‘Don’t be daft. No one can stop this thing once it gets going,’ Baz said. ‘Just sit down like a good gal or we’ll be in trouble. Who’s the boy with the golden eyes, anyway? No one has golden eyes.’
‘I just call him that because his eyes are a sort of golden brown, like lions’ . . .’ Lottie was beginning when the car reached the summit, hesitated for a moment, and then plunged even more horrifyingly than before.
As soon as they were within a few feet of the ground Lottie tried to get out, but Baz grabbed her firmly and shook her. ‘Don’t be a little fool,’ he said urgently. ‘The ride only takes a few moments. There’s one more hill and then the cars will come to a halt and you can get off like a Christian. You don’t want to end up with every bone in your body broken, do you? Now tell me about this boy. Is it someone you knew from Liverpool?’
The railway was climbing the last hill and Lottie searched desperately for a sight of the boy, then saw him. He was standing quite near the scenic railway now, looking upwards. His face was illumined by the coloured lights which winked and shone all over the pleasure beach and any doubts she might have had as to his identity disappeared. It was the boy with the golden eyes all right . . . oh, if only she could get off this wretched ride and reach him before he disappeared into the crowd once more!
‘Lottie. Who is this boy?’
‘He’s in my dreams; he calls me Sassy,’ Lottie said rapidly. ‘I met him properly once, but I didn’t ask him his name. If I can just get to him . . .’
Their car reached the top of the ride and even as Baz opened his mouth to answer her, speech, breath and practically everything else was whipped away as the steepest and worst descent began. Lottie shrieked because she could not help it and tried to fix the boy with her eyes so that she could find him again as soon as the ride finished, but even as the little car drew to a halt and Baz unclipped the guard rail, she knew it was no use. He would have disappeared into the crowds without even knowing she was there.
She jumped out of the car as soon as it stopped, but Baz detained her, a hand on her arm. ‘The boy you dreamed about? I’m getting confused, but I’ll do my best to help you, obviously. What was the fellow wearing? What colour is his hair?’
‘I only saw him from the top so I’ve no idea what he was wearing, but his hair is sort of toffee-coloured, like his eyes,’ Lottie said. She was pushing her way towards the fish and chip van as she spoke, hoping against hope that he might have returned to it, but, as she had feared, the only person she recognised was Merle. Her friend came towards them, holding out the bags of chips and pulling a face as she handed them over. ‘You were ages,’ she said accusingly. ‘A good thing we don’t work on a Sunday or we’d be in real trouble. Don’t blame me if your perishin’ chips is cold.’
‘We weren’t ages,’ Baz said, looking slightly surprised. ‘We came straight to the fish and chip van to find you.’
‘Well it seemed ages, to be left all on me own,’ Merle grumbled. ‘Where shall we eat our chips? Tell you what, if we walk back along the prom, we could grab a seat in the Marine Parade Gardens. Then I reckon we’d best be getting back to Mrs Shilling, else we’ll be good for nothing tomorrow.’
All the while they ate their chips, Lottie’s eyes were scanning the thinning crowd, but the boy did not appear again and she had not really expected that he would do so. Indeed, she was beginning to wonder whether she had actually seen him at all, or whether it had been a chance resemblance, or even wishful thinking. She told herself that it could simply have been due to her telling Baz about the dream, so that the boy was on her mind. Yet on the other hand, she had seen him first in Rhyl, a seaside resort, had dreamed of him in Yarmouth, and now she had seen him again, beside the sea. It was weird. If only she had asked him his name, where he lived, anything that would enable her to find him again! But she had not done so and it was no use regretting the fact. She had been very young on the school trip and anyway, she had not known then that she was going to dream about him. In fact the whole thing was a mess and a muddle and would probably be best forgotten.
‘Lottie? You’re awful quiet. I told you you wouldn’t like that scenic railway; you’d ha’ done far better to stick wi’ me.’
‘Yes I would,’ Lottie said thoughtfully. ‘If I’d stayed with you, I might have had a chance to speak to that boy . . . did you notice him, Merle? I dunno what he was wearing, but he had very pale, goldy-brown hair and eyes the same colour.’
