Chapter Seven

      Antoinette was soon going to dance halls every week. Soon, when she returned from the dances, another smell lingered on her breath: the smell of vomit. She had become unable to say no to another drink, even when the room was spinning and her stomach churned with nausea.

      It became a familiar routine. As soon as she had hurriedly left the dance hall or marquee, the cold night air would hit her full face on but she had consumed too much alcohol for it to sober her. Instead, waves of queasiness would rise in her throat, making her gag. Holding a handkerchief to her mouth she would stagger to the shelter of the shadows cast by parked cars, hoping that she was hidden from view. Then, placing one hand on the boot of the nearest vehicle, she would try to keep her balance whilst, with eyes streaming, she would bend almost double as her body heaved with the effort of rejecting the alcohol. Hot bile would spurt out of her mouth, burning her throat as it did so until she felt there was nothing left inside her.

      Then depression, the natural successor of alcohol-fuelled elation, would always swamp her as she wiped her mouth with a scrap of handkerchief, straightened up and resumed her wobbly walk home.

      Her experience of alcohol when she was younger had shown her that it could help to dull mental anguish as well as physical pain. But she did not realize that she had crossed the narrow boundary that lay between a drink-fuelled party girl and an alcohol-dependent teenager. Even if she had realized that she had a problem, she would not have cared. All she knew was that with each sip she took, the better she felt: her fear receded, her misery disappeared and her confidence grew. She could tell stories that made people laugh, feel she was accepted as part of a group and, once in bed, escape her thoughts in a drink-induced stupor.

      But there was a price to pay. On Sunday mornings, she wakened reluctantly, unwilling to face the results of the previous night’s excesses. Her head pounded. From behind her eyes and across her head, waves of pain shot into her skull. Her tongue felt swollen, her throat dry, and all she wanted to do was stay under the bedclothes for the remainder of the day. But she refused to give her mother satisfaction by giving in to her self-inflicted misery; she knew that Ruth already thought she had enough reason to complain about her daughter’s behaviour without Antoinette giving her fresh ammunition.

      Instead, she tried to recall the night before. She would see the dance hall where groups of girls sat chattering and giggling as they studiously avoided the looks from groups of boys walking around them. Antoinette was beginning to understand how the game worked now. This was a competition between Antoinette and her friends of who could look the most nonchalant and the prize was to be asked to dance by the boy they’d already selected. As he approached, a blank look would replace the animated expression shown to her friends and coolly, almost reluctantly, she would accept his invitation to dance with a stiff nod of her beehived head.

      Both sexes knew what they wanted: the girl wanted to be pursued and courted and then to win a steady boyfriend. The boy wanted to show his friends he could have any girl he wanted.

      But for all their bravado, the boys knew the rules. They might try to get further but there was no surprise when they couldn’t. They knew that a passionate kiss in the back of a car and a quick fumble would only lead to a soft but firm hand holding him back. In the early sixties, before the birth pill had led a sexual revolution, a pregnancy would result in either marriage or disgrace; both sexes knew that, and for different reasons, wanted to avoid them.

      Antoinette, though, was playing a different game. She wanted vodka. She longed for her world to blur; she embraced the dizziness, then ran her wrists under the cold tap and splashed water on her pulse points to steady herself before looking for a refill. She smiled sweetly at the nearest boy whom she knew had a smuggled bottle. Mistaking her motives, he would hastily top up her glass and when she knew that no more would be forthcoming unless she parted with more than a smile, she would drain the glass and make a rapid departure.

      Not for Antoinette a hasty grope in the back of a car, or the struggle to maintain her modesty as some youth, looking for a return on the free drinks he had given, tried to hoist her skirt up. She had no interest in that particular barter system and always made her escape before it could begin. Her friends were too young to be aware that drink not boys had become her obsession. But Ruth knew only too well.

      It was drink that stopped her facing the fact that everything between them had changed. The trust and friendship that was so important to her had now slid away. Ruth had finally shown her plans to her daughter and Antoinette felt that any chance of survival was to exorcise that love that still remained.

      Antoinette knew that her mother had begun to see her daughter as a problem, just as she had during those terrible years when she had refused to acknowledge what was happening. Now, as Antoinette slipped away from her control, Ruth obviously thought of her daughter as yet another burden she had to bear in a life strewn with unfulfilled expectations. Antoinette sensed that Ruth had begun to believe that her daughter was the cause of her problems.

      Now she had made it clear that she would welcome her husband back into their home as though nothing had ever happened, she began to undermine Antoinette as much as she could, bullying her with subtle and skilful manipulation until she forced her daughter to accept the situation.

      Ruth wanted control and she knew very well the words that would always make her daughter dance to her tune.

      ‘You are such a worry to me, dear,’ she would begin. ‘I can’t get to sleep until you come home. That’s why I’m so tired in the mornings. Do you really want to worry me so?’

      When she tired of making Antoinette feel guilty, there were her attacks – ‘You’re such a disappointment to me’ – and her accusations – ‘I don’t know who you’re with or what you and your friends get up to at those places but I know what you smell like when you come home.’

      Antoinette tried to ignore her as she defiantly watched Juke Box Jury and, with a mirror propped in front of the television, applied make-up ready for another big night out. Then Ruth would play her ace.

      ‘You know I love you.’

      Antoinette longed for it to be true; underneath the anger she felt at her mother’s betrayal, she still loved her and craved to be loved in return. Over the weeks that fell between that visit and her father’s release, she tried to shut out the sound of her mother’s voice as Ruth tried to seek her compliance in rewriting history. Her mother jerked the strings harder over the next few weeks until obedience, that integral habit of her daughter’s childhood, started to win out. She demanded that Antoinette play the game of happy families, that she pretend that she was looking forward to her father’s return and that nothing had ever happened that might make the very idea monstrous to her.

      ‘Daddy will be home soon, dear,’ Ruth would say to her daughter, her voice happy and untroubled, as though she expected nothing less than a delighted response.

      Antoinette would feel her stomach clench, her fists tighten and the fear rise, but she said nothing.

      Ruth would say in sharp tones that forbade any argument, ‘I want you to try not to upset him, dear.’ Then add in the patient voice of the martyr she seemed to believe she was, ‘I’ve suffered enough! Nobody knows how much I’ve suffered. I can’t take any more.’

      Antoinette believed in her mother’s suffering – she had heard that refrain ‘I’ve suffered enough!’ so often that she had to – but she didn’t see it in her mother’s eyes. Instead, she saw in Ruth anger at being thwarted, coldness and an implacable need to cling on to her own version of reality.

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