The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  I spent most of my time with Mum, and didn’t see Dad very much. He worked late, and often wouldn’t be home until I’d gone to bed. My response to him was complicated by the fact that he was so changeable. When he was sober he was gentle and easy to be with. We would play draughts or chess together, or take a walk to the beach and skim pebbles. He didn’t talk very much and was more comfortable showing me how to do things. By the time I was nine I could put someone in the recovery position, wire a plug, and tie knots to shame the Boy Scouts. Dad never talked about his life, but I felt he was sad, and when he was sober I felt sorry for him. He had a doleful, refugee look about him, as if he didn’t belong with the people around him and was ready to apologize at any moment for his presence. I never thought about him being a doctor, and I was always surprised at Christmas time when he would bring home presents his patients had given him. (Unfortunately it was mostly bottles of whisky, which meant a lot of Xmas cheer for Dad, and not much for Mum and me.) For a little while his black bag with his medical equipment inside – his props, Dad called them – fascinated me. The props looked so alien and authoritative, yet Dad could wield them and interpret their signals. When I asked him about them he explained what they were used for, and said they were easy to handle once you knew how.

  ‘Anyone can do it,’ he said, and I believed him and stopped being impressed.

  By the time I was twelve he was drunk or hung over more often than he was sober. One afternoon, just before the summer holidays, Mum came into my room and told me we were moving.

  ‘Your father’s lost his job,’ she said. ‘He’s in disgrace.’

  ‘What’d he do?’ I said.

  Mum walked over to the window and stared outside. Then she came over and put her hands on my shoulders.

  ‘Don’t hunch,’ she said, ‘it makes you look like an old woman.’

  ‘I’m not hunching,’ I said.

  She said it would be good for us to live somewhere new, but she didn’t sound as if she believed it.

  ‘You’ll miss your friends,’ she said, ‘but you’ll make new ones. And so will I. It’ll be exciting.’

  ‘I don’t have any friends,’ I said, which was true.

  ‘Well, that’s even better then,’ she said, ‘you won’t miss anyone. I’ll tell you what I’ll miss. I’ll miss Lucy, and I’ll miss the book group—’

  I interrupted to remind her that she didn’t even like the book group, and when she denied it I cited the week before when she told me they weren’t a very bright bunch, and all they wanted to do was gossip and read Joanna Trollope novels.

  ‘I did not say that,’ said Mum, ‘and even if I did, it doesn’t mean I won’t miss them. When I think of them discussing Pride and Prejudice without me… I have a lot to say about that book,’ she added ominously.

  I said I was sure they’d miss her too, and Mum surprised me by smiling hesitantly and saying, ‘Do you think they will?’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to say, No, they’ll crack open the party poppers, but I looked at her face and said, ‘Of course they’ll miss you. You’re the life and soul of that book group.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true,’ she said, in a way that made me believe she thought it was very true indeed, ‘but it’s very nice of you to say so.’

  She went on for another ten rninutes about what she’d miss – the beach, the house, the weather – until she stopped and said there must be something I’d miss.

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ I said. ‘I won’t know until we’re gone.’

  I saw her looking at me, willing me to mention something we could share together.

  ‘I might miss the tree,’ I said, ‘in the front garden.’

  ‘Oh, the tree!’ she said in sudden delight. ‘I love that tree. When you were little, you and I used to sit under that tree for hours in the summertime. You used to stare up at the leaves and there wouldn’t be a peep out of you. I used to wonder what you were thinking, you looked so serious for a baby.’

  ‘I was probably thinking I wish Mum wouldn’t stick me under this stupid tree for hours,’ I said, and Mum laughed.

  ‘And there was me,’ she said, ‘thinking you were deep.’

  It was an eternal disappointment to her that I wasn’t deep, as she had hoped, but just quiet. Mum’s criteria for deepness were pretty arbitrary anyway – they involved liking poetry and crying at sad films, as she did. I scuppered my chances of ever being deep by laughing during the graveyard scene in Who Will Love My Children.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘we’ll be together, you and me. That’s what matters.’

  ‘And Dad,’ I said, but Mum kissed the back of my head and didn’t say anything to that.

