Here I Am!

by Pauline Holdstock

  To her great credit she took me to the shops the very next day. She bought an exercise book with a green cover and two pencils. I carried them home in a brown paper bag and started straightaway. I burned through thirty-three of those books. I called it, with a blinding lack of imagination, My Trip, a title that gave no clue to its unorthodox nature. It probably saved my sanity, writing that book. No doubt it also saved me from countless prying questions from all the visitors who turned up with a morbid — and ill-concealed — fascination for its impetus.

  Gran wouldn’t disturb me if I was writing. “I’m sorry. You can’t see him,” she’d say. “But he’s doing really well. Considering.”

  By the time the book was finished, the long hot summer was over and my two heels were firmly dug in: I was not going back to school, ever. Dad resisted. He asked Gran exactly what she thought he was supposed to tell the authorities. She answered as she had before: “I’ll think of something.” I’ve no idea how she argued my case but I do remember being taken to the council offices a few times and being asked to perform my party tricks.

  I did overhear a few arguments between Dad and Gran on the whole question of school. Gran wasn’t as fiery as my mother but she was nowhere near as passive as Dad. She didn’t mind looking after me at home and so she couldn’t understand why Dad objected. “He never did like responsibility,” she said to me once, years later. And I think she was right: he was afraid of assuming responsibility for my education, and failing. He didn’t want to be held accountable. Gran took a simpler approach. She said just as long as she could get me to the library and back each day everything else would take care of itself. And she was pretty much right.

  I owe a great deal to my Gran. These days I’d automatically be subject to counselling for PTSD. But, without any formal training, Gran knew what I needed. Peace and quiet she called it. What it gave me was space and time. Invaluable gifts. “Lucky me!”

  My dad had a more difficult go of it. He kept his old job that took him away for almost a week at a time. When he came back for a few days, the house must have seemed dismal without Mum’s energy. I wasn’t any use to him. He used to wander around picking up items, putting them down again, adjusting a chair, a lamp, turning over a cushion. He was like a man waiting. I can see him now, finally settling in his own chair. He would sit forward a little, like a visitor. He’d reach for the paper and seem to be reading it, but he was really only looking at it, I could tell, like a patient in a doctor’s waiting room. Gran would say, “Why don’t you have a little drive out? Frankie would like it.” Then he’d say, “Would you, Frankie?” And of course, being me, I’d say, “No, thank you,” because there was always some reading to do or some complex mental task I had to pursue to its tyrannical conclusion. Often Gran would go back to her house. To water the plants, she said.

  I walked in on them in the kitchen one day early on, when they were talking about Mum. I knew I’d stumbled on something important so I paused at the door. Gran was saying, “Never mind stopping. She wouldn’t even have started without your “help.” I remember that word and its tone. I was intrigued by the way adults could do that: say one thing and mean its opposite. “Poor you.” Of course I didn’t know the rules governing inverted commas or how to apply them. I just knew adults had access to a special tone of voice and it fascinated me. I used to try it out sometimes, but I never got it quite right. Gran’s tone anyway succeeded in provoking my father.

  I remember sensing his contained anger.

  “That’s it, is it? That’s what you’ve been itching to say all this time? I’m to blame?”

  My grandmother denied it. Of course. She said “It’s just all those samples…”

  I watched him turn into a bully I hadn’t seen before.

  “What? What? Why don’t you say it? Lying around waiting to fall into her mouth?”

  Gran was at the kitchen table and he was behind her, standing over her, bearing down, one hand resting on the table in front of her, talking far too loud right into her ear.

  I ran off. I hated shouting.

  That conversation is something I never gave much thought to afterwards. I imagine I suppressed it because of the volume and the anger. It’s only come back to me now, in the last week, after reading and reliving that other drama I witnessed, the one when Mum was still alive, that sad and terrible drama that played out in the bathroom, my dad angry — so rare that — my mum on her knees by the toilet. Something else I suppressed. For fifty-five years. The dark matter of memory. Invisible. I could never have grasped the implications at the time or made the right inferences. I was five, for God’s sake. I can’t imagine what I thought they were doing. The moment I read it last week, it was as if a switch had been flipped on a dark soccer pitch. Floodlights! It was the era of Mother’s Little Helper, after all.

