Beauty?
What a laugh.
It didn’t exist, not in her world. Nothing worth a flying fuck did.
Mum wouldn’t look her in the face any more, Dolly knew that much. And more and more they carted Edie off to the hospital to get ‘zapped’, as Nigel mockingly called it. Nigel thought Dad could do no wrong, but Mum? He’d grown critical of her, aping his father’s attitude. When Edie got home, it was Dolly who had to put her to bed, clean up the sick, deal with her vague, mad statements. It always took a day or two for Edie to come back to herself, and in between she was lost to them. Not a mother at all, really, just a thing in a bed, babbling nonsense, poor cow. Dolly saw how Edie cringed away from her husband whenever he came near, and she didn’t wonder at it. She felt rage and bitterness toward her mother, no love at all now, but in the cold logical core of herself she could see Edie’s viewpoint. She could see that Edie had chosen to sacrifice her eldest daughter and save herself.
So it went on, months and months of endless torment. Dolly ate chocolates, the guilt-gifts she got from her dad, and she grew fatter, comfort-eating. Home was a war zone and she was just spoils, to be enjoyed as the man of the house thought fit.
It went on, and on – until she was ill.
Everyone was ill that winter; the flu bug was doing the rounds and sure enough the whole bloody family went down like ninepins. First it hit Edie, who’d been in the hospital again getting her brain fried, and her usual sickness and nausea when she came home just went on and on, until they had to call the doctor out.
‘Influenza,’ he pronounced, and left. ‘Bed rest, liquids, warmth.’
Then little Sandy, the weakest and youngest of the kids, fell victim, then Dick and Nigel, and finally Sarah, who’d been helping Dolly care for the whole damned lot of them. Inevitably, Dolly herself got up one morning and fell back on to the bed, too hot and dizzy to stand. For two weeks it was Dad who had to do the honours, stopping off work to heat up soup to feed them all and carrying buckets and bowls to and fro to all their sickbeds. Dolly was viciously glad to see him having to empty the shit and vomit in the khazi out in the back yard.
Served him right.
And there was a bonus to being ill; Dad didn’t come near. Didn’t want to catch a dose of the dreaded lurgy like she and the others had.
The Devil looks after his own, thought Dolly as she watched her father faffing around the house, moaning like a drain about having to fetch and carry for them all. He didn’t get ill, the bastard.
But soon the family recovered. Sarah started making cups of tea and helping again, Edie crawled from her bed to the rocking chair and then downstairs to the kitchen to flop into her usual seat there. The boys went back to school and Dad to work. But Dolly remained unwell; the flu didn’t seem to want to loosen its grip on her, and she was usually the strongest, the fittest of the whole family.
Eventually, Edie stirred herself enough to call the doctor out again. Dolly hated the doctor with his pompous air, she hated seeing the disgust on his face when he came into the house, into the bedroom she shared with Sarah. He prodded her with a stone-cold stethoscope, had her sit up, pressed the cold horrible thing to her chest and back, told her to breathe out, breathe in. Then he palpated her abdomen, looked at her face. He drew back, repacking his stethoscope in the Gladstone bag.
‘Do you have a due date?’ he asked.
Dolly stared at him blankly. What the hell was he talking about?
‘How old are you, girl?’ He sounded exasperated.
‘Thirteen,’ said Dolly. She felt like she was about to be sick again. Every morning, she was sick as a dog, it was wearing her out.
‘You know who the father is?’ Now he looked truly disgusted, like she’d crawled out from under a stone.
‘I don’t know…’ She had no idea what he meant. The father? What father?
‘You’re pregnant,’ said the doctor, and Dolly’s whole young world imploded.
21
She should have been able to turn to her mother at a time like this, but she couldn’t. Edie scarcely talked or moved or took any interest in anything these days. Talking to her was like talking to a wall. You got just as much sense out of either one.
To Dolly’s utter shame and humiliation, it was Dad the doctor talked to after his visit to her sickbed. She watched the two men conversing out on the landing, glancing back in at her, and she saw the exact moment when Dad got the news; she saw all the colour leave his face in an instant, and despite her own shock and devastation she felt a stab of evil gladness. It shocked him, did it, what he’d done to her? Well, good.
After the doctor left, Dad came back upstairs. All the kids were out at school. Edie was off having her brains adjusted, there was only the two of them in the silent messy house, this awful place that had become Dolly’s own private corner of hell over the last few years.
He came and stood at the end of the bed and he looked awkward, his eyes shifting around the room, as if trying to avoid fixing on Dolly, lying there in the bed. Maybe he was disgusted too, like the doctor.
But he did this to me, she thought.
Sam’s lip was curled like there was a bad smell under his nose. She’d let him down, she could see that, and somewhere inside her that hurt; he was her dad, and she loved him. But she hated him too, and now the hatred was growing stronger, like this thing he’d planted inside her.
‘The doctor said…’ she started, and she had to stop, she didn’t know how to go on with it. Embarrassment flooded her cheeks with red and she faltered to a halt.
‘I know.’ His eyes wouldn’t meet hers. It was almost comical, only it wasn’t very bloody funny at all, really, was it? Not when you got right down to the facts of the matter.
‘We’ll sort it out,’ he said, and without another word he turned and left the room.
One week later, Dolly was still in bed, feeling fragile. Timid little Sarah came in with soup and tea and chatter, as she did every day, doing her best to keep Dolly’s spirits up.
‘This flu’s a bugger, but you’ll be better soon, don’t worry,’ she said.
Then Dad came in from work that evening and said: ‘It’s all fixed up, we’ll go tomorrow.’
His eyes were doing that slip-sliding thing again, going around the room, not looking at his daughter, and he was sweating. Fix what? wondered Dolly. As soon as he’d gone, her hands wandered to her stomach, feeling the slight alien curve of it. She’d seen pregnant women; she’d be like the side of a house soon, and there would be things to buy, nursery stuff, she supposed. That must be what Dad was talking about. And at least this thing inside her meant that he wouldn’t touch her any more; there was that to be thankful for.
The next day Dad stayed off work. Dolly got up, ate breakfast, spewed it back up, then cleaned herself and they caught the bus over to Aldgate. Maybe there was a shop there with kids’ stuff, she didn’t know and she didn’t ask. Dad didn’t talk to her on the journey and Dolly was glad of that. She felt both queasy and numb, all at the same time. The numbness, the distance from the real world, had started the first time he’d played the man-and-woman game with her, and it had stayed.