Stay Dead - страница 9

‘Plug her into the mains, that’s what they do,’ said Dick, looking quite excited.

‘No, they don’t,’ said Dolly, although it was true, more or less. Dad had told her, because she was the eldest and she was his special girl, his favourite, that the treatment Mum got at the hospital was electric shock therapy. But Dolly clouted Dick upside the head because he had a big mouth and couldn’t he see that Sarah was frightened?

‘They do! Straight into the fucking National Grid,’ persisted Dick, rubbing his ear and grinning.

‘It’s a very mild thing,’ said Dolly firmly to Sarah, although she knew different. She had seen her mum brought home after those ‘sessions’, babbling and crying in a state of confusion and vomiting her guts up. Sarah hadn’t seen any of that. ‘It’s hardly a shock at all. And it puts things right in Mum’s brain.’

But they all knew that the treatment had no long-lasting effect. It was just Mum. She couldn’t help it.

Dad still had his job on the railways, but he was off the wheeltapping now. They’d made him a shunter, put him in with a new gang of men. He was doing well, so at least they never went hungry.

Dolly tried to keep the house tidy, but being naturally untidy herself, and hating housework, she found that she just couldn’t manage it.

So their house was dirty. Often, the kids went unwashed and their clothes were threadbare and filthy. Sandy wet the bed; he was nervous, highly strung like Mum. But so what? None of the families in their street were much different. All around them on the council estate there was junk piled up in front gardens, mange-ridden dogs endlessly barking, grubby kids sitting out on the front step watching the world go by when they should have been at school, studying.

Nobody around here gave a flying fuck about education, about making a better life for themselves; it was just the way it was. Vera and Lucy were exceptions to the rule. Around here, you knew your place, you didn’t go giving yourself any stupid airs and graces, trying to be all la-di-dah. Try to make something of yourself and you’d get laughed at or beaten up, or both.

For the boys, the future probably held a job on the railway like Dad. Nigel, the eldest boy, was prudish and formal; he hero-worshipped his little strutting bantam-cock of a father, and was sure to follow in his footsteps. For the girls, there would be marriage and kids.

But whenever Dolly looked at Mum, she wondered about that. Marriage and kids? It hadn’t done Mum any fucking favours. Everyone was talking about how the actress Grace Kelly had found her prince, like in a fairy tale; she’d married Prince Rainier the Third of Monaco.

‘Gawd, innit lovely?’ all the girls were saying.

It was in all the papers, it was even on the telly, they said, the actual honest-to-God ceremony had been filmed.

Dolly was pretty sure that she wouldn’t want to go down that road, not now, not ever. She was troubled by her own feelings about it, though. What else could a girl do? Men earned the money, women had the babies. It was set in stone. But the very idea of it turned her stomach.

Sometimes Dolly thought it started when she was ten, just before she considered running away. But no. Actually, when she really thought, it started a year or so before that, with him giving her little gifts.

Whenever she thought about it in later life – and mostly she tried not to – she always thought of the story about the frog put into cold water that was heated until it boiled to death. Had it been put in boiling water to start with, it would have jumped out. But death was slow, insidious; it crept up on the frog and lulled it; and that was how Dolly’s downfall came about, too.

The first time Mum went away to get her ‘treatment’, Dad brought Dolly a box of chocolates.

‘Got to spoil my best girl, haven’t I,’ he said gruffly, shoving the gift into her hands. ‘Don’t tell the other kids, they’ll all be wanting stuff, and that’s just for you, because you’re special.’

Dolly was delighted and flattered. She felt important, because Mum was away and she was in charge of the house, even if she was a lousy cook and an even worse cleaner. She tucked the chocolates away in a recess of the wardrobe in her and Sarah’s room, and ate them whenever the others weren’t around.