When Daddy Comes Home (3 page)

D
uring the weeks after her father’s return to prison, a barrier of distrust replaced the warmth of friendship between Ruth and her daughter. There was an invisible wall between them, this time constructed by Antoinette. The betrayal she had felt when she saw her father sitting in their living room was too much for her to overcome and she wanted to get out and run away as far as she could, but she knew that was not an option open to her.

Now that she had amassed some savings to put towards her dream of secretarial college, Antoinette still wanted to follow her plan of working away for the summer despite her experience on the Isle of Man. Hundreds of Irish girls would leave their homes to work the summer season at the holiday camps, hotels and guest houses of the mainland. With accommodation and all meals provided, along with high wages and good tips from happy holidaymakers, they could return with a substantial sum of money.

She’d already got a job at Butlins lined up for the summer season and her father’s date of permanent release, eighteen months earlier than the sentence handed down, was due before her departure. Could she bear staying at home after he had joined them there?

Up until now, she had not wanted to leave her mother, but faced with her perfidy and the prospect of having to share a house with her father, she longed to go. But if she left before she had earned enough money, she would use up her savings and have to say goodbye to funding further education. Without those all-important secretarial qualifications, she knew she was looking at a future of waitressing or shop work.

‘What choice do I have?’ she asked herself. She would be homeless. Nobody would rent a room to a girl who was under eighteen, even if she could have earned enough to support herself.

The money she could earn at the camp, though, added to what she had already saved, would pay for the secretarial course she so desperately wanted to take. With qualifications, she would be free to leave home, get her own flat in Belfast and be independent of her parents.

I’m frightened for my future, she told herself. I’ve seen too many middle-aged women trying to scrape a living by working long hours in second-rate restaurants, while the younger girls are given plenty of work at the better places where tips are high. Her jumbled thoughts scuttled around in her brain until she saw she had no option but to stay.

Every Saturday morning since Antoinette had lived at the gate lodge, she had seen the billowing white furls of the dance marquee being erected in an enterprising local farmer’s fields. On a Saturday night, she had heard the beat of a band as the music floated in the evening air. She would lean out of her bedroom window as far as she could, straining to hear more while she looked longingly at the huge tent. Lit up by the many lights inside, it glowed against the dark
of the sky, looking for all the world like a giant illuminated marshmallow.

She knew that in there, young people entered their own world where they had their own music, wore their own fashions and had fun. As she craned out of her bedroom window, she remembered what her mother had to say on the subject.

‘Nice girls don’t go to such places, dear. If a boy wants to take you out then he comes to the house and collects you properly. You certainly don’t go looking for him in there.’ Ruth would always add her strange humourless laugh to her pronouncement and smile her bright, empty smile.

Whenever her mother said this to her, Antoinette always replied obediently, ‘No, Mummy’, and was content to stay in with her mother, spending the evening pleasing Ruth by keeping her company.

Thing had changed now, though. Now she wanted to be part of that world she could see through her bedroom window. She wanted to go to the marquee. Weekends were going to become party time for her; she was going to mix with other teens and live as they did. She was certain that other girls’ lives were not centred on their mothers but on fashion, makeup and weekend dances, and she wanted the same.

Antoinette looked at herself in the mirror, giving her reflection a cool, appraising look. She knew she was different. Even apart from her English accent, her clothes were old-fashioned and her dark brown hair, falling almost to her shoulders in a page-boy cut, was more suitable to a fourteen-year-old than a girl of seventeen. It was all down to Ruth’s influence.

Not any more, thought Antoinette wistfully. I want to be like other girls. I’m going to be fashionable.

She thought of the groups of happy, confident young people she often served at the coffee bar when she worked
the evening shift. The boys with their neatly cut hair, dressed in jackets and well-pressed trousers, might look like younger versions of their fathers but the girls had created their own style, one that looked as though it had very little to do with their mothers. Their hair was teased into the new fashionable beehive, and their faces were coated in a pale pan stick that contrasted harshly with their black-lined eyes which peered out at the world through thickly mascaraed lashes.

Antoinette’s skin saw only a flick of powder, her lips wore a natural pink lipstick and her eyes were only enhanced by one coat of mascara. This set her apart from her contemporaries almost as much as her clothes did.

I’ll start at once, she decided.

