Playing Around (13 page)

Angie gestured at the notices in weary surrender. ‘Did I really let you bully me into coming all this way for a tea dance? I know, maybe, if we hurry, we can get to a church in time for the evening service. Then we won’t have wasted the entire day.’

Jackie took a deep breath and kept on walking in a straight, determined line, moving in what she could only hope was the direction in which the cosmopolitan attractions of Clacton sea front would soon be laid out, tantalizingly, before them. And if they weren’t, she might just have to throttle her supposedly best friend, Angela Moaning Minnie Knight, because she was driving her right round the bloody twist. In fact, she almost wished she was really staying with Marilyn – as she had pretended to her mum – Marilyn, the girl who had moved away to East Ham in the second year, yet had still faithfully kept in touch with all her old school mates, and who had been so looking forward to seeing them all again at her birthday party. Shame Jackie had invented her on the spur of the moment – a birthday party was very tempting.

Jackie stepped into the road without a second glance, her lips and eyes contracting into tight, displeased circles. ‘You are so ungrateful, Angie. I didn’t have to ask you to come, you know. If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have been sitting at home all by yourself tonight, and tomorrow.
Bank Holiday Monday
.’ The gravity Jackie lent the words made it sound more like some arcane pagan ritual than a day off work.

‘Oh, I am so sorry.’ Angie broke into a begrudging trot
to
catch up with her – that’d be all she needed, getting lost in this place – her sore feet making her uncharacteristically sarcastic. ‘I suppose I should be pleased you made me come with you. After all, you could have asked Marilyn. But, surprisingly, I am not absolutely flipping delighted that—’

Before Angie could finish her sentence, her words were drowned out by the roar of a pack of accelerating motorbikes that had appeared behind them from out of the dark.

Jackie spun round in alarm, and was confronted by a dozen, glaring headlights. She froze, a terrorized fawn in a hunter’s sights.

Without a thought, Angie sprang forward and yanked her stunned friend out of their path.

They stood on the pavement, panting and staring, as the bikes sped past; the hollers of abuse from the foul-mouthed rockers, as to what slags everyone knew mod girls to be echoing in their ears.

‘Exciting enough for you?’ Jackie gasped, her chin almost touching her chest. ‘They could have splattered me. All over that tarmac.’

‘They said we were mod girls,’ Angie gasped back incongruously.

Without warning, the first of the bikers did a screeching U-turn and began heading back towards them. ‘Oi, slags!’ he yelled.

Without further discussion, the girls broke into a run, their disagreement, and Angie’s blisters, forgotten, as, with a single mind, they headed for a family, complete with suitcases, who were walking along about fifty yards ahead of them.

The girls, panting and wide-eyed, fell into step with the respectable-looking group.

‘Mind if we walk along with you?’ asked Jackie, in an
ingratiating
voice. ‘Only we’re trying to get away from those motorbike blokes.’

‘They said horrible things to us,’ explained Angie. ‘Called us all sorts. Really scared us.’

The woman, a stern, matronly type, ushered her children to one side. ‘You walk along with Daddy,’ she said in a brisk, Yorkshire accent, then turned back to address the girls. ‘Is it any wonder blokes are calling after you?’ she challenged them. ‘You’, she pointed to Jackie’s thigh-hugging dress, ‘are practically showing your underclothes. And as for you.’ This time she jabbed a finger in the direction of the circular cut-out that flashed a small patch of Angie’s bare, pale midriff. ‘You look like … Well, never mind what you look like. But you do.’

Angie hung her head, shame-faced at the woman’s words, but Jackie was furious, her lips were pressed together so tightly her cheeks ached. Bloody old cow! What did she know, with her daft voice and her ugly perm? Jackie had a good mind to tell her where to get off, and she would have done so as well, had the motorcyclist not just been joined by all his companions.

They were circling in the road alongside them, continuing to jeer, although in a more subdued way now that they were in earshot of grown-ups, especially as the man with the kids looked a bit fit and might well be the type to front them out if they pushed their luck.

The woman glared, narrow-eyed, at the bikers. She’d die if her Melvin grew up to be like one of those little tearaways, or, God forbid, if her Myra ever went out looking like these two. The make-up! They looked as if they’d had their eyes blacked for them in a fight. But they were still someone’s daughters. Although the Lord alone knew where their mothers were, letting them out in such a state. ‘Where’re you heading?’

