Cross Your Heart, Connie Pickles (14 page)

Julie came on and said something in a tiny whisper which I decoded as ‘hello’.

‘Is it glandular fever?’ I said.

‘Tonsillitis,’ she whispered. ‘Thank God.’

‘What a relief.’ I added lots of sympathetic things and then, ‘So we’re doing brilliantly on the anti-Uncle Bert campaign.’

She uttered a painful high squeaking noise which I took for encouragement.

‘Yes. And well done you for last Sunday. Don’t know what you did, but it worked.’

She gave another squeak.

‘Though I’ve had to be quite busy since. Marie puked up all over him and I think that really put him off. And now I’m hard at work finding Mother another man.’ And then I told her all about Victor Savonaire.

She gave a terrible strangulated laugh which turned into a cough. I think she croaked ‘Leakey The Chemist?’ But then her Mum took the phone off her.

‘That’s enough for tonight, Connie,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she’ll be back next week. You can catch up with each other then. Thanks for ringing.’

So that’s that. I’m on my own for now. And I’m not doing too badly.

PS Isn’t Savonaire a heavenly name? Like posh soap.

Saturday 8 March

The chemist’s, out the back, 11 a.m.

I got up
really, really early and I’ve been frantically busy ever since. Full of hope and expectation. And other more confused emotions, of which more later.

I’ve left the house all ready. There is a cake, plump and sweet, sitting in the ice-cream carton we use as a tin in the kitchen. I dusted it with sugar, so it would look like the kind of cake they have in French patisseries. (Julie and I spent a lot of time in French patisseries on the day trip to Boulogne.) There are cucumber sandwiches – Victor Savonaire definitely looks like a cucumber-sandwich man – under cling film in the fridge. And there is a tray ready-laid, complete with teapot, cups and milk jug (the one Marie decorated with kangaroos at one of those do-it-yourself pottery places. Or I think they’re kangaroos. They might be cows).

When I showed Mother what I’d done she said, ‘
Monange
.’ She was a bit distracted because Marie and Cyril were fighting over the plastic dinosaur that came in a new packet of corn pops. I hope she remembers to sieve the sugar.

I walked to work feeling very organized and bossy, omnipotent like a Roman emperor, or the matriarch of some large ungainly family, like in the Mafia or something. I was unbeatable. I keep thinking how impressed Julie will be with me.

I was brought down to earth before I got to the chemist’s, because I met William in front of the station. He was waiting for his brother and he seemed to be in a bad mood.

‘Where’re you off to?’ I said. ‘Football? Away match in some hellhole end of the universe?’

‘Nope,’ he said, scowling. He had a little scrap of loo roll stuck just below his ear. ‘No, Kevin wants to go on the march today. You know, in the park?’

I did know. I’d seen it on the news – there’s been bombing in the last few days; a lot of buildings blown up, some casualties – but Victor Savonaire had put it out of my mind.

‘That’s good,’ I said, noticing that William looked quite handsome now his hair was growing out a little bit. Mind you, it needed a wash.

‘No, it’s not.’ He rubbed his hand across his nose (not attractive). ‘We’re away at Arsenal. I want to go to that. And what’s the point of marching? What difference will we make? It’s all happening too far away. It’s nothing to do with us. It’s pointless.’

I was still thinking about that when I arrived at the shop. John Leakey was behind the counter, looking cross.

‘So your mum’s boyfriend’s happy?’ he said when he saw me.

I didn’t immediately grasp what he meant. I must have just stared at him blankly.

‘A show of might and all that.’ He gestured to a new poster in the window. It was advertising the march in the park. ‘Troublemaking, I’m afraid. Some of us feel it’s not a good thing seeing innocent people die. Let alone the knock-on effect on merchandising or whatever it was.’ His beetle-brows seemed to meet in the middle.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘Awful.’ But I didn’t really mean it. I was thinking how magnificent some people look when they’re angry.

He stared at me. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes, it is.’ He gave his head a little shake and then said, ‘Right. Sorry. Connie, can you and Gail manage this morning? I’ve got Sanjay, the locum, coming in. I’m off to –’

‘The march?’ I said, gesturing to the poster.

He nodded. ‘Yup. Sorry. I just think it’s important to make a stand. You know, when you believe in something strongly’

I nodded. ‘Of course.’ I got my overall on and picked up the price gun.

But I couldn’t concentrate. I’d forgotten about the war. I’d been so determined to watch the news and follow it. And I haven’t, really. Not a lot. My own life has taken over. It’s all begun to seem such a long way away – like William said – and nothing to do with me. Also, worst of all, I did see the news last night and I did see the bombs go off, but I’d been too busy worrying about Victor Savonaire’s cake to think any more about it.

After a while I said, ‘Mr Leakey, I mean John?’

‘Yes?’

‘I think you’re so good to go on the march. I think you’re magnifi–remarkable, really You know, to care and to notice and…’

He didn’t look up from his accounts. ‘You have to make a stand.’

