Faith - Lesley Pearse [33]
Maybe he felt sorry for her, for he agreed she could have the room. But he made her pay a month’s rent in advance and said he’d evict her if she ever got behind with the rent, or had any parties. With that he gave her the keys and her rent book, and the room was hers.
The next problem was moving out of Barnes. She could only do it when everyone was out, but as it was the Easter holidays her mother expected her to go everywhere with her and the little ones. She had a suitcase packed and ready under her bed, and finally, on the last Friday of the holidays, she resorted to pretending to be violently sick just minutes before they were all about to go to the cinema.
There was no kiss goodbye, no concerned ‘I hope you feel better soon’, or even an offer to stay home and take care of her. Instead her mother said, ‘This is just like you, Laura. I arrange a treat and you have to spoil it somehow.’
Laura watched them with tears flowing down her cheeks as they walked along the road to the bus stop. Freddy was holding her mother’s hand, Meggie and Ivy skipping along excitedly in front, and she knew she would never see them again while they still lived under Vincent’s roof. He would malign her as soon as he was told she was gone; she could just imagine him strutting around the house reeling off all the things he had given her, and how ungrateful she’d been.
She waited half an hour before she left, just in case they came back for something. Then she wrote a brief note to say that she hated school so she was getting a job and somewhere else to live, and placed it on the hall table with her house keys.
On the bus and tube ride to Finsbury Park she thought how her mother would rage because she’d thrown away the chance of going to university for the short-term pleasure of no more studying. Laura doubted it would ever cross June’s mind that she’d run away from Vincent.
She found the job in the Home and Colonial shop in Crouch End the very next day. She didn’t want to work in a shop, especially not weighing up cheese and bacon with her hair under a white net. But as she walked in there to buy some groceries she saw the sign on the window that they had a vacancy and applied there and then, purely because it was so close to her room. She told herself it was just a stop-gap until something better came along.
She had thought living in fear of what Vincent might do to her was the worst thing that could ever happen to her, and that as soon as she got away everything would be fine. But that wasn’t so. She was frightened, lonely and missed her mother and the little ones so badly she cried if she dared think about them.
At work she could cope, even though the other staff were mainly older married women and didn’t want to bother with her. But when she got back to her room in the evening the feeling of total isolation was so bad that she would often crawl into bed and cry herself to sleep. For as long as she could remember she’d always had chores to do, the younger ones to take care of, and in later years a lot of homework. She might have felt hard done by sometimes, but now she was experiencing having nothing to do and no one to care for, there was a huge hole in the centre of her life which she had to idea how to fill.
All through the summer months, she went into parks on Sundays, in the hope she’d meet someone of her own age in a similar plight. She did see many other young girls, but they were never alone. She would watch them walking hand in hand with a boyfriend, or giggling with a friend, and wish desperately that she had someone.
At Christmas she cried nearly all day, imagining her brother and sisters’ joy as they opened their presents. She didn’t have a single Christmas card, let alone a present. When her sixteenth birthday came in January it was just as bad, and by then she’d come to think that this was how it