  I’ve been all over the internet since. Obviously. Dad was a pharmaceutical rep. It seems outlandish to hope to God there was no connection. Without knowing what he was plying, it’s hard to come to any conclusions. My mother was diabetic. Her heart had stopped. That’s what the death certificate said. What stopped her heart, though, is a matter for conjecture. Too many pills, taken in a haze of grief after Uncle Jack — or a too-sudden withdrawal, under pressure from Dad. Without the name of the drug it’s not possible to ever know for certain. Oh, Dad, oh, Dad. Poor Dad! Poor Mum!

  And poor me? Not really. I was very matter of fact about it. There’s a name for that now. Avoidant personality disorder. As if it’s a thing. Like a viral infection. Or a congenital deformity. Or deficiency. Some people would argue it’s exactly that…For me it’s normal. I’ve lived my life that way. It’s how I am. I experience people differently, that’s all. I read an Irish writer recently. The entire book was built around a family gathering for a funeral. I was trying to get insights into family relationships. Still trying to figure out how it all works. Love. Empathy. Grief. But she didn’t have any answers. She was still working on it, what drives us to “each love someone, even though they will die.” She wrote that it seems like “such a massive waste of energy — and we all do it.” The italics are mine. She might have written “we almost all do it.”

  My own book raises all sorts of ghosts for me and they’re not all about my mother. I’m just reading it again from the beginning — Ha! Certain things loom out at me, like figures stepping forward on a twilit stage.

  The whispered conversation, for instance, that I heard on our camping trip. Who did I hear in the tent that night? And did I hear anyone? Was there another tent nearby? Was the sound distorted to seem as if it were coming from ours? I never spoke about it again after that first time I asked. Why would I? And if Dad were alive now, now that I’m thinking about it again, would I have the courage to ask him? I don’t consider it my business. Was he unfaithful? He certainly liked getting out of the house, but it was most often: “Just going down the Gardener’s, love. Shan’t be long.” He came back reeking of beer, but so? Beer reeks. And he spent plenty of time there afterwards, that’s certain, though not with women. He had a good bunch of mates in the Gardener’s Arms. He explained to me once, when I was in my teens, how they had stepped up to help afterwards. How they’d had a whip round and a couple of raffles to help raise the money dad had to find for the Home Office. I know: it seems incredible the HO didn’t fly me back. No. It was merely a loan. Gordon Knight of course paid his fare out of his own pocket. He was a man of some means.

  He’s another ghost, Gordon Knight. Stepping forward from the darkened stage into the spotlight. It’s the moment I see him at the rail. Just standing there unseeing in the starlight. Alec was over by me. That’s the real ghost in this memory. Alec who should have been with him. Alec who was intended perhaps to keep me safe, to ensure I was conspicuous, noticed there and gathered back to safety.

  I know Gordon Knight had been crying when he came back and sat down — of that I’m certain. Fortunately he was wearing his da
rk glasses. An adult weeping is an alarming sight for a child of any age. A breakdown of order. And you know, if you’ve read this far, that I had a special relationship with order. Have. I haven’t changed much over the years. Many, many people have had a go at trying to change me: other teachers — briefly; my dad, though his heart was never in it and he never had the time, anyway; psychs — a string of those; girlfriends, the two before Lisa anyway. But not friends. I’ve only ever counted three real friends — Alec (yes really), Gordon Knight, and Nurse Adeyemi — and they were friends because, as my mother did, they accepted me whole. They liked me just the way I was. No one after that. Perhaps they’re the people I’ve loved. You might even call Nurse Adeyemi a passion. My six-year-old self had been convinced that Gordon Knight and Nurse Adeyemi had been plotting to marry. I wanted her to marry me.

