Custard, Part 2

I'm not entirely sure where Custard got to that night, but she did not go home and she did not go to Dick the Dustman's flat either.  In fact, she never went there again. By the morning, Janet was frantic with worry and having quizzed KM and myself about her daughter's whereabouts, and visibly disappointed in our lack of knowledge, she left our kitchen a whirlwind of pain and grey to the gills. A big, fat penny had dropped.

A few hours later, apparently none the worse for wear, Custard rolled up neither smiling nor proud of her absence but steely and determined.
"Wish me luck," she said as she went in.  She was still wearing her halter neck top and her hair shot off in all angles from where she'd slept.

At about lunch time Janet appeared in our kitchen again.  She didn't have a bag of tins as usual and she wasn't full of fun or stories.  She was gloomy, miserable and flatter than I remembered seeing her before; like she'd lost a fiver and found a penny. Or worse. My mother took one look at her, and then ushered KM and me from the room with a, "Don't you two have something better to do?" which we didn't although it would not have been a smart move to argue.

And so my sister and I stood in the living room bouncing from foot to foot, waiting for a sign that we could re-join the conversation: in the past Janet and my mother had competed to tell the funniest story, each rolling over the other in an elaborate game of Top Trumps.  Not now though - I instinctively knew those days were gone.

The sign to re-join the conversation never came.  Later my mother, a mass of contradictions herself, would say that she knew immediately what to do, and she did it, without a moment's hesitation.

And the truth was, if not complicated, than somehow not straight-forward even though on paper it was exactly that.  We don't live our lives on paper, neither by a manual where the right thing to do is followed by the next right thing and the next: rather we muddle through and drift and sometimes those drifts take us off course.  Janet had believed it was okay mostly because she'd turned a blind eye or never even looked.  She hadn't thought it through.  She was short of cash and Dick the Dustman seemed like a good source of additional income.  And why shouldn't he want to support Custard and why wouldn't he want to pay for her to stay over in his flat, and Custard had seemed fine with the arrangement and she'd got extra pocket money and other stuff?  But it was wrong.  It was so, so wrong, she'd told my mother so, so wrong.

It's easy to reflect with modern sensibilities and assume there was never any kind of defence for what Janet had done, and yet as a young person I felt some sympathy for her because I liked her.  We all liked her.  Janet was unformed, child-like; she was impulsive, uproariously funny and because of all of that she didn't  think about the consequences.  She hadn't even considered Custard beyond a fleeting second.

The first I knew about the gravity of the situation was seeing my mother in the hallway, holding the telephone - the phone half the neighbourhood paid 10p to use.

You can find the rest here

You can find the first part here