Troublemakers

by Catherine Barter

  I can feel the corners of my mouth tugging downwards like I’m going to cry, again. I don’t know how far I can push it before he shuts down but I decide to try my luck. ‘Do you think – if she was still alive do you think she’d like me?’

  He looks at me again. He is very still. ‘Do I think she’d like you?’

  ‘Like do you think she’d like me as a person?’

  ‘Lena. She’d be crazy about you. She’d be absolutely crazy about you. She was, already.’

  I swallow. It hurts, a bit. ‘I don’t remember her at all. I pretend that I do sometimes but I don’t.’

  ‘I know you don’t. It’s OK. I know you don’t.’

  ‘It’s not OK.’

  ‘I mean it’s not your fault.’

  ‘It is my fault,’ I say. ‘I should remember. I want to remember her. We had this whole life together for three whole years—’

  ‘Alena,’ Danny says. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’

  The tone of his voice shuts me up, turns the room silent. He’s turned towards the blank television screen and he’s looking at our dark reflections.

  ‘But first.’ He stops, clears his throat. ‘First. What I’m about to tell you. I want you to know that Nick never wanted to lie to you. That was my choice. I made him do it and he hates it, he’s hated it every single day since it started. You should know that. You shouldn’t be angry with him.’

  I shift a little bit further away from him. My mouth has gone dry. ‘What are you talking about?’ I say.

  ‘There’s something I have to tell you. A lot of things. It’s time for me to tell you some things.’

  I see, clearly, that what he is going to tell me is not what I have been waiting to hear. Don’t, I think, don’t, don’t, don’t, and he says, ‘I don’t really know where to start so I’m just going to start anywhere, all right?’

  And I hear myself say, ‘All right,’ and then he starts.

  PART FIVE

  FORTY-FIVE

  He was on the side of the road when she called him, sitting on the car bonnet waiting for the AA.

  She said, ‘Where are you?’ and he said, ‘I’m on the side of the road waiting for the AA.’ He told her that he thought it was the hydraulics, not that he even knew what this meant, but he used to try and impress her with things like that. He was in his first year at university and he was driving home for the weekend.

  She told him he should get away from the road, that it was dangerous to wait with the car in case a truck lost control and veered into the hard shoulder and crushed him to death. This is what she said to him. She said, ‘Danny, for god’s sake. Put on your hazard lights and get away from the road.’

  He said, ‘Why are you calling me?’

  She said, ‘Don’t overreact. I’ve been arrested. Can you call Dionne for me?’

  Dionne was one of her friends. She was a solicitor.

  He said, ‘What have you been arrested for now?’ because it wasn’t the first time, and she said, ‘Assault.’ He said, ‘Mum. Mum. Mum. I thought it was going to be a peaceful protest.’

  She said, ‘It escalated. I don’t have time to discuss this now, Danny. Sweetheart, can you call Dionne at her office for me, please.’

  He said, ‘What did you do?’

  She said, ‘Look, it shouldn’t have happened but they blocked our route and they had horses and god-knows-what. There was a lot of shoving and fighting. There was a policeman. It was the heat of the moment. There was a lot of pushing and shoving and I hit him.’

  Danny said, ‘Are they going to charge you with something?’

  There was a pause on the line and then she said, ‘Danny, I had an empty Appletise bottle. It was glass. It broke. I don’t even know why I was holding it. I hit him with a glass bottle.’

  He said, ‘Please tell me you’re joking.’

  ‘I don’t even know why I was holding it, Danny, honestly.’

  ‘Mum.’

  She said, ‘I know. I know.’ She said, ‘If you put the news on you’ll see what’s happening. There’s been a lot of arrests.’

  He said, ‘I can’t put the news on, I’m standing on the side of the road waiting to be hit by a truck.’

  What he didn’t know then but he found out when he managed to see her later was that she also got pushed to the ground and hit her head on the pavement. A doctor had seen her at the police station. He said that she should be OK but if she had any headaches or dizziness or sickness she should go to hospital and have an MRI. But she didn’t, so she didn’t.

