An Eligible Bachelor Read Online Free PDF Page B

her long hennaed hair parted in the middle. Sartorially she was hovering in limbo somewhere between a hippy and a punk: a lost soul when it came to style, in fringed skirts, fishnet tights and Doctor Martens, with tight crushed velvet tops and masses of silver jewellery – rings and bangles and earrings. But although she might look sweet and doll-like, she was actually selfish, lazy and not very bright, lurching from one disaster to the next, ill-equipped to think on her feet and always eager to take the easy way out, preferably at someone else’s expense.
    Living with her was an emotional rollercoaster. Sometimes she would hug her daughter fiercely, tell her it was just the two of them against the rest of the world, that she was all that mattered, and the little girl would go to sleep snuggled up against her mother’s warmth. Until the next man came along. Then Sally would be besotted, and would make it clear that Richenda was no more than a nuisance. Richenda would stand her ground stoically, knowing from experience that Sally’s relationships rarely lasted more than three months, and it soon would be the two of them again. But in the meantime she would be expelled from her mother’s bed, left to shiver in some makeshift pile of blankets in the corner of whatever squat or bedsit or rented room her latest lover occupied.
    Of course, in those days she wasn’t known as Richenda. Sally had named her Rowan at birth, but by the time she was three she was cruelly known as Missy, short for Mistake, a tag that had been bestowed on her by one of Sally’s many other mistakes, and it had stuck.
    For ten long years the two of them struggled to survive. Occasionally, Sally would relent when things got really tough and would go back to her parents. Richenda loved these sojourns, for it meant proper food, a warm bed, regular bedtimes, the chance to watch telly. But it would only be a matter of days before a row broke out and Sally would have one of her tantrums, and their few belongings would be swept up into a holdall and off they would go again, to throw themselves on the mercy of one or other of Sally’s friends. Richenda dreamed that her grandparents would one day have the strength to stand up to Sally and demand to keep her, but they never did. Shewould look back at them waving rather disconsolately and helplessly through the kitchen window, and as she grew older she came to despise them for their ineffectuality.
    By the time Richenda was twelve, they were living in a damp flat in a house overlooking the railway line in North London. Sally supplemented her benefits by knitting jumpers that she sold at Camden Market – brightly coloured jumpers with cannabis leaves or Dennis the Menace or peace signs emblazoned on the front. She could knit without a pattern, weaving the colours in to create pictures with an expert eye, and the jumpers were very popular. It was Richenda’s job to scour jumble sales and charity shops for old knitwear that could be unravelled and reused. She loved pulling the threads and watching the garments disappear before her very eyes, before winding the wool up carefully into neat balls which she stacked in colour-coordinated rows in orange boxes. One day Sally promised to knit her a jumper of her own, with the Jungle Book characters on it. Together they drew out a design, of Baloo with Mowgli, and Richenda watched in excitement as the figures emerged hanging from the needles. She couldn’t wait for the day it was finished. Somehow this jumper represented the fact that their life was settling down, that Sally had got over her resentment of her daughter, that they were almost normal.
    But before the jumper was finished, Sally met Mick…
    Mick also had a stall at Camden Market, where he was selling bongs and pipes and all manner of smoking paraphernalia, and doing a roaring trade. The first day Sally met him she came home with a silly grin on her face. Thesecond day she didn’t come home until the next