Queenie (22 page)

‘It’s what ballet-dancer girls wear, stupid.
You
don’t have to wear it. You don’t even have to come to
my
Birthday Land. It’s
my
birthday, see,’ I said fiercely.

‘Can
I
come?’ said Rita unexpectedly. ‘Can
I
have a pink ballet dress too?’

I paused, wondering which way to play this. ‘I’m not sure . . .’ I said slowly. ‘Can you do ballet?’

Rita didn’t have the sense to fib. ‘No, but I’ve always wanted to,’ she said.

‘Well then,
obviously
you can’t have a pink ballet outfit,’ I said.

‘Ohh,’ said Rita, sounding like a balloon deflating. She couldn’t see that
none
of us could do ballet now in our splints and braces and plaster. We couldn’t do it even if we were all little Margot Fonteyns. I didn’t like Rita much, and I despised her for being such a stupid little copycat, but when I craned my neck and looked at her, I realized she was near tears.

‘Only joking,’ I said quickly. ‘Of course you can have a ballet-dancer outfit, Rita. Do you want pink like mine? Or what about sky blue with blue satin ballet shoes to match? Or pure white, so you look like a little swan?’

That cheered her up, though she was flummoxed by the choices.

‘Pink too. No, maybe blue. Or would white be better?’ she burbled.

‘We want pink!’ said Maureen and Babette in unison.

‘Yes, you will be all in pink. You can even have pink knickers,’ I said, knowing Martin would groan again.

He did.

‘What about you, Gillian?’ I asked politely.

‘I don’t like all that fancy ballet lark,’ she said. ‘I like rock ’n’ roll jive-type dancing.’

I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure what this
was
, but I thought I knew the right clothes.

‘You can have a sleeveless blouse and one of those huge great swirly skirts,’ I said. Suddenly the magic finishing touch came to me. ‘And you’re wearing proper high heels – really high ones like my mum wears – but you don’t wobble in them a bit.’

‘That sounds smashing,’ said Gillian. ‘Red high heels! Can I have red, Elsie?’

‘Yep, and you’ve got proper nylons too, with a seam going all the way up the back,’ I said, inspired. I wanted to give her proper grown-up underwear too, but I didn’t want to embarrass her in front of the boys.

Martin was growing increasingly restless. ‘This is so
boring
, Gobface. I think the land’s changing. The polar bears are coming back. It’s getting much colder. You’re all shivering in your soppy dancing clothes,’ he said.

‘Excuse me! This is
my
story. If you don’t watch out, you’ll be wearing a pink ballet dress and –
and
 . . .’ I suddenly remembered the old taunt at school. ‘And frilly pink knickers to match!’

Everyone snorted with laughter. Everyone except Martin.

‘You shut up or I’ll punch you, Gobface,’ he muttered, though he was tethered in his bed, totally out of reach.

I knew I had to win him over.

‘You don’t have to join in any dancing, Martin,’ I said kindly. ‘This is just the beginning bit, anyway. This is the Land of Birthdays. Us girls are having a dance but the boys don’t have to.’

‘I’ll dance,’ said Angus. He said it very quietly but we all heard.

‘Dancing’s for
girls
, stupid,’ said Martin.

‘Not my kind of dancing,’ said Angus. ‘I’m doing Red Indian
war
dancing.’ He made a sudden wonderful Indian war cry.

‘Oh, that’s brilliant!’ I said.

‘Shut
up!
Old Nurse Patterson Big Ears will hear you making that row,’ said Martin. He was clearly in a grump because
he
hadn’t thought of such a great idea.

‘You can have a Red Indian outfit, Angus,’ I said. ‘With a full feather head-dress right down past your shoulders and war paint on your face.’

‘Me too, me too,’ said little Michael. He tried to do
a
Red Indian whoop, but his tongue kept getting in the way. ‘Show me how, Angus!’

Angus demonstrated, and Michael tried again, with little success but great enthusiasm.

‘Idiots,’ said Martin, but he sounded wistful.

‘Why don’t you be a cowboy, Martin?’ I said. ‘You could have one of those checked shirts and tight trousers with a gun holster round your hips, and a cowboy hat and cowboy
boots
– leather ones with tassels and those sticky-out things at the back . . .
you
know.’

‘Nurse Patterson’s ears?’ said Gillian, and we all laughed.

