Faith - Lesley Pearse [7]
Turning her head slightly, Laura looked down into the basement flat and winced when she saw what Janice and Margaret would have seen. Filthy windows, net curtains yellow with age and full of holes, and the dustbins for the entire four-storey house which were kept right outside their front door wafting out a sickly, rotten smell. If they’d seen the squalor inside, they’d have been even more shocked. The shame of it flooded through her, making her feel sick.
Dragging her feet, she went down the concrete steps to face her mother.
‘Where’ve you been all day?’ Mrs Wilmslow yelled as soon as Laura walked in. ‘I’ve been stuck in here with these kids fighting and the baby bawling, I ain’t even had a minute to nip out to buy some fags.’
Laura stood in the doorway of the front room which also doubled as her parents’ bedroom, and her spirits plummeted to rock bottom. No sunshine ever made its way in here, the couch had the stuffing coming out of the arms, and the wallpaper had been up so long that any pattern it had originally had been obliterated. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and smelled as though six-month-old Freddy had a dirty nappy. He was lying on the floor, grizzling. Ivy, the three-year-old, had jam all over her face and a bare bottom. Meggie, who was five, was playing with her doll. The room was a mess, toys, used cups and plates everywhere; even the double bed hadn’t been made.
June, Laura’s mother, was only thirty-two, a small, slender woman with bottle-blonde hair, a muddy complexion and a harassed expression. She still looked very pretty when she did her face and hair, but she rarely bothered with that unless she was going down the pub. She had curlers in her hair now, so she was obviously intending to go out later, but her dress had a tomato sauce stain down the front and she had holes in the elbows of her cardigan.
‘Go and get your fags now then,’ Laura retorted. She was tempted to point out that her mother could have taken the little ones out for a walk and got her cigarettes then, but she bit that back.
‘The kids kept on asking me where you were.’ Her mother’s voice had turned to a disgruntled whine. ‘For all I knew you could have been run over.’
‘Well, I wasn’t,’ Laura retorted. ‘You go and get your fags, I’ll tidy up in here and change Freddy – he stinks.’
It was an odd thing that her mother rarely asked what Laura or her older brothers did when they went out. It was as if she didn’t care other than to feel aggrieved that they hadn’t been around to do something for her. Mark was fourteen now, Paul thirteen, and without any kind of discipline they were running wild.
‘Peel some spuds too,’ June said, lighting up her last cigarette and dropping the empty packet on the floor. ‘We’ll have egg and chips for tea.’
∗
Laura opened the window when her mother had gone, and found the reason Ivy had no knickers on was because they were wet, and lying on the floor behind the sofa.
‘You must use the potty,’ she rebuked her little sister, and found her a clean pair to put on. She stacked up all the dirty plates and cups and carried them out into the kitchen, only to find the sink still piled high with the breakfast things. Groaning, she put the kettle on for some hot water, then heaved all the dishes out on to the table so she could bathe Freddy.
Mrs Crispin upstairs often said June should be ashamed of herself for being such a bad mother, that she was slovenly, lazy and a disgrace. Laura hated the woman for sticking her nose in her family’s business, but she was right.
June Wilmslow was slovenly. She seemed unable to see dishes that needed washing, the pile of clothes in a chair that required ironing, and she would walk over things dropped on the floor rather than pick them up and put them away. As for cleaning, she would keep moaning that it needed doing, but that was as far as she got.
Laura had been taught in domestic science that a good housewife should make a weekly timetable to fit in all the work needing to be