Bad Penny Blues by Cathi Unsworth

Author:Cathi Unsworth [Unsworth, Cathi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2020-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

22 ANYONE WHO HAD A HEART

I walked out of Holland Park tube and turned left onto Lansdowne Road. Diagonally across from me rose a high tower like a castle's keep made out of red brick, tiny little windows all the way up it. I stopped, sucked in a breath as I read the sign on the wall: Lansdowne Studios.

I was standing on the spot where Bobby Clarke had waited in vain for a boy to come and rescue her, got into a long black car instead. Across the road from the studios where James had been working, making his music late into the night.

Which was, in turn, bang opposite the place I was actually looking for. A modest two-story detached house that, judging from the grey cast of the stucco, had seen better days. Probably during the Twenties, in the aftermath of the First World War, when a grieving nation had been desperate to try and reach their lost boys on the other side, at The Christian-Spiritualist Greater World Association.

It felt to me like I had been living through another season of death. Ever since last November, when President Kennedy was assassinated and then, two days later, we watched his killer gunned down in front of the TV cameras. Shortly after, and much closer to home, a little boy called John Kilbride went missing from his home in Hyde, Manchester. He would not be back for Christmas.

December came with a personal reprieve – Macy's in New York invited me and Jackie to design a range for them, flew us over the Atlantic to meet them. Our week there still felt like a dream, from the excitement of the flight to the first appearance of the spectacular Manhattan skyline and the delights of the city itself – the yellow cabs, the Christmas lights, Central Park in the snow. We had such a good time that I almost forgot my worries about Jenny and Dave, almost chased away the shadows of the dead girls.

But all the time, Mya's card sat in my purse, waiting for me to use it.

Christmas and New Year passed in a blur of clinking glasses and excessive food, the start of the Big Freeze. I got a card from Jenny saying that things had gone so well with the film and its director, Robert Mannings, that they had gone and got married. On Christmas Eve in the Eternal City – I envied her the romance of it all, not to mention the climate. As 1964 dawned in blizzards and ice, Toby started work on a new series of canvasses, while Jackie and I found ourselves gracing the cover of Vogue, alongside a brace of other young designers, as the people putting London on the style map.

Then, on the first night of February, I fell asleep and into another horrific world. When the papers confirmed what I'd seen wasn't just a nightmare, but the murder of a real girl, someone called Sue Houghton, I reached the card out of my handbag, dialled the number and held my breath.

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