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“Would you like to have a spade’s kidney?” says Natalie thoughtfully.
“Ssssh!”
“I don’t think I would myself. I’ve nothing against them but—”
“Shut up!” I hiss.
Eradlik stops tapping his folded stethoscope against the palm of his hand and looks at his watch. ‘If Gruntstone doesn’t give his consent to the operation in the next five minutes, it’s going to be too late.’
“That bigot will never give his consent to anything that involves his son having a black girl’s kidney. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You look beautiful when you’re mad, Nurse Timkins. Your eyes blaze like all those stars out there.”
“You mustn’t kiss me, Doctor. I’m supposed to be sterilised.”
“I couldn’t believe that lips so sweet and pure could ever bear the stigma of stapyhylococci.”
Dream Snogger is just about to put his beautiful mouth to work when the telephone rings. I don’t mean the telly telephone but the one in our hall. I wait hopefully for Natalie to answer it but I am wasting my time. God help him if it is some adenoidal little pimple factory wanting to know if my kid sister is going to the youth club—or Teen Scene as the new vicar now calls it. I try and catch her eye as I stalk past but she is staring at the screen with her thumb in her mouth and her skirt up to her panties.
“Don’t scratch yourself like that,” I say primly.
“Why not? I’ve got an itch.”
“It’s not nice.” I pick up the telephone. “Hello!” My voice is meant to sound about as welcoming as Moshe Dayan being invited to judge the Miss Egypt Beauty Contest. There is a pip, pip, pip and the line goes dead. I return to the front room.
“That was Mum,” I say.
“What did she want?”
“She hasn’t got through yet. What’s happened?”
“They can’t wait any longer so he’s doing an emergency operation without the father’s consent.”
“And using the black girl’s kidney?”
“I think so. Do you smell anything?”
“Only that awful perfume of yours. You don’t wear that at school, do you?”
“Of course not. I don’t want to enslave them.”
“Smells like something burning. You didn’t leave anything on in the kitchen, did you?”
Natalie shakes her head. “No.”
“Well, don’t just sit there. Go and have a look.”
“Why me?”
“Because I just answered the telephone.”
Natalie nods towards the telly. “It’s better if you go because I know what’s happening and I can tell you. If I go—”
“Oh, stay there and mind you don’t scratch another hole in yourself!”
“Charming!”
I make tracks for the kitchen and the smell of burning gets worse with every step. Don’t say the rhubarb has caught fire. I glance at the dials on the cooker and wrench open the oven door. Crikey! I haven’t seen so much smoke since Dad borrowed an indoor barbecue set. I grab a couple of wet tea towels and drop the burnt offering in the sink where it sizzles merrily. It looks as if it might once have been a steak and kidney pud. In the hall the telephone rings.
“Telephone!” shouts Natalie helpfully. I make a quick list of the ten ways I would most like to kill her and snatch up the receiver. Pip, pip, pip, pip …
“I’ve found the steak and kidney pud, Mum,” I speak the second the pips stop.
“I’ve no time to talk now, dear,” says Mum. “Listen carefully. There’s a steak and kidney pud in the oven which should have come out half an hour ago.”
“I found it, Mum.”
“You must take it out immediately.”
“I have done, Mum.”
“Do you understand, dear? I can’t talk because the train is just about to go and your father is shouting at me. There’s a steak and—”
There is a muffled squawk and a noise that could be Dad yelling something I am grateful I cannot understand.
“Hello? Mum?” I can still hear station noises in the background and I imagine that Mum must have left the phone dangling as Dad dragged her away. I am about to hang up when I hear a sound like someone breathing and a voice full of eastern promise purrs from the receiver.
“Hullo, how are you?” says a man’s voice.
“Hello,” I say. On the spur of the moment it is difficult to think of anything else to say.
“Dear lady, how happy I am to be speaking to you. You do not know me but I am of strong build and reaching towards the upper limits of those considerably in excess of five feet tall. I am only recently arrived in your country and would be most happy if you would go out with me. I have had many happy reports of the friendly disposition of the ladies of London and I would like to put them to the test.” His voice drones on and I have half a mind to call Natalie.
“I’m sorry but I’m married,” I say. I mean, there is no need to be unkind, is there?
“I eat husbands for breakfast!” insists the voice at the other end of the line. “My ardour is unquenchable. I am a lion! By the holy waters of the Ganges I will—”
I put down the receiver with a shaking hand. I know that there are some funny people about but why do they always have to pick on me? Only the other day the middle aged man sitting opposite me in the tube whipped open his mac to reveal something that looked like a small garden gnome weathered by a million years of non-stop rain. By the time I had opened my eyes he had got out at Clapham North.
That was not an isolated incident. Strange men are always rubbing themselves against me on public transport—and some of them are not so strange either. I thought the fellow with the bowler hat who had his umbrella jammed against my reception area was unaware of what he was doing—until I saw that he did not have an umbrella. Why does it always have to be me? I know girls who spend their whole lives waiting for a man to flash himself at them. I only have to look at a man below a line drawn at right angles to the top of his zipper and I have an evens chance of copping an eyeful of crotch insulation. I have the same effect on men’s willies as a summer shower on a lawn full of thirsty worms.
