Sal

by Mick Kitson

  There was loads on Twitter still. All the same people posting, Ian Leckie and Mhari, and then I found @AlisonatTheClub and it said ‘Spoke to Claire she is doing well in the rehab.’

  And then ones from Maw from the past ten days. My heart started fluttering and it wobbled when I started reading it. I didn’t even know she did Twitter. One said ‘Praying still for ma lassies. Sal and Peppa please contact me. I love you both.’ And then one saying ‘Three weeks sober. One day at a time. I can’t believe it. Coping with this with no painkillers!’ and then loads congratulating her including Ian Leckie going ‘If you do the right thing then the right thing will happen Claire. Stay in there. Stick to the programme.’

  In one yesterday she said ‘Am breakin all the rools here doin this but I need to keep letting them know I am here an I love them. Sober 24 days. God protect my babies.’Then one came up while I was looking at her feed. She was posting right then. It said ‘Coming up four weeks no drink. It is a miracle. Now I need another one. God bring back my girls.’

  I left the library and got a pasty and a can of Coke from Greggs and went and sat on the bench looking at the river. Then suddenly Peppa came up and sat next to me. She said ‘Give us some money. I want to buy Ingrid a present.’

  I said ‘Peppa you’re not meant to be with me. What if we get seen together or on CCTV.’

  She said ‘Give us some money then.’

  I said ‘Don’t nick anything, if you get caught they’ll know who you are. Go on, stop talking to me.’

  I gave her twenty quid and she ran off into the town. I looked all up and down the main street and I couldn’t see any CCTV but they would have it in shops. There weren’t that many people about but the street was busy with cars and buses and it was cold and there was slushy snow on the pavements.

  I was feeling alright apart from being a bit scared about getting seen with Peppa. Maw had stopped drinking by the look of it and she was getting looked after in the rehab and the polis were clueless about us.

  Behind the main street there was a big car park and a Tesco and I went there and filled the rucksack up with the food we needed. I got flour and rice and pasta and salt, and a big tin of dried milk and oats for porridge and butter and cooking oil. Ingrid said we needed more soap and shampoo so I got them and I got string. I bought some steak for our tea when we got back and I bought apples and big baking potatoes. And then loads of cheese and tins of beans. Ingrid was going to get cake and sugar and we had loads of tea still.

  After I’d packed it all in the rucksack I walked back up to the bridge and watched down the main street and I saw Ingrid striding across the road from the Post Office and going into a shop but I didn’t see Peppa. I saw Ingrid come out of one shop and then go into the Co-op.

  We all met up a bit later. I was standing on the bridge and I saw Ingrid and Peppa both walking up towards me. Then an old man who was walking a wee dog stopped and started talking to Ingrid. She stopped too and was smiling and talking to him like normal. Peppa crossed over and ignored Ingrid and walked on up towards me. She was carrying two plastic bags and drinking a can of Irn-Bru.

  I walked on ahead towards the bus stop and kept looking back and saw Peppa coming along behind me. Then a bit further back I saw Ingrid coming on the other side of the road. I suppose it looked normal and we didn’t look like we were all together but you don’t know what people notice or feel like telling the polis.

  At the bus stop we all ignored each other and there was an old man and his wife there waiting too. Peppa kept looking across and catching my eye and grinning at me and I shook my head at her and looked to see if the old man and his wife had seen, but they hadn’t. Ingrid just stood at the end straight upright staring out along the road and ignoring everyone. She had Peppa’s backpack on and it was bulging with stuff she’d bought.

  By the time we were all together on the path up into Ingrid’s woods it was starting to come dark and was getting really cold. Ingrid said ‘I met an old patient of mine from a long time ago and he was asking me about how I was and where I lived. I told him I was living in London and I was here on holiday. I said nothing about us and living here. I was rather surprised that he was still alive because he was a diabetic.’ And she smiled at us and seemed pleased.

  I said ‘I found out about Maw. She’s got sober and stopped drinking in the rehab. She’s still in there and she keeps asking God to keep us safe.’

  Peppa said ‘If she is better we can go and get her.’

  We were climbing up a steep bit where the snow was undisturbed by animals or feet and it was crunchy. On some places the trees were so thick they were like a solid wall but Ingrid knew how to worm through them in the little spaces and we got to the top and started coming down into the valley where the river was. The trees were thinner here and bigger and the valley swept down in a long slope towards the river and there were wee evergreens in between the trees and next to one was a big mound with new earth all thrown out of a hole and old dry grass lying outside. I stopped by it and said ‘Look. Badgers.’

  Ingrid said we should come and watch them one day, sit downwind and see them coming out and feeding and playing. ‘They love to play and run around. They make very good paths to follow.’

  I decided we would come back and watch them. Badgers don’t hibernate like hedgehogs do. They still go out feeding and digging worms and grubs up as long as the ground isn’t too frozen.

  It was a hard climb back up to Ingrid’s bit with all the shopping and me and Ingrid had to keep stopping and breathing but Peppa ran the last bit right up to the top and the camp behind the trees.

