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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.
Chapter Seven
Antoinette was soon going to dance halls every week. Soon, when she returned from the dances, another smell lingered on her breath: the smell of vomit. She had become unable to say no to another drink, even when the room was spinning and her stomach churned with nausea.
It became a familiar routine. As soon as she had hurriedly left the dance hall or marquee, the cold night air would hit her full face on but she had consumed too much alcohol for it to sober her. Instead, waves of queasiness would rise in her throat, making her gag. Holding a handkerchief to her mouth she would stagger to the shelter of the shadows cast by parked cars, hoping that she was hidden from view. Then, placing one hand on the boot of the nearest vehicle, she would try to keep her balance whilst, with eyes streaming, she would bend almost double as her body heaved with the effort of rejecting the alcohol. Hot bile would spurt out of her mouth, burning her throat as it did so until she felt there was nothing left inside her.
Then depression, the natural successor of alcohol-fuelled elation, would always swamp her as she wiped her mouth with a scrap of handkerchief, straightened up and resumed her wobbly walk home.
Her experience of alcohol when she was younger had shown her that it could help to dull mental anguish as well as physical pain. But she did not realize that she had crossed the narrow boundary that lay between a drink-fuelled party girl and an alcohol-dependent teenager. Even if she had realized that she had a problem, she would not have cared. All she knew was that with each sip she took, the better she felt: her fear receded, her misery disappeared and her confidence grew. She could tell stories that made people laugh, feel she was accepted as part of a group and, once in bed, escape her thoughts in a drink-induced stupor.
But there was a price to pay. On Sunday mornings, she wakened reluctantly, unwilling to face the results of the previous night’s excesses. Her head pounded. From behind her eyes and across her head, waves of pain shot into her skull. Her tongue felt swollen, her throat dry, and all she wanted to do was stay under the bedclothes for the remainder of the day. But she refused to give her mother satisfaction by giving in to her self-inflicted misery; she knew that Ruth already thought she had enough reason to complain about her daughter’s behaviour without Antoinette giving her fresh ammunition.
Instead, she tried to recall the night before. She would see the dance hall where groups of girls sat chattering and giggling as they studiously avoided the looks from groups of boys walking around them. Antoinette was beginning to understand how the game worked now. This was a competition between Antoinette and her friends of who could look the most nonchalant and the prize was to be asked to dance by the boy they’d already selected. As he approached, a blank look would replace the animated expression shown to her friends and coolly, almost reluctantly, she would accept his invitation to dance with a stiff nod of her beehived head.
Both sexes knew what they wanted: the girl wanted to be pursued and courted and then to win a steady boyfriend. The boy wanted to show his friends he could have any girl he wanted.
But for all their bravado, the boys knew the rules. They might try to get further but there was no surprise when they couldn’t. They knew that a passionate kiss in the back of a car and a quick fumble would only lead to a soft but firm hand holding him back. In the early sixties, before the birth pill had led a sexual revolution, a pregnancy would result in either marriage or disgrace; both sexes knew that, and for different reasons, wanted to avoid them.
Antoinette, though, was playing a different game. She wanted vodka. She longed for her world to blur; she embraced the dizziness, then ran her wrists under the cold tap and splashed water on her pulse points to steady herself before looking for a refill. She smiled sweetly at the nearest boy whom she knew had a smuggled bottle. Mistaking her motives, he would hastily top up her glass and when she knew that no more would be forthcoming unless she parted with more than a smile, she would drain the glass and make a rapid departure.
Not for Antoinette a hasty grope in the back of a car, or the struggle to maintain her modesty as some youth, looking for a return on the free drinks he had given, tried to hoist her skirt up. She had no interest in that particular barter system and always made her escape before it could begin. Her friends were too young to be aware that drink not boys had become her obsession. But Ruth knew only too well.
It was drink that stopped her facing the fact that everything between them had changed. The trust and friendship that was so important to her had now slid away. Ruth had finally shown her plans to her daughter and Antoinette felt that any chance of survival was to exorcise that love that still remained.
Antoinette knew that her mother had begun to see her daughter as a problem, just as she had during those terrible years when she had refused to acknowledge what was happening. Now, as Antoinette slipped away from her control, Ruth obviously thought of her daughter as yet another burden she had to bear in a life strewn with unfulfilled expectations. Antoinette sensed that Ruth had begun to believe that her daughter was the cause of her problems.
Now she had made it clear that she would welcome her husband back into their home as though nothing had ever happened, she began to undermine Antoinette as much as she could, bullying her with subtle and skilful manipulation until she forced her daughter to accept the situation.
Ruth wanted control and she knew very well the words that would always make her daughter dance to her tune.
