“Elizabeth,” said Mr. Boakle. Briefly, Lizzie felt like she was in The Apprentice and wondered if he was going to point a big finger at her like Alan Sugar did, and growl, “You’re FIRED!” like a big grizzly bear, but he didn’t.
“I’m going to have to let you go. I’m really, really sorry.”
“But . . . but . . .”
“You’re young,” said Mr. Boakle. “There’s a big wide world out there. You should go and see some of it.”
“And how would I pay for that?” said Lizzie, feeling a huge lump in her throat.
Back in Brandford, their mother groaned a little and lifted up her legs again. They really were killing her. Oh well. She thought about her girls. She worried about them so much, she really did. Penny was out and about all over the place, never stopping, never eating a proper meal, and she didn’t even want to think about the kind of people she was hanging out with. Penny reminded her so much of Stephen it wasn’t funny. She was her father’s daughter all right.
And Lizzie was quite the opposite, seemed entirely happy to spend the evening with her old mum, eating choccy and catching up on the soaps. That didn’t seem right either. She’d wanted so much . . . well, wanting didn’t help anything, did it? It felt like such a long time ago, before she’d had them, when she’d met Stephen and everything had felt exciting and full of promise, and she’d been a young girl about town. He’d been so handsome and different from the boys she’d known at school. She’d grown up in Brandford, and headed to London as soon as she could, finding a job in Chelsea Girl, sharing a tiny, freezing flat in Bermondsey with four other girls. She’d loved it. They’d all shared clothes and spent all their money going up to town and having a laugh. She’d even had dreams of taking up acting. Best time of her life.
And Stephen. He’d swept her off her feet without a second thought. And she’d fallen for it too, completely. Upmarket boy like him, bit of Essex trash like her. Why had she thought it could work? But she’d thought it would be fine, that love would pull them through.
She remembered, after five whirlwind months, the mixture of terror and excitement she’d felt on finding herself in the pudding club. Her mother would have a fit. But he’d do the right thing—Stephen Willis was a proper, well-brought-up boy, not like the drunken wife beaters from around her area. She hadn’t known it was babies then, not till the doctor said he thought he heard two heartbeats.
In a pub in Chelsea, on a really lovely sunny autumn day, around the corner from his mum’s cluttered flat, he’d had a port and lemon (she was paying), and she’d had a Bacardi and lime (they weren’t so hot on not drinking during pregnancy in those days), and she’d broken the news. He’d just stared into his glass.
“Darling,” he’d said. “You daft cow. You stupid cow. That’s no good, is it?”
And his handsome face—Penny looked just like him—had twisted up into a mean look, and his eyes had turned cold on her, just like that.
She’d managed, of course. Well, she’d had to. Oh, the neighbors had been awful; that Eilish Berry, thinking she was better than them, taking herself off to London, and back less than a year later with a bun in the oven. Two buns, actually. Her mother had been furious to begin with, and softened, inevitably, when the babies came. They’d got their own council house and they’d all been there ever since, even though the estate just got worse and worse. She’d liked working at the school when the girls were little, she could walk there with them and home again at night and be off at holiday times. Until they got to about ten, of course, when Penny disowned her completely through embarrassment, which she didn’t seem to have shaken off now, seventeen years later. Eilish sighed.
She hadn’t seen Stephen much after that; he’d practically disappeared off the radar altogether. His mother, though, had tried—sent her some money and some ludicrously impractical knitted outfits, itchy and full of buttons. She’d taken the girls over there a few times when they were small, but Stephen’s mother’s place was a terrible mess, a huge old apartment in Chelsea that she’d filled with junk since his father had died. Mrs. Willis was a bit like one of these shut-ins, with piles of newspapers all over the place. It wasn’t hygienic, and it took four hours to get there and back and the girls screamed so hard that, after a while, they just stopped and got on with their own lives. She’d watched the girls. It wasn’t as if having no dad was particularly unusual in their part of the world. He’d visited for a while, every now and again, turning up with toys. Whenever he left, Lizzie would sit by the doorway for the next two days in case he came back. Penny would bite everyone in their nursery. She didn’t think they’d remember; they were three when he stopped.
Then they’d seemed all right, until they’d hit their teens. Lizzie had gained puppy fat she couldn’t grow out of. She never mentioned it, just gradually became more and more introverted till now, in her twenties, she barely went out at all. There’d been hardly any boyfriends—that last chap was a plank of wood—but she seemed happy to sit at home and watch life pass her by.
Penny on the other hand turned wild. She couldn’t get out of the house fast enough, up to all sorts of trouble. She’d done her best, thought Eilish. She’d tried to get Lizzie to be more sociable, while at the same time keep Penny in check. Forcing them together only made Lizzie more painfully shy and Penny more outrageous than ever, but she was glad they were still together.
“Look out for Penny,” she said to Lizzie all the time, till Lizzie worried sick. “She’s not sensible like you. She could do something stupid in a heartbeat.”
And she would have told Penny to look after Lizzie too, if Penny would listen to her, or stop for just a second. But she didn’t.
Probably for the best their dad never appeared again. But she still had her lovely girls.
“Oi! You! Wanker!” Penny was shouting at the back of a departing fat man, part of a group of blowhard salesmen who’d come in for lunch to celebrate some bonus, then acted like they were city millionaires, ordering ridiculous cocktails and not drinking them, making her run around, asking if they could order “off menu,” to which Penny had retorted that they’d cook one of their heads if they could fit it in the deep-fat fryer. They’d guffawed lustily and asked her if this was one of those American theme bars where the women wore bikinis, and she’d said no, it was one of those American theme bars where everyone tipped 20 percent. Whereupon they’d got up to go, leaving a catastrophe of thrown food, knocked-over glasses, and ripped-up paper napkins, and they’d left her . . . a pound.
She held it up in the air.
The fat man turned around. He had grease from his surf and turf platter spattered all down his Crazy Frog tie.
“What?” he said.
She held the pound coin out to him.
“You left this behind.”
His Neanderthal brow furrowed in incomprehension.
“That’s for you, darlin’,” he said.
“You’d have got more if you’d have given us a quick flash,” said a weaselly-faced man next to him. He looked at his watch. “There’s still time!”