‘Even if it doesn’t make a difference? Even if it isn’t the right thing? I mean, how do you know whether a war is a good thing or a bad thing?’

He looked up now. ‘That, Connie, you have to work out for yourself. You mustn’t listen to me, or your mum’s boy friend. You have to work it out for yourself. It’s that simple.’

‘I know’ I priced a few more toothpaste tubes and then stopped again. I wanted to tell him something –something really awful – and I was worried that if I did he wouldn’t like me any more. But I also knew that he would listen. There is something so understanding about him. He takes you seriously, even if you’re only fourteen.

‘Mr Leakey? John? You know last night, the bombing? I saw it, and the houses being destroyed, and I knew there were real people in the houses who were being killed, but it’s only now, talking to you, that I sort of realize they are people like you and me. They didn’t seem –’ Could I tell him? ‘They didn’t seem as real somehow. Do you know what I mean?’

He’d been working on the other side of the counter to me, but when I said this he came round and leant against the shelves just by me. ‘That’s very honest of you.’ He considered for a while. ‘It’s very easy to feel that. It’s like watching a film. It can even be exciting. That’s why war is a dangerous thing. It’s desensitizing. It becomes something other than it is, which is everyday and brutal.’

I nodded, but I didn’t look up. I felt shy suddenly because he was so close. He took my hand and squeezed it. His grasp felt firm and warm. His breath smelt of tea and mints. He said, ‘Connie, at sixteen, you have to start listening to other people and drawing your own conclusions. Don’t just follow the crowd, or me.’

‘At sixt–’ I began. I looked up and then remembered. Our eyes met. His lashes are so long you’d think they’d get tangled. I felt this weird tight feeling in my stomach, like butterflies and nausea muddled up, the feeling you get at the back of your throat when you’ve been running fast, or cycling, but it wasn’t in my throat, it was further down in the depths of my chest, like everything was taut.

I laughed to cover my embarrassment and said, ‘Anyway, the good news is he’s not her boyfriend any more.’

‘Who isn’t?’ He had returned to the till as if nothing had happened.

‘My mum’s boyfriend isn’t my mum’s boyfriend any more.’

He looked up from the roll of receipts he’d been studying and laughed. ‘That’s good, then, isn’t it? Because we don’t like him, do we?’

I laughed too. He was back on the other side of the counter, but for a moment there, it was him and me against the world. ‘No,’ I said, ‘we don’t.’

Chemist’s counter, 4 p.m.

The time is dragging really slowly. Sanjay, a studious lad straight out of college, is keeping himself to himself out the back. The only time we talk is when I say, ‘Nurofen!’, holding up a box, and he nods. When it’s busy Gail tends to get quite flustered. But when it’s quiet she taps the stool next to her and says, ‘Come and perch yourself down here.’ Today she wanted to know how I was getting on with my ‘BF’, whether things were OK between us now. I forgave the ‘BF’ –it’s her attempt to sound streetwise even if her street does lead to some jolly-hockey-sticks school of the fifties. I told her everything between me and my ‘BF’ was hunky-dory.

I asked after her mother, who is ‘bearing up’ in hospital, we sold some whitening toothpaste, and then she said, ‘And your young man, all well there?’

‘What young man?’ I answered.

‘The one on the bike, who spends the whole of Saturday afternoon cycling up and down outside the shop, pretending not to look in.’

‘He doesn’t!’ I looked out of the window, but the street was empty.

‘He does,’ she said in a sing-song voice. ‘Though I haven’t seen him yet today’

‘That’s because he’s gone to the march.’

‘Told you so!’ She thought she’d caught me out.

‘He’s not my young man,’ I insisted. ‘He’s just a friend. I don’t even –’

‘What?’ She was laughing at me.

I looked over my shoulder to check Sanjay wasn’t listening. ‘I don’t even fancy him. He’s not my type.’ (What is my type? Also, what’s William playing at? Why’s he spying on me?)

I wonder what’s happening at home. Victor Savonaire should be there now. I hope Mother remembered the icing sugar. I hope they’re having fun. Maybe they’ve finished tea and have moved on to wine. (French, I bet. There’s nothing poncey New World about him.)

5 p.m.

Off home now. I can’t wait to see how things have gone.

Halfway to Richmond, 7 p.m.

Oh, woe.

I’m on the bus on my way to visit Julie with a heavy heart.

I opened the door very noisily – in case Mother and Victor Savonaire needed warning – but I needn’t have bothered. The sitting room was empty. So was the kitchen. Worse. On the counter was the tea tray, just as I’d left it. I opened the ice-cream carton to find an
uncut cake
. And in the fridge, twinkling defiantly out at me from beneath their cling-film wrapper, was a pile of
uneaten cucumber sandwiches
. Wrong. One corner had been disturbed. A pile of uneaten cucumber sandwiches minus one.