82

1973

Life went on. Angel never told Dora about Donny’s real family. Somehow, she just couldn’t bring herself to do it. When she was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, Uncle Donny would buy Angel her fabric on her birthday so that she could make a new dress for herself. For Dora? He never bothered buying gifts for Dora. Not even at Christmas.

‘Bottle of voddy’ll do for you, won’t it, Dor?’ he’d say to Dora, and she would visibly shrink.

When Angel was fifteen, Donny brought back to the flat a bolt of shell-pink silk.

‘Isn’t that nice, honey,’ said Dora, encouragingly. Say thank you, her desperate eyes said to Angel.

‘Thank you,’ said Angel to Uncle Donny.

‘Make yourself something nice, yeah?’ he said, and sat down to read the paper. Princess Anne to wed Mark Phillips, shouted the front-page headline.

‘I’ll cook the tea,’ said Dora.

Angel hated the way her mother started rushing about the place when he was here. Trying to look industrious. Trying to please him. Which of course she never would. He just made use of her, couldn’t she see that? Couldn’t she break free of him? Try to make her own way in the world?

It maddened Angel, the way her mother seemed so utterly under Uncle Donny’s spell. Then she thought of standing on their relatives’ doorstep when she was five. She’d never forget that. They’d slammed the door in her mother’s face, left her to rot. Now they were trapped here, the pair of them, and Angel couldn’t see a way out. So she sat at her sewing machine and made up the shell-pink dress, and dreamed of another life, another world.

Within two weeks of her sixteenth birthday, the dress was completed. She slipped it on, and Dora zipped it up. Then they stood together, mother and daughter, looking in the big cheval mirror in the main bedroom at the pretty young girl Angel had grown into. More than pretty, Dora thought. Angel was growing into a beauty, while she . . .

These days, Dora tried not to look at her own sad, tired reflection, made all the more tired and sad when compared to her daughter’s youthful glow.

‘You look like a princess,’ said Dora.

‘Go on,’ said Angel, embarrassed. But she was pleased with her reflection, and pleased with the dress. She’d lost her prepubescent thinness now, and she was curving in all the right places. She was leaving school in the autumn, and she wanted to get into fashion and design if she could; she had a flare for it. But probably she’d have to settle for a job winding electric coils in the factory up the road. This strange closeted life with Donny and Dora, the long boring days at that deadleg secondary school, had left her with few expectations of life. Anyway, it would be nice to earn. Not to have to rely on Uncle Donny’s meagre handouts any more.

Then the front door opened. It was Uncle Donny. He came in and over to the open bedroom door and stood there, leaning against the door frame, looking at the pair of them standing there.