Bad Girls Good Women by Rosie Thomas

It’s heavy to carry round.’
    He looked carefully at her, examining everything except her face. ‘You a new girl?’
    ‘Er, yeah,’ Julia said ambiguously.
    He clicked his tongue in disapproval. ‘Jesus, where does Monty find them? Infant school? All right, leave your gear here. I’ll keep an eye on it.’
    ‘Thanks.’
    Julia slipped sideways out of the door before he could change his mind, or ask her anything else. The first thing she did was to head up Wardour Street into Oxford Street. Then she made her way to Mattie’s shoe shop. Peering through the plate glass window Julia saw her kneeling in front of a customer, with a sea of shoes spread all around them. She was holding a shoe in one hand and the other gesticulated as she talked. The woman listened intently, then took the shoe and tried it on again. Julia saw her nodding. A minute later she was on her way to the cash till, with Mattie bearing the shoes behind her.
    Julia waited until the sale was completed and then she slipped into the shop. Mattie stared. ‘What are you doing in here?’ she hissed, and then added in a louder voice, ‘Black court shoes, madam?’
    ‘You look like a born saleswoman,’ Julia told her.
    ‘I’m an actress,’ Mattie said haughtily. ‘I can act saleswoman, of course.’
    Julia took her hand and pressed something into it. Mattie looked down at the folded ten-shilling note.
    ‘It’s for your sandwiches at dinner time.’
    ‘How …?’
    ‘Tell you later. I don’t see anything I like the look of, thank you very much.’
    Outside, looking between the cliffs of high buildings, Julia could just see trees in the distance. She remembered that it was Hyde Park, the sanctuary that they had failed to reach last night, and the greenness drew her. She walked towards it, slipping through the skeins of traffic at Marble Arch, and then crossing on to the grass. It was brown and parched by the sun, but the softness was welcome after the hot, hard pavements. She walked on, under the shadow of the great trees, until the roar of traffic in Park Lane diminished to a muffled hum. Water glinted coolly, and Julia guessed that the wide stretch of lake must be the Serpentine. There was a scatter of green canvas deckchairs under the trees overlooking it. She sank down in one of the chairs and paid threepence to an old man with a ticket machine. Then she closed her eyes and listened to the faint rustle of leaves over her head.
    It was the first comfortable, solitary moment she had had to consider what had happened since leaving home.
    She found herself wondering what her mother was doing.
    It was easy to picture her. Perhaps she was dusting, picking up the ornaments from the tiled mantelpiece, very carefully, dusting each souvenir and china knick-knack before putting it back in exactly the same place. It was as if the house was always being made ready, cleaned and polished, for some big occasion that never came. Even the furniture, the settee and chairs with their cushions set at exact angles, seemed to wait tensely for inspection by guests who never materialised. Hardly anyone every came into the house, and when she was a little girl Julia was puzzled by her mother’s anxiety in the midst of their eventless lives. She was always being told not to make a mess when she played.
    Don’t do that, Julia, it makes such a mess .
    Betty wanted her to play neatly, setting her dolls out in rows. Julia’s own inclinations were for sand, and water, and poster paints that sent up plumes of brightly coloured powder when she poured in the water to mix them.
    Once, Julia remembered, she had come home from a birthday party with a packet of shiny, coloured stars. With childish cunning she had hidden them from her mother, and then one afternoon she had shut herself into her bedroom and stuck them all over the wallpaper. They looked wonderful, like fireworks, jets of cobalt blue and scarlet against the insipid pink roses. Betty had grown suspicious, and she had