‘Gawd, innit lovely?’ all the girls were saying.
It was in all the papers, it was even on the telly, they said, the actual honest-to-God ceremony had been filmed.
Dolly was pretty sure that she wouldn’t want to go down that road, not now, not ever. She was troubled by her own feelings about it, though. What else could a girl do? Men earned the money, women had the babies. It was set in stone. But the very idea of it turned her stomach.
Sometimes Dolly thought it started when she was ten, just before she considered running away. But no. Actually, when she really thought, it started a year or so before that, with him giving her little gifts.
Whenever she thought about it in later life – and mostly she tried not to – she always thought of the story about the frog put into cold water that was heated until it boiled to death. Had it been put in boiling water to start with, it would have jumped out. But death was slow, insidious; it crept up on the frog and lulled it; and that was how Dolly’s downfall came about, too.
The first time Mum went away to get her ‘treatment’, Dad brought Dolly a box of chocolates.
‘Got to spoil my best girl, haven’t I,’ he said gruffly, shoving the gift into her hands. ‘Don’t tell the other kids, they’ll all be wanting stuff, and that’s just for you, because you’re special.’
Dolly was delighted and flattered. She felt important, because Mum was away and she was in charge of the house, even if she was a lousy cook and an even worse cleaner. She tucked the chocolates away in a recess of the wardrobe in her and Sarah’s room, and ate them whenever the others weren’t around.
Dad loved her, she thought as she ate the chocolates; she was special. She bunked off big school – no one cared, anyway – and spent more time in the house, trying to hold back the tide of mess and failing. But she was appreciated, she was loved. Missing her mum, she liked that.
When Mum came home, looking like one of the zombies in those comics Dick loved so much, Dolly was relegated to second place, and Dad didn’t pay her much attention at all. So Dolly began to look forward to Mum going away, because when she did, there was Dad with gifts for his special girl: a tortoiseshell comb, a music box with a twirling ballerina inside, more chocolates.
And when Mum wasn’t there, when the other kids weren’t around, he cuddled her. She liked that, at first.
‘Come and sit on my lap, Doll,’ he’d say, and she would, to be enfolded in a hug scented with Old Holborn and beer-breath, the unwashed bristly skin of his chin nuzzling into her neck. It was lovely, comforting somehow.