  We got the fire going and Ingrid lit her candles and I cooked the steaks on a grill over the fire and we had them with beans and then we had cake and tea. Then Peppa said ‘Ingrid I bought you a present.’And she got three silk scarves out of her plastic bag and Ingrid just sat with her mouth open and then she hugged Peppa really hard and put the scarves on. Peppa said ‘I got them in a charity shop’ and she gave me all the change from her twenty quid. And she showed me a book and said ‘I got a new book too, and a wee reading light that clips on the page so I can read in bed in the bender.’

  Then Ingrid said ‘And now I have gifts for you little girls.’

  She had bought me a monocular which is like a small telescope that you can use for spotting animals and things quite a long way off. It was fantastic and it had a magnification of 10x40 and came in a canvas pouch with a wrist band. Ingrid said ‘Better than binoculars for spotting and also I had no idea if your vision was a perfect 20/20 so I decided to get a monocular. It is German and they make all the best optical equipment. Very good for hunting and watching birds.’

  Without even knowing it was happening I started crying. It just suddenly rose up in me and I was greetin for the first time since I was about eight. I don’t know why I did and Peppa said ‘Sal . . .’ I didn’t sob or shake or make any sound, the tears just started pouring out of my eyes and I felt a huge hard knot in my chest. Ingrid put her arm around me and Peppa held my hand. I think it was getting a present. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d got one. And it was such a brilliant present, not chocolate or perfume or make-up or something stupid. It was a monocular which is one of the best things you can ever have if you are like me.

  Then Ingrid gave Peppa a knife. It was an excellent survival knife with a serrated cutting edge and a self-sharpening webbing sheath like the Bear Grylls knife. Peppa didn’t cry. She jumped up and went ‘Yesssss!’ and ran around with it waving it and stabbing things and I shouted her to be careful. She probably is old enough to have a knife and she would like cutting wood and carving things as long as she didn’t cut her fingers off.

  We both said thank you to Ingrid, and Ingrid said ‘You are making my life very happy Sal and Peppa.’

  After that Peppa went to bed to try to finish Kidnapped and then start her new book which was about a boy whose mum died. Ingrid said ‘Help me Sal’ and we went over to near her bender and we brought
a big birch log to the fire. Ingrid got her knife and said ‘Now I show you how to make with birch bark.’

  She scored it right around and then peeled the bark back and it came off and under it was yellow and glistening and smelled sweet. Then she put a wee can with pine resin in it on the fire to heat it. When she had a piece of bark about the size of A4 printer paper, she made four cuts into the corners about six centimetres long going diagonal towards the middle. Then she folded the edges in on each other and put her hands around it and closed it in on itself so it made a bowl with neat square corners. She said ‘Silver on the inside, see . . . to make waterproof. Birch bark is full of oil.’

  She heated her knife in the fire and then spread resin on the joins and held them. She said ‘You can stitch this sometimes, but in the cold it will go hard and stick.’

  She put the bowl down, away from the fire. It had a nice flat bottom and the edges and top were all neat. It looked lovely and after a few minutes Ingrid got some water from the plastic bottle and poured it in. And it didn’t drip.

  She gave it to me and said ‘Drink.’

  Her hands were big and bony and she had long nails that she had painted red. All the skin was crinkly like scrunched-up tinfoil but they were soft like velvet.

  I said ‘Did you like your maw’s boyfriends?’

  She said ‘No. But some of them gave me things to eat and we were very hungry. My mother suffered a lot in the war. It is not easy to be a mother.’

  I said ‘Were you a mother?’

  She said ‘No. I wanted to be a mother. But it was not easy. In DDR after the war there was no fertility treatment.’

  Ingrid said she went to university in East Berlin which was part of the DDR, or the GDR as we called it in Britain. She started studying chemistry but then she went into training to become a doctor, because in the DDR there were more opportunities for women to be doctors than there had been before the war, with the Nazis.

  At the university she met a young soldier called Max who she fell in love with. He was doing training in electronics and he was tall and blond and had huge blue eyes and big strong hands. They were both in the SED which was the party that ran their country and it meant they could get jobs and flats and houses. The government built a wall round their part of Berlin to stop people getting out into the West of Germany and the rest of Europe which was all run by the Americans who were enemies of socialism and the German people. Max did patrols along the wall to stop people escaping. The people who wanted to escape thought that life would be better in the American sector where people had more money, but there was more poor people and unemployment and drugs there.

  Ingrid didn’t worry about people escaping because she was so happy learning about being a doctor and she started to do research into illnesses to find how people got them and she learned a lot about the body’s immune system which is the white blood cells we have that fight infections and viruses.

  She was so clever that she discovered things about the immune system and helped to make drugs to fight off diseases and drugs to make the immune system work better. She started working in a medical research place and Max got a promotion in the army and was in charge of electronic listening machines that they had to try and hear what the Americans were doing in the West of Germany where they had soldiers ready for another war with Germany.

  Ingrid said she was happy for a while being married and living in a flat in Berlin with Max. They wanted to have children but she couldn’t get pregnant no matter how much they did sex. They had friends they liked and they went out with but it was difficult to get all the things you could get in the West of Germany like TVs and vacuum cleaners and nice cars. But she still felt that she was trying to make Germany a better place and have a country where all the people shared and looked after each other.

