The Four of Us (7 page)

She, Artemis, had also looked years older than she was and, until they had reached the Two Zeds, she had thought she looked sensational. Her fuchsia-pink mini-dress was an original Mary Quant – and how many people in Bromley coffee bars were wearing one of those? She'd got electric-blue eye shadow on her eyelids and had borrowed a pair of her mother's bat-wing false eyelashes, which Primmie had glued on for her. Her hair had been long enough for her to anchor high on the top of her head and then back-comb into a chignon of large looped curls held in place by hairpins. She'd been wearing fairly high-heeled sandals, and, of all of them, she felt that she definitely looked the most sophisticated and that her fears of being left on the sidelines, if they should achieve their aim of meeting up with some boys from St Dunstan's or Dulwich College, were groundless.

There hadn't been any boys from St Dunstan's or Dulwich College there, though – and with good reason. Packing the Two Zeds to capacity and spilling noisily out on to the pavement had been a whole convoy of bikers. Chrome-encrusted Harley Davidsons had jammed either side of the High Street and the rock music blasting from the inside of the coffee bar had been deafening. To say that it hadn't been what she had been expecting was the understatement of the year. She'd been hoping to meet a boy who went to one of the two public schools in the area. Instead, she'd been faced with a situation so appalling she'd completely panicked, coming to a dead halt, struggling for breath like a beached fish.

‘Come
on
, Artemis,' Kiki had said exasperatedly, pulling on her arm so hard a scattering of hairpins had flown loose. ‘We're supposed to be making a sensational entrance.'

‘I'm not going in there!' she'd gasped in strangulated horror. ‘Not when it's full of all those … those …'

‘Bikers?' Geraldine had finished for her, helpfully. ‘I can't say I like the look of them myself, Artemis. Why don't we go somewhere else, Kiki? There's another coffee bar further down the High Street. I don't suppose it'll have live music, but there's a jukebox and it'll be groovy in a way Artemis and Primmie can cope with.'

As she buckled the belt of her tapestry skirt, Artemis remembered how grateful she'd been that Geraldine had made it obvious that Primmie, too, was just as horrified as she was by the sight of the dozens of fearsome-looking youths milling about on the pavement.

‘Oh, thank you, Geraldine Grant,' Kiki had said with sarcastic venom. ‘Thank you very much! Can I remind the three of you why we're here? We're here so that I can get up and sing with a group and strut my stuff. Singing along to a jukebox isn't on the agenda, OK?'

‘We're here,' Primmie had said with steel in her voice, ‘to have a fun night out and to meet some boys. Those aren't boys in the Two Zeds. They're bikers and we're fifteen years old. I think Geraldine is right. We should go somewhere else.'

‘
You
go somewhere else if you like,' Kiki had stormed, looking as if she'd like to throttle her, ‘but I'm not! I came here because it's the only place I know where I stand a chance of making an impression with a rock group. Now you can either come in with me and give me some support, which is what friends are supposedly for, or you can jolly well sod off.'

‘Hey, girlies. Come and join the party,' a leather-jacketed youth called across to them, drawing the eyes of other youths in their direction.

‘Don't worry! I am!' Kiki shot back brazenly and then, facing her and Primmie and Geraldine, she'd said, ‘Well, are you coming or aren't you?'

‘We don't have much choice, do we?' Geraldine had said dryly.

‘We can't leave you to go in there by yourself. We'll go, but we keep together. Right?'

‘Right,' Primmie had said grimly.

She'd said nothing. To have refused to enter the coffee bar with them would have meant her having to get the train back to Bickley on her own and would have been an act of cowardice none of her friends would ever forgive or forget. Miserable, trying to keep in the middle of their little group and not look too conspicuous, a difficult task considering her exotic hairstyle, she'd gritted her teeth and walked with them into the Two Zeds.

The next two hours had been unremittingly awful. There'd been other girls in the packed coffee bar, of course, but they'd all been dressed in either scruffy jeans and denim jackets or black leather trousers and leather bomber jackets.

