and hurl myself against the door and that is where Johnny discovered me.
This is the bit the girl knows by heart. Where Johnny discovered me. These are the words she will say to herself in the long afternoons when the woman is working. Sitting in the chair watching over the bed where her nightdress is stretched on top of the sheets. She leans her head forward every time the story reaches here and gazes at the woman’s lips.
Johnny came home at nine o’clock and when my father wouldn’t give him the key, he went upstairs and kicked the door in. He found me lying in a pool of urine with blood crusted on my forehead. He carried me into the bathroom and locked the door, then filled the tub and sponged me down. I remember that his hands moved with a gentleness I had not thought him capable of. It was the first time he’d touched me in over two years.
He pulled a clean nightdress over my head and laid me back gently in my bed. Though I was groggy and only half-aware, I could feel a tremor in his hands as he drew the blankets over me and whispered, ‘Don’t worry, sis, I’ll look after you. I’ll never leave you alone with him again.’
Then he closed the door and marched down to confront my father standing defeated in the kitchen.
The girl lies back against the wall, her limbs stretched out, her breath coming quicker. But the woman stares at the floor as if by now only talking to herself.
That night he came again to my room, but more hesitant and shy than when we were young. He drew the blankets back slowly and waited to see if I would complain. His body was stronger than before, so that in the darkness he felt like a grown man. And I clung to him and allowed his hands to wander wherever they wanted to over me. His fingers found me and I sucked in my breath as he rubbed them back and forth.
I was nervous now and frightened but yet I didn’t want him to stop even though I knew that it was wrong. My hands performed all the old tricks that he had taught me when I was ten. But I was fifteen now and knew there were no guardian angels to be excluded or wronged. He panted beside me so loudly I had to cover his mouth and then he lay flat like a dead weight against my side. And all he said was ‘I’m sorry, sis,’ over and over again.
The Casino cinema was taken over by the new supermarket and there was nothing left in the evening except the bus to town. Shoppers queuing at the meat counter could gaze up to the old balcony at trainee managers stacking cardboard boxes where suspicious ushers had once trained their torches.
Workmen began to fell the wood to build a dual carriageway that would slice the village in half. She watched the trees fall, every one of which seemed to contain a memory. A picnic of children sharing gur-cake and water, autumn afternoons with Johnny searching for conkers, the trunk her lover would have held her against. Blue tar was spilt and rolled into shape and, like a token replacement, tiny shoots of trees planted that the local youths smashed in disgust. Only the rivulet survived, swirling unnoticed through its narrow gorge.
The children of the estate were growing up and finding jobs or waiting at bus stops with two cases for the boat train. All the way to London, the train’s wheels chanting you’ll never go back, you’ll never go back. New estates were springing up in the fields where she used to walk. Lorries loaded down with furniture moved along the finished side of the carriageway.
Two weeks after the Beatles came I arrived home to find Daddy in tears. There was no light on in the dining-room where he sat alone and I know that he had been there for hours, staring down at the wedding photograph in his hand as the features were gradually obliterated by the darkness. He turned to me in bafflement, and said, ‘President Kennedy has been shot. Has the whole world gone crazy or what?’
I wanted to put my hand out to him as he passed but I was no longer able to. He leaned heavily on the banisters when he went slowly to his room. After that, he rarely spoke to us, as if all his pride and hope was gone.
We had the house to ourselves and could do what we liked. Johnny and I bought a record-player between us and his friends called now to the sitting-room to play cards and listen to music. I’d come in with big pots of tea and toast for them and fall in love with each in turn, and they’d always shout down to me in the kitchen on their way out where I read romance magazines alone.
I had new friends in the shirt factory and we laughed and chatted to each other among the clattering machines. At lunch-time we’d sit out on the steps and wave back at the lads unloading the vans. Every Friday night, we’d gather at the bus stop to go to the pictures or dancing. I’d soak for half an hour in the bath and use the Lady Manhattan talc I’d splashed out five bob for.
The Friday evening bus to town. They occupy the back seat on top: eight of them squashed against the blue leather, five with beehive hairstyles, one looking like Priscilla Lane. Frames of evening sunlight flicker between the houses. One girl is laughing hysterically, inhaling noisy gulps of air as though she were choking. Whenever she falters, another begins and then another, each setting the other off, with the original joke long forgotten. The boys in the top seats cast slick glances back at them and shout down the aisle.
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