The Seagulls Laughter

by Holly Bidgood

  I loved him then, before I found out that he was gay. And if I’m honest for some time afterwards. I had thought that such feelings only existed between a man and a woman, until I caught him with the boy who worked at the butcher’s.

  ‘You won’t tell anyone, will you, Martha?’ he pleaded with me later, a fear in his eyes that I did not understand then. I kept his secret, yet in time the news got out nevertheless – as such gossip inevitably does. He hung his head lower after that; came to me often with bruised eyes and a bloody nose. War wounds, he would say with a wan smile as I wrapped sticky tape around his broken glasses.

  I love him, still, though more as I imagine I would love a brother, were I not a stifled only child. Such children are ill-equipped for life in the big wide world, and I am no exception. I found myself pregnant at nineteen by a man who dominated me in a way that I believed was normal. It occurred to me, too late, that I could have told everyone that Neil was the father of my child. It may well have made life easier for both of us.

  But I was determined to accept the consequences of my actions. I thought that I could make it work if I did everything my daughter’s father wanted of me – if I gave him all that he wanted, he would have no reason not to love me. I believed him when he said that I had ruined his life by getting pregnant, that I had done it deliberately so that he would not be able to leave me, that it was all my fault. Perhaps I was the one who had turned his hand to violence, too – perhaps I had asked too much of him. He had once been romantic, gentle even, when we made love. And he is gentle with his baby daughter – most of the time.

  ‘He is a good father,’ my mother says, her words heavy with reproach, as though I am to blame for not appreciating what I have, for being so ungrateful. But no one can see what goes on behind closed doors; my mother has not seen the bruises that I hide in shame beneath my clothes.

  ‘I fell down the stairs,’ I tell her one day, when she inquires as to the origin of my recent black eye. It is an unconvincing lie, yet she swallows it without question. ‘You should be more careful,’ she warns.

  What would she say, I often wonder, if she knew the truth? Continue to reprimand me for my carelessness, perhaps. A man would not attack the mother of his child unless he had reason to. Or, you can see how gentle he is with the child, for she is innocent. Perhaps: what do you expect, when you gave him a child he did not want? You are lucky he is willing to marry you, so you will no longer have to live in shame. I hear her voice in my head, though I no longer know if the words are hers, or my own. No matter who first spoke them, these words are true to me: I am the one that he hates – he does not hurt the baby.

  I would not hurt the baby, he tells me afterwards, once he has sobered up, his voice broken as he watches me hold a tea-towel-wrapped pack of frozen peas to my bruised eye. And for a moment he looks so pathetic that my heart weakens. I pat his hand, smile, tell him that it will all be okay. He promises he will not do it again.

  Every time, the same promise.

  Neil is angry with me, too.

  ‘You should leave him,’ he says, steel-voiced. He does not believe, for an instant, that I injured myself by falling down the stairs. ‘How can you let your daughter stay in the same house as a man like that?’

  ‘Because he is her father,’ I say. I feel as though I am defending myself, making excuses for my fiancé’s behaviour. I feel sick.

  Every day Neil and I go for a long walk together, taking it in turns to push Boo in the pram that my mother bought – her one contribution in the role of a grandmother. Sometimes both Neil and I are battered and bruised. Other times our pain has no physical manifestation, yet it unites us. Often we ignore our bruises, talk only of mundane things – a distraction. Sometimes we compare our war wounds.

  ‘Could we not just run away together?’ Neil says one day, offhandedly, and I laugh, thinking he is making one of his usual piteous jokes.

  ‘I have an aunt who lives in Shetland,’ I say, pushing the pram as we walk.

  He raises his eyebrows – the hint of a smile, the glint of an idea. ‘Yes, no one would think to look there…’

  It is only later that evening, when my daughter and I are home alone again, that the idea starts to take shape in my imagination. Why couldn’t we run away? There is nothing to keep us here. The empty house looms around me in the darkness. I tremble secretly with excitement, the possibility of freedom. Could it really be so easy?

  Once this seed has been planted in our thoughts, Neil and I talk more and more about how we might make our escape. It feels hypothetical, a shared fantasy – something to keep us going in the dark hours so that we do not give up hope.

