by Annie Murray
For Martin, with love
FOREWORD
First of all, if you have bought a copy of this book, let me say a very big thank you. While this is a story mainly set in Birmingham, it has also been written, unapologetically, with the aim of raising money for the Bhopal Medical Appeal. So, in buying it, you have already helped to make a difference to someone.
It has been written out of love and anger. The anger will be self-explanatory. The love is something I feel for two places. One is the city of Birmingham, our old industrial heartland, which I have been writing about for many years and where people, in the not-so-distant past, were no strangers to industrial accidents. The other is Bhopal, a city also located at the heart of its mother country, India. Bhopal was one of the princely cities; it is sited on two lakes and it is old, beautiful and fascinating.
In Britain, most people who remember Bhopal at all think of it as a place in which a catastrophe happened a long time ago. In December 1984, its name became associated with what is still considered the world’s worst industrial accident. The poison gas leak over the northern area of Bhopal tends to be remembered as an event involving thousands of deaths, horrific physical suffering and shameful corporate callousness.
However, the contamination of Bhopal by the American-owned Union Carbide pesticide plant did not begin with, nor was it confined to, the events of December 1984. Less well known than the gas leak, but still wreaking terrible effects in this part of the city, is the ongoing poisoning of its water through chemical contamination from the plant, which has never been cleared.
There are of course still many survivors of the gas leak, living with pain, disability and a bitter sense of injustice. An estimated 150,000 still require health care as a result of ‘that night’. Their agony went untreated, or was inadequately treated, for many years. It was to help alleviate this suffering that a charity, the Bhopal Medical Appeal, was set up in 1994. Now, however, the toxic legacy of Bhopal continues into the second and third generation. Children of gas- and water-affected parents are being born with extreme deformities, suffering a variety of agonizing, debilitating conditions.
Nor, of course, is Bhopal the world’s only toxic hot spot. There is an urgent and ongoing question of how we enforce the idea that ‘the polluter pays’.
There is more information and more stories at the end of this book and on my website at www.anniemurray.co.uk, especially about some of the women and children of Bhopal.
However, this is, in the end, a story and I hope you will enjoy it. I have written it as a gift for Bhopal – and for you.
With warm wishes,
Annie
An Ugly Pair of Shoes
I am wearing a pair of shoes.
They are ugly shoes.
Uncomfortable shoes.
I hate my shoes.
Each day I wear them, and each day I wish I had another pair.
Some days my shoes hurt so bad that I do not think I can take another step.
Yet, I continue to wear them.
I get funny looks wearing these shoes.
They are looks of sympathy.
I can tell in others’ eyes that they are glad they are my shoes and not theirs.
They never talk about my shoes.
To learn how awful my shoes are might make them uncomfortable.
To truly understand these shoes you must walk in them.
But, once you put them on, you can never take them off.
I now realize that I am not the only one who wears these shoes.
There are many pairs in the world.
Some women are like me and ache daily as they try and walk in them.
Some have learned how to walk in them so they don’t hurt quite as much.
Some have worn the shoes so long that days will go by,
Before they think of how much they hurt.
No woman deserves to wear these shoes.
Yet, because of the shoes I am a stronger woman.
These shoes have given me the strength to face anything.
They have made me who I am.
I will forever walk in the shoes of a woman who has lost a child.
Author unknown
CONTENTS
New Rooms
Child’s Pose
Roses with Thorns
Flags
Boy at the Dentist
We Seem to Be Training
Twenty-One
Sugar-Sugar, Double-Double
Milk Street
Famous Four
The Night Between
What Do We Do Now?
Flames Not Flowers
Lion’s Breath
If I Can Do It, Anyone Can!
One
NEW ROOMS
25 November 2014
Two years, one month, three days and roughly five hours ago, our son went out to work and never came home. It was the last time we saw him alive. Six hours. Seven. This is how I count my life out now. He was twenty-three years old.