  We arrived in Glasgow one rainy Friday night, two days into my summer holidays. Mum said Glasgow meant dear green place, but it didn’t look very green. We passed groups of dark high-rise flats, shabby rows of shops, huge billboard stands. A fat girl behind the counter of a fish-and-chip shop stuck her two fingers up at me as we waited at the traffic lights.

  ‘Would you look at that,’ said Mum, ‘she must be very unhappy.’

  But the girl didn’t look unhappy at all. She looked like she wanted to bash someone, preferably me. When I said this to Mum, she replied that my outlook on life was superficial.

  ‘Any psychologist worth his salt will tell you,’ she said, ‘that behind every bully is a very scared, very sad person.’

  I rolled my eyes and looked out of the window. It had begun to strike me, in the past year, that Mum could be a bit dim. It wouldn’t matter, I thought, if she wasn’t so pleased with herself.

  ‘I agree with Cara,’ Dad said suddenly. It startled me to hear his voice because I’d forgotten he was there. What can you say to someone who agrees with you? I said nothing and we rolled into Waver Street in silence.

  The delivery van arrived the next morning, and we spent the next few days unpacking. The house was too small for all our things, and we had to start piling stuff into cupboards. The first things to go were Mum’s pictures, which looked wrong on the murky, floral walls. Then old photo albums, vases, toiletry sets, my old christening gown, her old christening gown. Hoarding was the one indulgence Mum allowed herself. She never threw anything away without a wrench of her heart. She got nostalgic about an old clay bear she’d made at school, and angry and disappointed reading my old school reports, which, apart from maths which Mum didn’t rate anyway, were roundly bad. One entry particularly incensed her for its inelegance and atrocious spelling:

  Cara may be a good student if she paid atention in class. As it is, she pays no attention, and is not a good student.

  ‘She certainly didn’t beat around the bush,’ Mum said. We were sitting on the living-room floor, the papers scattered around us.

  ‘They all say the same,’ she said. ‘Why do you think that is?’ She gave me a concentrated look, as if my answer was the most important thing in the whole world. I hated that look.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said and shrugged. ‘Because I don’t pay attention?’

  From upstairs came the sound of Dad laughing. I’d taken his lunch up to their room earlier and he’d been watching a Jerry Springer show about people who wanted to marry their pets. He’d pointed to the telly with his vodka bottle and said it just wasn’t right to get engaged to your horse.

  ‘Well,’ said Mum sharply, ‘you’ll need to start paying attention. You’re going into second year after the summer, that’s when the wheat’s separated from the chaff. I want to see you in the wheat pile.’

  I said what if I liked it in the chaff pile, and Mum said to stop being facetious. ‘Stupidness doesn’t suit anyone,’ she said.

  This brought on a reverie about her own thwarted ambition, what she could have excelled in (anything she wanted!) if she’d been given the chances and opportunities I had.

  ‘I just soaked up knowledge,’ she said. ‘I was thankful for it. How many other people,’ she said, ‘can recite the whole of “Hail to thee
blithe spirit! Bird that never wert” off by heart?’

  That same day, Mum decided we should introduce ourselves to the neighbours. Only one woman answered our knock, and we had to call out our business before she would open the door.

  ‘I thought you were those Jehovah Witnesses,’ she said.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Mum. ‘Though hopefully we bring good news,’ she added in an excruciatingly jolly voice.

  Shelia was round and solid as a Christmas pudding. Her t-shirt said FCUK OFF although her expression alone conveyed this message. I was intimidated by her, but also impressed by the short thrift she gave Mum.

  ‘Well then, I’m busy,’ she said after a few minutes, practically shutting the door in our faces. I’d never seen Mum dismissed before: she was used to regimenting people’s emotional responses to match her own.

  ‘Not a congenial person at all,’ Mum said when we got home.

  ‘Behind every bully is a very scared, very sad person,’ I said, pleased with myself.

  We saw Shelia again a few nights later. She came to the door late on Saturday night to tell Mum that Dad was passed out at the bottom of the street. At first Mum tried to pretend she didn’t know what Shelia was talking about. This was pretty futile, as Dad had been sitting in the garden for the past two days saluting everyone who went past.

  ‘Well, he must have a twin,’ said Shelia, ‘and it’s conked out down the road.’

