Copycat Read Free Page B

while Jennie endured the forceps.
    I recognized her in the morning when they wheeled her into the ward with the teas, drooping like a dunked digestive. I had caught sight of her only once, yesterday, when we moved in. I had made the sandwiches to tide us over until the cooker could be wired up. We never imagined we’d have no time to eat them.
    ‘I know you, don’t I? You live next door to me.’
    Jennie’s matching slippers sat waiting on the floor by her bed. White with rosebuds, signifying innocence, same as the nightdress she changed into. All that whiteness made her waif-like. She lifted her head from the pillow and eyed me, unaware of where she was or what she was supposed to be doing.
    Nosing into the pink blanket in the perspex cot beside her I said, ‘Great, a girl. They’ll be neighbours, they’ll be best mates.’
    Jennie’s moan of distress was tragic.
    ‘Leave Mrs Gordon alone,’ said the nurse. ‘She’s had an exhausting time.’
    Well, naturally I was indignant. I’d been spoken to like a child, but I managed to rise above it because my main concern was getting to the loo for that first morning cigarette.
    As I passed Jennie’s bed, fags deep in Sam’s dressing-gown pocket, she whispered to me with her eyes tightly closed, ‘That’s it. Never again.’
    One of the first subjects Jennie brought up was the way she was bullied at school. I think she had a thing about this and it influenced all her behaviour.
    We were in her house at the time, in her bedroom. I sat on Graham’s side of the bed while she, with her wet hair wrapped in a towel, sat beside me bottle-feeding Poppy after a careful sterilization routine. With her hairline reduced by the towel Jennie looked almost childlike, quite impish. And with her small bones and snub nose she put me in mind of a freckled pixie. ‘Why did they pick on me?’ she asked, still bewildered all these years later. ‘I didn’t stand out in any way. I wasn’t fat or spotty or smelly, I didn’t have a squint or a harelip. They were girls I’d had to my party, and they made fun of my mother.’
    ‘What was wrong with your mother?’ I teased, my sticky nipple in greedy Scarlett’s mouth. I was always finished way before Jennie because it was essential that Poppy drained the lot, was winded at least six times during her feed and by the time the torment ended Jennie’s lips were as sore as my tits; she bit them continuously. She kept Lipsalve in the pocket of her special feeding apron. She changed the brand of milk weekly, even venturing into goat’s when Poppy went through a long phase of colic.
    ‘Nothing was wrong with my mother,’ she snapped. ‘That was what made it hurt more. My mother was really trying, she’d made such an effort to get everything right. My God, how I hated kids’ birthday parties, but you had to have them and you had to go to other people’s if you were invited. Does any kid honestly like them?’
    ‘I did.’
    ‘Honestly?’
    ‘I was a pig. I went for the food and the presents.’
    Jennie propped Poppy against her hand and the baby burped and puked. Jennie looked worried. ‘Damn damn damn.’ Her agitation was catching. ‘I’m going to get no sleep again tonight.’
    ‘Leave her downstairs where you can’t hear her. It won’t hurt her – not as much as you being so tired.’
    Of course she didn’t listen to me, why would she? Letter by letter, word by word, Jennie was following the latest book. Following rules, like believing in God, like measuring recipes, like testing her hair before colouring, was an essential part of her nature.
    ‘My mother had veins on the back of her legs.’
    I looked at my own. ‘Join the club.’
    ‘No, Martha, not veins like that. Horrible wormy veins. She was always in having them done. She had to wear special stockings. It was the veins they started whispering about – Barbara Middleton and Judith Mort.’
    She even remembered their names. ‘Kids are so foul.’
    ‘They