Jim’s all too frequent brushes with the law were regarded as an occupational hazard, as the Robinsons regarded petty thieving and crime as a vocation, and the occasional incarceration as an inconvenience. However, Janice’s fall into degradation had stunned them all, and her name was never mentioned by her mother, who in between drinking herself into a stupor was a regular churchgoer.
The evening was balmy, the love that Rose felt for Brad was that of a fifteen-year-old, which was what she was. The age of consent was sixteen, although Brad wouldn’t have known that, and so what, everyone was having sex at the school they both went to. Rose had been feeling the pressure from her peers for the past year after she had inadvertently blurted out that she was still a virgin.
Rose had always felt that intimacy with another should be within the bond of marriage, and if not that, then part of an intense interdependency of one human on another, a person she could trust. And Brad was that person, she had decided five weeks previously when they had first gone out together. He had been the perfect gentleman, not once grabbing at her breasts or trying to put his hand up her skirt in the back row of the cinema; not like some others that had tried and been rebuked. The reason some at the school had accused her of being a prick teaser. She wasn’t; she was just a good girl, about to become a woman, about to give herself to Brad.
The plan was in place. Brad was to leave his house in Compton Road at Kensal Green at 9.45 p.m. It was a Saturday, and there was no school to worry about the next day, not that Brad’s mother would have been concerned, although Rose’s would have been.
Rose was to tell her parents that she was sleeping over at her friend Steph’s house that night, which was fine by them, as Rose chose her friends well, and Steph was a person they liked and trusted. It wasn’t the real person that they saw, Rose knew that, as Steph was well ahead of her in the losing virginity stakes, and had been with half the boys in their class at school, including Brad, not that Rose was concerned. With Steph it had only been lust, as Rose’s best friend was of easy virtue.
It had been Steph who had given Rose instruction in the more exquisite art of lovemaking, which wasn’t how it was in the novels she liked to read. Rose was convinced that Steph had experienced the physical act without the emotion, something she was not going to do.
***
The two young lovers met outside Kensal Green Cemetery on Harrow Road at ten in the evening. Brad was on time, Rose was two minutes late. They held each other tight and kissed.
It was Brad who suggested they take a short cut through the cemetery to Kilburn Lane where they could catch a bus down through Ladbroke Grove and Notting Hill. And once they had reached Holland Park Avenue, they could walk up Bayswater Road and into Hyde Park.
Brad had chosen the spot, suitably romantic and secluded, but he wasn’t sure how he’d last until they got there. He also wasn’t sure why it had taken five weeks for him to get to this stage with Rose. He thought it was love, but he couldn’t be sure. But whatever it was, it was important to him and to her.
They were, as he saw it, two people embarking on a life together, not a fumble in the dark, not like it had been with Rose’s friend, Steph, nor with the others. After all, he wasn’t a virgin, six women to date, and Rose was to be the last.
His brother, Jim, would have said he was a fool, and that women were only good for one thing, not that his advice was required, nor would he be commenting, as he was doing three years in prison for holding up a newsagent, the proceeds totalling just three hundred and twenty pounds, and even then he’d left his fingerprints on the cash register, and they were held in a police database.
Janice, his sister, another romantic, would have seen the gallantry in her young brother, recognised herself in Rose. Although at the time that Brad met up with Rose, she was about to be flat on her back for the seventh time that night, and it was no sixteen-year-old with sweet intentions; it was an obese, sweaty man in his late forties.
Rose felt some trepidation about walking through the cemetery, not because she was squeamish, but on account of having first watched a horror movie at Steph’s before venturing out, knowing full well how distressed her parents would be if they knew of her deceit. The film, a dystopian zombie frightener, long on darkened scenes and violent deaths, devoid of a discernible plot, had not interested her, but it was Steph’s bedroom, and she had been polite and had watched it.
‘It’ll be fine,’ Brad said. ‘Save a couple of minutes.’
He took her by the hand, and the two of them walked through the imposing entrance. It reminded him of a scaled-down version of Marble Arch, not that he knew why a cemetery should have such an entrance, nor that Marble Arch had been built