  ‘Okay, well thank you for letting us know,’ said Mum brightly.

  We went down the road to get him. He had a cut down one side of his face, and was muttering something about shitheads. Mum gave him a hanky for his face, but he groggily swiped it away.

  ‘You! What do you care?’ he said, slurring his words.

  ‘We both care,’ I said, desperate to get him off the street.

  ‘She doesn’t. She wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Mum. ‘Grab his other arm, Cara.’

  ‘You’d probably laugh your head off,’ he said, a note of girlish hysteria creeping into his voice. ‘You’d have a ball!’

  I tried to lift his arm to pull him up, but it was no use. He was too heavy and making no attempt to help us. He stumbled up himself, calling us a couple of fuckers before he lurched away.

  Things got back to normal pretty quickly. Dad got a job, I don’t know how he managed it, working in a doctor’s surgery in Bearsden. His drinking eased up, and became confined to frantic, demented bouts of one or two days. We hardly noticed him except when he was drunk. It was like realizing you had a ghost only when you heard its manacles rattle. Sometimes he would come into my room. He always used a pretext: he wanted to seal my window, bleed the radiator. He would hang around afterwards and maybe say something like: ‘That was five flus today. There’s something going around.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I’d say.

  ‘Have you been feeling okay? No temperature, no aches and pains?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Good.’ He would muse on this quietly for a few minutes. Then he would get up and say, ‘Well, tell me if you feel anything coming on.’

  A month after we moved in he came in to show me a big card everyone had signed for his birthday. He pointed out all the names and told me what job each of them did at the surgery. Everyone had written a message, which he read out in embarrassed pleasure.

  ‘They all call you Teddy,’ I said. ‘Not William?’

  ‘I know,’ said Dad. ‘That’s their nickname for me.’

  He told me that the last time he’d had a nickname was at school. The boys in his class called him walnut face, because of his acne. But, as Dad pointed out, that wasn’t really a nickname.

  ‘That was just people being cruel,’ he said.

  Later that night I asked Mum if she’d seen the card. We were side by side at the sink, Mum washing, me drying. She was humming a tune and broke off, smiling at me as if she’d just realized I was there.

  ‘The card,’ I said, ‘did you see it?’

  ‘Of course I saw it,’ she said. ‘It was very nice.’

  ‘He seems quite popular,’ I said, handing her back a plate with a tomato sauce stain. It was one of her principles to be sloppy about housework.

  ‘Yes, people always take to your father. He has a very modest way about him, people like that.’

  ‘Is that why you liked him?’ I asked, and Mum said she supposed it must have been.

  ‘It’s so long ago now,’ she said. ‘I was just turned eighteen when we got married. You don’t know your own mind at that age. All I wanted was to be grown-up, have a house, a husband, a big wedding. Idiotic,’ she said, ‘that was just the word for me at that age.’

  She smiled fondly at the thought of her younger, idiotic self, and went back to humming her tune.

  If anything, Mum was happier after we moved to Glasgow. She joined a hill-walking club and went on jaunts with them every Saturday. She came back late in the evening, full of the joys. Scotland had the most beautiful scenery – she described it rapturously – and the people in the group were the most interesting and well-informed people you could hope to meet.

  ‘It’s so invigorating,’ she said after the first meeting, ‘to meet people who understand you. People you can talk to.’

  ‘Are they all loonies too, then?’ I said, but Mum was in a good mood and just laughed.

  I got to know everyone in the hill-walking group on a first-name basis. Velma, a retired schoolteacher, wonderful for her age, but you didn’t want to get stuck as her partner because her arthritis slowed her down considerably. Gina and Tom, the couple who got on well, and Clair and Philip, who didn’t. Betty the librarian, who didn’t seem interested when Mum tried to engage her on the subject of literature. The person she talked most about, though, was a divorcee called Brian. He taught a communication course in a college in Hamilton, and his life had been a life compounded of misfortune. His parents died in a car crash, his sister was a recovering drug-addict, his ex-wife a jealous psychotic.

  ‘But he doesn’t let life get him down,’ said Mum, admiration shining through her voice. ‘He just refuses.’

  He revealed his life to her on these walks, supposedly because she was a good listener, and empathetic to boot. He said these were rare qualities.

