‘Dad … How awful, I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be, Floss. It’s all history. In the past.’
‘Not for me,’ I reminded him. ‘This is all new.’
‘And anyway, it’s me that should be sorry.’
We sat in silence for a while, unable to connect over the turmoil of memories, of revelations. The letter – the cause of all this – had drifted to the floor. My father’s head was slightly turned away but his cheek gleamed. I thought he might be crying. I would have liked that, to weep, but there was no such relief: I was dry as a bone. I had never known anything much about my parents’ past, and hadn’t much minded. That was how it was with us. As a child, like all children, inasmuch as I thought about the situation at all, I accepted it. A bit later when I realized through my friends that other families had hinterlands and shared histories, I’d constructed a fable about my parents, a story in which they were perfect, and perfectly romantic, sprung just as they were into life with no need for the mess and muddle of antecedents. Over the years I’d come to recognize this for what it was, a protective fantasy, and then to feel a mildly cynical detachment: if they didn’t want to tell me, who cared? I cared for nobody, no, not I and nobody cared …
Suddenly I thought of Edwin, who did care for me. Who loved me, and had taught me to love him. Who had taught me to love, full stop. I could not begin to imagine telling him any of this. Did I have to? Did it matter? Perhaps not in the practical sense, but as a newcomer to the realm of love, I felt instinctively that there should be no secrets, especially dark ones.
The room itself was getting dark. Zinny was sick, in hospital. My father must have been worried sick himself, and now he was having to tell me this.
And it wasn’t over.
‘I did go back, of course,’ he said. ‘Because we’d fallen in love. That was the mysterious second thing, that she’d fallen in love with me. All through that autumn we fought, and fucked, and found our way to some sort of resolution. And what we resolved was that we couldn’t live without each other. We planned to go just after Christmas – not that that meant much to either of us, but it’s the turning point of the year, isn’t it?’
I was shocked to hear him use the f-word. Because neither he nor Zinny swore, or only in the mildest way, the word given its proper meaning had a striking special force. He read my expression correctly.
‘Sorry, Floss. But that’s how it was.’
I nodded.
‘We decided to use Zinny’s name, Mayfield. And of course she stopped … that line of work. She’d already stopped when she told me about it. She had some savings, but we were basically skint. It was all pretty desperate, and desperately romantic, you might think.’
By this stage I just might have thought that. I might have … but for one thing.
‘What about this?’ I asked, prodding the note with my foot. ‘What about the signature?’
‘That was the thing,’ he said. ‘We were all set to leave, and you came along.’
NINETEEN
1969: Nico
He would always remember the day, because it was December 21st. The solstice. Short, dark and brutally cold. A thin stinging sleet in the air, rubbish scuttling across the pavements, freezing dirty water racing in the gutters, the glaring shop windows and skimpy municipal lights shaking a pathetic fist at winter’s mean black heart.
The earth was turning back to the light, but you’d never have known it.
They’d made their decision and laid their plans. Zinny had drawn her savings and the house would go on the market the day they left: December 27th. They were going to take off, marry by special licence, and head down to the west country. Zinny had no-one to worry about and Nico, now an adult at eighteen, couldn’t wait to escape. Just now things at home weren’t too bad – his mother was placid, unusually so, and his father was visibly enjoying the respite, his face less pinched, his shoulders less hunched. He and Nico had done some clearing up – you wouldn’t have called the house clean, but it was no longer chaotic. So they would be all right and besides, Nico told himself, they weren’t his responsibility, nor he theirs. Not anymore.
After work, which had been busy, but cheerful (Mr Dawson had dispensed tiny glasses of sticky sweet sherry at twelve o’clock), Nico didn’t go to Zinny’s, but straight home. Just for once they could afford to postpone gratification, because soon they would have all the time in the world together. Perhaps because he was going to leave it, the house felt quite nice, almost welcoming. The hall was warm, the small silver tree Billy had bought in Woolworths twinkled gamely in the living room, and the tranny was on in the kitchen: he could hear The Who’s ‘Christmas’. And there was a faint, appetizing smell of curry. Had the old man splashed out and got a takeaway? It was almost possible to imagine missing home.
But then he heard it. The crying.
He’d occasionally seen stories in the more fruity papers of women having babies when they didn’t even know they were expecting. Athletic women, old women, exceptionally large women – every so often it happened and you thought But how could it? That’s impossible! How stupid would you have to be …?
But there it was, audible over The Who, and a great deal more insistent, cutting across Roger Daltrey, the thumping bass and ringing guitars: the fierce insistent squawking of a newborn baby. Nico had never heard one before, but some atavistic response left him in no doubt. He stood in the hall caught between worlds – the dark, damp bustle of outside, the relative cheeriness of the downstairs rooms and that extraordinary alien sound, emanating from somewhere beyond the landing.
As he stood there a door opened and the crying grew louder. His father appeared at the top of the stairs, with a baby held out in front of him on his forearms like a butler carrying an expensive coat. The baby was loosely, ineffectually wrapped in a towel, beneath which its tiny limbs spasmed and writhed quite strongly; minute red buds, fists and feet, thrust their way out. Its head appeared purplish, and seemed, even from where Nico was standing, to vibrate with the strength of its screams. Above this miniature fury Billy’s face was distorted by shock, his eyes and mouth like holes.
