traffic along the Embankment seemed to grow louder to fill the silence between them. It was the first time either of them had mentioned going home, but they knew that they had both been thinking about it. It was three nights since they had run away. Four nights since Mattie had appeared at Julia’s parents’ front door, back in Fairmile Road, with her face bruised and puffy and her home-made blouse torn off her shoulder.
Julia’s father had stared past Mattie at the police car waiting in the road. Then his eyes had flicked to and fro, checking to see if any of the neighbours might be witnessing the spectacle. He had opened the door by another inch, as Julia watched from the top of the stairs.
‘Don’t you know that it’s one o’clock in the morning?’ he had asked his daughter’s best friend.
‘I’m sorry,’ Mattie said.
‘I suppose you’d better come in.’
Mattie stepped into the hallway. Mr Smith looked almost unrecognisable without his stiff collar, and his wife’s curlers sat on her head like thin sausages. Only the house looked the same. Little slippery rugs on the slippery floor, flowery papered walls and spiky plants in pots, and a framed Coronation picture of the Queen. And then Julia was the same, looking anxiously down at her, with her hair very dark against her pink dressing gown. Mattie was so relieved to see her, and the concern in Julia’s face touched her so directly, that she was almost crying again.
Mattie hitched the torn pieces of her blouse together and faced Julia’s parents squarely. They had always hated her, of course. They thought she led Julia astray, although that wasn’t the truth. It didn’t matter, she told herself. If they threw her out into the street again, at least the policeman had gone.
‘Whatever’s the matter?’ Betty Smith asked. Julia came down the stairs, pushing past her parents, putting an arm around Mattie’s shoulders. Mattie felt her comforting warmth. She would keep the story simple, she decided. Tomorrow, later today, whatever the time was, she would tell Julia what had really happened.
‘I’m afraid that there was an argument at home. My father … my father thought that I was out too late. I’d been to see East of Eden, that’s all. Julia didn’t want to come again.’
‘Julia was at home, doing her homework,’ Mr Smith said. ‘As she should have been every other night this week, instead of running around goodness knows where.’ With you, he might as well have added.
Julia is sixteen years old, Mattie thought savagely. What does bloody homework matter? And I’m seventeen. I’m not going to cry. Not after everything that’s happened. Not just because of these people, with their little, shut-in faces.
‘There was an argument,’ she went on. ‘I came out for a walk. To keep out of the way, you see? And a policeman saw me. He thought I was up to no good.’ She tried to laugh, but it drained away into their stony silence. Clearly Mr and Mrs Smith thought she was up to no good as well. ‘He offered to take me to friends, or relatives. I thought of here. I thought perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me. Just for one night.’
I’m not here because of you. I came to Julia. And what gives you the right to judge me?
‘You’d better stay, then,’ Vernon Smith said brusquely. He left it unclear whether it was for Mattie’s own sake, or in case of another visit from the police. Betty began to flutter about dust and boxes in the spare bedroom.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Mattie said. She realised that she was exhausted. To go to sleep, that was all that mattered. ‘Anywhere will do.’
Julia was shocked by Mattie’s appearance. It wasn’t just the bruises, and the oozing cut at the corner of her mouth. More disturbingly, Mattie’s verve and defiance seemed to have drained out of her, leaving her as shapeless as a burst balloon. Julia had never seen that, in all the years that they had been friends.
‘Come on,’ she whispered now. ‘It’s all right. Tomorrow, when you wake up, it’ll be all right.’
She steered Mattie up the cramped stairs, with Betty fussing behind them.
Vernon still wanted to impose his own order. ‘I should telephone your father, at least, to say where you are. I wouldn’t want him made anxious on our account.’ He lifted up a china doll with an orange net skirt from the hall table. The telephone sat underneath the skirt. At lot of things in the Smiths’ house had covers. Even Mr Smith’s Ford Popular, parked outside, had a mackintosh coat.
‘We’re not on the telephone,’ Mattie said.
Betty made Julia go back to bed. In the white tiled bathroom Mattie washed her face with the wholesome Pears soap laid out for her. Her distorted face in the mirror looked older under its tangle of hair. Betty knocked on the door and handed her a bottle of TCP.
‘Put some of this on your poor mouth,’ she said.
The small kindness brought Mattie to the edge of tears again.
She went into the spare room and climbed under the turquoise eiderdown. She fell asleep at once.
In the morning, at six o’clock, Julia came in with a cup of tea. She opened the curtains and looked out. In the early light the row of back gardens was tidy and innocent, its squares of lawn surrounded by pink hybrid tea roses. Julia turned her back as if she hated them.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
Mattie looked away, and Julia climbed in at the bottom of the bed, pulling the eiderdown around her. ‘What happened?’ she persisted.
And then, lying there wrapped in the eiderdown and enclosed by the room’s sprigged wallpaper, whispering so that Betty and Vernon wouldn’t hear, Mattie told her.
Julia listened, with anger and disgust and sympathy mounting inside her. Afterwards, with two bright spots of colour showing in her cheeks, she held Mattie’s hand between both of hers.
‘Why didn’t you ever tell me before?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mattie said. She was crying now, tears pouring down her cheeks and making a dark patch on the turquoise cover. She had told Julia everything, the smallest details that she had kept boxed up for so long. And at once, amazingly, she had felt her guilt lifting. Julia hadn’t cried out in horror, or accusation, of course. Had she been afraid for all this time that it was really her own fault?
‘It’s all right.’ Julia hugged her, making inarticulate, comforting noises. ‘Mat, it’s all right. You’ve got me. We’ve got each other.’
At last, the storm of crying subsided. Mattie sniffed, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand.
‘Sorry. Thanks. Look at me.’
‘No thanks.’
They laughed, shakily. Julia was relieved to see Mattie lifting her chin up again. She would be all right. Everything would come back to her, once they had got away. Excitement, a fierce heat, was beginning to boil inside Julia, fuelled by her anger. It was hard to talk calmly as the idea took hold of her.
‘Listen, Mattie, this is what we’ll do. You don’t have to go back there to him. We’ll just go. We’ll leave all of this …’ She waved through the bedroom window, and the gesture took in the bland gardens, the grid of streets with their semi-detached
