‘Mrs Averly?’ asked Dad.
‘Yeah. Mr Farrell, is it?’ she said, fag in hand. She squinted first at him and then at Dolly. ‘Come in then.’
They moved into a grubby hallway that stank of cabbage and cat piss, and the woman shut the door behind them.
‘First things first,’ she said, and held out her hand.
Dad rummaged in his billfold and pulled out a fiver. He placed it in her hand, and she nodded with satisfaction and quickly tucked it into her bra.
‘That’s fine. You can wait down here.’ She turned to Dolly. ‘Come on then, girl, up the stairs.’
This wasn’t a shop with baby clothes. Bewildered, Dolly followed the woman up. They went into a tiny box room; inside there was a fold-up bed stashed against the wall, hectic violet wallpaper with sprigs of heather rampaging all over it. In the centre of the room, on the scuffed and worn purple carpet, was a yellow washing-up bowl steaming with warm water and frothy with soap suds. Beside it was what Dolly recognized as an enema, and an open packet of Omo.
‘We’ll soon have you straight again,’ said the woman, crossing to the fold-up bed and stubbing her cigarette out on an overflowing ashtray perched there. ‘Don’t you worry.’
Dolly had no idea what she meant, but she was a kid and this ugly gorgon of a woman was an adult; it wasn’t her place to question.
Then the woman turned back to her with a thin smile. ‘Right then, lovey. Slip your knickers off and stand over the bowl.’
Dolly didn’t know how she got back down those bloody stairs and out of that place in Aldgate. She was in agony. From the moment the woman had started pumping that Omo mixture into her, she’d been doubled up with pain.
‘Don’t you worry about that, you’ll come away, that’s what matters,’ said the woman in an irritated tone of voice because Dolly had the gall to complain and start to cry.
Dolly didn’t even know what that meant. Come away? Come away with what?
‘All right then, Doll?’ asked Dad when she came back downstairs, and he looked sheepish when he saw how white she was, her face twisted up with pain, before his gaze skipped away from her again.
‘Thanks,’ he said to the woman, and they left.
Dolly, standing at the bus stop and trying not to pass out, couldn’t believe it. Her dad had taken her to that horrible ugly frightening cow and let her do that dreadful thing to her. As they waited and the rain drizzled down, a young mother with a child in a pushchair stood nearby and the child howled its head off.