The glamorous, swinging sixties had begun and with them came a new affluence. Blue-collar workers became part of the middle classes and housing estates sprung up everywhere, offering young couples the chance to own their box-like house, identical to all the others nearby. Cars were parked outside every house, television aerials decorated every roof and the words ‘hire purchase’ replaced ‘debt’. This was a boom time, and it brought with it a new youth culture that Antoinette longed to be a part of. Teenagers had found an assurance their parents had never known, and in their leisure time they danced to the new rock ‘n’ roll, went to cafés, drank cappuccinos and talked confidently together. They refused to be younger versions of their parents and instead invented their own fashions and attitudes.

These were the people Antoinette wanted to mix with and to do so she knew she would have to change. She could do
little about her English accent but she could certainly change her appearance.

A very different Antoinette began to emerge. She bought tight dresses and hid them at the back of her wardrobe, along with stiletto-heeled shoes and new underwear. A hairdresser recommended by one of her youthful customers worked his magic and made the neatly cut dark brown hair disappear. In its place was a back-combed beehive. Plucked eyebrows now accented eyes that had grown harder, and a loss of appetite turned her once-plump shape into a more fashionable slim one.

Ruth watched the transformation, puzzled and displeased. She was used to unquestioning obedience from a child that had always sought approval, and she was taken by surprise by this sudden rebellion. While she did nothing to stop it, she fought back subtly, using her skill with words to manipulate her daughter and provoke the reaction she wanted. She used words full of hurt and bewildered anger for her emotional blackmail.

‘I don’t know why you want to make me unhappy. Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough?’ she would say plaintively.

But Antoinette refused to listen.

As the new, fashionable Antoinette took shape, she found that the girls who frequented the coffee shop now chatted to her. Her new friends’ main interests were make-up, teenage fashion and how to get a boyfriend, and these interests took up most of their mental energy. Antoinette was grateful for this, as it left them with little curiosity about Antoinette’s home life, so she didn’t need to use the false one she had created: a happy home, a loving mother and a father who worked away.

The weekend when Antoinette decided she was going to complete her transformation arrived. The process took hours. First, a bright orange dye was washed through her hair and then she set about drying it and teasing it into that fashionable shape so loved by teenage girls and despaired of by their parents: it rose high above her hair, stiffened into place with a generous squirting of lacquer. It was so thickly coated that a comb could hardly penetrate it.

Then, her face. She took a pan stick and covered her skin with it so that she was strangely pale. She ringed her eyes so heavily in black liner that they appeared to have shrunk in size. Then she took up the latest addition to her fast-growing make up collection: a small plastic box complete with mirror containing a cake of black mascara. Generous gobbets of spit turned the black cake into a gooey mess which she carefully applied to her lashes. After each coat, she added another until the thickened lashes nearly weighed down the lids. Finally, the natural colour of her mouth was obliterated by the palest of gleaming pink lipstick studiously applied to puckered lips as she practised pouting in front of the mirror.

She looked at her reflection, pleased with what she saw. She pursed her lips and smiled. Much to her satisfaction, the mirror showed no sign of the shy studious teenager her mother knew, nor of the old-fashioned girl that worked at the coffee bar. No, this was a modern girl, one who shared the assurance of the people she admired.

She felt as though she had emerged from a cocoon, and had shed the safe skin of ‘obedient daughter’. Deep down, she still lacked the confidence to be completely sure of the outcome of her metamorphosis but she tried to put that out of her mind.

Instead, she welcomed her new image. She pouted at the girl in the mirror.

‘Goodbye, Antoinette,’ she said. ‘Hello, Toni.’

Her new self was born and she was a girl ready to party on a Saturday night.

N
ow that Antoinette looked the part, the girls she’d met at the coffee bar invited her to share Saturday evenings with them. They would meet in groups and descend in a pack on the local dance venues, spending the evening dancing, giggling and flirting with the boys.

At last, Antoinette felt herself accepted. More than anything else, she wanted friends and the companionship of other young people. She needed desperately to be part of a group, to giggle companionably with them and to have what she had been missing her entire life: fun.

One Saturday morning, she excitedly watched the beginning of the conversion of the nearby field from muddy site into a magic place. At last she was finally going to enter that secret world, the one where teenagers dressed in the height of fashion, danced the night away, passed cigarettes around to appear sophisticated and drank smuggled-in alcohol. She couldn’t wait.

