Rock a Bye Baby (27 page)

‘Just you take note, you old bag. I’ll be back, and I’ll keep coming back until I see her. Right?’

‘Piss off!’

He swung away from the front door and heard it slam behind him. Barbara had to be there, or they knew where she was.

Back on the Isle of Sheppey, Rosa Brooks had fallen asleep in her armchair. The chair was old and had been inherited from her husband’s mother as had most of her furniture. Carved wood surrounded the stuffed headrest and the springs were pressing upwards through the seat.

But Rosa loved that chair because it had been her husband’s chair. When she closed her eyes she could still detect the pungent aroma of Navy Shag tobacco from his pipe. It had faded with age but it was still there, the last remnant of his physical presence.

Tonight the scent overwhelmed her and in her dreams she was with him again. During her waking hours she was now longing to be with him. Life was
not worth living without her son and all her grandchildren. She had been brought up to value having her family round her. Now there was no one other than Marcie; and even she would be leaving home soon, Rosa fancied.

It often happened that she dreamed of things to come, though rarely with regard to her own future. Although she often saw the future of others, her own seemed shrouded from her sight. She accepted that this was the way of things and the will of the Almighty.

The emptiness of the house seemed to echo around her as though silence itself was a sound. A terrible darkness seemed to flood over her. She found herself gasping for air and smelled dark earth all around her; it felt as though she’d been buried alive.

She awoke with a start. Her gaze toured the familiar surroundings. Everything was where it should be except for those photographs that Babs had taken with her.

Shaking slightly, Rosa got to her feet. There was no real reason to rearrange the photographs of her and her son when he was still a babe in arms. Her fingers alighted and stayed on a photograph of her husband. She couldn’t help but smile back for to her he would always be young, and always be alive.

The smile dropped from her face as she recalled the dream and attempted to interpret its meaning.
Could it be that she’d witnessed her own death?

She spoke of her concern to her husband’s photograph.

‘It seems I could be joining you soon, Cyril.’

She smiled at the thought of it. In the back of her mind she tried to recall all the details. She frowned. She’d
felt
and
smelled
earth all around her, yet she hadn’t seen herself lying there.

A shiver coursed down her spine as she retrieved what she could remember. There was a body, but not her own. It was a man’s body but she couldn’t see his face. She jumped to the obvious conclusion, closed her eyes and prayed.

‘Please, God, spare my son.’

There were days that week when Marcie could quite happily have murdered Rita. She was going on and on about the new friends in her life and how trendy they were.

‘My new friend Sandie has got the most
gorgeous
pair of Courreges boots.
Courreges,’
she repeated. ‘They’re white with cut-out bits around the top. I’m going to get a pair.’

‘Is that so!’

Marcie was deliberately offhand. It had taken someone else to point out that Rita wasn’t such a good friend as all that. But Rita didn’t seem to notice and went rabbiting on about her new friends, and how fashionable they were.

‘Sandie looks a lot like Sandy Shaw. She doesn’t sing, though, but she is just
so
fashionable. It’s all shop-bought clothes, of course. She buys it up London in the King’s Road. Her boyfriend does too. He wears a suit with a round collar like the Beatles and a yellow shirt with buttons on the collar. He smells nice too. Not like rockers and their dirty motorbikes,’ she added, an obvious dig at Marcie and her relationship with Johnnie.

Rita’s dad seemed to pick his daughter up from work nearly every night that week, on each occasion offering Marcie a lift home. ‘I’m doing overtime,’ she said.

‘I can wait.’

‘Don’t bother.’

She refused even to look at him. Her face reddened at the thought of what he’d done. She’d told no one. How could she? They’d question why she hadn’t reported the incident at the time. Besides, what kind of incident was it? She found she was wearing her knickers inside out, her bra not properly fastened. But you’d been drinking, they’d say. What can you expect? You went willingly with him to his house when his family was away. You’re a prick tease. You were asking for it.

Once his car was out of sight she grabbed her things and marched to the bus stop with her head hanging. On the Friday she told Mr Tytherington that she didn’t want to work for him any more. He said it was OK, but he wouldn’t have minded keeping her on for a month or so, just to help him with the packing away.

