Clover's Child (29 page)

‘And by the love of Christ don’t we know it, wallowing in it day after day, dragging us all down with you! Bad things happen, it’s called life!’ Joan shook her head and reached inside her bra for her hankie. ‘I can’t go through it again, not today. You are driving me nuts!’ Joan stalked out and left the two girls alone.

‘You mustn’t say “shit”, Dot. Swearing makes your face ugly, Miss King told me that.’

Dot smiled. ‘She’s right.’

‘Can I do my eyes with your make-up?’

Dot stood up. ‘Course,’ she mumbled, and walked into the hallway and down to her room.

As she sat on her own bed for the last time as a single woman, Dot placed the shell on her lap and felt it jab at her skin through the thin silk of her slip.

‘I can barely say the words: today is my wedding day. Not the wedding I dreamed of, to the man that I love, and not through choice, but it still feels like a betrayal. I want you to know that in my heart I’m yours and you are mine. This wedding will feel like a sham, a fake, because every waking morning and last thing at night I will think of you, just like I always do. It will always be you, Sol, always. I’m up the creek without a paddle, mate, and I can’t find a way out – I must be living above the permanent snow line, whaddya reckon? This feels like my only route out and so I’m taking it. But I want you to know that if you ever come back for me, I will run into your arms faster than you can say pineapple juice. I just want you to know that.’

Dot placed the shell inside her suitcase, on top of her clothes, setting it alongside her copy of
Anne of Green Gables
. She stuffed in her pillow and then snapped the locks shut. Her room had gone from being her childhood refuge to a prison; she wouldn’t miss the four drab walls. She was surprised that her ocean of tears hadn’t seeped through the floorboards and weakened the joists so as to make the bed and all the furniture go crashing through the floor onto the buffet below. That would certainly spoil her mother’s spread.

Dot, her mum and dad and Dee gathered in the hallway. There were no gasps from the father of the bride or tears from the mother; instead, her dad enquired, ‘Has someone locked the back door?’ and that was it, off they trotted.

They walked to St Anne’s on Newell Street, a grand looking building whose ornate architecture only emphasised the mediocrity of their nuptials. Iron bars and mesh sat over the windows, installed by a fed-up vicar who was trying to deter the vandals that regularly targeted the poor box. They walked quickly, as though late for the cinema or the chippy that was about to close. There was nothing in their expressions or demeanour that suggested they were a wedding party – except for the fact that Dot was dressed like a bride. She had let her mum pick the dress, so little had she cared. It was a simple A-line of duchess satin with an empire bust and a row of daisies sewn around the neckline. It came to just above the ankle; she teamed it with matching character shoes that fastened with a metal hook and a little hoop. Her elbow-length gloves were the same colour as the dress, just a shade off white.

Her parents had decided that as this was a church outside their faith but inside Wally’s, it didn’t really count and so it wasn’t breaking any rules. In any other circumstances, Dot would probably have found such skewed logic amusing, but there was very little that was funny about her predicament. She had, like many girls, carried an image of her wedding day in her head since she was small. The details had always been sketchy, but the general picture had always included her in a white lace creation, with a bunch of lily of the valley in her hand, her mum crying into a cotton hankie and a dashing groom, beaming as he reached for her hand with a twinkle in his eye. This image had come into sharper focus when Sol had proposed; then she’d seen herself in a classic fitted dress with long sleeves and a bolero in matching satin. She’d wanted to arrive at the church like a princess, sitting in a big, open carriage drawn by horses with flowers up their reins. He would turn and watch her walking up the aisle; then he would beam as they stood side by side and uttered the words that would bind them even tighter.

Joan strode towards the church, pulling Dee by the arm. Her dad hesitantly held out his crooked elbow. Dot placed her hand inside and rested it on his arm. He patted her fingers with his other hand. It had been a long time since they had touched. He didn’t look at her, but spoke to the middle distance. ‘I love you, Dot. Always have and I’ve only ever wanted what’s best for you.’

He continued to stare ahead. She was silent. It was too late for his words to act as a salve, the damage was done. Dot had thought stronger emotions might have accompanied her big day. But no, it was just the same anaesthesia that had gripped her since she had returned from Lavender Hill Lodge. It was, in fact, horrible to be led to her fate by the one man that she used to trust.