  A number of years ago, on one of my visits, I asked Gordon about that last night on the boat. He and I had taken a slow walk to the pub one lunchtime. We had been chatting about gay marriage, only just beginning to be a thing one could chat about. I ordered a couple of beers and carried them out to the table in the garden.

  As I set them down I said, “Back on board…” A catch phrase we used often. “What about Nurse Adeyemi?”

  He said, “What about her?”

  I said, “I heard you making a promise.”

  I reconstructed the scene: the last night on the ship, the sunloungers under the stars, the three of us and Alec.

  I said, “You were making a promise to each other.”

  He said, “I remember. Yes. She was making me promise to tell her how things went for you once you got home. She said I could write directly to the ship.”

  “And — ?”

  “It’s rather sad. We lost touch. I had asked my neighbour to save any newspaper items she came across, so I had those, a couple from the local paper and one from the Express. Then after you came to visit with your father I typed a long letter to her. Got it sent off to the Gloriana — Haven’t I told you all this?”

  “Never.”

  “After a few months it came back to me with a note. The postman always let me know who my post was from — if he could identify it — in case it was anything pressing. I rushed over to my neighbour’s at the end of the lane — I remember it — she was in the middle of hanging out her wash. She read it right there in the garden. “Miss Adeyemi is no longer in our employ.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I settled for, “Bloody life, hmm?”

  Gordon said, “Bloody people!”

  I said, “Sometimes not, though.”

  And there we were, an elderly and a not-so-young man, contemplating our beer. Our bitters, obviously.

  Reminiscing, another question surfaced but I didn’t ask it. And out of some kind of English reserve I never did. What puzzled me for a long time afterwards about Gordon Knight is not what he intended when he stood at the rail. That seemed clear enough later, even when the full ramifications of it were still beyond me. No, it was the reason for his tears when he came back. Regret? Shame? Relief?

  Two weeks ago, just a week before he died, it all came into focus. I went down to see him as usual — yes, we kept in touch all those years. He was eighty-five, still in his own home, though he had help: someone to clean, someone who came in twice a week to do a bit of cooking, a gardener to trim and prune and keep the place looking nice. He was lucky, as I’ve said. He had a bit of money. But nevertheless he kept his independence. His bedroom was still upstairs in the house. He found ways of managing. He carried whatever he needed — book, biscuits, medication, a bottle of Scotch — up and down in a bucket. Made his builder’s tea in a jam jar and drank it from the same jar too. Anyway, I was there for a visit (so he had to bring out the teapot) and he told me something important.

  He said, “Something I’ve always been meaning to tell you, Frank. Do you remember on the boat we had a long talk?”

  I said, “We had a few long talks.”

  “And you wanted to know about my first dead person? I lied. I need you to know that. I know how important it was for you, growing up, to have people around you who would tell the truth. But I had to make it up. I knew what you needed to hear.”

  I couldn’t believe what he was telling me. Over the years, he had become my lodestar for integrity: honesty and truth. He seemed different from every other adult then, and, to be honest, most I’ve encountered since.

  I didn’t know what to say.

  He said, “I did it to help you, Frank. You had no one.”

  “So who was your ‘first dead person’?”

  “It was him, the man I loved. That part was true, except I never saw his body, never visited the body. Never touched him. ‘Lost at sea.’ Officially. He was completing his National Service. He’d deferred it while he was finishing his degree. I never liked his choice of the navy. Felt he was asking for trouble. You know, the times then were brutal for people like us. Cruel in every way. Harry’s family were told there’d been an accident. Simple as that. He’d been lost at sea, in the mid-Atlantic. His body was never found. Whether it was an accident or something worse I didn’t know. It was unbearable either way. Still is. I never saw him to say goodbye. The pain was so intense. So intense. I couldn’t wait to join him.”

  I took hold of his hand.

  “You came back from the rail for me that day, didn’t you?”

  “Not just for you, Frank. For my six-year-old self, too. It would have been such a betrayal otherwise. Such robbery. Anyway, as I said, I never did see my first dead person, but it seemed important for you to understand yours and not be afraid. So I lied. “Oops!”

