RUNAWAY || G.H

i, You Swine!

1960, Late September

"WHEN ARE YOU coming home, John?"

That was the first question Juliet proposed, it was a ritualistic occurrence each time a malicious onslaught of bickering would occur on the telephone, John had left for Hamburg in Germany and his unknown presence diminished all the humour in the Smith household which was no longer filled with his infamous jibes that got the younger girl through the strict times her mother imposed on the duo. The place she called home loomed higher than ever making her feel suffocated and imprisoned, her mother was no better either. The woman had imposed more chores on the young girl than ever, taking her cousins absence as an excuse to educate Juliet on how to be a proper lady seeing as though she had no distractions now. So with now having the tedious lifestyle of a nun she was practically begging for Johns presence to soak up all of the tension in the Smith household.

The pebbled, white walls of her childhood home had always been somewhat downcast. What should have been a snug and inviting terrace instead resembled somewhat of a chasm that ensnared her, like the chains trapping a dog. Her bedroom was no different: it was four pale walls, wooded flooring, a creaky bed, a side table and a dresser. Unlike John, she hadn't taken to pasting up photos of her favoured idols. John mostly did it to irritate her mother with his vulgarity. Women famed for their sex appeal: Bardot and the like made up the majority of his posters. She watched as the posters mounted up over the years, remembering when it all first started when her aunt, Julia, gave him a poster of Lana Turner. Mimi was furious, stating it was widely innapropriate for a boy his age to own something as vulgar as that, as her father instead chuckled from behind her and tried to calm his wife down before she caused the next world war.

Her most treasured possession, however, was an old record player her father had given to her as a little girl. When her hair was sprouting brown to her ears and she had yet to cut a blunt fringe to hide her forehead, her father had passed on to her what would become her greatest obsession. The music player was a brown mess of a thing, antique and likely to have lived longer than her. It was small and packed into a leather briefcase, its wooden framing falling to pieces and its metallic shine dull. The vinyls it came with whirled round and round and sounded more alike to a screeching cat than to music, yet as her collection expanded she grew to adore the kinks and cracks the machine would emit. She had only been around four, John took the bedroom next to hers two years before. He had been slightly nicer back then, before he had evolved into a teenage boy who's only goal in life was to torment her. Her mother and father had taken to spoiling him slightly, guilt wrecking them for his circumstances and all the while had they forgotten about her, their only daughter. Thus, her father brought her home the record player. A gift, a bribery. Either way had she forgotten their misdoings and instead took to locking herself up in her room to listen to all the old American tunes.