Sallie Day - The Palace of Strange Girls

SALLIE DAY

The Palace of Strange Girls

For Julian

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Read on…

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

I-SPY AT THE SEASIDE

Hello, children! Welcome to your very own I-Spy book. In these pages you’ll be able to look for all kinds of secret, exciting things that are found only by the sea. As you spot each of the things pictured here – and answer the simple questions – you earn an I-Spy score. It’s fun!

Blackpool, Tuesday 12 July 1959

Beth has had it with Jesus. She’s kicking the skirting boards to prove it and she hopes He’s watching. Mrs Brunskill at Sunday School says He’s watching all the time, even when you’re asleep. It’s amazing. You’d think He’d be too busy (what with all the cripples and foolish virgins) to be bothered with Beth. Thus assured of an audience, she pauses in her assault and eyes the heavily varnished wood. Beth is disappointed; the skirting boards are as yet undamaged, so she changes leg and carries on kicking. Flakes of dirty cream paint and grey plaster spiral down from the wall above her head and the picture of a little boy crying rattles in its frame. Beth carries on kicking.

‘You big bugger,’ she mouths on the off chance He’s listening as well as watching. Beth has learned the word from the dustbin man, Mr Kerkley, who lives next door. Mr Kerkley shouted ‘You little bugger’ at Beth’s best friend Robert when he dragged a club hammer into their coal shed and reduced all the big shiny lumps of coal into powdered shale. Beth had repeated the story to her mother. Word for word. She’d hoped to witness a satisfying gasp of shocked disbelief and disapproval from her mother, but her tale had the reverse effect. Her mother took her by the scruff of the neck and washed her mouth out with soap and water for using dirty words. Since then the offending word has been a constant resource for the child, who mouths it silently on a daily basis.

Beth woke early this morning. Wiping the sweat from her face, she sat up and dangled her feet out of the bed, waving them back and forth through air thick with the smell of bacon fat, unreliable plumbing and floral disinfectant. After a moment she slipped on her sandals (ignoring the shiny steel buckles that must always be fastened) and rummaged around under her pillow for the book. She has had the I-Spy book for four days now. Beth’s initial reverence for the volume has been replaced with an obsessive fascination. Its white pages have softened to cream under Beth’s sweaty-fingered perusal. It was purchased at the newsagent’s on the first day of the holiday and Beth will not be parted from it. By day she carries it around in her pocket or, failing that, inside her knickers. By night she sleeps with the book under her pillow and her hand on top of it. Beth is at a loss to decide which is the best part – the book itself or the codebook that came with it. And then there’s the membership card, the source of her present frustration.

The green card announces in heavy type ‘Official Membership Card – Issued by Big Chief I-Spy, Wigwam-by-the-Water, London’. Underneath there are four dotted lines for the member’s name and address. Although Beth can write her first name easily enough, her surname is long and fraught with difficulties. It has to be perfect. Bearing this in mind, Beth reached reluctantly for her glasses. The pink clinic glasses have a plaster stuck over the right lens. It is there to correct a lazy eye. The flexible wires hook ferociously round her ears and the frames dig in across the bridge of her nose. The discomfort always serves to concentrate Beth’s mind. The ‘B’ for Beth went down wobbly but correct, the ‘e’ and ‘t’ were easy and even the string on the ‘h’ was almost straight. She paused before attempting her surname, Singleton. The task demands a deep breath before she starts and, in the face of her inability to write the letter ‘S’, something approaching a miracle. Where should she start? Does the snake go this way or that? Within minutes the virgin card is smeared with rubber and gouged with the swan-necked traces of continued attempts. It makes no difference how hard she tries, the ‘S’ always comes out back to front. Beth cast around for a solution to her dilemma. An idea occurred. The verse she had to learn and recite at Sunday School last week was,

Ask and it shall be given. Seek and ye shall find.

The memory slipped back unbidden into Beth’s head as she surveyed the wreckage of her once pristine membership card. It might be worth a try.

Beth placed her palms together and scrunched her eyes shut in an effort to attract the Almighty’s attention and asked. She then set the point of her pencil to the card. When she finally opened her eyes, eager for the promised miracle, she found yet another backward ‘S’. The letter lay fixed on the page. Eternally, immovably wrong. Beth stared at the card in disbelief. This is why she is now venting her fury on the nearest thing – the skirting boards.

The room that Beth shares with her sister is devoid of any luxury other than a dusty blue rug between the two single beds and a similar grey offering underneath the washstand in the corner. This is the Belvedere Hotel (‘Families Welcome, Hot and Cold Water in Every Room, Residents’ Bar’). Management do not supply eiderdowns in their fourth-floor bedrooms, nor do they supply dressing tables, trouser presses, suitcase stands or any facilities for hanging clothes other than two hooks behind the door. Not that either girl is discomforted in any way. Save for the washstand and the film of dust, room forty-eight is exactly the same as their attic bedroom at home. Except that Beth wouldn’t dare kick the skirting boards like this at home. Beth lands another almighty kick on the woodwork.

The noise wakens her sister Helen who, aware of the damage that Beth, clad only in her vest, is visiting upon the toes of her new Startrite sandals, is quick to respond. ‘For goodness’ sake, Beth! Stop that kicking. You’ll ruin your sandals doing that. What’s the matter?’

‘I can’t do it,’ Beth shouts.

‘What can’t you do?’

Beth gets down on to her knees by way of reply and searches under her bed. Helen yawns, scrapes her fingers through her thick blonde fringe and flips the rest of her hair behind her shoulders. Helen has been trying to grow her hair to shoulder length for over a year now but her mother, who considers long hair to be an open invitation to nits, has constantly thwarted her. Normally Helen would have had her hair cut at the beginning of the Easter term but her mother was distracted by other things and Helen escaped. It is now July and her hair has grown long enough for a ponytail. Her mother has told her that she will have to have it cut before school starts again in September. But Helen isn’t inclined to have her hair cut and she’d rather be dead than go back to school.

At last Beth retrieves the card and wipes it down the front of her vest to dislodge the dust, fluff and flakes of discarded skin.