Free Wise Children by Angela Carter

eyes were misting over, too, I saw the hang of our Tiff’s shirt, remembered how she’d spent her last visit with us in the toilet, and put two and two together.
    ‘You’ve put her in the club, Tristram!’ I couldn’t hold it back, I came right out with it.
    Nora turned the tap off sharpish, stopped crying in a flash and pressed the Standby button so the screen froze on our lovely Tiff in mid-teether.
    ‘What’s that? A little baby?’
    ‘I’m not ready to be a father,’ said Tristram. ‘I can’t take the responsibility. I’m not mature enough.’
    ‘No man ever is,’ announced Wheelchair, in her grande dame voice.
    We all three glowered at him. He cowered.
    ‘Aunties,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’
    ‘It’s not for us to do the forgiving,’ said Nora. ‘It’s up to that sweet, innocent child and how you make amends to her if she can ever see it in her heart to forgive you. And you’d better make your bloody amends pronto before her father finds out you wouldn’t do the right thing or your days of close-ups are numbered. Not to mention your days of breathing. Now let’s see what foul thing you did next.’
    With that, she smartly pushed the Play button and shut him up.
    I can’t say if Tiffany knew it was Tristram down there at the bottom of the staircase or if she didn’t know him at all; whether he seemed familiar from some scarcely remembered time before her heart broke, or if his face seemed to her a new face that reminded her, just a little bit, of somebody else’s face. Somebody dead and gone. But down the stairs she came towards him, without a smile, flowers in her hair, half-naked on her poor, bare, shaky feet.
    Such pretty feet she always had, long, but perfectly formed, and pretty little piggies, nicely gradated, not like those long, root-like toes some people have. Her bare, pretty feet tracked blood behind her; she’d rubbed her heels raw on her purple stilettos. Fancy walking all the way from Bermondsey in those heels!
    Tristram looked as though he was propping old Melchior up, now, unless it was Melchior holding up his son; each clutched the other like drowning men at spars. Tristram’s career in pieces! His old man’s birthday tribute ruined! The flower-like child he’d violated turning up to shame him, mad as a hatter in front of an audience of millions! Was there no end to his troubles?
    She reached up behind her ear, fished out the bit of wallflower and offered it to Tristram. He, not knowing what to do with it, sniffed at it. That made her smile. He tried to give it back to her but she wasn’t having any.
    ‘Wallflower,’ she said. ‘You know what they say about wallflowers – many are called but few are chosen.’
    All this while, there’s the uneasy shuffling of the studio audience and every now and then some minion would dash across the set on a frenzied bid to stop the whole business in its tracks. But on it all went, and on, and on, and on.
    ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Cop hold.’
    Now she thrusts her battered little spring posy at Tristram, retaining for herself the one daffodil, which she holds to her mouth as if it were the mouthpiece of one of those sit-up-and-beg telephones we used to have, years ago. Hello, hello? Then she holds it to her ear. Nobody at home. And offers that flower to Tristram, too, with such a sad smile – a smile that changes when she looks at it again and notes that it is not, in fact, a telephone at all, to a pale giggle.
    ‘Daffy dill, daffy dilly,’ she said. And once more broke into song, but one with words, this time.
    Oh, my little sister, Lily, is a whore in Piccadilly,
    And my mother is another in the Strand –
    I thought: That’s it! They’ll fade her now, for sure! But still and still and still they didn’t, not even when, now she’d got rid of her flowers, she cried out suddenly:
    ‘Off with it! You only lent it to me! Nothing was mine, not ever!’
    And stripped off her Number 69 shirt, threw it to the floor and trampled