Nico gawped, his own face mirroring that of his father.
‘What’s going on?’ he asked stupidly.
His father began walking down the stairs with his enraged burden. ‘She’s had a baby, that’s what.’
‘Who?’
‘Who the bleeding hell do you think? Jessie! Your mother!’
‘But surely … how …?’ Nico couldn’t formulate the question he needed to ask.
‘Don’t ask me! Here—’ Billy thrust the baby at Nico. ‘Hold on. Hold on, I said!’
‘OK …’ Nico took the skinny bawling creature and tried to gather the towel round its limbs to make it more manageable. He’d never been near a baby, let alone held one, and if he thought about it at all he imagined an infant would be round and cuddly, like a breathing teddy bear. But this creature was a miniature fury, both angular as a clockwork monkey and slippery as a fish.
Billy backed away, holding his hands up. His eyes were wild, wilder even than those times when his wife had attacked him.
‘Got her? Got her, got a hold of her, have you?’
‘I suppose …’
‘Well have you? I need to call a doctor!’
‘Yes, I’ve got her!’
So it was a her.
‘What about … Is Mum …?’
‘I’m going to call the doctor! Take her in there!’
Nico went into the front room and Billy shut the door behind him. In here the small silver tree twinkled bravely and beyond the uncurtained window were the street lamps, and cars, and a festoon of red and green fairy lights between the trees opposite. For whatever reason – the calmer atmosphere, the lights, Nico himself – the baby’s crying sputtered to a halt, like a car running out of petrol.
Nico went to stand next to the tree where he could see out into the road. Life was continuing out there while in here … this had happ
ened. He looked down at the baby, noticing for the first time that she wasn’t clean, but scabbed and draggled like the bits of flotsam he’d seen washed up in the estuary. He parted the towel gingerly and what he saw made him jump – his father had told him this was a girl, so what was this alarmingly long slippery rope of bloodstained flesh? Below, it was girl-like – a tiny unripe version of what he saw between Zinny’s thighs – but as he looked a squirt of dark matter, black as tar with a tinge of green, came firing out from behind and he only just managed to gather up the towel in time to stop it going all over him.
Such was his agitation that he didn’t at once notice that the baby had stopped crying. When he did, he peered down at her with a rush of fear, in case she’d simply given up, and died. There was so little of her, this blotchy rag of life – might she just have withdrawn, unwanted, into oblivion?
Absolutely not.
She was staring back at him, fiercely intent. The whites of her eyes were a fragile near-blue, the irises dark and opaque. Her fingers were pressed together under her chin, and her mouth pouted forward as if offering a kiss. The top of her head under its slick of damp dark hair pulsed gently. Nico experienced a surge of emotion more powerful than anything he’d ever felt – more powerful even than what he felt for Zinny, because this came out of nowhere and ambushed him where he stood. Overwhelming, incomprehensible. And then it came to him.
This is my sister. My little sister.
The door banged open and Billy came back into the room, pushing his fingers back through his hair, feeling in his pockets, twitching with agitation.
‘They’re coming. Ambulance is coming. I’ve been up to her, she’s all right.’
‘What about the baby?’
‘They’ll take her too, make sure she’s fed and that.’
‘She doesn’t have to go.’
‘What?’ Billy pulled a face of furious disbelief. ‘Of course she bloody does! Her – up there – your mother – she’s a sick woman, Nick. Mad!’ He made a screwing movement with his forefinger at his temple. ‘She didn’t even know she was pregnant!’ The screwing motion had been so hard it left a mark.
‘Then we can look after her – the baby.’
‘No we can’t, and I’ll tell you why!’ Billy came so close that Nico took a step back, clutching the baby close. She began to cry again and he could feel something hot and damp on his sleeve, the black stuff oozing out. ‘I’m not stopping – not after this. I kid you not, I’m going, and not before time.’
‘But this is your daughter!’ whispered Nico. He was about to cry – from fear, from sadness, from sheer love.
‘Who knows?’ snapped Billy. ‘I don’t. Could be anybody’s. She doesn’t know the time of day. She’s never been bothered who she gives it out to, I’ve always known that. Any randy bastard who gives her the glad eye.’
Suddenly, Nico knew there was something he should do. He walked past his father, turning his shoulder away as he did so to shield the mewing baby, not from any violence, but from that searing blast of indifference.
‘Where are you going?’
‘To see Mum.’
‘Don’t bother, son, she won’t know you!’ Nico was going up the stairs. ‘Let the medics take care of it, for Christ’s sake!’
He kept going, though he was terrified. He dreaded going into the bedroom, and what he might find there, but the baby was like a talisman in his arms. Nothing bad would happen while he held her. They were each other’s shield and protector.
