Faith - Lesley Pearse [35]
Music blared out from the large sitting room at the front of the house. ‘Runaway’ was played over and over again, along with Roy Orbison, Elvis Presley and the Everly Brothers, but every now and then an adult would come in and put on Frank Sinatra or something equally old-fashioned. The younger children chased around the house, the adults moved on out into the overgrown garden for more serious drinking, while Jackie and her friends took over the kitchen.
Laura didn’t bother to change out of her pink and white spotted sheath dress when she saw that Jackie intended to wear a pair of boy’s jeans and a plain white cotton shirt which she tied in a knot at her waist. ‘I like myself in jeans,’ she said when Laura looked at her in surprise. ‘You are the frilly type. I’m not.’
That evening everything Laura had hitherto imagined about what went on in middle-class homes was turned upside down. She saw adult women getting drunk and dancing like teenagers and grown men playing with small children. No one seemed the least concerned about mess, noise or what the younger people were getting up to, yet strangely enough it was these friends of Jackie’s who seemed to be the most sensible. One girl in four-inch stiletto winklepickers and a beehive hairdo took it upon herself to wash up. And a Teddy boy in a pink drape jacket swept up a broken glass from the kitchen floor.
Yet to Laura the most wonderful thing of all was that she was totally accepted by everyone. No one asked her awkward questions about where she came from; they didn’t appear to notice that she wasn’t as well spoken as they were. She almost felt that she could announce her father was in prison, her mother living in sin with an old man who’d wanted to have sex with her, and that she worked in the Home and Colonial, and they wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.
Laura tucked Belle into bed around ten that night when she was almost keeling over with tiredness and Lena slung her arm around her drunkenly as she came out of the child’s bedroom and declared that she was ‘a poppet’. Later a boy called Dave asked her to dance with him, and as he held her tightly to ‘It’s Now or Never’ by Elvis Presley, he asked her if he could take her to the pictures the following evening.
By midnight the party had dwindled to just a dozen or so of the older people and Jackie insisted that Laura stay the night. ‘You can go to work from here,’ she said with a grin. ‘I’ll lend you a clean pair of knickers.’
It must have been after two when Laura finally got into the spare twin bed in her friend’s room, and in the darkness she heard Jackie murmur sleepily, ‘You know, I think you are going to be my best friend for ever.’
Looking back with an adult perspective, and a great deal more knowledge about Jackie’s early years, Laura felt she understood now why she came to that conclusion, although she’d made it rather prematurely. Jackie had floated through her childhood with boundless love and encouragement and had never had a moment of feeling insecure or worthless. She’d had nothing to rage against, nothing to fight for, and while not spoiled in a material way, for her parents were not rich, she’d been given boundless freedom to mix with whoever she liked, go wherever she wanted.
Jackie saw Laura as being intrepid, worldly, practical and independent, all because she lived alone. She marvelled that Laura could cook a meal in her bedsitter, do her own washing and get herself to work on time. But the clincher was almost certainly that at only sixteen Laura was all alone in the world. Her parents were the kind who welcomed waifs and strays joyfully, and Jackie was just following