  ◆◆◆

  I arrive back at home one evening to find that he is waiting for me.

  I wheel the pram through the front door and into the hallway. Boo lies asleep inside it, swathed in blankets. I take off my coat and my hair is damp from the rain, uncomfortable against the back of my neck.

  Then I see him: a malignant figure slumped over at the bottom of the stairs in the semi-darkness. I can tell immediately that he is drunk, I can smell the alcohol on his breath from the end of the narrow hallway. A flash of panic tears through me. For a few moments I stand unmoving. I hear the pounding of my heart inside my head, and the gentle sighs of the baby sleeping from where she lies in the pram. I wish that I had left the pram outside. I am thankful, at least, that I waved goodbye to Neil at the end of the street. He will never come into the house – I don’t blame him.

  ‘It’s late,’ slurs the shadow at the bottom of the stairs.

  I swallow hard, try to keep my voice from shaking as I answer. ‘We walked all the way to the park. It’s such a lovely evening.’

  I would not have expected a drunken man to move at such speed: in a flash he has his hands around my neck, pushing me up against the wall behind me. I can barely catch my breath. I try to pull his hands away, but there is no use in fighting, he is too strong for me.

  He has his face right up against mine.

  ‘I don’t want you hanging around with that faggot, do you hear me?’

  I do hear him. His voice is deafening. There is a splutter as Boo begins to cry, rudely awakened from the innocence of her slumber.

  He releases his hands. My knees buckle, I gulp air back into my lungs. It takes a few moments before I am able to come to myself again, and when I do I see that he is beside the pram, one arm leaning heavily on the edge, apparently supporting his drunken weight – the other reaching down to touch the baby’s head.

  ‘Get away from her!’ I shout in panic, though my voice sounds weak.

  He turns around. I see his eyes flash with the light of the streetlamps that cast their cold yellow light through the window.

  ‘She’s my daughter – my daughter! I’ll kill the filthy bastard if he touches her again.’ Boo is screaming now, a cry of pure fear. He kicks the pram, stumbles away into the kitchen. Through the sound of Boo’s crying I hear the clank of a glass bottle against the kitchen table.

  I snatch my daughter from the pram and carry her upstairs as fast as my weak knees will take me, holding her tightly to my chest, stroking her head and whispering gentle reassurances in her ear. I sit on the bedroom floor to nurse her, my back against the closed door, and shudder and gasp as our tears mingle on the skin of my breast.

  I have Auntie Jeanie’s letter in my satchel, the reply to my letter that I sat waiting for – for four long days – watching the letterbox. Yes, come here, she has written, come here and be safe.

  We leave under cover of darkness, loading up Neil’s campervan with our belongings. It has not taken long to prepare – a few clothes stuffed into a suitcase, some tinned food for the journey. Neil has filled the van up with petrol. We each have some savings – enough to get us across the Atlantic, to Shetland.

  Neil drives all evening. Few words pass between us, and Boo sleeps in my arms. Neil has arranged for us to spend the night with an old friend of his, somewhere near Manchester.
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br />   ‘A close friend and ally,’ he assures me, for I am uneasy about leaving a path for others to follow, ‘We need allies. You can trust Dennis. He used to play in my uncle’s band – you know, back in the sixties. He’s practically a hermit now.’

  I am not sure that I do trust Dennis. He eyes me up with an air of suspicion when we disembark from the van and meet in the midnight darkness at the end of a cul-de-sac. He roughly shakes my hand, which I untangle from the blankets I have wrapped around Boo, and leads us along a path beside an inky canal, torch in hand, to the narrow boat where he lives.

  But Dennis is kind, though he gives little away. He offers us a bed for the night and in the morning plenty of porridge and endless cups of tea, even a little coffee. He and Neil are deep in discussions through most of the following day, about what I have no idea and am little concerned. I play with Boo beside the heat of the wood burning stove, try to keep her entertained and my thoughts occupied, but my mind is blurred by anxiety. My body, too, itches with restlessness. Why are we lingering here when we are on the run? It occurs to me that perhaps I am fearful that Neil will change his mind, decide we should return. ‘We’ll carry on in the morning,’ he assures me as the afternoon is drawing to a close and still we have not moved on.