  Max was unhappy they didn’t have children and Ingrid couldn’t get pregnant and soon he started cheating on her with other women. And he drank a lot too, mostly vodka they got from Russia. Sometimes he went away to Russia or other parts of Germany for weeks and Ingrid was on her own in the flat and just going to work every day and researching.

  She changed her job and started working in a People’s Medical Centre where they treated workers and ordinary people who were ill. She saw a lot of people who were sick with illnesses that were easy to cure if they had the medicine and things they needed but they didn’t. She often had to complain to people from the party and to older men doctors that they didn’t have the things they needed for making the workers better, and the hospitals were all run down and had dirty wards and cracked windows.

  Because Max was away a lot and when he was home he got drunk, they argued and she started getting depressed. And she knew people who told her about how different it was in the West and she heard pop music on radio from the West of Berlin and everyone seemed to be having a good time there.

  Then Max told her he had got another woman pregnant and he was going to leave her and live with the other woman and have children and she got really depressed and sometimes even thought about committing suicide.

  The police in the GDR were called the Stasi and they watched people they thought were American spies and who they thought wanted to destroy socialism and they watched anyone who moaned or criticised the government or the high-up people in power and sometimes people who moaned or complained got arrested and put in prison. It was not a democracy like Britain where you can say that the prime minister is a wanker and you hate the Tories and not get in any trouble. In the GDR you had to say and do what the government said and not complain and moan about the country and all the things that were wrong. And you couldn’t leave either unless you were with Stasi people who stopped you from talking to people they didn’t like and stopped you from running away to live in another part of Germany or America.

  One day some Stasi people came to Ingrid’s flat and told her Max had been arrested because he was an American spy and had been sending secrets about the GDR to Americans in West Berlin. Ingrid didn’t believe it and they asked her all about Max and she told them about the drinking and the other woman and they asked her if she could think of anyone else she knew who might be an American spy and she said no. And they said if you do and you tell us we’ll get you a better flat and even a car.

  During this time Ingrid learned English so she could read English medical books and journals about immunology and because she was a party member she got to go on a trip out of the GDR to London to a conference where doctors from all over the world met to talk about their ideas about the immune system. Three doctors from the GDR went to the meeting which was held in a big house in the middle of London. They got told that they were going to see the capitalist system and that there was crime and drugs and poverty everywhere and the workers were all suffering because they were not allowed to have a socialist country like the GDR. But when Ingrid got to London she loved it. There were lights and theatres and red buses and loads of people and expensive shops with beautiful clothes in them. She heard pop music and saw hippies with long hair and weird clothes and everything was colourful and exciting in London. They had Stasi men with them all the time to stop them running away and they had to show everything they brought back to the GDR with them in case they brought illegal things or pop records or expensive clothes. But she had no money to spend in London, she just liked all the colourfulness and she liked the hippies and the music she heard. She said people looked happy and it felt like they were free.

  When they got back they got asked by the Stasi who they had spoken to and what they had said and Ingrid got asked to tell if the other doctors had spoken to people or had tried to buy expensive clothes or gold or pop records. She said no.

  She stayed in the GDR for another ten years until she was thirty-nine. She worked for the People’s Medical Centre and she did research about the immune system and she lived in a small flat. She was told that Max had got executed for being a spy and other people she knew got arrested including both the girls she used to go
cycling with, Anna and Irene. Anna worked for the government radio station and Irene worked at a big power plant in the countryside and they got taken away and put in prison for being spies. Some of the people in the university got arrested too and Stasi men started following Ingrid back from the university. And all the time she was thinking about running away and going to London. It became her dream to go there and live and be free and not get arrested for doing nothing wrong.

  Sometimes she walked around East Berlin at night and walked along bits of the wall and looked over and you could see apartment blocks and cranes and buildings on the other side. In the middle was all barbed wire and there were machines guns to shoot people who tried to escape. She still never really thought about when she was wee or the things that happened to her mum. But inside she was sad and angry and she got depressed a lot. She listened to the BBC at night even though it was illegal and she found out about lots of things going on in Britain like workers going on strike and punk rock music. In the GDR she couldn’t really trust anyone because people informed on their friends to get better flats and cars.The Stasi still came to see her and asked her about people she knew but she would never tell on them and she just said she didn’t know anything. But they followed her and when she got letters or parcels sent from the UK or America about immunology they had been opened and looked at by the Stasi.

  Then she wrote a research paper about immunology and the way that blood cells identify harmful things they need to kill which she discovered using a microscope and doing lots of tests on rats. The paper made her quite famous and she was asked to come to London again to another conference.

  It took ages for the Stasi and the government to give her permission but in the end they did because she was making East Germany look good in the West and they wanted to show how good the medicine they had was. She had three Stasi men with her who pretended they were doctors and they stayed with her all the time.

  In London they had a hotel in Kensington which was posh and really expensive and the Stasi men were all really excited about it and they got drunk in the bar and made Ingrid sit with them while they drank and laughed. They were being watched too by British spies and Ingrid knew that one of the barmen was a spy because he didn’t know how to pour beer and he kept looking at her and catching her eye.