The Palace of Strange Girls Read online

  The sight of the hotel bins is aggravated further by the appearance of two overturned buckets that roll back and forth as the wind shifts. Surely the hotel owns more by way of cleaning equipment than that? Ruth has a whole selection of buckets in her backyard. One for gathering up the hot ashes from the kitchen fire, one for scrubbing floors, another for washing windows and, finally, a monstrous aluminum bucket, twice the size of its iron counterparts, for “best.” In line with its elevated status this bucket stands in glorious isolation in the scullery, immaculately clean and gleaming with potential, waiting for the next load of cottons that need starching.

  Ruth’s ruminations on household equipment are interrupted by a cry of protest from her older daughter: “Isn’t it time I changed my skirt, Mum?”

  Ruth turns her gaze from the window. “I don’t know what you’re fussing about. That skirt will do another day. You’ve got clean underwear. You wouldn’t have that if I hadn’t spent half an hour in the laundry room last night.”

  This is not quite the irksome job it might appear. The hotel laundry room houses a brand-new Bendix Twin Tub. Under the pretext of hand-washing the family’s underwear, Ruth has admired the top-loader lids and neat hoses on the twin tub, seen the spinner in action. As the adverts say: “This is the future of household laundry.” Ruth has a Hotpoint Empress at home. With its built-in “automatic” wringer and Bakelite agitator it used to be the last word in laundry. But the advent of the Bendix Twin Tub has changed all that. Who would want the backache of hauling double sheets through the wringer if they could drop them in a spinner and pull them out forty minutes later drip free? This is the modern world of postwar Britain. A world made familiar to Ruth through magazines. A world she is determined to enter.

  Ruth turns her attention to her younger daughter. “Have you washed your face, Elizabeth? Elizabeth!”

  Beth has her head firmly in the I-Spy codebook. She is practicing stroking her cheek in the manner prescribed at the beginning of chapter 3 “Greeting other Redskins.” Beth has been rehearsing this move for the past four days but no one has yet responded.

  “Elizabeth!” Ruth says, taking her daughter firmly by the arm. “Are you listening? Have you washed your face?”

  “Yes.” It is a small lie. So small that it barely deserves the name. But it affords a morsel of revenge, a minor victory in the guerrilla war Beth has been waging since Easter, a war that Ruth is only dimly aware is being fought.

  “Looks more like a lick and a promise to me,” Ruth says, scanning her daughter’s face. “You could do with using a bit of soap next time.”

  “Can I have a summer dress today? Please. I hate wearing shorts. I look like a boy in them.”

  Ruth holds up the brown shorts. The weave is a right-hand twill, perfect for rough wear because it will resist snags and tears. And it won’t wear out. “Well, if these shorts and those sandals aren’t summery I don’t know what is,” she says. “I’ve only brought your sweater because we’ve got to keep you warm.”

  “Can I wear this?” Beth asks as she pulls a smocked cotton dress from the bottom of the pile. Beth has inherited the dress from her sister but has yet to be allowed to wear it.

  Ruth holds up the dress. “It might do,” she concedes. There follow a frantic ten minutes while Ruth tries and fails to fit the dress over Beth’s wool undershirt and fleece-lined liberty bodice. “It’s no good, Elizabeth. It’s not going to fit. Hold your arms up while I get it off.”

  Beth raises her arms as the dress is pulled up over her head, bringing the undershirt and liberty bodice with it. By the time Beth emerges from the struggle her face is the color of the rising sun—for a minute she looks healthy. In her haste to protect her daughter from any potential drafts Ruth yanks the undershirt back across Beth’s skin so sharply that the child flinches with pain. In another moment she is dressed in the prescribed brown knee-length shorts, olive-green sweater and thick socks to take up the slack in her sandals.

  “There. Now you’re done.” Ruth heaves a sigh with the effort involved in arming her daughter against all the sharp winds and torrential rain that Blackpool can offer in the middle of July.

  2

  Red-Eyed Sandhopper

  These little animals live between the tidemarks, chiefly under stones and in the rotting seaweed at the top of the beach. They are white with bright red eyes and five pairs of legs. Score 10 points for a bleary-eyed sandhopper.