‘You are such a worry to me, dear,’ she would begin. ‘I can’t get to sleep until you come home. That’s why I’m so tired in the mornings. Do you really want to worry me so?’
When she tired of making Antoinette feel guilty, there were her attacks – ‘You’re such a disappointment to me’ – and her accusations – ‘I don’t know who you’re with or what you and your friends get up to at those places but I know what you smell like when you come home.’
Antoinette tried to ignore her as she defiantly watched Juke Box Jury and, with a mirror propped in front of the television, applied make-up ready for another big night out. Then Ruth would play her ace.
‘You know I love you.’
Antoinette longed for it to be true; underneath the anger she felt at her mother’s betrayal, she still loved her and craved to be loved in return. Over the weeks that fell between that visit and her father’s release, she tried to shut out the sound of her mother’s voice as Ruth tried to seek her compliance in rewriting history. Her mother jerked the strings harder over the next few weeks until obedience, that integral habit of her daughter’s childhood, started to win out. She demanded that Antoinette play the game of happy families, that she pretend that she was looking forward to her father’s return and that nothing had ever happened that might make the very idea monstrous to her.
‘Daddy will be home soon, dear,’ Ruth would say to her daughter, her voice happy and untroubled, as though she expected nothing less than a delighted response.
Antoinette would feel her stomach clench, her fists tighten and the fear rise, but she said nothing.
Ruth would say in sharp tones that forbade any argument, ‘I want you to try not to upset him, dear.’ Then add in the patient voice of the martyr she seemed to believe she was, ‘I’ve suffered enough! Nobody knows how much I’ve suffered. I can’t take any more.’
Antoinette believed in her mother’s suffering – she had heard that refrain ‘I’ve suffered enough!’ so often that she had to – but she didn’t see it in her mother’s eyes. Instead, she saw in Ruth anger at being thwarted, coldness and an implacable need to cling on to her own version of reality.
The day her father was expected home loomed on the horizon. For years, she had tried to block the date of his release from her mind but now it was impossible. The image of his face and the derisory tone of his voice haunted her sober hours – hours that were becoming fewer and fewer.
The week before his arrival Ruth triumphantly produced a packet containing a brown hair rinse.
‘That red beehive has to go. If you want to do your hair like that when you are with your friends I can’t stop you, but while you live here you are going to leave the house looking decent,’ she told her daughter firmly.
Antoinette knew better than to protest. Having her mother furious with her a few days before her father was due home was not, she knew, a good idea. Sighing, she took the rinse, brushed her hair until it was straight and then applied the dye. One hour later, when she had given her hair its final rinse, then towel-dried it vigorously in front of the fire, she looked in the mirror and was faced with the reflection of a drab Antoinette. Of Toni, who, with all her mistakes, had courage, there was no sign. In her place was a frightened teenager that looked like the victim she had once been.
Her mother had won – she had destroyed the confidence that Antoinette had managed to build up since her father had vanished from their lives. And now, as his return loomed, she felt more than ever that she was being sent back to the place she had started out from.
Her mother looked at the new hair colour. ‘Very nice, dear,’ was her only comment, said without warmth. It was not meant as a compliment.
The night before her father was due to arrive an uneasy silence hung between Antoinette and her mother. Antoinette just wanted to escape to her room and block the thoughts of her father and his arrival from her mind, while Ruth was determined that the charade of a happy family would be played out in full.
When her mother was silent, Antoinette knew that it was only the prelude of worse to come and as the evening wore on, her nervousness increased.
‘Well, I think I’ll go to bed now,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m feeling very tired tonight.’
It was then, knowing she had won and that her daughter’s short-lived rebellion was firmly under control, that Ruth delivered her coup de grâce.
She looked up at her daughter and said, ‘Tomorrow, dear, I want you to meet Daddy and bring him home. I have to work in the morning and I know you are on the evening shift so you have the day free.’ Opening her purse, she drew out a ten-shilling note and thrust it into her daughter’s hand, giving a smile that showed more steely determination than sincerity. Then, as though she had planned a special treat, she said, ‘Here’s some money so you can buy him afternoon tea at that coffee shop you like so much.’
Stunned into obedience, she said, ‘All right, Mummy.’
As she spoke, Antoinette felt her mother’s power over her slip back into place and saw the gleam of satisfaction in Ruth’s eyes as she smelt victory. As she had done every night before her brief rebellion, Antoinette kissed her mother quickly on the cheek and went to bed.
She knew in her heart that she had been successfully sucked through the looking glass into her mother’s fantasy. She understood somehow that her mother needed to believe that she, Ruth, was a good wife and mother and that Joe was the handsome Irish husband who adored her. Between them, they had a daughter who was nothing but trouble and Ruth suffered because of it. She had been the victim of her husband’s disgrace, but as long as Antoinette behaved herself and did not annoy her father when he came home, everything would be all right.