‘Oh aye; there were a young man in front of me in the queue with funny, very light brown eyes,’ Merle said carelessly. ‘Quite a looker, wasn’t he? He had a gal with him and he kept turning his head to talk to her. Then, when he’d bought his chips and were walking back along the queue, one of the little bags slipped . . . he’d bought four or five . . . and I grabbed it just before it hit the ground. He thanked me and grinned – lovely white teeth he had – and the girl he were with went off in the opposite direction, so I guessed they’d just got chatting in the queue, the way one does.’
‘I wonder who he was buying for?’ Lottie said. She was not particularly surprised that Merle had noticed a young man – she was a girl who did notice men – but was not at all sure that Merle had really encountered the boy with the golden eyes. To Lottie he was a boy, not a young man, but then she chided herself. Years had passed since the meeting in Rhyl. She herself was no longer a child but a young woman, and he had been several years older than she. Dreams, of course, did not take age into account, but if she and Merle really had seen the same person, then he would probably be at least as old as Baz, and probably older. In fact, he would be the young man Merle had described, and not the boy which she herself had thought him.
‘Who were he buyin’ for? Why, pals of course. But what does it perishin’ well matter?’ Merle asked impatiently. ‘How come you know him, anyhow? Does he come to the theatre? But no, he can’t, ’cos if he did I’d know him an’ all. Come on, spill the beans! How come you know the feller?’
‘Oh, I met him on the beach once,’ Lottie said, vaguely but not untruthfully, for she had indeed met him on the beach, though only in her dream. ‘He was nice to me, really friendly. He was with his old gran – I think that’s who she was – and he helped me make a sandcastle. Only I never asked him his name and when Baz and I were on the scenic railway, right at the top, I was looking for you over by the chip van, and saw him only a few feet from you.’
‘Oh, I see,’ Merle said, losing interest. ‘Well, we’d best be heading for home now, or old Ma Shilling will lock us out.’
‘She wouldn’t,’ Lottie said at once. She was truly fond of their landlady and knew how generous Mrs Shilling was towards her lodgers. ‘Merle, would you know that young man again? The one – the one in the queue in front of you, I mean?’
‘Why?’ Merle asked. She scrumpled the little paper bag which had contained her chips into a ball and lobbed it into a nearby litter bin. ‘You ain’t interested in boys, you’re always saying so.’
‘I told you: I forgot to ask his name and I want to know it. If we’re coming back to Yarmouth next year, then I’d like to meet him again. Why shouldn’t I have a friend, even if he does happen to be a feller?’ Lottie said rather belligerently. ‘Look at you and Jerry . . . you’re just friends, but I reckon if we really do come back next summer, you’ll want to get in touch with him again.’
Merle jumped to her feet and gave Lottie the benefit of her most scorching glance. ‘You spiteful little cat,’ she hissed. ‘If Baz hadn’t gone off to buy a bottle of lemonade, and heard what you just said, he’d never have understood.’
Lottie, who had spoken quite without thinking, felt the blood rush to her cheeks. Merle was right: what a catty, thoughtless thing to have said! ‘I’m really sorry, Merle, it was a stupid thing to say,’ she said humbly. She turned as Baz collapsed on to the seat beside her, saying as he did so that he had been unable to find anyone selling lemonade. ‘Never mind. If you come back to Nelson Road with us, there’ll be plenty to eat and drink there. Mrs Shilling puts supper on the kitchen table each Sunday. It’s always cold food – bread and butter, salad and cold ham – and then there’s usually a big sponge cake or a bowl of jelly to finish up with.’
Baz agreed to share supper and they returned to Nelson Road to find Max, Louella, Jack and the Melias already in the kitchen, piling their plates with salad, new potatoes and ham. Max grinned at his son. ‘It’s a shame you’ve got to go back early tomorrow, but we’ll be in Liverpool ourselves in a fortnight so it’s not so much goodbye as au revoir,’ he said. ‘Come on, youngsters, dig in.’
As soon as the meal was over, and Lottie began to stack the plates in the sink – for it was her turn to wash up – Baz said his goodbyes, asked them to thank Mrs Shilling for her hospitality, and set off for his digs. He had barely been gone two minutes, however, when Merle threw down her tea towel and hurried out of the room, calling over her shoulder that she had forgotten something she needed to say to Baz and would not be a moment. She was gone nearly half an hour, and Lottie had washed up, dried and put away all the supper things before her friend re-entered the kitchen, looking flushed and pleased with herself. ‘Thanks, Lottie, for doing my share of the work; I’ll do your turn next week. And now let’s get up to bed ’cos I’m almost asleep on my feet.’
