Bad Girls Good Women. Rosie Thomas

Jessie. But the colour of his skin was only a dim reflection of his father’s blackness.

      What would I be? Felix wondered. An angel the colour of cold English coffee? He also wondered if it was his half and half-ness, the awareness of being neither one person nor the other, that gave him his sense of separation.

      Desmond and Jessie had met when they were both working in a club off Shaftesbury Avenue. Within a few months Jessie was pregnant, and a few months after that her musician obligingly married her. He had also insisted on the boy’s Christian name, although Jessie had preferred Brian.

      ‘It means the lucky one, girl,’ he told Jessie. ‘We all need a bit of luck, don’t we?’ He disappeared for good about a year after Felix was born.

      ‘He went on tour, with a new band, up north somewhere,’ Jessie said. ‘Going to be his big break, it was. He never came back.’

      ‘Why not?’ Felix would demand. When he was small boy his father’s absence made him silently, unnervingly angry.

      Jessie would only shrug. ‘Liked his drink, Des did. And pretty faces, especially if they were white ones. Plenty of those in Manchester, or wherever he was. Fell for someone else, I expect. He’s got two or three wives to his name by now, I should think.’

      At sixteen, Felix had calculated, he could move away from Jessie and begin to live his own life. He dreamed of going to Rome, or Florence, to find some kind of menial job that would still give him time to paint.

      Then, in the same week as the King died, Jessie fell ill.

      She had double pneumonia, and for five days Felix was sure that she was going to die. He sat by her bed, waiting again, and all the waiting he had done all through the years of his childhood, seemingly for nothing, welled up out of the past and crushed the hope out of him. Later, he remembered the stillness of that week. All the music had been silenced for the King, and the faces in the street outside the hospital were sombre.

      He didn’t believe the doctors when they told him that his mother would live. She seemed so fragile, with all the energy and liveliness that he had taken for granted drained out of her.

      Jessie did recover, very slowly, but it was as if her illness had quenched some hope of her own. She struggled back to the current club as soon as she could, but the work exhausted her. The customers noticed and commented on her low spirits. They were allowed, even expected, to have their problems, but Jessie had to be cheerful for them. Not long afterwards she was ill again, and missed more days off work. At last the boss, the latest in a long line of owners to whom Jessie had devoted her energy, took her aside. She would have to be more like her old self, he warned her, his special girl, our Jessie, or he couldn’t promise to keep her on.

      Felix was incandescent with anger when Jessie told him. He wanted to burst into the club and hit the man square in his puffy face.

      ‘Don’t upset yourself, love,’ Julia advised him wearily. ‘It isn’t worth it.’

      Two months later Jessie was fired. A salvo of bouquets and fulsome good wishes followed her into exile from the only world she knew.

      ‘There are other places. Other jobs,’ Felix said savagely, but Jessie only shrugged.

      ‘It isn’t worth it,’ she repeated.

      Already she was drinking heavily, and her bulky body seemed more of a burden for her to propel to and fro. But Jessie had dozens of friends and they rallied round her now, almost against her will. One of them, a man like Mr Mogridge but even shadier, owned a block of property to the north of Oxford Street. It was out of their old territory, but Jessie and Felix gratefully accepted his offer of a short tenancy, at a tiny rent, of the flat overlooking Manchester Square.

      ‘It won’t be for ever,’ Mr Bull said crisply. ‘It’s due for development, all that. But you can have it for now, if it’s any help to you.’

      They moved into the flat, and Felix decorated it. He enjoyed arranging the cramped space more than he had enjoyed anything since Jessie fell ill.

      ‘You’ve done a good job,’ Mr Bull said. ‘Made the place look like something.’ He looked hard at Felix, and then smirked.

      By that Saturday afternoon, they had been living in the flat for two and a half years. As a temporary measure, it felt more permanent than anywhere they had ever lived before.

      Felix heard his mother’s chair creak, and a long, exhaled breath. He looked across at her and saw that she had fallen asleep, with her chin on her chest and her glass tipped sideways in her fingers. He took it gently away and put the top back on the bottle. His face was expressionless as he lifted her swollen legs on to a low stool, and slipped a cushion behind her head. Then he brought a blanket from her bed and tucked it securely around her.

      Felix carried the wicker tray of dirty dishes back into the kitchen, and washed up. He put each plate and bowl back in its proper place, and dried the old-fashioned wooden drainer. When everything was satisfactorily tidy he went into his bedroom and put on a dark blue sweater.

      He looked at Jessie once more, and then he went out and closed the door softly behind him.

      The threat of thunder had lifted, and the sky was clear. The lines of chimneys and rooftops were sharply defined against it. Felix walked for a long time, watching the darkness as it gathered softly in narrow alleyways and in the corners buttressed by high buildings. He enjoyed listening to the hum of the city changing as night came and the lights flickered and steadied.

      He had been idling, not thinking, when he passed the Rocket Club. He loitered for a moment, incuriously, reading the notice on the door. Then he heard the music, drifting up to him through the cellar grating at his feet. He hesitated, and then he thought that there was nothing to hurry home for. Jessie would certainly be still asleep, and the little flat would be quiet and dark. He could go in for an hour, to drink a Coke and listen to the music. Felix went to the door and handed over his entry money.

      ‘Just one?’ the doorman asked, without interest.

      Felix had to duck his head under the low ceilings as he went down the stairs into the cellar. He bought a drink, and found a place at a table against the wall.

      He noticed the two girls almost at once.

      Felix was impressed by the club itself, too. He liked the blurred distinctions of night-time in these places, and he quite often visited the other clubs in the nearby street. He had a loose network of acquaintances based on them, and that suited him because it didn’t trespass on the rest of his privacy. There was a sprinkling of faces here that he knew, and more that he didn’t. It was a pleasing mixture of beats and bohemians, ordinary kids and blacks and Soho characters packing the steaming space. He hadn’t intended to stay but the atmosphere, and the two girls, made him linger. The two of them were dancing with intent, almost fierce enjoyment. It was, Felix thought, as if they were afraid to stop.

      The crowd grew thicker and wilder as the night wore on. Felix danced with a girl he knew a little. He bought her a drink, and talked to a group of her friends. All the girls liked Felix, as well as admiring his looks, but they were used to his evasiveness. He glimpsed the girl with the hair laughing, through the press of people, and then he lost sight of them both. The dancers were leaping and shouting now, and the walls of the cellar itself seemed to run with sweat.

      In the end it was the exhausted musicians who gave up. They played a last, storming number and then began to pack up their instruments. The crowd booed and protested, but they knew that there was going to be no more that night. They started to flow reluctantly up the stairs, and Felix went with them.

      Outside it was already light, a still, pale summer morning. The air was cool and sweet after the smoky cellar. He walked a little way, and then stopped to watch the pearly light lying along the street.

      Something made him look back.

      The two girls were standing outside the club doorway. There were two suitcases at their feet. All the wild enjoyment had drifted away with the music. They looked tired, and dejected, and very young.