A horrible creature with a crucifix hanging from one ear had tried to pick her up and, when Geraldine had come to her aid and told him to ‘shove off and leave Artemis alone', he'd begun making fun of her name, calling her Fatimis-Artemis.

Tears of humiliation had burned the backs of her eyes and then Geraldine had inadvertently made everything worse by fishing a packet of cigarettes from the bottom of her bag. ‘Let's light up,' she'd said. ‘It'll make us look groovier.'

They'd all tried their hand at smoking before, but the experiment hadn't been an unqualified success. Only Primmie – of all people – had successfully inhaled. Now, grateful for any crutch that would make her look as if she couldn't care less about the nickname the biker had given her, she took a deep, experienced-looking breath inwards when she lit up. The result had been catastrophic. She'd coughed and choked and struggled for breath, her eyes streaming, her mascara running in rivers of black down her cheeks. To make it worse Kiki had said wryly, ‘A ciggie isn't making Artemis look very groovy, Geraldine. And she's going to look even worse if she's sick.'

She had been very sick. Primmie had taken her into a disgustingly dirty toilet where she'd retched in blessed privacy until she'd got the smoke out of her lungs.

By the time the two of them had reluctantly squeezed their way back to where Geraldine was waiting for them, Kiki was already up on the small podium and was well into a number that had a beat like a sledgehammer.

‘How come she's been allowed to sing?' she had asked Geraldine, grudgingly admiring of Kiki's ability to always get her own way.

‘God knows – the biker with the crucifix in his ear has taken a shine to her and he's the group's roadie. The only number she knows that they know is “Dancing in the Street”, which didn't best please her. She wanted to do something more R&B. Still, she's got the voice for it and she looks every inch a pop singer, doesn't she?'

‘She does if the cotton wool stays in her bra,' Primmie had said with anxiety.

Artemis stared musingly at her reflection in her dressing-table mirror. Ever since the night at the Two Zeds she'd been on a crash diet and had already lost six pounds. As she studied the size of her breasts in relation to her emerging waist, she knew one thing for an absolute fact: Kiki would
kill
to be able to fill a bra the way she did.

Satisfied with the look of the tapestry skirt and the pie-crust collared blouse she was wearing with it, she picked up a purple suede coat and hurried downstairs to where her father was waiting for her.

‘You look sensational, Princess,' he said, beaming at her and stubbing out a cigar in a conveniently handy rose bowl.

‘Thanks, Daddy,' she said, hoping their daily cleaning lady would attend to the cut-glass bowl before her mother saw its contents.

‘Come on, then. Let's be on our way.'

Her mother wasn't coming with them to the matinée. It was going to be just her, her father and Primmie, and the car they would be going in was the Rolls. Being driven in the Rolls through the back streets of Rotherhithe was not an experience she relished and was one she knew that Primmie hated. ‘I'll meet you and Artemis at the theatre, Mr Lowther,' Primmie had said, valiantly trying to avoid the crushing embarrassment of having the Lowther Rolls glide to a halt outside her council home.

Her father, however, enjoyed cruising in grandeur the mean narrow streets where, as a child, he'd run wild with his arse hanging out of his trousers, and wouldn't hear of Primmie making the easy journey from Rotherhithe to the West End by public transport.

As Artemis slid into the front passenger seat she reflected that the most astonishing thing she had ever experienced had been her father telling Primmie's parents that he'd been born only a couple of streets away from where they lived. Until then, she hadn't known that her father had been born and bred in south-east London. She had always believed he was born and brought up in Berkshire.

As the powder-blue car slid down the drive she tried to imagine what her life would have been like if her father had never wheeled and dealed his way out of the narrow cobbled streets of his youth, and couldn't. The prospect was just too vile. The only thing she could imagine was that, if they had lived near to each other, she and Primmie would have been friends, just as they were friends now. Primmie, who was always so steadfast and supportive and who never lost her temper or threw emotional scenes.

The Rolls began to gather speed and she remembered the one time Primmie
had
thrown an emotional scene. It had been the night of the Two Zeds nightmare when, on their way home from Bickley Station, an already horrible evening – horrible for her and Primmie, at any rate – had grown far, far worse.