‘Is everything OK between you and Baz?’ Lottie asked as they undressed and got ready for bed. ‘I guessed you’d followed him, and you looked pretty happy when you came back into the kitchen just now.’
‘Yes, we’ve sorted things out,’ Merle said. ‘I knew I could make him understand if I could see him alone for ten minutes.’ She got into bed and shrugged the covers over her ears. ‘Goodnight, Lottie. I’m going to dream about Baz and I bet he’ll be dreaming about me. I suggested we might have a weekend in Blackpool together, and he liked the idea.’
Lottie, snuggling down also, hoped Merle was joking, for nice girls, she knew, did not go off with young men for weekends. But then she gave a small and secret smile: I know all about dreams, she thought drowsily, and they won’t simply come for the asking. Chances are Merle will dream she’s being dragged out to sea by a giant octopus, or having her best dress gobbled up by a whale, ’cos you can’t order dreams the way you can order boiled beef and carrots in a restaurant.
For her own part, however, she thought she had a pretty good chance of getting into the dream this very night, if it followed the course of her previous experiences. She had been on the beach and had paddled in the sea. She had dug a big sandcastle and carted water to fill the moat. But the best sign of all was seeing the boy with the golden eyes. Yes, she really should get back into her dream tonight, and if only she could remember, she would ask the boy his name.
In the other bed, Merle began to snore.
Though Lottie had had such an exhausting and exciting day, it had taken her ages and ages to get to sleep. Despite her most earnest efforts – or perhaps because of them – she had lain awake in her small bed listening to the chimes of the church clock until well past three in the morning, when she had fallen at last into an exhausted slumber. It had not, however, been a dreamless sleep. In the middle of her tap-dance routine, one of her shoes had come untied and had flown across the orchestra pit and into the front row of the stalls, where it had inflicted a black eye upon a fat and furious man. With surprising agility, he had leapt the orchestra pit and chased Lottie out of the theatre and along the whole length of the pier. Within six feet of the end, her legs had unaccountably turned to lead, so that the dreadful man had caught her up and tossed her over the rail. She had been wearing an enormous crinoline dress and a poke bonnet, so had sailed down towards the sea, crinoline billowing. But before she could touch the water, a giant octopus had wrapped his arms round her, clearly intending to do her awful harm. But the crinoline had foiled his evil intentions for he had chosen to devour her clothing first, and so difficult had he found it to negotiate such an unwieldy and prickly garment that he had let her go. She had swum desperately to the shore, seeing a tall tower on the promenade, and guessed this must be Blackpool. As she gained the beach, she realised she was naked when holidaymakers surrounded her, oohing and ahhing and telling her she ought to be ashamed, for no decent girl would ever arrive in Blackpool without a stitch on her back.
Lottie did not think she had ever visited Blackpool, yet here she was, apparently having swum all the way from Yarmouth. She looked round desperately for a towel or a shawl, anything to drape her nakedness, and finally seized a striped deckchair, tearing its canvas free from the wood and wrapping it thankfully around her. Before she could feel even slightly safe, however, the man who hired out the deckchairs gave a roar of displeasure, and once more the chase was on. Poor Lottie ran and ran, but the sand was soft and the crowds impeded her progress, and no one can run one’s fastest whilst clutching a piece of stiff canvas around oneself. She was near despair, her breath running out and tears pouring from her eyes, when she ran full tilt into someone who clasped her comfortingly, saying as he did so: ‘’Ello, ’ello, ’ello, what’s all this then? Ho, a naked young lady! I can see I’ll have to take you to the police station and throw you into a cell.’
Terrified, she looked up, past the familiar black uniform with its winking silver buttons, and into Baz’s face, for it was he. She began to explain that it was not her fault, that an octopus had eaten her clothing, but he was shaking his head at her, his dark eyes sorrowful. ‘Nice girls don’t go to Blackpool with octopuses for a dirty weekend,’ he said reprovingly. ‘I’m surprised at you, Lottie Lacey. I thought you’d ha’ known better.’