She watched as coils of electric cables were run from large, noisy, diesel-fuelled generators to provide the sparkling lights that shone on the dancers. She saw a huge glitter ball,
something she had only seen before on television, being carried into the tent.

Sections of wooden floors to be laid over the damp earth were taken in and then, once that was in place, the furniture followed. A small army of helpers carried in folding tables and an assortment of chairs was placed in groups around the hastily erected wooden dance floor. She had been told that there would be a bar inside, but that it only offered soft drinks. Anything stronger had to be smuggled in but that wasn’t difficult. Customers with bulging pockets were given a cursory search by good-natured security guards as they looked for forbidden alcohol they seldom found. The walls of the marquee were easily raised and small bottles full of spirits slid under its folds to the eager hands of their co-conspirators.

Antoinette liked drinking. Ever since her father had first introduced her to the intoxication of spirits, she had enjoyed the sensation of numbness and relaxation that alcohol brought. While most teenagers were just discovering how to drink, Antoinette was a practised hand. Even now she liked to keep a bottle in her room so that she could take fortifying sips when she needed them. As soon as she had looked old enough, she had been able to buy it herself from off-licences, pretending it was for her mother.

At the moment, Antoinette had a small bottle of vodka, her chosen spirit, hidden in her room, in the belief that her breath would not be tainted by its smell. She did not know how easily available spirits were at the dances, so she decided to have some before she left, and poured herself a generous helping.

Fuelled by a double-vodka-induced confidence, she put on her American tan stockings, pinning them to her pink suspender belt. Then she slithered into a dress so tight that it nearly bound her knees together and forced her feet into
high white stilettos. She teased her hair as high as it would go, then sprayed it with a coloured lacquer, turning it into a bright orange halo. As she applied her make-up, her face lost its glow and became deadly pale. Two black-rimmed eyes, more panda than doe-like, looked into the mirror one more time and she was delighted with what she saw. Now she was ready to hobble the short distance from the gate lodge to the marquee.

As she went downstairs and into the sitting room, Antoinette gave scant thought to what her mother’s reaction would be when she was face to face with her daughter’s transformation. But she heard the shocked intake of breath as she entered, and quickly averted her eyes from Ruth’s horrified face as she made her way towards the front door. She didn’t care what her mother thought. At last she was going to swing her tightly encased hips on the dance floor and that evening that was all that mattered to her.

For once Ruth was speechless and before she could regain her voice, Antoinette made her hasty exit.

‘I’m off now!’ she called unnecessarily as she closed the door firmly behind her.

A pack of girls, all dressed in similar attire to Antoinette, was waiting for her in the queue that had already formed outside the marquee. Once admitted, they made their way to the ladies’ toilets where, giggling and chattering, they preened in front of the mirrors. Handbags snapped open for the teenage ritual of repairing make-up. They did not give a thought to the fact that a ten-minute walk from their homes to the tent was hardly likely to have disturbed their hours of work. Hair was once again tweaked and teased then sprayed liberally, filling the air with a cloud of cheap perfume. The tail end of a comb was inserted into the construction, lifting it
even higher, and only then were they satisfied there was nothing more that could be done to it.

The girls carefully inspected their faces to make sure that enough make-up had been applied to mask their young complexions, and slicked on another coating of lipstick. Then, once content with the apparition in the mirror, the girls turned their attention to pinning, helping each other insert strategically placed safety pins into the long zipper of their dresses.

‘Come on,’ said one pert blue-eyed blonde to Antoinette. ‘I’ll fix you. Where are your pins?’

‘I’ve not got any,’ she replied. ‘What are they for?’

There was a peal of girlish laughter at her naivety.

‘Well, if you don’t want to end up with your dress down to your waist, you have to pin. The boys will have been drinking at the pub and you know what that does,’ said the girl, and she exchanged knowing smiles with her more experienced friends.

Until that moment, Antoinette had been completely unaware that zippers presented such irresistible temptation to the youths at the dance hall. She had only thought as far ahead as dancing and hadn’t given any consideration to what the boys might expect. She gulped as a picture came into her mind of a horde of drunken youths with sweaty hands and ‘one thing only on their minds’.

Sally, the blonde-haired girl who was the oldest in the group, saw the look of fear that had crossed her new friend’s face.