  Jack has escaped early to buy a newspaper. With this end in mind he has made his way to the promenade in holiday mood. The sun is still a bit fitful but the air is fresh. He is easily tempted by the sea and so wanders over the tram tracks and pink tarmac to the edge of the promenade, takes a deep breath and gazes over the railings. The run-up to the annual Wakes Week holiday has been hectic. The weaving shed where Jack is foreman has been buzzing with talk of closure. Jack has spent the last week sorting out one problem after another, reorganizing shifts, dealing with strike threats and all the while continuing the daily struggle to keep output steady. Jack takes another deep breath and, determined to relax, gazes out to the horizon. The tide is coming in and the remaining strip of sand is empty save for a single figure, shoes in hand, making its way painfully over sand hard rippled by the tide. It’s Dougie.

  “Mornin’, Dougie! Up an’ at it already?” Jack shouts.

  The figure looks up and glares. Dougie Fairbrother is knee high to a grasshopper and walks like he’s fighting a gale. When he comes within hailing distance he yells, “What time is it, Jack?”

  “Just comin’ up to twenty past.”

  “What?” Receiving no immediate reply, he adds, “Twenty past what?”

  “Seven.”

  “That means I’ve been on this friggin’ beach for the best part of two bloody hours,” Dougie says as he makes his way slowly up the concrete steps that separate the beach from the prom. Jack shakes his head. He has known Dougie Fairbrother all his life. Jack was the first person Dougie went to when his wife walked out and it was Jack who got him sorted out with a solicitor. Dougie has developed a fair thirst since his divorce back in the spring. It’s eight in the morning and he’s still drunk from the night before. When Dougie finally reaches the top of the steps he stops to catch his breath. Dougie has worked in the weaving shed since he was fourteen, that’s the best part of twenty years filling his lungs with lint and dust.

  While he is puffing and blowing Jack remarks, “Aye, well, they say there’s no rest for the wicked. What happened to lying in bed, Dougie? I thought your lad had booked a double room.”

  “He did. But it’s otherwise occupied at the moment. The little bastard has got a lass from over yonder in with him.”

  Jack follows the direction of Dougie’s thumb and sees a strip joint on the corner opposite with all the hatches battened down. “Who’s he got in there?” he asks, hard pushed to hide his incredulity.

  “One of the strippers. I didn’t stop long enough to get her name and there were no bloody point asking Doug. Pound to a penny he wouldn’t know.”

  “So where did you sleep?”

  “I kipped down in the Residents’ Lounge. I was OK till the cleaners turned up at six and threw me out. I’ve been hanging around here on the off chance one of the lads turned up. I’m chilled to the bloody bone and gasping for a drink. They won’t open the hotel doors before nine at the earliest.”

  Jack puts his hand in his pocket and gives Dougie half a crown. “That’ll be enough to get you a pot of tea and some breakfast.”

  Dougie brightens immediately and says, “Thanks, Jack. E-e, but you should have come with us last night. We had a grand time. It was a good do.”

  “Looks like it,” replies Jack.

  Dougie blinks his bloodshot eyes and rubs a calloused hand over his sickly face. “We started off at Yates’s but, God help us, we ended up at the King o’ Clubs.”

  “I’m surprised you went back there. I thought you’d been thrown out last time,” Jack says as they cross the tramlin
es.

  “We were. It was Tapper’s fault. We sat through this load o’ guff about how we were going to see amazing things. Some tart wi’ her own version of pingpong, half a dozen Egyptian dancers, that sort of thing. We’d gone in to see Sheba, the star of the show. She was billed as ‘six foot of exotic woman, naked as God intended, from the distant reaches of deepest Africa.’ Tapper jumped up halfway through the spiel and yelled, ‘Well, bloody bring her out! I’ve summat here from Blackburn waiting for her!’ It took three of us, mind, but we managed to get Tapper to sit down again and button his fly. Nowt would have come of it if some lard-arse next to us hadn’t said summat smart. Tapper only got to throw three or four punches before we were out on our ears. Never a dull moment wi’ Tapper.”

