Caryl Phillips - The Lost Child

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather stop in and talk?”

“Well, it’s up to you. If you’re frightened of what folks might say, then let’s stop in, but you know you can’t live your life like that.”

Pamela tossed her hair back and lit another cigarette. In this half-light she looked beautiful, but Monica knew that the real source of her friend’s attractiveness to men would be her confidence, for she never gave out the impression that anybody could knock her off her tracks.

Monica put on her only dress, the blue one that her mother had bought for her before she went off to university. She had last worn it to the library on her first day at work, but it became clear, simply by the way that Denise was looking her up and down, that she was overdoing it, so unsure if she’d ever have an occasion to take it out again, she’d put the dress away. It was made of blue satin, with a bow on the front by the bust, and it was all she had to dress up properly for a night on the town. She felt funny using her own comb after Pamela had used it, but because she’d recently snipped her hair short, these days it needed only a few rapid strokes. Monica gave her face a hasty towelling and then took a deep breath. It was evident that she wasn’t that pretty, and she had long accepted this reality as a bearable fact of life, but when she was set against Pamela, the full extent of her plainness was all the more noticeable. She carefully hung the towel over the side of the bath and realized that at the moment her main source of worry was not her looks but her raincoat, which, having had fish and chips pocketed inside it, would stink, as, in no time, would her dress.

“Well, how do I look?”

She heard Pamela lie and say “marvellous,” but she knew that at thirty-one she looked ten years older, and most days she felt it. A trip to the hairdresser’s was top of the list of things to be done, for having had a good go at her hair with the kitchen scissors, she desperately needed the ends trimmed and the whole mess straightened out. And of course, her nails were a disaster, but it was too late now.

“I’ll have a quick check on the kids?”

Monica stepped quietly inside of the boys’ bedroom and gently moved Tommy’s hand from his face. Then she looked down at a peaceful Ben and Lucy before closing in the door behind her.

“Well, Mary Poppins?”

“The kids are asleep.”

“Good, we won’t be long.”

Pamela insisted that since it sounded like it was only spitting now, they needn’t bother with coats, which was something of a relief. Monica quickly hung the smelly raincoat back up on the hook by the door.

* * *

Pamela had made the Mecca Ballroom seem like a quiet and civilised little place, but Monica had never seen anything like it. From the outside it could easily be mistaken for a cinema, but once they stepped inside the foyer and out of the sprinkling rain, she could feel the combined energy of noise, music, and lights just beyond the double doors. In front of them a shabbily suited man sat behind a desk, tearing tickets off a roll and dropping the money into an oversize metal cash box. He sat up straight when he saw her friend and greeted her by name (“Hey, Pam!”) in what he clearly hoped might pass for a gangster movie accent, but Pamela ignored him and snatched the tickets and then pushed her way through the double doors without turning back to make sure that Monica was following behind.

The dance floor was before them, but Pamela started to climb the circular staircase to their left, and once they reached the balcony she claimed a small table near the railings from whose vantage point they were able to survey the antics below. While Pamela went to the bar for two rum and Cokes, Monica looked all about and could see that the balcony encircled three sides of the dance floor, and was decorated with tables and chairs and the occasional settee where people could relax and drink until they were ready to once again take the plunge. Downstairs, girls were dancing in groups around their handbags, while blokes dawdled against the walls, smoking their cigarettes and trying to muster enough courage to make an approach. She could see that the downstairs girls were all sturdy curves and improbable inclines, and compared with them, she wasn’t much. Up here on the balcony she was marooned with the less glamorous set and the drunken men who, too shy to approach any lasses, had decided instead to drink the night away. She was older than most of the people, and as she saw Pamela teetering back towards her with their two drinks, it struck her how ridiculously formal her own dress must look, and she began to ache with embarrassment.

The two men at the next table kept looking at her and Pamela and smiling, but her friend didn’t seem to notice. Monica knew they were being talked about, and she had a sense that these men were not being kind. She held her glass of rum and Coke in both hands and tried not to look over in their direction, while a preoccupied Pamela propped herself up against the balcony and conducted a running commentary on who was here, and who was with whom, oblivious of her friend’s discomfort.

“Have you seen Angela Marsden’s top? She’s barely in it. Always queening it, she is.”

Monica was fully aware that she had lost the years in which you were supposed to learn what to do in a situation like this. While she was still living under her parents’ roof and studying for her exams, she had no interest in going out to places like the Mecca Ballroom. Other girls went, but they were the types she wasn’t keen on mixing with, and even if she had wanted to go out with them, they would almost certainly have shunned her. During her first year at university she made a conscious effort to attend the Christmas Ball, but the young men there affected to take delight in both her accent and her blue dress without showing any real interest in her beyond the obvious. For Monica this was the final indignity, and she thereafter retreated to her room, where she buried herself in reading for the rest of the year. At the start of her second year, fearful that she might completely lose sight of herself, she decided to seek friendships and alliances outside of her college and eventually discovered the Overseas Student Association, whose members seemed better able to recognize her. And now, all these years later, she found it ironic to think that finally here she was, in the Mecca Ballroom, but suffering from all the same insecurities that as a teenager she had intuited would plague her were she ever to set foot in a nightclub. As she continued to gape at the gyrating dancers, she knew that she ought to get a grip and make the best of the situation, and at least try and enjoy herself.

“I beg your pardon.” She suddenly heard Pamela, who was now leaning back in her seat, addressing somebody. She turned quickly as her friend continued. “Are you talking to us?”

The two men from the next table were idling over them, drinks in hand and with what they believed to be winning smiles on their faces.

“Well, we reckoned we’d come over before we go blind with staring. Can we join you?”

The taller, handsome one was doing all the chatting, while his less impressive friend lagged a little behind him, anxiously sipping at his pint of beer and quickly wiping away his frothy moustache. There was something about the friend’s combination of cocky assurance and nervousness that made her immediately like him.

“Well,” said the taller one, “we didn’t know that we had a model agency in the town?”

Pamela rolled her eyes. “Does that usually work for you?”

The man grinned and shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, come on then, help us out. Are you local, because we’ve not seen you around. I’m Victor, and this is Derek.”