‘Have you got a job to go to?’ he asked.

‘I’ve been offered a job in Woolworths.’

She hadn’t been offered any such thing, but there had to be a chance of getting a job there now Babs had left. The true reason was that she wanted to be
away from where Alan Taylor had an easy excuse to run into her.

Johnnie was coming down every weekend, and Marcie was glad to leave the emptiness of the house. Her father was in London; her grandmother was like a lost soul. Many times she caught her staring out of the kitchen window. Perhaps like her granddaughter she was willing the garden to echo with her grandsons’ laughter once again.

Alan Taylor never came to the house, but his car did pull into the curb in front of her on a few occasions and she knew he’d been following her.

‘Marcie! I need to speak to you. It’s important.’

She ran into the nearest shop rather than speak to him.

Rita never called, not even to ask why she’d left her job without saying goodbye. Sometimes she saw her riding pillion on a shiny scooter, its fairing festooned with a multitude of wing mirrors.

Woolworths weren’t hiring but Marcie found a job working in a local record shop on the high street. It wasn’t long after starting there that she began to be sick in the morning. She’d become friendly with Jennifer Page. Jennifer worked in the chemists nearby and was hoping to go a lot further than serving people rheumatic remedies and haemorrhoid cream.

One Tuesday lunchtime they met on a seat over-looking
the beach. Unlike Rita who never ate anything unless it was with chips, Jennifer, like Marcie, preferred sandwiches.

Marcie took only one bite of hers. Just the weight of the bread on her tongue was enough to make her feel sick. She spat it out.

‘Sorry,’ she said to Jennifer. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’

She felt Jennifer’s eyes on her. ‘You’re looking very pale. Is everything alright, Marcie … you know … is everything as it normally is?’

‘Of course it is!’

She regretted snapping. She valued Jennifer’s friendship. Rita would have stormed off to nurse her injured feelings. Jennifer was more steadfast and there was genuine concern in her eyes.

Marcie apologised.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap your head off.’

‘It told me everything.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Are you sick most mornings?’

Of course she was. And her period was late. But she’d been tired lately and upset because of her family troubles. That was all it was.

She shook her head vehemently when she realised what Jennifer was suggesting. ‘I can’t be in the club. I’m on the pill. I can’t be.’

Jennifer frowned. ‘Did you follow the instructions?
You didn’t miss one, did you? Or, have you been ill? I know if you’re ill, they sometimes don’t work.’

Marcie’s eyes followed a young woman pushing a pram. Two toddlers with barely a year between them scurried along beside her. The young woman looked worn out. She could have been any age between eighteen and forty. It was hard to tell.

Marcie thought of Annie. She wondered how she was and hoped Babs was looking after her. Sometimes she’d resented having to look after her baby half-sister. Now she found herself missing her.

But to have a baby of her own?

‘I’m not seventeen yet,’ she said, her eyes still following the young family.

Jennifer sighed. ‘You’re going to have to get it checked.’

Marcie swung her gaze back from the sea front.

‘I don’t want to do that yet. The doctor would have to tell my father and he’ll go mad.’

‘Have you got your pills with you? Show them to me. It’s easy to check if you forgot to take one,’ said Jenny.

Marcie couldn’t understand how it could be easy to check, not unless you counted each and every pill from the very start. She opened her bag and passed them over.

Jennifer frowned. ‘Where did you get them? Why are they in an aspirin jar? They should be in a
pre formed pack with each day of the week imprinted underneath them.’

Marcie explained what Rita had done in order to disguise the pills.

Jenny frowned. ‘They look a bit ropey,’ she’d said. ‘And they’re white. I don’t know for sure that there are any white ones. Most of them are pink. Are you sure they’re real birth control pills?’ she asked sceptically. ‘I think I should get them checked out.’

They met the next day after Jennifer had shown the pills to her pharmacist.

‘These aren’t genuine,’ she said gravely. ‘These are aspirins that someone has filed down to look like a different kind of pill. Someone has deliberately sold you something that might cure a headache but it wouldn’t stop you getting pregnant! It must have been your friend Rita.’

