Authors: Gilda O'Neill
Tags: #Chick-Lit, #Family Saga, #Fiction, #Relationships, #Romance, #Twins, #Women's Fiction
Playing Around
About the Book
London in the Swinging Sixties.
When Angie Knight transforms herself into a mini-skirted dolly bird, it’s an escape from life with her bone idle mother in the East End. Angie soon has the world at her pretty, white-booted feet as she dances the night away in Soho’s strobe-lit Canvas Club with her best friend, Jackie.
She’s heard all about the dangers of Soho, of course, but what can go wrong? They’re only playing around.
Until club owner David Fuller sets his sights on Angie and, on a dark rainy night, she climbs alone into his big, shiny car …
Gilda O’Neill was born and brought up in the East End. She left school at fifteen but returned to education as a mature student. She wrote full-time and continued to live in the East End with her husband and family. Sadly she died on 24 September 2010 after a short illness.
Also by Gilda O’Neill
FICTION
The Cockney Girl
Whitechapel Girl
The Bells of Bow
Just Around the Corner
Cissie Flowers
Dream On
The Lights of London
NON-FICTION
Pull No More Bines: An Oral History of East London Women Hop Pickers
A Night Out with the Girls: Women Having Fun
My East End: A History of Cockney London
For Lynne Drew
AS THE TWANGING
opening strains of ‘Ticket to Ride’ struck up on her transistor, Angie Knight closed her magazine with a sigh, and shoved it under the bed.
It was all right for Jackie – she looked like a fair-haired version of that Cathy McGowan off the telly – and for all the other girls who looked as though they belonged to the world that Angie could only glimpse in the glossy pages of
Honey
. They all knew how to dress, how to look good, and how to do their make-up.
On the secret occasion when Angie had experimented with cosmetics, she had wound up looking like a cross between Coco the Clown and a cheap tart: just like her mother, only without the fag hanging from the corner of her mouth. Mind you, men seemed to like the way Angie’s mum looked. Lots of men.
It was a good job Angie didn’t care what blokes thought about her, and that she didn’t mind spending yet another Saturday night with no one for company except a bunch of pirate disc jockeys who sounded as though they were speaking with their heads stuck in a bucket. Although, Angie suspected, that had more to do with the radio her nan had bought her off Doris Barker than the quality of the actual broadcast, despite the fact that it was coming from somewhere out at sea instead of a nice, cosy, BBC studio.
The unexpected sound of a key turning in the street door had Angie hurriedly flicking off her crinoline lady bedside lamp and turning off the transistor with a
metallic
click, darkening the room and silencing Radio Caroline and the Beatles right in the middle of their final chorus.
She groaned inwardly and pulled the blankets up over her head. It was only a quarter past ten. She hadn’t expected them home nearly so soon. Had the pubs run out of booze? She had hoped, really hoped, that she would be asleep by the time they got back.
Angie listened, in the muffled darkness, as Vi, her mother, and Chas, her mother’s latest, useless, boyfriend, stumbled drunkenly up the stairs, their voices raised in anger over something or other.
She hadn’t expected them to be rowing quite so soon either. It usually took at least a month for her mother to grow bored with her men – or rather her ‘meal tickets’, as she called them behind their backs, and sometimes to their faces as well if she’d had a few too many Snowballs – and then another week or two for the inevitable, and occasionally spectacular, battles to begin.
‘All I said,’ she heard her mother shriek, ‘was I didn’t like the way your nasty little brother was looking at her yesterday.’
‘Vi, your daughter is meant to be how old?’
‘She’ll be seventeen next week, as you’d know if you’d listen to a single, bloody word I say.’
Angie threw back the covers and propped herself up on her elbows. Had she heard right? Were they actually arguing about
her
?
‘Seventeen. Exactly.’ Chas was triumphant.
This was a first. Her mother was the centre of the universe, the only possible topic of interesting conversation, everyone knew that. Well, you did if you spent any time in this house, regardless of whether you were her daughter, or a visiting boyfriend, even if you were a well-off, dodgy car dealer – sorry, businessman – from
Chigwell
, like Chas, rather than a casual pull off a local building site as the last one had been.
‘Surely she can look after herself at that age.’
There was a pause, then the sound of her mother’s bedroom door being swung back viciously on its hinges, and her mother snapping, ‘You’ve seen how slow she is around fellers. She could get really conned. Specially by a nice-looking boy like your Matthew. You’ve got to do something, Chas. I mean it.’
Slow
?
Conned
? Angie sank back on her pillows, her cheeks burning red with shame.
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘I’m telling you, I didn’t like the way that randy little so-and-so was looking at her.’ Vi’s voice was now whiny and low, as, in a customary display of acrobatic mood-swinging, she had leaped from banshee to pouty child in a single, accomplished swoop. ‘He could take advantage.’
Angie heard Chas snort derisively, and then the twang of bedsprings. ‘Be honest, sweetheart, who’d want to take advantage of that mousy little thing? She’s as timid as a bloody rabbit. And twice as gormless.’
‘Don’t talk about her like that.’
Chas snorted again. ‘I’m not saying she’s got a furry coat, long, pointy ears and big teeth, I’m just saying—’
Angie could hear Vi laughing. ‘Stop it, Chas. She can’t help the way she is.’
