Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection: Strangers, Bad Girls Good Women, A Woman of Our Times, All My Sins Remembered
down the hill, still hooting with laughter.
Mattie was shuddering with fright and shock. Julia put her arm over her shoulders. ‘He was only an old tramp. We’ve pinched his place, that’s all. Come on, we’ll change places so that I’m in the front. You can hide behind me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Mattie mumbled.
They scrambled stiffly to their knees and lay down again. Mattie stopped shaking at last, and she let her eyes close. It wasn’t the tramp who she saw at once against her eyelids. It was only his smell that had frightened her, and repelled her so deeply that all her flesh screamed and crawled in case he touched her.
He had made her think of her father, and of what she had really run away from.
She had been to see East of Eden, just as she had told Vernon and Betty Smith. She came blindly out of the Odeon in the High Street with the image of James Dean more real than the windows of Woolworths across the street, more flesh and blood than the two boys from the technical college lounging in front of them. For a few minutes more, while the spell lasted, the hated suburban shopping street and the teds whistling at her were nothing to do with Mattie.
For two whole hours she had escaped from home and her younger brothers and sisters, from work, and from everything that surrounded her. It was her fourth visit. Julia had come with her three times, but even Julia had balked at a fourth visit. So Mattie had gone on her own, and afterwards she drifted to the bus stop, lost inside her own head with Cal Trask.
The enchantment lasted until she reached home. She walked through the estate, where every avenue and turning was the same as the last and the next, and reached her own front gate. It creaked open, brushing over the docks and nettles sprouting across the path. She stopped for a second outside her own front door. The house was quiet. It must have thundered while she was in the cinema, Mattie thought. It had been a dusty, muggy day but the air was cool and clear now.
She put her key in the lock and opened the front door.
Ted Banner was standing in the dim hallway.
‘Where the bloody hell have you have been, you dirty little madam?’
Mattie smelt sweat and whisky and the indefinable, sour scent of her father’s hopeless anger. She knew what was coming. Her stomach heaved with fright, but she made herself say, calmly and clearly so that he couldn’t possibly misunderstand her, ‘I’ve been to the Odeon to see a picture. It was James Dean in East of Eden. It finished at a quarter to ten and I came straight home.’ As conciliatory as she could be, with as much detail as possible, so that he might believe her. But he didn’t. He came at her, and she glimpsed the patch of sweat darkening his vest as he lifted his fist.
‘Bloody little liar.’
He swiped viciously at her. Mattie flung up her arm to protect her face, but the blow still jarred and she stumbled backwards.
‘Been out with some feller, haven’t you? Taking your knickers off for anyone who asks you in the back of his car, like your sister. All the same, all of you.’
‘I haven’t. I told you, I’ve been to the pictures.’
‘Again?’
Some evenings, Mattie didn’t have the protection of the truth. But it made no difference anyway. Her father hit her again, hard, a double blow with the flat and then the back of his hand. Her teeth sliced into the corner of her lip, and she tasted blood, salty in her mouth. A little part of her, cold and detached and disgusted, heard the rest of herself whimpering with fear. He knocked her sideways and she fell against the rickety coatstand that stood behind the door. It collapsed with her, in a humiliating tangle of clothes and limbs.
‘Please,’ she whispered. ‘Please, Dad.’
I hate you. The words drummed in her head. I hate you.
A door creaked open at the top of the stairs, and Mattie looked up to see her sister Marilyn, nine years old, looking down at them. The girl’s eyes were wide with anxiety, but there was no surprise in them.
‘It’s all right, Marilyn,’ Mattie said. She pulled herself upright, pressing the palm of her hand against her throbbing lip. ‘Go back to bed now. Don’t wake Sam up.’
The child melted away again.
Ted was breathing heavily through his mouth. His cheeks were blotched and treaded with broken veins, and his big moustache was beaded with sweat and spittle.
Suddenly his shoulders sagged. He rolled his head to and fro, as if he was trying to break free of something.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last.
Mattie tried to slip past him up the stairs. ‘It’s all right,’ she murmured, pressing herself against the wall so that even her clothes need not brush against him. But his hand caught her wrist.
‘Come in the kitchen,’ he begged her, in a new, wheedling voice. ‘I’ll make us both a nice cup of tea.’
‘All right,’ Mattie said. It was easier to acquiesce than to risk stirring up his anger again.
She watched her father warily as he lit the gas and put the kettle on. She was ready for him when he came at her again. She flinched, and slid out of his reach behind the table.
He held out his big, meaty hands.
‘Mat, don’t run away from me. Don’t, I can’t bear it.’
There was a bottle of whisky on the table and he took a swig from it, wiping his moustache with his fingers. He had gone from anger to self-pitying drunkenness. Mattie knew what that meant too, and it made her even more afraid.
‘Come here.’
Her skin crawled, but she knew that she couldn’t refuse him. She sidled out from the table’s protection.
‘Right here, I said.’
Her father’s hand touched her arm and then her shoulders. It weighed heavily, and the hairy skin of his forearm was hot and prickly against the nape of her neck. With his other hand he turned her face to his. He was very close, and she bit the insides of her cheeks to keep her fear and disgust hidden inside her. Ted’s hand slipped downwards, and his fingers touched her breast. He hesitated for a second, his expression suddenly dreamy, almost tender. Then his hand closed on her, squeezing and twisting, and she cried out in pain.
‘Don’t. Please don’t.’
‘Don’t you like it? Those boys do it, don’t they?’
They didn’t because Mattie wouldn’t let them, but her father didn’t know that. The sweat had broken out on his face again, and a thread of it trickled from his hairline, across his temple. His mouth opened and hung loosely as he rubbed his hand over her breast. He jerked her closer. Holding her so tightly that she knew she couldn’t break away, he thrust his face against hers and kissed her. Wetness smeared her mouth and chin, and then his tongue forced itself between her lips.
Mattie understood how drunk he was.
For years, since she was younger than Marilyn, her father had touched and fondled her.
‘It’s a little game,’ he used to say. ‘Our little game. Don’t tell anyone, will you?’
Mattie hated it, and the feelings it stirred in her frightened and puzzled her. But she also discovered that it was a protection. If she let him play his game, just occasionally, he was less likely to hit her. She would stand, mute and motionless, and let him run his hands over her. That was all. Nothing else. She kept the knowledge of it in a little box, closed off from everything else, never mentioning it to her older sisters, or to her mother while she was still alive. It was just her father, after all, just the way he was. Dirty, and pathetic, and she would get away from him as soon as she could.
She had never even whispered anything to Julia.
But tonight was different. Somehow Ted had slipped beyond control. He didn’t