  His laugh was painfully hoarse as he mimicked my own six-year-old self.

  “You do see, Frank, don’t you, why I tinkered with the truth?”

  I took hold of his hand and said, “I see. Haha.”

  He smiled.

  “The stories we tell ourselves usually turn out to be wishful thinking, don’t they. They’re life jackets. For our survival. The story I told you that night on the Gloriana was for yours.”

  I said, “Thank you.”

  I made us both another cup of tea and made an egg sandwich for Gordon to eat later. I cut the crusts off like Mum used to do for me.

  We drank the tea, ate a couple of biscuits, and then I took my leave.

  I said, “See you next week.” and Gordon said, “See you.”

  I sat in the car in his drive for a few moments and thought about what he’d told me with such conviction all those years ago. As I turned the key in the ignition I knew I was going to come home and look for my book. I hadn’t turned to it once since I wrote it.

  When people hear my own story now, they’re aghast. They try to put themselves in my place and they find it unimaginable. To sit with the body of your own mother. To spend the night with her. But it wasn’t such an ordeal. It was just my mum. And she was gone. I got on with it. Looking at my mum that night I understood what people meant when they said to me, “Aren’t you lonely? Wouldn’t you like a friend?” I never really knew what they were talking about. But my mum looked like someone who might be lonely, who might like a friend. I was keeping her company. Plus I knew she liked me. I felt safe. The worst part wasn’t being with her. By far the worst part was Miss Kenney next day. Imagine that if you can: delivering what every intelligent cell in your body is telling you is the most momentous news of your life —

  I suppose running was my way of saying, “Sod them all.” My way of saying, “There is nowhere here I really wish to be.”

  Looking back, I can see — I think — why people had difficulty believing me. If my story were true, they reasoned, why wasn’t I in floods of tears, sobbing with fear and grief? They couldn’t understand it. And what people still find disturbing is the thought that I was devoid of “real” emotion. They regard my six-year-old self as quietly horrific, some u
nnerving Stephen King creation.

  I learned very quickly that the trick to fitting in is to fake affect. Just leapfrog the inconvenience of not really “getting” it and take your cue from others, reproduce the expected affect at will. It’s a collusion with the systemic hypocrisy that keeps the social wheels turning. But it’s bloody disastrous in relationships.

  But it’s all academic. In the short time I knew her, I loved my mother. I know what I know. I loved her in my own way, not the “normal” way, and she understood. Later, when I went back to school — yes, I eventually went back — my disrupted affect was taken as further evidence of what was usually referred to in shorthand as my “problem” and no doubt played a part in prompting the numerous investigations into the mysteries of my “disorder,” my “abnormal” behaviour. Do you see how riddled with inverted commas my life was?

  My way of loving — and living — wasn’t problematic for me. I was fine with it, and to tell you the truth, I think my dad was too. But he didn’t have the conviction to stand up to the teachers, the professionals who wanted to (here it is again) “normalize” me. And I didn’t do myself any favours. After learning that bald statements like I wrote a book, or I know what two million times seven hundred and forty two is — I’ve been to New York all by myself, MyMum is dead — only incurred scorn, mistrust, and accusations, I clammed up even more.

  Oh, I’m not looking for sympathy of any kind. (I wouldn’t give it.) I’m only trying to explain why reserve looked like a good option for me. And still does.

  And perhaps it explains my attachment to Gordon Knight. He accepted me right from the beginning, and then all through my formative years, exactly the way I was. And that was important because, to tell the truth, social behaviour has always been a great puzzle to me: how is a person supposed to know how to be? How do you determine the best spot to occupy in the trickily booby-trapped landscape of possibilities? Self-possession and independence get a gold star; cockiness and stubbornness a black mark. What’s a six-year-old to make of that? Or a sixteen-year-old? A twenty-six- or fifty-six-year-old? Disarmingly shy or unpleasantly stand-offish? Wise or judgmental? Judiciously shrewd, or coldly calculating? Dignified and reserved, or frigid and withdrawn? Growing up has been no help at all to me. None at all.