The Outcast by Sadie Jones

Author:Sadie Jones
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780307375452
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2008-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART THREE

Chapter One

August 1957

Kit arranged her records around the room so that they covered the skirting and made a border. There were fourteen of them now and they didn’t reach all the way around, or even far along the second wall, but it was a start. They kept slipping on the wooden floor and dropping, with a slapping sound, and she would go and prop them up again. The faces seemed to look at her as she went around them, and she knew them so well she almost couldn’t see them properly any more. Elvis, Gene Vincent, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Bill Haley, Julie London, Betty Carter, Sarah Vaughan … She had a portable record player in its own red leather carrying case and it lived on the floor next to her bed. She would sometimes hide a song from herself, in a drawer under her clothes, so she could play it again after waiting and hear it fresh. She’d done that with Julie London singing ‘Funny Valentine’, and Elvis’s ‘Mystery Train’ had waited a whole month, and it had almost been like hearing it for the first time. She never heard the wireless at home because she wasn’t allowed one, and the one downstairs was very big, in a wooden unit, and lived in the drawing room, but at school she did. Some of the older girls had them, and it was an illicit and thrilling pleasure to sneak into one another’s rooms at night and listen to music as loudly as they dared. Kit saved up her birthday and Christmas money and every trip she’d made to a record shop was in her memory; the listening to each song, the horrible choosing. She’d had to sacrifice Little Richard’s ‘Long Tall Sally’ for Julie London singing ‘S’ wonderful’, and it had been worth it because ‘Cry Me a River’, was on the other side. It had a been a huge decision, not just because the songs were so precious to her and each one had to last so long, but because it was about who she was, jazz or rock and roll, and it had been hard to do.

She lowered the needle very carefully onto ‘Cry Me a River’, newly reinstated from her underwear drawer, and went to the window. She didn’t put it on loudly because her parents were having drinks on the terrace below and if it disturbed them, there would be a row. The view from her window was ahead of her and the song behind, rich and bitter, and making her mind liquid and reaching. Out in the garden was normal; the evening birds singing, the lawn and the woods and the empty green and blue of nature and everyday life. The song coloured her sight and she half closed her eyes as she looked out of the window and there was an ecstasy to her frustration and her boredom.

‘Daddy!’

Kit saw Tamsin come onto the terrace where her parents were, from the front of the house.

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