Today, we moved into this house. Tonight, I am lying in a new bed, a new room. If I get up to go into the bathroom, I’ll have to think carefully about where to step – the cupboard to the left now, not the right, that chair close to the door. Beside me, my husband Ian is lying with his back turned to me, which is how it is now, or how it feels, anyway. I suppose he is asleep though I can’t be sure.
Before, we lived nearer the middle of town, in Moseley. Now we have come to the southern rim of the city. Our old house was an Edwardian terrace; this one is in a row of houses built in the seventies. It used to belong to an elderly lady and is decorated in her style: neat and clean, beige carpet in the hall and living room, wallpaper with big bronze-petalled flowers above a dado rail, pale coffee colour below; a kitchen with white cupboards and black-and-white chequerboard floor; all double glazing and thick white door frames with security locks. And I am glad. One day in some distant future I will feel like redecorating, but for now I want it to be new and quite different from before, the paint colours not chosen by a past version of me; not haunted. Somehow, differently, I have to learn to want to go on.
Eyes open in the dark, I’m listening for his feet on the stairs, the way I used to hear them in the other house, long after he was gone. There would be the tiny noise of the front door latch turning very quietly, Paul trying not to wake us after a shift, that pause as he pushed each of his trainers off with the toe of the other foot. The still-laced shoes would be there in the morning. He might go into the kitchen for a drink before creeping up the stairs, his bedroom door closing almost silently. He was good like that, always sweet, considerate, even at his worst.
I feel bad if I don’t listen for him, guilty if I forget, even for a second, guilty if I smile – even the briefest of social smiles – which up until now I have not felt like doing, hardly for a second.
‘Jo?’ Ian’s voice comes to me up the stairs the next morning as I’m cleaning my teeth. ‘I’m off now.’
I look down at the basin so as not to see myself in the mirror in this bright white bathroom, this woman hearing a man calling to her from downstairs who is my husband of almost thirty years. Answer him, I command myself. It seems to take an ocean of energy to force words past my lips.
‘’K,’ I spit out. ‘Bye. Hope it goes well.’
‘You going over to Mom’s?’ he calls.
‘Yeah – course.’
He’s taking the car. He doesn’t ask if I’m going to the cemetery. I went every day in the beginning. It’s two buses from here to Selly Oak, just as far as it was from Moseley.
‘Great, thanks.’ A few seconds of quiet. ‘OK, bye.’ He pauses again. ‘See you later.’
The front door closes. The latch sounds different from the old house with its dark-
blue door and ancient Yale. Here we have one of those clicky white jobs, the sort where you have to jam the handle up to lock it. The unfamiliar sound tilts me back into anguish. I’ll never hear that old lock turning again, the door opening, the creak of the stairs, each tread familiar. Everything has gone, been taken away . . .
Losing caution I raise my head and the woman in front of me stares back, frozen and at a loss. God, who’s that? I try to reckon with her. Skinny. I wasn’t always skinny. Haggard? Yes. The best thing you can say about my face is that it’s ‘heart-shaped’, and I used to have good skin as well. The woman I see in front of me has a complexion about as grey and saggy as her old T-shirt. Then there’s the mousey hair in an overgrown bob, dull blue eyes looking out from under a too-long fringe, toothpaste round her lips. God, she’s a state . . . It’s too much for me and I quickly look away again.
It’s very quiet. Outside somewhere a car door slams. I’m dazed by all the newness. The old bathroom had pale blue tiles. The walls were lumpy, decades-old dirt creeping out from behind skirting boards. This house came on to the market after Mrs Parsons went into care. Everything is so square and clean. The downstairs walls are smooth, Anaglypta in the bedrooms, everything spotless.
We even have three bedrooms, one small as a monk’s cell looking out at the back.
‘We don’t need three,’ I said to Ian when we were looking round. I could hear the savage tone of my voice. ‘We don’t even need two.’
