by Lucy Lawrie
‘Yes, I still like the diminished seventh at the end.’
It wasn’t like me to stand up to Miss Fortune, but I really liked the piece I’d written. It had come naturally, for once, and I didn’t want to smudge it up with dissonant notes the way she’d suggested.
‘Too obvious, dear. Too Disneyfied. Hmm. I wonder.’
She went over to her bookcase and drew out a folder with a couple of sheets of music.
‘This is a wee thing I wrote a while back. Have a play of this and see what I mean. This could so easily have turned out nauseating and sugary. But it’s a question of adding melodic surprises. And the whole character can be changed by a few gently discordant harmonies. They give it so much more depth. And intelligence.’
‘Blue Bear’s Dance?’
She closed her eyes briefly, and nodded. ‘Play it and tell me what you think.’
Technically, it wasn’t a difficult piece. I could pick out the melody easily enough with my right hand. My left hand reached for the harmonies, velvety dark underneath, and they made those top notes quiver and sing. Like tears about to fall.
On finishing, I went straight back to the start before she could stop me.
‘Right,’ she said softly after my fourth attempt. ‘Now let’s hear your piece again and put our musical thinking caps on.’
My mouth flooded with saliva. She followed me as I rushed to the yellow bathroom, and she hovered at the door, watching as I cowered over the toilet, my stomach wrenching itself inside out, again and again.
Afterwards, she took me back into the music room and motioned to me to sit down at the piano.
‘So whose is it?’ she asked. ‘The baby, I mean.’
She moved round so she was standing behind me. I didn’t dare look round to see her face. I just watched her shadow, dancing on the piano as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The room had darkened and the streetlight was shining in the window.
Suddenly, I just wanted to tell somebody. And Miss Fortune, for all her weirdness, was the one person who paid any attention to me. Somehow, I thought she’d appreciate the seriousness, the high stakes, if I told her.
‘The father is James Marlowe,’ I said. ‘Hattie’s brother, James.’
It felt strange to say it out loud. I hadn’t said his name since the night of the party. My head swam at the sound of it in my mouth. Nausea surged again.
The shadow went still. Then it seemed to expand, growing around me till it was enfolding me.
‘I see. An extension to the Marlowe dynasty.’ Her tone – a parody of politeness – was devastating. ‘But my dear, why haven’t you got it seen to by now? Don’t tell me you want to keep it?’
I closed my eyes, recalling the moment I’d realised I was pregnant. How I’d snuck into the library at lunch break to leaf through The Human Body Explained, a tome as large and uncompromising as a church Bible, but with full-colour images that could have been conjured from hell itself. Up till that moment, I’d almost been able to convince myself that the Regent’s Crescent party, and my shameful behaviour, had never happened. But it had happened, because I was carrying a piece of it – of him – inside me. I’d dropped the body-bible with a massive thud and run to the girls’ toilets to vomit.
And yet, as the weeks passed, I began to feel that I must have got it wrong, must have misunderstood the night of the party in some way. The real world began to reassert itself, where James was still boyish and brotherly, out there somewhere skimming stones in rivers or slithering along forest floors, where Hattie would soon return from Ramplings. The baby would be a girl, who would take after her aunt in all sorts of ways. I felt that she was headstrong, mischievous, the way she’d insisted on an existence, wriggling over from that strange, adult parallel world where nothing made sense and people weren’t themselves. And I wanted to keep her safe in that spongy darkness, which is why I hadn’t told anybody.
But how long would I be able to hide her? My stomach was hard and swelling by the day. Last week I’d had to steal Amanda Dooley’s super-sized skirt when we were changing after hockey. I’d felt guilty at the sight of her, red-faced, trying to squeeze herself into mine, which I’d left in its place on her peg, the fabric torn where I’d ripped off the nametape. But I pushed away my guilt. Amanda’s life – large as she was, and skirtless now – was paradise, pure paradise, compared to mine.