Marcie shook her head. ‘No. She wouldn’t do that.’

It was hard to believe that her old friend might have tampered with the pills, but Marcie knew it might well be the truth. The other option was Rita herself had been sold dodgy pills, but in Jennifer’s opinion, that seemed less likely.

‘It was done deliberately,’ said Jennifer.

Marcie didn’t meet her eyes. They were thinking the same thoughts, but it was so hard to face.

Would she have gone on being free and easy with
Johnnie if she hadn’t had the birth pill? The question was a difficult one to answer. The responsible side of her would not, but the surging of teenage hormones was difficult to control.

The worse thing of all would be facing her family, especially her grandmother. Jennifer offered to help her have a pregnancy test. ‘All I need is a water sample and we can tell you for sure whether you’re in the family way or not.’

By the end of the week, Marcie had her answer. There was no doubt about it – she was nearly three months pregnant.

The weekend loomed bright and clear, one of those autumn days when the sky is blue and the air is crisp.

As usual Johnnie turned up on Friday night and picked her up from the corner of the street. They drove to Leysdown. The night was warm, and the atmosphere buzzed with laughter and the Mersey Sound bubbling from half a dozen transistor radios.

There were teenagers on motorbikes wearing leather jackets and jeans, and teenagers on scooters wearing cool-coloured trousers and double-breasted blazers – all drawn by the smell of fried onions simmering on the mobile hot-dog cart.

The cart was a Saturday night regular in Leysdown, occupying one corner of the car park. The leather boys were parked in the second corner to the
right of the cart, the mods to the left. The little man dishing out burgers and hot dogs was nervously aware that his cart formed a kind of demarcation zone. In order to keep the peace he maintained non-ending cheeriness and he had very good reason to.

The queues alternated between mods and rockers so that there was never a mix, though the girls in mini skirts and summer dresses looked as though they might belong to either camp.

She saw Rita. Neither girl acknowledged the other – it was as though they’d never been friends at all. After what Jennifer had told her, all she wanted to do was walk over there and give her face a good slapping.

Pete turned up with a new girlfriend who introduced herself as Diane, the introduction dissected with the blowing and popping of pink bubblegum.

Pete said hello. ‘Saw your mate,’ he added, jerking his head to where the scooter crowd were gathered. ‘Glad to see you haven’t joined the opposition.’

‘Course she hasn’t,’ said Johnnie, wrapping an arm around her. ‘She’s my girl. Always will be.’

She liked the way he hugged her. She was going to need a lot of reassuring hugs before the night was over – once she told him that she had a problem. What would be his response?

Johnnie offered to buy her a burger but she shook her head. ‘Not for me.’ Her stomach was rolling in response to the smell coming from the hot-dog cart.
The candyfloss stall didn’t open at night, but the sticky sweet smell lingered and mixed with that of deep fat fryers containing everything from chips to doughnuts.

‘Won’t be a minute.’

He went off to the burger cart and came back with two. ‘I thought you might change your mind,’ he said. ‘It’s a well-known fact that women change their minds as regularly as they change their underwear.’

The comment was meant to be humorous. Marcie turned away. At the same time she hit the burger from his hand.

‘No! I don’t want it.’

Diane, the girl blowing bubblegum, asked if she was alright.

Marcie might have been fine if Diane hadn’t blown another bubble. The sight of the shiny pink ball emerging from Diane’s mouth was too much to bear. She threw up.

Pete gave Johnnie a knowing look and a sharp nudge from his elbow. ‘I think you might have a problem, mate.’

Johnnie looked stunned. Then he put his arm around her. ‘We’d better talk.’ He led her to a quiet spot between two shops selling beach stuff and cheap mementos of Leysdown, made in Hong Kong.

She looked up at him. The look in his eyes and the slight frown said it all.

‘I’m not stupid, Marcie. Have you got a bun in the oven?’

She nodded. ‘I’m late.’

He frowned. ‘You said it was safe. You said you bought the birth control pills from your mate Rita.’

She heard the suspicion in his voice. ‘I did,’ she said bitterly and looked down at the ground. She thought she’d been safe but she hadn’t. She explained what she’d discovered, what Jennifer had told her.