One of Your Own Read Free

Dukinfield after breakfast. While they were gone, Ian set up his camera and photographic lights in Myra’s room and checked that all the equipment was in working order. He slid his reel-to-reel tape recorder under the divan bed.
    In the maisonette on Charnley Walk, Lesley played with her new toys and looked forward to her visit to the fair that afternoon. Whenever her mother, Ann, opened the kitchen window, the tinny music and stallholders’ booming, magnified shouts wafted up from the recreation ground. Lesley elicited a promise from her mother that she would show her how to make clothes for her two favourite dolls, Patsy and Lynn, on the new sewing machine later that day. Shortly before four o’clock, she pulled on her coat and left the flat with Tommy to knock on the Clarks’ door downstairs. Mrs Clark and her children – Lesley’s friend Linda, and her younger brother and sister, Roy and Ann – had planned to spend an hour at the fair, but Mrs Clark declared herself too tired to venture out. Undeterred, the children left Charnley Walk without her, agreeing to return at five o’clock. At ten years old, Lesley was the eldest of the small group walking along the frosty, twilit streets.
    Myra returned from Dukinfield after lunch, having arranged to pick up Gran at nine-thirty that night as usual. By late afternoon, she and Ian were driving out to the Tesco store they had visited a few days before Christmas; the posters for Silcock’s Wonder Fair, emblazoned with a big wheel, were everywhere. They did their shopping, packing it with deliberate carelessness in a few cardboard boxes. With the groceries in the back of the car, Myra pulled on the black wig and headscarf, careful that no one should see her. She started the ignition and they drove on to Hulme Hall Lane, parking the car in a quiet side street, away from the whooping crowds milling about the recreation ground. She and Ian overloaded a couple of boxes, locked the car and began walking towards the dazzling, flashing lights of the fair.
    By five o’clock, Lesley’s small group had run out of money and knew they should be heading home. Lesley was still breathless from a ride on the cyclone as they threaded their way past the soft toy prizes dangling from the stalls. Away from the main booths and whirling waltzers, they trod on dank grass and entered the dimly lit streets where a pale, thin flurry of sleet fell. As they trooped towards home in the shadow of the gasworks, Lesley suddenly said, ‘I’m going back’, and turned and ran up Iron Street before anyone could stop her, past the red-brick wall and in through the dark opening, met by a surge of deafening music and glaring lights.
    At six o’clock, Lesley was still at the fair. Bernard King, an 11-year-old boy who attended the same school, spotted her from where he stood beside the spinning waltzers. She was by the dodgems, alone, gazing at the bright, speeding cars as they thudded about the rink, the jolt of buffers colliding. Bernard passed Lesley to get to the cyclone and that was the last he saw of her.
    The sliding guitars of the Rolling Stones’ recent number one single, ‘Little Red Rooster’, blared from the fairground speakers as Myra and Ian watched Lesley from the darkness behind the dodgems’ rink. 1 They waited several minutes, observing her spellbound expression as purplish sparks of electricity flickered on the wire mesh overhead from the car rods, and when they were sure she was alone, they made their approach.
    Groceries spilled from the overfilled boxes Myra and Ian carried awkwardly in their arms; as Lesley turned to look, Myra smiled and asked if she would mind giving them a hand taking the boxes back to their car nearby. She promised Lesley a reward for her help and the little girl readily agreed, following where the couple led through the glittering fairground to the dim side street where their car was discreetly parked. Myra asked Lesley if she might help them unload the boxes