Because if the baby was as real as it seemed to be turning out to be, I wouldn’t be worrying about my uniform for much longer. I’d have to leave school. I wouldn’t even be able to do my exams. What would Mrs White say, and Madame Malo? Their faces curdled if you so much as missed a night’s homework, so what would they say if you dropped out of the entire course? And then, having to actually give birth. To lie there stranded on a hospital bed with my legs apart, like that mournful-looking woman in The Human Body Explained.
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s . . . it’s a disaster.’
‘And I suppose you just want nothing more than for this whole . . . disaster . . . to go away?’
I sniffed, and nodded, relieved at the thought that an adult might be able to take over, to say ‘I’ll take it from here, Janey, don’t you worry.’
But suddenly I felt her breath on my cheek, and her hands on my stomach, over the place where I imagined the baby, floating in her own little universe in there.
And then, in a sing-song voice that was the most horrific thing I’ve ever heard:
‘So, then. Nobody wants you. A little bastard.’
The word ‘bastard’ jarred horribly in her Morningside accent and I shuddered.
‘No – body – wants – you,’ she repeated, enunciating the words clearly, as though teaching them to a child, and gripping me a little tighter. ‘They’ll probably suck you out through a tube and sluice you away. Why don’t you save everyone the trouble? Just ble-ee-ed your way out. Nature’s way, and all that. For the best.’
But then she laughed.
‘Come and sit down, Janey. Dear me, you look quite peaky. Not at all yourself today.’
I started bleeding on the bus home. I felt the thick wetness pooling underneath me, and when I slid my hand underneath the seat of my skirt, my fingers came up red. I got off at the next stop, afraid of bleeding over the seats.
Legs clenched together, I stood on the pavement shivering, and considered my options. Going home wasn’t one of them. Granny was hosting the church vestry social tonight and had spent the last three days making quiches and lemon syllabub.
I realised I wasn’t far from Regent’s Crescent, and remembered James’ drawling voice on the night of the party, boasting about the absent tenants, touring for six months, and the ‘busted’ catch on the kitchen window. And somehow it felt fitting: that’s where this had begun, so maybe it was right for it to end there too.
Thankfully, no scaling of walls was required this time – the back garden gate swung open when I pushed it. James must have kicked it in for his guests’ convenience. And he hadn’t bothered to set the alarm, or to clean up. Broken glass crunched under my lace-ups, as I used the phone in the kitchen to call Granny and tell her, between clenched breaths, that I was staying at a friend’s that night. And I had to sidestep past a cascade of dried vomit on the basement stairs.
My plan had been to go up to Hattie’s room and wait it out, but I only got as far as the first floor when I realised it was too late for that and made for Renee’s en suite.
The next few hours were spent twisted on the floor, with strings and clots of blood sliding out of me. With each vice-like pain, I made myself focus on the short length of copper pipe that led from the base of the radiator into the floor, and the small unfinished patch of plaster behind it, grey with dust: two square inches of imperfection that Renee had probably never noticed.
And in the quiet moments, I noticed other things – how the streaks of blood shone a soft ruby red against the white porcelain tiles, and the way that the criss-cross of my handprints, on the curved enamelled edge
of the Victorian bath, looked oddly beautiful.
By two in the morning it was all over. No anomalous traveller from another world, this was a human creature, with a tracery of tiny blood vessels under her skin, perfectly formed fingernails, and a whisper of fine dark hair as soft as anything I’d ever touched.
It was the sense of purpose that got me, that all these things should have been going on unseen – nerves, arteries, bone, muscle – cells reaching out, making connections, every single one with a meticulous purpose that didn’t matter any more.
For a time – five minutes, perhaps, or an hour, or maybe even the whole of that night as it crept by – I managed to hold it all in my heart, the enormity of what had happened. She’d been a person. Separate from me now, but never separate. I cradled her in my hand, held her cooling body against my chest as I lay curled on the hard floor.
*
The lessons of the next day crawled past, the time punctuated only by my visits to the toilets every fifteen minutes or so to change sanitary towels. As well as the pains, I was shivering. My skirt and tights were still damp: Renee’s tumble dryer hadn’t finished its cycle by the time I’d had to leave to catch the bus.