  I nod mutely, swallow my discomfort. I tie Boo up into the sling and wander outside to stretch my legs along the tow path. She burrows into my chest, drifts off to sleep. There are swans on the water of the canal: mute, graceful. A strong breeze rushes through the trees’ bare branches, crisp and clear – it is as though it has travelled here from a distant land, an ethereal force – the wind of change. I breathe in its newness; it calms me a little. When I get back to the boat I lay down on the mattress in the cupboard-sized spare room, Boo beside me, and fall asleep to the muffled sounds of Dennis and Neil in deep conversation.

  I awake with a start as Boo cries out, seemingly out of the blue. I comfort her, blink the drowsiness from my eyes and carry her through to the boat’s living space.

  At first I do not notice the stranger sitting beside the wood burning stove. I am preoccupied with my daughter, wiping something sticky from her cheek as I set her down on the floor.

  ‘Martha,’ I hear Neil say. ‘I’d like you to meet Malik: the Mysterious Stranger.’

  It is only then that I look up.

  ‘Oh,’ I breathe, taken by surprise. I had not expected another visitor to the boat. I nod in greeting, but it seems he does not see me as he has his eyes fixed upon my daughter where she sits on the floor, staring back at him.

  He has such strange eyes: wide-spaced, mismatched. His left eye is dark, almost black, deep as the night out here where there are no street lamps; the other is an orb of watercolour blue, deceptively large – for the pupil is little more than a pinprick – an island of rock in a vast, colourless ocean. Its washed-out blueness is completely at odds with the darkness of the rest of his features. His hair is as black as night, thick and long about his rounded face. His skin appears golden brown in the light of the fire. One of them foreigners, my mother would have said in hushed tones, not exactly disapproving and yet not open to acceptance either.

  I shake my mother’s influence from my thoughts.

  Dennis is clattering about the stove, tipping chopped vegetables into a large pan, roughly slicing a loaf of bread with an apparently blunt knife and stealing wary glances at this new visitor. He must be a stranger to us all, I think, rather than a visiting friend of Dennis’s.

  The visitor continues to watch Boo as she potters about on the cushions and on my lap. He looks young, yet his eyes are ringed by dark circles as though he has not slept in days. He responds to Neil’s questions and attempts at small talk with only a nod of his head – have you walked far? You must be hungry?

  Dennis’ soup is forever in the making. There is little conversation as we wait – even Neil gives up, lulled to a tired thoughtfulness by the warmth of the fire. Boo climbs into my lap, whimpers, and I feed her at my breast, before she should make a fuss.

  I feel my cheeks burn as I sense the young man’s eyes upon me, but stealing a glance at him I see that he is only looking at Boo as she sucks contentedly. I am sure I detect the faint traces of a smile in his eyes: the warmth of a memory perhaps, or just the reflection of the tenderness of an infant at its mother’s breast. As the fire gathers heat, he falls asleep on the cushions, even before my daughter has closed her eyes for the night.

  I dream that he is pursuing us. Sometimes he is a malignant presence in the shadows, haunting my every step – at other times a bloodthirsty giant under whose stomping feet the whole earth shakes. But mostly he is simply a man, just as I remember him – no more than that, yet no less frightening. I run as fast as I can through the vast, mountainous landscape where I had been certain he would not find us, clutching Boo to my chest, disorientated by her emotive, fearful cries. If he catches us I know that this time he will kill us.

  It is almost dark. I can’t see where I am putting my feet. I stumble over something unseen and my knees come into contact with the hard earth. Still in my arms, Boo’s cries grow more fearful. As I struggle back onto my feet, I send a glance behind me. I expect to feel his hands grabbing hold of my shoulders, seeking to inflict more bruises. He is not there; instead I catch sight of something else in the near distance, something that freezes me to the spot with fear.

  It is a bear, an enormous animal silhouetted by the last rays of the setting sun. It rears up onto its hind legs. Powerful, dangerous. Boo sees it too. She falls silent, too frightened to cry. As we watch, paralysed, the bear drops its great paws back to the earth and the ground beneath us shakes so violently I almost fall back down to my knees.

