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SALLIE DAY
The Palace of Strange Girls
For Julian
Table of Contents
I-SPY AT THE SEASIDE
Hello, children! Welcome to your very own I-Spy book. In these pages you’ll be able to look for all kinds of secret, exciting things that are found only by the sea. As you spot each of the things pictured here – and answer the simple questions – you earn an I-Spy score. It’s fun!
Blackpool, Tuesday 12 July 1959
Beth has had it with Jesus. She’s kicking the skirting boards to prove it and she hopes He’s watching. Mrs Brunskill at Sunday School says He’s watching all the time, even when you’re asleep. It’s amazing. You’d think He’d be too busy (what with all the cripples and foolish virgins) to be bothered with Beth. Thus assured of an audience, she pauses in her assault and eyes the heavily varnished wood. Beth is disappointed; the skirting boards are as yet undamaged, so she changes leg and carries on kicking. Flakes of dirty cream paint and grey plaster spiral down from the wall above her head and the picture of a little boy crying rattles in its frame. Beth carries on kicking.
‘You big bugger,’ she mouths on the off chance He’s listening as well as watching. Beth has learned the word from the dustbin man, Mr Kerkley, who lives next door. Mr Kerkley shouted ‘You little bugger’ at Beth’s best friend Robert when he dragged a club hammer into their coal shed and reduced all the big shiny lumps of coal into powdered shale. Beth had repeated the story to her mother. Word for word. She’d hoped to witness a satisfying gasp of shocked disbelief and disapproval from her mother, but her tale had the reverse effect. Her mother took her by the scruff of the neck and washed her mouth out with soap and water for using dirty words. Since then the offending word has been a constant resource for the child, who mouths it silently on a daily basis.
Beth woke early this morning. Wiping the sweat from her face, she sat up and dangled her feet out of the bed, waving them back and forth through air thick with the smell of bacon fat, unreliable plumbing and floral disinfectant. After a moment she slipped on her sandals (ignoring the shiny steel buckles that must always be fastened) and rummaged around under her pillow for the book. She has had the I-Spy book for four days now. Beth’s initial reverence for the volume has been replaced with an obsessive fascination. Its white pages have softened to cream under Beth’s sweaty-fingered perusal. It was purchased at the newsagent’s on the first day of the holiday and Beth will not be parted from it. By day she carries it around in her pocket or, failing that, inside her knickers. By night she sleeps with the book under her pillow and her hand on top of it. Beth is at a loss to decide which is the best part – the book itself or the codebook that came with it. And then there’s the membership card, the source of her present frustration.
The green card announces in heavy type ‘Official Membership Card – Issued by Big Chief I-Spy, Wigwam-by-the-Water, London’. Underneath there are four dotted lines for the member’s name and address. Although Beth can write her first name easily enough, her surname is long and fraught with difficulties. It has to be perfect. Bearing this in mind, Beth reached reluctantly for her glasses. The pink clinic glasses have a plaster stuck over the right lens. It is there