‘You’re not looking so well,’ said Mrs White at the start of biology. ‘Why don’t you pop along to see Mrs Potts. She’ll give you something.’ She patted my arm in a confidential way, as though to say ‘women’s troubles’. I thought of Mrs Potts’s cool hands and nodded. The walk along the echoing corridor, with its marble floor and high ceilings, made me dizzy.
The smell of TCP assailed me as I opened the sick room door. Hilary Grogan was perched on the edge of a chair, holding a grey-cardboard sick bowl. Mrs Potts turned to me, and said, ‘Janey, what can I do for you?’
Black came down over my vision.
‘I called her a disaster,’ I said quietly, as though I’d come about a grazed knee or a nosebleed. ‘So Miss Fortune’s killed her and now I can’t stop bleeding.’
I registered the school nurse’s mouth falling open before I collapsed into her doughy arms.
The next hour or so passed in a blur of voices, questions, phone calls, with an undercurrent of embarrassment about bleeding so heavily onto the smooth white sheets of the sick-room cot.
Granny couldn’t be roused from her bowling club lunch, so it was Mrs Potts who accompanied me to hospital.
And it was Mrs Potts who held my hand while the medics asked questions I didn’t know how to answer. The emergency procedure that they performed sorted out the bleeding. They told me so when I came round, as though I ought to have been pleased. There’d be no lasting damage, they said.
No lasting damage.
I closed my mouth, and my mind, against what I knew was coming next, and let the questions, over the next few days and weeks, flow over me, through me, around me. I imagined myself drifting, pitching, whirling, in a storm at sea, the roar of the water drowning out the sound of the concerned, and then increasingly insistent, voices.
How, what, who, when, where . . .
Granny was the only one who didn’t ask me anything at all. She came to collect me from the hospital. I woke to find her standing at the side of my bed, her mouth a hard, gleaming line of coral lipstick, powder clinging to the downy hair on her upper lip. She unclipped her black crocodile handbag to retrieve a flower-embroidered handkerchief – I recognised it as one that I’d given her for Christmas, along with a rose-scented soap set – and dabbed it beneath rheumy, sunken eyes.
‘Granny,’ I managed.
‘I suppose it’s a blessing,’ she began, then blew her nose loudly. ‘A blessing, that your grandfather never lived to see this day.’
I looked down the bed at the humps of my feet underneath the blue hospital blanket, and wiggled them, thinking, for a moment, how strange that was: my brain wanted them to wiggle, and they wiggled. And what an odd word anyway: wiggle.
‘I’ve spoken to the school. They’ve a place for you at Victoria House starting after half-term.’
Oh. One of the school boarding houses.
She shook her head, closing her eyes. ‘I told Martina, I told her from the start. Children are one thing. For the sake of poor dear Michael I was prepared to take you in, and your grandfather was so soft in the head over you he wouldn’t hear a word against the idea. But how I’m expected to manage a teenage girl – on my own – with the bridge club to run and the flower rota, and the Columba’s committee?’ She counted them off on her fingers, her rings jingling against each other with each jab. ‘Well, I’ve no idea, I’m sure.’
She stared at me pointedly, as though waiting for me to rise up from my bed and insist on taking over the running of the Columba’s committee.
‘Wiggle,’ I mouthed silently. ‘Wiggle wiggle wiggle.’
‘And now this, this abomination. The shock of it. I nearly took one of my turns when the school called yesterday. Lord knows what, going on under my roof.’
Nothing had gone on under her roof. Except there’d been a tiny life, growing in the darkness of my body as I ate cabbagey dinners, and did my homework, and slept in my little single bed under the eaves. A third heartbeat, fast and light as a bird’s, in a house that had been as dead as a tomb since Grandpa had died. I closed my eyes.
‘You can come back and stay in the school holidays,’ she added, in a wavery, wheedling voice, as though she wanted me to comfort her. ‘You’re family at the end of the day and I’m not casting you out. Though Lord knows, it’s about time Martina started doing her bit. Career or no career. Yes, it’s up to her to sort this sorry mess.’