‘Don’t look so scared,’ she said, trying to reassure her. ‘Most of the boys are just here for the crack. Oh, they won’t say no to a chance but you’ll be all right. Anyhow those pins put them off and stop their sweaty hands from climbing. I’ll lend you a couple.’

Antoinette obediently turned round and Sally carefully inserted the safety pins on the inside of her dress, placing them along the zipper until the last one was pinned at the top of the dress. Once their dresses tugged back into shape, the girls made their way into the main part of the marquee where the band was already playing a fast number.

Antoinette found her feet were tapping to the music and felt her nervousness evaporate as she saw groups of youngsters all around her sitting, chatting or swinging their bodies on the dance floor.

The girls bought soft drinks and then talked nineteen to the dozen to each other while their eyes scanned every male present. The group took their seats. Boys dressed in sports jackets and trousers with firmly pressed centre creases walked in front of them before approaching to ask for a dance. When they were asked, the girls would look up, smile an acceptance and then, holding their dance partner’s hand, allow him to lead her on to the dance floor.

Suddenly, Antoinette heard a voice ask, ‘Would you like to dance?’

Looking up, she saw the smiling round face of a boy not much older than she was. She took his outstretched hand and did as she had seen her friends do, following him to the floor. She tried to remember the steps she had practised at home; then the rhythm of the band took over and she felt herself being swung into a jive.

It was a wonderful feeling and she was so happy that she remembered the moves of the new dances which she had only tried before in front of the mirror, with Judy as her only audience.

After the first dance, her partner requested a second and then a third. Then the band took a break and, buoyed up with
confidence after her dances, she thanked her partner and rejoined her friends. Their group was a popular one, for they were vivacious girls out for a night of fun and their heavy make-up had not succeeded in masking their natural prettiness. Dance after dance was asked for, smuggled vodka spiked their drinks and Antoinette felt her confidence grow as, with flushed cheeks, she swung in time to the beat of the band.

Her first dance partner reclaimed her for the final dance. As the lights were dimmed, the slow music of the last waltz was the only sound she could hear. Alcohol made her body relax and she gave herself up to the pleasurable feel of being held, laying her head against his shoulder as they circled the floor. She raised her head while the music still played and felt a damp cheek with its light fuzz pressing against hers. Hands climbed uncertainly above her waist until they rested only a fraction below her breasts. Antoinette instinctively arched her back to avoid body contact. She removed one hand from around his shoulders as she covered his hand lightly, smiling as she gave a slight shake of her head. With that, she established that she liked him but was not easy.

She knew that if she wanted to be accepted by her group of new friends, she had to learn the games played by the sexes and the unspoken codes they communicated with.

Her dance partner was not ready to recognize defeat. Even with her hand still keeping his in place, he lowered his face to hers and she felt his lips searching for her mouth while the other hand tried in vain to mould her body to his.

Antoinette threw back her head, looked him in the eye and gave a light laugh while her body tensed against his manoeuvres. Seeing that she was a nice girl even if her appearance belied that fact, he slackened his hold and smiled
back sheepishly. Boys of that age, as she was to learn, dreamt about finding easy girls but they very seldom succeeded.

Then the band played the last notes and the lights came on again. Happy and tired, Antoinette said goodbye to her girlfriends and returned home, the smell of cigarettes still clinging to her hair and the tang of alcohol still on her breath.

The smell lingered until the following morning when she came down to find her mother sitting in her armchair, waiting for her. She saw the look of disapproval on her mother’s face as she recognized the familiar odour of stale alcohol and tobacco.

‘Well, did you enjoy yourself last night?’ asked Ruth, in tones that said she hoped for the contrary.

Her daughter, still wrapped in the glow of happiness from her first dance, refused to rise to the bait. ‘Yes, thank you, Mummy,’ she replied calmly.

‘You know you looked a complete spectacle last night. Of course I can’t stop you spending your money on what you like. But you’re never to come out with me like that. I don’t want to be embarrassed.’ Ruth stood up and went to leave the room, but before she did, she delivered her parting shot. ‘I don’t know what your father will say about all this when he gets home.’

Too dazed by what she’d heard even to gasp, Antoinette stood staring after her mother. The pleasure from the night before drained away, replaced by a seed of panic. She never thought she would hear her mother say such a thing to her and it terrified her.

Over the next few weeks, the seed would take root, spreading until it invaded her dreams, making her nights restless as the panic rose, threatening to suffocate her.