‘
Spurs!
’ said Martin, and I could tell I’d got him hooked at last. ‘And I don’t exactly do a dance. Cowboys think all dancing is sissy, but I whirl my lasso around, whipping it through the air, and then I catch a Red Indian with it!’

‘Catch me, catch me!’ Michael said.

‘Yes, I catch the littlest Red Indian and I
tickle
him,’ said Martin. ‘I tickle him till he squirms and begs for mercy.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Michael agreed happily, his chin on his chest, his arms flailing, giggling as if he really were being tickled.

‘
So
, the music plays and all my little birthday people dance and sing the “Happy Birthday” song and
we
all join in, and then Rita and Babette and Maureen and I do a birthday ballet in and out of the lit trees while the others cheer and clap us. We dance, all four together, and then I do a solo in a special spotlight. It’s called the Dance of the Roses, and I have a rose in my hair and I dance on rose petals. It looks lovely and it smells beautiful. At the end of the dance I pick up great piles of rose petals and shower them about. I smell of roses for the rest of the day.’ I sniffed my hands, and just for a moment I thought I smelled a sweet soft rose scent instead of hard carbolic soap.

‘We smell of roses too,’ said Rita. ‘It’s
our
rose dance as well.’

‘It’s a
solo
, Rita. That means just
one
person does the dance, and that’s me. But you can be my understudy, and one day, if I’m not feeling well, then
you
get to do the rose dance. You two can do it when you’re a bit older, Babette and Maureen.
Now
, the music changes. It makes us all tap our feet and snap our fingers, and it’s your turn, Gillian.’

‘Yep, it’s my turn, and I’m jiving with Bill Haley. We’ve got matching kiss curls. He’s swinging me around like crazy,’ said Gillian.

‘But you don’t wobble a bit in your high heels, and your ponytail bobs about and your skirt flares out—’

‘Showing her knickers,’ said Martin.

‘You shut up, squirt. Yes, Bill and I dance and dance – jiving away. He flings me right over his shoulder—’

‘And you land on your bum,’ said Martin.

‘Listen – you shut up or I’ll give you a really good kick with my new high heels,’ said Gillian.

‘And now you and Bill Thingy sit down—’ I went on.

‘Can I sit on his lap?’

‘Oh Gillian! All right, you’re on his lap, and the music changes – it’s all sort of thundery and we can hear horses’ hooves, and it’s the cowboy and Red Indian dance.’

‘I don’t dance,’ said Martin.

‘OK, you don’t dance, you whip your lasso about,
crack crack crack
—’

‘And I catch the Red Indians.’

‘
No
, they’re doing their war dance. You catch a horse, a wild golden palomino horse, and it leaps and bucks but you tame it and get on its back and trot round and round with it—’

‘I gallop.’

‘Look, who’s telling this story, you or me? You can go galloping round and round in a circle, waving your cowboy hat, while Michael and Angus do their war dance. They’ve got red and blue war paint all over their faces and their hair hangs down in plaits.’

‘
Girls
have plaits, not boys!’ said Michael.

‘OK, you can have short hair, with a band, and just one bright feather because you’re still little, but Angus has his full head-dress.’

‘Can I have a tomahawk in my hand?’ asked Angus. ‘And I’m stamping my feet in my moccasins, leaping up in the air, going
walla-walla-walla
!’

‘Oh yes, that’s a great war cry – but
softly
: we don’t want Nurse Patterson to come.’

‘Yes we do, because I shall scalp her!’ said Angus.

‘No, this is
Birthday
Land – no one gets hurts. Hey, guess what? All my little people have stopped singing now. They’re rushing helter-skelter through the trees. Where are they going? We have to follow . . .We run behind them, crying, “Wait for us!” and then glimpse a beautiful garden with roses.’

‘Pink roses?’ said Martin.

‘No, these are all different colours of the rainbow – red and yellow, but also bright emerald-green roses, and deep purple ones, and roses as blue as the sky. But never mind the roses – in the middle of the garden there’s a long table spread with the most wonderful party food. There are great wobbly jellies and enormous blancmanges –
pink
blancmanges because they’re raspberry flavour – and there are trifles with cream and cherries on the top, and ice cream all different flavours – vanilla and strawberry
and
chocolate – and there are cakes too – big fat sponges with cream and jam, and chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream – and lemon meringue pie with the meringue whipped into peaks, and fruit tarts – peach and cherry, with little rosettes of cream . . .And wait till you see the birthday cake right in the centre! It’s huge, like a fairy castle covered in snow – that’s the icing – and there are windows and doors made of marzipan, and little tiny sweetie figures too, and they’re us – me and Gillian and Martin and Angus and Michael and Rita and Maureen and Babette. We pop them in our mouths, and they’re like the best fruit gums you’ve ever tasted.’