  That much is true. Eddie Tapworth is the best tackler in the cotton shed. A giant of a man, he is built for the heavy job of lifting beams. He can keep his looms running all day. He’s not one of those tacklers who hang around making the weavers wait while they sort out a trapped or broken shuttle, or grumbling at Jack to chase up a shortage of spindles from the spinning rooms. Tapper sets to and does it himself. He could replace the used shuttles and put a fresh cop in faster than you could draw breath. He is one of the few tacklers who can reckon how much the shaft speed will increase when the leather drive belts from the looms shrink in the heat. If all the tacklers were as capable as Tapper, the foreman’s job would be a damn sight easier. When he’s sober, Jack has a good deal of time for Eddie Tapworth. But drunk it’s another matter. A few pints and Tapper would fight his own shadow if it followed him.

  “We’re off to the Winter Gardens tomorrow night,” Dougie continues. “You’d like. It’s Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen. Why don’t you come?”

  Jack rubs the angle of his jaw and shakes his head. “No, I’m not that bothered, Dougie.”

  “Come on! You’ve not lost your taste for jazz! I’ve known a time when I couldn’t get you to play a waltz straight without jazzing it up. We lost work for the band because of it. You were Blackburn’s answer to Jack Teagarden.”

  Jack’s expression is transformed by the memory. Laughter rumbles from deep in his chest while his gray eyes all but disappear above the curve of his cheekbones. He and Dougie got up to all sorts in the band before the war. He played trombone to Dougie’s trumpet. Jack had started off as bandleader—top hat, silk scarf, the lot. But it hadn’t taken long to sort out that it was the players who were getting all the girls. The bloke with the trombone in particular. Eddie Cummings couldn’t shift for skirt. When Jack promoted Eddie to bandleader and borrowed his trombone, things started looking up. Jack’s broad shoulders and ability to charm make him popular even now with the women. He may be in his late thirties but he takes care of himself. His blond hair is cut by the best barber in town and combed back into a series of shiny Brylcreemed tramlines.

  “No, I’ll give it a miss, Dougie. Kenny Ball’s a bit tame for me. I like the proper stuff—I saw Count Basie at the Tower a couple of years back. Cost an arm and a leg to get in, but it was worth every penny. Kenny Ball is just an amateur in comparison. I listened to a fair bit of jazz in Crete during the war.”

  “We were damn lucky to get Vera Lynn where I was stationed. Wasn’t it Crete where you met that bloke… the one that…?”

  “Yes. Nibs turned up one day with a gramophone and half a dozen jazz records. He’d brought them over from Greece. Got them from a black GI who was being posted back home. Only the Yanks would think to take a gramophone to war. I couldn’t get enough of it. The first time I heard Meade Lux Lewis playing ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues’ I cracked out laughing.”

  “Aye, well, Kenny Ball’s the best Blackpool can come up with. You sure you won’t come?”

  “No, I’ll give it a miss. I promised to see Tom Bell tomorrow night.”

  “What? The Union bloke? Now isn’t that a surprise!”

  “Oh, it’s nothing serious. He just wants a chat.”

  “Chat my arse. He’ll have summat up his sleeve. I bet he’s got wind of Fosters’ offer.”

  “You haven’t said anything, have you, Dougie? Nobody is supposed to know. I haven’t even told Ruth. I’m still thinking about it.”

  “Why haven’t you told Ruth? I’d have thought you’d have wanted to shout it from the rooftops. Bloody hell, Jack, they’ve offered you the top job. Manager of Prospect Mill. What’s there to think about? It’ll more than double your pay packet overnight. Get her told.”

  “She’s been distracted with Beth. And anyway I haven’t said I’ll take the job.”

  “Then you want your head examined, Jack. You should have bitten their hand off the minute it was offered. They should have made you up to manager years ago. You know more about cotton than all the Foster brothers put together.”

  “It’ll mean sitting behind a desk all day.”

  “You won’t catch Ruth complaining about that. I remember when we were kids on Bird Street. She had some fancy ideas even then. We used to tease the life out of her, but she’d never change her tune. She was going to get married, live in a beautiful house and have two children—a boy and a girl.”

  “That’s Ruth. Always knows exactly what she wants. But I still think I’d rather be busy in the weaving shed than sitting by myself in an office pushing papers around. I’ll get round to telling her. I’ve got other things on my mind at the moment.”

  “Anything you want to talk about?”

  Jack shakes his head. “No, no. It’s something and nothing. Not worth bothering with.”