Sorry mess. Sorry mess. I remembered, with a start, that I hadn’t mopped up the puddle of blood in the main hall, at the foot of the curving staircase, or the sticky footprints leading down the basement stairs.
*
‘She was just a tiny thing,’ I said to Hattie now. My voice seemed to be coming from somewhere else. ‘But these days, they might have been able to do something. Maybe even then, if I’d got to a hospital. If I’d had any kind of antenatal care. I don’t really know.’
And I’d been very careful, over the years, never to find out.
Hattie simply sat there, with nothing at all to say. There was nothing to say about antenatal care, or hospitals, or Renee’s bloodstained bathroom. Nothing to say about James, or Miss Fortune, or Granny, or all the different ways things might’ve turned out.
She drew me into her arms, and held me, and rocked me, over and over again, like a mother would. And there in the silence, even as my heart broke all over again, love washed through me and around me: the love that I’d thought had disappeared all those years ago, but – I knew it now, as if it was written into my bones – had been there all along.
36
Hattie’s Letters from Ramplings
Dear Janey,
Have you been getting my letters? Because I haven’t been getting any from you. I’ll try posting this in the village once my ban has been lifted. I’m suspicious of Matron’s box.
I still haven’t been sleeping and the girls in my house are still a nightmare. They called me a saddo today, because I cried in biology. We were doing life cycles, and it made me remember the day of the frog dissection. It shines in my memory, even though it was disgusting at the time. They’re ages behind here, because they do so much music. Morning, noon and night.
The life-cycles workbook here is much less interesting than the one at St Katherine’s. I miss everything about St Katherine’s. Even Matron is awful, and has orangey bouffony hair like Miss Fortune.
Nothing strange has happened yet, but it still might. I still feel the buzzing in the air sometimes. And there’s a spotty boy called Michael who’s had a faint ‘broom broom’ noise coming from him the last couple of weeks. I have to sit next to him in history of music and it’s quite distracting.
I just try to think about something else, like algebra or French verbs. Sometimes I whisper quelle dommage and I imagine you laughing, and it brings me back to myself.
The school play must be coming up soon. Hope you’re practising your part! Who got mine, by the way?
All my love,
Hattie xxx
Dear Janey,
Mum has said I’m not allowed to talk about you, or St Katherine’s, or anything to do with home. I knew she didn’t like it, because she always pressed her lips together and breathed loudly through her nose. But I kept mentioning you anyway, even if nobody listened or said anything. Kind of like when your grandpa died and we agreed that we’d mention him at least once every day.
But last weekend when she visited for James’ chamber choir thing, she said she was sick fed up of hearing your name and she didn’t want to hear another word about ‘the whole wretched business’, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
And nobody in school will talk about it either, simply because they are not interested at ALL.
It’s as though I’ve got to pretend you never even existed. But it’s like a great slice of me never existed either. I’m only half a person without you. Or maybe two-thirds, but not a whole person.
The only way I can keep you alive is writing these letters. Unfortunately I’ve got another village ban. I spilled Coke on Thomasina’s bassoon and she fainted. But as soon as there’s an exeat weekend I’ll post them all.
Hoping that all is well at Granny’s and St Katherine’s.
All my love,
Hattie xxx
Dear Janey,
On Monday, Michael, the spotty boy I mentioned, stole Mr Parsons’ motorbike and crashed it into a tree on the edge of the hockey pitch. He’s done something to his spine and they’re saying he’s going to be paralysed from the waist down.
I went a bit funny when I heard, sort of curled up on the floor, right there in the lunch hall, with my hands over my ears.
Then Mum picked me up early yesterday and took me to see a doctor in London with a little blond beard – he looked a bit like Noel Edmonds. I had to sit outside in the waiting room for ages while they talked, and then Mum came out and I got sent in, and he made me strip down to my vest and pants so he could measure me and weigh me. And he asked me all these questions, to do with my headaches and my sleeping and blah blah blah.