When Daddy Comes Home. Toni Maguire
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and she wanted the same.
Antoinette looked at herself in the mirror, giving her reflection a cool, appraising look. She knew she was different. Even apart from her English accent, her clothes were old-fashioned and her dark brown hair, falling almost to her shoulders in a page-boy cut, was more suitable to a fourteen-year-old than a girl of seventeen. It was all down to Ruth’s influence.
Not any more, thought Antoinette wistfully. I want to be like other girls. I’m going to be fashionable.
She thought of the groups of happy, confident young people she often served at the coffee bar when she worked the evening shift. The boys with their neatly cut hair, dressed in jackets and well-pressed trousers, might look like younger versions of their fathers but the girls had created their own style, one that looked as though it had very little to do with their mothers. Their hair was teased into the new fashionable beehive, and their faces were coated in a pale pan stick that contrasted harshly with their black-lined eyes which peered out at the world through thickly mascaraed lashes.
Antoinette’s skin saw only a flick of powder, her lips wore a natural pink lipstick and her eyes were only enhanced by one coat of mascara. This set her apart from her contemporaries almost as much as her clothes did.
I’ll start at once, she decided.
The glamorous, swinging sixties had begun and with them came a new affluence. Blue-collar workers became part of the middle classes and housing estates sprung up everywhere, offering young couples the chance to own their box-like house, identical to all the others nearby. Cars were parked outside every house, television aerials decorated every roof and the words ‘hire purchase’ replaced ‘debt’. This was a boom time, and it brought with it a new youth culture that Antoinette longed to be a part of. Teenagers had found an assurance their parents had never known, and in their leisure time they danced to the new rock ‘n’ roll, went to cafés, drank cappuccinos and talked confidently together. They refused to be younger versions of their parents and instead invented their own fashions and attitudes.
These were the people Antoinette wanted to mix with and to do so she knew she would have to change. She could do little about her English accent but she could certainly change her appearance.
A very different Antoinette began to emerge. She bought tight dresses and hid them at the back of her wardrobe, along with stiletto-heeled shoes and new underwear. A hairdresser recommended by one of her youthful customers worked his magic and made the neatly cut dark brown hair disappear. In its place was a back-combed beehive. Plucked eyebrows now accented eyes that had grown harder, and a loss of appetite turned her once-plump shape into a more fashionable slim one.
Ruth watched the transformation, puzzled and displeased. She was used to unquestioning obedience from a child that had always sought approval, and she was taken by surprise by this sudden rebellion. While she did nothing to stop it, she fought back subtly, using her skill with words to manipulate her daughter and provoke the reaction she wanted. She used words full of hurt and bewildered anger for her emotional blackmail.
‘I don’t know why you want to make me unhappy. Don’t you think I’ve suffered enough?’ she would say plaintively.
But Antoinette refused to listen.
As the new, fashionable Antoinette took shape, she found that the girls who frequented the coffee shop now chatted to her. Her new friends’ main interests were make-up, teenage fashion and how to get a boyfriend, and these interests took up most of their mental energy. Antoinette was grateful for this, as it left them with little curiosity about Antoinette’s home life, so she didn’t need to use the false one she had created: a happy home, a loving mother and a father who worked away.
The weekend when Antoinette decided she was going to complete her transformation arrived. The process took hours. First, a bright orange dye was washed through her hair and then she set about drying it and teasing it into that fashionable shape so loved by teenage girls and despaired of by their parents: it rose high above her hair, stiffened into place with a generous squirting of lacquer. It was so thickly coated that a comb could hardly penetrate it.
Then, her face. She took a pan stick and covered her skin with it so that she was strangely pale. She ringed her eyes so heavily in black liner that they appeared to have shrunk in size. Then she took up the latest addition to her fast-growing make up collection: a small plastic box complete with mirror containing a cake of black mascara. Generous gobbets of spit turned the black cake into a gooey mess which she carefully applied to her lashes. After each coat, she added another until the thickened lashes nearly weighed down the lids. Finally, the natural colour of her mouth was obliterated by the palest of gleaming pink lipstick studiously applied to puckered lips as she practised pouting in front of the mirror.
She looked at her reflection, pleased with what she saw. She pursed her lips and smiled. Much to her satisfaction, the mirror showed no sign of the shy studious teenager her mother knew, nor of the old-fashioned girl that worked at the coffee bar. No, this was a modern girl, one who shared the assurance of the people she admired.
She felt as though she had emerged from a cocoon, and had shed the safe skin of ‘obedient daughter’. Deep down, she still lacked the confidence to be completely sure of the outcome of her metamorphosis but she tried to put that out of her mind.
Instead, she welcomed her new image. She pouted at the girl in the mirror.
‘Goodbye, Antoinette,’ she said. ‘Hello, Toni.’
Her new self was born and she was a girl ready to party on a Saturday night.
Now that Antoinette looked the part, the girls she’d met at the coffee bar invited her to share Saturday evenings with them. They would meet in groups and descend in a pack on the local dance venues, spending the evening dancing, giggling and flirting with the boys.
At last, Antoinette felt herself accepted. More than anything else, she wanted friends and the companionship of other young people. She needed desperately to be part of a group, to giggle companionably with them and to have what she had been missing her entire life: fun.
One Saturday morning, she excitedly watched the beginning of the conversion of the nearby field from muddy site into a magic place. At last she was finally going to enter that secret world, the one where teenagers dressed in the height of fashion, danced the night away, passed cigarettes around to appear sophisticated and drank smuggled-in alcohol. She couldn’t wait.
She watched as coils of electric cables were run from large, noisy, diesel-fuelled generators to provide the sparkling lights that shone on the dancers. She saw a huge glitter ball, something she had only seen before on television, being carried into the tent.
Sections of wooden floors to be laid over the damp earth were taken in and then, once that was in place, the furniture followed. A small army of helpers carried in folding tables and an assortment of chairs was placed in groups around the hastily erected wooden dance floor. She had been told that there would be a bar inside, but that it only offered soft drinks. Anything stronger had to be smuggled in but that wasn’t difficult. Customers with bulging pockets were given a cursory search by good-natured security guards as they looked for forbidden alcohol they seldom found. The walls of the marquee were easily raised and small bottles full of spirits slid under its folds to the eager hands of their co-conspirators.
Antoinette liked drinking. Ever since her father had first introduced her to the intoxication of spirits, she had enjoyed the sensation of numbness and relaxation that alcohol brought. While most teenagers were just discovering how to drink, Antoinette was a practised hand. Even now she liked to keep a bottle in her room so that she could take fortifying sips when she needed them. As soon as she had looked old enough, she had been able to buy it herself from off-licences, pretending it was for her mother.
At the moment, Antoinette had a small bottle of vodka, her chosen spirit, hidden in her room, in the belief that her breath would not be tainted by its smell. She did not