His mother was sitting on the side of the bed, facing the window that looked out over the back garden. The bedding was rumpled and the pillows disordered, but that was all. She was wearing a dress she often wore, a sort of green and yellow patterned sack, with a grey cardigan over the top. Her great cloudburst of hair prevented Nico from seeing her face. Everything looked surprisingly normal – he had prepared himself for blood, smell, the shocking disorder of a crime scene, a violent assault on the senses. This unnatural calm was if anything even more disconcerting.
She appeared not to have noticed him come in but as he moved, with excruciating caution, round the end of the bed she turned her head a little and looked at him. Her expression was that of a child caught with its hand in the sweet jar – sly and self-satisfied but in her case also abstracted. She may have been looking at Nico, but she wasn’t seeing him, or either of them; her eyes were heavy-lidded and her mouth drooped in a slack smile. His mother was in some unimaginable world of her own.
The baby was yelling again, shuddering with the violence of its own voice, and he jiggled her up and down, but there was no change in his mother’s expression.
When he was able to, what he saw was this: the skirt of the dress was runkled up above her knees and her tights and knickers were round her ankles. The underwear, her slippered feet and the cheap bedside rug beneath them were soaked in blood, more than Nico had ever seen before in his life, some of it containing shreds of darker matter. He had to swallow hard. The rest of his mother seemed separate, as if every part of her body above the waist had had nothing to do with the upheaval below.
‘Mum?’
For a long couple of seconds she continued to look in his direction, but without any sign of having heard, or even seen him. The baby’s cries subsided to little exhausted, choking tremors. Nico had come up here with the half-formed intention of reuniting mother and baby, of closing the circle, but he could see now that was hopeless. From outside came the yelp of the ambulance, abruptly cut off, and the sound of the front door opening, voices on the doorstep …
‘Mum!’ He had to try one more time. ‘Do you want to see your baby?’
But she was swaying slightly now in time to a tune in her head, fingering the hem of her dress, and the voices were louder, there were brisk footsteps coming up the stairs.
He had made the offer, and it had been refused. As the first of the ambulance men appeared in the doorway the only certainty in Nico’s life was in his arms, against his heart. And he was never going to let her go.
‘And I didn’t,’ said this man I’d always known as my father – whom I couldn’t yet think of, let alone call, anything else. ‘And I never have.’
I couldn’t speak, even if I’d been able to think of something to say. I was stone dumb. Petrified.
‘I told Zinny,’ he went on, ‘that I couldn’t go with her unless we took you. She didn’t hesitate, not for a second.’
There was something insistent in his tone now. Was I supposed to admire this selflessness of his and Zinny’s, and perhaps be grateful? That was still far, far beyond me. I got up, a shade too quickly, and my head swam. Nico got up too. I wonder if I looked as terrible as he did. We were like two ghosts.
‘Where are you going?’
‘I don’t know, out somewhere.’ I headed for the door.
I swear he wrung his hands. All his debonair confidence had deserted him, and I despised him for it. He said, ‘I shall be going back to see Zinny soon. Would you like to come?’
In all I’d learned in the past hour, I’d almost forgotten Zinny was in hospital. Were we supposed just to carry on as normal, then? Play happy families? I shook my head.
‘I don’t know if I really made it clear, she’s very unwell.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Ironic really,’ he went on almost frantically, ‘that she gave up all those years ago – because we had you – but I never bothered, and now she’s the one who’s … who’s ill.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said again, ‘but I can’t come.’
Didn’t he realize that he had just taken the whole of my life to date and thrown it up in the air, letting it fall down around me in shreds like the sordid lie it was? He seemed to think, as usual, that it was all about him and Zinny, and their selfless rescuing of me.
‘Can I at least give her your love?’ he asked. It was merely an expression, a form of words, but at that moment it hurt, and I chose to take it literally and throw it back at him, to hurt him
too.
‘Do whatever you like, Nico.’
He made a little sound and ducked his head as though I’d punched him in the stomach. ‘Oh, Floss!’
I went into the hall and snatched my coat off the chair. He followed me.
‘Will you be here when I get back?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Please do stay. You brought the note, we need to talk about it.’
‘Not any more. You’ve explained the whole thing, haven’t you?’
He scrubbed fiercely at his head, leaving his hand there for a moment, his arm over his face protectively. ‘I don’t know about explained. I’ve told you what happened.’
‘At last! Finally! Because you had to, because there was no alternative!’
‘I suppose that’s true, but—’
‘Nico, I’m going.’
‘But you will be back?’
‘Some time.’
‘What does that mean? Floss?’
‘It means I need to be away from here for a while.’
I heard him say something else as I closed the door.
‘From us, you mean …’ I think it was. And he was right.
TWENTY
1999
I should never have been behind the wheel. I was a danger to myself and others. For the first hour I drove much too fast and on autopilot. I couldn’t remember making a single conscious decision: how I avoided a collision I’ll never know. Then, in the space of a few hundred yards I was poleaxed by exhaustion, and had to weave unsteadily along the A-road, hugging the verge, until I reached a lay-by, where I’d barely switched off the engine before I fell asleep.
I woke up with a sort of psychological hangover, dry-mouthed and disorientated. For a moment I didn’t know where I was or what had gone before, then everything rushed back over me, bringing with it an attack of nausea. I opened the car door and leaned out just in time.
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