Dot took a deep breath and looked skyward; one last silent wish for a different solution. As she lowered her eyes, they fell upon a shadowy figure standing to the left of the cedar tree at the side of the church. Her heart lurched in her chest. The figure side-stepped behind the wide trunk, moving quickly, not wanting to be seen – but not quickly enough to hide the familiar hairdo and favourite jacket of her friend Barb.

I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry
.

Reg and his daughter marched a little too quickly down the aisle. The pews were empty on the bride’s side, bar her mum, Dee and Mrs Harrison, who was perched on one of the back pews, not exactly invited, but no one was going to turf her out. Dot noticed that she had removed her curlers for the occasion, the nosy cow.

Wally stood in front of the altar in his black drainpipe trouser suit; she hadn’t noticed how tall he was before. Dot felt sick. Wally turned to face her as Reg delivered his daughter; she felt like a parcel, wrapped in off-white satin. He smiled, not with love or longing, not the way that Sol had smiled at her so many times; this was more of a nervous smirk, like when an awkward teenager is given a compliment. He took her hand and placed it on his crooked arm.

‘You look really lovely.’

She was sure he meant it, but rather than encourage or reciprocate, she closed her eyes for a second as if to say, ‘Leave it out.’

As they exchanged vows, Dot stared at his mouth, studied his profile, noticed he had long eyelashes; she’d never looked at him for this length of time, this close up. She watched his mouth as it turned towards the vicar, moved up and down, uttered the words that completed the transaction and sealed her fate. It didn’t feel real, any of it; it felt like a horrible dream.

‘I now pronounce you man and wife!’

Dot closed her eyes and fought the urge to scream. Strangely, she wasn’t filled with panic, but something closer to numbness, as if a slow burn of indifference had been lit in her veins that would smoulder away for the foreseeable future, filling every gap inside her until the fight finally left her.

Wally and Dot, the new Mr and Mrs Day, led Wally’s parents, sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, neighbours and mates from the sheet metal in a laughing, smoking procession along the street to 38 Ropemakers Fields. They poured into the house, filling every corner with their back-slapping, fag-toting banter. They were a family of strangers who dived into her mum’s buffet, stuffing sandwiches and sausage rolls into their gobs, digging into trifles and popping cubed cheese into greedy mouths. She felt sick, again. It was as if she was invisible, and when one of the Crimplene-clad fatties hugged her to their cigarette-scented bosom and welcomed her to the family, it shocked her as though it must be a case of mistaken identity.

Her dad put the record player on and some of the aunts shimmied a little where they stood, with paper plates held aloft to a Motown track. Dot looked at Wally as he drank pale ale from the bottle and sat on the arm of her dad’s chair. One of the aunts caught her staring, ‘Oh bless her, that’s a look of love alright, you love him don’t you girl?’ Dot was unable to reply, she knew the answer was no, not tomorrow or the day after that or the day after that…

Joan smiled at her from the other side of the room. Unusually, Dot stared back. What was her mum saying, with her covert smiles and wave?
I’m proud of you; it’s done, look forward, not back.

Someone put a slow waltz on and Dot felt the tears pooling in her eyes; she missed her lover, oh God! She couldn’t cry here, not in front of all these strangers. Wally, engaged in conversation with some of his mates, kept glancing nervously in her direction; she wished he wouldn’t, didn’t want to feel responsible for his misplaced concern. She ventured outside and looked around her at the back fence, she wondered if the Rusalovas saw any of the goings-on in their back garden or wondered about the family that lived a few shelter panels away and yet they had never really spoken to. She would have liked to have seen the garden that yielded the occasional rose, a thing of beauty that accidentally bloomed in this barren shit hole of a back yard, remembering how she’d been too embarrassed to tell Sol the truth about their excuse for a garden.

‘Here she is!’

One of the guests was clearly delighted that she had been located.

‘We want to get a photo, Dot.’

Her stomach flipped.
Oh, please, not a photo!

Wally sauntered over and removed the fag from his lip, tossing it into the flower bed that on occasion produced a chrysanthemum. He put his arm around his wife’s waist and pulled her towards him. Dot drew breath sharply and was about to push him away when two things registered: firstly, everyone was watching, she was trapped; and secondly, he was entitled, she was his wife.
His wife.