  It is this movement of the earth that wakes me. I open my eyes blearily, my body still rigid with the terror of my dreams: it is Boo bouncing on the mattress on her knees, eager in the first light of morning.

  I push the memory of fitful dreams to the back of my mind. I dress quickly so as not to disturb Neil where he lies asleep next to me, and also because it is cold away from the protection of the blankets and without Boo’s slumbering heat beside me. The boat rocks gently beneath my feet. I can hear the winter song of a robin outside the window.

  It is only when I notice that Boo has crawled out of the bedroom that I remember the stranger that Neil brought to us yesterday, the tired traveller who did not speak and who fell asleep beside the fire. He has the look of another world about him, I recall, as though he has wandered alone from some remote land, as though he is lost in a place that he does not understand.

  Rushing to follow my wayward daughter into the living area of the boat – my fingers working my hair into long plaits – I see that our guest is awake, messy-haired and bleary-eyed as though he has arisen from a deep coma and does not know where he is. I apologise hastily, anxious that Boo has woken him, but his eyes are fixed only on her.

  His eyes. I had almost forgotten their strangeness, since he fell asleep so soon last night. They make me think of fairytales or half-remembered dreams. On someone more overbearing the effect could well be unsettling, fearful even – yet there is a look of gentle sadness behind his gaze that wards off any fear of their peculiarity.

  Dennis is wary of him nonetheless. He muttered as the stranger lay sleeping, that we may well wake in the morning to find we have been robbed. As if he has anything worth stealing. I laughed as he said this, and Dennis glared at me. And you with the baby, he added, you don’t know what he might do. But I only shook my head: I know a violent man now, when I see one. And he looked so young and innocent as he slept – the stranger – lulled by the warmth of the fire perhaps, and the contended stillness of Boo at my breast as she fed her way to sleep (this makes Neil sleepy, so he says). The stranger’s skin is the colour of caramel. The fire’s heat spilled a rosy hue onto his cheeks as he rested, though his eyes were ringed by shadows.

  I see that the darkness still encircles his eyes in the morning light. Unsure of what to say, I find
myself mentioning breakfast. He keeps his eyes on Boo as I set about making porridge, my attention divided, as always, between my daughter and my task. I see him move her hands away so gently when she reaches out to touch the basket of coals as he is lighting the fire. As he does so he speaks to her soothingly in a language I have not heard before. It is low and guttural, the music of a bubbling stream. I stop and look over from my place at the cooker, drawn by the look of enrapture on my daughter’s face as she listens, before she throws her arms up in the air and squeals with delight.

  The stranger laughs and the troubled look vanishes from his gaze; heavy creases are etched into the corners of his eyes as he smiles. First at Boo, then at me. My heart writhes inexplicably in my chest.

  I am brought back down to earth as Neil lurches into the room, exclaiming something about his missing socks. I sigh inwardly, turning my attention back to the cooking porridge, back to the mundane. I hear Neil greet the stranger with a few meaningless pleasantries before he is at my side, mentioning his socks again. Irritation bubbles up in my chest; he is always leaving his socks lying around.

  ‘I don’t know, Neil. Why don’t you just keep them on your feet?’ The words come out a little snappier than I had intended, but Neil does not seem to notice the unexplained edge to my voice. A wide smile creeps out over his face as the stranger approaches, the missing socks held in his outstretched hand. Neil takes them from him.

  ‘Thanks, man.’

  Something leaps within my stomach as the stranger turns to me, Boo on his hip.

  ‘Fire’s lit,’ he mutters as he passes her into my arms. I can smell the wood smoke caught in the woollen knit of his jumper, he is so close to me in the tiny kitchen. But only for a moment. Boo’s eyes follow him as he slips out the door and onto the deck. Neil’s gaze, too, lingers on the doorway, now empty. With one hand he slides his glasses off the end of his nose and absentmindedly rubs at the lenses with the socks that he is still holding. Neither of us speaks a word and even Boo is still and quiet in my arms.