Mick waited for her by the parish church beyond the shopping mall, a pathetic figure now with his stupid green hair in disarray like daffodil stalks after the flowers were picked. “Over the top, right?”
She nodded, too breathless to speak.
The wall around the churchyard was about four feet high. She put her hands on the coping and half-jumped, half-hauled herself off the ground. Mick shoved her backside unceremoniously higher and she scrambled onto the wall and jumped down. He followed, then stooped to pick up the champagne, which he must have tossed over first. Why he bothered with it, she couldn’t imagine.
“Come on.”
Stumbling between ancient headstones in the near-darkness they made their way as well as they could across the churchyard to the accompaniment of the police siren. At one point Gloria thought she could make out the sound of running footsteps quite close, but Mick was unconvinced. He’d stopped from sheer exhaustion, leaning against a tombstone. “They’d have searchlights and torches if they was trying to follow us.”
Gloria said, “I can’t run any more.”
“Have some of this.” He started fiddling with the foil wrapping on the champagne.
“I don’t want any, you moron. I didn’t want it in the first place.”
He was loosening the wire around the cork. “You did. You said.” He sounded like a six-year-old now.
“I didn’t know you were going to break into a shop to get it and ruin Mr Hibbert’s car.”
The cork popped and Mick’s hands were covered in froth. “Have a swig.”
“I don’t want any.”
“I don’t want any,” he mimicked her. “Snotty-nosed bitch.”
“I’m the one who stands to lose most,” she pointed out. “I’ve never been in trouble with the police.”
“Who says you’re in trouble? We got away, didn’t we?”
“Yes, but I took the keys from his overcoat pocket when he was visiting my Mum. It’s going to be obvious.”
“He was visiting your house?”
“Yes, he’s probably still there.”
“What’s he doing with your Mum?”
“That’s my business.”
“Is he staying long?”
“I don’t know — a couple of hours.”
Mick fumbled in his pocket and produced the car-keys, dangling them in front of her face.
“You’ve still got them?”
“Now who’s a moron? You can stick them back in his pocket and he won’t never know.”
“Give them to me.”
He closed his fingers around them and hid them behind his back. “Who’s a moron?”
“I’m sorry, Mick. I didn’t mean that. Please.”
“Come here.”
“Mick, I said I was sorry.”
He curled his finger, beckoning.
She felt her stomach clench. He wanted her. This was what it had all been leading up to, the joy-ride, the ram-raid, the champagne. Almost every day of her life since she had first learned about sex she had tried to imagine how it would happen to her the first time — the situation in which she would consent. Never, remotely, had she pictured it like this, among the gravestones in the bitter cold, with the police searching for her.
She said, “There isn’t time.” She could have added that it was dangerous and squalid and unromantic, but those were concepts that would make no impression on a punk. In his scale of values they might actually be incentives. And — in spite of everything that had governed her life until this moment — Gloria herself was being swayed. She was a different person now, a law-breaker.
Impulsively she stepped towards him and offered her lips.
He jammed his mouth against hers so hard that their teeth scraped. She could feel his hand fumbling low down at the front of her coat.
He said, “Take ’em, then.”
It was a moment before she understood that he was trying to hand her the car keys. He pushed them into her hand.
Then he drew back and so did she, bewildered. Apparently all he’d wanted was the kiss.
“You’d better leg it now,” he told her.
“Yes.”
“See you.” He turned and walked away.
She put her hand to her mouth as if the act of touching her slightly numb lips would somehow preserve the kiss. She didn’t want him to leave her. She knew it was the sensible thing, the safe thing, but tonight she’d stopped being sensible and safe.
“Mick!”
He turned his head and said, “Leave it out, will you?”
Despairingly, she echoed the words he had used. “See you.”
He walked on.
She bit back her distress. If she really wanted to be accepted by people like Mick she had to be tough with herself. She left the churchyard by a different route from Mick’s and — to borrow his terminology — “legged it” through the streets towards home. So much had happened that she hardly expected to see the houses still lit — but they were — almost every one she passed. She couldn’t believe that Mr Hibbert would still be in the house with his coat hanging in the hall, but in fact the entire adventure had lasted less than an hour and twenty minutes. It might still be possible to return the keys and pretend she had been at choir practice.
But when she turned the corner of King George Avenue she had a horrible shock. A police car was parked in the space where Mr Hibbert’s car had been. The police? Already?
In two minds whether to run back and search the streets for Mick, she stopped at the corner and waited, going over in her mind what she could say if the police were with her mother now. She was in an appalling position. If she told the truth, she’d have to betray Mick. Then it occurred to her that the police might not yet have connected her with the theft of the car. It was possible that they were there for no other reason than to inform Mr Hibbert what had happened.
She was going to have to find the courage to walk into the house and act as if she knew nothing at all. It was no use waiting for them to leave, because Mr Hibbert was sure to leave as well. The only chance she had of returning the keys to his overcoat pocket was now.
With her heart pounding, she stepped up the street to the house. The light was on in the front room and she could hear the faint murmur of voices, but the curtains were too thick for her to see anything. Under the porch light she checked her clothes. Her shoes were muddy at the heels and her coat was dusty where she’d climbed over the church wall, so she did some rapid grooming with a paper tissue. She couldn’t do anything about her hair; she’d just have to say that one of the plaits had come undone and she’d unfastened the other one. She took a deep breath, slotted her own key into the front door and let herself in.
The coat was still hanging on the hallstand, but there were others as well. And she didn’t have time to do anything about the car-keys because the door of the front room opened and Mr Hibbert came out, followed by a police sergeant in uniform.
“You must be Gloria,” said Mr Hibbert. “I’ve seen you several times, but we’ve never spoken. Your hair’s different, isn’t it?”
She murmured some bland response.
“Mrs Palmer’s daughter,” Mr Hibbert explained to the police-man. “Just back from choir practice, I believe.” He sounded surprisingly chirpy for a man whose car had been stolen and wrecked.
Other people were coming out of the front room. Two women from up the street and old Mr and Mrs Chalk, from next door. Even the obnoxious Mrs Mackenzie from the house opposite, a woman her mother detested. So many witnesses?
And now her mother was there. “Gloria, help Mrs Mackenzie with her coat, there’s a dear.”
Nobody seemed unduly alarmed.
“I’ll be off, then,” announced the police sergeant, opening the front door. “Thanks for the coffee, Mrs Palmer.”
Gloria reached for the fur coat that she recognized as Mrs Mackenzie’s, just as Mr Hibbert was lifting his overcoat off the hook. He was saying something to her mother about coming again. In a swift movement, using Mrs Mackenzie’s fur as a shield, Gloria succeeded in dropping the car keys into Mr Hibbert’s coat pocket. Only just in time.