Dot tried to find a smile, but it was difficult. Just as the photographer was about to click the button, capturing them forever, Dee popped up beside them. It was the first time Dot had properly looked at her little sister since they’d left the house. Only now did she notice the inch-high blocks of bright-blue eye shadow that Dee had caked under her eyebrows and all over her eyelids, and the circles of black eyeliner she’d drawn around the blue. Dot beamed at her lovely little sister, who looked part clown, part panda. She smiled and at that precise moment the shutter clicked, capturing forever the grinning Wally and his laughing bride. She looked beautiful and happy and for that split second she was.

The crates of beer were soon drained and the men loosened or removed their ties, rolled up their sleeves and with braces hung down onto suit trousers, threw their arms around the next fellow’s shoulders and started the singing. Her dad was in the thick of it, pissed and happy.

A couple of the aunties who were sozzled on sherry slept open-mouthed in the back room, their heads lolling against the lace antimacassars on the settee. Mrs Harrison hovered, sniffing around the depleted buffet and having a good look at the decor while she had the chance. Joan ran back and forth from kitchen to table, capturing her guests’ compliments as if they were butterflies, ready to pin and dissect them at a later date. She replenished empty plates with slices of pork pie and tipped crisps and Twiglets into Tupperware bowls.

Dot sloped off to her room – her old room, as it was now – stepping over her niece by marriage, who was snogging her latest spotty beau on the stairs. She changed into her grey pleated mini-skirt and polo neck, placed her wedding dress on a hanger and hung it on the wardrobe door, running her fingers over the silky skirt.
What a waste of bloody money.

There was a rap on the door and it opened straight away. She expected to see the flushed face of her mum, but it wasn’t Joan.

‘Hiding up here, are you?’ Wally put his hands in his pockets and straightened his shoulders, trying for masterful, but achieving awkward.

Dot drew breath to tell him to get out, when again a wave of realisation hit her that she couldn’t – she was his. She plopped down on the single bed as the strength left her legs. She felt uncomfortable and nervous, she’d never had a bloke in her bedroom before and she didn’t like it.

‘Reckon we’ll push off in a minute, if that’s okay.’ There was a quiver to his voice.

She nodded into her lap.

These were the first words they had properly exchanged as man and wife. They were strangers.

Dot carried her suitcase into the hallway and spied Dee sat on her bed, kicking her legs and chatting to her stuffed bunny. ‘Don’t cry, bunny, you silly sod, course you’re gonna see her again! She’s only going to Walthambloodystow.’

Dot knocked on the door frame. ‘Y’all right, tin ribs?’

‘Yep.’ Dee looked up, her face smudged with blue eye shadow and the remnants of strawberry jam around her mouth.

‘Now, I’ve told Mum that you should come and stay with me. How you fixed next week?’

Dee visibly brightened. ‘All right, I think!’

‘Great, that’s settled then. We’ll get fish and chips and you can help me get settled.’

‘F’ya like.’ Dee beamed.

‘I do like. Keep learning them tables, Dee, you’re gonna need them if you want to be an air hostess.’

‘D’you think I’ll be a good air hostess?’

Dot dropped to her knees in front of her little sister. ‘I think, Diane Simpson, that you can be anything you want to be and that you can go anywhere you want to and whatever you choose, you’ll be bloody brilliant at it!’ She kissed her firmly on the cheek and stepped out of the room.

The guests at 38 Ropemakers Fields crammed into the hallway and spilled out onto the pavement. Holding fags and bottles in the same hand, the strangers waved and hooted as Dot placed her suitcase in the boot of Wally’s cousin’s car. Her dad was waving with his eyes half closed, so pissed he could barely keep them open.

Joan stepped forward. ‘Bye then, Dot.’ She leant over and kissed her daughter on the cheek. ‘Well, that’s it then, me firstborn off me hands!’ She tried out the joke.

Dot bent her mouth towards her mother’s ear. ‘Consider yourself lucky, Mum, that you had me under your roof for nineteen years. I only had my firstborn for fourteen days.’

Joan pushed her hand against her mouth as her eyes clouded with tears. She threw her arms around her daughter’s neck, holding her tight. Her body shook as her tears fell. ‘I did it for you, love, and I did it for your future. You wouldn’t have had a life! And I loved you too much to watch that happen.’