estate, lying baldly under a grey sky, was exactly the same. Mattie walked the familiar route, trying to pretend that her breath was coming easily instead of in panicky gasps.
The house, when she came to it, looked the same too. The windows were closed and the stringy curtains were drawn, but that was nothing unusual. No one had remembered to open them, Mattie thought. Then she opened the front door. She smelt stale air and sour milk, and listened to the oppressive silence.
A different fear swelled up, bigger, threatening to choke her.
Ted wasn’t here.
None of them was here. Where were the children, and what had he done to them?
She half turned, not knowing whether she was going to stumble on into the house or turn and run, and then she heard a sound. It was completely familiar, a tinny rattle and then a plop. It was a record, falling from the stack poised over the turntable of Ricky’s prized Dansette.
‘Ricky!’
A clatter obliterated the first tinny bars of music, and Ricky appeared at the boys’ bedroom door.
‘Mat?’
He hurtled down the stairs, a skinny boy of fifteen with Mattie’s hair, brutally cut so that it stood up in tufts all over his head.
‘Are you all right?’ she demanded.
He hugged her and they clung together, briefly, while Mattie stared fiercely at him.
‘’Course. Where’ve you been?’
Relief was making Mattie shake. ‘Where is he?’
Ricky knew what she meant, of course. ‘He’s out. He’s working, unloading crates at the Works. What are you shivering for?’
‘Nothing. It’s all right. Come on, let’s have some coffee.’
‘Bit of a mess in there,’ Ricky warned her.
The kitchen was a morass of dirty pans, plates and food. The smell of sour milk was almost overpowering.
‘Ricky …’
‘I know. Look, it doesn’t matter. Me and Sam’ll get around to it. It doesn’t bother us, you know.’
It didn’t, Mattie thought. And she had left them. So she had no right to come back and fuss about details. She cleared a space and filled the kettle, rinsing out two cups from the filthy stack. There was no fresh milk so they drank their coffee black, sitting out on the back step and looking across the hummocks of dandelions to the backs of the next row of houses. Ricky told her what had happened. A woman had come from the Council, a bossy woman with papers. Ted had refused to see her at first, telling Ricky and Sam to say that he was out, but she had come back, and then she had simply sat down to wait for him. She had looked at the house, and she had talked to Marilyn and Phil.
In the end Ted had appeared. Ricky and the others had been sent out of the room, but they had heard Ted shouting, and then mumbling. The woman had gone at last, and Ted had come to find them.
‘He looked,’ Ricky said, groping for the words, ‘he looked like Phil does when someone’s pinched her sweets, and then yelled at her for creating.’
Mattie knew that look of her father’s. Unwieldy anger, too big for him, subsiding quickly into cringing weakness. She had seen it that last time, here in the kitchen, with the kettle whistling. Only when he looked at Mattie there was something else, too. That hot, anxious longing. Mattie wrapped her fingers round her coffee cup to stop the shudder.
The woman from the Council had announced to Ted that there was evidence of neglect. Either the young ones must go to live with a relative, in more suitable circumstances, or a place would be found for them in a council home.
Ricky relayed the details with matter-of-fact calmness. He had worked out a way of living for himself, Mattie understood. Ricky would be all right, and Sam too. Sam was the family survivor, happy so long as he could play football on the scuffed fields beyond the estate. The younger ones, the girls, were living with Rozzie.
‘They’re okay,’ Ricky said. ‘It’s better than here.’
‘I know that,’ Mattie said heavily.
‘The council woman asked about you. Dad said you’d done a runner. He didn’t know where to, and didn’t care either.’
Mattie stood up quickly and put her cup with the rest of the dirty dishes. It seemed a pointless gesture to bother to wash it out.
‘I’m going to Rozzie’s to see them. Walk round there with me?’
Rozzie lived a mile away, further into the estate. They walked together, past the effortful gardens bright with zinnias and lobelia, and the rows of windows guarded by net curtains. Rozzie’s house was almost identical to the one they had just left, but better kept. The window frames and the door were painted maroon and there were marigolds growing under the windows.
Rozzie opened the door to them. Her flowered nylon housecoat hardly buttoned up over her stomach. She was eight months’ pregnant and her two-year-old son, runny-nosed, peered out from the shelter of her skirt. She didn’t smile.
‘So you’re back, then?’
Mattie nodded. Her sister had every right to be sullen, and Mattie had been expecting it. Rozzie was nineteen, and she had had to marry her car mechanic boyfriend two and a half years ago. The enchantment with one another had worn off almost before the wedding, and now they were confined here together with their baby. Then, suddenly, they had found themselves responsible for Rozzie’s little sisters, as well. ‘Just to see that you’re all right.’ Mattie added awkwardly, ‘And to say I’m sorry.’
‘Sorry?’
There was a silence, and then Rozzie jerked her head. ‘Well, you’d better come in. Phil? Marilyn? Mat’s here.’
They had been in the garden at the back, and they came pelting through to leap on to Mattie. She hugged them fiercely, pulling them close and burying her face against them.
They were well, and they looked happy enough. That was something.
For half an hour, they took all of Mattie’s attention. Then suddenly they were off, taking the little boy and Ricky with them. Mattie and Rozzie sat in the kitchen, drinking more watery coffee. The house was bleak and under-furnished, but it was clean. Mattie suddenly thought of Felix’s flat, with its simple, definite style and the bright touches of pottery and exotic Soho vegetables. She had got away, after all, and Rozzie hadn’t. Guilt dropped around her, weighty and sour with familiarity.
‘Do you need money?’ she blurted out. ‘I can send you my wages.’
‘We always need money, Barry and me. But Ted’s giving us plenty for the girls. Guilt money, isn’t it?’ They both knew that it was, of course. It would last for as long as he could hold on to the job. ‘You keep your wages. Until your plans work out, that is.’ Rozzie was teasing her, and they both laughed.
It was the right time for Mattie to leave. She didn’t want to stay to say difficult goodbyes to the younger ones.
‘Give
