Patricia Burns - Follow Your Dream

Lillian felt quite breathless. He was offering her his secrets.

‘Is that your dream?’ she asked.

‘That’s my dream. I’ll have a business of my own with people working for me, and a car of my own, and I’ll get a decent place for my mum to live with a proper kitchen and bathroom, so nobody can look down their noses at her any more—’

He broke off, gazing over Lillian’s shoulder, a rapt look on his face. Where a second ago his attention had been all hers, now it was as if she was no longer there. Slowly, he straightened up.

Lillian didn’t have to turn round to know who was there. She was seized with such a storm of rage and jealousy that she thought her chest might burst open. She didn’t know where it had come from or how to deal with it. She gritted her teeth and growled, only just stopping herself from leaping up and attacking her fascinating sister with teeth and nails and feet.

Wendy stopped a couple of feet away. Lillian picked up one of James’s spanners and started jabbing it into the sour earth for all she was worth. In spite of herself, her eyes were drawn to her sister. Wendy was still dressed in the old skirt and blouse she had been wearing for the spring cleaning, with a spotted scarf over her hair. Anyone else would have looked scruffy and bedraggled after the hard day’s work. But Wendy had stopped to apply bright red lipstick to her full mouth, her waist was cinched in with a wide black elastic belt, her blonde curls escaped from beneath the scarf and the blouse was undone at the neck just enough to give a tantalising glimpse of cleavage. She stood with one hand on her hip and flicked James with a cool assessing glance.

‘So you came to see to the famous bike, then? She’s been going on about it all week.’

‘She’s made a good job of it. I’ve just done a bit of maintenance.’

‘Yeah, I can see that. Your hands are covered in oil.’

James flushed. ‘It’s honest dirt. You like men with soft white girly hands, do you?’

Wendy gave a knowing smile. ‘I like a man who can take me out dancing and show me a good time.’

‘I can dance,’ James said.

‘They all say that. Then they tread all over your feet. I can’t bear being trampled on.’

‘No danger of that with me.’

For a moment their eyes locked, each of them challenging the other. It was as if Lillian didn’t exist. She wanted to leap up and scream Look at me! but something held her squatting by her bike, raging inside.

Wendy raised her eyebrows and turned away. ‘I don’t think I’ll take a chance on it.’

She walked back into the house. James’s eyes were fastened on her opulent backside until the door shut behind her. Even then he didn’t come back to Lillian immediately. He stood staring at the closed door.

‘Idiot!’ he muttered. ‘What did you go and say that for?’

‘What?’ Lillian asked.

Slowly, he turned his head to look at her, his eyes seeming to adjust like someone who had just come indoors from bright sunshine outside.

‘I went and told her I could dance. I can’t, not properly.’

A whole beautiful new vista of opportunity suddenly stretched out before Lillian. She beamed at him.

‘I can,’ she said. ‘I could teach you, if you like.’

THE kid’s bike was the perfect excuse to get in with the Parker family. Or, to be more precise, to get closer to Wendy. Wendy filled James’s days and haunted his dreams. He had never met a girl like her before, not in real life. She was like something out of a film, what with her luscious body, her lovely face and her exotic natural blonde hair. And then there was the way she treated him. He knew she didn’t take him seriously. He was only a few months older than her, and she was looking for men in their twenties with money in their pockets, so he knew she regarded him as a kid who hadn’t even started his national service yet. But he was not without hope. There was something in the way she looked at him, a certain challenge in her big blue eyes and her mocking smile, that kept him coming back for more.

So when Lillian announced that she had saved up enough for the tyres and almost enough for the inner tubes, he offered to loan her the rest.

‘The weather’s getting almost summery. You want to get out on that bike as soon as you can,’ he said.

She looked at him in total amazement. ‘Would you?’ she cried. ‘You’d do that for me? Trust me with your money?’

If only it were so easy to please her sister.

‘’Course,’ he said. ‘I know you’re good for it.’

‘Oh!’ she gasped. ‘You must be the nicest person in the world!’

And as she often did when really pleased, she put her delight into action, crossing the narrow yard in two flick-flacks. James laughed and clapped. It was a pleasure to see her dance or perform gymnastics. She moved with such grace and athleticism that even someone like himself, who knew nothing about it, could see that she was good.

Once the bike was up and running, it was more difficult to find reasons to visit the Parkers. What was more, time was getting short. In July he would be eighteen, and then his call-up papers would arrive. But luck was on his side. He called in after work one Monday with the excuse of making sure that Lillian was managing all right, and found Mrs Parker in despair over the mangle.

‘It’s stuck,’ she explained, practically in tears. ‘And we’ve had PGs in over the weekend and there’s all these sheets to get dry.’

She indicated the big galvanised tub full of wet bedlinen.

James had rather overlooked Wendy’s mother in the past. There were so many large personalities in the family, what with Wendy herself, and little Lillian, and their old hag of a grandmother, as well as Boring Bob and Shifty Frank, as he thought of them, that Mrs Parker rather faded into the background. He smiled at her as she stood there in her floral overall, her wispy hair tied up turban-style in a scarf and her sleeves rolled up to reveal thin arms and red, work-roughened hands.

‘Would you like me to take a look at it for you?’ he asked.

Relief flooded her tired face. ‘Oh, would you? I’d be ever so grateful.’

It was the work of a moment. Mangles were hardly difficult pieces of machinery to understand. Mrs Parker was so fulsome in her thanks that James was ashamed to earn so much praise for so little.

‘Let me turn it for you,’ he offered. ‘You just feed the stuff in.’

Turning the heavy handle to squeeze the water out of the washing was easy for him, young and strong as he was. In no time the job was done. James carried the basket of damp sheets and towels and pillowcases into an outhouse, ready to be pegged out on the lines in the morning. Just as he had done this, Wendy’s father arrived home. He looked at James with suspicion.

‘You here again?’ he asked.

There was something about the man that irritated James. Maybe it was the apologetic stoop to his shoulders, or the way he always seemed to be looking for a way to get at other people. James supposed he must be bitter about having a crippled right arm and just managed to bite back a sarcastic reply. After all, this was Wendy’s father. He needed to keep in with him.

‘Oh, Doug,’ Mrs Parker said. ‘James has been such a help to me. He got my mangle going and everything.’ She turned to James with real warmth in her smile and for the first time he saw something of her daughters in her. ‘Won’t you come in for a cuppa, dear? Kettle’s boiling.’

After that, he seemed to be accepted as the fixer of anything mechanical, just as he was at home. Mr Parker couldn’t have done these tasks, not with his bad arm, but it amazed him that neither Bob nor Frank seemed capable of doing them. He was glad that they weren’t, though. He now had the perfect reason to be calling in at the Parkers’ whenever he liked. He soon found out what time Wendy got in from her job at the big department store at the top of the High Street, and timed his arrival to coincide with hers.