Lucky Bunny (9780062202512) (14 page)

And I'm going to look like Gloria. She's like Jane in the
Daily Mail
cartoon. All silky bosoms—my favorite bra of hers is a peachy satin number, swirled with stitching, and these great big pants with satin ruffles up the sides. I've seen her dress up in the ladies' powder room when we're getting ready to go out, and she'll catch me looking and she'll pat her bum and say, “Will you take a look at that? No wonder I have them all slavering.” Then she'll curl my eyelashes for me with this little gadget she has and tell me again how special I am:

“You're gifted, darlin', no mistake. If Queenie says the coast's clear, if Queenie's socks are all pulled up—I know all's well with the world!” she says.

Up West it's not all rubble and houses gashed and luxury all nipped off. Rationing—well, there's rationing I suppose but you just don't feel it in the same way, not with the Green Bottles, of course, nor the nasty cheap demob suits and children hobbling on wooden sticks and the old ladies with the faces stripped and stunned like they've burned and crumbled themselves, along with their houses. No. In the West End there are women wearing red hunting caps and silk scarves and check skirts and eating rich cakes. Not tortured poor women. Women like Nan.

H
oisting was the best possible way not to miss Bobby. There was so much excitement, and nervousness; there were just so many
feelings
—brilliant, sweeping feelings to fill you up, to push out any other thoughts. By the time I was thirteen I was the best. The Queen of Shoplifters—or the Best Green Bottle of all. They all said it. I would nick things for Bobby and keep them under the bed at home. A shirt in his favorite lucky blue. Brylcream. A tortoiseshell comb. Taylor of Old Bond Street sandalwood shaving cream. (I didn't know if Bobby was shaving yet, but when he did, I wanted him to smell expensive.)

It was my daring the Green Bottles admired—my fearlessness. I never glanced back, or hesitated, or looked shifty; all of which would have given the game away. Shop walkers were trained to look for that kind of thing—a nervous look, a furtive movement. My heart might be going berserk, sweat streaming from my armpits to my waist, soaking my vest and reaching my blue serge slacks, but I was just brilliant at hiding all of that, at ignoring it; at being, as Mum said all those years ago, “a proper little actress.”

The Green Bottles would kiss me and feed me violet creams and praise me and dangle their warm pearls round my throat and squirt me with their Chanel No. 5—and so I just got better and better, more daring, more of a “bloody child genius,” as Gloria put it.

I remain grateful, whatever you might think, to the fabulous Green Bottles for all they taught me, despite what happened next. It was inevitable. The day came, naturally enough, when I was caught.

I
t starts badly. The morning starts with Dad yelling at Annie, trapping her in the door because she wants to go out, and a scrap between them, Annie screaming, that brings half the street out to see what's going on. Dad sticks his head out over Annie's shoulder and booms at them all: “Yeah! Stare all you like, you dozy bitches!” and they all go back in again, to twitch at their curtains. The baby—Annie's baby, my half sister, Gracie, who is about six months old—is sleeping through all of this, in the pram in the front garden where I've been sitting on a wall, swinging my legs and watching all of this, and so I decide to get the baby some shoes.

I can still hear them shouting as I turn down Well Street. My heartbeat is quick, the way it always is when Dad gets the dead needle. I never like to admit this to myself, how frightening he can be. Other memories will float at me, occasions with Mum, times when I'd bury my head under the pillow and whisper to Bunny, but I can't remember the occasions properly, only the feelings around them. I push them away.

I try whistling as I walk down Well Street, bouncing the big wheels of the pram over every stone and crack in the pavement. The pram is a fancy navy and silver one. It has little silver handles to push up to make the hood stretch up and a navy gabardine cover that buttons at the sides with little elastic hoops slipping round these silver buttons on the side of the pram. Trouble is that once it's up you can't see Gracie's face. I peep in over this and check that her dummy is in her mouth and doesn't need a new dip in sugar. Saturday. I wonder what Bobby is doing, and when I might see him again. I'm fourteen, and floating through my head is some old story line from a Nancy Spain detective story about a sleuth called Miriam Birdseye.
Poison for Teacher
. I like detective stories, especially ones set in schools like this one, with its “problem pupils,” a phrase that makes me scoff. I'm also dimly aware that something doesn't feel right and that I have a faint stomachache.

