her face collapsed. She was crying, helplessly. Suddenly Julia caught a glimpse of her mother’s grown-up fears. She half-understood her struggle to keep everything that was lurid, and threatening, and incomprehensible, at bay with the semi-detached walls of their house. For an instant she understood what it must be like to be grown-up and still afraid, like Betty was.
She had run to her mother full of sympathy, but Betty was good at holding on to her anger and she had pushed her away. They had spent the rest of the day in silence, and when Vernon came home from work he turned Julia over his knee and smacked her with a slipper.
There must have been dozens of other times like that, Julia thought, and plenty of times when she had deserved whatever they had doled out to her. But that was the time that she remembered. Perhaps because of the embrace that Betty had rejected. Perhaps because of the glimpse of her mother’s fear.
Sitting in her deckchair, with the sun warming her face and arms, Julia remembered the old men on the Embankment. In the middle of her own night terrors she had recalled her mother’s too. Betty was afraid of everything, afraid that if she let any little detail out of place the long slide might begin, and leave her with nothing. Was that why she wouldn’t allow her daughter anything new, or different, or dangerous?
In the night Julia had determined I won’t let it get me. Not the darkness, nor the fear of it. And she had survived.
I won’t live like Betty, Julia promised herself. I won’t be afraid, and I can risk everything, if I have to.
She shivered a little, trying to imagine, looking