“I didn’t know you were married,” says Natalie as I come through the door. “Geoffrey put you in the family way, did he?”
“I was getting rid of another crank,” I say.
“You mean Mum?” asks Natalie.
“Her as well. She put a pie in the oven for us.”
“And Geoffrey put a bun in the oven for you. It’s our lucky day, isn’t it?”
“Do stop going on about Geoffrey. I just watch him play tennis sometimes, that’s all.”
“And soak up the ritzy atmosphere at Eastwood Tennis Club. Was that Mum’s pud we smelt?”
“Yes. Steak and kidney.”
Natalie pulls a face. “I wouldn’t have been able to eat it anyway. Doctor Dish has just whipped out that black bird’s kidney.”
“Is she all right?”
“She is at the moment, but she’s not going to last, is she?”
“Why not?”
“Stands to reason, doesn’t it? If you’re black you never last long on this programme. Specially if you’ve been going out with a white fellow. It saves all the embarrassment. See? She’s going to snuff it. The little white light has stopped bleeping.”
“I’ve seen them come back after the little white light has stopped bleeping.”
“Not black ones, you haven’t. Anyway, it’s two weeks since somebody kicked the bucket so we’re due for a spot of the deathbeds. It makes the whole thing more realistic, doesn’t it? You watch.”
Natalie’s blood is colder than an eskimo’s inside leg measurement and I can’t remember her crying since Mum put her David Cassidy T-shirt in the washing machine—he came out looking like Wee Georgie Wood.
On the screen, emotions are running higher than the interest rate on a hire purchase agreement. Doctor Eradlik is gazing into the camera as usual and behind him a brash young voice can be heard.
‘Sure. I feel great, doc. How’s Dawn?’ An expression of refined pain flashes across Eradlik’s beautiful face. ‘What’s the matter, Doc? Is something wrong? Doc—’
The voice breaks off in mid-speech even before Eradlik has swung round. ‘You’re not going to find this very easy, Sonny. I’m not finding it very easy myself. You see, Dawn gave you much more than just her kidney.’
‘You mean—?’
‘Yes, Sonny. She gave you her life.’
“Just like I said,” interrupts Natalie.
“Ssssh!” Natalie has no soul. Lots of body but no soul. Sonny is reacting badly to the news so Eradlik puts his hand on his shoulder and gazes into the camera again. ‘We found out after the operation that only one of her kidneys was working.’
‘You mean—?’
‘That’s right. The one she gave to you.’
‘So she knew?’
‘Yes, Sonny. She knew. But she also knew that you didn’t know, and knowing that gave her the strength to know herself.’ The camera moves from Eradlik’s face to the sobbing Sonny and then outside to a shot of the sun rising over a hill.
“I like the end bit best, when he walks down the long corridor and the girl is waiting for him with the sports car,” says Natalie. “The music is nice, too.”
I pat the tears out of my eyes with a Kleenex and prepare to wrestle with Mum’s burnt dish.
“You know, I think I’d really like to be a nurse,” I say. “I really would.”
CHAPTER 2
“I hope nothing goes wrong,” I say.
“Of course nothing will go wrong,” says Natalie. “It’s only a little party.”
It is the day before Mum and Dad are due to come home and much against my better judgement I have been nagged into giving a party with Natalie. The way news of us being on our own has rocketed round the neighbourhood you would think we were a couple of queen bees who had put up a notice saying “Come and get it!” outside the entrance to the hive.
“Don’t you think those trousers are a bit tight?” I say.
“Yes,” says Natalie. “That’s the idea. They’re supposed to be figure-hugging.”
“Figure-hugging? They’re squeezing your body to death. I don’t know how you get into them.”
“You spray them on and wait for them to dry. Don’t be a spoilsport, Rosie. Relax and have a good time.”
“I’m not going to relax until everyone has gone home. You know what Mum said. No parties. She’d go mad if she knew that bunch of refugees from Easy Rider was coming round here tonight.”
“It’s not really a party, more a sorry.”
“You mean a soiree, don’t you? It’ll be a sorry when Dad finds out about it.”
“Why should he find out about it?”
“Because the neighbours are going to tell him, stupid. Mrs Wilson has already got tennis elbow from pulling aside the curtains every time someone comes to the front door.”
“Maybe we should ask her?”
“You must be joking. She’d spend all the time in a corner taking down evidence. The last party she went to was to celebrate the shooting down of the first Zeppelin.”
“What was that?”
“You don’t know anything, do you? It was a German airship used in the first world war.”
“Oh, you mean a giant French letter that carried passengers.”
“Yes. It didn’t carry as many passengers as a real French letter, though.”
“Does Geoffrey use French letters?”
“Why do you suddenly ask that? I don’t know.”
Natalie looks concerned. “Well, you should do. You don’t want to end up in the family way, do you? That would really upset Mum and Dad.”
“What I meant was—Oh, it doesn’t matter. I don’t want to discuss my sex life with you, Natalie. You take some of your own advice and watch out tonight.”
I mean it, too. The way the local boys look at Natalie you would think she was a bag of warm aniseed balls thrown over the wall of Battersea Dogs’ Home. At least there is one good thing about those trousers—I can’t see any one getting them off in a hurry.