In Ruth’s universe, Antoinette was the difficult daughter who had caused all the problems. Although she tried to fight it, it would not be long before Antoinette began to believe that perhaps her mother was right.
Chapter Eight
The coffee shop where Ruth had arranged for Antoinette to meet her father was one of the many that were rapidly springing up in the centre of Belfast. These forerunners of wine bars sold cappuccino coffee to the youth of Belfast and this one was Antoinette’s favourite. It was there that she and her friends met before going to the dance halls, where they would sip their frothy drinks as they made plans for the evening ahead.
That afternoon, on the day of her father’s release, she felt no pleasure in the familiar surroundings; the darkness of the interior looked gloomy to her while the large silver and black coffee machine, usually alive with a friendly hissing and gurgling, stood silently on the bar.
It was too early in the day for the hordes of people who frequented it in the evening to be present, while the lunchtime crowd, a mixture of smartly dressed businessmen and sophisticated women, had returned to their offices.
Her father’s imminent return had sunk Antoinette into a depression. It was like a black hole that she had sunk into, where she could not even think about tomorrow. Even the simplest task seemed impossible and anything was liable to make her panic. All her responses shut down and she became the robot she had once been, secure only when obeying orders.
And then there were her other worries. What could she say if she met one of her friends? How could she explain him away? Why had her mother arranged for them to meet on what Antoinette saw as her territory? It was as though any independence that she had gained, any life that she had forged out for herself, had been taken away from her.
All those thoughts were running through her head as she walked to one of the wooden tables and took a seat. His bus was due to arrive at 3 p.m. She was grateful for this as she knew that the chances of bumping into anyone at that time of day were slim.
Which father was going to greet her, she wondered. Would it be the ‘nice’ one, who eleven years ago had met his wife and daughter at the Belfast docks; the father who had made Ruth glow with happiness as he hugged her and made his daughter giggle with pleasure when he swung her five-year-old body in the air, and then kissed her soundly on both cheeks? That father, the jovial man who had chucked her under the chin as he presented his wife with presents of boxes of chocolates after one of their many rows, was now only a dim memory. Or would it be the other father, the one with the bloodshot eyes and the mouth that quivered with rage at the very sight of her? Her childhood fear of the man she remembered most vividly, the one she had tried to force out of her mind, came back to her.
Antoinette arrived early. She was dressed as her old self: her newly washed hair now hung to the collar of her navy jacket and a grey skirt and pale-blue twin set had replaced the teenage uniform of jeans and shirt. Her mother had come into her room early that morning. She had made preparations to see her husband again and was dressed in a grey jacket with a fur collar that framed her face, softening it. Her hair was freshly permed with a copper rinse to hide the grey that had appeared in recent years and once again fell in soft waves about her face. Her mouth was painted a bright red, a colour she had always favoured, while rings sparkled against the hands tipped with scarlet-lacquered nails. She had opened the wardrobe and selected the clothes she wanted Antoinette to wear.
‘That looks so nice on you, dear,’ she had said. ‘Wear that today.’
‘I don’t like it,’ Antoinette had muttered. ‘It’s old-fashioned.’
‘Oh no, dear, it makes you look very pretty. It’s your colour blue. Wear it to please me, won’t you?’
And she had.
Antoinette wanted to arrive before her father so that she had the advantage of being seated at a table with a clear view of the door. She wanted to see him before he saw her.
Hanging lamps cast soft pools of warm light on the wooden tables. A cup of coffee had been brought to her and she needed both hands to hold it to her mouth because her palms were damp and slippery with the moisture that fear brings. Her stomach fluttered with nervous tremors and her head felt light from a sleepless night.
She felt his presence a split second before she saw him. Looking up at the door, she could only make out a male form. With his back to the sun, he was a faceless shadow but she knew it was him. She felt the short hair on the back of her neck bristle and she placed her hands on her knees to hide the shaking.
It was not until he reached her side that his features came into focus.
‘Hello, Antoinette,’ he said.
As she looked into his face, she saw someone she had not seen before: the remorseful father. He’d been in prison for over two years and apart from that weekend leave, when she’d only seen him for a few moments, she had not spoken to him.
‘Hello, Daddy,’ she replied. Not wanting to hear any words from him she blurted out, ‘Mummy’s given me some money to pay for your tea.’
Such was Antoinette’s conditioning to behave normally, she did. To any outsider the two of them presented a perfectly ordinary spectacle – a man taking his daughter out to tea.
The moment she said her first words to her father, Antoinette took another step further into her mother’s world. It was a world where her sense of self-will disappeared, where she danced to the tune that Ruth sang. She had no choice, she had to comply. She acted her part in the charade that everything between them all was normal.