First I go in the ration shop run by Old Mr. Spinks. He was once a bare-knuckle boxer, and Bobby told me that one day, when Mr. Spinks didn't like the fish and chips he was served, he threw the cat in the fish shop fryer, so I'm scared of him. The place is too small anyway, so I just glance around and float my hand over some socks to muss up the neat piles and then leave. I consider nicking a pair for Bobby, but the stash under the bed for him is getting bigger and bigger, and today the thought doesn't comfort me.

Also the Green Bottles are in Margate for some reason, and I miss having them around to goad and praise me. I choose not to go up towards Bethnal Green Road, like I normally would. I'm tired of the rubble—Stein's clothiers is just one pointed finger of bricks left standing. I hate seeing all the poor sad dogs nosing around, nobody to claim them anymore. No, I'll go the other way. Not that Mare Street is different. I'm sick of everywhere being window splinters and dust: the buildings all broken open, showing their ugly insides, everything so exposed and jumbled up and frightening, the way you feel when you come home and find your drawers tipped out, after your house has had a spin by the police. Now it's like
all
the houses have had a spin. One big giant one, by God or the Luftwaffe.

Thinking this, I'm getting deeper and deeper into the doldrums, and I find myself outside James Brooke and Sons, and the only little possible cheery thing I can think of is to get Grace the new shoes. So I leave the pram outside. Red ones. Red leather with little cutout clovers in the front and a red leather button on a fine strap. They're so sweet they make me drool. They're on a shelf next to some blue ones but the red look smaller, they look a better size for Gracie. I just pick them up and push the door and walk out into the drizzly rain with them. I'm thinking that if anyone stops me I'll say I was just trying them for size on Gracie's feet.

But no one stops me. No one is interested. I think about going back in for some socks but the rain is now falling a little harder, making a patting sound on the hood of the pram, and I don't have a coat, or hat. The baby will be fine with her waterproof pram cover. I slip the shoes inside it to keep them nice and dry and maneuver the pram around—the trick is to use all my weight at the back to make the front wheels lift so that I can turn it—and begin hurrying home down Mare Street. I feel flat. The red shoes are mouthwateringly beautiful, but just the same . . . things look as ugly as ever. And I can't show them to Bobby and there's no point nicking a bun from Smulevitchs's bakery for him, either. The dust and the rubble everywhere turns to slick grey sludge in the rain. My stomachache is really kicking in. I need to go home and get some bicarbonate of soda. And when I have, I'm going to write to Bobby again. Annie mentioned there's a “borstal hour” when they're allowed to write letters, so maybe this time he'll reply?

Did I see a shop walker? There was someone looking at me, and usually I would be so good at spying her. I go over and over this in my mind when I get home (in the end I took a meandering route, sloshing the pram wheels through puddles and forgetting my stomachache; stopping at the sweet shop for some paregorics, then throwing them away because the smell brings back Nan so fiercely; kissing Gracie's nose and making her laugh), and Dad tells me grimly that the police have already been round and asking for me. His mood has changed entirely since this morning. Anger always seems to leave him as suddenly as a match flame dies. He's dog-tired now and looks it, with a five o'clock shadow and his ice-blue eyes pale as water. He ruffles my hair with his huge hand and I grab it and hold it there as he says, “Oh, sugar. What am I going to do if they take you off of me as well?”

I really think he means it. Gracie starts crying in her pram outside but no one goes to pick her up.

Phew. I've got away with it—the police have been and gone again. Yes, they know where I live, but it's hardly surprising: our family is pretty well known to them.

I show Dad the gorgeous dolly-sized shoes and he smiles but then sighs and frowns and says I'd better go chuck them in the Regent's Canal. When I pull a face he says gruffly that he'll do it for me. So that's where he is when the cozzers come back.

Annie lets them in. This time they have the welfare lady with them.