‘Down the front,’ said Jackie hurriedly, worried that Angie would ask for an escort back to the station and that she’d then have to come up with some bizarre explanation for her mum, to account for their abbreviated evening at Marilyn’s. Bloody Marilyn. She was getting on her nerves almost as much as Angie. ‘We’re meeting my mum and dad down there.’

‘You’re in luck.’ The woman relaxed a little at this slightly unexpected news. She took a map from her pocket and waved it in Jackie’s face. ‘We’re going in that direction. We’re off to the Waverley.’ She paused, waiting for the name of the hotel her sister-in-law had recommended to register with the girls. Her efforts were wasted, there wasn’t a flicker of recognition of the name. Obviously, it was far too decent for the likes of these two. ‘I’ll see you safely down there, but I’m warning you, if you so much as think of looking at my husband, I’ll march right up to your mother and tell her exactly what I think of her. Allowing girls to go out with their private parts barely covered.’

Jackie resisted saying she’d rather poke her eyes out with a sharp stick than have to so much as take a single peek at her ugly old sod of a husband. Instead, smiling sweetly, she replied, ‘That’s really kind of you, thanks ever so much.’

The short, silent walk to the promenade brought them to a scene that couldn’t have contrasted more with the sober, residential streets around the station. It wasn’t only the bright lights and noise coming from all the typical seaside attractions that lined the front, it was the sheer numbers of young people milling about the place. Angie and Jackie had never seen anything like it. They were everywhere: on foot, on scooters and on motorbikes; parading up and down the front, jostling for
space
, swaggering and shouting; mods and rockers, male and female, divided only by tribal affiliations marked by choice of hairdo and clothes.

The atmosphere of youthful anticipation was so thick that the girls could almost taste it. It made their skin prickle with nervous excitement. And the underlying threat of conflict and violence that was bubbling up amongst the hoards of barely restrained young people wasn’t lost either on the woman who had guided them into this maelstrom of hormone-propelled tension.

‘I don’t know, Arthur. What on earth was your sister suggesting, sending us here when we could have gone to the Lakes?’ The woman scooped her children to her and shook her head. ‘Trust you for listening to her. Trust you. I’m warning you, this Waverley place had better have clean sheets, acceptable lavatory arrangements and good strong locks on all the doors. Or, Arthur Turpin, you’ll have me to reckon with.’

Jackie and Angie scarcely acknowledged the Turpin family’s sour-faced departure for their hotel, sparing them only a brief mumble and a half-hearted wave to see them on their way; they were also now oblivious of the cold, and their row was a distant memory. The girls were transfixed.

Youth, as it always had, and always will, was calling to youth.

‘This is more like it, eh, Angie?’ Jackie took her arm and they joined the packs of youngsters patrolling the promenade.

This was where it was all happening. And they were right in the middle of it.

Sonia walked across the car park and astonished the guard with a flickery wave and a cheery goodnight. It was the first time the stuck-up tart had even
acknowledged
his existence. Little did she know what he’d seen her getting up to with that dark-haired bloke the other night.

It made him flush, remembering the shape of the dirty cow’s naked backside.

Bloody hell! She was coming over to the booth.

‘Mr Fuller’s not back yet, then,’ she trilled, as she pointed to his empty parking space. ‘These businessmen and their meetings.’

‘No, he’s, er, not back yet.’ Had the woman gone mad? She hadn’t said a word to him all the time he’d worked here and now she was practically flirting with him.

Perhaps she fancied him.

He’d read in the Sunday papers about these hoity-toity women liking a bit on the side with a man in a uniform. And while he wasn’t exactly a copper or a fireman …

He swallowed hard. What would he do if she made a grab for him? He had his lumbago to think of. Never mind his old woman. They didn’t go in for all this modern stuff, all this wife-swapping and that, not round his way they didn’t. Although he had heard stories that there were certain housewives who waited for their husbands to go out, then they put a packet of Omo washing powder in their front window – OMO: Old Man Out – as an invitation for blokes to come round and join them. It made him feel quite unnecessary just thinking about it.

