Faith - Lesley Pearse [61]
Laura burst into tears then and carried on insisting she wasn’t lying. But Jackie just closed the door and sat down on the chair, looking at her in disgust.
‘Attention-seeking, that’s all this is,’ she raged. ‘A desperate attempt to get Steven back any way you can. But it won’t work. Don’t you know you lost him weeks ago by being so jealous and clingy? He’s had enough of you.’
Laura tried to justify herself but Jackie just told her to grow up. ‘Of course he’d been with other girls before he met you. He’s twenty-four, not an innocent little boy. You’ve snogged and petted other boys too. But never mind that. It’s this fantasy pregnancy I’m angry about. Have you forgotten that you asked me for a Tampax only last month? I even had to point out that you had some blood on your skirt. How do you explain that?’
Laura had forgotten about that and she knew she was caught out.
‘You don’t care about me now you’ve got Roger,’ she blurted out desperately, unwilling to admit she had lied, even when she was cornered.
‘I certainly don’t care about you when you behave like this,’ Jackie snarled at her. ‘How could you ring Steven’s work and tell such thundering, malicious lies? Have you got any idea of how embarrassing that was for him? It went round the whole firm and his boss called him in to question him about it. When Steven called me at my work I was ashamed that I even knew you. I never want to see you again!’
That last statement of Jackie’s before she stormed out of the door stayed with Laura for a very long time. She never saw or spoke to Steven again and it was months before she saw Jackie either. All through the remains of that summer she cried herself to sleep at night, not so much over Steven – she’d more or less reconciled herself with that being over – but because of Jackie. She missed her, she couldn’t bear the thought of losing her best friend, and she was very ashamed that Jackie had had to find out what a liar she was.
Sonia became her new friend, and all through the summer and autumn Laura told herself she was far more fun than Jackie, but that wasn’t true. Sonia was cold-hearted and she only wanted to go out with Laura to pick up men. Every time she found a new one, she dropped Laura. But during the time they were together Laura learned even more ways of manipulating men, better shops to steal from, and to drink brandy.
Yet however hard she tried to convince herself that she didn’t miss Jackie, it never really worked. It was like a dull pain inside her, which never went away. She wanted to go up to Jackie’s house in Muswell Hill and apologize, but she was too afraid of being rejected to do it.
That Christmas was miserable. Sonia had found a new boyfriend just a few weeks before and once again dropped Laura, and she had no choice but to spend the holiday alone in her room. On New Year’s Eve she passed the time going though her clothes, wondering why when she had so many lovely ones, she had so little opportunity to wear them.
Then on the morning of her eighteenth birthday in January, there was a card from Jackie. She sobbed with delight as she read the message that Jackie missed her and she’d decided at New Year that their friendship had been too good to forget.
Laura phoned her soon after and Jackie said that although she would never condone what she’d done, she thought she understood Laura’s reasons and would like to draw a veil over the incident.
To Laura’s keen disappointment Jackie was still going out with Roger, so she couldn’t expect everything to be the same as it once had been. But even seeing her friend just once a week was better than nothing, and at least the New Year of ’63 looked very much brighter.
That winter was a very bad one with endless snow, making the journey to work twice as long. Having a bath was an ordeal because the bathroom was so cold, with snow underfoot it was too much trouble to go out