A
nd that's how I ended up in the Approved School in Kent. The very same day I became a “young lady,” as Gloria had helpfully warned me in advance that I would. That is, I finally understood what the stomachache was, as I sat squirming self-consciously on the nasty green seat next to the young policewoman in the Black Maria. The first time I was nicked was the day I got my first period. The Curse.

But before I got to the Approved School, I got my first glimpse of Holloway. Another day, another journey in a Black Maria. They took me to the juvenile wing first, for assessment and to await my next showing in the juvenile court. I'll never forget it—the drive towards that awful gatehouse: the building just exactly like something Dracula would live in, I thought, glimpsed from the window of the police car. I craned my head to look up at the waving Union Jack, knowing this would be my last sight of anything gaily moving, anything
free
in a long, long time. Two stone griffins with keys clenched in their jaws glared down at me. There was a pause while the policewoman sitting next to me leaned forward to say something to the driver, and a prison guard by the door. The car rolled towards the gate with horrible slowness, to allow me to fully take in every word carved above it.

Let this place be a terror to evil doers.

I'm sure I cried then, but if I did, I wiped my nose and cheeks with my sleeve and made sure the policewoman didn't see it and licked at the salty taste and told myself that would be the last time. If I cried, it would have been because I allowed myself the luxury of thinking of Mum, or that I couldn't stop thoughts of her from clamoring. Remembering that one visit to her, that haunting, castle-like place. Holloway was bigger and scarier than the secure hospital had been; with no countryside around it, just gargoyles and griffins and ugly stone things. That would be me, now, my life, I thought. Stuck in stone. Mum would never know I was here, in the borstal wing, with the borstal brats, waiting for people to assess me and write about me and decide, as they had with her, what to do with me.

When Approved School was first mentioned in court I pictured it like I'd seen in
Picture Post
with sexy girls in pointy sweaters fighting and pulling each other's hair. But Holloway was nothing like that. I asked if I could go to the toilet and as I reached the cubicles in the remand wing, flanked by two officers, something skidded out across the floor from under the large gap at the bottom of the lavatory door. My new status as a “young lady” allowed me to understand what this paper item was, but did nothing to reduce the shock of seeing such a thing—soiled, too, as it bounced off my ankle.

B
ut Approved School was better. A house in the country with locked doors, but no bars on the windows. Thirty girls, mostly tearaways and hoisters and “good time girls”—it filled the papers, the problem of “good time girls”; there was even a film with that title, about this real case, the “cleft-chin murder,” done by a girl with her GI boyfriend, and the policewoman who came with me to prison was full of it, kept talking about it excitedly and wanting the prison guards to tell her more.

Approved School had five dormitories with six beds in each, and a big recreation room, where we were taught to make pineapple upside-down cake.

What I remember about that school now was the smell in it—a smell of old food, puddings and gravy, and of mothballs and damp, dirty coats hanging in the hall. We had to have daily walks, in all weathers, but laundry and baths were only once a week. A faintly unclean, unloved smell. Also I remember this: there were no mirrors. You brushed your teeth staring at wallpaper or bathroom tiles. You brushed your hair by asking the girl next to you if it looked all right. The nuns who ran the school must have thought that mirrors would make us vain, or tempt us to smash them, perhaps—make weapons of them. But fourteen-year-old girls need mirrors; it's the time in your life when you're most puzzled by what you look like, the time you are most anxious to see yourself reflected, to know who you are, whether you're pretty and desirable, or even that you exist. And so I think that the other girls, and particularly Stella, became my mirror. We spent so much time together, seeing only other girls, like us—seeing ourselves. We somehow knew without asking things about each other's lives that others would never guess at. And we learned how others saw us, too, our reflection in the world. That phrase of Elsie's: “East End slum kids.” That came back to me sometimes, when a certain nun looked at me, usually Sister Grey, who shrugged her shoulders with a great flourish and told me I was the wickedest girl she'd ever come across in her long long life. “You're wicked through and through, Queenie Dove.” (I'd found a field mouse, and put it in her desk. Which wasn't wicked—it was funny.)