But he needn’t have worried; Sonia hadn’t gone mad, she was not flirting, and she definitely had no intention of making a pass at him. Her odd behaviour had a simple explanation: for the first time in her life, Sonia Fuller was truly happy. She was in love.

*

It was almost eleven o’clock, and the girls, having spent the last of their money on an orgy of sugary, greasy junk that they had tucked into as if it was their last meal, were sitting on the sea wall, licking the final grainy remains of candy floss from round their mouths, watching the now booze- and pill-fuelled crowds from a safe distance.

‘What now?’ asked Angie, closing one eye and looking down her nose for any stray strands of pink sugar.

She had enjoyed, far more than she thought she would, being part of this youthful, simmering pot of turbulence; well, more of a witness than a participant really, but that hadn’t been such a bad thing. A rocker had thrown a bottle that had narrowly missed Jackie and had shattered on the pavement in front of them. Rather than causing alarm amongst the crowd of mods it had been intended to strike, it had merely infuriated them. They spun round in formation, like a shoal of short-haired, Ben Sherman-shirted fish, and started running after the gang who had attacked them.

It was then that Jackie and Angie had retreated with their goodies to the safety of the sea wall.

‘Not sure,’ said Jackie. ‘But I know I wouldn’t mind being indoors. It’s getting flipping freezing out here.’

‘I’m glad you said that. I really thought you wanted to sleep on the beach.’

Jackie swung her legs idly back and forward, knocking her heels against the rough sea wall. ‘I imagine, somewhere, there’s got to be …’ She paused. ‘Dancing.’

‘Dancing?’ yawned Angie.

‘Yeah.’

‘In a lovely warm club.’

‘No. On the beach. By moonlight. More romantic.’

‘Do you reckon crabs and shrimps do the Hitchhiker?’ Angie shimmied and windmilled her arms. ‘With all their little legs waving about.’

‘Well they wouldn’t get very far doing the Stomp, would they? They’d sink in the mud.’

‘But they’d be good doing the Swim.’

They had collapsed into childish giggles, a combination of tiredness and a surfeit of sugar, when they heard the first screams. At first, they thought it was someone larking around, maybe getting up to a bit of hanky-panky on the sands behind them, but when the screaming continued and they saw a group of hobble-skirted mods with tears streaming down their heavily made-up faces, and one with blood gushing from her nose, being chased by a pack of leather-clad, chain-wielding rocker girls, they realized it was more serious than a bit of adolescent horseplay.

The next thing they heard was the defiantly aggressive sounds of male whooping and hollering, as a horde of blokes came barrelling out of a side-street towards the sea front, with another bellowing mob close behind.

They were heading straight for where the girls were sitting.

Angie grabbed her friend’s arm. ‘Bloody hell, Jack. Let’s get out of here.’

They barely noticed the drop as they angled themselves round and plunged down into the darkness on to the damp sand below. With hearts racing, they crouched close to the wall, listening to the smashing and crashing of missiles being hurled between the roaring, shrieking gangs of rivals.

When a house brick came flying over the wall and thudded on to the seashore somewhere in the gloom behind them, they knew they had to get moving.

Jackie pulled off her red suede shoes. ‘We can leg it along the beach. To the steps by the bus shelter. All right with your blisters?’

‘Watch me.’

With the wail of police sirens and the crunching of heavy boots adding to the clamour and confusion above them, the girls fled from what was turning into a full-scale riot on just the other side of the wall.

They covered the four hundred yards to the shelter at adrenalin-fuelled speed, and hauled themselves up the steep steps back on to the promenade.

‘I’ll bet Arthur’s getting what for,’ said Jackie, in a creditable impersonation of the Yorkshire woman’s accent.

‘God help the poor sister-in-law,’ panted Angie. ‘All this’ll be her fault.’

The girls carried on their act of composed nonchalance as they sat on the wall behind the shelter, in what they hoped were its impenetrable shadows, brushing the sand from their feet, but they were both shaking. The naked hatred they had just witnessed was like nothing they had ever seen before, and it had terrified them. And the sounds of chaotic, frenzied battle, still so close, were not dying away; if anything, they were growing louder and more angry.