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By Root 587 0

at all the funny objects in the window: rubber trusses and surgical braces and adverts for pills and lotions. There was a photograph of a man in his combs flexing his muscles like a boxer. There was a great brown nozzle with a ball at one end and holes in the head. ‘Whirling Spray,’ she read, but there was nothing to say what it was for. It was too big for an ear syringe. She supposed it was for something rude, like the things described in Auntie Marge’s hidden book. She didn’t like to be seen staring into the window, and there was a tiny sensation of fright just beginning to grow somewhere in her head or her heart. Why hadn’t he come yet? Please God, she prayed, don’t let him be dead. Make it be the right place and the right day. Bending her head against the gusts of rain, she walked back to the station. He was there, lounging against the soot-covered wall under the giant wrought-iron clock.

‘Oh,’ she cried, laughing with relief, ‘I was beginning to think—’

‘The train was late. The guard wouldn’t shift till some of the guys got out of the carriage.’

He didn’t attempt to kiss her cheek, but she was too grateful at his arrival to be discouraged. She did recognise that some part of him resisted her. She saw in his cool untroubled eyes an absence of warmth as if he didn’t realise that he had been waiting all his life to find her. He was slow and unaware, locked in the protracted torpor of adolescence.

‘We can go to the movies,’ he said, looking at her rain-soaked clothes and her face yellow with powder.

‘I can’t go to the flicks now. It’s too late. I can’t be late home – me Auntie Nellie’s poorly.’

She loved walking with him, holding his arm. She hardly noticed the rain or how cold it had grown. In her head they spoke to one another tenderly, talking about the future, how they loved each other, moving through the town, he with his coat collar turned up against the wind, she with her head scarf trailing about her shoulders – arm in arm, completely silent in the Double Summertime. They walked almost to the Pier Head, sheltering under the black arch of the overhead railway that ran alongside the docks.

‘Is it like home?’ she wanted to know, listening to the sound of a train rumbling above them, thinking it was like a film she’d seen about America. The municipal gardens in front of the pier were deserted. The green benches dripped water. Spray rose above the river wall and blew like smoke across the bushes and the grass.

‘It ain’t nothing like home,’ he said.

They walked back to the town, thankful to have the wind behind them.

‘Don’t you wish we were in the country again?’ she asked, but he didn’t answer: he wouldn’t commit himself. If it had been the aunt’s, she would have taken the silence for moodiness. But he, she knew, used words sparingly. When the time came he would know how to talk to her. There were numerous bars and cafés, but she didn’t want to share him, nor did she think Auntie Nellie would approve of such places.

‘We ought to shelter from the rain,’ he said. ‘I guess you’re soaked right through.’

‘I don’t mind,’ she said truthfully, and he stopped quite still and touched the shoulder of her mackintosh. ‘You sure feel like a drowned rat.’

She stopped breathing with the hurt, blinking her eyes, not knowing where to look. Everything was suddenly cold and bleak, the black buildings rising into the grey sky, the street filled with strangers wrapped in one another’s arms.

‘I’ve got to get my tram now,’ she said, and in her head he pleaded with her: Please don’t leave me now – you’re pretty as a picture, you’re lovely as a rose garden.

They waited in the tram shelter outside Owen Owen’s and she studied the angle of his jaw as he turned to listen to the music of a dance band from the Forces Club across the street. When she boarded the tram he waved his hand in farewell, and she sat stiffly, holding her handbag to her chest, watching him for one brief moment as he sprinted across the street, before the tram clanged its bell and tore her from him.

6

Rita was in the first stage of her nightmare. As yet