Bad Girls Good Women

‘I wonder about what she’s like. Why she had to give me away.’

‘I didn’t mean her,’ Jessie said.

Julia bent her head and picked at a loose thread in the bedcover. ‘My adopted mother?’

‘Of course. She counts as your mother, my girl, whatever other nonsense you’re letting yourself run away with.’

Julia flared back at her, ‘They’ve tried to turn me into someone else. Tried to turn me into themselves. A reflection of themselves. They didn’t want me. If they’d just loved what they got, it would have been different. Wouldn’t it?’

Jessie saw the hurt then. Julia had kept it to herself, but it was there. They had rejected each other, the mother and the daughter. No one’s fault, and everyone’s fault. She felt sorry for the little brown woman with her pulled-in mouth, and she felt a different sadness for Julia, who was just beginning everything.

The weight of Jessie’s memories heaved again beside her, pulling her down. She wanted to cry, for herself and Felix, and for the two silly, fresh, blank young women who had been washed up here with them.

The tears felt greasy under her eyelids, and then on her cheeks.

‘Jessie, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.’ Julia moved quickly, putting her arm round Jessie’s big, doughy shoulders, hugging her. ‘I’ve got you. I don’t need Betty or the other one. Don’t cry, do you hear? You’ve got us two, me and Mattie, as well as Felix. What else do you need?’

Jessie wiped her face with the corner of the sheet, an angry scrubbing movement. ‘Need? Nothing. Everything. Oh, don’t listen. I’m just an old windbag with indigestion and insomnia. And you can’t sleep because you’re too happy. Funny, isn’t it?’

They sat and looked at each other, and then suddenly they laughed. The daytime Jessie was there again.

‘Look at the time,’ she said sharply. ‘If you’re going flying with that boy tomorrow, and I’m glad I’m not, you’d better go to bed for a few hours first. Go on. Do what I tell you.’

Julia leaned over her first and kissed her cheek. Jessie’s skin was cold and dry. ‘Goodnight. Jessie …?’

‘What is it now?’

‘Thank you for letting Mattie and me, you know, do what we want.’

‘Go to the bad, you mean? That’s up to you. Nothing to do with me. Go on.’

Julia went, and Jessie lay back against her flattened pillows to watch the window, where the light would begin again.

Josh came in the morning. Julia ran down the stairs to meet him, the bag containing her overnight things bumping a tattoo against her legs. There was a little black open MG parked in the square, and Josh held the passenger door open for her with a flourish.

They climbed in, and the car roared through the Saturday morning traffic. Julia looked up at the red buses looming over them, the pigeons strutting on ledges and the boys on Vespas trying to outpace the MG, and sank back into her leather bucket seat with a sigh of satisfaction. It was like being in an Audrey Hepburn film.

They left London behind, and wound out through the neat suburbs that reminded Julia of Fairmile Road. It was an added satisfaction to be zipping past the identical semi-detached houses where men were sweeping the fallen leaves off the paths. Josh was beside her in his brown leather jacket with the worn sheepskin collar turned up around his chin. The wind blew his hair back off his forehead and sharpened the handsome lines of his face. He was whistling as he drove.

‘I’m so happy,’ Julia said.

Josh look sideways at her. ‘I’m happy too.’ Then he glanced up into the thin autumn blueness of the sky. ‘It’s a great day for flying.’

Happy because of me, Julia wondered, or because of the sunshine?

They drove on through the Kentish lanes, and then at last they swung through a pair of tall gates and out on to an airfield. There was a cluster of low huts, and a row of light aircraft drawn up with the sun reflecting off their windshields. A windsock hung limp in the mild air. There were men in overalls moving between the huts, and one of them lifted his arm in a half-salute as the MG stopped. In the sudden quiet that followed Julia could hear a plane somewhere overhead. The ones on the ground looked very small and fragile.

Josh was already out of the car, calling out greetings and shaking hands and joking with the men. Julia followed him shyly, not looking at the waiting planes.

Josh put his arm round her shoulders. ‘… and this is Julia. Making her first flight today. I can tell she’s going to be a flier, just by looking at her.’

Julia shook hands. Her knees were going wobbly with fear.

‘Welcome to the Kent Aero Club,’ a man with a handlebar moustache boomed at her.

‘It’s an amateur club,’ Josh explained. ‘I like this kind of flying, as well as the stuff I do for Harry. I started out on planes like these.’

‘Is it safe?’ Julia asked. She hadn’t meant to, but the words just escaped.

The moustache man roared with laughter. ‘You’ll be safer in the air with Josh Flood than you are on the ground with him. She’s all ready for you, Josh.’ He laughed so much at that that his face turned crimson.

‘Let’s go.’ Julia could feel Josh’s eagerness crackling beside her. She turned and followed him, over the wide concreted space of the apron. Josh’s strides in his baseball boots seemed to cover yards at a time. Her own legs were leaden.

They reached a plane parked to one side of the line. It was white with spruce red lines along the fuselage, and the letters G-AERO near the tail. Josh ducked under the wing and opened the cockpit door. The whole aeroplane looked no bigger than the MG.

Jump in,’ he smiled at her. ‘Are you excited?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Julia’s voice was faint.

She climbed into the tiny space and settled herself into her seat. Josh swung in on the other side. He leaned across her and pulled the webbing straps over Julia’s shoulders.

‘This is the quick-release catch, look.’ He showed her the lever on her lap-buckle.

Julia looked at the hump of the instrument panel, and then over the plane’s tilted nose to the stationary tip of the propellor. ‘Don’t I get a parachute?’ She tried to make it sound like a joke.

He looked at her properly then. ‘You don’t need a chute in a crate like this. Didn’t you believe what Jimbo said? You’re quite safe.’ He kissed her on the corner of her mouth and Julia thought, if I’m going to die I’m glad it’s with Josh.

Josh gave the thumbs-up sign to a mechanic waiting at the nose of the plane. The engine coughed and the propeller turned, then spun into a blur as the engine note rose and settled into a steady roar.

‘What kind of plane is this?’ Julia tried to focus on something, anything other than the thought of pitching into the air in this little shell.

‘Auster Autocrat. Powered by a one-hundred h.p. Cirrus Minor Two engine. Okay?’

Josh was busy. He touched the rows of switches and watched the dials, turning his head to look at the tail-flap and the wing-tips. Julia sat and waited, hoping that he couldn’t hear her heart banging. She hadn’t expected to be afraid, and the surprising fact of her terror somehow made it worse.

Josh gave another thumbs-up to the mechanic. He stood to one side and beckoned them on and the Auster taxied forward.

Josh was whistling again, the same tune as behind the wheel of his MG. They reached the end of the tarmac runway.

‘Here we go, baby. Hold tight.’

The plane darted forward and then skipped into the air.

Julia saw the tarmac lurch and drop away beneath them, and then she saw the roofs of the huts and the treetops beyond the perimeter fence, swaying drunkenly, then a scatter of houses and the scarlet blob of a telephone kiosk. The ground seemed to swoop sideways and upwards, pushing the horizon into the wrong place, terrifyingly wrong, so that the empty space of sky was beside her instead of over her head. Julia lurched sideways, wanting to grab hold of Josh, but her seat straps held her down. She was amazed to see that he was still smiling.

The horizon swung again, and then titled into its proper place. The brown and gold and pale green squares of fields unrolled towards it, and Julia looked down to see white threads of roads, thick dark curls of woodland and a village laid out around a church. She could even see the pale flecks of gravestones under the shadow of the spire.

Above the plexiglass cockpit bubble the air shimmered. The air felt solid all around them, bumping against the plane’s skin, lifting them up. They were flying.