  Four years later, Danny says, nobody remembered this detail but him, that she’d hit her head, and when he brought it up people looked at him with pity and said, I’m sure that had nothing to do with—

  But she had seemed wrong, he remembers, just a little out of it for a few days after. A strange, glassy look in her eyes.

  It had been Lynn’s march. She’d organised it, drawn up the route, notified the press, invited all the big anti-war groups. ‘So why didn’t you get arrested?’ Danny asked her, when he saw her.

  ‘I was marching in a different section,’ she said. ‘There’s no point blaming me for this, Danny.’

  But he did, he did, he does. Heather had been telling him for months that she was going to stop going on demonstrations. She was going to start lobbying her MP, campaigning from home. She was getting too old for demonstrations, she said. But it had been Lynn’s march, and Lynn was her best friend. Lynn, who was marching in a different section.

  After Heather was bailed and came home, he took two weeks off university to stay with her, told his friends he was sick with flu, sat around watching TV while she and Lynn co-ordinated a letter-writing campaign from the kitchen table. Danny and Lynn weren’t talking, but Heather found a lawyer who everyone said specialised in this kind of thing, and said to Danny: ‘Everything will be fine, everything will be fine,’ over and over again, light as air, like an incantation. But he overheard her talking to Lynn, saying, ‘I don’t have the heart for this fight, I’m too old for this. I have a grown-up son, that’s how old I am.’ Lynn saying, ‘The fight’s here whether you’ve got the heart for it or not.’

  Presumably, Danny thought, he was supposed to be the grown-up son.

  Still, she made him dinner every evening and read all the essays he’d written that term, kept telling him how wonderful they were.

  When they set a date for her court case it seemed so far away that for a while Danny managed to pretend the whole thing had never happened. There was a whole spring and summer in between, and after he’d finished his exams Danny came home and got a summer job in the local cinema and Heather went back to work at the university library, started going out a lot in the evenings wearing her favourite silver earrings, obviously seeing somebody who she didn’t want to introduce, which was fine with Danny because he was still attached to her last boyfriend, Simon the gardener, who’d been a reassuringly boring person with a huge collection of early Bob Dylan bootlegs that he’d make Danny copies of on tape. ‘Your mother’s a bit of a free spirit, isn’t she?’ Simon used to say, admiringly, which Danny would agree with while privately thinking that this was a bit of a cliché. And while Simon was essentially a gentle, melancholy hippie kind of guy, Heather was an altogether tougher person: flintier, more resilient, more joyful. Goodbye, Simon.

  ‘Does whoever you’re going out with know about your life of crime?’ Danny said to her one evening in May as she was on her way out.

  ‘No, and he doesn’t know about my smart-aleck son either, thank god,’ she said, kissing him on the cheek as she passed him on the way to the door.

  It was almost a normal summer. Up until the night that Heather told Danny over dinner that the solicitor had told her to prepare for the worst. Her court date was coming up.

  He said, ‘What does “prepare for the worst” mean?’

  ‘It means she says I should prepare for a prison sentence.’

  He put down his knife and fork and stared a
t her. She looked back at him. She was very composed. He was not. He said, ‘They can’t do that. Mum, they can’t do that. Come on.’

  She said, ‘And there’s something else I have to tell you.’

  ‘They can’t do that. Are you serious?’

  ‘Danny.’

  ‘A prison sentence for like a couple of months?’

  She said, ‘Danny, there’s something else I have to tell you.’

  At first Danny thought she might have done it on purpose, some wild scheme to keep her out of prison, like maybe she thought they wouldn’t lock up a pregnant woman. And even if in his heart he knew this couldn’t be true he heard himself saying over and over again, ‘How could you be so irresponsible? How could you be so irresponsible? How could you be so irresponsible?’ like he was the parent and not her.