She can’t help the way she is
? Angie felt her eyes begin to prickle with humiliation.
‘Well, don’t be so silly.’ There was another pause, then she heard Chas say, ‘Here, you’re not jealous are you?’
‘Jealous? Of her?’ The sound of her mother’s obvious outrage made Angie feel sick.
‘I’m not a fool, Vi. I know as well as you what you’re up to. As long as you keep her looking like some gawky
schoolkid
in those terrible clothes you make her wear, people’ll look at her as if she’s a child. And that makes you seem younger.’
‘You bastard. You know I’m only thirty-four. And I don’t tell her what to wear, I just sort of advise her, that’s—’
‘Come off it. If anyone did show interest in her, you’d be right up the Swannee. Who’d you have to skivvy for you then?’
‘You know I’ve got my condition.’
‘What? Lazyitis?’
‘Don’t be so rotten. The doctor said it was a very traumatic birth. He said I was to get plenty of rest. I had a lot of trouble. It affected me. Psychologically.’
‘Vi. That was seventeen years ago.’
‘You’d understand if you were a woman.’
‘Well, I’m not, am I? As you can see.’ There was another, brief pause, followed by Vi squealing in half-hearted annoyance. Then Chas went on, ‘Come on, darling, don’t let’s fall out over a bloody kid. Show me how good even an old girl like you can be.’
As Angie felt the tears brim, and then trickle down her cheeks and flow into her ears, she pulled the blankets back over her head and tried to block out her treacherous mother’s lascivious giggles, and the vision of what was happening in the next room, as the bedsprings began squeaking like a rhythmic, asthmatic donkey.
Chas was right, she was a mousy little thing, a timid little rabbit. She was too scared, or too stupid, to make it clear how unhappy she was, how unhappy people could make her. Her nan was always telling her to stand up for herself, but somehow she never had. She knew she had to do something about it, or she would be trodden on for ever.
But knowing something didn’t mean you could do it.
Angie sobbed as quietly as she could, hoping that they had no idea next door that she had heard every humiliating word.
The petite, expensively dressed blonde glanced down at her gold cocktail watch as she strode purposefully across the concrete floor of the private underground car park, her high heels tip-tipping like a metronome.
Nearly half past ten.
Without pausing, she looked over at the security booth. The guard wasn’t there. He often wasn’t at this time of night. She smiled indulgently. Lazy sod. Off having a crafty drink and a cigarette as usual. If only the other tenants of the exclusive Mayfair block knew that their precious E types and Bentleys, supposedly being defended to the death, were regularly abandoned to the mercy of any even half-way competent thief or resentful vandal, the guard would have been sacked on the spot. If you lived in these flats, you could afford the luxury of bypassing any sentimentality regarding the jobs and lives of lesser mortals such as car-park attendants.
She stopped beside a scarlet Mini Cooper, dropped her chin, opened her handbag and began to rifle through the lipsticks and screwed-up tissues, searching for her keys.
As a large, masculine hand clapped over her right shoulder, the woman froze.
‘Don’t turn round, and don’t even think of screaming.’ The voice was deep, husky. ‘Understand?’
She swallowed hard, then nodded.
‘Good.’ The man laughed, a sound that rose from somewhere deep in his broad chest. ‘Look at you. Birds like you, you’re asking for it. Dress up your arse, flashing all you’ve got. Now. Now you can turn round. Slowly.’
Wide-eyed and with her open bag still in her hand, the woman did as she was told. But, before she had a chance to call for help, run, or even faint, the man, in what seemed a blur of movement, had slammed her back against the car, had pulled up her skirt with one hand, and had ripped open his flies with the other.
‘Stockings and suspenders. Good.’ His breath came in short, excited grunts as he made a wild grab for the triangle of sheer black lace that barely covered the mouse-coloured curls of her pubic hair – the woman was not a natural blonde.
She snapped upright, clapping her knees together. ‘Careful!’ She spoke in a refined, Home Counties accent, and she sounded annoyed: a middle-class woman complaining about the behaviour of the lower orders. ‘David only bought these for me today. They cost a fortune.’
The man grinned. ‘Glad I’m the first to appreciate them, Sonia.’
Sonia grinned back, and stepped delicately out of the panties. She tucked them neatly into her handbag, clicked the clasp shut, set it on the ground next to her, and then rolled her skirt tidily up her thighs.
‘Get on with it then, Mikey, or the guard will be back.’ She ran a perfectly manicured fingernail across his cheek, and peered up at him through suggestively lowered lashes. ‘Or maybe you’d give a better performance with someone watching …’
As the man thrust into her, and the woman threw back her head with a gasp, neither of them realized that they did, in fact, actually have an audience.
Too busy with their game, they had failed to notice the hot, red glow of a cigarette, coming from the back seat of the nearby racing-green Jaguar, as her husband, David Fuller, took a draw on his rare, imported Turkish
Imperial
, before crushing it, without a flinch, in the palm of his hand.
‘Coming.’ Tilly Murray, a pleasant-looking woman in her early forties, walked along the passage to answer the door, wiping her floury hands on her apron. Sundays, especially the mornings, were all go for Tilly – even harder work than the other six days of the week were for her and her husband, Stan. And that was saying something.