  We finished the dishes, and Mum dried her hands and said she’d better get ready. She was meeting the hill-walking group in the pub at seven.

  ‘That’s the second time this week you’re going out,’ I said. ‘Not including Saturday.’

  Mum said she was in the house all day with me, wasn’t she allowed to see her friends at night? ‘Humans are social animals,’ she said, ‘they need other people to spark off.’

  ‘For hearty outdoor types, you spend a lot of time in the pub,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know why you’re being like this. You’ve got Barbara now. I don’t stop you seeing her.’

  In fact, I wished Mum would stop me seeing Barbara. She was someone I was scared not to be friends with. She was thirteen, a year older than me, and none of the other girls in the street would hang around with her. Barbara said it was because they were snobs, but the real reason was that she hit them. I didn’t know if she hit them because they didn’t like her, or if they didn’t like her because she hit them. The thing was that Barbara insisted on being involved in everything they were doing. There were four girls, all about our ages, that lived in Waver Street. When it was hot as it had been for weeks, they spread blankets on the street and lounged around on them. They read magazines, painted each other’s nails, plaited their hair with beads. Barbara was bony, with a greyish, old-china tinge to her skin. She had heavy, greasy black hair, thick eyebrows, and a huge nose that she often stroked self-consciously. She didn’t look like the kind of girl who could get away with thinking she was pretty, or worth decorating.

  The first time I met her was one of those hot days. I was sitting with the girls, whose names I’d instantly forgotten, trying to decide how I c
ould escape home without seeming rude. I was going through what Mum called a beefy stage, and I towered above them in height and girth. They were asking each other questions from a ‘How Good A Friend Are You?’ quiz in a magazine. Barbara came along and stood beside the blanket.

  ‘Ask me,’ she said fiercely, halfway between a threat and a plea. One of the girls, a bossy, vicious blonde, said, ‘Why, Barbara? You don’t have any friends.’

  ‘I do so,’ said Barbara. ‘and they’re better than any of you.’

  ‘Unless you count her nits,’ another girl said, and they all tittered.

  ‘I don’t have nits,’ Barbara said flatly. ‘You have nits.’

  ‘Very clever,’ said the blonde one. ‘How long did it take you to think that one up, Barbara?’

  They all ignored her after that, but Barbara kept standing there. And then suddenly she swooped down and walloped one of them on the face. The girls jumped apart, shouting, but not before Barbara had managed to rain a few more blows on them. It all lasted only a few minutes. Barbara stopped abruptly and walked away, giving me a half-hearted push on her way past.

  A few days later I was down at the disused railway line at the back of Waver Street. I was walking up and down the tracks, bored, when Barbara appeared.

  ‘Hey, you,’ she said, ‘what’s your name?’

  ‘Cara,’ I said.

  ‘What kind of name’s that?’ she said, and I shrugged. She sat at the edge of the platform and swung her legs over the edge.

  ‘Everyone says your dad’s an alkie,’ she said.

  ‘He’s not. He’s a doctor.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter anyway. They say things about me, too, that aren’t true. They make me so mad.’

  ‘I’d better go,’ I said after a few minutes of silence.

  She was picking a scab on her knee and didn’t look up. ‘See you around,’ she said as I walked away.

  Barbara was very definite about what she wanted to do, and more and more she wanted me to accompany her while she did it. Even though I didn’t like her, it never occurred to me to say no to her. At first we just walked around the streets. Then Barbara started to invite me to her house. The curtains were never open, but the sun shone through them and showed up dust everywhere. There were ashtrays, and old newspapers, and dirty plates and cups lying around; a smell of old cat-food permeated the house. Barbara’s room was the worst. There were clothes all over the floor, mixed up with plates and bowls crusted with dried-on food. A box of cereal with cornflakes spilling out of it lay in the corner of her room for weeks. The only things that Barbara took care of were her old, beat-up trumpet, and her cassette player. She had two tapes – Simply Red and Louis Armstrong – and she made us listen to them right through, in total silence. The other thing she liked to do was rifle through her mum’s bedroom. She would pull all her clothes out of the wardrobe, onto the bed, and run her hands tenderly through them, as if she were touching skin.