  He said, ‘How could this have happened? How did this happen?’ and she raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Well, the usual way, I suppose,’ and he said, ‘But who—’ and she said, ‘I’m not going to tell you that. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to be involved.’

  The fact that she was pregnant and wouldn’t tell him who the father was and wouldn’t tell him anything except to say that it was an accident – a surprise – and that she’d decided to keep it – the fact that she was going to have a baby at least gave some kind of clarity to his new and permanent state of anger and anxiety, and saying, ‘How could you do this to a baby?’ stopped him from saying, ‘How could you do this to me?’ which is what he really felt when he thought about her going to prison, but which he thought sounded childish and selfish and petulant. He was struck with wild and desperate ideas about how maybe she should flee the country, go and join her sister in Australia, and he called the lawyer himself one evening and said, ‘Can they really send somebody to prison if they’re pregnant?’ and the lawyer said yes, they can, they do it all the time.

  Heather was an organised person, gritty and essentially optimistic, and she already had lists and plans and ways-this-will-work. She told him that if she was still in prison when she had the baby she would apply for a place in a mother and baby unit where they’d let her keep it for eighteen months and by that time she’d probably be released anyway.

  Danny said, ‘For god’s sake, Mum, you can’t raise a baby in a prison. It’ll end with some kind of serious psychological—’

  She said, ‘Danny, this is what I’m going to do,’ and that was the end of it. Danny’s friends had always thought he was lucky, that his mum was some kind of flake who would let him do what he wanted: a single mother with wild, curly hair and right-on politics who wore ethically-made boots and charity-shop skirts to work. I bet she’d let you get high at home, his friend Toby said to him once, I bet she’d buy you beer, but Toby was kind of an idiot, and wrong. She was more serious than people realised, and stricter, and since Danny could remember she’d always insisted on knowing where he was at all times, even if where she was was chained to a soon-to-be-demolished school, or something. It was the seriousness that used to make him nervous, the way she regarded the world as a thing that could be changed, and had to be.

  Still, privately, he thought that they wouldn’t really send her to prison, that they couldn’t, and that even if they did it would be for a couple of months and she’d be released before the baby was even born and they’d all look back on the experience as character-forming.

  She went to prison. She got six years. It was the maximum possible sentence. They said she would serve half of it. She had a lot of friends in the courtroom and everybody cried, apart from Danny, who says he remembered it like he was having an out-of-body experience; he had tunnel vision and he couldn’t feel his hands. The policeman was there with his scarred face and Danny couldn’t look at him.

  As soon as she got to prison they told her because of the length of her sentence she would have to arrange for the baby to be taken care of on the outside, or it would be placed in foster care. She told him this in a phone call from the prison. She sounded far away and tearful. There was a weird clicking on the line, the calls being monitored.

  ‘They’ll send us to a mother and baby unit,’ she said. ‘But that’s only for eighteen months and they might not even let me keep her that long. They might take her away sooner.’

  Danny was at home alone, eating soup at the kitchen table. The day before, knowing she was going to prison, she’d made a vegetable soup and left it in the fridge so he’d have something to eat when he came home without her.

  Danny said, ‘Mum, they won’t. They can’t do that.’

  She said, ‘Somebody needs to be ready to take care of her. Once eighteen months is up. Maybe even less than that. Do you understand? Somebody needs to be ready to take care of her until I’m released.’

  He didn’t know what to say. He said, ‘How do you know it’s a girl?’

  She said, ‘I just have a feeling.’

  ‘You thought that I was going to be a girl as well, though,’ he said.

  She said, ‘Well, I’m sure I can’t be wrong twice,’ and then an automated voice on the prison phone told them they had thirty seconds left.

  She wasn’t wrong twice.