‘But that one’s hardly more than a boxroom,’ he said, peering into the tiny one. ‘Look – it’s fine.’ He turned, wary with me, the way he is now. ‘It’s perfect for what we need, isn’t it?’
It’s just along the road from his mom’s and of course he was right, but I was scratching my nails against everything because I didn’t know what else to do with all that was inside me.
For a moment now I glance back at the mirror. I must get a haircut, buy some new jeans. Pull myself together. I’m the only person allowed to suggest that to me. If anyone else says it – my mother, for example – they’ll get their head chewed off. I can’t remember when I last went to the dentist. I need to start something – yoga or Pilates – something healthy, no more sleeping pills and all that. Get some sort of life, now we’re in this new place. And this is the most difficult thing of all – to accept having a life, when my boy, my dear, lovely boy, is lying in Lodge Hill Cemetery. How can I have a life, be allowed to go on? But I can’t escape the fact – the cruel, unjust fact – that I am one of those still alive.
‘Breakfast,’ I murmur to myself. ‘Eat.’ I am trying to think of my body as someone else’s, an objective thing that I have to look after, like a pet tortoise.
My phone goes off as the smell of toast is drifting through the kitchen. Ange, the screen says. God, when did I last speak to Ange?
‘Jo? How’s it going?’ She sounds really, really nervous.
Dear old Ange, so perky and kind, so distant now, someone from a completely different life – my different life. I suppose it’s my fault, but that’s how it feels.
‘Oh, fine.’ I wander into the living room. It’s all one room knocked through, light streaming in at each end. Feeling the pile of the carpet under my toes, I realize I haven’t put any shoes on or even socks. ‘Did you know we’ve moved?’
Of course she doesn’t know.
‘Oh?’ Startled. ‘Have you? Where to?’
‘Hollywood.’
‘Hollywood? What – you mean, America? Film stars?’
‘You know, near Wythall, down near Ian’s mom. Seemed a good idea. We only got here yesterday.’ Does my voice sound normal? I can’t tell any more. I’m trying to sound light and cheerful – heaven knows what I actually sound like. Probably shrill and a bit crazy. ‘Just getting settled in. I’m going to see Dorrie in a bit.’
‘Good for you.’ Ange sounds awkward and not really like herself either. I’ve become one of those people who others are not sure how to talk to or what they can say.
Say the right thing.
‘You’ll have to come over.’ It would be great to see Ange, wouldn’t it? To have a friend, a life. I can’t remember when I last saw her – has she deserted me or was it me who did the damage?
‘Yeah,’ she says. I hear a small sound, her dragging on a cigarette. ‘Yeah – hey, I’ll be over to see you soon, chicky.’
I leave it a beat. ‘Who says chicky?’
Ange lets out a relieved snort of laughter. ‘Soon, yeah?’ Nothing definite then. She’s cautious, hurt, I think. A tiny window must be opening in me if I even realize now, how I’ve shut everyone out.
‘All right – yeah. That’d be great. Thanks, Ange.’
‘TTFN then. Glad you’re OK, Jo.’
Afterwards, I sink down on our navy sofa which is pushed against the wall, bare as yet because I haven’t found the cushions.
One day, a few months after Paul died, before I finally broke down at school and had to leave work, Ange and I were in the staffroom at breaktime. She was in the corner, making us both a cuppa amid all the chat and stressed outbursts around us and the photocopier churning away in the corner. And suddenly, quite softly, Ange called across to me.
‘Hey – how’re you doing, chicky?’
I was just sitting there, at least my body was, but I was not there in my head at all. I looked across at her, managing, God knows how, some sort of grin and I saw this great glow of relief in Ange’s face, as if she’d caught a little glimpse of me, her mate, the old Jo, the joking, messing-about Jo.
‘Chicky?’ I said. ‘Who says chicky?’
Ange shrugged, mocking herself because when she’d said it, the way she’d said it, was really tender. She grinned back, bringing me a mug of coffee, a pack of Jammy Dodgers under her arm. ‘I do, apparently! Must be getting old.’
