Polly Samson - A Theatre for Dreamers

‘Edie Carson, this is my sister Erica, prisoner of Palace Court, Bayswater; Erica, this is Edie, Queen of Wood Green.’ Bobby was gesturing with a pint mug brimming with beer. It slopped on the table between Edie and me and, as we both reached to mop it, our heads met with a bump and Bobby said, ‘Glad to see you two hitting it off,’ and we both groaned.

Soon we were back to Jimmy’s studio and, though it was cold enough to see your own breath, we kept each other warm. Jimmy’s bed was on a ledge high up inside the skylight, Bobby’s a divan behind stacked easels and a curtain of purple velvet. Edie was not shy about crying out.

A few nights later Bobby told Edie Carson about our plans to travel, because as soon as Jimmy and me got serious Bobby knew he didn’t want to get left behind. Edie had plans of her own; she and her best friend Janey weren’t hanging around waiting for spring. We made a date to meet Edie and Janey at the port of Piraeus the week before Easter.

Mum’s money kept us in fuel and food so the trip from London and on through France and Italy went without danger or hunger. The boys recovered quite quickly from the putrid horrors of our first squatting lavatories. I’m not sure I ever have.

We made it almost as far as Paris by night one, stopping only for fuel and baguettes, pâté and fizzy orange. At a hostel in Chantilly we fell exhausted into an enormous and very creaky bed with surprisingly crisp linen sheets. Breakfast was a memorable highlight: yellow sunshine at a window, a chequered cloth, a large bowl of milky coffee and my first croissant, which was flakier and more buttery than any croissant since. Mum’s car was beautifully behaved and didn’t break down once. I wish the same could be said of Bobby.

We’d left London a whole three weeks late – my fault entirely as Bobby never tired of telling me. There hadn’t been a right time to broach the subject with Father, who had reached a stage of grief that involved tearing Mum’s books from the shelves and making me clear her wardrobe. Her smell wafted from the folds of her clothes. He caught me with her rose silk petticoat to my face. ‘No use for you, any of this stuff,’ he said. ‘You don’t have her figure.’

As we drove from the hostel and skirted Paris, Bobby’s irritation cast a black spell. ‘Might have been nice to visit the Louvre, but no…’ he said, turning to Jimmy, who was still holding out some hope that he would relent on this mad dash to meet Edie in Piraeus. ‘And you can forget the Crazy Horse, mate. I hope you think waiting for the kid was worth it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you: we’ve got nothing ahead of us but the N7.’

I hated being called ‘the kid’ but ached to hug my brother all the same. When one of us needed to cry about our mother we did it in the arms of the other. Maybe I was a cowardly little girl, as he said, but was there to be no let-up in my punishment, no forgiveness? Bobby had been schooled in the seething house of our father, so it seemed not.

All his life Bobby had been scared of Father. We all were. I’ll never forget Mum’s face the first time she saw the marks his belt left on him. Boiled eggs for tea and me in the high chair so Bobby could only have been about five or six. ‘Why won’t you sit down?’ Mum was exasperated with the pair of us grizzling, until finally, he gingerly lowered himself to the seat and winced. Bobby was twisting and screaming as she pulled down his shorts to find his bum, which was normally as white as her pinny, lividly striped and shocking as a burn.

Father had no shame, the way he came striding in, swirling ice in his drink. ‘Now, young fellow, you’ll know in future to do as you’re told.’

I saw Bobby cowering, then and other times too, until he learnt to stay in his room. And Mum curled over sobbing into a tea towel and me trying not to flinch as Father’s big face comes towards me. I’d like to get away and hide but I’m strapped in my chair. To this day it makes me panicky to think of it. The mess of crushed egg and shell as Mum opened her fist.

Bobby was tense the whole trip but I didn’t expect so quickly to fill the space of the common enemy we’d left behind. Nothing I said could raise a smile and then, in Grenoble, I drank the local water and was so doubled up by the morning that Jimmy insisted we pull over and pitch the tent long before we reached Bobby’s goal of the coast. We lost another day because of my guts and, as I sat shivering and unwell, I thought I’d lost my brother’s love forever.

I came across him outside the service station near San Remo. I thought he was crying. He scowled, said it was exhausting driving for fourteen hours to the border without stopping.

His tears had left tracks, his face dusty from the road. I persevered, trying to talk to him about Mum, about Dad, but Bobby shoved me, hard, said he was through with even thinking about the pair of them.

‘Believe me, family’s an over-rated concept; the sooner you realise, the better,’ he said.

We drove on, ignoring Pisa and a distant view of the Leaning Tower as we turned inland. I sounded whiny to my own ears each time I begged that we stop somewhere to take in the sights, or even to stretch. My first trip abroad was not turning out to be a dream. Domes and towers whizzed by, cypress trees lengthened their shadows, Roman ruins beckoned and proffered the shade of umbrella pines, but not for us. I was beginning to hate Edie Carson. Not for Edie Carson this ever-unwinding road of resentment. Bobby said he should’ve sold the car in England and gone on the train instead of waiting for Jimmy and me. I said I wished he had. Edie had a Spanish friend in a French circus, some dodgy-sounding gig with a sculptor in Rome, Janey’s aunt had invited them to her castello near Siena. I wondered aloud if a Greek island and Bobby would prove such a vital part of her itinerary.

He thumped the steering wheel. ‘Everything’s your fault,’ he said.

Jimmy sat jackknifed and silent beside him with the map. I was stowed like the sulky child I’d become between our camping equipment and the luggage. Occasionally Jimmy’s hand would find me there but then so would Bobby’s eyes in the rear-view mirror.

I was supposed to have sorted it out; I’d kept them hanging around promising I would. In the end we’d had to wait until my eighteenth birthday before Bobby came over to wrestle my passport from Father’s hands. It was an ugly scene, the ugliest really. Again it passes behind my eyes, a juddering reel of a home movie or the onset of a migraine: accusations of Bobby’s corrupting influence, Father’s face boiling, Bobby throwing back at him that he only wanted to keep me as a skivvy now Mum was gone.

Father, his crazy, twisted mouth bellowing: ‘Better than you turning her into a tart for your friends?’

Bobby, suddenly very tall and cold: ‘Thank God Mum’s not here to hear you, old man.’

And Father, a chair toppling as he roared: ‘Damn you, Robert, you’re no better than a pimp. Your mother is turning in her grave.’

Bobby surprisingly fearless. ‘She had to die to get away from you… she hid everything from you because she was frightened… she was too scared to even let you know about the car, no wonder she…’ and our father came at him with the scissors I’d been using to cut coupons from a magazine, my hands too shaky to keep going. Bobby’s kick threw him off balance. Father was floored, heaving for breath, and Bobby with planted feet panting above him, the neighbours banging on the door. Father’s portrait had been knocked from the wall, the glass shattered. From behind the cracked glass, a young soldier with a trim black moustache and a pair of stripes newly fixed to his sleeve. The broken man coming roaring towards us bore little resemblance to this proud defender of the realm. He came at us with my passport in his hands, shoved it at Bobby, went to make a fist then let it drop. ‘Take it. Take her. Don’t either of you darken my door again.’