  Four and a half months later Danny got a phone call on a Wednesday afternoon from a prison officer to tell him that his sister had been born. Three weeks premature but she was fine. He was waiting to go into a lecture. He ditched the lecture and borrowed petrol money from his friend Lisa and drove to the hospital where she’d been taken. It was in central London and he got stuck in rush-hour traffic and couldn’t find anywhere to park and ended up leaving the car on a side road where he was probably going to get ticketed, and when he got there and found the right ward he had to argue with a prison officer before anyone would let him into the room and when they did she had one wrist handcuffed to the bed and he said, ‘Are you fucking joking?’

  Heather said, ‘Danny, behave.’ She looked terrible, her hair scraped back and an NHS gown that didn’t fit.

  He said, ‘Where’s the baby? Where’s the baby? Where have they taken her?’

  ‘They’re doing some tests,’ said the prison officer, and Danny ignored him.

  Heather said, ‘They should have brought her back by now. Can you go and find her? They took her an hour ago—’

  And Danny ran, actually ran, out of the room and down the corridor because he had a vision of his new baby sister being taken away by strangers before he’d even seen her, and when he found a nurse he could hear the panic in his voice as he tried to explain and the nurse eventually realised who he was and took his hand and led him to a room with four or five babies and pointed at the one which was his sister and said, ‘Here you go, she’s absolutely fine, she’s right as rain, this one,’ which was a phrase that stuck with him and he still thinks it sometimes, when he looks at me, he thinks right as rain, this one, and remembers that nurse.

  ‘They’re sending us back to the mother and baby unit at Holloway,’ Heather said, later. ‘But I’m getting a bad feeling. The things they’ve been saying. I don’t know how long they’ll let me keep her. I don’t think they’ll let me keep her for the full eighteen months. That’s the feeling I get.’

  Uncuffed, finally, she was holding the baby, who was asleep. A prison officer was sitting on the other side of the bed, reading a newspaper. They were talking in quiet voices, like he wouldn’t be able to hear.

  He didn’t want to say it but Danny didn’t think the baby should be in prison all that time anyway – more than a year – not that she’d know any better but it seemed wrong; it seemed like a bad start to a person’s life.

  ‘So somebody needs to be ready to look after her until I get home,’ Heather said, her voice a little shaky but steel in her eyes. ‘Just until I get home. If they take her into foster care they might never give her back. Do you understand what I’m saying, Danny? Somebody needs to be ready. It might be only a few months she can stay with me.’

  ‘I could do it,’ he heard himself saying. ‘Do you think
I could do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I think you could do it.’

  They agreed that he could do it. He didn’t think that he could do it.

  Eventually they told him he had to leave. Walking out of the hospital at nearly eleven o’clock, exhausted but wide awake, he started to feel like he was having a panic attack. His heart was racing and he was wheezing slightly, like his childhood asthma was kicking back in. It was a cold night but his palms were sweating. His eyes felt sandblasted open. He couldn’t remember where he’d left the car. He walked endlessly round the side streets that surrounded the hospital and couldn’t find it, started to feel like he was going crazy, like he couldn’t breathe properly. He walked past the same half-deserted bar three times until a woman standing outside smoking asked him if he was lost and for some reason he didn’t understand her and she had to repeat the question until he said, ‘No, no, I’m fine,’ and then he walked into the bar, thinking maybe he just needed a drink.

  Inside it was very hot and bright and he realised in an instant that he didn’t have any money; he’d left his wallet in the car. He was stopped in the doorway and a bartender came up to him and said something, and he didn’t understand him, either, and so he sat down in the nearest chair and knew, in an abstract kind of way, that he was hyperventilating. Grey spots were starting to drift in front of his vision and he could tell that people were staring at him.

  Then somebody was sitting next to him, the bartender, and they had their hand on his back, between his shoulders, and they pushed his head down towards his knees and said, ‘All right, just breathe,’ and held him there for a few seconds. Then they pressed a glass of water into his hand and he downed the whole glass in a few seconds, put his head down again, waited for the grey spots to recede. The guy’s voice was distant but reassuring. He was saying to somebody, ‘No, I think he’s fine, let’s give him another glass of water.’