‘Does the birthday cake have candles?’ asked Gillian, as absorbed as the others.

‘Yes, the top of the icing castle roof has all these ridgy things, up and down—’

‘Battlements!’ said Martin.

‘Yes, that’s it, and there are candles all along the battlements, and we line up together and the little people sing us the birthday song, and when it’s over they go “Blow! Blow out your candles!” in their little high-pitched voices, and so we all blow.’

They all blew obediently.

‘And now we have to cut the cake and make a birthday wish!’ I said.

‘Oh please, let
me
do it and get the wish,’ said Rita.

‘One of the little people has one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight silver knives on a polished silver platter. One for each of us. The cake’s enormous, so we all line up, and when another little man blows on a silver flute, we cut the cake together,’ I said triumphantly. ‘Then we all have a wish.’

‘Oh, oh – what do we wish for?’ said Rita.

‘You wish
privately
or it doesn’t come true,’ I said. ‘Shut your eyes and wish.’

I closed my eyes and wished so hard I thought I might burst.

I wish Nan would get better and I wish I could get better and we could live together again!

I wanted to keep on wishing it, over and over, but the others started clamouring to know what was going to happen next.

‘We eat all the birthday tea, you sillies,’ I said. ‘We gorge ourselves on jelly and blancmange and trifle and ice cream and every kind of cake.’ We were eating for England, though we’d all had our Spam sandwiches and tinned mandarins for hospital supper.

It didn’t stop us playing party games. I let each child choose a game to keep them interested. Martin chose Murder in the Dark and insisted on being the murderer each time. Gillian played Kiss Chase and insisted that Bill Haley was playing too. Rita dithered because I insisted she choose a game of her
own
, and eventually said she wanted to play skipping. It wasn’t a proper party game, but I let her have her way and gave an extra length of rope to Martin – ‘To practise your lassoing – don’t you go round hanging anyone,’ I said sternly.

Angus chose Musical Bumps, and we all leaped up and down to the music. Michael opted for Hunt the Thimble and we let him find the thimble every single time. Babette and Maureen conferred and chose Squeak Piggy Squeak and then gave continuous little piggy squeaks in between fits of giggles.

‘Shut up, you lot. You’re being daft,’ said Gillian. ‘What game are you going to play, Elsie?’

‘I think I shall play Pass the Parcel,’ I said. ‘Oh my goodness, the little people are bringing us the parcel, and it’s
huge
. When we form a circle and the music starts, we have to
roll
it round the ring.’

‘That’s not right for Pass the Parcel. We played it at my last party and Mummy gave us just a little parcel,’ said Rita.

‘Yes, and what did you do with it?’ I asked.

‘Well, we unwrapped it. First there was brown paper, and then newspaper, and then wrapping paper, and eventually we got right down to this tiny little pink plastic doll. It was my party, so
I
should have got it, but this other girl snatched the parcel off of me and
she
got the doll, and when Mummy went back to
Woolworths
to get me another one, they’d sold out,’ said Rita.

‘Do shut
up
, Rita, or I’ll lasso you and tie you to a tree,’ said Martin. His arms were attached to his brace in such a way that he couldn’t move them freely, but he made swishing noises with his tongue.

‘Yes, shush, Rita. You’ll see
why
I need such a big parcel. Come on – we’re rolling it round while the little people tootle and drum, and then they all stop. It’s your turn to unwrap it, Martin – quick, scrabble with the paper, tear off the string. Whoops, what’s this falling out? It’s a present!’

‘You don’t get the present already,’ said Rita.

‘In my version you do –
that’s
why the parcel’s so big. It’s got lots and lots of presents – and Martin finds a gun. A toy gun with caps.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Martin. ‘And I seize it and shoot at everyone –
bang bang bang
, and my caps go
pop pop pop
and make that lovely fireworks smell.’

‘And now the band starts up and we roll the parcel round again, and now it’s . . .Maureen who has the parcel when the music stops. Tear at the paper, Maureen. I’ll help you because your hands aren’t very strong. Oh, your present’s quite big!’