They'd arrived at the station to find the loos locked – which meant they couldn't change back into their school uniforms. Hoping against hope that they were going to be able to sneak into Kiki's house without being seen, they had begun the walk to Petts Wood from the station.

Kiki had been noisily euphoric, walking along the edge of the curb as if it were a tightrope, over the moon at how successful her evening had been, full of how Ty, the hideous creature with a crucifix dangling from his ear, was going to meet her in Bromley on Saturday afternoon.

Geraldine had been serenely indifferent to the ghastliness of Kiki doing any such thing and had taken her shoes off and was walking along the pavement barefoot. Primmie was rubbing her eyes, complaining that they were still stinging from cigarette smoke. She, Artemis, had just wanted to be in bed. Her high-heeled sandals had been crippling her, she'd lost so many hairpins there were more curls toppling loose than were still secured on the top of her head and one of her false eyelashes was so askew she could barely see where she was going.

When a car approaching from behind them suddenly pinned them in its headlights and screeched to a halt beside them, she was the last of the four of them to recognize it.

‘Hell!'
Kiki had said, freezing into immobility. Geraldine had said merely, ‘That's torn it.' It was Primmie's reaction that had really alerted her to the fact that an evening she had thought couldn't possibly get more dreadful was just about to do so. Primmie had given a cry of such distress that for a moment she'd had thought the car was full of youths who had been in the Two Zeds and they were all about to be raped.

The figure that had leaped out of the car, rounding its bonnet with such fury she'd thought he'd been going to hit one of them, hadn't been a youth. It had been Kiki's father.

Geraldine, who never panicked, merely said, ‘I thought he was away this weekend at a conference,' as Simon Lane bore down on Kiki, shouting, ‘What the
devil
do you think you're playing at?'

As she looked at her friends' faces, captured in the glaring headlights, Artemis was well able to understand his anger. Though stone cold sober, Kiki looked as drunk as her mother often was. Her beret had slipped halfway off her head, her Cleopatra-black eye make-up looked garishly clownish and the cotton wool in her bra had rearranged itself into telltale bumps and lumps.

Geraldine didn't look a mess. Geraldine never looked a mess. She looked years older than fifteen, though. And because Primmie was wearing a school skirt and because her crocheted top was as prim as her name, her heavy make-up looked even more outlandish and tarty than Kiki's did. As for herself … She shuddered to think what she'd looked like, with her hair half up and half down and one false eyelash on and the other dangling half off.

‘In the car!' Simon Lane had snapped, half throwing Kiki into the front passenger seat. ‘You look like trollops, but I suppose you know that, don't you?' Seconds later, taut with fury, he had slammed the driver's door shut behind him and savagely turned the key in the ignition. ‘I suppose that was the effect you were striving for, was it, Primmie?' he'd asked, nastily singling her out as she sobbed as if her heart would break. ‘So where have you all been and who have you been with? And I don't want any lies – not from any of you.'

That a man usually so mild mannered could be so very angry was, to Artemis, such a frightening shock, she was incapable of saying anything.

‘We've been to a coffee bar in Bromley,' Geraldine had said, leaving out the fact that it was a biker's coffee bar. Primmie, still crying, had confirmed it and Kiki had simply remained mutinously silent. Once in the house he'd refused to let any of them change back into their school uniform and had phoned her parents and Geraldine's, asking that they come and collect them. Primmie's parents weren't on the telephone and only Primmie had slept at Kiki's house that night as arranged.

There'd been ructions, of course, but though Geraldine's parents' anger had been directed at Geraldine, her parents'anger had been directed at Simon Lane – or at least her father's had.

‘You weren't at fault, Princess,' he'd said. ‘It was that puffed-up doctor that was at fault. You were to stay the night at his house, under his care. He should have kept a better eye on that daughter of his. If it wasn't that you're best friends with her I'd have punched his lights out!'

He would have done, as well. Artemis had long ago become aware that people around her father tried very hard not to upset him.

‘It's a good thing she couldn't come to the theatre this afternoon,' he said now, breaking in on her thoughts as they flashed past Lewisham clock tower.