‘We’re growing old together,’ I said.
We met when we were doing teacher training. The first day in class, I spotted this flame-haired girl with interesting cheekbones. And there was something she did with those pouty lips and her bright eyes which made it look as if she was trying not to laugh quite a lot of the time. She looks good fun, I thought. We quickly became friends and through the years we had jobs in separate schools and, now and then, in the same one. But never, in all that time which was the best part of thirty years, had Ange ever, ever before said ‘chicky’.
Thinking about it now, in the drifting scent of toast, my eyes fill with tears. At last – please. I ache for tears, a proper flow of them to release me. But I can’t cry – hardly ever have since Paul died. I’m ashamed of it – of not being able to do it. So why this, now?
Covering my face with my hands, I breathe right down into myself, into the blockage, like a stone, lodged in my chest. But I’m dry – the tears do not flow. So many things were destroyed with Paul’s young life. I shut Ange out – shut everyone out because the pain locks you in with it by yourself, won’t let you escape. And it never ends. You can never wake up one day and say ah, it’s over now. It goes on and on until I bore even myself and still can’t get out of it . . . I rejected Ange, wouldn’t answer the phone, wouldn’t see her after I left work . . . Because even people who are sympathetic want you to talk about other things sooner or later – day-to-day things, their kids, their lives. And how can you, when you feel eaten up with rage at them for having kids who are still alive and getting on with it and with guilt for still having a life yourself? And when every moment, of every day, all you can think about is him, and getting to the cemetery because if you don’t you’ll have let him down . . .
And now, Ange, bless her, doesn’t say all those crass things, Are you getting over it? Have you moved on . . . ? All her helplessness and feeling of being shut out pops up in that one word, chicky.
I drag myself up to sort out the toast. I want Ange to come round – but then again I don’t. Her two kids are going along fine, her life is as it was. She’s part of the old days, which for me are closed behind a door of steel. Many
things die with a death.
And, I realize, as I stoop to get the marge out of the fridge, she didn’t actually ask for my address.
Two
‘Dorrie? It’s Jo.’
Ian’s mom’s house is only a few doors along the street. I’m about to knock, but I try the door, right in my guess that she’s left it unlocked.
‘Come in, bab – I thought you’d be along any minute.’
Dorrie makes her usual attempt to sound cheerful, but there is a quaver, a new thinning of her voice. We thought the stroke had not affected her at first. TIA did not sound as bad as ‘stroke’. But we’re beginning to realize that it’s done more damage than we thought. Nothing you can exactly put your finger on. It’s more as if it’s knocked the stuffing out of her.
I step in and close the door. Dorrie’s house is similar to ours – bare paving stones at the front, white plastic-framed double-glazing and high-security locks. Even though we had the new front door put in for her a while back, she often, out of old habit, just leaves it unlocked, even swinging open sometimes. What’ve I got to steal? she says. No one round here’s like that anyway.
A plastic runner covers the swirling black-and-mustard pattern of the carpet all along the hall. Another strip of plastic branches off at right angles into the living room, across the cocoa-brown carpet, as if the paving-slab geometry outside has continued into the house in transparent form. There’s a faint smell of the cat’s tray from the back kitchen, the gas fire, a hint of Vanilla Blossom air freshener.
‘Hello, Dorrie.’ She’s the one person for whom I can push my face into a smile. And she’s my saving grace – having her to look after.
The room feels changed somehow, but Dorrie is seated as usual in her chair by the fire, a shrunken Dorrie now, thin and gristly, but she still has her head of soft white curls. Someone comes in to do it for her every week. Sweep, the black-and-white cat, is curled up in the warmest spot close to her feet.
‘You can just lock the door, you know,’ I say. ‘I’ve got the spare key, remember? Best to be on the safe side.’ I don’t want to alarm her but you never know . . .