  “Well, think on. There’ll be merry hell to pay if she finds out you’ve been keeping secrets.”

  Jack looks at his feet and moves his hand unconsciously up to the inside pocket of his jacket where he has hidden the letter. There are enough secrets in there to keep him busy for a fair bit and then some.

  “Anyway, how is she?”

  Jack looks confused; his mind has been elsewhere. “Who?”

  “Your Ruth.”

  Jack shakes his head. “She’s jiggered after all the upset with Beth. She didn’t want to come away for fear that Beth wouldn’t be up to it. We ended up having a fight about it. Ruth needs a holiday more than any of us. Still, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. The first thing she did when we got to the hotel was to set to and clean the washbasin.”

  “But Beth’s goin’ to be OK?”

  “Oh aye. Give her time, she’ll pull round. She’s a right little fighter.”

  “And how’s your Helen?”

  Jack smiles. “Still pushing to leave school this summer. It’s the usual do—she’s sixteen going on twenty-five.”

  “They’re all the same. Our Doug is only a year older and he thinks he knows it all. Never satisfied. ‘He wants jam on it’ as my old dad used to say. Talking of which, just take a look at this.” Dougie reaches into his pocket and pulls out a square of fabric and hands it to Jack.

  “Where did you get this?” Jack asks, turning the square over and back.

  “One of the lads from Whittaker’s. Says this is what they’re turning out nowadays.”

  “Are you sure Whittaker’s are weaving this?”

  “It’s right what I tell you. Look at the state of it. Lowest possible thread count and sized to glory.”

  Jack runs his thumbnail across the surface of the dry, brittle fabric and a small cloud of white powder rises. “It must be hell to weave. There’s no movement in it, no give.”

  “There’s more elastic in a tart’s knickers.”

  “I can’t believe Whittaker’s are using such poor-quality cotton staple that they’ve had to glue it together. They never used to use anything less than Egyptian or Sea Island cotton.”

  “Times have changed, Jack. You know that as well as I do. There’s no pride left in the business.”

  Dougie and Jack reach the pavement where they part, Dougie for breakfast at the nearest café, and Jack for a Daily Herald and twenty Senior Service cigarettes.

&nbs
p; On the way back from the newsagent’s Jack finds a bench on the prom, sits down and reaches for his cigarettes. The pack of untipped cigarettes is embossed in the center with a picture of a brawny sailor. Jack runs his thumb over the familiar relief as he pushes open the pack and lights his first cigarette of the day. Smoking is barely tolerated at home. Jack may smoke in the backyard or, if it is raining, in the scullery. Tab ends to be disposed of directly into the ash bin. There isn’t an ashtray in the house and Ruth refuses to buy one. Numberless though her household duties may be, emptying ashtrays is not one of them. Alcohol is subject to similar restrictions. The single bottle of sherry is brought out every Christmas and returned untouched to the darkest recesses of the sideboard every New Year. Ruth is running a house, not a public bar. She is teetotal, has been since the Temperance Society marched down Bird Street with their banners flying.

  Jack sighs and opens the paper, but he’s too distracted by memories of his friend to read. Nibs was barely five foot six, thin as a rake. He seemed to be in a permanent sweat. His skin shone like it was newly oiled and he couldn’t speak without using his hands to illustrate his point. He looked like a windmill in a gale when he got upset. He had run a pet shop in London before the war. A typical Cockney—loads of patter and plenty of old buck when things weren’t going his way. But he loved animals. It didn’t matter where they were, there’d be some mangy mongrel or moth-eaten cat at his heels. In Heraklion Nibs had put his hand halfway down an Alsatian’s throat to pull out a sliver of bone that was blocking the dog’s windpipe. The dog had promptly vomited and then nipped Nibs on the ankle as he was walking away. He’d always taken in strays and the fact that he was in the middle of a war didn’t make any difference. He argued that there wasn’t much to choose between dogs and men. “Sometimes, even with the best will in the world, you can’t save them and there’s no point in even trying. It’s kinder to have done and put them out of their bloody misery.” The memory is a bitter one, considering how things turned out. Jack shakes himself and rubs his hand across his forehead as if to wipe away the memory. He lights another cigarette and stares out across the empty sands, a look of hopelessness on his face.